The Devil's Acre (24 page)

The simplest way out of it all, he’d concluded, was to go along with what Slattery had proposed; and at dawn he’d left Crocodile Court determined to double the tally of stolen Colts before the day was over. He’d cornered Caroline at the Bessborough Place gate, demanding to know the source of her mysterious revolvers so that he could lend his hand to their removal. She’d refused to tell him, saying that something was afoot – that Noone had got wind of wrongdoing and had every department of the works under a close watch. There was still little love lost between them; Martin knew that she even blamed him in part for Michael’s death, in
fact, as it was due to him that the boy’s short, fragile life had been spent amid the disease-ridden squalor of the Devil’s Acre. He was sure that he’d detected a trace of pity in her, though, somewhere behind the knot of her frown, and this had irritated him enormously. She’d plainly thought that he, veteran of a hundred dangerous adventures, wasn’t fit for a simple piece of burglary. He’d tried again, growing angry, repeating the lie about the debt, yet she would not budge – and now he saw that she’d been entirely in the right. Noone and his men would surely be at their most alert after an incident such as this, making any irregular movement about the works nigh-on impossible. Caroline was showing herself to be quite the thief; she had a clear instinct for it. Martin was honestly not surprised.

Mr Quill clambered down after him, shaking his head. ‘What the devil is it with that fellow, eh, Mart? Why does he have to be such a confounded jackass?’

‘I take it,’ said Mr Ballou from over by the engine, raising his voice over its constant clank and hiss, ‘that this Robert Adams is a rival gun-maker.’

Loren Ballou, ‘Lou’ to every Yankee in the works, was a neat, pale man, bearded and bespectacled, almost professorial in his manner despite his engineer’s corduroys and leather apron. His accent was slightly different from the other Americans, softer somehow; Mr Quill had told Martin that he hailed from Kentucky rather than New York or Connecticut, and had cut his teeth laying the Kentuckian railroad. Now, though, he bore the lofty rank of general overseer, and was said to possess a complete knowledge of the Colt industrial process rivalled only by the Colonel himself. The Yankees certainly deferred to him on all matters. Even Mr Quill, better qualified perhaps on the specific workings of the London steam engine, listened very closely to Lou Ballou and allowed him to work alongside them in the engine room without a whisper of complaint. Their diligence had also increased markedly; drinks in the Spread Eagle had almost become a thing of the past.

Mr Quill leaned against the table, crossing his serpent-covered forearms. ‘Robert Adams, Lou, is an Englishman
based on the other side of the city, who sees the Colonel as the very nemesis of his trade. He makes this double-action five-shooter, y’see – a distinctly inferior device, if truth be told, but he hopes that the John Bull government will take it on for patriotic reasons. Things got rather hot between Colt and Adams back in the spring. There were a few rows in the streets hereabouts – nasty business. We did our part, didn’t we, Mart?’

Martin said nothing. His head felt empty; his eyes were burning. He concentrated on the steel ring in his hands, rotating it slowly, looking for imperfections.

Mr Quill chuckled on regardless. ‘Anyways, the Colonel didn’t put up with it for, as I’m sure you can imagine. Noone put the whip-hand to ‘em and they soon backed off.’ He sighed, picking up a spanner from the table. ‘But here they are having another try, and with a rather more sly tactic than beatings and suchlike. I’ll wager they’ve heard about your arrival, Lou, and the great things that we three are bringing about in here. They know that Colt production is ready to soar up to the heavens, leaving them behind in a world of trouble!’

Ballou took this in impassively. He was never particularly impressed by Mr Quill’s efforts to include Martin in their engineering accomplishments. ‘I suppose that fighting off a determined rival will keep Mr Noone happy, at least,’ he mused. ‘It wouldn’t do for the poor fellow to get
bored.’
The general overseer had known of Noone before he came to Pimlico. From what Martin could gather, the watchman’s hiring had caused serious division among Colt’s senior staff members back in Hartford. Why he could not discover; it was clear, though, that Ballou had been one of those who’d opposed the appointment. ‘D’you think he’s sent word to Jamie of this revived threat?’

‘Aha, no,’ Mr Quill replied, ‘I think the Colonel’s brother has some pressing personal matters to worry about of late. Besides, simply reaching him has become pretty difficult.’

