The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  Peter listened, heard nothing.

  He gave Evangeline a nudge and they walked out onto the mill floor. It was like walking through a tunnel at Fenway and emerging into the grandstand. Everything opened up—two acres of floor space, defined by three dimensions of gridwork: a pattern of metal pillars holding up the floor, another of sprinkler pipes running across the ceiling, one of window-panes, another of blackened floorboards. And paint—dung brown? vomit green?—peeled from every surface, including the tongue-and-groove paneling on the walls of the old glassed-in office, where generations of managers had watched generations of workers spin their fabric and spin out their days.

  At the far end of the floor, there was a door, a big metal slider, leading to another segment of the mill. There was a stairway at that end, too, and someone was moving on it. They could hear him.

  Peter shouted in that direction, “Hey! Bindle!” Then he started walking.

  The footfalls stopped, then began to move faster. Up or down? Peter couldn’t tell.

  “Stay close,” said Peter, then they went back into the tower staircase. More footfalls. Above or below? Above.

  “Hey!” shouted Peter, and he started up again. “Peter,” said Evangeline. “Let’s go.”

  “One more flight,” he said.

  “Peter!” she said. “Let’s get out of here and get help.”

  He ignored her and took another turn of the staircase. She followed him.

  On the next landing Peter went to the window and looked down at the millyard. Then he cocked his head and listened.

  What he heard was the sound of Evangeline’s footfalls on the old floor, then her voice: “Oh, God. Peter, look.”

  Morris Bindle was hanging by a leather strap from one of the sprinkler lines. His face was already blue, a large wet stain had spread across his trousers as his bladder purged. A small stool had been turned over beneath his feet. And a bottle of whiskey was broken on the floor beneath him.

  “Oh, Jesus.” Peter followed Evangeline.

  At the same moment, they heard those footfalls … coming closer … on the staircase and at the far end of the floor.

  “Peter,” whispered Evangeline. “We’re trapped.”

  “Do you have your cell phone?”

  She pulled it out and punched nine-one-one.

  The steel door at the far end of the floor slid open. At the same time, the footfalls grew louder in the staircase.

  A figure was appearing through the metal sliders. A big man in a black leather jacket, stopping a moment in a shaft of sunlight.

  “Hello, police,” said Evangeline.

  “She’s callin’ the cops,” said the one in the black leather, the one they could see, but he said it calmly, as if he were calling for coffee.

  “We have time,” said the other one, who was emerging from the staircase tower. He had on a black ball cap pulled low, sunglasses.

  They were coming, cops or not.

  Peter raised the blackthorn, hoped that neither of them went for a gun.

  Think quick. Act quicker.

  “Yes, police,” said Evangeline, “I want to report an assault…. Who? Me!”

  Peter noticed Bindle’s cigarettes and lighter on the floor beside the broken whiskey bottle, part of the stage managing: make it look like he had a last butt, a last drink, and then—

  Peter grabbed the lighter. Then he lifted the stool that they’d stood Bindle on to hang him, stepped up, and flicked the lighter under one of the sprinkler heads.

  “Don’t do that,” said the one in the ball cap and shades. “We just want to talk.”

  Evangeline pointed the phone at him. “Talk to the police.”

  A few seconds later, water exploded from the sprinkler head. A second after that, the fire alarm rang in the station on the other side of the river. A long time ago, someone had had the good sense to put the fire station close to the mill.

  Peter grabbed Evangeline by the elbow and pulled her back to the little office and slammed the door. It was all glass and would protect them for only a few moments, but it was all they needed because the engine sirens were screaming.

  Unless these guys started shooting …

  Then the one in black leather took a look out the window as a siren arrived right below. “Beat it,” he said to the other guy.

  The one in the ball cap took another step toward the office; then he turned and disappeared into the staircase tower.

  “WILL YOU BE available for further questioning, Mr. Fallon?” said State Police Detective Patrick Mee. He was a big man. All the Staties were. They handled jobs like this in small towns that had four squad cars and tiny budgets.

  “You have my cell phone,” answered Peter.

  “You have any plans for travel?” asked Mee.

  “Not beyond New England.”

  “And you, miss?” he asked Evangeline.

  She shook her head. Her hair had dried with a Chia Pet frizz.

  “Good. We don’t know what we’ll be looking for, but—any idea why someone might kill the president of this historical society?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “It could have something to do with the death of Buster McGillis. After all, Mr. Bindle found McGillis. Didn’t he?”

  Detective Mee considered this a moment. “We know about you, Fallon. This isn’t the first time that someone has ended up dead after they’ve done business with you.”

  “It’s a dangerous business,” said Peter.

  “Dangerous? Rare books? Historical treasures?” Detective Mee looked up at the mill. “Were you looking for a treasure in that dump?”

  Peter was glad the question was phrased like that. Answering “No” would not come back to bite him later on.

  “We expect you to cooperate,” said the detective.

  “I always cooperate with the police,” he said. “Call Detective Scavullo of the Harvard police force. He and I worked to find the Shakespeare Manuscript.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No, but we know where it is, safe and sound.”

