Free The Devil's Acre by Matthew Plampin Page A

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, abull’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