Brookland (33 page)

“Much obliged,” he said, and worked himself another plug. The saw screamed through something below, then fell silent again. “You realize you're speaking of a good deal of wood, and there's little but saplings hereabouts. I sold your father the lumber for his original plant, for pennies.
Excellent wood, too—seasoned right. What you can buy nowadays for a shilling isn't good enough for a chicken coop.”

“If I were willing to spend more, could I yet buy something fine?” She didn't know if he meant a shilling per plank or per tree.

“Not as good as what built my house, but sure,” Theunis answered. He was known in the village for his oaken floor, which hadn't a single knot in it.

“But what kind of timber would it wish to be?”

He rubbed his fingers over his chin. “Fir'd be your man, no doubt: flexible, strong, and sturdy, so far's the rain goes. Often used in bridges, though not, that I know of, in any as large as the one you speak of. You could get some up the Hudson at a fair enough price.”

Prue was pleased he had so decisive an answer, though she would also need to see for herself why this was so. Fir it would no doubt be, but she knew she would do best to question its fitness, rather than to rely on his opinion. “I wonder if you can school me in the properties of the wood? Its strength, in tension and compression? Its ability to bear loads?”

“Absolutely. I am sure you know it has always been my chief desire to become a natural philosopher. I run this mill because my father left it to me; that, and it's a good living, of course. You understand. But I've a hundred experiments I can show you, and more still in which your assistance would be a boon.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Prue said.

“We'll begin as soon as the weather breaks, if you can wait that long. In the meantime, that plank? Give me its dimensions.”

“Six feet by four? Doesn't need to be pretty.”

“Quite a desk you're after. Shall I send it down this afternoon?”

“Please.”

As she stood to take her leave, he said, “I think you'll find the scientifical experiments interesting.”

“I sincerely look forward to them.”

“The first warm day,” he said. “Now off with you.”

Ivo Joralemon was out lurching along the road on his crutches, and he beamed at her as she passed.

When the plank arrived that afternoon, Jean Boulanger used the sand of the mill yard to brush it smooth. The next morning, again leaving the distillery under Tem's direction, Prue accompanied one of her shipments
to New York, and while there paid down the hefty security required to join the lending library. She brought home a stack of books, and felt her chest constrict when she realized how forbidding were some of their theorems and diagrams. They required her strictest attention and most careful study, along with a willingness to stretch her mind more strenuously than she had done since finishing her apprenticeship to her father. It was not enough to know, as she already did, that the strength of a beam was a function of the area of its cross section, increasing along a parabolic curve relative to that area; she must recognize that the weight of such a member would be a function of its volume—that is, that it would increase along a cubic curve. It would therefore be a challenge to build a structure of such magnitude without having it collapse under the simple strain of supporting its own weight. Likewise, she already understood that a lever relayed a weight at its tip back to its base—if it did not, Cornelis and his siblings would simply have tumbled into the pond. But she did not yet know the function by which that weight was magnified as it approached the ground. She knew her bridge's abutments would have to be mighty to withstand such force, but she did not yet know how to guarantee their strength. Studying these questions consumed her whole attention, and left her spent and bleary-eyed by late afternoon. She remembered her dream of the finished bridge at such moments; only infrequently did she recall its twin dream of a maimed and bleeding Pearl. To relieve these periods of intense concentration, she began to travel on alternate days around Brooklyn, in search of knowledge that could not be found in books. The first few times she went out in this manner, passersby stopped to ask if she was abroad because aught was amiss at the mill; but Prue's neighbors soon grew as accustomed to this peculiarity as to her others, and began to leave her in peace.

On her days out in the world, Prue commandeered Jolly from her stables, as he was unlikely to be missed. Before she would mount him, she'd offer him a lump of table sugar, which he chewed as if it tasted like poison. He'd shake his head in disgust when she prodded him with her heels. But bitter old Jolly also did nothing more than grumble when schoolboys yanked his tail, and he was strong enough to carry Prue on a day-long journey. She began frequenting the shipyard at Wallabout Bay to observe their techniques of building, and to note, of course, the height of a mainmast. The Wallabout was two hours distant by the Shore Road, but
Jolly became so accustomed to the route, he'd walk there if she held the reins slack in her lap. Prue was a stranger in all but reputation to the slaves and free workers of the Wallabout (who seemed pleased the rumors about her britches were true), but when she went, she carried a bottle of gin in each saddlebag, and found the shipwrights willing enough to teach her what she needed to know. She thought she could herself shape the posts and beams to frame a building if she had to, but it was of great use to watch the shipbuilders plank the sides of a schooner, fill the seams with tar-soaked rope, and coat its outside in pitch. Prue remembered that this was precisely the technique Ben and Isaiah had shown her in the book on shipbuilding all those years ago; but not until she saw it in practice did she realize how well it would likely work to prevent rot upon the sides of a bridge. The shipbuilders' lumber was floated rough-cut up the river from van Vechten's, and the saw pit on the site sang each day till dusk.

February brought a false spring, and on its first day, Prue went up to the van Vechten mill, where the sawdust smelled sweet as apple blossoms. Under Theunis's guidance she conducted experiments on such woods as ash, locust, heart pine, and native fir, to discover how much weight they might bear, and what might be the degree of their distortion beneath that weight. Theunis cut her a beam of each type of wood, free of imperfections and a uniform eight feet in length by one and a half in height and six inches in breadth, and securely clamped one end of each to a level platform. His men helped her attach weights from fifty to a thousand pounds to the lever ends of the beams, and Prue measured the angle of their distortion from true and noted when the beam splintered and sent the weight tumbling to the ground. (The ash, the most beautiful of the woods, gave way first.) Her mind already felt stretched by her book learning and what she had acquired in the shipyard; and on some days, she was anxious she would be unable to hold the knowledge Theunis was bequeathing her. On the other hand, the experiments bewitched her; and after a few weeks, she began to feel their import in fleeting moments as part of her bodily understanding, a faint echo of the way she understood gin in her nose, skin, and bones.

