Brookland (36 page)

He nodded, and worked his fingers into her hair. “You suppose, however, that this future husband should wish to be a distiller.”

“He wouldn't have to,” she said. “He'd own the works. That is what affronts me.”

“I see.” He never once looked away from her eyes. His pupils were wide and black in the firelight. “But this ‘he' you speak of is not I. I shall be King's County's surveyor, Prue. You shall make the gin, and if seems only fair that you should therefore own and manage your distillery.” He kissed her softly. “The law can say what it will, but that is how I see things standing between us. What do you say, then?”

“That I find your terms agreeable,” Prue said. She still felt unsettled, yet could not contain her grin. “But I don't know when we'll find time for a wedding. We've a bridge to plan, and I've my distillery.”

“We can bide awhile. Lord knows we've managed all this time; a few months more won't seem long in comparison.”

“Then it's settled,” she said, and held him close.

“Oh,” he said into her hair, “that's my Prue.”

“But I don't think it wise to stay the night.”

Once again he pushed her away enough to see her. “Why so?” he asked. His face was merry, as if her constant fretting were the very thing he liked in her.

“My sisters will worry.”

“They'll figure it out,” Ben said.

“And what will Mr. Severn say?”

“That I'm a luckier man than he.”

Prue shook her head no.

“Very well,” Ben said. “But you will stay another time? When your priggish friend hasn't seen you arrive?”

“He's shy, not priggish.”

“Hmm.” He kissed her once more and brushed her off his lap. “You should be home for supper. I know Pearlie; she won't let anyone eat until you appear.”

“That isn't quite true,” Prue said, but she did feel she should return home before she committed some other act of rudeness.

Ben walked her back through his dark hall, and helped her on with her coat and hat. He kissed her in the doorway, about which she felt strange, though the street was dark. As she once again crossed his lawn, Will Severn looked up from his reading to watch her pass; and when she reached the crossroads and turned around, Ben was still standing beside his open door, his arms folded in front of him for warmth. He raised a hand to see Prue off and did not go back in until she'd gone a distance down the turnpike.

The next day, as she walked the boards of the cooling room, feeling the warmth of the wort rising from underfoot, she saw him fix one end of his Gunter's chain at her boundary with the Schermerhorns. His assistant—Adam, the van Suetendaels' youngest son—took up the other end and began to chain off the property's perimeter. She stopped along the open southern wall to observe them.

“Anything wrong?” Mr. van Voorhees asked, behind her.

“No,” she said, and watched as Ben picked up his end of the chain to continue the measurement. She knew the rudiments of surveying—that he would next use his transit to determine true north, and then measure angles with the theodilite so he could accurately calculate distance—but could not estimate how long he would be about the property; yet she thought she'd have a fine time looking after business with him wandering the premises.

Ben's first project as county surveyor was to parcel off some land southeast of Brooklyn proper, across Bergen's Hill. Throughout the remainder of April he went down to the distillery just past dawn each day to borrow a horse and cart to drive himself, Adam, and their instruments to the site. He performed his calculations for the bridge while he was there. At first, he took bearings on Prue's land and across the river; after a time, he began to check his angles and distances against hers and Pearl's at the large plank desk in the assembly room. He helped her move the desk aside one morning when the men needed to be paid. Prue took real pleasure in his proximity, and Isaiah in harassing her about it, “as,” he said on a few occasions, “you could have had him here every day of the past few years, if you'd only said the word.”

“Ah,” Prue would answer, “but now I have you both, which is exactly as I please.”

Ben's own drawings indicated only the edges of property and the
height of the cliffs, but through his measurements he thought he might propose some emendations to the plan. Prue had always had the distillery in common with Tem, but had thought little of her judgment; it was thrilling now to share a project with both Ben and Pearl and to believe each might have something valuable to contribute. Of a Sunday, then, Prue and Pearl began sitting toward the back of the church—which Prue now found herself with the time and inclination to attend—and were among the first to leave. While Will Severn chatted with his parishioners, they would run up Buckbee's Alley, where Ben would be waiting with a pot of coffee and some dried-out baked goods from Thursday's market. There at his table, they argued over the angle of approach vehicles would take and the construction of walkways for pedestrians; the means of bracing the structure against the wind; the merits of moving the Brooklyn abutment ten feet closer to the water's edge, thus decreasing the lateral force by a fraction of its magnitude. Will Severn often took his Sunday dinner with a member of the parish, but when he returned home, Pearl would sneak out the surveyor's door and knock on the minister's; and Ben and Prue would spend the remainder of the afternoon upstairs. Prue did not discuss this arrangement with Pearl, but assumed she found it acceptable. At least, when Prue began taking Mrs. Friedlander's herbs again and jumping around the yard for exercise, Pearl took a mild interest in it but did not question her.

Pearl herself, meanwhile, began to assemble a file of information about the bridge, and made sketches of every slight change they considered. She was waiting to execute her final drawings—a large, detailed view of the structure as a whole, and the plans from which they might construct the various members—until their plan had arrived at relative stasis; but although she could not yet engage in her work, it had already begun to brighten her manner. She was spending less time at home with Abiah poring over her needlework, and more time taking long walks through Brooklyn—a habit into which she had never before fallen, as she had been so discouraged from it as a child. When she wanted a book, instead of asking Prue to fetch it from New York, she began going down to Losee's landing, riding across, and visiting the bookseller herself. Prue thought her sister must have laid a fair sum by from the sales of her needlework, as she never asked another penny for the household expenses, and this was the only other money to which she had access.

