Brookland (28 page)

On the Monday Winship Gin was to begin operating under her official direction, Prue awakened with a hollow feeling in her stomach, deeper than hunger, less desperate than grief. It was as if that morning she possessed, for the first time, a true understanding of the breadth of the world and of her insignificance within it.

Yet it would be no small task to run the distillery. She had been doing so, of course, for years; but while her father lived, she had always known she could turn to him for advice, no matter how sunken his spirits. The emptiness in her stomach reminded her that, for all her years of training, in her heart she had never believed this day would come. Her father had taught her everything from the mathematics of bushels and barrels to the arcana of bouquet; yet the Reverend Mr. Elihu Juster Winship had lived to be seventy, and she'd expected no less from her father. She had always imagined she and Tem would apprentice into their forties, and would together run the business half by instinct—they would, by then, have lived more than half their lives within its enclosure—and half by the freedom granted the old of good standing to quack on about their obsessions without exciting notice. (Her exemplars were the brothers Hicks, who probably dreamed their very dreams in rods and acres, and the irascible old Mr. Patchen, out past the Philpots', who sat each day on his stoop with a loaded musket in his lap, lest a second civic-minded citizen approach to inquire whether a streetlamp and footpath might be erected upon his property for the public weal.) Prue did not really suppose she, Tem, and Isaiah could run the distillery into the ground; but she recognized it was a business with as much worth in its name as in its coffers, and she felt the burden of upholding that reputation.

Prue cracked the thin layer of ice that had formed over their washbowl during the night. If she couldn't control her mind's propensity to worry, she could, at least, see to her body.

She and Tem picked at their breakfasts that morning, but as they walked down the lane, the very set of Tem's shoulders—back and down, so her breastbone rode high—expressed her eagerness to face her new responsibilities. “You don't feel ill at ease?” Prue asked her.

“Of course not. You're the one who'll have to make the speech to the workers.” She glanced over to her sister, obviously delighted to have discomfited her. “As I see it,” she went on, kicking a pebble down the lane, “very little has changed, as far as the distillery is concerned. We shall keep doing the work we've been doing, exactly as before. I think the only difference will be the suitors lined up outside our door.”

“Really,” Prue said.

Tem shook her head as if Prue were a dour old maid. “You'll see.”

If the men doubted the sisters' ability to run the works, they kept mum about it; many of them wore bright expressions when Isaiah rang the bell to gather them in the assembly hall. (“They haven't worked in a month,” Tem whispered. “You'd be happy, too.”) He had lit a fire in the stove, and the room was cozy.

“Gentlemen,” Prue began. Her voice wavered, and someone shifted his weight, causing the floor to creak. “Gentlemen, it has been a trying month for Winship Gin. We have lost both my father and Mr. Horsfield, God rest their souls.” She saw Tem pull a face at this. “And I know it has been a month of hardship for those of you who have lived without your wages and meaningful employ. I thank you all for having faith in this distillery, and for being here this morning.” Speaking to the men turned out to be less difficult than she had supposed. “Protocol will be chiefly as it has been for the past year. You will refer your inquiries to me as the sole proprietor of this distillery; in my absence, you may consult Miss Temperance. We have also a new foreman for the works. I introduce to you Mr. Isaiah Horsfield, son of our late and most wise manager.”

Rather to her surprise, the men began to clap; and Isaiah, who looked as if his stomach had eaten itself out from the inside, removed his hat and made a deep, awkward bow.

“Very well,” Prue said. She had no idea how to finish. “We will commence the first mashing in a quarter hour. Those of you who work in the stillhouse, rectifying house, and cooling house should begin to scrub down your places of employ.”

Many of them lingered by the stove a moment before heading out. Neither Tem nor Isaiah said anything to her, but Prue felt she had at least not botched her performance. She felt her father's watch ticking in her waistcoat. It was an unfamiliar sensation; it called to mind how it might feel to hold a sparrow to her breast.

