The Devil's Acre (17 page)

‘What of the packing room?’

James was on the seat now, a couple of feet to the left
of Richards; the woman was cleaved to his side, sliding an arm inside his jacket. ‘What of it?’

Edward hesitated. The young courtesan was taking him in idly with her large hazel eyes; he saw that she was unpeeling James Colt like a well-ripened orange, and would take her pick of the juiciest segments. ‘Mr Stickney mentioned that a dozen more girls are needed over there, to put together our crates and cases, now that production is starting to pick up. Shall I choose them from those already employed on the machine floor? We will have enough recruitment work on our hands finding fifty new operatives.’

James shrugged, utterly indifferent. ‘Whatever you think best, Edward – I leave it entirely with you.’ He looked away, devoting his attention to the woman who seemed to be edging her way expertly onto his lap.

Edward turned to Richards. The press agent was talking to himself, his head lolling this way and that, apparently reliving some long-past triumph in the courtroom won during his promising, youthful years as a barrister. He was a sorry sight indeed, dishevelled and increasingly emaciated, his face and hands dotted with scabs. Since Colonel Colt’s departure he’d given himself over entirely to dissipation; Alfred Richards was not the sort who flourished under a lax regime. Edward went to help him rise but was waved away with a curse. Somehow, Richards stood unaided, plucking a palm frond from beneath his lapel, but after a single faltering footstep he stumbled against the low table directly in front of their seat, knocking glasses everywhere. This won him a growl of unkind laughter from the Harum-Scarum Club, and a few affected titters from their fair friends.

Edward took hold of the press agent’s shoulders, heaving him upright. He bade goodnight to James and his assortment of parasitic companions, and then grappled the protesting Richards out into the centre of the balcony. It occurred to him that he didn’t know where the press agent lived, but he thought that they could save this particular problem for the cab.

Richards was about to speak, his face contorting with ill-will – his earlier good humour had vanished. ‘You are such
a bloody
fraud,
Lowry,’ he said bitingly. ‘I see through you, sir, in a – in a second. In a damned
trice.’

Edward commenced the laborious process of manoeuvring the press agent towards the balcony stairs. ‘Yes, Richards,’ he replied, ‘I’m quite sure that you do.’

The news of their termination by the Colt Company was greeted by the female operatives with every manifestation of distress. Some simply slunk away, never to be seen again. Others cried and pleaded as they were shepherded from the factory block, telling of debts and the rent and their hungry children, lingering around the gates and lanes outside the works for several hours as if hopeful that a miraculous reversal might occur and they would be called back inside. A few refused to leave, raving against Colonel Colt and his dandy brother, striking out and spitting at anyone who came near. Finally, Noone and his watchmen were summoned; they scooped up the screeching rebels, carried them down to the embankment and dropped them unceremoniously in the clotted, putrid mud of low tide.

Besides Caroline Knox, Edward had chosen the dozen women who would be retained for the packing room from the staff list, picking names completely at random. They were held in a corner of the forging shop until the last of their former co-workers had been removed, and were then escorted from the factory to the warehouse, all barely able to believe their good fortune. Edward stood nonchalantly in the middle of the yard, next to the water trough, thinking that Miss Knox was sure to look his way and realise the central part he had played in preserving her place at Colt. But she hurried straight past him, eyes fixed on the cobblestones before her.

Back up in the office, Edward perched on the edge of his desk with his arms tightly crossed, smoking a cigar with concentrated fury, his frustration champing on him like a carthorse. He’d rescued her from dismissal. Surely she owed him a minute of her attention. He hadn’t asked for any of this; he hadn’t sought her out. It was she who’d approached him during the Hungarian’s visit, and invited him to come to the
masons’ tavern by the river. How could she turn away from him now – cast him aside like a rotten apple? That he was so angry served to anger him yet further. It seemed absurd that such a trivial thing should be affecting him to this degree. He was twenty-five years old and a man of worldly experience, not some trembling virgin. He’d known women of grace and comeliness; he’d felt the tangled emotions of romantic involvement. For this particular sensation, however, he was completely unprepared. He honestly didn’t have any idea what to do next.

