The Devil's Acre

by Matthew Plampin

  Saul looked towards the bar – towards the gleaming row of ale-pumps, the phalanx of bottles up on shelves, the team of barmen and pot-boys attempting to field many dozens of simultaneous orders – as if gazing off into his own glorious future. Then, suddenly, he grabbed hold of Edward’s arm.

  ‘You must run too. I’m sure we can find you a winnable seat before another election is called, and drum up the necessary support. Think of it, Edward! Us two, in bloody government! Imagine what we could accomplish!’

  Edward’s laughter ceased when he realised that Saul was entirely in earnest. Never had he seen his friend so animated; and although he suspected that the pint of whiskey they’d shared in the park might bear a measure of responsibility for this, he could also tell that there was genuine conviction beneath it all.

  Graff released him. ‘Give it some thought. You have the brains for it, the nerve, and the stamina as well. I shall endeavour to obtain us some refreshment, and will expect an answer upon my return.’

  He began to work his way to the bar, soon vanishing among the hats clustered along it. Edward fumbled in his pockets, looking for a cigar, oddly flattered despite himself. What Graff proposed was absurd – wasn’t it? Surely a man needed money, important friends and a whole raft of other advantages to aspire to political office. Yet his mind started to turn it over nonetheless. After eighteen months with Bannan he was not without connections. It would be an extremely difficult and lengthy process, that much was certain; but perhaps there might just be a way.

  A sharp pain in his side brought Edward’s reflections to a halt. Someone had dug a knuckle between two of his ribs, as if trying to shove him aside. He twisted around to make a complaint – and was confronted with the equine features of Alfred Richards, fixing him with a savage glare. Before he could speak, Richards prodded him again.

  ‘So it is over,’ he spat. ‘Pleased, are you?’

  Edward lifted his arm to ward off any further jabs, taken aback by the intensity of the press agent’s loathing. ‘What is this, Richards? What the devil d’you mean?’

  The man glowered, saying nothing.

  ‘If you refer to the war, then yes, I suppose I –’

  ‘Colonel Colt is shutting up the London works,’ broke in Richards contemptuously. ‘He’s making Hartford his sole site of manufacture. There’s this infernal peace, of course. Guns are furthest from the government’s mind, all of a sudden. The trade is flat as a bloody…a bloody…’

  His thoughts seemed to wander off. Edward saw that he was deep in one of his liquor-filled troughs; he’d grown a thin, unhealthy-looking beard, his lower lip was split and he had a large scuff in the fabric of his hat. After a few seconds he returned to the present, poking an accusatory finger at Edward’s chest.

  ‘But we were finished long before that, oh yes indeed! That great loss last summer was the mortal blow – since then, we’ve just been bleeding away in the gutter. And you were behind it, weren’t you, you damned turncoat? Leaving us to go to Bannan? Telling him all the secrets you’d learnt about Sam’s business? Sam never said it – Christ, he never so much as spoke your damn name after you’d gone – but I knew, you blackguard. I bloody well knew.’

  Edward wasn’t about to deny it. ‘He was smuggling guns to Russia, Richards,’ he said. ‘He was trying to supply revolvers to our enemy.’

  For a moment he could see Cousin Arthur, sitting motion-lessly among the begonias in the garden of Aunt Ruth’s cottage in Wandsworth. He’d been shot through the upper arm during the second assault on Sebastopol the previous September. The wound had become infected, leaving the surgeons at Scutari no option but to amputate the limb. His mother, so frail and enervated throughout the Russian campaign, was overjoyed to have him back alive, invalided out of the Army. The young veteran, however, was utterly disconsolate, reduced to a wasted, embittered husk.

  Richards barely paused to take this in before waving it away. ‘And what of it? Of course he was! They will get the things sooner or later – so they might as well get them from Sam Colt!’

  ‘You cannot honestly believe that.’

  The press agent’s red eyes widened. ‘Why, Mr Lowry, he’s in bloody Russia right now! He travelled to St Petersburg the very instant that peace was declared. There was some surplus stock in the end, y’see, despite your treachery. He’s shifting his peacemakers to the very chaps that were having the things shot at them not six months ago. The Russians love him, it seems, and he can operate without fear of what Bob Adams or Clarence Paget or your dear chum Simon bloody Bannan might make of it. And once all the guns are gone – which they will be, in a damned trice – he’s vowed to go home for good.’ Richards took a needy swig from a small brown bottle. ‘He’s getting married, or so he says.’

