The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

  Noone didn’t like this. ‘I’ve done pretty well by you so far, ain’t I, Colonel?’ he growled. ‘Three guns back, and not so much as a whisker of the law? It’ll end the same way.’

  The gun-maker sighed; their meanings were not quite the same. He considered explaining the difference to his bloodthirsty underling but decided it would only be a waste of his time. ‘You got any leads on this missing gun?’

  ‘The Irishmen are gathered in their slum-tavern. They’re under watch – we’ll keep picking ‘em off until we get the pistol. The packing-room girl’s slipped us for now, but we’ll track her down.’

  ‘What d’you know of her? Anything?’

  Noone paused, raising his chin a couple of inches. ‘She was friendly with your secretary, Colonel. Proper friendly, if you follow me. I saw ‘em together a while back, when that Hungarian fellow visited the works. Seemed to go cold, but I reckon that could’ve just been part of the scheme.’

  Sam started across the office, shaking his head. ‘Coincidence,’ he declared, ‘and that’s all. By God, Mr Lowry ain’t in on this! You’re off course there, Mr Noone – way off course. Just get me that goddamn pistol back.’

  Noone eyed him inscrutably as he opened the office door. ‘Right you are, Colonel.’

  Normally when Sam rejected a notion it left his head completely, jettisoned like slops from a transatlantic steamer. Not this one, though. The watchman’s comment about the secretary nagged at him all the way along the corridor, down the staircase and out into the yard, riling him with its sheer absurdity. Noone had a determinedly suspicious way of thinking that could lead him in some truly nonsensical directions. Mr Lowry was a businessman, a professional to the bone – that was why he’d been taken on. His ultimate goal was to assume the management of Colt’s European operations. Sam was sure of it. Such a fellow would never risk all that for a few stolen guns, for a few pounds in ill-gotten profit. At a stretch, Sam could imagine him defecting to a rival, to Adams perhaps – which would make him a louse and a cocksucker and a miserable ingrate bastard – but base theft, and on such a piddling scale? It was so goddamn unambitious.

  His secretary was waiting by the side of the Colt carriage, chewing on an unlit cigar which he promptly stowed away in a pocket. Sam slowed his march across the freshly swept cobbles, studying him for a moment. Mr Lowry was no thief, of that he was certain, but he couldn’t deny the slight distraction that continued to mar the boy’s otherwise impeccable business manner. Sam had yet to uncover a satisfactory explanation for this.

  ‘You’ve got it all, do you, Mr Lowry?’ he called out as he approached. ‘All the figures?’

  ‘I have, Colonel,’ he answered smartly, lifted up the folder under his arm, ‘every piece of coal burned, every bar of steel forged, every Colt pistol made in London so far, entered and accounted for.’

  ‘Good work,’ said Sam – who knew very well that this was far from the case. ‘We’re ready for Mr Street’s man then, eh? Ready for the inner chambers of British government?’

  As ever, the secretary made all the right sounds, professing his enthusiasm for this and his expectation of that. Sam looked at his quick, bright face, his firm jaw, his sideburns untouched by grey; and he remembered the wan, jowly reflection that had met him in his dressing-room mirror that morning, inexplicably flabbier and more lined than he felt it had any right to be. Mr Lowry turned from him to climb into the carriage, and he caught something – a misty half-smile, as if the boy had suddenly become lost in a tender recollection. It lingered around his lips as they took their seats.

  Sitting back, Sam made his assessment. ‘By Heavens, Mr Lowry,’ he pronounced, ‘I do believe you’re cunt-struck. And it’s a bad case indeed.’

  Mr Lowry demurred, colouring a little. ‘I assure you, Colonel, that I am in no way, as you put it – ’

  ‘Let me guess,’ the gun-maker cut in. ‘She’s the daughter of some distinguished professional gentleman, well schooled, with modest accomplishments of her own – painting, perhaps, or the teaching of music or arithmetic. These are the best sort of girls for men like us, Mr Lowry. They have brains, yet they are used to the needs of a strong male character.’ Sam decided to make a personal revelation, thinking that this might induce the secretary to reveal something of his own. ‘I myself am engaged to such a woman, in fact.’

  The boy stared. ‘You are engaged, Colonel?’

