Matthew Plampin - The Devil’s Acre

Soon the engine was really pounding along, the driving cylinder above them humming as it spun. For a minute or two the men took their ease, lulled into a strange kind of peace by the engine’s thunder; then Mr Stickney reappeared, lumbering through the shadowy forging shop. There was a part in his hand, a pistol frame from the looks of it. Mr Quill went forth to meet him, and a detailed examination began. Both men had been with Colonel Colt for many years, and knew his arms inside out. Their verdict was a good one.

‘By God, Gage,’ exclaimed Mr Quill, holding the part up, ‘this is damn near perfect. You couldn’t hope for a cleaner bit of shaping than that – the drag is quite gone. I do believe that this here frame is ready to be jointed. The Colonel’ll be cock-a-hoop when he hears.’ He looked around. ‘Christ Almighty, I’ve half a mind to fetch him here right now!’

With sudden boyish excitement, Colt’s chief engineer rushed back past the boiler and clanged his wrench repeatedly against one of the engine’s sturdy wrought-iron supports, letting out a triumphant huzzah. The Irishmen joined in, taking off their grubby cloth caps and tossing them upwards so that they slapped against the chamber’s low ceiling.

Pat Slattery, however, did not cheer. He sought out Martin’s eye and held it, his thoughts stamped clearly on his thin, hawkish face. The Irish in that room were all brothers, united by a sacred oath; and Slattery, the closest they had to a leader, never lost sight of their purpose. This was a moment for their mistress and namesake – the maiden Molly Maguire. Who she was, or who she had once been, no one could say for certain, but it didn’t matter. Molly was their mothers and daughters, and everyone else they’d lost in the Hunger; the blighted fields and the famished animals; the dismal workhouses and the mass graves. She was the Holy Virgin’s dark-hearted sister, watching over them always with her teeth bared.

Back in Roscommon, it was their pledge to Molly Maguire that had sent them out against the landlords and land-agents and bailiffs, fighting those who sought to evict them from their homes and starve their families, her families, from existence. It was Molly who’d set them rioting in streets from Boyle to Tipperary, smashing windows, breaking limbs, burning barns and worse besides. The others spoke of her often, of their loyalty to her; she was as real to them as the saints and angels, and every bit as beloved. For Martin, though, it went beyond this. He didn’t know if it was lunacy or some form of sickness in his soul, but from time to time – when his heart beat fast and thick and his brain ached – Molly Maguire would come to call on him. He could see her right then, in fact, moving through the Colt engine room, slipping in among the men gathered there like a current of cold air. She was holding aloft loose handfuls of her dusty copper locks, singing one of the old songs in that scratched whistle of a voice; he saw the awful whiteness of her skin, and the way that tattered gown allowed a glimpse of the ribs standing out so painfully beneath.

The first of these visitations had occurred in the spring of 1847, just after he’d collected his youngest sister’s body from the Athlone workhouse. As he’d sat slumped beneath a tree, half-mad from the poteen he’d drunk, Molly had slid across the borders of his vision like a figure from a dark, dreaming vale, beyond all wakeful reason; yet even through his stupor he’d known at once that she was there to protect and encourage him. From then on, when he was out doing her work with his brothers, he would sometimes sense her flitting around nearby, and hear her voice whispering in his ear. On the night when they’d broken into the manor house of Major Denis Mahon, who Slattery had proceeded to beat to death with a threshing flail, she’d laughed and trilled with joyful approval. This act, the righteous slaying of the worst of their oppressors, had been celebrated throughout Catholic Roscommon – but it had forced all suspected Molly Maguires to flee the county or risk the gallows.

Martin, Slattery, their friend Jack Coffee and a couple of others had travelled to London, trying to fashion new lives for themselves among the impossible numbers of Irish who’d also been forced to start over in the heaving rookeries of the city. The Mollys had thus established an outpost of sorts in Westminster, in the dank lanes of the Devil’s Acre. A series of cockeyed plans had been devised, spoiled and abandoned. Years had passed. Molly Maguire herself had stayed well away, and Martin had started to think that she was done with him. He’d begun portering at Covent Garden; he’d even found a wife. Then Colonel Colt had settled just up the river in Pimlico, and back Molly came, rising once again to the shallows of Martin’s mind. As always, she wanted vengeance for the suffering of Ireland; and now, at last, there was a way for her faithful lads to get it for her.

‘Lord John,’ Slattery had declared on that first night, after they’d all made it through the Yankees’ quizzing and were employees of the Colt Company. ‘Lord John Russell. He’s our mark, brothers. He’s the one what must die at the first bleedin’ opportunity. There are others, o’ course there are. Clarendon, that was viceroy; that damned Labouchere as well. But it’s the Prime Minister, him that was in charge, who must fall ahead o’ the rest.’ He’d struck his callused fist against the tavern table. ‘It’s Lord John that would not give sufficient aid to a famine-stricken people, for fear that it might prove a burden to England. That stopped the public works, the railways and suchlike, which would have given many thousands o’ Irishmen an honest living wage, and presented them instead with a charity soup so thin it wouldn’t sustain a bleedin’ farm cat.’ His voice had begun to buckle, his rage twisting him up into a bitter ball. ‘That could not overcome his bigot’s hatred of the Catholic Irish even as he was given the power of life and death over us – that chose to let us die!’

The Molly Maguires had nodded, a couple growling their agreement.

‘I’ve a name for you, brothers,’ Slattery had continued. ‘Daniel M’Naghten. Ten years ago this brave Celt went after Sir Robert Peel with a pair of flintlock pistols. He chose poorly – the man he shot was only Peel’s private secretary, and he was brought down by the crushers before he could load another bullet. Well, thanks to the Yankee Colt, this sad result can be avoided by us. We’ll be sure of our man – sure of his much-deserved death. And we’ll fight our way out as well. All we need are a couple o’ dozen of these repeating arms.’

Now, just over a fortnight later, the Mollys were gathered in Colonel Colt’s engine room, being led by Mr Quill in a second cheer, and a third, as he kept on banging away with his wrench. After a minute or so of this, Stickney intervened. Martin thought him a bad-tempered bastard, and a bully as well; he frowned a little at the sound of the foreman’s voice.

‘Calm yourself, Ben, for God’s sake,’ he shouted over the engine, stopping Quill’s arm as it was being raised for yet another blow. ‘We’re still some distance from our best. We could be getting thirty-five horses from this thing, and it’s giving us eighteen at the very most.’

Mr Quill, red-cheeked and exuberant, regarded the foreman with something close to pity. ‘Gage, if there were another seasoned Colt engineer within a thousand miles of where we’re standing then, yes, I confess that it might be possible to wring some more life out of this here contraption. But look around you, friend! The London factory is working! We can make a goddamn gun!’

‘Full production’s a good way off,’ Stickney countered. ‘A distant prospect.’