  PETER STARTED THE BMW.

  “Those guys were stalking us, Peter.”

  “One of them has been stalking us since the Cliff Walk. Maybe before.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know, but we are now officially on the run.”

  “On the run?”

  “No going home. No going to the office. The usual.”

  “So … where do we go?”

  “Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire … while we keep in touch with the office. We have a lot to learn about these Pikes and their descendants and all the visitors to the Massachusetts Historical Society.”

  “Why do we have to go on the run?”

  “Because it’s that or stand still, and if we stand still, one of the bastards might get us.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but who are the bastards?”

  “I don’t know … yet.”

  One of the bastards was still in the mill, hidden in the rafters of the cupola at the top of the staircase. He dropped down and watched the green BMW go over the old bridge.

  He might have been the most dangerous man ever to gaze upon the world from that perch, but he was not the first….

  THIRTEEN

  August 1861

  THEY WERE BORN COUSINS and born to be rivals.

  One climbed each dawn to the cupola above the mill and looked out at all that the Pikes had wrought on the Blackstone Valley.

  The other began his day before first light, in the office on the spinning room floor, where he invented new ways to get more work out of the girls …

  … until one day their grandfather told them that climbing to the cupola each dawn seemed like “a kind of prayer.”

  The next morning, the cousin named George Amory was in his usual place at the usual time, watching the mist rise from valleys and rooftops, when the cousin named Bartlett Pike popped up through the trapdoor and announced, “I’ve come to join you in prayer.”


  “I’m a Unitarian,” said George. “We pray by living.”

  “A Unitarian in a family of Congregationalists”— Bartlett hauled himself into the cupola—”an anomaly that Grandfather overlooks.”

  “Let’s enjoy the sunrise,” said George. “And leave religion to Sunday.”

  George was twenty-one, Bartlett twenty-two. During their summers, they learned the textile business, from the basic jobs to the boardroom, because one of them would carry Pike fortunes into a third generation.

  And though they shared a set of grandparents, they shared little else.

  George had inherited his height and angles from his father, but people said that he had inherited his warmth from his grandmother, the beloved Mary Pike. He enhanced a natural brightness of personality with light-colored suits, pastel cravats, and a facility for quoting from whatever poetry he had recently been reading. Some called him a dandy and he did nothing to discourage them. He even nurtured a rakish Vandyke with mustache points like rapiers.

  Bartlett was not so tall but presented more bulk. His side whiskers resembled weeds sprouting in a new-mown field, and he dressed in the dark suits favored by most men of business, which meant most men in the family. He also favored the reading of history over poetry. As he told those men in the dark suits, the family’s history was too illustrious to forget. Even in his reading, what workers said about him was true: He knew just when to toady up, just when to bully down.

  Bartlett hated returning to Harvard College at the end of the summer, because he believed that his destiny lay in Millbridge.

  George hated coming from Bowdoin College at the start of the summer, because he dreamed of things far beyond Millbridge, or Bowdoin, or New England itself. He dreamed them every morning in the cupola atop the staircase tower, which reminded him of a steeple. And its bell called workers to worship as surely as the one that rang each Sunday in the steeple across the river. Honest labor, it seemed to say, brought rewards as real as faith.

  Bartlett seldom saw the symbolism of such things. He looked to their utility. If the staircase rose in a tower at the front of the mill, there would be space for more machines on each floor. If there was a fire, the staircase could be closed off to control the draft. If there was labor trouble, the staircase would make it easier to control the workers, too.

  The cousins watched the workers coming through the fresh morning light, flowing as steady and reliable as the river itself. They poured out of the long tenements that housed single workers and out of the small duplexes built for families. Some of them had grown up in Millbridge but many had traveled far, from the farm counties to the west and the seacoast cities filling fast with immigrants. And the trains brought more of them all the time, because the trains brought everything now—raw material, machines, replacement parts, and people, too.

  There was a train off to the north just then, a smudge of smoke rising above the river, a shrill whistle proclaiming a future that crossed the fields eight times a day. Passengers and freight. Hopes and dreams. Iron sinews binding New England and the nation together, like the document that had bound Americans to an idea until war tore it asunder.

  George glanced at his watch. “Almost time.”

  In a few minutes, the bell would ring. Then the headrace would open. The water would flow. The wheel would turn. A gear would engage the vertical drive shaft that pierced the mill like a giant spindle. Gears on the drive shaft would engage gears that turned line shafts that ran across the ceilings, spinning flywheels geared to smaller wheels, which turned leather belts, which engaged carders and throstles and looms that would thump and spin and clatter and clack, and the whole building would begin to vibrate, all four floors of machinery, men, women, and nimble-fingered children, too, coming to life as a single sentient creature.

  And out in the countryside, where corn grew green in spring and ripened in August and stubbled the fields come fall, farmers would stop to wipe their brows. And they would hear, beneath the rustle of the wind, a sound no New Englander had ever heard in the quiet before the nineteenth century, the distant rumble of a mighty mill turning … turning….

  “So,” said Bartlett. “To our posts.”