  Edward began to shake his head. He remembered the last, desperate breaths that Caroline had drawn down on the floor of that Westminster dust-yard; the pressure with which she’d squeezed his hand, and its devastating release. ‘I had to do it, Richards,’ he said. ‘It had to be done.’

  Richards wasn’t listening. ‘A truly singular fellow was among us,’ he fumed, a fleck of foaming spittle flying from his spilt lip, ‘and you and your sanctimonious kind chased him off. And don’t you be thinking for a second that you defeated him, Lowry. You defeated only us, you wretched ass – you and me and every other Englishman turned out of his works!’

  With some relief, Edward heard Saul Graff call his name. His friend was struggling back across the tavern with two dark jugs of porter in his hands. Behind him someone climbed up onto the bar and proposed a birthday toast to the Queen. This met with a mighty cheer, and Saul was lost from view as several hundred glasses were raised aloft, their contents sloshing out over hats and coat-cuffs. Edward felt another vicious dig to his ribs; but when he looked back around, ready now to retaliate, Alfred Richards was already pushing his way towards the street.

  The cab slowed to join the queue moving through the toll on Vauxhall Bridge. Almost anxiously, Edward peered out of a window at the mouth of the defunct pistol works. The buildings were devoid of life. No smoke came from the chimneys; the windows were the colour of day-old puddles. Up on the roof of the factory block the enormous whitewashed letters of the Colonel’s slogan were starting to show through the pitch that had been daubed over them, like a spectral reassertion of his departed authority.

  It was a dreary mid-November afternoon. Fog lingered along the quays and hung in sallow drifts around the factory gates. Some manner of market appeared to be underway in the yard. Serious-looking gentlemen were stalking to and fro like crows, examining the pieces of Colt machinery that had been arranged for their inspection. Edward knew that this would be the last stage in the close-down of the works: the sale of the machines not deemed worth the cost of transportation back to America. Even the dead engine, the factory’s stilled heart, had been torn from its cradle and dragged out into the cold.

  The cab advanced a couple of places in the queue, revealing more of the yard. There against the wall of the warehouse was a rectangle of searing yellow so bright and strong that it cut through the day’s dullness like the beam from a lighthouse. Realising that it was the Colt carriage. Edward sat upright and pulled away from the window, fully expecting to see that familiar, broad-chested form, dressed in its wide-brimmed hat and fur-lined Yankee coat, striding around its side. But no, the vehicle had merely been parked out there to be sold, like everything else. Colonel Colt was very many miles from Pimlico. He cleared his throat, feeling a little foolish.

  There was a giggle beside him. Katie was mimicking his alarmed, straight-backed posture. She was dressed in a new bonnet and mantle, both deep blue, bought for her that morning. As she’d moved from infancy to early childhood, the angles of her face slowly gaining more definition, her resemblance to her aunt had grown ever clearer. Her hair had become the same tone of light hazel; her smile contained the same unlikely mixture of affection, wilfulness and wicked mockery. A neat mole had even appeared high upon
her left cheek. This likeness would sometimes cause Edward’s grief to be suddenly revived, yet it brought with it a strange sweetness. To be reminded of Caroline by one so very much alive, at the outset of her years, gave him greater consolation than he would have imagined possible.

  ‘Look over there,’ he said, pointing at the yard as the cab started to move again, passing through the toll-gate and onto the bridge. ‘What a smart carriage that is!’

  The little girl, flattened her hands against the window pane. ‘It is yellow, Mr Lowry.’

  ‘Yes, Katie,’ Edward agreed with a wise nod, ‘it certainly is.’

  ‘I rather prefer blue,’ she declared, switching her attention to the barges crawling along the foggy river, their lanterns flashing in the murk.

