The Devil’s Acre

The Secretary to the Master-General of Ordnance leapt up from his chair with a shocked exclamation, moving around the side of the desk. All colour was struck from his pinched face. Calmly, the Colonel followed his progress with the Adams, keeping him before it.

‘The main spring in these double-action models is just too damn tight, y’see,’ the gun-maker went on, his manner aggressively conversational. ‘It requires such pressure to be applied to the trigger that a fellow’s aim is thrown off completely. Now, watch the barrel, Paget, and watch it closely – you too, Mr Lowry.’

The ordnance official lifted up his hands. ‘Colonel Colt, please –’

Colt pulled the trigger. There was a shallow click; and sure enough, as the cylinder rotated, the Adams’s barrel jerked down by perhaps an inch. To stress his point, the Colonel repeated the action, with the same result. ‘You both see that?’

Paget staggered, almost as if he had actually been shot, leaning against his desk for support. ‘It is loaded, by God!’ he blurted. ‘One of the – the chambers is still loaded after a demonstration earlier in the week. I was waiting for a sergeant-at-arms to come up and empty it for me. Put it down, sir, I beg you!’

Colonel Colt, magnificently unperturbed by this revelation, examined the pistol’s cylinder for a moment before knocking out a ball and an issue of black powder into the palm of his hand. ‘Hell’s bells, Paget,’ he growled, ‘are you such a fairy prince that you’re unable to remove the charge from a goddamn revolver?’

Edward exhaled, the blood humming through his trembling fingertips, trying to work out if the Colonel had known for certain which chamber the bullet had been in. Surely he must have done. He was sauntering back across the room, continuing to act as if nothing whatsoever was wrong – as if he was, and always had been, the master of the situation.

‘My point is made, I think,’ Colt pronounced. ‘If you honestly wish to equip Her Majesty’s troops with such an unsound weapon – troops who are battling savage Negroes to the death even as we speak – well, Paget my friend, that mistake is yours to make.’

The gun-maker poured the powder and bullet onto the desk, the tiny lead ball bouncing twice against the wood before disappearing onto the carpet. Laying the Adams revolver stock-first before the still-petrified Paget, he looked at Edward and then nodded towards the door. Their audience was over.

The Colt carriage was waiting for them on Pall Mall. Edward climbed inside and recoiled with an oath, almost losing his balance. A man was tucked in the far corner, dozing away peacefully with his hands folded over his chest; woken by Edward’s entrance, he stirred and let out a massive yawn. Completely unconcerned to have been so discovered, this intruder then heaved himself up, bending back an arm until he elicited a loud crack from one of his shoulder joints. In his mid-thirties, he had a long, horse-like face, a Roman nose and languid, greyish eyes. His clothes were fine but worn, and looked as if they had been slept in the night before. There was an air of gentlemanly entitlement about him, despite the clear signs of dissipation and financial hardship. He looked over at Edward and smiled sleepily.

‘You must be the new secretary,’ he said. A good deal of the polish had been scraped from his voice, but it was still plainly that of a well-born Englishman. ‘So pleased to make your acquaintance.’

Before Edward could demand to know who this character was and what the devil he was doing in the Colt carriage, the Colonel climbed in, having given the coachman his directions. ‘Alfie, you goddamn wastrel,’ he muttered to the man by way of greeting, sitting down opposite him, ‘I was wondering if you’d honour us with your company today.’ He took off his hat, setting it upon his knee. ‘Mr Lowry, this here’s Mr Richards, my London press agent. He was supposed to accompany us in to the Board of Ordnance this morning, but clearly did not deem it worth his precious time.’

Edward sat next to the Colonel. There was an old familiarity between his employer and Mr Richards. This was an unwelcome development.

‘My apologies, Samuel,’ said Richards with a shrug, settling on the carriage’s full cushions and refolding his hands. ‘My schedule simply would not permit it.’

Colt looked at him disbelievingly, pulled off one of his calfskin gloves and then laid his naked hand against his brow. ‘By Christ, my head,’ he grumbled. ‘I could surely use an eye-opener about now.’

Immediately, Richards produced a slim bottle from his frock-coat and tossed it across the carriage – no mean feat as they were moving by now, cutting back out into the traffic. Colt caught it with similar dexterity, gratefully tugging out the stopper and taking a long drink. This simple but well-practised exchange laid bare the nature of their relationship. Both were devoted to drink, and had no doubt shared a series of adventures about the city during the Colonel’s previous visits. Richards had thus managed to earn the Colonel’s indulgence, if not his trust.

