The Devil's Acre (35 page)

Several unfriendly looks were directed at him, and he got a nasty sense of how changed things would be now that Jack was gone. The last tie connecting him to these men had been severed; the final trace of sympathy or fellow feeling had disappeared. They would turn on him in an instant, and gladly.

‘You mean your precious Ben Quill, I suppose,’ said Slattery, his voice curdling with contempt. ‘Very well, Martin – you’ll just have to bring him to us. We’ll hold him as they’re holding our Jack. I’m fairly certain that while the bugger’s in our care we can convince him to leave off his duties wi’ Colt.’ The others let out a cruel chuckle. ‘And then, when the place has been closed down, the workers dismissed and most o’ the Yankees sent away, we’ll have another run at it. We’ll get us our guns, brothers. Molly will have her revenge. We just need to cleave to the bleedin’ path.’

This was bad. With some effort, Martin rose from his stool. ‘I won’t let Quill be hurt, Slattery.’

Slattery took a couple of steps towards him. ‘If you want to pay your debt to Molly Maguire you’ll do what I bleedin’ say and nothin’ else,’ he snapped. ‘You see what’s at stake here, don’t you?’

A shape moved in the rafters. Martin glanced up, shivering with pain; she was hanging over his wife and child once more, a creeping, fanged thing horrible to behold, watching them both with a hunter’s patience. He lowered his head.

‘Aye,’ he muttered. ‘I do.’

Edward picked his way through the expectant crowd that packed the main concourse of Waterloo, treading on toes and having his toes trodden on, elbowing and being elbowed, trying to reach the arrivals platforms on the far side of the station. He was about halfway there when the steady beat of a drum over at the side gate sent those around him into a frenzy of patriotic enthusiasm. Policemen struggled to keep a channel clear as a sixty-strong square of infantry entered the building, marching in dress uniform with full field-packs on their backs. The iron and glass canopy overhead amplified the cheering to a deafening volume.
God save the Queen!
the people bawled;
God save her brave soldiers! Down with the Rooshin and his wicked Tsar!
They waved their caps, hats and handkerchiefs with furious passion, and many a cheek grew moist with sentimental tears. Edward stopped for a moment to take it in. The soldiers were an impressive sight, to be sure. Everything about them seemed sparkling and fresh, from the crisp whites and deep scarlets of their uniforms to the polished stocks of their rifles. It was more than some could bear; a number of young ladies were swooning from the sheer pitch of their admiration.

A sergeant yelled an order and the square wheeled to the left, towards a rank of specially commissioned military trains; a second formation was already coming in behind them, the trill of a fife now accompanying the drum. The infantry were travelling down to Southampton Water, where troop ships
would convey them first to Malta, and then on to Constantinople, in readiness for a move against Russia. It was happening at last; every newsboy in London was shouting it out at the top of his voice. Lord Seymour, British ambassador to the court of Tsar Nicholas, had left St Petersburg. A formal declaration of war was rumoured to be only days away.

Edward looked over at the military trains, their idling locomotives pumping up drifts of steam into the watery sunlight that shone in through the station’s roof. Large boards hung at the end of each platform, painted with numerals: regimental designations, placed to direct soldiers to their carriages. The previous afternoon a ‘44’ had hung prominently among them – and Edward had stood beneath it, bidding farewell to Cousin Arthur as he went off to fight. He’d been the only member of their family present; Aunt Ruth had suffered a nervous collapse at the news that her beloved son was to face the Russian cannon, and Edward’s own mother was tending to her as best she could at her house in Sydenham Hill.

Arthur had not so much as mentioned any of this, however. He’d been with a group of other subalterns from his regiment, mere boys in red jackets, among whom he was clearly considered something of a buck. Edward had been introduced as ‘the Colt man’ rather than a relative; all of them had admired Arthur’s revolvers, and several tried to convince Edward to send samples to them as well, once they were settled in their camp in Constantinople. Arthur discouraged this idea, seeming to take a childish pleasure in the distinction his six-shooters gave him. Puffing out his chest, he launched into another extravagant prediction of the many Russians he would kill with his Navys, likening the enemy on this occasion to rodents, who would be plugged with lead as they fled from his path. His comrades had obviously heard this routine before, and they met it with laughter and joking applause.

Edward had stayed quiet. He’d known that he should have been making the most of this chance to aid the Colt cause – to reveal that the Colonel was doing his utmost to win a
contract with the Army, perhaps, and request that the young soldiers spread word of the pistols’ excellence as widely as they could. Instead, he’d stood silently to one side, picturing Arthur standing on some Turkish battlefield in the months to come, surrounded by the dead like Walter Noone at Monterrey. He’d felt an urge to demand the revolvers back – to search through Arthur’s luggage and seize them from him. In the end, though, he’d simply shaken his cousin’s hand, begged him to take care of himself and left the station.