Having learned Theunis's methods of testing and notation, she began, with growing confidence, to conduct experiments of her own. She requested beams of differing lengths and breadths and continued to explore
their susceptibility to stresses and to shearing along the grain. Prue also took blocks of the various woods, treated some with pitch and allowed others to remain as nature had made them, and left them out to see what the weather would do to them. Theunis, meanwhile, was delighted to have occasion to share his knowledge of timber and of the laws governing the natural world. He rigged up a ramp so a horse could, with some coaxing, walk out onto a long lever. In this way, he and Prue could observe how the various kinds of timber behaved when subjected to unequal stresses, such as a bridge would experience with carriages moving along it ad libitum.

When the library proved insufficient to her burgeoning understanding and the deeper questions it raised, Prue began to purchase more books, many of which her bookseller had to order from England and the Continent. She requested all available treatises on the works of Telford, Pritchard, and Brunel, who were the Old World's most celebrated builders of large-span bridges. She learned with elation that a Philadelphia landscape architect by the name of Thomas Pope had received his state's approval to build a timber and masonry bridge across the Schuylkill, and she wrote to him directly to open a dialogue and ask to see his plans. Her knowledge of mathematics and bridges grew brighter and more thorough by the day, and as Prue traveled back and forth to New York to acquire the fuel for this bonfire, she felt a thrill she had not known since the workings of the distillery had first revealed themselves in their true glory. She felt profound gratitude for this understanding, and for the diligence that underlay it, without which it would never have come to pass. At the same time, she eagerly awaited Ben's return. She no longer had time to attend Will Severn's church, as her every free moment was given to study; but she found she did not miss it overmuch. Pearl went without her, and sometimes as she left or returned cast her sister a sharp glance which Prue could not interpret.

When she did not have a boat of her own going across, Prue had to take the ferry, though she thought the well of Losee's legendary good spirits had at last gone dry. Instead of gossiping or chatting about the news, he now spat venom about Ezra Fischer.

“We've always done fine with one ferry,” he said one morning, hunching into his labor.

“But surely, Lo, you can't keep doing this forever,” Prue said.

“No, not forever. But a few years more yet. And that damned Fischer—have you met him? Has anyone met him?”

“Not that I know of,” she said. She did think Losee old for such backbreaking work.

“No one's even met the
klootak
, and he proposes to serve our village.” He looked out over his shoulder for traffic. “And he's a Jew”

“If it's the slightest consolation, I promise I shall never once use his boat.”

“Hmm,” Losee said. “It'll be a good deal closer to your property.”

“We Winships have walked up to your ferry for decades. I imagine we can continue to do so.”

He nodded. “You're a good girl. Your father's girl,” he said. “You wouldn't put a man out of business.”

She wondered if he'd heard anything from Theunis, as the project upon which she was working could do him in far more swiftly than a second ferry. But she could not guess what he knew, and despite ample opportunity, told him nothing about what she hoped to attempt.

Evenings, she sat at her new desk in the assembly hall, totting up what she'd learned against the questions thereby raised. She was grateful for the rare day on which the accounts came out in her favor; but chiefly, she was aware what a solemn duty it was to propose a bridge. If people chose to travel across it, they would stake their lives on her knowledge of the physical world. She did not, therefore, begin to make any calculations until she had spent more than two months in almost uninterrupted study. In April, she received a warm reply from Mr. Pope, who was only too happy to supply an image of his future bridge and small sketches of the plans on which it would be based. He was treating her, Prue noted with elation, as an equal, a comrade in arms; and she pored over his drawings until she'd nearly memorized them. She also sent a cask of gin for him on her next delivery boat bound for Philadelphia. His bridge was not so revolutionary as the one she proposed—his would rest on pilings, its weight borne by a harmonious string of segmental arches—but he found her idea intriguing. In his letter, he asked her to furnish him with as much detail as she could at this early stage, and to send drawings once she had them. “It would be my Delight,” he wrote, “to serve in whatever Wise as
Mentor
to your
Telemache
; & to offer whatever counsel my age & experience may entitle me to give.”

Only when Prue trusted her grasp of all her material did she begin to cipher, and to draw ever more detailed diagrams and images in her clumsy hand. Her dream had begun to metamorphose: No longer an airy substance, each day it relied more upon the precision of its angles and the weight of its abutments, the progressive diminution of the levers' size as they approached their zenith, the particular manner in which its every joint would be mortised and reinforced with nails, the exact pitch of the roadway. Prue began to understand that, though money would be an object, the true work would be in the hands of the men who would build it day by day. If they were to be safe, dangling from the sides of the bridge and securing its joists, she would have to devise slings to hold them; if the great timbers were to be hoisted aloft without benefit of a thousand spare hands, she would have to get to work designing movable cranes, which would allow pulleys to bear the brunt of the labor.

And as she sketched and calculated, the bridge seemed to take on life and breath of its own. In her vision, it had arched like a rainbow, like God's promise to man, over the straits; but in the quotidian world, if people were to travel across it without strain, it would have to arc at a gentler inclination, in a flatter parabola. The bridge's shape would, therefore, more closely resemble the trajectory of a bullet, and the anchorages would have to be stronger than at first she'd imagined to withstand that increase in lateral force. This was not within Prue's control; this was the way the bridge itself needed to be. Its twin spandrels had, from the start, sloped gently to convey any weight at the structure's center safely back to the ground; but as she figured and drew, Prue at last uncovered the method for planking them that would both best repel water and please the eye. Here, too, however, she felt the bridge had suggested the plan to her, and not the other way around.