Brookland (26 page)

Prue went out to the tumbledown fence, and at first could see nothing out of the ordinary. The sky was nearly white, as if it presaged snow. Her father's manufactory and the Schermerhorns' would not commence their workdays for two more hours, and the river was smooth, almost empty of traffic. A few minutes later, however, she saw the grain wagon set out from the Luquer Mill, up the Shore Road. Two men were riding the buckboard seat, and three others walked alongside. As the wagon rolled up the road, people began to join the procession, until at last a clot of a dozen neighbors trailed it toward the Heights. Prue watched it in silence a moment, then turned toward the house and called out, “Temmy? Pearl?” A gust of wind rose off the river and blew away the tarpaulin that had covered the back of the wagon. Two of those following the wagon ran after it and folded it, and one of them tucked it beneath his arm. Even from such a distance, Prue could see there was a body in the wagon bed.

Her sisters came outdoors and crossed to the back fence as slowly as Prue had ever seen them move, Pearl's brown skirt rustling across the dead grass. They stood beside her, and watched the procession up the road. The Luquer Mill was nearly half a mile distant from the Winship property, and Prue still could not make out the faces of the people in and around the wagon, but Pearl bent double and began to make a sound that would have been keening, could she have gotten enough voice behind it. That her cry was soft and raspy as the wind in the marsh rushes made it all the more awful to hear. Prue wanted to go out to the road to greet the wagon—she had no doubt it was coming for them, no doubt what it contained—but she wrapped her arms around Pearl's bent form and tried to make her stand upright. Pearl had wept her fair share over their mother and Johanna, but at that moment she seemed to have snapped in two; and Prue wondered if she herself might have done the same, had she not had her sister to look after.

The wagon cornered awkwardly at the foot of Joralemon's Lane, and Prue could now see Nicolaas Luquer driving and Cornelis beside him. Rem and Jens walked alongside the wagon, and Nicolaas's two blond Clydesdales bobbed their heads low as they drew up the steep lane. None of the men wore a hat. Tem walked back toward the house, muttering,
“No, no, no,” and shaking her head, as if someone had incorrectly totted up a bill of sale. Abiah had to steer her back outdoors.

Pearl was still bent double, and Prue could not quit her side. This left Rem Luquer to unlatch the gate, and his father to drive the gentle horses across the yard. Those who'd followed the wagon milled in the road. When the wagon was halfway to the back fence, Nicolaas drew lightly back on the reins and dismounted. He patted himself down as if about to enter a church. “Prue Winship?” he said.

“You have found him,” Prue said. Old Mr. Luquer breathed deeply, as if unable to find his voice. “How so?” she asked. She could hardly believe her own composure, or how quiet the day was.

Cornelis climbed down from the wagon seat. His coppery hair, which Prue rarely saw uncovered, seemed impossibly bright. “I heard something smash into the logs of the trash rack this morning,” he said. He came up and put his hand on Prue's arm. Neither his voice nor his hand was steady. “When I went out to check it, he was bobbing and turning there, Prue, as would any flotsam intent on breaking the mill wheel.”

“Oh,” Prue said.

He withdrew his hand, and began picking nervously at the blunt tips of his fingers. Rem and Jens set out for the toolshed, to bring back the cooling board, Prue thought. Cornelis was shaking in earnest now. She remembered that he had seen his own brother drowned, and felt a shiver of empathy for him.

The Horsfields were coming toward them across the yard, and Prue could see how distorted their faces were by grief. “Christ, Matty,” Israel said as he walked. Prue now realized she was the only person in this assembly too shocked to have any response but wonder. At that moment Ben grabbed her in so fierce an embrace he knocked her to the ground and stumbled on top of her. They were both startled enough to laugh, and the laughter unleashed Prue's tears. She began to sob, and though she thought at every moment she might manage to contain herself, she cried until her eyes burned and her ribs felt cracked open. Ben remained curled around her.

“Shh, now. You're all right,” she heard Isaiah say. When she looked up, she saw Pearl sitting on the dead grass in his embrace. He was stroking the back of her skull as she mouthed an emphatic
No
.

Ben wiped his red nose on his shirt cuff and whispered, “I'm sorry I knocked you over.”

