The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

  He proceeded to embark upon an energetic mime of a man scrutinising an envelope, holding it at arm’s length then bringing it close, screwing up his face and pacing back and forth, setting the thing down and then picking it up again – all the while supplying his own commentary to the fellow’s confusion. It went on for several minutes before ending up where it had begun.

  ‘“Is it,” Mr George still muses, “blank cartridge or ball?”’

  There were chortles and a smattering of applause. The gun-maker was wondering what exactly to do next when the door by his side opened just far enough to admit Walt Noone’s scowling mug. Sam glared at him, ready to demand that he account for his absence that morning, but the watchman managed to speak first.

  ‘This way, Colonel,’ he muttered urgently. ‘There’s something you got to see.’

  Sam didn’t argue. He was glad of the excuse, to be honest; the exuberant Mr Dickens was starting to tire him. Nodding to Lowry and Richards, he followed Noone back out into the yard. The watchman led him wordlessly through the Ponsonby Street gate and straight on through the midday traffic – showing the palm of his hand to an approaching dray with such blunt violence that the driver drew it to an immediate halt. He was angry, madly angry, the lid rattling on a boiling kettle.

  They strode onto the section of the quay given over to the Colt works. The wooden pier had been extended, and a coal barge was moored at its end. It had yet to be unloaded, the barrows standing empty on the shore; the labourers who would do the job stood off to the side in an apprehensive huddle, held back by Noone’s men. Noone himself went to where the pier joined the quay, standing at the very edge, locking his hands behind his back and lifting up his chin. His meaning was plain enough. Sam went to his side and looked down at the river.

  There was a band of black mud about six feet wide between the greenish water and the base of the embankment wall. Directly below the pier, amid the trash and debris of the metropolis, was a larger object, the shape of a packing case or small barrel; and laid across it, waxy white against the muck, was the lower half of a man’s arm. Sam’s first thought was that it was being devoured by eels, but he quickly realised that the serpentine forms swarming over it were not moving. They were tattooed on. This was the body of Mr Quill, his missing engineer.

  ‘How long’s he been in there?’

  ‘Since last night at least. Tide keeps shifting him – he was lying on his back a minute ago.’ Noone met his eye. ‘You could see the great big goddamn bullet-hole in his chest.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Sam reached into his pocket for the screw of Old Red. Fingers trembling, he sliced off a chunk with his clasp-knife and pushed it into his mouth.

  ‘Colonel, I know where they are. I can go there right now and finish it. I can –’

  ‘No, Mr Noone,’ Sam interrupted, champing furiously, ‘you will do no such goddamn thing. We do not need the fuss. If you draw notice to us in any way – if this business here gets out – then we’re sunk. How many times are you going to make me say it? We can’t be seen to be this vulnerable, or this hated. The British Government will not touch us again if they think there’s any kind of risk involved. D’you understand me?’

  ‘We owe it to Ben Quill to see the motherfuckers what killed him get their rightful goddamn punishment.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘That ain’t got a single thing to do with it. You hide that body, as soon as you can. Somewhere it won’t ever be found.’ He gestured towards the labourers. ‘How much have they seen? Will they stay quiet?’

  Noone looked away without answering. That kettle lid was rattling again.

  ‘Will they, Mr Noone?’

  ‘I can make them see our viewpoint, Colonel.’

  ‘Very well then. Hide that body, and quietly. Get Lou Ballou in that goddamn engine room if you have to carry him over from the lodging house. Then we’ll put our heads together and devise a new strategy.’

  The watchman’s frustration got the better of him. ‘So again we do nothing,’ he hissed. ‘They kill one of our number and we do nothing. I’m loyal to you, Colonel, God knows I am, but this is starting to look like cowardice. We’re losing right here – letting a bunch of ragtag Papist cocksuckers thumb their noses at us.’

  Sam spat a long stream of juice onto the stones. ‘No, Mr Noone, we are winning. We’ll sell more guns, knock down our rivals and make a ton of money. Our company will become the unchallenged supplier of arms to the entire goddamn world. And if you want to keep your place in it, you’ll do what I damn well tell you.’