  Sam nodded, having expected this reaction. The few people he’d told tended to assume that his roving life would make such a commitment impossible – not understanding the rather sedate pace of Connecticut society. ‘To Miss Elizabeth Jarvis of Middletown, and for upwards of eight years now. Her father is an Episcopalian rector, and he has developed in her a serious mind indeed. Time spent with Miss Jarvis has a positively wholesome effect on a fellow.’

  Mr Lowry was smiling. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint, Colonel, but Almighty God has yet to favour me with such a salutary companion.’

  Sam’s tone hardened. ‘Well, that simpering face ain’t made for no whore,’ he said. ‘Tell me you ain’t meddling with the lower orders, Mr Lowry. Tell me you ain’t finding your fun up in my goddamn packing room or someplace.’

  The smile dropped away. ‘I assure you that I am not.’

  These words were delivered with the flat ring of finality; an iron gate had been shut in the path of Sam’s enquiry and bolted from the other side. That’s real resolution there, the gun-maker told himself. He ain’t saying any more on the subject. Sam looked out through the window. They were passing through the main gates onto Thames Bank, ready to drive up the river to Parliament, and then on to St James’s Park. He glimpsed a well-dressed party clustered around a brazier – and all deliberation of Mr Lowry’s reticence ceased at once. His fingers went straight for the grooved brass bar at the top of the window pane; he wrenched it down and leaned out, treading on the secretary’s toes as he did so.

  ‘Why, Lady Wardell!’ he called out, as if spotting an old friend. ‘By God, ma’am, it’s been a good long while since you graced my humble establishment with your attentions! Was it the pong of the river or the call of some nobleman’s country house that caused you to abandon us? Would Christ have left off his righteous duty so easy, I wonder?’

  A score of middle-aged faces turned up towards the gun-maker like a sour parody of a sunflower patch, every one of them puckered with dislike. Sam’s coachman, hearing his employer’s voice and then seeing his head and shoulders jutting from the side of the vehicle, drew it to a rapid halt, murmuring a few soothing words to the horses.

  Lady Wardell herself towered above her comrades, looking really quite magnificent in her outrage, Sam had to admit. ‘We will be coming out here, Colonel, for as long as your infernal factory is producing its death-dealing instruments.’ This met with a muttered chorus of amens. ‘We have seen the revolting advertisements you have been circulating around the city. We have seen how they actively celebrate the part your guns have played in the butchery of your country’s heathen tribes – of poor, simple people who should rightly have been offered the true salvation of the Christian faith, but met with senseless murder! And we mean to put a stop to them – to you, Colonel Colt – once and for all!’

  There were more amens, louder this time, and a fat, pasty creature behind the noblewoman started up with a bible quotation, delivered in an irritating, reedy voice – something about how evil men will soon wither away like the grass.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Sam interrupted, trying his best to stay civil, ‘those boards are only intended to attract private customers, of which we’ve never had more than a handful in this country, to be perfectly honest with you. Our real focus at present, ladies and gentlemen, is the upper regions of the government. Why, I’m just on my way to see a cabinet minister right now, in fact!’

  This quietened them down a bit. ‘And which minister is that, pray?’ asked Lady Wardell, her eyes cold and sharp as icicles.

  Sam looked straight back at her. ‘Now that
I’m not inclined to reveal, ma’am. Let’s just say that he falls well outside your particular sphere of influence.’ He cast a glance up at the rain-clouds that were cruising over from the east of the city. ‘You all be sure to have a pleasant afternoon out here.’

  The gun-maker ordered his coachman to carry on, ducked back inside the carriage and closed the window with an emphatic thud.

  ‘Jesus Christ on a donkey,’ Sam thought as Lord Palmerston walked across the hall of his mansion-house to greet him. ‘What kind of a man is this?’

  Decked out in finest Harris tweed, the Home Secretary was a shade away from seventy but conducted himself in a very lively fashion, moving with a weird, mannered grace as if about to take his place in a grand dance. He wasn’t physically impressive, possessing a short stump of a torso, long, simian limbs and a rather outsized skull. His hair was neatly cut and brushed in a style too modish for one of his years, artfully arranged to hide some thinness at the temples, and copious whiskers gushed over his collar. The colouring of both was strange; brown, broadly speaking, but weak and yellowed in places. Sam suspected that dyes had been employed. His folio of portrait engravings of British political figures had led him to expect a supremely dignified statesman, radiating a diamond-hard intellect. The reality was a good deal more bizarre, but pretty daunting nonetheless; his servants stood about that marble hall at rigid, terrified attention, like men facing a firing squad.