‘You still have today’s pistol, I see.’

‘I was disinclined to make a gift of it on this occasion.’ Colt took another slug of liquor, sucking it through his teeth. ‘We saw Paget.’

Richards was aghast; he too clearly knew Lord Paget. ‘Was no one else available? What of old Tom Hastings?’

Colt shook his head, saying that it had been Paget or nothing. He gave a brief summary of the meeting, failing to mention his practical experiment with the Adams revolver but admitting freely that the door had been pretty much slammed in their faces.

‘Mr Lowry here fought his corner, though,’ he added. ‘A cousin soldiering in Africa, saying my guns would force the savage foe to surrender! Why, he came at it like a seasoned operator. Nothing of the greenhorn about our Mr Lowry! Potential there, Alfie, real potential – like I told you.’

Edward grinned, well pleased by the gun-maker’s praise. Colt plainly thought that he’d invented the cousin at the Cape to help win over Paget. This he most definitely hadn’t – Sergeant-Major Arthur Lowry was very real, although in truth the half-dozen letters Edward had received from him contained only a single passing reference to revolving pistols and gave no indication of Arthur’s opinion of their merits. He decided to keep all this to himself. Why risk spoiling the Colonel’s contentment?

Richards was looking at the new secretary again. There was laughter in his eyes, and a certain opposition too. He sees me just as I see him, Edward thought: as a potential competitor, an adversary within the Colt Company. Edward found that he was unworried by this. Let the dishevelled fool try to knock me down, he thought, and see where it gets him.

The press agent stretched out luxuriantly, placing his muddy boots on the seat beside Edward, just a touch too close to the edge of the secretary’s coat. ‘He certainly seems like a sound fellow – a good London lad.’ Richards paused to pick something from between his large, stained teeth. ‘Not actually a cockney, I hope?’

Edward met this with careful good humour. ‘No, sir, I hail from the village of Dulwich. My father was a schoolmaster there.’

Richards inclined his head, accepting the bottle back from Colt. ‘So you are seeking to rise above this rather humble background – to improve your lot under the guidance of the good Colonel. No doubt you expect that before too long you’ll be at the head of one of his factories.’ He took a lingering drink. ‘A Colt manager or somesuch.’

This was exactly the future that Edward had predicted for himself a couple of nights before, while out celebrating his appointment with his friends; he’d declared it nothing less than a blasted certainty, in fact, standing up on a tavern stool, liquor spilling from his raised glass and running down inside his sleeve. The secretary looked over at his employer. Colt was staring out of the window at the elegant townhouses of St James Square, oblivious to their exchange.

‘I have my professional goals, Mr Richards, of course,’ he replied, ‘but my only concern at present is to serve the Colonel’s interests to the best of my abilities.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I have long been a sincere admirer of both the Colonel’s inventions and the dedicated manner in which he conducts his business.’

One of Richards’s eyebrows rose by a caustic quarter-inch. ‘And how did you come to hear of the position? It was not widely advertised.’

‘Through an interested friend,’ Edward answered lightly, ‘that’s all. No mystery there, Mr Richards.’

The secretary thought of Saul Graff, the fellow who’d passed on the tip to him. Graff was like a voracious, information-seeking weed, his tendrils forever breaking out across fresh territories; God alone knew how he’d found out about this particular vacancy, but his timing had been faultless. He was owed a slap-up dinner at the very least – although he doubtlessly had his own reasons for wanting Edward Lowry placed with Colt.

‘An interested friend. How very deuced fortunate for you, Mr Lowry.’ Richards held the bottle up to the window, trying to ascertain how much spirit was left inside. ‘Sam tells me that you know a thing or two about the buying and selling of steel.’

‘I do, at a clerical level at any rate. I was in the City – the trading house of Carver & Weight’s, to be exact.’

This jerked the Colonel from his reverie. ‘Goddamn City men!’ he snapped. ‘Scoundrelly rogues, the lot of ‘em. I do believe that I’ve saved you from a truly ignominious existence there, Mr Lowry.’ He gave his secretary a grave, forbidding look. ‘A life lived among stocks and shares, generating money for its own sake alone – why, you’d better blow out your brains at once and manure some honest man’s ground with your carcass than hang your ambition on so low a peg. You get hold of some steel for me, boy, and we’ll damn well do something with it, not just sell it on for a few measly dollars of profit.’