By sundown, they'd managed two mashings and gotten the wort safely to the cooling floor and the fermenting-back. Prue had heard of no waste or accidents, and more grain was set to arrive the next morning. Prue knew her father would have counted such a day a success.

After closing, Tem ran up to tell Pearl they'd run the business a day without mishap, and Isaiah stayed behind to tour the works with Prue. He knew nothing about distilling except what he'd gleaned at the supper table, but she could not at present afford the kind of thorough education her father had given her; she would teach him everything she could on the fly, and send him back for his apprenticeship later. He made extensive notations as they inspected the tuns, the cooling floor, and the wort, but he kept glancing at her. At first she ignored him, but when they climbed back aboveground from the fermenting room, she turned to him and asked, “Do you have a question?” Night was coming down quickly, but she could see she'd caught him off his guard.

“No,” he said. “That is, I have a thousand, but they'll all be answered in due time. I wonder if you've heard from Ben.”

“I don't think there's been time for a letter to arrive from Boston. Do you?”

“No, and he isn't much of a writer. I imagine when you do hear from him, there'll be as many blotches as words.” Isaiah nodded. “I miss him,” he said. “I've spent every day since he was born in his company.” He brushed at his lapel. “Though perhaps it's worse for you.”

Prue said, “I wonder what he's told you.”

“Oh,” Isaiah said, and laughed quietly. His laugh always sounded uncomfortable, as if it grew rusty through infrequent use. “I'm sure it's not to share, what a brother says in confidence to his brother. But I daresay he loves you.”

After all the misery that month had brought, Prue's heart warmed to hear him say it.

This intimacy must have discomfited Isaiah, however, for he patted more briskly at his lapel and said, “So how many days will it be before we have the product our sign advertises? Our first batch of Winship Daughters gin?”

The evening wind was picking up, and made a hollow sound as it whistled through the buildings. Prue did not know why his question had
driven all their losses home. “By the end of the week. But we age it awhile. We'll be selling Matthias Winship's for some time yet.”

“Everyone knows it was yours anyway,” Isaiah said. “Or at least, so my father told me.”

“Do you think they can see us now?” she asked. She pulled her coat tighter around her. The watch tickled her ribs.

“I have no doubt. They are looking down from Heaven as we speak. They're probably continuing their Junto, still talking about the merits of a bridge, but now with all the great thinkers to assist them. Plato and Aristotle, perhaps even Euclid himself.” He put his arm around her shoulders and turned her toward Joralemon's Lane. “Come, it's growing cold. We should both get home to supper.”

Prue began to walk but could not help saying, “My father cannot have gone to Heaven. He cursed God and the church all his days, and took his own life.”

“You don't know that,” Isaiah said.

“I do, though.”

He pulled the gate shut behind them and bound it with its rope. “Well, he was a good man, and a winsome conversationalist. He'll have realized his mistake and done his best to remedy it.”

If Isaiah Horsfield had never done anything more for her—had he not been her friend and supporter in all the endeavors yet to come, nor proven an even more able manager than his father had been—Prue felt she would have been indebted to him for life for saying that to her, and for walking her to her door that dark November evening.

S
lightly more than two years after her father's death, on the morning of her twenty-sixth birthday, Prue awakened from a vivid dream in which she'd been the pilot of that same spirit canoe she'd imagined as a child. Like many of her nights of dreaming, her birthday eve had been a whirlpool of images and anxieties—her overseer, someone who both was and wasn't Isaiah, had vanished; an entire shipment had gone down in the straits while she'd stood moored to the retaining wall, unable to dive in or shout for help. But it was the image of the spirit canoe that remained with her when she awakened.

Even twenty-four years later, when she recounted the dream to Recompense, she could recall the sound and feeling of paddling the canoe toward Butcher's Wharf, on which Pearl stood wearing a flimsy white dress of republican cut. Pearl's hair, ordinarily so fine and dark, was a blazing mandorla of fire, and her pale chin and throat glistened pink with blood. Prue pulled the paddle back into the canoe and allowed the boat to drift toward her sister as she watched the blood trickle down the bosom of Pearl's dress and form a spreading stain. When Pearl opened her mouth, Prue could not see her teeth for all the gore; and in a sudden flash of understanding, she knew she herself had cut out Pearl's tongue and thus hastened her on her journey to the beyond.

