Always a River

By: Drayton Mayrant

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Synopsis: Sandy Purbeck, the young schoolmaster from Dorchester, Massachusetts, loved two women. The first was Ness Goodman, whom he had loved all his life. Gentle and demure, Ness was as different from Nicole Lenoir, the capricious, flashing-eyed French Huguenot emigree, as Sandy’s own birthplace was different from the New Dorchester which the Massachusetts Puritans had built in the South Carolina wilderness. Sandy had joined the first Puritan mission to South Carolina to escape from those who had allowed their fear of witchcraft to make a mockery of Puritan justice. Sandy didn’t want to be caught by the evil that had ensnared those he loved. As his ship carried him South, however, he wondered whether a man could ever escape from what life had in store for him. In South Carolina, Sandy found a way of life completely alien to his own; but he found a friend, too, in Mr. Lenoir, the elderly French Huguenot. Won by the Frenchman’s directness and simplicity, Sandy tried to help him build a silk business in the Puritan settlement. Nicole, Lenoir’s daughter, was another matter. Holding the dream of Ness bright in his heart, Sandy resisted Nicole’s teasing ways. Absorbed in his new interests, he learned almost too late that the witchmakers had found a new victim for their malicious tongues. But this time, Sandy decided, he would meet his destiny face to face.