Brookland (55 page)

She did differ from Roxana, however. She could remember, from the years before Pearl was born, her mother suffering weeks of illness, which could only have been her loss of the unborn children. She would emerge pale and subdued from her room, and mourn for weeks on end. Prue's father had been unwilling to answer questions, and she had learned only the sketchiest facts from Johanna. But though Prue also felt, as her mother must have, that her heart was broken, the following day she had a strong desire to return to the distillery. Ben and her sisters tried to convince her otherwise, but though her body still ached, she would not be told no. Isaiah's expression of pity when she walked in the countinghouse door almost turned her around, but she persevered; and when later she found herself sweating as she worked the lever to express the fragrant essence of juniper, she felt better for the exercise, and glad to have something to distract her from her grief

And as if as a sign that circumstances were improving, the spring thaw arrived early in 1799, though it brought with it the state legislature's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. Support for the act was much stronger in Brooklyn than Prue might have supposed. Many of those who rejoiced on the streets or in Loosely's tavern were slave owners themselves, but at most of only one or two domestic servants; only she and Pieter Schermerhorn still kept large numbers of slaves for their manufactories. The act, Prue realized, struck a fine balance between pleasing those who relied upon slave labor to make their living and assuaging those who opposed it on moral grounds: All adult slaves were to remain in bondage for the rest of their lives, though they would henceforward be called “indentured servants,” and all children born after the coming Fourth of July would be freed in the i 8zos, after having given their best
years of service to their masters. As matters stood, then, she was free to retain her current workforce for the distillery; and if she had to man all the stills and tuns with paid workers twenty years hence, she had ample time to determine how she would manage to pay them. She could not purchase slaves for the bridgeworks; but with the fervor for abolition so much in the air, she had never for a moment supposed the state would allow her to buy souls with its money.

The early thaw, meanwhile, meant that by mid-March the mud season had commenced, turning the roads once again to sludge and shoes of all descriptions brown and noisome. The neighborhood children, wild with the pent-up energy of having been trapped indoors all winter, tore stumbling through the streets with mud on their clothes and in their hair. After a few days, one could see even fastidious mothers such as Patience simply brushing the caked dirt from their coats and allowing them back out again. Just as in the autumn, it rained for days on end, clotting the river with brackish debris and making the roads all but impassable.

“But it's good news, overall,” Ben told her. “Pearl shall have her jonquils, and we shall begin our model bridge weeks sooner than we anticipated.”

Both he and Prue were fascinated by the performance of the first model, and sent tracts of observations to Mr. Pope in Philadelphia. The model now creaked if one stepped on it—Prue thought because its primitive abutments had shifted on their base, Ben because every boy in the neighborhood had done his utmost to break it—and its northern side had acquired a faint patina of moss in its months outside; yet the thing still held. Day after day they tested it under weights of various sizes; and though Prue thought it would soon deflect under such pressure as they placed upon it, it remained solid, exactly as a bridge should. Prue was happier with this than she could explain—though the model was diminutive by real-world standards, it had been their first attempt at bridge building, and they had gotten it fundamentally correct.

“When do you think it'll be complete?” she asked him.

“Sometime this summer, I'll wager. And the moment it's done, I'll build a room onto the house for your sisters.”

Pearl had been looking wan from her sleepless nights in Tem's company, but as soon as the weather improved and she could resume going out for her long walks, her color once more brightened. Her interest in
her needlework declined as her interest in being outdoors grew, and her fair skin freckled from all the time she spent out tending their vegetable garden and wandering the country lanes a stone's throw from town. All those years later, she was still visiting Will Severn's house at least one evening a week, though she could not have believed she owed him a debt any longer; and when their conversations were heated, she would fill sheet after sheet, later in the evening, in continuing with Prue whatever the original argument had been.

The second model was Ben's project. He had no need of Prue's assistance, while until she did something to change the way they rectified, the distillery did. Ben's six men were eager to begin their real work; and Ben vowed to keep them on as foremen if their current project proved successful and the governor gave permission to attempt to bridge the straits. Though they were only seven people, they worked with tremendous speed and dedication. The two anchorages were complete on their foundations by mid-May, and the levers began to spring from the abutments in June. Once he had proven that the cranes worked to hoist timbers into place, Ben wrote Mr. Pope to inquire when he might come to inspect the miniature bridgeworks and issue his report to the state. Mr. Pope replied that his own work on the Schuylkill detained him at present, but that as he had business of his own to conduct in New York in early September, he would be pleased to view the bridge then.

As Prue watched the progress of this model, she felt doubly joyful: because it appeared to be working according to plan, and because exactly as Pearl and Dr. de Bouton had promised, she had found herself with child again as soon as the weather turned warm. This time she did not tell her family anything until the size of her belly obviated an announcement. Dr. de Bouton told her she could expect the child to come sometime in the Christmas season, by which time, she reflected, the model would be long since complete, and plans might even be under way for the bridge itself. At first Prue did not dare hope this child might survive; but as it grew and stirred within her, she began to think she had at last ridden out the effects of her misdeed. Perhaps she and her sister would live henceforward as two mortals bound by ties of love and convenience, and not by any more sinister thing.