  Lord Palmerston was fond of raising his voice without warning, and at unexpected times; having roared Sam’s name, he then adopted a normal tone only to bellow out a commonplace observation about the weather a few seconds later. The gun-maker’s equally commonplace reply caused a sudden, wild smile to grip the minister’s face, exposing a set of false teeth as ivory-white and even as the keys on a piano, and wrinkling up his eyes so tightly that they threatened to vanish altogether. And then, just as completely, the smile was gone, the nobleman’s thoughts seeming to have switched abruptly to something else. They strolled across the crimson carpet, the conversation continuing in a general vein. Palmerston asked whether the Colonel was taking full advantage of the pleasures of the season, the balls and theatres and so on – London really was at its most brilliant, he opined, during the six weeks before Parliament broke for Christmas.

  ‘I pursue my customers,’ Sam replied, ‘but beyond that –’

  This prompted a gale of jovial laughter, terminated as swiftly as the smile, followed by an enquiry about Sam’s metropolitan residence. ‘Piccadilly, eh?’ Palmerston noted with approval once he’d received his answer. ‘It is the proper region for men of the world such as ourselves. A vivacious place – a place of possibility, of variety. I shall be up there as well before very long, out of this wretchedly dull part of town.’

  And then Sam saw it. This here was a faded dandy-gentleman who, despite all his wealth and power, still fancied that he had the strut of fashion left in his warped old bones. He looked around the hall, and the corridors and stairways that led off from it, decorated in the usual overblown aristocratic style; the gilded grandeur was so rich and intense that it jaded the eye. How could a man who dismissed all this as if it were a Bowery garret possibly govern a nation of equal men? These John Bull politicians truly were a rum lot. In America they were lawyers and soldiers, professional fellows who took to the hustings to do something for their country. Over here, though, so many of the most powerful had simply been born to it. They knew nothing else. For them, the governance of millions was but an arena for petty personal contests. There was little method or principle at play, just lordly men expressing their characters, and executing their endless plots and plans against each other. It was a damnably unpredictable system, and a difficult one indeed for even the most resourceful businessman to navigate.

  Lord Palmerston led his guest through to a large smoking room at the back of the house, the walls covered with wide, vaporous landscapes. Lawrence Street was there, along with a couple of others, all of whom rose to their feet at the minister’s entrance. Street met Sam’s eye, and the coolness of his demeanour gave the gun-maker heart. Business would certainly be done that afternoon. Mr Lowry waited by the door, a dapper mouse in a lion’s den.

  Palmerston walked to the fireplace and swivelled around on his heel, striking an oratorical pose. ‘Colonel Colt,’ he began, ‘I am certain that I need not tell you of the situation in the East. You read your Times and your Morning Post, as does every man here. Our Prime Minister, poor Aberdeen, still holds out for peace, and with every passing day it becomes plainer that his feeble-minded indecision will finish him. Now, I have long pressed for action, proposing most recently that the Navy sail into the Black Sea and occupy it, thus preventing any further Russian manoeuvre. We must show this blood-steeped Tsar that we are serious, Colonel – that we will halt his aggression towards his neighbours at the point of a sword!’

  His voice had been getting steadily louder, building to a rousing, flourishing finish and a defiant snap of the fingers; the assembled aides, Street included, seemed ready to applaud.

  ‘There will be war,’ the minister added carelessly, ‘it is quite certain. Nothing less than British honour is at stake. Turkey, our weak and brutalised ally, must receive our protection. I’m trying to push this question of the Black Sea to a division in the House. We’ll see what happens there, eh?’

  Sam revised his initial, rather dubious opinion of the flamboyant old fellow before him. There was plainly a rod of best steel running up Lord Palmerston’s spine; this was a man who faced the goddamn situation, who called it what it was and did not shy away from the prospect of a necessary conflict. He met the minister’s speech with an impassioned rendition of his own about the fabled Anglo-Saxon bond that had first inspired him to set up a manufactory in London – glancing over at Street again as he did so. Palmerston seemed well pleased by this, and continued to pay close attention as Sam described the Pimlico works’ unrivalled production speeds, mounting stockpile and extremely competitive prices.

