The Devil's Acre (40 page)

Three weeks after the shootings, quite penniless, Edward returned to London. Climbing from the train at Fenchurch Street with Katie in his arms, he was convinced that he would be arrested at once. The constable they passed on their way out to the street, however, ignored them completely. Edward’s intention was to leave the child with his mother and then go abroad, borrowing the money for his passage from Saul Graff; but when they arrived at her house at Sydenham Hill he was astonished to discover that there had been no mention at all of the dust-yard slaughter in the newspapers. No description of him had been circulated. Not a single policeman had called, asking his whereabouts. Neither had there been any sign of a grizzled, gimlet-eyed Yankee in a military-style cap. It was as if it hadn’t happened.

They’d been hiding in Margate, in a small suite of rooms at the top of a deserted seaside boarding house. The proprietor was told that they were uncle and niece – that Katie had recently become Edward’s ward after the untimely death of both her parents. The man had been happy to believe this, reassured by Edward’s respectable appearance and the five pound note he’d produced before writing ‘Mr Benjamin Quill’ in the register.

At first the child would not talk or engage with him in any way; she just sat listlessly on the floor, staring at nothing. Next came the screaming fits, striking at all hours, when she
would call out for her mother and father in the most piteous tones. Utterly out of his depth, Edward relied upon simple kindness and a steady supply of sweetmeats – and lemonade laced with a drop of gin to ease her off to sleep. He came to realise that she was not as scared of him as might have been expected. The only explanation for this he could think of was that she must have seen him with her aunt in those last awful moments in the Devil’s Acre. By the time the money from the pawned gun had run out, the child was reaching for his hand as she tottered timidly along the windswept seafront; and meeting his eye when sharing her murmured, semi-intelligible confidences.

Edward’s mother was glad to see her son safe and well, if rather drawn, but could not hide her shock at the sight of the two-year-old girl resting against his shoulder, her arms thrown around his neck. He told her only that he’d lost a close friend and suffered a dramatic rupture from his employer in the same dreadful afternoon; that the child had been entrusted to him by this friend before she died, and had no one but him to look after her. He was too tired to be able to tell precisely what his mother made of this half-story. She stepped back from the door readily enough, though, welcoming them both inside.

With the child out of his immediate care, the grief that had been held in suspension above Edward fell down upon him like a smothering shroud. He found that he could no longer bear to look out on the world, to dress himself and shave his face, to leave his room or even rise from his bed. As well as the constant pulse of sorrow, he was assailed by a terrible self-loathing, tormented by thoughts of everything he could have done but did not do. Lying on his back, he spent his days raking through the day of the Dickens visit, from beginning to bloody end, upbraiding himself severely at every juncture.
Why did you stay in the factory after you saw Ben Quill’s corpse?
he would demand, striking his head with his palm.
Why did you not go straight into the rookery and hunt her down – run from street to street shouting out her name?

His memories of Caroline were so clear that he felt he could almost summon her form before him, to the point of
being able to run his hand along the smooth undulation of her side; knowing all the while that she wasn’t there, that she couldn’t be there. At night, stirring from a fitful sleep, he’d swear that he could make her out in the darkness, watching him from over by the window. Sitting up, fumbling with a Lucifer match, he’d say her name out loud, his voice loaded with a strange, fearful hope. The flame would flare, revealing nothing; and he’d lie back among the sweat-dampened sheets, gazing numbly at the ceiling, listening to the frenetic thuds of his heart slowly subside.

Eventually, of course, Edward began to recover. He obtained a clerical position in a local architect’s office, working on a string of new churches that were to be erected across the burgeoning villages to the south of London, and found sanctuary of a sort in the discipline and efficiency it required of him. Outside his working hours he set about discovering the fate of Katie’s mother. Amy Rea had been convicted of robbery, he learnt, and sentenced to two and a half years in Brixton Prison – although what she had stolen and from whom was not specified. Edward wrote to her, reporting that her child was safe and being well looked after. He had no idea if the letter would be given to her, or even if she was capable of reading it, but he had to make the attempt.

