Brookland (52 page)

B
en soon discovered that to buy timber even for a roof beam was not so easy as when Matty Winship had built his distillery. It had been more than a decade since the depredation of war had ended, but as far as the eye could see, the trees were still at most of middling size. The tall, straight beams for ship masts and keels were difficult to find and commanded a good price; and Theunis van Vechten predicted their second model would be built dear. The newspapers concurred, with the exception of Brooklyn's only sheet, the newly founded
Long-Island Courier
, which did not attempt to hide its partisanship.

Prue thought, however, it was a point in favor of her schema that it did not call for any such rarefied timber as a ship. The structure's stability would depend not upon its members' prodigious length or girth but upon their being free of imperfections and cut to the correct size. They would need to be carefully balanced to relay weight to the ground in the proper fashion, and they would have to be ingeniously secured to the structure, that if any single member were to succumb to rot, it might be removed without danger to its neighbors. What the large model needed was not a few gargantuan trees but a great many, medium in size and uniform in growth pattern; the only problem Prue foresaw was to be able to get enough of them. And fir was not a rare or expensive wood; this was part of the reason she had chosen it.

Theunis knew they would not find sufficient timber to build the model in New York or on Long Island; but he thought if Ben set off up
the North River, he would find both wood to his liking and limestone to use for the model's abutments. Prue deposited the governor's money, when it arrived, in the distillery's account and signed Ben permission to draw upon it for his purchases. After tarrying for what he called a “wedding-week,” during which he sold his house to a family newly come from Virginia and put that money aside, Ben traveled northward in search of the materials. He was, he reasoned, nearly done with his surveying projects for the year; he believed he could tie them up upon his return and restore Adam van Suetendael to Joe Loosely's employ for the season. Though he supposed he could get a better price if he were buying in the quantities required for an actual bridge, he thought Governor Jay's letter, and the promise of a much larger purchase if the model succeeded, would convince merchants to treat him fairly. He kept his promise and wrote Prue frequently, though he would likely arrive home before the letters did.

She, in the meantime, continued to check on the progress of the first model. It was beginning to look weather-beaten but remained solid, which boded well. She took her daily measurements, and found it had hardly degraded in its weeks outdoors. She also returned to her ordinary business at the distillery—the general management she shared with her sister and Isaiah, and the rectifying of spirits in which she found herself once again alone, now that she had moved Marcel, against his will, to the countinghouse.

“No,” he had said, on his first day back. “I shall be more careful, Miss Winship.” Most people, she found, still called her Prue Winship, in the same way Patience remained a Livingston, or perhaps even more so because of the gin. Though she didn't want to argue with Marcel, she was glad, for his sake, to see a spark of fire in his eyes.

“I can't risk it,” she'd said simply.

“What else can happen? What other ill could befall me? The worst has already occurred and, as you see,” he had said with some force, “I am faring well.”

“You could have lost a hand or an arm. It might have killed you. And while I dislike depriving you of a vocation for which you feel passion and in which you show obvious promise, I feel I must do so out of regard for your granduncle. You may argue as strenuously as you wish, but I shan't change my mind.”

He had continued to stand looking her square in the eye, but the next day had begun to learn bookkeeping.

Prue knew she had acted correctly, but now found herself in an awkward position: When Ben returned, she might have devoted her energy to working on the large model, were she not single-handedly responsible for rectifying the liquor. Her options were either to relent with Marcel Dufresne, which she did not intend to do; to find someone else with his talents, which seemed a remote possibility; or to do as Tem had suggested and pin down the ingredients, in precise amounts and a particular order, now and for all time. She could not effect the first two remedies and could not stomach the third. Therefore, she chose none.

Long ago—before she'd once traveled to Manhattan and before her father had reconciled himself to the fact he would never sire a son—she had thought the distillery would offer her incomparable freedom, a wide-open arena in which to prove her mettle. It had, and continued to do so; and Prue considered herself more in command of her own fate than, say, Patience, tied to a house, a sister-in-law, and three small children. Her freedom was immense, compared to Pearl's. Yet the distillery also circumscribed Prue just as surely; her current dilemma did not seem to leave her any room to move at all. Making no decision was tantamount to deciding things should continue as they always had. Though she knew they would have to change soon enough, she chose the course of inaction.

She received news from Ben only a week after he left, that he had found an adequate quantity of fir, already hewn and cured and suitable for use in the model. He noted, however, that this purchase would tax the timber merchant's capacity, and he wondered how they would procure sufficient materials for the bridge itself, were they fortunate enough eventually to build it. For the nonce, he recognized his concern as mere hope. He would hunt down their limestone, including suitable foundation stones, and return with all due haste.

It was another ten days before he returned, bearing receipts for three acres of timber and a few tons of Hudson Valley limestone. His first task was to finish the surveys he'd contracted to do for Mr. Whitcombe and out past Bergen's Hill; his second was to hire men to dig two foundation holes for the model bridge in the sand of the mill yard before the frost. With this work completed, his small crew could spend the winter cutting the timber and limestone to specifications and building the small cranes
they would employ to test their methods of construction; actual building might then commence with the first sign of a thaw. He ordered nails by the cartload from the local smiths.

“Is it not your good fortune,” he said over supper a few nights after his return, “to have married a man suited to such work?”

Abiah rolled her eyes, and Tem tossed her napkin at him. “I think it is rather
your
good fortune,” Prue said, “to have married a woman with such fine ideas.”

Pearl wrote,
I thnk it ill becomes you Boath to speak of't
.