  They carried on through the corroded crust of factories and workshops that lined the southern bank, past the bare treetops of the boarded-up pleasure gardens and the handful of dejected-looking sheep that had been put out to graze upon the Oval. The cab turned right onto the Brixton Road. Outside the window now were the neat divisions of well-tended suburban gardens, with rows of identical houses standing at their ends – a grey parade broken only by the coaching inn, half-rustic in character, that served as the terminus for the Westminster and St James omnibus route. Heaps of decaying leaves were scattered across every common and clogged every drain. All the people they saw seemed to be hurrying home, coats and mantles buttoned up against the bone-chilling fog. It was only a quarter past three o’clock yet darkness already seemed to be drawing in.

  After some minutes on the same straight avenue the cab swung into a lane with elm trees on one side and a tall wall on the other.

  ‘We’re almost there, I think,’ Edward said.

  Katie had been providing them with a chattering commentary throughout the journey, identifying particularly large horses or pretty bonnets; now, though, she fell completely silent, gazing down at her boots. A few moments later their vehicle stopped before an arched gateway, an ugly and enormous thing; the gate it contained was like that of an ancient stronghold, its massy planks studded with pyramidal nailheads. Edward glanced at his mother. Sitting in the far corner of the cab, her hands folded in her lap, she was regarding Katie with concern. Together, they had done their best to prepare the child, but could not know how successful they had been. She was simply too young to understand fully what was about to happen.

  ‘I will stay here, Edward,’ she murmured. ‘This is for you to do alone. I will come if I am needed.’

  Edward climbed from the cab, lifting out the little girl and setting her upon the pavement, away from the mud of the lane. An ordinary crowd about a dozen strong had gathered for the release, all dressed in drab working clothes. Most had come on foot, although a single tradesman’s cart had drawn up a little further down the road. Theirs was the only carriage, and a few curious stares were thrown their way. They were not the sort usually encountered waiting outside prison gates.

  Somewhere in the depths of the prison a clock started to chime half past three. A small door opened in the gate and women started to emerge, all dressed in claret-brown gowns with grey shawls and bonnets. There was little jubilation among them as they regained their liberty; they looked to Edward like survivors picking their way from a wrecked train, dazed yet relieved, stumbling into the arms of friends and relatives. He glimpsed what appeared to be a familiar profile, careworn and pale with exhaustion but still so similar to Caroline’s that it paralysed him completely. It was her sister – Katie’s mother, Amy Rea. She soon spotted Edward standing there, frozen in place in his top hat and frock-coat, able only to blink back at her. Knowing who he must be, she started towards him; and as she left the crowd she saw the child hiding nervously behind his leg.

  Amy cried out her daughter’s name, her voice filled with longing and joy and a clear trace of apprehension. She made to run over, but came to an uncertain halt in the middle of the lane.

  Katie turned to Edward. ‘Mr Lowry…’

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he managed to say. ‘It is your mother. We wrote her a letter, do you not remember?’

  ‘But I – I do not –’ Katie stammered, looking away, ‘I do not know –’

  Recovering herself, Amy took four quick paces to where they stood, her eyes never leaving her daughter. Saying Katie’s name again, she crouched down on the pavement, placed her hands on the girl’s shoulders and looked long into her face, searching for any sign of recognition.

  ‘My angel,’ she whispered, ‘don’t you remember me?’

  Then she folded Katie in a close embrace, rocking them gently back and forth. After a few moments Katie’s arm rose from her side. Finding a corner of the prison shawl, she gripped onto it tightly, bunching up the coarse cloth in her palm.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Devil’s Acre is based around a series of historical events, from the factory visits of Lajos Kossuth and Charles Dickens to the seizure of the Russia-bound revolvers at Aix-la-Chapelle. Many of the details about Samuel Colt’s time in London, however, remain unknown. The Colonel seldom left any more than accidental traces of his movements, for obvious reasons. What he did, where he went, who he spoke with and the understandings that were reached can often only be imagined – or deduced, perhaps, from the pattern of contracts he won from the British Government. Letters do survive between Colt and Lord Palmerston, who was the only senior British politician to take a serious interest in the American gun-maker and his Pimlico factory. Although rather vague, they are cordial in tone and contain clear suggestions that the two men intended to meet; and as Palmerston’s power increased, so did the government’s patronage of the Colt Company, despite a marked lack of consensus among British experts over the superiority of the Colonel’s pistols.

