The Endless Vessel by Charles Soule

Author:Charles Soule
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

II. Seven: The Calder Mill.

NOVEMBER 1790.

42°28'13.1"N, 71°21'10.9"W

MOLLY CALDER PULLED HER SHAWL CLOSE AROUND HER SHOULDERS. Winter was not yet here, but it was in the air. The leaves had turned and fallen, leaving only the pines clothed in green. She thought about the supplies they had laid in, wondering if they would last. A wagon was waylaid the prior week, and they’d lost an important and expensive shipment of dry goods.

She stood in the tower at the south corner of the Mill, looking out across the compound. Two months since the attack that had killed Milton Tenenbaum and Edward Albright, traumatized young Nellie Franck, and forced them to rebuild the riverwheel and many other structures. The Mill was made new in a hundred ways. What was once a textile factory, and then a growing garden of free thought and innovation, was now something like a fortress.

A high palisade of sharpened tree trunks surrounded the Mill, with watchtowers at each compass point. Two heavy gates provided access—one to the river road and the other to the cropland to the northwest. Those crops had been harvested, the stalks plowed under, leaving wide swaths of cleared ground beyond the north gate. The forests to the Mill’s south and east were cut down to create the palisade. On all sides, it was impossible to approach the Mill without crossing a long stretch of open ground or fording the Concord River.

Were such drastic measures necessary? Molly believed so. She had requested assistance from the local constable after the attack, even doing his job for him and pointing at Mr. Jonathan Franck as the obvious culprit. But the law, in the end, had not helped her. The constable pointed out that Molly had no real evidence of Franck’s involvement, and anyone who could speak to the purpose of the attack had either vanished or died that dark night.

The people of the Mill looked to her for leadership, for explanations, but what could she tell them? That she had made enemies of the Puritan elite in Boston and odds were the attack was only the first of many to come? Molly had been on the verge of disbanding the compound, telling everyone to find other, safer employment, when help had arrived from a surprising source.

Just days after the death of Edward Albright, three men arrived at the Mill claiming to be wartime colleagues of the lieutenant. Molly had always had an inkling that Edward was no ordinary soldier, though the full truth of his past had died with him. These new arrivals had many of his mannerisms. They were sharp-eyed, precise, and acted as if they expected an attack from any side at any moment. They seemed, in a word, to be rather deadly.

The three soldiers—Dalton, Briggs, and Aselton—asked to view Albright’s body, which Molly had ordered stored in the Mill’s icehouse alongside the three corpses of the mysterious attackers. They spent a few solemn minutes in the presence of their dead brother-in-arms, then spoke among themselves for a time, over by the wreckage of the mill wheel.

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