It gladdened Edward to hear this. While at Carver & Weight’s he’d grown tired of the abstractions of the trading floor and had felt a growing hunger for what he came to think of as real business, where manufacturers innovated and improved, and communicated directly with their customers – where things were accomplished beyond speculation and self-enrichment. He was fast reaching the conclusion that Colonel Colt, with his masterful inventions and determination to win the custom not only of men but of entire nations, was the best employer he could have wished for.

The gun-maker cut himself a fresh wad of tobacco, effectively closing the topic of his secretary’s regrettable early life and moving them on to other matters. He’d resolved to send off a letter to Ned Dickerson, his patent lawyer in America, concerning Robert Adams, and began to dictate in an oddly direct style, delivering his words as if Dickerson was seated before him – telling him angrily that the ‘John Bull diddler’ would not make another cent from his goddamn forgeries, not if there was a single earthy thing that they could do about it. As he took all this down, Edward got the sense that the campaign against Adams had already been a long and bitter one, with no resolution in sight. Alfred Richards, meanwhile, devoted his attentions to what remained of the bottle.

Some minutes passed, Colt’s language becoming bafflingly technical as he detailed the precise matters of engineering that the lawyer was to direct his attention towards; then he stopped speaking mid-sentence. Edward looked up to discover that they were on Regent Street; a long row of shining, plate-glass shop windows offered disjointed reflections of their mustard-coloured vehicle as it swept around the majestic, stuccoed arc of the Quadrant. After only a few moments they turned again, heading off towards Savile Row. Colonel Colt was putting on his hat, preparing to disembark; and seconds later the carriage drew up before the frontage of one of London’s very smartest tailors.

‘New waistcoats,’ said Colt by way of explanation. ‘I’m out in society a good deal in the coming weeks, and thought it a prudent investment. You two gentlemen remain here. I shan’t be very long.’

The press agent’s grey eyes followed the Colonel all the way to the tailor’s counter. Edward watched him closely, certain that battle was about to begin. It was only when Colt’s arms were outstretched and a tape-measure was being run across his back that Richards finally spoke.

‘So how large exactly,’ he asked, ‘were the perimeters of the explosion?’

This was not what Edward had been expecting. He begged Richards’s pardon, pleading ignorance of any such blast.

The press agent responded with a small, whinnying laugh. ‘Why, Mr Lowry, I refer of course to the explosion of our beloved master when Paget first mentioned the name of Robert Adams!’

Somewhat patronisingly, Richards revealed that throughout the Colonel’s previous sojourn in London at the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, when he had made an initial, more modest attempt to establish a European outpost, Clarence Paget had been an energetic partisan for the cause of their chief English rival. He had (they suspected) encouraged opposition to Colt at every level within the British Government, rigged various official tests and leaked negative reports on the American’s weapons to the press.

‘Since returning, the good Colonel has not so much as mentioned Adams revolvers before today; but after an unplanned meeting with Paget he’s sending vehement missives on the subject straight back to his legal mastiff in America. It don’t take a detective genius to piece it together, Mr Lowry.’

Edward put away the unfinished letter. ‘The subject was raised, certainly.’

‘And what, pray, was said?’

Realising that Richards would learn about the incident sooner or later anyway, Edward related what had happened up in Paget’s office as neutrally as he could manage.

The press secretary was heaving with mirth long before he’d finished. ‘Well, Mr Lowry,’ he wheezed at the tale’s conclusion, ‘that’s our Colonel, right there. His defence of his interests is quite unflagging. You’d better get used to such forcible tactics, old chum, if you are to stand at his side.’ Richards wiped his eyes; something in his manner told Edward that a card was about to be played. ‘The Colt family has an impulsive streak in it so broad that it borders on madness. I’m sure you’ll know to what I am alluding.’

And there it was, a veritable classic: the dark secret, casually touched upon to unnerve the callow recruit, to fill him with doubt and prompt a confused re-evaluation of his position. Edward found that he was smiling at this unsubtle piece of manipulation. ‘Mr Richards, I assure you that I do not.’

Richards feigned surprise. ‘You mean that you haven’t heard of John Colt, the axe-murderer of New York?’