  “To our posts.” George gave him a mock salute. “To do our duty.”

  “And remember … meeting in the boardroom at ten o’clock.”

  Another meeting, thought George. He hated meetings as much as Bartlett liked them. This one would be interesting, though, the first since the debacle at Bull Run.

  THE MILL OFFICES occupied the Colonial-style house that Will and Mary Pike had built in the early years, when they were expanding the mill again and again to meet the demands of their business. When they moved to the Greek Revival house across the river, and the mill moved into the mighty edifice now looming behind the original buildings, the men who ran the mill moved their board meetings to the mahogany table in Will Pike’s first dining room.

  They were the Blackstone Investors: graying heads, dark suits, sober demeanors, forests of facial hair shrouded in a fog of cigar smoke in an atmosphere growing tenser with every dispatch from the Virginia battlefront.

  Bartlett’s father, Charles Pike, sat with his belly pressing against the table.

  George’s father, the cadaverous Reverend Mr. Jacob Amory, had traveled from Portland to see to interests that had been his since he’d married George’s mother “and rescued a thirty-eight-year-old woman from the misery of old maid-hood.”

  George gave his father a polite nod. Deeper affection was seldom expressed between them, perhaps because Reverend Jacob was a distant man growing more distant as he aged, a late-in-life father growing old before his son had grown to maturity.

  As the boys took their seats along the wall, Uncle William glanced at them over his spectacles, then squinted at the clock: 10:04. He was the oldest of Will and Mary’s children, a bachelor who had given his life—sixty-nine years of it—to the Pike Mill. He sat at the head of the table, though he seemed to hunch rather than sit, as if bowed by the weight of his position.

  “Sorry we’re late,” said Bartlett.

  “Yes,” said George. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize twice,” said Grandfather Will, the grayest éminence grise in the room. “It’s a sign of weakness.”

  “As I was saying”—Bartlett’s father had the floor—”Bull Run changes everything. This will not be a ninety-day war. So where are we to get our cotton?”

  “Stockpiling has protected us against bad harvests,” said Uncle William. “It shall protect us against the decisions of whimsical voters, too.”

  George, without a shred of whimsy, had cast the first ballot of his life for Lincoln, but he did not speak up. He enjoyed these meetings only because they rescued him from the incessant click-cla-clack-cla-click-cla-clack of two hundred shuttles slamming bobbins back and forth in as many looms. So he nodded occasionally to appear attentive and tried to recall lines from a poem, “Self-Dependence,” by Matthew Arnold. “Weary of myself, and sick of asking/What I am and what I ought to be….” He remained in his reverie until he heard his grandfather’s voice:

  “Horace Greeley is a fool!” Most of the time, the old man sat on a wing chair in the corner and stared out the window. But when he spoke, he commanded attention. “A New York fool!”

  “Horace Greeley’s right.” Charles Pike read from a newspaper: “ ‘If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the rebels, and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that.’ That’s in a Greeley editorial, and I say he’s right.”

  “I say it’s time we stopped making money from cotton picked by slaves,” answered the old man.

  “You started by making Negro cloth,” said Arthur Perkins, who always seemed to speak through his nose, which he always seemed to point at the ceiling. “Cheap sacking to clothe the poor darky.”

  “Then we invested in better machinery to make better cloth,” said Will Pike.

  “And you did so well that you attracte
d Boston money,” said Perkins. “Ours.”

  “We’re more than pleased with a Perkins partnership,” said Uncle William, “and with our strategy on cotton. We’ll leave wool to the Stanleys in Uxbridge. Let them make uniforms.”

  “Uniforms?” Reverend Amory raised an eyebrow. “Do you think there’s money to be made from uniforms?”

  “No,” said Charles Pike. “Before this goes too far, brighter men than Lincoln will recognize that if the South wants to leave the Union, there’s nothing in the Constitution that compels them to stay.”

  “Not true,” said Will Pike.

  “I’ve read the Constitution, Father,” said Charles, “and—”

  “I lived the Constitution.” Will Pike stood and drove his cane into the floor. “And I tell you that once a state joins the Union, it has no right to leave. No right! And … and …” As if overcome by emotion, he took a fit of coughing that turned his face red, dropped a shock of white hair down over his forehead, and left him wheezing in his chair.

  The meeting went on, as though there were not a distressed old man sitting in the corner trying to catch his breath.

  It was at last agreed that they had enough raw cotton to keep the mill running another two years, by which time the war would surely be over. Then the gentlemen rose to leave, all except Will and his grandsons. After each meeting, Will talked with them about all that had been said. They always came away realizing that he heard everything and was distracted by nothing.

  “I’ve lived too long,” he said, as soon as the room was clear. “My own son advocating the legality of secession …”

  “But Grandfather,” said Bartlett, “the Constitution—”

  “Don’t quote the Constitution to me, boy.” The old man’s voice rose, but he remained seated. “I know more about its genesis than … than any man living.”

  They had heard stories of the Philadelphia convention, but the most he would ever say was that he had gone there, had met great men, had heard great talk. Then he would urge them to read Madison’s book.