  Those who staffed the London works are similarly elusive. A few figures appear from minutes, press reports and scraps of correspondence, including the gigantic, peevish foreman Gage Stickney, who betrayed his employer at the Select Committee on Small Arms; Alfred Richards, failed barrister turned press agent, with his sweeping, gentlemanly language and troubled domestic circumstances; the disgruntled overseer Jabez Alvord, dismissing his charges in a letter to his brother as ‘thick-headed Englishmen’. Many more are unaccounted for, though, and it is here that my own inventions – Benjamin Quill, Walter Noone, Edward Lowry – have been inserted, filling roles that would have existed within the gun factory’s hierarchy.

  Records of the men and women from the factory’s lower reaches are even more scant, but Colt’s well-known policy of employing cheap, unskilled workers and then training them up himself would have made the Devil’s Acre his natural recruiting ground. A good number of those he took on would have been Irish – and where there were concentrations of poor Irish in the mid-nineteenth century there was a significant chance that Molly Maguires would be found among them. The Mollys emerged in the 1840s from a long tradition of secret societies in rural Ireland: of ‘whiteboys’ and ‘ribbonmen’ committed to the violent intimidation of their enemies, who were usually oppressive landlords or perceived symbols of English rule. Molly Maguire herself is a creature of myth. Neither her origins, nor her followers’ bizarre tradition of cross-dressing and corking their faces before an attack, have ever received a definitive explanation.

  Murderously active throughout the potato famine (a Major Denis Mahon was indeed killed by them in County Roscommon), many Mollys are believed to have scattered in its aftermath, settling in the cities of England and Scotland and emigrating to the new world. They would next come to prominence in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania during the 1860s and 70s, when they waged a long and bloody campaign against mine-owners and their feared Pinkerton detectives. That they had a presence in London is beyond doubt, but there is no evidence that they ever planned a killing as ambitious as that conceived by Pat Slattery. The Irish hatred of Lord John Russell, however, was very real. John MacHale, firebrand Bishop of Tuam, expressed the views of many in a widely-circulated
letter to the then-Prime Minister that told him bluntly: ‘if you are ambitious for a monument, the bones of a people, slain with the sword of famine, and piled into cairns more numerous than the ancient pyramids, will tell posterity of the triumph of your brief but disastrous administration.’

  The novel’s other significant characters are a mixture of fact and fiction. Lawrence Street, Lady Cecilia Wardell and Simon Bannan all fall into the latter category, although Bannan shares a few professional features with William Monsell, the actual MP for Limerick in the 1850s. Lord Clarence Paget and Sir Thomas Hastings, on the other hand, are historical figures who served in both the Royal Navy and the Board of Ordnance – and although their respective dispositions towards Samuel Colt are accurately portrayed in these pages, it should be stressed that the personalities given to them are entirely conjectural.

  After the collapse of his London enterprise, freed from any pretence to an ‘Anglo-Saxon bond’, the Colonel sold openly to the Russians and anyone else with the money to buy from him, soon recouping his losses from the seizure at Aix-la-Chapelle. Returning to Connecticut in 1856, he finally married Elizabeth Jarvis, gave up the rigours of inter-continental travel and built a magnificent mansion overlooking his Hartford factory. Business boomed, Colt pistols selling in their hundreds of thousands as America drifted towards the Civil War – and the Colonel’s weapons were to be widely used by both the Union and Confederate armies. Sam himself did not live to see the conflict’s resolution. The gun-maker’s dedication to both his business pursuits and his liquor eventually exacted its price and he died in 1861, aged forty-seven.

  Although The Devil’s Acre is a work of fiction containing numerous fabrications and distortions, many books and sources were consulted for the purposes of research. Perhaps the most important among these was Joseph Rosa’s Colonel Colt, London, an engaging and detailed history of the short-lived factory at Bessborough Place. Also useful for getting a sense of Samuel Colt and his London venture were two entertaining biographies – Jack Rohan’s Yankee Arms Maker: The Story of Sam Colt and his Six-Shot Peacemaker and William Edwards’s The Story of Colt’s Revolvers: The Biography of Colonel Samuel Colt – and the series of swaggering promotional pamphlets published by an anonymous English author (very probably Alfred Richards) in the early days of the pistol works’ existence.