Ben laughed. “Modesty does not serve in all regards,” he said. “I think your sisters had best watch out, Pearlie, or I'll start poking my fingers in the distillery's pies as well.”

Prue laughed at him, but she did feel blessed to know he could look over the building of the model as well as, or better than, she could do herself.

Later that week, on the same day the first of Ben's newly hired men went looking for lodging in the town, there was an accident in the brew-house, when one of the great agitating arms broke in the second mash tun. Neither Tem, Prue, nor Isaiah was in the brewhouse that morning—an unfortunate, though not an unusual, circumstance—but by Phineas Bates's report, the agitator broke off with a stupendous crack as if of lightning, then became entangled with the machine's other arms as they continued to turn and strain. The tank held three thousand gallons of water and grain; it was a powerful machine could stir all that, and the noise, by all reports, startled everyone in the mash room. They scuttled down the ramps and ladders from their own tuns, and up to the afflicted one. A worker new to the brewhouse—perhaps thinking the break his own fault—panicked at the racket of the agitators grinding one another to shards, and hurled himself over the side of the tank, no doubt with the intention of trying to fix it. He immediately became ensnared in the mass of splintered wood.

The distillery had a protocol for such circumstances. Every building connected to the power train had its warning bell; anyone could unwrap the rope from its cleat and alert the windmill keeper to disengage the drive shaft from the crown gear. In a heartbeat, the rumble of the whole works could grind down to silence. There was no untangling why some more seasoned hand did not, on that day, pull the bell at once, nor why
they all crowded up that single ramp; but minutes elapsed before someone jumped down to ring for mercy. Before the signal reached the keeper's ears, the ramp collapsed, taking almost twenty men down with it, and leaving the hapless worker drowning in the tun.

Prue had been in the stillhouse, where some of the machines ran off the waterwheel's power and therefore kept humming while everything else fell quiet. The sound of the alarm bell reached her dimly, however, and the eerie silence of everything shutting down was unmistakable. She and Jens Luquer left the worm tub unattended and ran outside, to see the entire mill sprinting toward the brewhouse. “What happened?” Prue asked everyone around her. A few turned to her with puzzled expressions—either no one knew or no one could stop to tell her. She joined the crowd and ran down the yard.

Her elderly fermenting master, Elliott Fortune, was climbing the steep steps from the cellar. He'd been able to hear the tumult from where he worked, and as Prue hurried past, he held out a finger and said, “Some kind of accident, Prue. Don't know what yet.”

Isaiah had reached the tun room first and was calling for ladders. The room was in chaos. Men were shouting, in pain or fear, and others were helping them from the wreckage of the collapsed ramp. The fall from the top had been only ten feet, but so many had fallen atop one another, they had injured those closest to the bottom; and the ancient wood of the ramp itself had cracked into splinters, full of nails. Prue took the arm of the person nearest her and, without remarking who he was, sent him for whichever doctor he could find. The ladders came in directly he left, and were passed hand to hand to those nearest the tun. Isaiah scrambled up one and stared down into it with what appeared to be blank horror. Prue was terrified to think what he might have seen, and quickly prayed that no one be harmed. The moment she'd thought it, she realized her prayer was no doubt useless; but she still hoped no ill had befallen anyone. Phineas, who'd been right beside Isaiah, scaled the other ladder and stood looking down, also clearly confused.

“What is it?” Prue asked. “Who is it? What happened?”

They didn't notice her, however. They regarded each other a long moment before Phineas dropped his boots to the ground and slid over the side of the tun.

“Man in the tank, ma'am,” said one of the workers nearby.

People hushed each other throughout the room. Phineas held on to the rim of the tun with one hand, all that was visible of him. Prue picked her way nearer, noticing, as she went, that while some of the men were badly cut and in obvious discomfort, they all appeared to move and breathe. “Isaiah?” she said.

“Hold, Prue,” he said quietly.

Phineas's hand began to move toward the back of the brewhouse. He stopped at the farthest extremity from where Prue stood. “I have him,” he called.

“Do you need help?” Isaiah asked.

Phineas's hand slipped another few inches around. “Yes, sir,” came his reply.

Tem came in then, from who knew where, and said, “What's going on?”

The whole room hushed her, as it had done to Prue, who now scaled the other ladder to relieve Isaiah of his watch. Before Isaiah could hand it to her, she looked down into the tun. The water in an active mash tun always bubbled as the sugar was extracted from the grain; but this foam was tinged pink with blood. Phineas was bobbing slightly, at the far side of the tank, with one hand holding the worker's corpse. One arm had been torn off at the shoulder and floated free, near his bare feet; and the man's skull had been crushed. The gray matter of his brain wafted behind him on the murky water.

“Oh, God,” Prue said, and felt she would vomit or faint.

“Go down, Prue,” Isaiah said. When she did not at once obey, he pressed the watch upon her and said, “Someone take her down.”

She felt two hands clasp around her waist, and she followed them back down the ladder, the watch chain dangling from her palm. She felt the watch ticking, but her breath could not penetrate the depths of her chest.

Isaiah dropped his boots to the floor and splashed into the tun. Whoever had helped Prue down the ladder passed her off to Tem, who put her arm around her; and they stood back, Prue with her breath short and her stomach clenched against what she knew to be forthcoming. There were splashing and squelching sounds, of something ripping and shifting
underwater. Phineas and Isaiah hoisted themselves out and stood side by side on the ladders, soaked and dripping, with every eye in the room upon them.