Brookland (38 page)

Prue said, “Pardon?”

You herd me plain
, Pearl wrote.

“It will stretch from the foot of Clover Hill to the Old Market Wharf,” Prue said, as if this were not apparent from the drawing.

Yes. To New-York. Where the Dead do ther Marketting
. She flipped to a clean page, stepped back a few paces, and sharpened her pencil against her pocketknife.
Lets roll it up before some Ill befalls it
.

Prue kept an eye on her as she walked to one end. “Pearl, what are you saying?” she asked. Pearl wrote something and held it up, but Prue was too far off to see it. “Well, let's put it away, and then speak.” She began to roll in the side of the elevation, but she was preoccupied with what Pearl had written, and could not keep the drawing centered along its own axis. As she rolled it, it stretched into a tube. She started over twice, and when she finally reached the midpoint, found Pearl crouched down waiting, with her pad open on her knee.
Johanna told me. Sometimes I think you & T. think I am deaf

“No,” Prue said, “you're mistaken.” Though even as she said it, she knew she sometimes considered Pearl less perceptive than an ordinary person; when, if anything, the opposite circumstance obtained. “Johanna told you I once thought New York the Land of the Shades?”

Pearl nodded.

Prue could not remember ever having spoken to Johanna of her belief, and a shiver coursed down her spine as she realized Johanna might
merely have intuited it. “Why did she tell you this?” she asked, though she wanted badly to drop the subject. This was not how she had imagined Pearl learning of her crime; this would not do. She reached down for the two ends of the black ribbon and tied them around the scroll.

Pearl touched her hand to Prue's arm, then held a note in front of her.
In illustration of Why you were so Sad a Gell
.

“You'd asked her?”

Pearl nodded.
You worg'd me
.

Prue blew a breath out through her nostrils. As much as she wanted to run from the room, she had to find out how much Pearl knew “I wonder what other illustrations she may have given you,” she prompted. “I don't believe she was fond of me.”

O I know she was! Pearl wrote. She pray'd for you always
. She flipped her page.
She say'd you'd drunk that Fret of our Mother w. her Milk. I did'n't have so much Milk, you see, for some While. Jo
^a
thought it spar'd me
.

“I remember.” Even after so many years in each other's company, Prue could not always read Pearl's tone in her hasty notes. She believed she could read her sister's eyes, however, with utmost clarity; and she did not sense any hostility behind this, though she was uncertain she understood its import. She found herself longing to tell Pearl of the curse she'd inflicted on her, to be rid of the burden once and for all; but after so many years guarding her secret, she could not bring herself to do so. It mortified Prue—it broke her heart—to think she had ever harbored such resentment against her sister. In defense of her own thoughts and actions, she told herself that before Pearl had been born, she had had no means to know how much she'd value her. It was only now she could not imagine anyone dearer to her than this small-boned person, with such particular curves and angles in her face.

& so I understand, why it's a
Bridge
you wish to build. I understand the desire to get there & proov yr Self wrong
.

Prue said, “It isn't only that. I learned I'd been mistaken, of course, a hundred years ago.”

It's for Mother & Father?

“And for myself also. To have done something that wasn't handed down to me.” She hadn't known she thought this until she said it. Her breath felt tight in her rib cage, but she continued anyway. “And it's for Brookland.” Hearing herself say this, however, she felt foolish.

Pearl wrote,
I think it noble of you. Truly
.

“Thank you.”

& I want to help you build it, in what ever way I can
.

“You have done much already.”

I want to help with the Moddel
.

“You don't know anything of construction.”

I know more than you think I know
. Pearl patted the roll with her pencil hand, then wrote,
& I did this
.

“It's true,” Prue said. “We should put it away.”

Together they heaved the scroll upright, and it stood tall and broad as a house post between them. They shuffled it over to its corner. Pearl
was
correct, about the drawing and what it showed she knew of the natural world. When it was safely stowed, Prue said, “We must show Ben your work, and I believe Tem will also wish to see it. Perhaps we can begin building after that.”

Pearl nodded, and gave her a swift hug before making her way to the door. What an unanticipated delight, Prue thought, to see her sister so full of enthusiasm.

P
rue received Recompense's next letter, as she had received all the others, in the countinghouse. The postman knew where her home was, but as everyone excepting Abiah could usually be found below, it was no doubt worth an extra few minutes of his time to descend the ravine; any of them would slip him a gratuity for a letter delivered by hand. Prue thought he seemed a kind boy, not over-rough on the post horses.

Prue had to put the letter aside, however, to see to more pressing business. She was teaching her son, Matty, to rectify, and though he was much older than she had been when she'd begun studying the process, he was not learning well. When her father had told her that to rectify spirits required a gift, she had not truly believed him; but in all her years in the distillery, she had had only one employee who'd shown the slightest aptitude for the process. Prue had always assumed she'd inherited her skill from her father in the same way she'd acquired her mother's kinky hair. She had likewise assumed her son's mind and nose would prove educable, that he would come into the knowledge as a result of his parentage; but she was beginning to despair he'd ever get the knack of it. If he didn't, what then? She could hardly call Recompense home.

