The Devil’s Acre. Matthew Plampin
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?’
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