The two Americans shared a laugh. Stories were going around of how James Colt had disgraced himself with the wife of a military figure he was supposed to be charming
on behalf of the company. What exactly he had done was unknown, but it was bad enough to force a rapid retreat to a distant corner of the English countryside. There was a bitter edge to Quill and Ballou’s amusement; like many among the American staff, they were starting to feel that the London factory was a rudderless ship, drifting aimlessly, failing to avail itself of some real opportunities. War with Russia had not arrived, but the word was being printed in every newspaper and journal in letters three inches high on an almost daily basis. This feverish climate, they said, was one in which a gun-maker could thrive. Yet there they sat, stagnating by the Thames, taking only small private orders; their enemies were resurgent, and showing new levels of deviousness; and their supposed captain was nowhere to be seen.

A flat clang made Martin jump and rock back on his stool. The piston ring had slipped from his grasp onto the brick floor. Some time had passed; he realised that he’d fallen asleep, and had been seeing Michael in his dreams, those little legs kicking up in the air – feeling the infant’s pink fingers close so gently around his thumb. Mr Quill and Mr Ballou now stood together before the engine. The general overseer was examining the condenser; the chief engineer, alerted by the sound, was looking over at him. Martin bent down to retrieve the dropped ring, but it seemed to blur before him, blending in with the bricks. His eyes were brimming with tears. Hurriedly, he wiped them away; but more welled up immediately, one escaping the stroke of his sleeve and rolling across his face.

A hand was laid upon his shoulder. Mr Quill had come to his side. ‘We’re stepping out for a minute or two, Lou, me and Mart. Nothing to worry about.’

Ballou glanced around impatiently. ‘But I may need your help, Ben, with the –’

‘Damn it, Lou,’ Quill snapped, ‘I’ll be gone a moment only. You can manage until then, I’m sure.’

Soon afterwards Martin was sitting against the factory wall in the still, dead heat of the afternoon, leaning against his
knees and weeping hard, a hot, salty mixture of tears and snot running around his mouth and dripping off his chin. Mr Quill was beside him on the cobbles, one of his tattooed arms wrapped around Martin’s shoulders, puffing stoically on his pipe.

‘The first month is blackest torture, Mart,’ he said. ‘I’ll not lie to you. It’s like madness. After my Jenny was taken – scarlet fever, it was, at the age of three – I lost the winter of forty-two completely. Can’t say where I was or what the hell I did. But when I did finally return home, my wife was gone, bless her, and my house sold on to a taxidermist named Bowley.’ A curl of white smoke wound from the corner of his mouth. ‘That’s what first put me on the steamers, matter o’ fact.’

Taking in a breath, Martin pulled up his shirt front and mopped his streaming face with it. ‘I can’t
sleep,
Mr Quill. I ain’t had a bleedin’ wink for days.’

The engineer nodded, as if this was to be expected. ‘When was your last square meal?’

Martin couldn’t say. He remembered something about whitebait, but they hadn’t done that in the end, had they? He shook his head. ‘My baby boy died because of me. Because of this bleedin’ city, the filthy air, all the – the muck and the bleedin’ dirt. I let him be born here, and by God I let him perish here.’ He was growing restless once again. ‘I’ve got to get us
out.’

Mr Quill tightened his embrace. ‘You are
not to blame,
you hear me? Christ, Mart, if only you knew – I thought the very same things myself, my friend, the
very same things,
but it just ain’t so. Some souls are too pure for this Earth. Almighty God has to gather ‘em in early.’

Martin’s brow darkened; he shrugged the engineer off. ‘Why does He choose to put them here in the first instance then, Mr Quill? Michael was but seven months old. What the devil does God get from putting us through this? My wife, my poor bleedin’ wife can barely
stand,
she –’ He stopped. This was unfair of him; he adopted a calmer tone. ‘I’m sorry, I – I don’t know why I…’

Mr Quill, who had coloured slightly, waved his apology
away. ‘You’re angry, Mart – I understand, believe me I do.’ He knocked his pipe out against the wall and tucked it in his apron’s front pocket. ‘But look, you must think on this. One day not so far from now we’ll leave this place, you and I, and your wife and little daughter as well, and we’ll go over to America. All we need to do is really make our mark in this blasted factory and I’m certain the Colonel will agree to it. Another year, say – two at the most.’

Martin wiped his stinging eyes. This glorious escape to Connecticut could never come to pass. Even if the Mollys’ plan went off perfectly, his involvement in it was sure to be detected. The safest place for the Rea family would be Ireland – Roscommon, most probably, with all its old miseries.