As for Caroline and her brother-in-law, there was not a single earthly trace. No mention had been made anywhere of a shooting in the Devil’s Acre. Edward couldn’t even find a reference to their deaths. They had been erased.

Sitting in the reading room of a public library with a wealth of newspapers and periodicals at his disposal, Edward inevitably found himself investigating the continued fortunes of the Colt Company. Alfred Richards’s regular postings in the armaments trade press revealed that most of the senior London staff had been replaced, Walter Noone among them. Edward dared to think that he might be safe.

The pistol works itself was flourishing, by the press agent’s somewhat hyperbolic account at least. Over the summer of 1854, as the Army’s expeditionary force camped out in Bulgaria and the Navy patrolled disputed waters in search
of the enemy, the demand for Colt’s revolvers underwent a steady rise. Orders in the thousands were placed for the Black Sea fleet, and dispatched with all haste to Constantinople. The Colonel, Richards claimed, had taken his rightful position as the armourer of the Empire; the formidable American eagle perched upon Britannia’s shoulder, ready to lend its tearing talons to her cause. Robert Adams and his partners were still on the scene, expanding their works, insisting on fresh comparative trials and agitating at the Board of Ordnance, but Colt’s remained the larger operation – and the significantly cheaper product. It was hinted that Army contracts, the really huge ones for which the Colonel had held out for so long, were sure to arrive soon.

Edward read all this with growing consternation. That the world was to become so filled with these firearms, these deadly devices that had already killed Caroline and countless others, now seemed to him like nothing short of insanity. He knew that this was not a rational reaction, and tried to remind himself that Samuel Colt was merely a businessman providing an effective tool – a model of highly successful entrepreneurship and self-promotion, in fact, to whose example he had once aspired. Yet Edward became increasingly convinced that this wasn’t the complete picture. He recalled the numerous anomalies of his time as the Colonel’s secretary, from the mysterious correspondence forwarded from Liège to that huge stockpile of unproved weapons Caroline had discovered down in the warehouse cellar, for which he’d never actually found an explanation. Something untoward was going on at the Pimlico pistol works. He resolved to keep up his watch on it.

With the end of summer came the commencement of the long-promised war. The nation looked on as that which they had cheered for so loudly stumbled to miserable disaster in the space of a few weeks. Reports from
The Times,
the
Courier
and a host of other papers left no doubt as to the chaos on the front lines, and the dire suffering of the troops. Cousin Arthur wrote Edward a rather peevish letter detailing how
his Navys had rusted solid in the heavy Crimean rain, and now served him only as paperweights.

By the time winter arrived the campaign had ground to a complete standstill. The heavily fortified port of Sebastopol was under siege, and would not fall without a far greater assault than the Allied armies were able to muster. Certain quarters of Parliament became progressively more discontented, maintaining that the Army was failing because it was badly led and poorly equipped. There were calls for immediate and sweeping change at the very summit of the hierarchy. This, in Edward’s estimation, all played directly into Colt’s hands. Great Britain’s patriotic fervour and lust for war could be made to work for the gun-maker – but so, surely, could her defeat. The beleaguered British troops needed to be given whatever advantages could be secured for them, as a matter of urgency. It would take only a little Colt ballyhoo to ensure that revolving pistols were added to such an inventory.

But the Colonel was nowhere to be seen. He gave no more well-publicised tours of the factory to prominent personages; there were no boastful announcements or grand claims in the press. The yellow carriage was absent from London’s frozen, foggy streets. He was in America, it was rumoured, meeting with some of President Pierce’s men in Washington – or in Egypt, seeking the custom of the new viceroy.

Then came the letter. Published in
The Times,
it had been written by an Englishman who had recently stopped in St Petersburg. There were a good many Americans in the city at present, he wrote, working on the Moscow railway; but also among them was a Colonel Samuel Colt, travelling with specimens of his machine-made repeating arms.