  Mr Lowry was approaching from the edge of Ponsonby Street. Sam broke off from the watchman and went to intercept him – but not before he’d come within sight of Mr Quill’s arm. His eyes widened with disbelief; he knew what it was all right.

  ‘What the devil are you doing out here, Mr Lowry? Shouldn’t you be looking to our guest?’

  The boy gathered himself with remarkable speed, managing a pretty good show of light-heartedness – pretending that he’d seen nothing. ‘Never fear, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Mr Dickens is doing perfectly well without me. What has happened, may I ask? Can I be of any assistance?’

  Sam studied Mr Lowry for a second. Why exactly had he left the warehouse? Had he been thinking to spy on them? The gun-maker remembered the suspicions Noone had voiced about the boy before Christmas. They no longer seemed quite so ludicrous. One thing was absolutely certain: there was rot here, deep inside his London works. It had led to theft, and sabotage, and now Ben Quill being dumped like garbage in the open sewer of the Thames. He couldn’t say how the secretary might be connected to it all and he didn’t much care. Steps would have to be taken. The system would have to be flushed.

  ‘A delivery mix-up is all,’ he replied gruffly. ‘Sorted now.’

  Back in the proving room the performance had resumed. The audience had swollen, the blueing smiths crowding in around the testing tubes and the women from the packing room lining up along the stairs, leaning eagerly over the banister. Everyone there was shaking with laughter; even Richards wore a grudging grin. Mr Dickens had removed his hat and coat and was throwing himself around with great enthusiasm. He was enacting a conversation between the booming-voiced character he’d been doing earlier and a more nasal but equally simple-minded lackey, each role requiring a complete change of posture and demeanour. They were discussing a dream of the lackey’s – a dream of the countryside.

  ‘“How did you know it was the country?”’ inquired the booming voice, standing bolt upright, to the left. ‘“On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it,”’ the nasal voice answered, crook-backed, to the right. ‘“What were the swans doing on the grass?”’ The famous author paused, teasing out his audience’s mirth. ‘“They was a-eating of it, I expect.”’

  Sam decided that this had all gone far enough. From the doorway, speaking tersely over the general hilarity, the gun-maker asked his guest’s opinion of his pistols – now that he’d had a chance to cast an eye over the finished article. The workers scattered at once, hurrying back to their rightful labours. Mr Dickens turned towards his host, offering a laughing apology for getting so caught up in his capering. Sam repeated his question. Smoothing down his hair, the author looked again at the rows of newly proved Navys. He pronounced himself impressed, but seemed more interested in the gallery of promotional posters that had been pasted to the wall behind them. They featured illustrations of the revolver’s gallant service across America; an Indian scene, Colonel Hays of the Texas Rangers seeing off a vastly superior force of Comanche, struck him particularly.

  ‘I see that your revolver is a pacifying hinstrument of some potency, Colonel,’ he said, holding out a hand for his coat and then pulling it on. ‘An effective means indeed of keeping Christian families safe as your republic extends its borders across the wilderness.’

  Sam nodded. ‘It’s the ideal weapon for combat against barbarian tribes, Mr Dickens. I made this case to your government, in fact, but I couldn’t get ‘e
m to send any to the army fighting at the Cape.’

  ‘Give them time, sir, give them time. In his heart every savage is covetous, treacherous and cruel, and quite beyond reform. There will be further difficulties in the African colonies, mark my words. Those equipping the poor souls doomed to fight there will see sense soon enough.’

  Sam picked up an unloaded Navy and passed it to him, stock first. ‘That ain’t piecework there, remember. Every part is fashioned by a machine.’

  Mr Dickens worked the mechanism, admiring the smooth rotation of the cylinder and the hammer’s precise snap. ‘D’you know, Colonel,’ he imparted confidentially, ‘I believe that this hinvention of yours will have the most profound consequences for storytellers such as myself. The possibilities for a Bill Sykes or a Mademoiselle Hortense armed with such a device – why, the imagination positively reels!’

  Sam admitted that this hadn’t ever occurred to him. ‘Want to try it out?’