  ‘So, my dear Colonel Colt,’ the nobleman asked with another of his savage smiles, ‘if a man was so disposed, might an order – a really very large order, I think – be placed with you right now, this minute?’

  ‘A fair price will get you however many you ask for,’ Sam answered. ‘Under five thousand and you can have ‘em today.’

  He waved Lowry forward to present the pair of pistols they’d brought along with them, which he did with a low bow. Palmerston was delighted by this gift, opening up the case at once; and there it was, Sam’s beautiful Navy, engraved and blued and glinting fiercely in the firelight. The minister started to wave it around, advancing playfully on Street, jabbing at him as if it were a rapier. Sam managed a pained smile, and gave a quick explanation of the firing mechanism. He stared at the landscapes for a minute, at the soaring mountains and shady plains, hearing the soft click-click of the hammer drawing back – and then the sharp clack as it sprang back into the body of the gun. This was repeated several times, and the weapon declared a positive wonder of engineering in tones so loud that they almost jingled the coins in Sam’s waistcoat pocket.

  Something seemed to occur to his lordly host; turning around, he let the shining pistol go limp in his hand, the barrel angled towards the floor. ‘You gave a tour of your marvellous factory to my dear friend Lajos Kossuth, did you not, back in April? I noticed it in the newspapers and meant to see you then, but events got the better of me. You are a supporter of his, I take it?’

  ‘I am,’ Sam said with a grave nod. He noticed that a tiny ironic line had appeared at the side of Lawrence Street’s mouth. ‘A true American always backs the cause of liberty.’

  The minister inclined his head in polite acknowledgement, raising his eyebrows. ‘Of course he does. Not that such admirable sentiments will help Mr Kossuth, I am afraid. The poor devil is doomed to fail. He has too many foes, and of the most inconveniently influential variety. Why, when I attempted to have him to stay at my country seat a few years
ago – as a rather modest demonstration of support – the cabinet, including several close colleagues of mine, passed a vote expressly forbidding it! Imagine that, Colonel!’ He sighed, laying the Navy on the oval table that stood in the centre of the room. ‘Have there been any other noteworthy guests since?’

  ‘There have not. I’ve been back in Connecticut, y’see, and my brother –’

  Lord Palmerston exchanged a look with Street. ‘We really should remedy that with all haste, I think. Your renown must spread yet further, my dear Colonel – you deserve it, and I will do everything I can to ensure it. Come, let us drink to your amazing invention! What would you care for?’

  ‘Bourbon,’ muttered Sam gratefully.

  ‘Bourbon, then, for Colonel Colt!’ cried Lord Palmerston, sending a servant scampering immediately from the room. ‘Bourbon for us all!

  The drinks came in moments, far more quickly than Sam would have thought possible. He swallowed his down at once and was promptly poured another. They settled themselves in a ring of high-backed chairs, upholstered in oxblood leather – apart from Mr Lowry and a couple of the minister’s more junior aides, who remained by the door and windows respectively. Cigars were lit and snuff taken. Sam cut a plug of Old Red, thinking to make use of the wide fireplace; but to his surprise, a fine silver spittoon was brought in and placed at his feet.

  ‘Presented to me by an American friend,’ Palmerston said. ‘Suitable for all manner of expectoration, I find.’

  As evening approached they talked their way through the meatiest issues of the day, the minister leading the conversation in his expansive, erratically voluble manner. Sam did his bit but grew increasingly unsatisfied; after such a promising start, their discourse stayed well away from the definite pledges of government custom that he’d been pretty confident of receiving. He reminded himself that the Home Secretary’s area of authority was domestic issues. Lord Palmerston was in no position to patronise the Colt Company, whatever his views on the necessity and inevitability of war and the superior quality of the Colt revolver. Finishing off his fifth whiskey, Sam tried to raise the subject of the police, and how fearfully under-equipped they were for what was a damnably dangerous job – only to be knocked back down at once. Englishmen, he was informed rather pompously, instinctively deplore the idea of an armed police; the sure and certain result of such folly would be an enormous rise in shootings by policemen, and a new breed of criminal who carried a gun of his own as a matter of course.