Edward glanced at the desktop. Piled upon it was a long report from the steelworks in Sheffield – his supposed area of expertise, he remembered – and a stack of inquiries from all manner of private individuals, forwarded to him by Mr Dennett, the agent in charge of the sales office at Spring Gardens. He could not bring himself to attend to any of it. Crossing over to the circular window, he watched a fierce argument taking place down on Ponsonby Street between the fractious women Noone had dumped in the Thames sludge and Lady Wardell’s protesters.

‘We ain’t
better orf,
damn you,’ one mud-blackened specimen shrieked, ‘so shut yer bleedin’ trap!’

The secretary rested his forehead against the glass, wondering how he had worked himself into such a ridiculous situation.

The morning passed slowly. As the heat in the little attic office grew more intense, Edward sat staring up at the sloping ceiling, imagining the sun melting together the tiles on the other side so that they slid off the edge of the roof in one congealed mass. He was sorely tempted to go over to the warehouse on some pretext or other and have her called out of the packing room, but couldn’t think of anything he might then say that wouldn’t sound petty, aggressive or aggrieved. When the midday break arrived at last, he spent it standing at the forge door with his hands in his pockets, scanning yard and warehouse for any sign of her. None presented itself; and eventually Mr Quill came over to speak with him, inquiring after his health in a kindly but distinctly pointed manner. Edward realised that his behaviour was
starting to draw attention. Americans and Englishmen alike were speculating about what – or who – had worked the Colonel’s cool secretary into such an unholy lather, and they were smirking as they did so. He returned to the office at once.

There, back at the circular window, he tried to revive the line of reasoning he’d taken in the days after they’d first met, when he’d walked her back to Millbank. The end of their nascent friendship, he told himself sternly, was for the best – undoubtedly and indisputably. She was a
factory girl,
for God’s sake! He was aiming for great things, for the golden pinnacles of business. Was such a woman compatible with such ambition? Could he really see her, a decade from now, being presented at the greatest houses in the city, with a fine silken shawl and a fan, making genteel conversation? He forced his thoughts back to his supper with Saul Graff, and the clear suggestion behind his old friend’s words: a liaison with Caroline Knox would only ever be a conquest, a liberty taken with a girl from the servant class, virtue assailed and yielded and that was all. It would be a common, tawdry, short-lived thing. The distance between them, although small enough by Edward’s reckoning, was nonetheless real, and would make any lasting connection impossible.

But it was no use. He could not think like this – not about her, the radiant, razor-sharp Miss Knox. In the hot, dusty calm of the office, with the rumbles and squeals of the gun factory vibrating faintly through the floorboards, his mind wandered off in an entirely different direction. He saw them standing together at the rail of a Collins steamer, sailing out of Liverpool harbour, bidding farewell to the old world forever as they headed for the lush vales of Connecticut, far away from England and her paltry prejudices. There, under the mantle of Colonel Colt, they would become wealthy, and respected, and so very happy that merely envisaging it made his heart strain and ache with longing.

At the end of the day, with this tormenting vision still lingering within him, Edward walked resolutely from the factory block and took up the same position beside the water trough – a point which, by his calculation, she would have to
walk past as she left the works. The bells rang and the workers crowded out. He spotted the other packing-room girls filing from the warehouse, and caught his breath; but he quickly realised that Caroline Knox was not with them. A couple of these girls stopped to thank him as they went to the gate, smiling and dropping curtseys. They deduced who had made the selection for the packing room, probably on the basis that Miss Knox was among their number. One came forward to talk to him, launching into an earnest speech about how important her post was to her, what with a sick mother, four little children and a husband out of work. Edward tried to be gracious, feigning attention, but his eyes kept wandering past her shoulder towards the warehouse. On and on she went, labouring her points, repeating the litany of her difficulties; but the number of infants changed from four to five, and suddenly he saw that he was being stalled. This woman was deliberately keeping him occupied while Miss Knox made her escape through the Bessborough Place gate at the back of the works. He excused himself and hurried off.