Quill could see that Martin hadn’t gained any comfort from his words. ‘You’re wondering how the hell we’re going to get anything done in this here pistol works when our manager is hiding away somewhere, and we make guns just so they can be stacked up in the goddamn stock room. Well, Mart, take heart – all of that is about to change. Word arrived this morning. We’ve been instructed to keep it to ourselves, but I can’t see the harm in you knowing.’ He hesitated, casting a quick glance about him. ‘It’s happening at long last. Colonel Colt is coming back to London.’

‘Colt!’
Sam roared as he burst through the doors of Mivart’s Hotel. ‘Colt is the name! Where the hell is he?’

The startled clerk did his best to halt the gun-maker’s furious charge, but it was like setting pasteboard before a typhoon. ‘It is against hotel policy to reveal such details,’ he protested, ‘and quite out of –’

‘Mr James Colt.’ Sam gripped the edge of the counter as if he was about to tear it free and use it to hammer the clerk into the floor. ‘Directions to his room, right this instant – or by thunder I will see you removed from your post and tossed out into the street like so much goddamn garbage.’

James was installed on the top floor, of course, five storeys up; Sam was leaning heavily against the sumptuous mahogany banister by the time he reached it. Staggering on through the carpeted hush of the corridor, he beat his fist against his brother’s door. Sam had sent no word of the precise time of his arrival in London to anyone, preferring as always to catch his people unawares; accordingly, James was most surprised to see him standing there, red-cheeked and panting with necktie loosened, his eyes starting out like black spikes from his head. The gun-maker pushed his brother aside and walked into the middle of a large, well-furnished sitting room, all rich drapery, polished sideboards and upholstered chairs, with a fine view of the copper and gold treetops of Berkeley Square. It was early evening, about five o’clock; coals glowed softly in a wide stone fireplace and a moulded gas fitting hissed
away between the two large windows. The overall effect was one of elegant, costly comfort.

‘What’s this here, then,’ he growled, his first words to his younger brother in nearly four years, ‘the most expensive set of rooms in the hotel? In the entire goddamn
city?’

He’d given James a few seconds to think since opening the door; the rascal had realised that there was to be a clash between them. Somewhere inside him he must surely have been expecting it. ‘It is important, Sam,’ he said now, as coolly as ever, ‘to make a display of wealth. You know as well as I that no one at all will buy from a shabby or desperate-looking salesman.’

Sam spun around so hard that the thick rug on the floor bunched up beneath the heel of his boot. ‘Oh, ain’t you wise, all of a sudden! Ain’t you the noble authority, the voice of goddamn experience! Desperate-looking indeed! How d’you think we look right now, Jamie? How d’you think
I
look after three months of your wondrous stewardship?’ He shouted out a couple of oaths before putting a hand to his brow, trying to calm himself to the point where he was capable of normal speech. ‘You tell me about Major Dyce’s wife. I want to hear it from you, from your own lips.’

James stiffened defensively, the fatuous grin dropping from his face. He had a plump, well-rested look to him; his clothes were new and distinctly English in style. This fellow has been playing at being a London dandy these past weeks, Sam thought, and on the Colt Company’s dime. ‘Then let me say that I was not at fault – not at fault at all. Major Dyce is a jealous lunatic, Sam. I’ve crossed his sort before, back in St Louis – they can’t bear the sight of anyone they don’t know so much as
talking
to their wives. And I was talking only. I swear it on Mother’s grave.’

Sam was not convinced.
‘Improper attention
is what I heard, you unmannerly dogger, which I take to mean that you were making your oily advances on this woman before a roomful of people – whose number just happened to include not only her goddamn husband but also several of his close friends from the Woolwich Arsenal! The
Woolwich Arsenal,
Jamie! What in Christ’s name is wrong with you?’

His brother was smiling bitterly, shaking his head. ‘Well, you may have heard that, Sam, but it was not the case. I merely took Amelia through to the garden for –’

‘Amelia,
is it? Lord God Almighty!’ Sam considered crossing the room and giving James the resounding slap he so deserved, as he would have done in their youth; but instead he just cursed some more and looked about for a drink. Several decanters were arranged upon a corner table. He went over and poured himself three fingers of bourbon. ‘What of the works?’

James followed him, affecting concern. ‘You look worn right out, Sam. How long have you been back in London?’