When at last the fruit trees were swathed in the pink mist that presaged blossoms, Prue, Ben, and Pearl all agreed their plans were as complete as they would be. Prue handed them over to Pearl, along with her key to the assembly hall.

And as she read her mother's letters, Recompense marveled at the bitterness of her first upstate winter, and tried to envision that workaday space in her mother's distillery given over to such a use. Like her brother, she had been given free run of the premises when she'd been small; but Recompense had found all the noise and bustle frightening, and had felt she would wilt, surrounded by such heat and such powerful scents. The assembly hall, clean and empty most of the time, had been the place that most appealed to her, rather to her mother's disappointment. She enjoyed now imagining it full of bustle, promise, and purpose.

Recompense loved Jonas and enjoyed their evening discussions but, for reasons she could not articulate, had not yet told him of this correspondence. The world her mother drew within its pages opened itself for Recompense's eyes alone; and she could not say why she wished it to remain so. She read this most recent letter through twice, folded it, and tucked it into the bottom of her workbasket. There it was well hidden beneath the white cotton yarn from which she'd make her baby's things, if ever she quit feeling so low.

P
earl was secretive about her drawings. When she worked in the assembly hall, she locked the door, and took breaks only to eat or visit the privy. She put in as long a day as the foremen, and though she must have been making good progress, she would neither talk to Prue about it nor show her the fruits of her labor thus far. Prue was piqued by this refusal, but also understood her sister's dedication; she herself worked this way, and though her father's humor had been lighter, he had been similarly single-minded when occupied with a task. The assembly room's windows were, however, large and numerous, and allowed Prue to glance in on her, always in passing. In this way Prue saw her sister had purloined some more candle stands from the house and acquired others from the Chardonnons. Prue also discovered, after a few weeks, that Pearl had dismantled the table and stacked its components against the far wall. She was working spread out on the floor, on a great roll of printing paper. This had arrived at the Winship dock one morning and caused speculation among everyone who worked at the distillery, but among no one more than Tem and Prue. They had both been out at the wharf, supervising outgoing shipments, when the log-thick roll of paper had arrived. Prue directed the deliverymen to their destination, and Tem stood watching with her arms akimbo. After a moment, she began to laugh. “Damme if she didn't find a printing press,” she said. Prue was likewise amazed. “I do underestimate her,” Tem said cheerfully, “don't you?”

“Yes,” Prue said. “I suppose.”

Pearl, meanwhile, must have caught her sister or others spying, because she'd had the great roll of paper no more than a day before she'd tacked lengths of it over the lower halves of all the windows. Prue thought her canny: She had deflected both the stares of interested parties and the human propensity to gawk out from windows, while still admitting the needed light and her view of the sky through the upper panes. When Prue and Tem needed the assembly room to distribute payroll or make an announcement to the men, Pearl would roll her work up and let it lie unobtrusively against the far wall. The men stood clear of it, as if it were charmed.

When Pearl drew, she drew for hours at a stretch, and would emerge, wan and red-eyed, blinking in the noise and bustle of the yard. Any of the men nearby would say hello to her as easily as they did to Tem or Prue; and Prue saw how taken they were with her thoughtful expression and the sweet manner in which she waved her reply. Prue remarked her forthright gaze in such moments; if she herself had not worked in the distillery so long, she might have wished to bury her head in the sand, but Pearl kept hers up, where it belonged and could be admired. She would stand outside for a few minutes and breathe the salty spring air, then turn back and lock the door behind her. A while after the bell rang for closing, she would plod up the stairs to the countinghouse and either pour herself a drink or sit down in whichever seat was empty and lay her head on her arms; but by the time they sat down to Abiah's supper, she would have left a sheet of questions beside Prue's plate. The questions she asked—about distances and types of materials, about the fir's strength under tension, about the means of constructing the twin voussoirs to either side of the elliptical central arch—all indicated an understanding at least as thorough as Prue's own. On a few occasions, Prue had to hunt down the answer in a book.

While Prue and Pearl discussed the bridge's evolution over supper, Tem and Abiah generally sat across the table, not talking. Abiah might have preferred to gossip or hear the news, as she still could barely read and the balladeers came only from time to time; but the moment the conversation turned to construction, Tem began stabbing at her food and dragging her utensils across her plate. Prue imagined she might be jealous of Pearl's work on the bridge, which was, after all, the most interesting thing occurring on the distillery's premises at that time. Prue also realized
she had not consulted Tem on a single question about construction. Though this was reasonable, as Tem could not have much useful knowledge to bestow, she was accustomed to being party to decisions. Not all her annoyance was related to her sisters, however; some stemmed from the attentions of Ezra Fischer. He had recently moved to Brooklyn to begin preparations for his new ferry and had bought the old Pierrepont mansion, which had stood empty since the close of the war. The whole town was abuzz with news of him. Some were in favor of his ferry, and others entrenched against it; some were impressed by the renovations he'd undertaken on the house, while others thought them extravagant; some found his manners refined, others unctuous; and more or less everyone was interested to have a Jew in their midst. Even Prue, who had plenty to occupy her, wondered if until his ferry began operating he would have to take Losee's boat to attend his worship in New York; and if so, what the two men would find to say to each other.