And now, unexpectedly, Edward was at Waterloo again, struggling through the second day of troop departures. Pushing past a final bank of well-wishers, he spotted Colonel Colt up ahead, dressed in his Yankee hat and a fawn travelling suit, talking with a senior officer while a porter dragged his steam-trunk onto a trolley. The secretary had no idea where his employer had been for the past fortnight. His suspicion was northern Europe, to the Colt sales offices in France and Belgium, but the gun-maker covered his tracks and threw down false trails as a matter of habit, making any hunch hard to verify. Indeed, Edward had penned several letters from the Colonel’s own notes hinting that he was in fact headed back to America. The telegram announcing his imminent return, delivered that morning to a factory still reeling from the events of the night before, had thus come as a rather stunning surprise.

Seeing Edward approach, Colt bade the officer farewell, handed him a card and strode over at speed. ‘Cotton, Mr Lowry,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘I want you to look into raw cotton, with all haste.’

Edward had been steeling himself to tell of the Irishmen’s attack and the resultant halt in pistol production. This threw him completely. ‘I beg your pardon, Colonel?’

‘Have you gone deaf, boy?
Cotton.
Great Britain imports it in bulk, does she not? From India – from the southern states of my own country? For her mills and so forth, up in those northern towns?’

‘I believe so, Colonel, but –’

‘Well, find out the cost of a bale. Go to a few importers. Write some letters – don’t be using my name, though. I’ve
an inkling that there’s money to be made here, taking it from companies supplying your British mills and then selling back into Europe. Come on, write this down!’

Edward took out a notebook and pencil. ‘May I ask what this has to do with gun-making – with our business?’

The Colonel glanced at him, amused by this query’s impudent edge, but his reply was interrupted by a renewed riot of cheers from the concourse. ‘Look at that,’ he shouted a moment later, jerking a thumb at the soldiers, ‘all these hundreds of men going off to fight without the benefit of the Colt revolver! That there’s some woeful negligence on the part of your government, Mr Lowry!’

They walked from the station, advancing across the busy pavement. The gun-maker’s wealth and importance hummed from him with a repelling energy, making the ordinary people part before him; and the instant they reached the pavement’s edge the magnificent Colt carriage pulled up directly beside them, the shining yellow panels attracting the usual degree of covetous attention. The Colonel watched the porter load his trunk onto the back, flipped him a shilling and then told the coachman to take them to Piccadilly.

‘Diversification is the thing,’ he proclaimed as he opened the carriage door and climbed inside, ‘for the true inventor and salesman. I’ve come to be known for my revolvers, but they’re just one of many schemes to which I’ve given my time over the years. Undersea mines, for instance. Copper wires for the electric telegraph.’ He settled in his seat, picking up the packet of letters his secretary had brought along with him and flicking through them.

Edward took a seat opposite. ‘Colonel, I must tell you that last night –’

‘And now,’ Colt went on, ignoring him, tearing open one of the letters, ‘as we try to get a bit of wider interest out in the continent beyond this little island, it has occurred to me that an international trade network might be useful for more than just pistols. I look to the future and I see a company that brokers deals over continents – that shifts all manner of cargo many thousands of miles. And I’ve decided to start with cotton. I’ve an old attachment to cloth trading,
Mr Lowry. It’s how I made my first bit of cash, in fact, back in thirty-four – buying wholesale in Canada and then sneaking it across the border into Newport. The price of a roll of broadcloth almost doubled during that short journey.’

Edward considered this for a second. ‘You mean you smuggled it in.’

Colt gave him a pitying look over the top of his letter. ‘I saw an opportunity, Mr Lowry, and I took it. Didn’t quite come off as well as I’d hoped, though, in the end.’ He continued reading. ‘Goddamn customs men.’

The news could wait no longer. ‘Colonel,’ Edward declared firmly, ‘I’m afraid that there has been an attack upon the works.’

Colt listened to the details in silence, not lowering the letter before him. Pressure was building, though, his neck appearing to swell inside his collar; and as Edward related how the foreman had been forced to turn away the machine operatives, telling them there would be no work that day, the Colonel cast aside the letters, yanked down the carriage window and redirected them towards Bessborough Place in a furious shout. Slumping back on the seat, he drew a silver flask from his jacket and took a long gulp. ‘Adams,’ he rasped, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Has to be.’

Concentrating hard upon sustaining the correct professional air before his seething employer, Edward raised his voice over the street noise that was flooding in through the open window. ‘No, Colonel, I’m told that this is something else. Mr Noone caught one of them. He’s being held in the factory.’