The gun-maker drank down his liquor in one swallow. This was a fairly transparent bit of evasion. He didn’t feel that it deserved a reply.

‘You must tell me how things are in Hartford,’ James tried next. ‘Did you see Father? Or Miss Jarvis?’

Sam had forgotten that James knew about his engagement. It vexed him to be reminded of this. ‘I saw ‘em both.’

James reached for the whiskey decanter, knocked a little by this terse reply; his older brother’s tone had left no doubt that nothing more was forthcoming. He was visibly wracking his flabby brain for another topic. ‘And what of the dyke?’ he asked at last.

‘It’s going ahead, full steam. Those self-appointed bores could not stand against me. The South Meadow will be drained and the Hartford factory will be extended. It’s already well underway, in fact.’

‘I knew it.’ James was grinning again. ‘I knew you would prevail, Sam. You always do.’

That was it. The boundary had been crossed. Sam slammed down his glass. ‘Do I now, Jamie? Do I
really?’
he yelled. ‘What of my slogan, then, painted so boldly across the roof of the London works so that every ship passing down the mighty Thames would see it? What of my
slogan,
you worthless son of a bitch? Have I
prevailed
there, would you say?’

James blanched. He replaced the whiskey on the table without pouring himself any. ‘That was…unfortunate,
I’ll admit. But you didn’t hear the case that was made against us. Lady Wardell and her –’

‘You gave in to that harpy? That John Bull bitch so puffed up with her own righteous authority over the rest of us – professional men just trying to turn a bit of business?’

‘There were others with her, Sam,’ James came back weakly, ‘a Mr Cubitt, for one, who accused us of bringing down his neighbourhood, and –’

‘Cubitt’s a blasted
builder,
that’s all, a fellow with a seriously overblown sense of his own importance. He ain’t nothing to us. That there slogan was a prime piece of ballyhoo – one that I’ll struggle to replicate.’ Sam walked to a window. ‘And you’ve barely been in the city since, I hear – after you’d mortally offended half the goddamn British army, that is.’

His brother frowned, as if affronted by this suggestion of negligence on his part. ‘Who told you that?’

‘I’ve already been out to Pimlico. I’ve talked to the foreman, the overseers, the engineers. They gave me a full account of your tenure as manager, if it can rightly be so described. Did you honestly not realise?’

James swallowed. ‘Everyone of quality leaves the city during the summer. There was quite literally no one useful left for me to talk with.’

‘Horseshit,’ Sam declared. ‘What about Lawrence Street?’

The name elicited only a blank look. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to –’

Sam plucked a vase of dried flowers from a shelf and hurled it into the fireplace. It broke apart in a puff of dust and old pollen, scattering brittle purple blooms across the hearth. James’s instructions regarding Street had been plain to the point of bluntness. It had been stressed in several letters that the fellow was possibly the most important man in all London for the Colt Company. For a weapons manufacturer, Sam had written, politicians were the real prize, of more worth than any number of soldiers or ordnance officials. Yet James had failed him here as well. Sam glared into the fire, the energy draining out of him.

‘This is my own doing, I suppose,’ he admitted. ‘I should’ve
known that you’d be useless for a delicate piece of work like this – Christ, way
worse
than useless.’

There was a creak off to his left. Sam looked around to see that the door to one of the apartment’s adjoining rooms was open just a crack; an eye withdrew from it swiftly, and a pair of dainty feet danced away across the floorboards.

The gun-maker stared at James in disbelief. ‘Tell me you ain’t bringing back whores to a place like this.’

‘She ain’t no whore, Sam. That’s –’

‘By Heavens, Jamie, you really are dumb as a pile of goddamn rocks.’ Sam paced over to his brother, stopping only when their faces were a few inches apart. The idiot had to be dispensed with before he could do any more damage. ‘You listen to me, and you listen well. Keep away from Bessborough Place from now on. Don’t even think of showing yourself there, nor over at the sales office neither. D’you hear me?’

James’s expression, clearly intended as a wry, defiant smile, came out half-cocked; he seemed almost on the verge of tears. ‘Are – are you ordering me back to America, Sam? Is this how it is to end?’

Sam started for the hotel corridor. ‘I don’t give a good goddamn where you go, Jamie,’ he replied, without looking back. ‘Just keep the hell away from my factory.’

