The Devil’s Acre

There was a pause; then Mr Quill, with a sad shake of his head, knocked his pot solemnly against Martin’s. ‘By Heavens, Mart,’ he murmured, ‘I’ll surely drink to that.’

The Eagle closed its doors at twelve. Martin and Mr Quill, both well-oiled, started wandering up the Belgrave Road, through the eerie silence of Pimlico’s southern end. It was a warm night, a taste of the approaching summer; the two men puffed on their pipes, ambling along with no particular purpose in mind. Caroline had departed the tavern some time before. Thankfully, Mr Quill’s interest in her had shown itself to have been light-hearted and of the moment only. After she’d left them, in fact, the engineer had seemed to forget her existence altogether. He was now engaged in some slurred philosophising, rambling on about the role of the machine in what he termed ‘manifest destiny’. Martin wasn’t really listening.

After a while, they left the main avenue, lurching onto a side-street. Identical apartment-houses, four storeys tall, built with red brick and fringed with stucco, loomed on either side of them in two long lines. Only recently completed by Cubitt’s men and still unoccupied, the windows of these houses were as dark and smooth as tar pools. The sounds of London – the yelping of dogs, the rumble of coach-wheels over on the Vauxhall Bridge Road – were but faint ghosts of themselves, banished to the distant background. The street was as clean as it was quiet. Not a trace of mud or dung could be seen on the cobblestones, their fish-scale pattern catching the dull moonlight; and even the stench of the river was masked by the mineral smell of fresh cement and stone.

They reached the end of a row. The next block along was still under construction, swathed in scaffolding, the shadowy road before it piled with whatever materials Cubitt’s foremen had judged too heavy for thieves to make off with. Through the many gaps in the unfinished buildings, across an expanse of barren land, Martin saw a night-site at work, a tower of light and action in the surrounding darkness. Labourers scaled the ladders of the scaffold, heavy hods of stone balanced on their shoulders; bricklayers slowly built up walls, inserting each new piece with steady concentration. The jokes and curses of both echoed along the empty streets. Martin stopped to take it in, smoking reflectively, leaning against a covered mortar-barrel.

A footstep crunched nearby, from inside one of the incomplete apartment buildings further along the row – a man’s footstep, heavy and sure, stepping on a bed of gravel. Martin felt a distinct, sobering nip of wrongness. He knocked out his pipe. Quill was further down the street, pointing into the air and gassing on like a true taproom orator. Martin whispered his name, gesturing for silence.

‘What’s up?’ the engineer called back, as loudly as ever, stretching out his arms. ‘What’s the problem, Mart?’

There were more footsteps, and some muttering; Martin went over to Quill’s side. ‘Someone’s here with us, Mr Quill.’

Quill drew on his pipe, making the tobacco in the bowl crackle and glow. ‘Footpads?’ he asked, speaking excitedly through the side of his mouth, as if eager to fend off such an attack. ‘How many?’

‘I don’t believe so,’ Martin replied, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Why would such people be out here? There’s none about but us. Pretty slim pickings. No, this is different.’ He met Quill’s eye: this was worse.

The engineer wasn’t alarmed. ‘What should we do, then?’

Martin nodded towards the night-site, its lamps twinkling between the scaffold poles and slabs of masonry. It suddenly seemed very far away. ‘Best bet’s to head over there, I reckon. Straight through these buildings here – towards the light.’

Before they could act, however, the trap was sprung. Three men appeared from behind a stack of planks, dressed in working clothes. All three were solidly built and had short, stout sticks in their hands. Martin turned; four more were approaching fast from the opposite direction. They’ve been stalking us, he thought, from the moment we left the Eagle, waiting for the right moment to strike. He cursed himself for all the pots he’d sunk – for stumbling so unsuspectingly into this crude snare. How could he have been so bloody stupid?

‘What is this?’ he demanded, his eyes darting around, scanning the street for an escape route. ‘What d’yous want?’

The little pack started to laugh with the nasty confidence of men who believe their victory to be guaranteed. The tallest of them lifted up his stick and opened his mouth to speak.

His words were never heard. With a wild roar, Mr Quill suddenly charged forward, butting the fellow like a bull and sending them both tumbling into the shadows. The engineer’s pipe cracked against the ground, releasing a tiny spray of orange sparks. There was a second roar, and a loud shout of pain. Their assurance rocked, the gang lunged at Quill, trying to drag him off their friend – a difficult task in the murky street. Gritting his teeth, Martin threw himself upon them, landing squarely on someone’s back. They went over together, slamming down hard against the newly laid pavement.