The secretary’s secret hope was that this assault would be Colt’s undoing. With the engine disabled, there was no hope of them making the deadline for the Baltic Fleet contract, and the Colonel’s reputation would certainly be damaged as a result. Not even Lord Palmerston would be able to protect him from this. The government would offer no further business to a man who had proved so unreliable in a time of national crisis. It could be a truly telling blow after the unsatisfactory one landed by the Select Committee.

Edward had seen Saul Graff a few days after that awkward afternoon in the Palace of Westminster. His friend had reported that Mr barnna wasn’t best pleased with how his public interrogation of the gun-maker had gone. Nothing significant had been elicited or revealed. Many were saying that despite his fractious behaviour the Yankee had got the better of the Honourable Member for Limerick; that barnna had been beaten by Colt as soundly as Lady Cecilia Wardell, who since the previous winter had given up her protests and withdrawn from Pimlico, switching her efforts to campaigning against the coming war. The Colonel had shown himself to be a slippery customer indeed, a kindred spirit to the devious Pam – with whom he had no demonstrable connection of any kind. Just enough distance had been kept between them. Mutual amity was rumoured, but that was all. Legitimate channels had thus yielded no results. Edward’s one ally of any influence had lost interest, for now at least. Perhaps a crude attack such as this would be more effective.

They clattered onwards, Colonel Colt swigging more liquor, cutting a plug of tobacco and sinking down into a brooding, masticatory silence. Edward looked at the open page of his notebook, where he’d written
prices of cotton bales
in a wobbling, hurried hand. He frowned at the words, pondering them again. This was an odd development.

The Irishman was hunched in a corner of the engine room, a forlorn and broken thing. His garb was absurd, cheap widow’s weeds it looked like, made for a large woman but barely stretching across his labourer’s shoulders; every seam was at the point of splitting open. It reminded Edward of a costume one might see on the stage, adorning a meddlesome great-aunt in a broad farce, but this was no comic actor caught mistakenly in Mr Noone’s snare. Neither was he the sort glimpsed occasionally in the darker lanes around the Haymarket, dolled up in harlots’ finery with faces painted, trying to pass for women; that tattered dress accentuated his masculinity rather than doing anything to disguise it. His intentions in wearing such a garment could only be guessed at. The prisoner’s face was bruised beyond recognition, his
red hair turned slick and black by his blood. Several of his fingers had been broken and he was hugging a chest of cracked ribs. Noone and his men had worked him hard. Looking upon this doomed wretch caused needle-points of perspiration to prickle across Edward’s skin. As he lingered uneasily by the doorway he found himself imagining what further plans the Colonel’s brute might have for his captive – what horrors he might be about to witness.

The factory around them was quiet, which seemed wrong indeed on a bright Wednesday afternoon. The American staff were fitting up parts that had already been made, or blueing and proving over in the warehouse block, but the engine was dead. Nothing could be cast, or cut, or drilled. They had been halted.

Colonel Colt stood in the middle of the engine room, hands on his hips in his old King Henry pose, glaring from the split boiler to the Irishman and back again. ‘This son of a bitch used to work here, you say?’

Noone was leaning against the work-table with his arms crossed, one eye always on the prisoner. ‘Just over there,’ he answered with an almost imperceptible nod, ‘in the forging shop. Got the boot for stealing, along with a few of his paddy pals – who I’ll bet make up the rest of the gang.’ He paused. ‘Ben’s assistant was one of ‘em.’

Quill looked around with a scowl; he’d been leaning over the engine, prodding at its disordered innards with a long-handled spanner. ‘You don’t know that, Walt,’ he snapped. ‘None of us knows for sure what happened to Martin.’

‘I saw ‘em together, Ben,’ Noone said. ‘The cocksucker took you in. Played you for a goddamn fool. How d’you think they managed to do so much damage to your engine, and in so little time? He was there guiding ‘em – telling ‘em what to do.’

Quill shook his shaggy head, turning back to the engine. ‘Mart wouldn’t do this. He just wouldn’t.’

Edward observed this exchange in silence, keeping his thoughts well hidden. Noone was right; he’d deduced only a fraction of it, in fact. It was painful to see Quill’s loyalty
so misplaced, but the secretary was hardly about to add his voice to the watchman’s efforts to disabuse him.

Noone’s temper darkened. ‘You soft bastard,’ he said. ‘That double-crossing mick had you eating from his palm like a pet sheep, and now you –’

Through his stupor, the Irishman suddenly realised that Colonel Colt was in the room with him. Gathering the last of his strength, he flopped out from his corner, reaching towards the gun-maker with his shattered, bloody hands.
‘Damn
you, Sam Colt,’ he croaked. ‘Molly Maguire will see you in hell, so she will!’