The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

  Mr Quill’s voluble good humour, a constant feature of the gathering, quickly subsided. Edward had heard that there was a problem of some kind between these two men, but knew no more than this. He went back round to his seat as swiftly and unobtrusively as he could.

  ‘That was many years back, Walt,’ the engineer replied, wiping ale-froth from his top lip. ‘All this here is just business. The Colonel’s business.’

  ‘If I may, gentlemen,’ Richards interjected, ‘speaking as one of Mr Noone’s John Bull cocksuckers, there is a phrase that our Colonel uses a good deal to express the fellow feeling that should now rightly exist between our two lands. He describes an Anglo-Saxon bond – a bond that places the friendship of Great Britain and America in the utmost rank of international alliances. And there is a truth in it, is there not? I think, at any rate, that our two countries have certainly fought their last war.’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon now, Mr Richards,’ drawled Noone, to the amusement of his men.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Noone,’ spoke up the other engineer, the bespectacled man called Lou Ballou, ‘how valuable do repeating arms actually prove on the field of battle? Forgive my directness, friend, but I believe you are the only person here who knows from first-hand experience.’

  Edward couldn’t tell if Ballou was asking this question to move the conversation on and thus rescue Quill from Noone, or because he wanted to know the answer. Either way, it immediately won them both the undivided attention of the room.

  ‘S’alright, Lou,’ replied Noone a little warily, sipping his drink. He shifted in his chair, preparing to reply. Without his military-style cap he looked considerably older, with tufts of spiky white hair sticking up around a bald pate; but that weathered rock of a face was as formidable as ever. ‘They were beyond all worth. Plain as that. My six-shooters saved this sinner’s hide on more occasions than I can remember. I owe my life to Sam Colt, and I’ve told him as much.’

  Noone’s sneering attack on Mr Quill had split the company; a number of them had family who’d fought in the war of 1812, and the War of Independence before that, and resented his suggestion that they were being disloyal to their ancestors. But this simple statement of loyalty, of indebtedness to their chief, earned the watchman a murmur of unequivocal approval.

  ‘There was this one time down in Mexico,’ Noone continued, warming to his subject, ‘during the taking of Monterrey. My company was sent to the western quarter of the town, away from the main advance. We were in the second wave, and it seemed that the fun was pretty much at an end. The Mexicans were a worthless foe, cowardly and badly trained – but they knew how to stage a goddamn trap. Me and two of my corporals were sent to scout out this little square, just three rows of their mud houses thrown up around a whitewashed church, a real spot of nothing. Anyways, some genius in the 10th Infantry decided to start a fire somewhere, and fires in Mexico spread damn fast. Before we knew it there was smoke all about, and these great jumping flames too, the whole place hot as Satan’s hoof. Right away we’re severed from the rest of the company. This barn door opens across the square from us – Mexicans, ten of the motherfuckers, muskets ready in their shoulders like a goddamn firing squad. That’s it, thinks my two corporals, we’re finished. One of ‘em started to damn well pray, right then and there. Shaming, it was.’

  Noone paused, a cigar smouldering unsmoked between his fingers. No one made a sound, the entire room willing him to continue. Then, slowly, the curved line at the left side of the watchman’s mouth deepened, twisting his top lip; for Walter Noone, Edward realised, this was a smile.

  ‘I had my Colt Dragoons at my belt, a fine pair of ‘em, loaded and set to go. Five of the Mexicans were back with God afore the dumb bastards even realised what the Drags were. The rest didn’t even bother to fire, just turned and ran like cats from a goddamn skinning shop. Them grey Mex uniforms made for some easy shooting, though – I brought down three more of the cocksuckers as they tried to get away.’

  Abruptly, the watchman looked up, his eyes going straight to someone at the back of the party. Edward followed the direction of this stare; it was fixed on Martin Rea, Caroline Knox’s devious brother-in-law, who was sitting away in a corner of the room, behind the ample form of the chief engineer. The Irish plotter had been keeping a low profile – so much so, in fact, that the secretary hadn’t even noticed him before that moment.