From then onwards all was confusion, a virtual blind-fight. One of their attackers was shrieking as though he was bleeding out his last. Martin realised that these men, although determined, had definite limits to their bravery. Searching around in the gutter, his fingers found a single loose cobblestone. Thinking of Molly Maguire, her green eyes alive with animal rage, he lashed out with it.

This drew forth a yell, followed by the urgent scrabbling of hob-nailed boots; then a blow fell across the back of Martin’s neck, sending a dazzling blaze across his sight. He slipped, losing his footing, swinging the stone around again but hitting nothing. They were circling him, keeping their distance, reduced to black shapes only. Off to his left, he heard Mr Quill swear and then exhale with pain. Martin recognised what was happening. He’d been in this situation many times before. The two of them were being overwhelmed.

A powerful kick drove in from nowhere, catching Martin on the jaw. Reeling, he dropped the stone; it struck the pavement with a metallic, ringing sound. The gang were on him immediately. Before long, the blows lost their distinctness, blurring together, his foes’ grunts mingling with the thumps of their fists and sticks against his flesh. All pain ceased. It felt only as if he was curled up on an open hillside, being buffeted by a powerful wind, Molly’s mocking laughter rattling in his ears.

After a time – a minute? two? – something disturbed them. ‘Come, lads,’ said one, speaking in a twanging cockney accent, ‘let’s be off. They’ve ‘ad enough for now.’

There was a final kick to Martin’s stomach, and the beating stopped.

‘Don’t you bleedin’ forget this, you Yankee bugger!’ hissed another. ‘We ain’t about to stand by all ‘elpless and just let this ‘appen!’

A strong beam of light was approaching through the gloom, chasing the men away. Martin tried to fix his eyes on this beam; but it dipped and faded, becoming lost in a smothering, thickening sensation close to sleep. His clenched limbs relaxed and he flopped over onto his back.

The next he knew he was being helped to sit up, a bull’s-eye lantern in front of him. Gagging, he rolled to one side, his pots of dog’s-nose coming up in a long, unbroken jet, splashing hotly across the Pimlico pavement. He gasped for breath, spitting out bile, feeling a great many aches awaken across his bruised, bleeding body. A party of night-watchmen had come to their aid, Cubitt’s people from the sound of it, those charged with weeding out the beggars who sought shelter in the empty buildings. He heard them assessing his injuries, and deciding that they were not too grave – nothing broken, at any rate. They already knew that he was from the Colt works, a fact they could only have learned from Mr Quill. Gingerly, Martin turned his head the smallest fraction; his neck felt as if it was being twisted to breaking point, and a flaming claw gripped at the back of his skull.

The engineer was sitting on the steps of an apartment block, streaked with fresh blood, slowly rotating his right arm around in its socket. A grin and a pained wince were struggling for control of his features.

‘Christ above, Mart,’ he laughed, coughing, ‘who the devil were they?’

4

Crocodile Court lay near the middle of St Anne’s Street, squarely within the Devil’s Acre, and it was filled with rowdy conversation. Almost every window in the close lane was open, with lamps and candles set upon their ledges, like the boxes in a shabby theatre where the curtain would never rise. Roughly-dressed women, the majority of them Irish, leaned out in twos and threes, gossiping and quarrelling with each other. As Caroline entered she overheard talk of the evening’s arrests, a mysterious murder over on Tothill Street, the rising price of milk – anything that came into the women’s heads, in short, and all at the same time. Bottles were being passed from window to window, and even lobbed across to the opposite side. The Court had once been home to the wealthy, back in the age of powdered wigs and sedan chairs, but had long since been given over to the very poorest. Hundreds now lived in residences designed for a single family – residences that were on the brink of collapse. Beams bent and cracked like dry rushes, and plaster dropped from walls in huge chalky sheets. Caroline could never look upon the parliament of Crocodile Court without imagining these ancient piles suddenly overbalancing due to the great weight on their sills, and toppling forward into the lane with an almighty, screaming crash.