The newspaper’s thin pages began to quiver in Edward’s fingers as he thought it all through. The gun-maker was selling to Russia, Great Britain’s enemy – aiming to provide revolvers to the very soldiers Cousin Arthur was being pitted against. Colt had been working towards this from the first sign of hostilities between the two countries. The defaced stamp on that letter forwarded from Liège had been the
imperial eagle of Tsar Nicholas I. Those crates piled up in the warehouse cellar had been put aside for the Russian market – which was why their existence had to be kept from the British Government and its official proving rooms. And here, Edward surmised, lay the reason behind the Colonel’s unaccountable interest in raw cotton after that trip to mainland Europe. The bulky bales were to serve as the means of conveyance. Each one could hold a decent-sized crate of smuggled pistols; and the European trade routes he’d taken such care to develop could be used as an effective conduit to this clandestine customer. It suddenly seemed so damned obvious – shameless even. Edward snorted, drawing glances from those sitting around him in the library. So much for the
Anglo-Saxon bond!

Word of Colt’s visit to St Petersburg spread rapidly, the flames fanned by his gleeful rivals. We have nourished a
snake,
they cried, a venomous Yankee snake in the heart of our very own metropolis! This American, loyal only to his balance-sheet, is using English steel and English machine-hands to make guns that will be used to shoot down English soldiers on the field of battle! This is what happens when foreign entrepreneurs are permitted to operate unchecked on our soil, and given preference over our own craftsmen!

Yet just when things were looking impossibly bleak for Colonel Colt, sheer good fortune – or the hand of a powerful, unseen ally – came to his rescue. A fortnight after the publication of the damaging
Times
letter, the Board of Ordnance awarded him the largest revolver contract it had ever drawn up: five thousand pistols for the Army, for the officers and sergeants leading men across the battlefields of the Crimea, against the Russians with whom he was being accused of colluding. Colt could now claim to be the official supplier of repeating firearms to the entire British war machine. Emboldened, he decided to defend himself, penning a letter of his own to
The Times
from his stronghold in Hartford. Yes, he admitted, he had indeed been in St Petersburg, but only to visit the US ambassador, Mr Thomas Hart Seymour, an old friend of his. No weapons had been sold; no negotiations
conducted. And as no one could prove otherwise, his opponents were forced to back down. He’d dodged it.

Edward went to see Simon Bannan as soon as he could, early in 1855. They met first thing in the morning, sitting down in the Honourable Member’s office with their coats on, shivering as they waited for the heat of his freshly lit fire to build. Bannan was not particularly pleased to see him. The memory of that inconclusive Select Committee hearing and the spiteful gossip that had followed it was still a sore one. Edward had expected this – he’d counted on it, in fact, as he knew it could be worked in his favour. Mr Bannan, plainly a rather vindictive man by nature, bore a grudge against Colonel Colt.

He made his proposition, choosing his words carefully, but the gist was this: if Bannan would agree to employ him, he’d use certain facts that he’d learnt in the gun works at Bessborough Place to deal a heavy, even fatal blow to the Colt Company in London. Bannan’s position on the Board of Trade, he hinted, and access to the books of the Customs House, would make this all the easier. The Honourable Member was immediately interested. He wanted Colt brought low, and still had hopes of exposing a connection to Palmerston that would cause the Home Secretary discomfort. The chance that Edward might be able to achieve something towards these ends was well worth a junior post in his office.

In the days after this meeting, at the start of Parliament’s January session, Lord Aberdeen’s administration finally collapsed under the weight of innumerable reports of Crimean misery and incompetence. Bannan was a vocal supporter of the motion for a full inquiry into the conduct of the war; and when it came to a division large numbers deserted the government, effectively bringing about its demise. Aberdeen’s tenure as Prime Minister was over, but whatever triumph the radicals might have felt at this was tempered by the knowledge that only one candidate was available to replace him: Lord Palmerston.

For all his annoyance at this turn of events, Bannan also felt some grudging admiration. ‘Palmerston planned it
all from the first, damn him – from the very first. He egged feeble Aberdeen on to war, knowing full well that he’d fumble it and drop us in something like our current mess. It’s a cunning, ruthless piece of work – there’s no one else the Queen can turn to now, despite her reservations, and the public are crying out for his appointment. They want a speedy end to this accursed war, and they think their beloved Pam is the fellow to supply it.’ He gave Edward a dry look. ‘Good news for your former employer, eh? His protector is in the top seat.’