  A smith took the gun from the author’s hand and set about loading it. Mr Dickens demurred, protesting that he wielded a pen, not a pistol; that he was but a frail, desk-bound creature not fitted to the robust pursuits of those from the Colt mould. Predictably enough, however, the chance to perform again was more than he could resist. Half a minute later he’d accepted the loaded revolver and was being directed towards the range.

  Stepping up to the firing line, Mr Dickens adopted the classic duellist’s pose – dead straight, sideways, with his chest thrust out and his pistol arm raised at a right angle to his body. He then tilted back his head, shutting one eye and taking aim along the barrel. Despite this rather comical approach, his first shot was a good one, slamming straight into the black and earning some whistles and whoops from the smiths. Encouraged, grinning wide, he fired his second, and his third, filling the proving room with noise; and by his sixth he was sniggering like a lunatic.

  ‘By my soul,’ he panted through the powder-smoke, ‘what deuced fun this is!’

  Sam held out a fresh Navy. ‘Will you shoot off another?’

  ‘My dear Colonel,’ the famous author declared, ‘I don’t mind if I do!’

  8

  Caroline was perched a few yards up the side of a dust-heap, dressed in her old, well-worn clothes so as not to draw attention to herself. Edward’s Navy was hidden under her shawl. A further search of his rooms had uncovered a small supply of ready-made cartridges in the back of a drawer – small, papery tubes that had slotted easily into the gun’s chambers. She had a nagging sense that something was still missing, something that might prevent it from firing properly, but she couldn’t worry about this now. There simply wasn’t time.

  The dust-heap, a great accumulation of ancient ash, was about two storeys high, covered in coarse-leafed weeds with a cracked, tar-like crust that crunched beneath your boots. The yard it stood in had fallen out of use many years ago; the dustman’s house was a mouldy ruin, stripped of its timbers and tiles. Like the dairy on the other side of its broken-down fence, it would not be safe from the mallets of the City Corporation’s wrecking teams for very much longer. Evening was approaching, the sun sinking behind the treetops of Belgravia as church bells across the city chimed six o’clock. Lights winked along Victoria Street, tracing a path through the misty wasteland of the clearances. In the other direction, over the exhausted roofs of the Devil’s Acre, jutted up the unfinished towers of the Parliament building, the engines at their summits puffing out final scudding clouds of steam.

  Caroline made herself look at the dairy, a low shed of mossy, discoloured brick. Three of the Irishmen had stepped outside a few minutes earlier, walking off towards the river, leaving only Slattery and two others inside with Amy and Martin. Almost immediately a vicious argument had begun. Even from her place up on the dust-heap, Caroline could tell that Slattery and Martin were really going for each other. Martin sounded weak, his voice thin and hoarse, but he was giving no quarter.

  ‘Yous killed him, damn you,’ she heard him cry. ‘An innocent man and yous bleedin’ killed him.’

  ‘You helped kill enough on the Mother Isle, Martin Rea – Denis Mahon, remember him? And you was going to kill Lord John happy enough, wasn’t you?’

  ‘Never one that didn’t warrant it, Slattery! Never!’

  Their numbers were reduced, and they were distracted by their quarrel. Caroline had been watching them, waiting for such a chance, for the best part of three days. But now it had finally arrived she was glued in place, thinking only of Edward Lowry; of the comfort they’d found in each other’s arms throughout that freezing winter. To rise from the dust-heap and go down into the dairy was to lose him absolutely. Caroline had thought that she’d accepted this. Seeing the continued distress that the prospect of their parting brought him had actually made her feel a little guilty, so much greater did it seem than her own. Yet at this critical moment she’d suddenly ground to a halt, like a horse refusing to venture out onto a frozen lake. As the shouts from within the dairy reached new peaks of fury, and Katie’s wail was added to the clamour, she kept delaying her approach by another tiny portion of time, and then another. Just until that person over there reaches the end of the lane, she told herself; just until that crouching cat jumps up onto that wall.

  Laying her hand on the hard curve of the pistol stock brought back some of her reason. Her sister was in there, and her niece: her family. They needed her. No one else was going to help them. She wiped her damp palms on her shawl, squeezed her eyes shut and whispered a short prayer.