  ‘This was the thing, y’see,’ Noone said loudly, grinding out his cigar. ‘In a practised hand the Drag could take down men so quick it was like they were all falling at once. Up in California after the war, when I was with the 1st Cavalry, I got myself known for being able to shoot Pomo braves clear out of their saddles – three, four of ‘em from one cylinder. And this is me on horseback too.’

  The room remained admiring, by and large, the Colt men raising eyebrows at this feat of gunplay; someone said that Indians were savage bastards and often gave you no choice but to reach for your gun.

  ‘This is the power that the revolving pistol gives a man,’ Noone continued, his eyes still on Rea. ‘Christ, with a Colt Drag in each hand you could ride into a ring of their teepees and put a bullet in everything, more or less – the old crones hunched around their fires, the crazy squaws that charged out at you with those tiny goddamn axes, even the little ones as they scattered into the brush.’

  There was a short silence. A couple of Noone’s men guffawed. The rest of the party stirred uncomfortably as if struck by a simultaneous bout of indigestion.

  ‘Good Lord,’ murmured Mr Quill.

  ‘Oh yes, we did their children in my unit. Some men wouldn’t but I had no trouble with it at all. They’re all just goddamn vermin to me, I said, at the end of the day. Leave the dirt-worshipping heathens to grow and in ten years’ time they’ll just be coming at you like the rest, creeping into Christian houses to scalp us in our beds. Best just to get ‘em at the start, I said, and plenty agreed with me.’

  Heads were shaking now, and brows furrowing with disapproval, even as Noone and his men knocked their whiskey glasses together in hearty camaraderie. Edward couldn’t be sure of what was going on here. Were these foul boasts true? Was this butchering past the reason that the watchman had such a dark reputation – why his appointment had caused the Colonel so much difficulty? Or were they a fabrication, part of a distasteful, pitch-black Yankee joke – their liking for ‘tall tales’, of which he had been warned by Saul Graff when he started at Colt back in the spring? And also, regardless of their veracity, why was Noone directing them so pointedly at Martin Rea?

  ‘I did have my limits, though. I knew this one moon-struck cocksucker, a sergeant he was, who took pleasure from gunning babes from their mothers’ arms. This I would not do. I told him: I will not shoot anything that cannot walk unaided.’ Noone stopped to take a drink. ‘No, in my unit we just brought down all the others and left ‘em for the goddamn wolves.’

  A chair was propelled violently backwards, tumbling to the floor. The Irishman was up and storming from the room, his face contorted with fury. Noone’s men laughed at him, rocking in their seats. Mr Quill got to his feet, directing a disgusted look their way as he followed his assistant onto the stairs.

  Suddenly, Edward saw that the purpose of Noone’s stories had been blunt intimidation. He’d uncovered Rea’s shady scheme somehow and was trying to panic the engineer’s assistant, to scare him into revealing himself. A cruel game was underway.

  One inescapable thought now filled Edward’s mind: Caroline Knox, as a party to the Irishmen’s plan, was surely in the gravest danger. The fragile pretence of indifference that he’d worked so hard to maintain since the summer collapsed at once. He had to warn her.

  7

  By the end of the day the women of the packing room were always very eager to be out of the Colt works, making it easy indeed for Caroline to slip away from them unnoticed. As they all left the warehouse she stopped in the semicircle of gaslight around the doorway, pretending to refasten her bonnet, letting th
em continue without her; and then, when they were off, heading determinedly across the yard, towards the lamps of Bessborough Place, she slid into the lake of shadow that pooled around the left side of the building.

  Every single part of this thievery was utterly terrifying. The empty winter darkness; the echoing stone that could betray you with just one misplaced step; the ceaseless squeak, scrape and rummage of rats down in the cellars; the sickening fear of discovery and capture, of being at the mercy of of Walter Noone and his gang. But Caroline found that she actually looked forward to it, as you might to a ride on a sledge down a steep, icy hill – that she was frustrated when it could not be done and regarded her tally of stolen guns (three off with the Irish now, and one more ready to be handed over) with furtive pride. With the fear came a tingling flood of energy. Chancing everything like this, turning away for just a few minutes from the dull path that had otherwise been allotted to her, made Caroline feel properly aware of herself, properly awake, for perhaps the first time in her entire life.