Prue glanced down in shock, and saw her own, knees were draped in a moth-eaten gray cloak and her hands were ashen as the water of the East River. She reeked of kelp and fish. As her canoe drifted toward the landing, it bobbed in the wake of a swift fore-and-aft schooner, gliding out
toward Nutten Island and Upper New York Bay. (Here Recompense paused to wonder why her mother did not call the Governor's Island by the name it had been given forty years since; but there were some things, she realized, she would never understand.) As her vaporous craft bumped against the wharf, Prue found herself appalled by what she'd done. Even in the midst of the dream, she recognized the injury she'd given Pearl as bearing a “symbolickal relationship” (as she wrote to Recompense) to the metaphysical crime she'd committed against her in childhood; but though she felt an immediate stab of remorse, she could say nothing to her. When she opened her mouth, nothing came out but wind.

Pearl gathered her skirt awkwardly around her with one bloodstained hand and crouched down with the other extended to offer payment for her passage in cockleshells. Prue opened her mouth wide and lifted her tongue to accept the briny offering. The shells stung the delicate ligaments, as if to remind her how it had pained Pearl to have them severed. Prue spat the shells into her boat's pitched hull, already littered with the fares of the unlucky and taking in water through a leak plugged with an oily rag. In life, Pearl moved with grace, as if the elegance of her carriage could make up for her raspy silence, but in the dream, she wobbled as she settled in the canoe's bow to face her sister. The empty shells cracked beneath her good cloth shoes, which were soon stained dark with water.

Prue pushed off, turned the boat to face westward, and began to paddle. The water offered little resistance. Traffic glided by all around her, fishing boats steering clear of the lumbering square-riggers, and she feared someone would cry out about the hideous work she'd done upon her sister. No one did. It was dusk, and the men loading goods on the docks of Winship Daughters Gin and the Schermerhorn ropewalk were so weary, they paid the straits no mind. Losee van Nostrand rowed toward his landing without seeing her, and wearing a thoughtful expression on his broad, sunburned brow. Prue tried to concentrate on paddling, so the image of her maimed sister would not hew to her memory.

But Pearl's nimbus of fire cast a red glow on her eyes, her bloody face and hands, and the gray water. To an onlooker on either shore, Prue thought her boat would be a shimmering memento mori; but for the first time in her memory, the river was going unremarked. Her sister, having apparently lost her notebook, raised a finger and pointed over Prue's shoulder. Prue kept a steady rhythm with her paddle, to the left and to
the right. Pearl continued to point, and after a time, Prue once again drew the paddle in, its blade spraying droplets into the river, and allowed her canoe to drift southward with the tidal current. She looked up to see what had drawn Pearl's attention.

And past her left shoulder, a mighty structure arced over the water. It was a bridge, moored to the rocks of the river's twin towns and traversing the straits in a single span. The shape of the bridge was revolutionary and, even in her role as Charon, brought her breath up short.

To her daughter, she wrote,

By now you know well how I had hoped since childhood to find a way to bridge the roiling straits that separated my home from that nearby city. On a practical level, I wished to do this for Brookland's sake,—to ease the transport of produce & Schermerhorn rope & my gin,—but as time wore on, I began to wish to do so even more for the sake of your grandfather's memory. I imagined he had loved New-York with something like my fervour, and though he'd mentioned it only that once & in passing, I knew he'd loved me because I, like him, had possess'd a head for projects. He had been grateful for the river's transport & the power it supplied to his stills; and whether by his choice or accident, it had taken him. It had
taken him
; I could not bear to think long on how. I wanted a bridge to honour my love for my father, and to honour those terrible phantasies that had so afflicted me as a child; & I wanted a bridge to lay them to rest.