The left paddle-wheel began to reverse, sending black smoke belching from the steamer’s single chimney as the vessel turned against the current of the river. There was a sudden retreat of passengers from the rail as a gush of noxious foam splattered up the side of the hull; Sam watched a leathery turd the size of a brick arc through the evening air and slap wetly against the deck planks. The dank stone arches of London Bridge passed overhead, and the long double row of stationary traffic that stood forever stranded upon it came into view, hooting and whistling in useless complaint. Off across the Thames, a short distance downriver, stood the battlements of the Tower, with that pale, pepperpot fortress rising in its centre. Sam gave this ancient stronghold a moment’s contemplation, gazing out across the greenish
waters and the boats that swarmed about them. That was where his state-of-the-art firearms were being sent to be subjected to the indignity of government tests – to be picked over by hare-brained British smiths and branded with crowns and suchlike, as if they belonged to Queen Victoria rather than Samuel Colt, their inventor and manufacturer. He couldn’t help but resent it.

On the other side of the vessel, along the river’s southern bank, stretched a row of plain brown buildings, warehouses and tanning shops from the look of them. The top hats pressed in around Sam began to stir; newspapers were being folded tightly and stowed under arms. These were the men of modern London, departing their workplaces at the day’s end to ride locomotives back out to suburbs and villages, and they were preparing to fight their way onto the shore – to barge aside their fellows so that they could catch that train, win their preferred seat in the carriage, secure themselves a few more minutes of precious rest. The crowd jostling upon the wharf seemed a mirror image of the one on the deck of the steamer; Sam almost expected to see his own smart blue coat reflected among the wall of black. He carved a path through them without difficulty, leaving the quayside and starting along Tooley Street, a busy avenue of shops of the more modest, practical variety.

The place he sought was in an alley about fifty yards down. Its frontage was humble enough; it could have been the premises of a carter, or perhaps an undistinguished instrument maker. Only the revolving pistol rendered upon the sign – a double-action model, lacking a hammer, drawn with expert precision – gave any indication of what went on within. He went through the door without announcing himself. The interior was no more impressive. It reminded Sam of his own very first pistol manufacturing venture, in fact, which he’d set up in a Hartford attic more than ten years earlier. The tables were fitted out with crude clamps and pedal-drills –
pedal-drills,
for Christ’s sake! Small wonder that the son of a bitch’s guns didn’t shoot straight!

Sam’s timing was good; the bulk of the workforce had already retired for the day. Only one other person was in
there, a skinny boy who had been sweeping the floor and was now gaping at him in obvious recognition. Without daring to utter a word, he gave his forelock a tug, dropped his broom and rushed up an open wooden staircase set against the far wall. Left alone for a moment, Sam took the chance to make a closer study of the main shop. Over in a far corner stood several huge crates, of the sort used to transport pieces of steam-driven machinery. He was walking over to them, thinking to look for a maker’s stamp, when he noticed that an internal wall had recently been demolished and the area beyond cleared. The meaning of all this was plain. Mr Robert Adams of London Bridge was planning an expansion.

‘Colonel Colt,’ declared a slow voice, marked with a rustic-sounding burr. ‘An unexpected pleasure.’

Sam turned; a stout, long-nosed man in sober clothes was descending the stairs: his English competitor, in the flesh. The fellow looked like an apple farmer in a borrowed coat – a simple soul ill suited to the vigorous cut and thrust of the armaments business – but Sam knew from experience that this impression was deceptive.

‘Mr Adams,’ he replied with a civil nod. ‘How long has it been? Two years, ain’t it – that test at Woolwich?’

Adams stopped three feet from the bottom of the staircase. ‘I’d invite you up to my office,’ he said, ignoring Sam’s question, ‘but I’m afraid that I have none at present. The company of Deane, Adams & Deane is undergoing a few changes.’

‘I can see that, Mr Adams.’ Sam nodded towards the crates. ‘What are these, chucking lathes? Drop-hammers, perhaps? Are we mechanising at last?’

A scoundrelly smile twitched at his rival’s face. ‘We must remain competitive, Colonel, must we not?’

‘Indeed you must, Mr Adams,’ Sam answered, marvelling at the fellow’s shamelessness, ‘indeed you must. Now, as you might know, I have only recently returned to your delightful city after a stay in America. Imagine my dismay when my watchman told me that over the summer he was obliged to weed out a couple of your employees from my factory floor –
spies,
Mr Adams, who’d burrowed their way into my works
like ticks, with the intention of copying my machine designs and committing acts of sabotage.’