She ceased wearing britches, as they made her growing womb look somehow obscene, but she found all her mother's fears had been unwarranted;
she was careful with herself, but her skirt posed no danger near the press or the drive belts. The baby left her tired, and she began stopping work in the late afternoon to go out and take measurements on the small model and inspect progress on the large one. By midsummer, she could walk through the arch in the pyramid and out onto the promenade of the bridge itself. In terms of its height, it was no more impressive than standing on the balcony above any room of her distillery: The model bridge would be, at its zenith, barely fifteen feet from the ground, and the approaches were considerably lower. But when she stood out upon the miniature roadway, watching the ships cruise by on the straits, she could already imagine herself standing far above them and pausing for the view in the middle of the river. Even those newspapers skeptical of the project as a whole reported favorably on the structure's beauty. Though it only spanned the dull brown mill yard, the bridge had clean, delicate lines; it was now clear it would “ornament the river as elegantly as a simple flower behind the ear ornaments a fair woman's nape,” C. Mather Harrison wrote—rather poetically, Prue thought—in the
Argus
.

Ben finished the model in August. The workers did not let out a shout when they slipped the last timber into place and nailed it in; Prue simply left the casking room one afternoon and saw one of the men standing on the bridge's very apex, stretching his arms up toward the sky. Ben came toward her, his eyes as bright as on their wedding day. “Will you cross the East River with me?” he asked.

And though Prue was beginning to feel awkward when she walked, she said, “Oh, with pleasure.”

T
homas Pope arrived on Mr. Fischer's ferry one warm, clear morning in September. The previous afternoon he had sent news of his arrival in New York, and Prue had wanted to hurry across the river and fetch him back for supper; but she told herself such eagerness would not do, and resolved to be patient. Instead she gathered her workers into the assembly hall, where she noticed how scuffed and scarred the floorboards were after Ben's season of indoor work. She exhorted the men to wash themselves that evening and to put on clean work clothes the next morning. “And if you have any lingering doubts about the bridge, I beg you hold your peace this one day,” she said.

“We have none of us any doubts, Miss Winship,” Elliott Fortune said.

The man behind him said, “I should hope she's ‘Mrs. Horsfield,' with that belly.” Though some around him laughed, Prue was pleased that one of his neighbors hushed him.

The workers were clean as springtime the next morning. Half of them had even shaved.

Prue stationed a young slave—indentured servant, she reminded herself—at Fischer's landing with Ben's sight glass to look out for Pope's arrival. The moment he'd spied the trim black boat, he came tearing up the Shore Road and into the countinghouse. He was so short of breath he could barely speak, but Prue understood his import; and though she could walk only slowly and with no great ease, she and Ben were on the landing when the boat arrived. In her imagination, Pope had been practically a titan, tall and broad, with a strong jaw and flowing gray hair. The man who
sat in the bow of the ferry was a mere human, to Prue's combined relief and disappointment. She could not judge his height from the dock, but she could see that his face was round and merry; he obviously enjoyed both his meat and his port. His woolly hair poked out from beneath his hat in all directions, and his eyes took in the straits with interest. “Mr. and Mrs. Horsfield!” he exclaimed before the ferryman could even hand him out of the boat. “Heavens, it is an honor and a delight.”

“The pleasure and the honor are all ours,” Ben said, removing his hat and bowing. When he stood again, Prue could see Mr. Pope was a full head shorter than her husband. Prue curtsied, and Mr. Pope reached out and kissed her hand. “You have been of tremendous assistance in our work thus far; and we are most, most grateful that you've come. Have you breakfasted?”

Mr. Pope pushed down his hat as if afraid it might blow away, though the breeze was calm. “Excuse me, but I have no interest in breakfast; it's a bridge I've come to see. Quite a miraculous bridge, if you've told me true. Take me to it. There'll be time for victuals later.”

Prue's heart fluttered with expectation, and the baby, who knew everything of her emotions, likewise wriggled and kicked.

Fischer's second ferry docked only a moment later, and C. Mather Harrison and two other young men disembarked. “Good morning, Mr. Harrison,” Prue said.

“Good morning,” he replied. He had his shoulders drawn awkwardly in, as if he thought the other men were standing too close to him.

“We thank you for the fine notice,” Ben said.

He nodded politely.

When the two men shot Harrison disgruntled glances, Prue gathered they had come from other papers. They allowed Prue, Ben, and Mr. Pope a respectful few paces of distance as they walked toward the distillery, but Prue knew they were trailing behind like ducklings.

When first Mr. Pope saw the larger model bridge arching across the mill yard, he raised both arms in the air as if to call down Heaven's witness and cried, “Oh, 'tis true! Bless you both, 'tis true!” He walked out upon it with as much wonder and joy as any neighborhood urchin had shown; but when he was done, stood beside it with his hand on its flank as if it were a horse Prue and Ben meant to sell him. He wore a soberer aspect the rest of the day, which he spent in meticulous study of the
structure. He took measurements of both model bridges and observed the straits themselves; he asked for some of the weight tests Ben and Prue had engineered to be duplicated; and he examined each detail of the construction of the abutments and the cranes. He wrote copious notes to himself as he worked. By late afternoon, he claimed to have been convinced that such a bridge could soundly span the East River; but Prue caught something hesitant in his expression.

“Have you any lingering doubts?” she asked him.

Mr. Harrison politely looked off toward the water, but she knew he was taking note of everything they said.

“No,” Pope replied, but with a faint rising tone at the end of the word. Prue wondered if he might rue not having himself invented the method of construction. She waited for him to qualify his statement, but he did not. She could hear water rushing into the tuns in the brewhouse.