She laid her head down on his bent leg, and listened to her own breath as it caught in her throat. Tem was still saying “No,” with more and more force. Prue knew she should stand up, but felt she could do nothing but breathe in the smoky, gamy scent of Ben's trouser leg. She wondered why she had wasted so much of her childhood thinking about death, when all the thinking had done nothing to prepare her for the shock of it, no matter how many times it came to her door.

From the corner of her eye she saw Rem and Jens arrive with the cooling board and begin to unload the corpse from the back of the wagon. Prue rose, leaning on Ben for support as she did so, and walked over to meet them. Her father had not been in the water so long, but he had begun to bloat. His skin was mottled blue and green, and his belly pushed against the buttons of his vest. She looked at him only for a moment, but saw that something had already eaten out his gray eyes.

Israel sent one of the onlookers upferry for the doctor. Prue could not think why.

When Dr. de Bouton arrived at the house he wept over his old friend. He had been with Israel and Nicolaas at the Junto the evening before and, like the rest of them, had not remarked where Matty had gone on leaving the company. Not even he would conjecture if Matty Winship had drunk too much and slipped from his own retaining wall or if he'd stepped down with some darker purpose. In his pocket Matty had carried only his keys and Roxana's ring. He'd left his watch on his wife's small desk that afternoon, but had left no instructions about the distribution of his property. Prue found those he'd written years before stashed in one of the desk's cubbies. He had willed Prue the house, distillery, and land entire, with the provision she was to give Tem meaningful employ and the funds necessary to begin a family or business of her own, should she choose to do so; and she was to look after Pearl, to the best of her ability, as long as they both should live. She would gladly have traded all this wealth for her father to bang up from the countinghouse, swearing about some debtor in New York.

The neighbors rallied around the Winship girls and made certain they were well supplied with food. The women brought their needlework and
sat by the fire, while the men saw the last of the Winship barley was properly harvested and stored. Patience Livingston—who, being too dull to have a social calendar, had found her niche in taking an overweening interest in the misfortunes of others—began to arrive with baskets of bread and elaborate-looking sweets. Tem refused to eat them, asserting, even in the midst of her grief, that “Patience Livingston's two eyebrows have grown together to avoid the sin of superfluity. I shan't eat anything with her taint on it.”

The distillery shut down the day Matty was found; and Prue asked Israel to keep it so long enough for her to gather her wits. She was not, however, truly thinking, at least not about the business, or not in a productive manner. She kept returning to the river, as if it held some secret she might convince it to divulge, as if it might tell her what she had done to have earned such pain. She walked down to the millrace so many times, Cornelis came to tell her he didn't think it wise. He brought her up to his parents' house and coaxed her to eat a sandwich. Having been denied the opportunity to stand staring at the trash rack, she began going down to her own retaining wall instead. She felt certain it was the spot from which her father had embarked on his last journey; it would do as well as the spot at which he'd washed up.

She watched Losee row his ferryboat back and forth across the river as the days passed. The ropewalk belched forth as much smoke as ever, and at regular intervals, the Schermerhorns' men continued to load the vast spools of rope onto barges. Trade with the Continent and the southern and northern states seemed every day increasing, and each day more sloops and packets were moored in the deep water at Brooklyn. Only Prue's own manufactory was quiet, and even it, not completely so. As she stood staring one afternoon, she heard the slaves cleaning their quarters, and heard Owen's barrow squeak and clank across the damp, hard-packed sand. Two slender plovers were hopping at the water's edge a few yards off. Yet as she looked around her, at this view as familiar to her as anything in the world, she felt distant from it, as if she were a traveler newly arrived and too exhausted from her journey to care for the sights.

What a comfort it would have been, had she known where the dead resided. Manhattan was such an easy solution—big enough to hold every sinner in Creation, and with a various terrain of shoreline, creeks, city streets and winding country lanes, rocky precipices and rambling hillsides.
In it was a place to suit any individual's preference, and sufficient goods and trade to supply an eternity of afterlife. Had her parents resided there, she would have boarded Losee's ferry right then, or had her men row her across, and besieged them with questions. It seemed tragic to have outgrown her childhood, all woolgathering and fancy, only to have become a sober woman with two sisters to look after and an inactive manufactory, losing money by the hour; because if she thought about her parents from an adult perspective, their fate looked bleak. Will Severn, out of either friendship or ignorance of the true manner in which Matty and Roxana had died, assured Prue and Pearl they were in Heaven, united with God. Even so religiously ill-educated a person as Prue, however, knew suicides had from birth not been among the elect; even she knew their sin was the ultimate sin, and they were damned. Tem argued their mother had taken ill, and their father had suffered an accident; then, too, in the days since their father's death, Tem had begun spending more of her time at the tavern. If Prue had to trust one of them was looking straight in the face of their situation, she would not have chosen Tem.

