Nicole felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. She sat down heavily in a chair. A night of love and a morning of horror.
Chapter 8
NICOLE LOST NO TIME LEAVING THE HOUSE. SHE KNEW THAT her resolve wouldn’t be strong for very long. She rowed herself across the river to the mill. It sat on a hill with a long wooden trough leading from the fall of the river to the top of the water wheel. It was a tall, narrow building with a stone foundation and a brick body. The roof was of split wooden shakes. A porch ran along the entire front of the building. The water wheel itself was one and a half stories high.
Inside the building, Nicole climbed to the second story, where two doors opened onto a balcony overlooking the wheel. As far as she could tell, the buckets on the wheel were in good shape, though the ones resting at the bottom could possibly be rotten.
The enormous millstones inside the building were five feet in diameter and eight inches thick. She ran her hands along the stone and recognized the irregular network of quartz. The stones were of French burr, the finest in the world. They had been brought to America as ballast in the hold of a ship, then carried downriver to the Armstrong plantation. The stones were deeply grooved, with a series of radiating ridges. She was pleased to see that the stones were well balanced, coming very close together but not touching.
Outside in the sunlight, she walked along the hill to the little house. She could tell very little about it because of the lumber nailed over the windows and doors.
A commotion toward the river drew her attention.
“Nicole! Are you here?” Janie was yelling as she trudged up the hill.
The large, pink-cheeked woman was a joy to see, and they hugged as if they hadn’t seen each other every day since they had left the ship.
“It didn’t work out, huh?”
“No,” Nicole said. “It didn’t work
out at all.”
“I was hopin’, what with the two of you already being married and all—”
“What are you doing here?” Nicole wanted to change the subject.
“Clay stopped by the loom house and said you were moving over here, that you were going to run the mill. He said to pick out two good men, take all the tools we needed and help you. He said that if I wanted to I could live here, and he’d pay me just the same.”
Nicole looked away. Clay’s generosity was almost too much.
“Come on, you two,” Janie yelled. “We got work to do.” Janie introduced two men to Nicole. Vernon was tall and red-haired, while Luke was shorter and dark. Under Janie’s instructions, the men used crowbars to pry the boards off the front door of the house.
It was still dark inside, but Nicole could see it was a beautiful little house. The bottom floor was one large room, an eight-foot-long fireplace along one wall, a staircase with a hand-carved balustrade in the corner. Three recessed windows were in two walls, the door and a window in another. There was an old pine chest under one window, a long, wide table in the center of the floor.
As the men pried the boards off the windows, very little light came through. The noise sent hundreds of little feet scurrying.
“Phew!” Janie said, and wrinkled her nose. “It’s going to take a lot to clean this place up.”
“Then I guess we’d better get started.”
By sundown, they’d made some progress. The upstairs was a low-ceilinged loft, the sides of the room dropping off sharply. Under the filth, they found some beautifully crafted woodwork. The interior walls were plastered, and a coat of whitewash would make them like new. The clean windows let a great deal of light through.
Vernon, who’d been nailing down loose roof shingles, suddenly called that a raft was coming across the river. They all went down to the edge of the river. One of Clay’s men was poling the raft ashore. It was loaded with furniture.
“Wait, Janie, I can’t accept that. He’s done too much already.”
“This is no time to be proud. We’ll need that stuff, and besides, it’s only out of Clay’s attic. It’s not like it was costing him anything. Now, come on and grab one end of that bench. Howard! I hope you brought some whitewash—and a couple of mattresses.”
“This is only the first load. When I get through, you’re gonna have all of Arundel Hall on this side of the river,” Howard answered.
Janie, Nicole, and the two men worked for three days on the house. The men slept in the mill, while the women fell each night, exhausted, onto straw-filled mattresses in the attic of the house.
On the fourth day, a short, gnarled man appeared. “I hear there’s a woman here who thinks she can run a mill.”
Janie started to give the man a piece of her mind, but Nicole stepped forward. “I’m Nicole Armstrong, and I plan to run the mill. Can I help you?”
The man watched her closely, then held out his left hand to her, palm down.