  When she opened them again there he was, in the dead centre of her vision, like a divine judgement upon her hesitancy – Walter Noone, Colonel Colt’s watchman, striding along Old Pye Street. Despite his neat coat and shining boots, the Acre’s inhabitants were leaving him well alone, warded off by a potent, unspoken threat. He stopped a short distance from the old dairy, studying the front entrance and the derelict premises on either side. As Caroline herself had done, he quickly decided that the dust-yard was the best way in and started for the gate.

  She was almost overcome by panic. How had he found his way here? Had he been following her – and if so, for how long? Did he know that Edward had been giving her shelter? It didn’t matter. She had to act at once. Skidding down the dust-heap, she met him as he entered the yard, pointing the pistol at his chest with both hands.

  Noone wasn’t surprised or alarmed to see her. If anything, his reaction was one of boredom. ‘Well, if it ain’t Lowry’s whore,’ he drawled. ‘That preening bastard round here too, is he? All come to have a good chuckle with your Papist pals about the Yankee boy I’ve just had to sink in the Thames mud?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she replied, fighting to control her fear, ‘but you ain’t going in there.’

  The watchman stared at her; it felt like violation. The Navy’s long barrel started to wobble.

  ‘You ain’t with them no more,’ he stated. ‘You’re here for someone else – the sister, that dark-haired bitch I seen hanging about with ‘em before.’ He nodded at her revolver. ‘That ain’t one of those you stole from us, is it?’

  ‘I’ll shoot you,’ Caroline said, clicking back the hammer, ‘so help me I will.’

  This won her the slightest wince of scorn. ‘It ain’t loaded properly, you dozy cunt. Percussion caps are needed to fire a repeating pistol.’

  Caroline glanced at the gun, lifting it a little, knowing that he was right; and he drove a fist straight into her in the eye, knocking her against the dust-heap. For a few seconds she was blinded, floundering dazedly in the black soil. A hot iron seemed to press down hard upon her cheek, stinging wickedly, making her curse aloud. Ignoring the pain as best she could, she rocked herself upright. A thick drip was crawling along her top lip. She touched her face; her nose was bleeding.

  Noone was about ten yards away, pushing through the dust-yard’s fence, heading for a side door in the dairy’s wall. He’d drawn a pair of pistols from under his short coat. Rubbing her bloody nose wit
h her sleeve, Caroline gave chase. The Irishmen were still arguing ferociously – actually fighting each other from the sound of it. They wouldn’t hear the watchman coming.

  ‘Amy!’ she shouted. ‘Amy, get out!’

  It was too late. Noone had gone through the door. Tearing her skirts on the fence, slipping on a step and colliding with the outside wall, Caroline careened in after him.

  Slattery and Martin were caught in mid-brawl, each screwing up a handful of his adversary’s shirt, in the centre of the dairy’s single rectangular room. Martin looked awful, pale and sunken-eyed, his left arm swathed in grubby bandages. The two other Irishmen were standing on either side of them, as if they’d been trying to pull them apart. All four now gaped at the intruder, their fight forgotten.

  The dairy was a decayed place, its whitewash soured to a dirty yellow; the milk-urns that lined the walls had been eaten up completely by rust. There was a counter at the street end and a row of cattle stalls at the rear, in which its current residents had made their beds. From one of these, only a few yards from the side door, peeked Amy and Katie. They were clinging together, both struck dumb by fright. The sisters’ eyes met; and if anything, Amy’s confusion increased. Caroline remembered that, as well as being bloody and bruised, she still held Edward’s useless Navy in her hand.

  Noone was walking towards the counter, checking the dairy’s boarded-up front – making sure that no one could escape through it.

  ‘What the hell d’ye want?’ Slattery shouted at him, letting go of Martin.

  The watchman turned around. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t come looking for you?’ he demanded. ‘Did you really think you could kill Ben Quill and nothing at all would happen?’

  Slattery was defiant. ‘Aye, so we killed him. What of it? We’d do it again, so we would, in a bleedin’ heartbeat. Your precious Colonel is an enemy of Catholic Ireland – of our mistress Molly Maguire. She’ll see him reduced to bleedin’ nothing, d’ye hear?’