  Nothing had been taken for almost two months. What with the Adams spies, and then the return of the Colonel, the watch upon them all had simply been too close. That evening, however, an opportunity had presented itself. There had been a lavish celebration the night before, thrown by Colonel Colt for his American employees in an upmarket dining room – a right buster of a meal, it was being said, with enough liquor on hand to float a coal barge. The result of this was that none of the Yankees were at their best. Up in the packing room a grey-faced Mr Churn had barely been able to keep himself from his vomit-pail for long enough to count their crates. A good number had retired to their lodging house as soon as they could, and most of those still within the works’ walls were now gathered in the factory where Colt was holding court. The route to the cellar – and then back out into the city – lay wide open.

  Caroline had known at once that she had to act. Martin was better, but he was still too addled by his grief for Michael to be of any reliable help. The debt sitting over her poor sister and her family had to be paid off as quickly as possible. She was the only one who could do what was needed. Pausing for a half a minute to let her eyes adjust to the darkness, she watched her misted breath drift back towards the yard; then she crept along to the cellar door, removed the lock and went beneath the warehouse.

  The gloom was soupy and suffocating. Finding a wall, ignoring the musty smells that pressed in on her, Caroline started to feel her way along the slime-coated bricks, trying to recall the cellar’s layout. Before very long there was a rustle of oilskin beneath her boot. Cautiously, she extended her fingers into the murk before her until they met corners of rough wood and the cold, round heads of packing nails. She’d located the pistol crates, and rather sooner than she’d been expecting. The store of pistols had almost doubled in size, she realised, spreading out of the area it had originally occupied. Mr Churn had continued to bring in his ‘priority jobs’ every week or so, but he’d ordered that they be assigned to a different girl each time, making it difficult for her to keep track of them. Down there in the cellar, though, it was plain that this was an ambitious project indeed, far more so than she’d first thought. These guns now numbered well into the hundreds.

  Selecting a crate close to the back of the pile, she took out a Navy revolver, resealed the box and headed back up to the yard, the gun tucked beneath her shawl. The works were quiet. She left by the Ponsonby Street gate, intending to hurry back along the river to Millbank.

  Sight of Vauxhall Bridge brought her to a halt. A vast, unruly procession was advancing across it, engulfing the evening traffic, singing songs and chanting with enormous vigour. Many of the marchers held torches or long poles with lanterns dangling at their ends. There were flashes of bright colour, accompanied by bangs and the odd scream, as small fireworks were lit and tossed into the air; Caroline saw a ball of fizzing green light drop over the bridge’s side, rushing to meet its reflection in the water below. The leaders of this enormous parade were just emerging onto the Thames’s northern bank, pushing their way through the toll gate. They were carrying a strange, outsized mannequin between them, bearing it aloft as if it were a criminal being taken to meet some bloody mob justice. She remembered the day’s chatter up in the packing room, and the various plans that had been under discussion. It was the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Night. Revellers would be crowding through London’s streets and parks, heaping a hundred different likenesses of that infamous Catholic plotter onto roaring pyres, consigning him once again to hellfire.

  The Guy leaving the bridge was a fine example of his kind, with a pointed black beard, a broad-brimmed hat and a large bundle of matches pinned to his cloak. As Caroline watched, he lurched a little to the right; the procession was turning onto the riverside road, the very route she’d been about to take herself. Their destination was likely to be the square before Parliament, next to the New Palace Yard. They would be passing within a few streets of the Devil’s Acre, one of the greatest gatherings of Catholic Irish in the city. As the people streamed onwards, another mannequin rocked into view, very different in appearance from the first. This figure was grotesquely fat, dressed in lurid robes with an upside-down cross painted on its belly; the face was little more than a greedy leer, above which wobbled a huge bumblebee’s arse of a hat. It was the Pope.