Bessborough Place was crammed with departing factory hands. Craning his neck, Edward caught sight of a single bonnet among the caps, nipping into an alley mouth. He decided that he would give chase. This had gone on quite long enough. If she wanted him to leave her be then he would, of course he would, but he’d be told this by Miss Knox herself. He wanted some explanation for why something that had seemed so fresh and hopeful and filled with excitement had grown so painfully strange. Like most of the workers, she was heading in the direction of Millbank, across the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Edward shouldered his way through the mass of Colt operatives, thinking that he would catch her up, say his piece, and end this one way or another.

He couldn’t even get close. Miss Knox was traversing the packed pavements with considerable agility. The secretary, who had of late become used to riding in cabs or the Colonel’s barouche, had trouble simply matching her pace. A smothering veil of dust hung over the Vauxhall Bridge Road, stirred up by the tramping hooves and grinding wheels of the city
traffic, poisoning the soft evening air. One of the plagues of midsummer London, this dust was yet another instance of the great metropolis perverting Nature, transforming Her into something viciously malign. As he started across the road, Edward pressed his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, squinting so hard that his eyes were almost closed. Miss Knox left his sight, and he feared that he might lose her altogether among the vehicles, animals and swirls of powdered filth. But then he saw her again – coughing against her hand as she walked on into Millbank. He stepped up onto the pavement, following as quickly as he could.

Away from the main thoroughfare the dust thinned a little. Edward glanced down at his jacket and trousers; pale dirt, smelling distinctly of dung, coated both like hoar-frost on a tree-trunk. He tried to knock it off with swift, clapping sweeps of his hand, but with no success. Ahead, behind a row of low houses, rose the dull fort of Millbank Prison, like an austere, geometric remaking of the Tower four miles down the river. Edward guessed that she was heading towards her home – to where he’d escorted her on that first night. He wondered what he might do if she reached the lodging house before he’d managed to speak with her. Would he present himself at the threshold, ready to brave the landlady with a slick tale – or would he take to watching the place, to lurking sadly in doorways like so many of the lovelorn? He couldn’t say, but felt strongly that it would be best to catch her before this question became a pressing one.

Miss Knox marched straight past the end of her road, though, away from Millbank and into old Westminster – into the Devil’s Acre. Again, it was all Edward could do to trail thirty yards behind her. The streets grew narrow, hemmed in by tight, winding lines of buildings, giving them a shadowy, almost subterranean feel. Everything seemed to slow, the powerful current that propelled mankind throughout the rest of the city slackening off rapidly, as if one was leaving the main course of a mighty river for a stagnant tributary. The denizens of this rotten place leaned and slouched all about, a tattered, aimless crowd, sunk completely in their dismal indolence. Edward tried not to look at them; he knew that meeting an
eye, any eye at all, would be unwise in the extreme. Around him, they argued and brawled with drunken, foul-mouthed savagery; or let out febrile coughs and moans, succumbing to the depredations of liquor or some other unknown ailment. He directed his gaze upwards. The last of the day’s sunlight, so burningly beautiful, was but a narrow stripe across a sagging rooftop.

There was not much dust here as there was precious little of the lively movement required to provoke it. In its place, though, were flies, many thousands of them, plump as brandy-soaked raisins, that settled upon you if you paused for even a second, crawling for your tear ducts, your nostrils, the corners of your mouth. The smells were enough to stop the breath in your lungs, thick as fish-glue and repulsively over-ripe; Edward imagined that a multitude of deadly diseases were thronging into his body, gaining stronger purchase on his blood with every step he took. In such an environment, Miss Knox stood out like a clean cotton glove dropped on a seething refuse heap, and was therefore a great deal easier to follow. She was forging onwards through the rookery with her head down, deflecting any unwelcome attention with her purposeful haste. Edward became acutely aware of the notice he was attracting himself – of the sheer idiocy of what he was doing. His initial reason for starting up his pursuit was now utterly invalid. He could hardly stop her, amid all this miserable, sickening decay and make his heartfelt declaration. Her sister lived in the Acre, he remembered; that would be why she was venturing out there. She would soon vanish into a tenement of some description, leaving him on the street. He had to turn back, right away.