She was a visitor to the Devil’s Acre, marked out by her clean face, neat straw bonnet and new boots, and had been pursued by a throng of ragged children from the moment she’d crossed Peter Street. Fending them off, picking her way through the darkness, past the stinking puddles, mounds of rotten vegetables and decaying house-fronts, she’d cursed Martin Rea for bringing her Amy to this godforsaken place. It nearly broke her heart to think that this was where Katie, her little niece, was taking her first steps.

As she started along the Court, very glad to be nearing her destination, a great scornful shout went up. Heart thumping, she looked around, thinking for an instant that she must have provoked this somehow; but no, a drunken, filthy husband had staggered in behind her, returning home after a debauch. The women showered him with hoots and bitter catcalls. He waved a dismissive arm in their direction before vanishing through a sagging brick archway.

About half of Crocodile Court’s paving stones had been prised up and stolen, creating an irregular chequered pattern and making it impassable for all but the lightest of carts. Caroline hopped from slab to slab, past the rusting water-pump and the rag-and-bone shop, heading resolutely for Amy’s building. A game of rummy was underway on the steps, with much swearing and spitting. She took a breath and pushed straight through its middle, slipping quickly through the door.

The stairwell was heavy with snoring, belching, coughing bodies. People were everywhere, overflowing from the rooms onto corridors and landings. Of all ages, they sprawled semi-clothed across the floorboards, lost to liquor; perched upon the stairs, taking their meagre suppers; or huddled quietly in corners, trying to sleep. This was the result of the Victoria Street clearances, which had begun again in earnest, leaving many hundreds without homes. Caroline could not help but kick a few of them as she passed, clutching at the rickety banister. Most did not even have the energy to curse her.

The numbers had thinned a little by the time she reached the third floor. She went to a door at the end of the corridor and knocked three times. Someone came to the other side. Caroline said her name, a bolt slid back and she walked forward into a dell of flowers. Crocuses, lilies, tulips and carnations were gathered into loose bunches, and laid out in baskets and bowls. Their colours were all but lost in the dimness of the room, and there was no perfume beside those of the dyes and inks; but these clean, chemical odours were a definite improvement on those mingling in the musty corridor outside. Caroline shut the door behind her.

Amy was already back in her seat by the fire, a large silk rose in her hands. She was stitching wire-trimmed petals to its cardboard stem by the meagre light of the few coals that smouldered in the grate. The lines on her face deepened as she squinted down at the flower, pushing dark strands of hair behind her ears, searching for the right place to poke in her needle. She looked thin and desperately old for a woman of only four-and-twenty. It seemed to Caroline that her sister, once so strong and clever, was being worn away before her very sight; that life in the Devil’s Acre was killing her by degrees.

On the rug between them, rolling around in the weak firelight, lay Katie. The child was trying to rise onto her knees, plump legs wobbling as they took her weight. Hearing the door close, she looked up, mouth open; and seeing her aunt standing there, she cried out with pure delight, lost her balance and tumbled back down onto her side. Caroline felt a sudden rush of love; a tear, a bloody tear for Christ’s sake, pricked at the corner of her eye. She swooped in on the giggling infant, taking her up into her arms and spinning her around.

‘Why hello, my precious darling,’ she said. ‘And how are you tonight?’

Amy gave them both a quick smile but did not stop working. Caroline knew that she had four hundred flowers to deliver to her current employer, a milliner on Bond Street, first thing in the morning. Failure to meet this deadline would certainly mean the loss of the business, and the five shillings it brought in every week. Amy would not let this happen if she could possibly prevent it. Caroline sniffed the top of Katie’s head; the girl’s skin was sour, her chestnut curls clammy with grease. Once again, Amy had been too busy to bathe her. She glanced over at the cot in the corner that held Michael’s tiny form. He was quiet, at least, unlike the three or four other babies who wailed away nearby, somewhere along the corridor. Whether this was a good or a bad sign she dared not consider.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Caroline took a small paper parcel from her apron and unfolded it on her knee, revealing half of a slightly wilted ham sandwich. Katie grabbed out for it, gobbling down a mouthful with such hungry haste that Caroline feared she might choke. There had plainly not been much food around that day either. She looked at the grey marble fireplace, a remnant from one of the cramped room’s previous, more prosperous lives. The wide central slab bore a relief of a pheasant, spreading its wings as if taking flight from a hunter’s hound; an old crack in the stone, black with dirt, ran through the middle of the bird’s outstretched neck.