  ‘Burn him in a tub of tar,’ sung those around him, ‘burn him like a blazing star, burn his body from his head, then we’ll say old Pope is dead! Hip hip hoorah! Hip hip hoorah, hoorah!’

  This was a deliberate bit of baiting that the Irish were sure to snap at, and in numbers. Brawling between Catholics and Protestants had become a feature of this night in London’s poorer quarters, and one relished by both sides as far as Caroline could tell. The police would be on hand, but they had allegiances of their own. It seemed to be a fight that everyone wanted – and one that could surely know no possible resolution. Caroline cursed the whole foolish business and cut back along Bessborough Place, thinking to cross the Vauxhall Bridge Road fifty yards further up. She reached the wide thoroughfare to find it empty of traffic and echoing with terrified shrieks. A pair of Irish girls had been discovered heading for the Acre, and were being pelted with stones and rotten vegetables by a snickering group who had split off from the main procession. Lowering her eyes, Caroline checked the pistol and continued on her way.

  She soon pulled ahead of the Guy Fawkes parade. The lanes around the prison were clear, save for the beer-sellers rushing down with their barrels and hand-carts to secure the best spots along the procession’s route. There was a strong odour of bonfires coming from the direction of the Victoria Street clearances. Many of the penitentiary’s inmates were joining in the chants of those marching past its gates, and Caroline could hear a robust, disembodied chorus drifting out over the walls and away through the smoke-hazed air.

  ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November,’ the prisoners were singing, ‘gunpowder, treason and plot…’

  Reaching her boarding house, she bade her landlady good evening, went up to her room for a length of cheesecloth and then crept out of the scullery door. Across the alley at the rear of the house lay Selby’s Lumber Yard. It had a high wooden fence with a loose slat at one end; a little pressure and it creaked aside, creating a triangular crack that Caroline could just squeeze herself through. The yard beyond was shut up for the night, and lit only by a single oil-lamp over in a window by the front gate. There was a watchman, but he was a drinker and would be fast asleep in the office by now. She sneaked down a shadowy corridor between two tall timber stacks, coming to a pile of lichen-spotted logs heaped up against an old brick wall. Caroline knelt down, leaning around the logs and feeling for a particular brick, close to the wall’s base. Like the slatted fence, this wall had been cheaply built and poorly maintained. Finding the brick she was looking for, she pulled it loose. There was a sizeable cavity behind.

  This was where Caroline stowed her pistols before she delivered them to the Irishmen
in the Devil’s Acre. She’d concluded that it was far too great a risk to have them in her room or anywhere in the boarding house. It would be the first place a policeman – or Colt watchman – would look. A couple of hours spent hunting around outside in the dead of night had brought her to this Selby’s wall. Should she ever be exposed to suspicion, this one simple measure might well prove to be her salvation; she could not help but be a little pleased by her own cunning. There was already one other gun in this secret nook. Caroline had decided to start handing them over two at a time, partly to limit her contact with Slattery as much as possible, but also to make him look a fool in front of his lads. He’d derided her, doubted what she could do. She saw herself walking before him, telling him exactly what she thought of him and his precious bloody Ireland, and then throwing down not one more Colt revolver but a bloody pair.

  She’d been planning to go on to the Acre that evening, but the Guy Fawkes parade had changed her mind. It could wait until tomorrow. Caution was everything, after all; she was coming to believe that a sufficiently cautious thief would never be caught. Taking the latest stolen revolver from her shawl, she wrapped it up carefully in the material she’d fetched from her room and then reached into the hiding place to arrange its brother so that both guns would fit. Where there should have been a length of finely shaped steel swaddled in cheesecloth, however, there was only coarse mortar dust – an empty space.

  For several seconds Caroline couldn’t move. Blinking, she searched again, forcing her fingers into the furthermost cracks of the wall cavity. But the pistol was gone. There could be no doubt of it. Her shoulders sagged and she slumped onto the log pile, feeling as if a butt of ice-water had been tipped over her, robbing her of breath and weighting down her clothes. Suddenly wild with panic, she looked behind her, fully expecting to see a policeman’s light approaching between the banks of wood.