At day's end, while Tem stood at the west-facing window and drank her first glass for the evening, Prue read her daughter's letter. She laughed over Recompense's account of a visit from Jonas's cousins, the Starks. (She wrote: “These are: Chas. Wallace Stark, the cousin himself, a good spirited gentleman & farmer of Jonas's age; Charlotte, his wife; and two
children, Harry & Lydia, of six or seven years of age. 0 mother, what
energy
they have! These two are like tops;—set aspinning at sun rise, and not tumbling to ther sides till long past dark. I see they are good children,—they sit quiet at table, & Miss Lydia makes valiant efforts to murder my spinet,—but I cannot recall running so much in my own youth nor Matty doing likewise neither. They have given me a
terrour
of this infant within me, who is already, I think, starting to kick to apprise me she wishes to
get out
.”) The rest of the letter troubled her, however, for Recompense was bothered—a state of mind Prue little thought her daughter experienced—by how her mother had treated Pearl. (“Did you really disregard her so?” she asked. “& did you all those years count her talents so cheap?”)

Prue read the letter over, then laid it by. “Tem?” she asked.

Tem turned from the window to face her. Her hair was graying in delicate stripes but remained black underneath. Prue thought it becoming in the dusk's soft light.

“D'ye think I treated Pearl unfairly when we were planning the bridge?”

Tem blinked twice. “How so?”

Prue could not answer succinctly; her daughter's question had raised a thousand instances from her memory.

Tem leaned back on the windowsill and finished her drink. “I imagine we all did. Why do you ask?”

“Recompense wondered.”

Tem shook her head and walked to the shelf to replenish her cup.

Prue knew they would not discuss the matter at greater length; and she dreaded that same awkwardness if she brought it up at home. Therefore, she told herself Recompense's objection was as to degree. She herself had admitted having rated Pearl's abilities too low; perhaps Recompense wished her to feel greater remorse for the misdeed. This was impossible, however. Prue could not yet explain to her daughter why so.

When she wrote her next letter, later that evening, she began by asking about the cousin's children, and did not respond to Recompense's concern.

It was a lovely late spring day when Prue and Pearl brought their sister down to view the elevation. They waited until the works had gone silent,
and led her out to the yard. Then Pearl blindfolded Tem with one of their father's stocks.

“Oh, please,” Tem said, although she was smiling. “We are not children.”

“But it is a surprise such as you may not have had since you were a child,” Prue said. She took her by the hand, and looked out for anything she might trip on.

Tem said, “Then I earnestly hope it's a pony.”

Pearl hissed.

Once in the assembly hall, they left Tem in one corner while they went to its opposite and untied the drawing.

“This is stupid,” Tem said. “May I take it off?”

“No,” Prue replied. She and Pearl unfurled the scroll upright along one of the room's long walls. It made a satisfying rattle as they did so. They kept hold of its ends, and Prue said, “Very well. Now”

Tem pulled her blinder straight off overhead, and it was still in her hand when she covered her mouth with surprise and bent over as if the drawing had punched her in the belly. “Good God,” she said, into her hand and the piece of silk. Her dark eyes began to pool. “What a beautiful thing.” She took a few steps closer to it. “I had no idea it would be so lovely. Pearl, I had no idea you could draw so well.”

Prue felt vindicated. Pearl shrugged her shoulders but looked pleased.

“My God, Prue, it's a much better idea than I thought it would be. Gravity will keep it up, you say?”

“I believe. We're about to commence building a facsimile, on a small scale, to begin to find out.”

“Suppose I'll be running the works again, then.” Tem did not phrase this as a question.

“If you don't mind.”

“No. It's odd; I wouldn't say I enjoyed it during the last spell, but I found it gratifying to know I could.” Tem crouched down to peer at the boats. “You got it all, Pearlie, even the bucket on Losee's landing. I am most impressed.”

Pearl gave her a small curtsy and nearly lost hold of her end of the drawing.

Prue's head was full of how to construct the model. It seemed clear she should build it of the same wood she proposed to use in the finished
structure, and with the individual members cut to the same relative dimensions; but she wondered if she could secure iron nails at a two-hundred-fiftieth their normal size.

“I'd say glue's your man,” Theunis van Vechten said, when she went up to order the wood. “Otherwise you'd have to use jeweler's tools to hammer in the little pins. Have to become a watchmaker. A proper mallet'd break 'em.” Prue wondered if he'd told anyone of her intentions.

“But glue won't hold if we take it out to see how it fares in the weather.”

“I don't know, then,” Theunis said. “See what the smiths recommend.”

“And what of the stone? I can't ask a quarry for bricks. It wouldn't be worth their time.”

Theunis took up his toothpick and, with an expression of satisfaction, worked it between his teeth. “Let me look after that as well. I'll find you a bit—just enough to anchor the thing.”

“Thank you,” Prue said.

“This time next week.”

Waiting was an agony; but she realized if she actually was to build a bridge, this was an agony to which she had best grow accustomed. There would be waiting for the signatories to sign, and waiting for the legislature to approve her plan. If they did approve it, there would likely be a long, long wait for any money to arrive, and another for men and materials. Prue had always known she could be impatient, but she realized now she would have to pluck that quality out of herself by its roots if she was to get anywhere in this work.

After closing one day that week, Tem found Prue in one of the storehouses, where she'd been draining off samples of their three oldest batches. It was not quite time to test them, but she wanted to see how they were faring in the heat. Tem motioned toward the gin in her sister's hand. “How is it?”

“Still good,” Prue answered. She held the beaker toward her. “A bit perfumey, to my taste.”

Tem rolled it around her palate before swallowing. “I agree. How many are left?”

“Just eleven.”

“It sells well, then,” Tem said. “So it shan't matter if we think it perfumey.” She drained another dram into the receiving vessel, and Prue pulled out the spigot and recorked the cask so she wouldn't take more. “What's that?”