‘So I’ve joined the gun factory,’ she announced brightly. ‘Mrs Vincent’s letter of recommendation did the trick, like you said it would. And it’s decent enough work, I s’pose – one and six a day, which ain’t half bad. Better than what I was getting before.’

Amy said nothing; her brow creased as she pulled a needle through the rose. Something was troubling her. Caroline took the sandwich back from Katie and tore off a small piece, placing it carefully in the child’s outstretched fingers.

‘It’s a pleasant thing to be out of service, I must say,’ she continued, ‘and in a new part of town. I’m grateful for you passing on word of this to me, Amy. I mean it. After Mr Vincent done what he done, ending himself in the public road, we all thought we’d be in the workhouse for sure before the month’s close. Blind panic, there was, down in the servants’ parlour.’

Caroline had witnessed her former master’s demise – prompted by a shocking loss on the money markets, or so it was rumoured. Early one cold Wednesday morning at the start of March she’d been on her knees scrubbing the front steps, cursing the butler who’d given her the job, welcoming the warmth of the water on her freezing fingers as she rinsed the brush in the bucket. Mr Vincent had stepped over her, dressed for the City but lacking his coat and hat. The Times was in his hand, held limply by the spine, spilling out pages as he wandered to the gate. Reaching the street, he’d stood on the edge of the pavement, peering back and forth, craning his neck as if searching for a cab. A huge coal wagon had passed by, heading up towards Highgate. Mr Vincent had walked out alongside it, crouched down in the muddy thoroughfare and placed his head beneath one of its rear wheels. It had run on over him without so much as a bump, squashing his skull flat; Caroline’s first reaction, watching incredulously from her soapy step, had been to let out a yelp of manic laughter.

Amy’s needle halted. ‘I am glad you have found a position, Caro,’ she said quietly.

Caroline fed another piece of sandwich to Katie. ‘I saw your Martin, in a tavern near the works. He was drinking with this Yankee engineer. Quill was his name.’

Amy set down her rose. ‘He’s mentioned Mr Quill to me.’

‘A harmless old cove, that one. Likes to talk. Loves his Colonel, this Colt fellow. And he’s really taken a shine to Mart. I’m told that he’s looking to train him up – turn him into a proper engineer.’

This was surely good news, but Amy made no reaction to it. She looked at her daughter for a moment, and then stared blankly into the fire.

‘There were other paddies there as well,’ Caroline went on. ‘Roscommoners like Mart. Friends of his, from the looks of things. Those I work with said that they’re employed in the forging shop, and keep mostly to themselves. One is making a name for himself, though, as a regular hard customer – Pat Slattery, he’s called. Word is that he’ll serve out any Englishman who dares look his way.’

Amy sighed sharply, her head dipping forward.

‘D’you know him?’ Caroline asked.

Her sister rubbed at her eyes with a bony, needle-scarred knuckle. ‘He was a porter with Mart and Jack in Covent Garden,’ she replied, ‘but they’re old pals. From Ireland. There’s a whole group. I – I was hoping that Mart had broken with them, by moving to Colt and all, but I had me doubts.’ Amy hesitated. ‘It’s just that Pat Slattery is – is – he’s –’ Merely saying the name made her slip on her words and lose her way. She was frightened.

‘D’you think they’re up to something? Planning mischief – or thievery?’

Amy shook her head. ‘No. No. Martin wouldn’t. He’s a good man, Caro. He’s never been nothing but kind to Michael and Katie and me.’

Caroline scowled, made immediately impatient by this unconditional loyalty. ‘Oh Amy, for Christ’s sake, listen to yourself! Where is he right now, if he’s such a saint? It’s the dead of night, you’re alone with your babies in this wretched place with no coal and no food even, and where is your precious Martin? Out drinking up his wages, that’s where, propping up some bar with the legion of the bloody useless!’

Katie caught the heat in her aunt’s voice and gazed at her questioningly. The girl’s almond-shaped eyes – the same eyes as Caroline and Amy – were open wide, her lower lip starting to tremble. Caroline made a shushing noise, bounced Katie up and down rather briskly, and then gave her another piece of the sandwich.

Amy, too, grew annoyed. ‘He is gentle,’ she said. ‘Not once has he so much as raised his hand to any of us. And he is true – do you have any notion of how rare that is, Caro?’

Caroline rolled her eyes; her sister would often resort to this tactic. ‘How could I possibly, Amy, unmarried as I am?’