It was Pearl who suffered most. She spent most of her day weeping, her only solaces spending time in Will Severn's company, helping Abiah with the cooking, and stroking her cat. Prue wanted to tell her she was free now to do as she chose; but had she told her so, it would not have been true. She was free to continue assisting Abiah, and free to join Patience Livingston in her pious knitting, but Prue could think of no other comfort to offer her. Prue resolved that whenever the manufactory came to start up again, and whenever she recommenced making frequent visits to New York for deliveries and banking, she would continue her father's practice of bringing home gifts for Pearl. But Prue could not imagine when that would be, and knew no candied violets or French grammar could supply the want, or ease the sadness, her sister felt.

As for the distillery, a week after Matty's funeral, Israel Horsfield came knocking at the kitchen door. “I don't mean to intrude upon your grief,” he said, “but I simply don't think we can leave off production any longer. We feed the slaves and keep them in firewood whether they work or no, and the hired men will leave us if they're too long without pay.”

Tem had been out drinking with the Luquer boys the previous evening, and sat at the table holding a cool rag against her occiput. “Can they wait a little longer?” she asked.

Prue watched Israel weigh his response. Tem was only sixteen, but she knew the business better than anyone save Prue and Israel. Her opinion mattered. “A brief while,” he said. “But we don't want to lose our men. Perhaps you don't understand how they live, who work for wages.” Here he glanced apologetically toward Abiah, who did not seem to have taken offense. Israel looked haggard and let out a slight cough. “They haven't anything laid by. What we give them on a Saturday is gone to feed the children by the Thursday next, and they scrape for sustenance the week after.”

Tem said, “Perhaps we're not paying them enough, then.”

Both Prue and Pearl cracked smiles for the first time in days. Tem overdrank, and she could be insolent when caught in a mistake, but Prue liked her for considering this possibility.

“No,” Israel said. He coughed again. “We pay as well as the ropewalk and better than the Longacre Brewery. The trouble is what they skim off the top in drink.”

Here Tem looked at the ceiling, as if she were being lectured.

Pearl opened her book and wrote,
M
^r
H, are you unwell?

He cleared his throat and said, “No, only a tickle. Thank you for asking.”

“Another week,” Prue said. “I can't begin yet; but a week hence.”

He nodded his acceptance and took his leave. A week thence, however, his cough had begun to rail in his chest, and he was confined to bed with fever. Prue supposed she could run the distillery without his assistance, but felt nervous about doing so; and she resolved to wait until he should recover to open the works.

His respiratory infection had come in off one of the boats and was sweeping through the neighborhoods near the ferry, including the slave quarters and Olympia, where many of the paid workers resided. As the second week passed, those who were well began stopping by the Winship house with gifts of eggs, salt pilchards, and dried apples; Prue tried to refuse these on the premise the givers needed them more than did she, but they entreated her to take them. She knew they were asking to work again, and she began to be anxious for Israel's recuperation. Even if half her men remained abed, she could resume production partway if Israel were well.

In anticipation of his recovery, she called Scipio Jones up to the
house and asked him to repaint the side of the storehouse to read
Winship Daughters Gin
. Scipio was an old man, perhaps old enough it was unwise to ask him to climb a ladder, but he had been one of her father's first employees and had worked for him near thirty years. He wept when she asked this of him, but agreed to do it. Abiah sat him down and gave him a good, strong cup of tea; and Pearl went upstairs to get one of her father's silk cravats to give him. Of course, this made him cry the more. When he had settled down and drunk his tea, he told Prue a few of the less rooted men had decamped to the Longacres in Queen's County, and when he left, she resolved the works must reopen as soon as possible.