This sarcasm was ignored. ‘Neither does he pay any notice to the many spiteful things that are said out in the Court. They call him a traitor to Ireland, to his people, as he is bound to an Englishwoman with half-English issue. And he does not pay them any notice at all.’ Her pale cheeks were colouring, and her voice becoming yet more insistent. ‘He is my husband, Caro.’

‘Only in the eyes of Rome,’ Caroline retorted. Her blood was up now. ‘Where was it you was betrothed? A chapel in an old potter’s shed on Orchard Street, weren’t it, by some crack-brained boggler of a priest? You ain’t no Catholic, Amy. Your union with Martin Rea is founded on a flaming lie.’

Amy didn’t respond. She fell quite silent, in fact, reaching over to pick at her artificial rose. Caroline itched with shame. Yet again, she’d gone a step too far; she’d said things she hadn’t meant, regretting them even as they passed through her lips. She didn’t, in truth, give two farthings for religion of any kind, yet here she was coming on like some doorstep Evangelical raging against Papist heresy. This was often the way between the sisters these days: an almost accidental battle, with the victor plunged into miserable remorse the second it was concluded.

‘I’ll bet you’re right, anyway,’ Caroline said at last, as if making a concession, attempting to mask her guilt with breezy cheerfulness. ‘Lord, you couldn’t steal from the bloomin’ Yankees even if you were stupid enough to try. They’re far too careful. I ain’t so much as seen a complete pistol in all the time I been there.’ She cast a look around the tiny, dirty room. ‘We stand to turn a decent penny off this Colonel Colt, Amy – your Mart in particular, what with this Mr Quill looking out for him. You’ll be leaving the Devil’s Acre, I should think, before this year’s out. I’ve found lodgings just along the river, in Millbank, in a new terrace next to a lumber yard. You could do very nicely over there.’

Katie had finished the sandwich but wanted more. Whimpering, she tugged at the front of Caroline’s apron. When nothing else was produced, the whimper grew into a low, continuous moan, the infant’s smooth little berry of a face crumpling with distress.

Amy stood, wrapping a thin shawl around her shoulders. ‘This is our home, Caroline,’ she said coldly. ‘We ain’t going nowhere.’ Then she crossed the room and took back her child.

London dirt coated the window beside Caroline’s drilling machine like a sheet of cheap brown paper. She had to lean up close to the pane to see anything much through it at all. Her ears had not misled her; down in the courtyard were the thirty or so men employed in the forging shop. Released to take their dinner, they were wandering towards the river, over to the row of costermongers and victual-sellers that had set up on the near side of Ponsonby Street to snag custom from the new Colt factory. All had removed their caps in the April sunshine and were smoking hungrily after their morning’s labour. After passing through the tall factory gates, most simply selected a stall, made their purchases and walked back into the yard, eating as they went. A small number lingered, however, taking time to choose or trying to haggle down the price.

There was an angry, affronted shout from the direction of a boiler-cart selling steamed potatoes. Caroline squinted, looking closer. A dark, fierce-looking man, quite short and thin but utterly fearless, was cursing loudly in a strong Irish accent, making an energetic complaint to the stallholder. It was Pat Slattery, the fellow she’d seen with Martin and Mr Quill in the Eagle – whose name alone had caused her sister such alarm. A handful of others, his Roscommon boys, rushed to his side, raising their voices along with his. Martin’s stooped, broad-shouldered form was not among them. Caroline supposed that he must be off somewhere doing the bidding of the chief engineer.

Slattery and his friends started rocking the cart back and forth, and a dull clang rang out as one of them struck the boiler with his fist. The rest promptly followed suit, and soon the squat iron tank was under a prolonged, noisy attack. The stallholder did not try to weather this battering for long, driving his dented boiler-cart off towards Vauxhall Bridge in a hail of oaths and stones, whipping his braying mule for all he was worth. The Irishmen patted each other’s backs, nodding with the curt satisfaction of a job well done. They paid visits to a couple of the surrounding stalls – which served them quickly, waving away payment – and then came back through the factory gates, joking with each other as they settled against a wall to eat. These were creatures from the Devil’s Acre, Caroline thought; that was their natural place. What could possibly have lured them out to this Yankee’s factory in Pimlico? It wasn’t just the daily wage, that was for certain. Amy was wrong – something was going on here.