Brookland (6 page)

After the tearful breakfast, Roxana bound her daughters up so tightly in mufflers, Prue thought she might choke; but as if to make up for this, her father hoisted her onto his broad back and carried her all the way down to the river. The juniper bushes sat plump, fragrant, and dusted with snow in the otherwise bare dooryard. Johanna had refused to accompany them, but Prue wasn't certain she'd understood the invitation. At that time, Joralemon's Lane, which ran south of the distillery from the top of Clover Hill to the Shore Road—and which Prue thought, with mild indignation, ought to be called Winship's Lane, as no Joralemon had
lived on the property in years—was only a rocky, rutted path snaking down the bottom of the ravine, so Prue was jogged along on her father's back. The sails of the windmill, halfway down the hill between the house and the works, barely turned in the still, cold air, and the bright flag of the nascent republic drooped from its tall pole. The freeze meant the waterwheels of the mill and the rope manufactory could not turn; and as no traffic could move, either, the river was quieter than Prue had ever known it. Both the gin works and the ropewalk were on holiday, so none of the fires were burning, to smoke up the view. A few of Winship Gin's slaves were out behind the retaining wall in the frozen dirt yard, smoking their cheroots and calling out greetings to the bright-eyed New Yorkers as they arrived. “Get to work!” Matty called to them, but most smiled at him and waved to the girls. Prue imagined Israel Horsfield had already been down to tell the men work was canceled for the day, and had probably paid off a boy or two to stand on the road and alert any late-morning stragglers. In confirmation of her theory, one of the men—a free Negro named Elliott Fortune, her father's fermenting master, who was friendly toward Prue—blew his employer a farting sound in reply.

The ice was unlike that of the millpond, so meticulously swept clean for skating: This ice was a bumpy, dull gray, and dirty with ash, twigs, trapped fish, and bits of the week's papers. As Matty stepped onto it, with Prue still on his back, Prue half expected it to give way and groan; Roxana drew in her breath sharply and pulled both toddlers up short by their hands. Matty cast her a dismissive glance over the shoulder and continued out onto the ice. “Look, Roxy,” he said, “half the persons of our acquaintance are out and don't seem to be coming to any harm.”

Prue noticed the ice was also supporting dozens of people she didn't recognize, and with no more danger than an occasional loss of one's footing. A group of the Schermerhorn slaves, released from the rope manufactory for the morning, stood in a circle clapping and blowing into their hands while one man jumped with all his might, as if it were possible to break through. One of His Majesty's brigs was frozen just offshore, her sailors sliding along on the brackish ice. They hallooed and whistled as people passed, and one called out, “Hey, Matthias Winship—get back to your place and make the gin!”

“Never you fear, sir,” Matty called back. Prue beamed with pride to be thus aloft on his shoulders. “It's a year in the casks before its minute in
your tankards. I'm sure it's your hope as well as mine you'll all be home by then.”

“Amen,” the sailor said quietly, but sound carried well in the crisp atmosphere. He spat over his shoulder for emphasis.

“What's it do in the casks?” Prue asked.

“It steeps like tea.” He let her down to the ground, where she slipped on the tricksy surface, eliciting his laughter. Tem got a running start and came skidding on top of her, hooting with joy. Pearl, who was trying to skate in her shoes, arrived more slowly; but the Horsfield boys were never far off from a commotion and came to jump on the pile like piglets, with Ben, as usual, in the lead.

“Careful of the little 'uns, Isaiah,” Roxana said, but her tone suggested she didn't think there was much to be done about rowdy Horsfields. Their blond sister, Maggie, was Pearl's age and apparently under the boys' supervision, but she hung back from the fracas as if such entertainment were beneath her dignity.

A few dozen yards out onto the ice stood Simon Dufresne's Black Peg, as she was known, with a large tray suspended from her neck. Roxana had always evaded Prue's questions about Peg, but Johanna had taken her aside to whisper that Peg had begun her life as Simon's father's kitchen slave. After the father's death, Simon had freed her, out of love. Now, though the domine would have nothing to do with them, nor some of the villagers, either, they lived together as man and wife, an arrangement which made Johanna shake her head and smile, but which she would not further explain. Dufresne was the only farmer in the neighborhood who paid wages to all his men, as a result of which, Prue's father had told her, his family did not live so comfortably as Prue's own. “Hot pears, nice hot pears!” Peg cried. She was tall, and the fringed red ends of her muffler streamed down her back. “Piping hot! Get 'em while they're hot! Hot pears for a penny!” Tem shot up like a rocket at Peg's cry, and bit Ben hard on the exposed skin of his wrist when he tried to wrestle her back into the pile.

“You get 'im, Temmy!” their father shouted to her. She roared at Ben in reply, then ran off toward Peg.

Roxana said, “Don't encourage her,” then shouted out to Ben, “Are you all right?” But he was already up, trying to keep Isaiah from arriving first.

When Prue dusted herself off and went over to her father for money, he was saying to their mother, “She may be the littlest, but damme if she doesn't spit fire.” Roxana didn't look appeased. He fished a sixpence from his pocket and gave it to Prue, saying, “For the Horsfields as well. Check she didn't draw blood.” Prue noticed the concern with which her mother was watching Ben shake out his injured wrist, then ran off, slipping, to catch up with the other children.

Even as she held her goal of a hot pear in mind, Prue realized what a wonder it was to be able to run across the East River. The buildings that so fascinated her were drawing nearer, and she couldn't wait to see them up close. She might have taken a certain grim satisfaction had a spirit canoe gone skidding across the ice; but she found reassurance in seeing nothing but ordinary rowboats lately abandoned by their owners near the New York shore, their oars hanging back in their locks.

The Horsfield boys were high as Peg's shoulder and clamoring for sweets, but Peg shooed them away so that Pearl, skating methodically across on her shoes and whistling a pleading trill, might have first pick. It was one way or the other with Pearl: Half the neighbors treated her as if she were a changeling, but those who didn't seemed to like her attentive air and were willing to wait for her signs. “That's a good girl,” Peg encouraged her, kneeling so Pearl might have a better view. Pearl picked the pear most evenly glazed in molasses; directly Tem grabbed another, almost without looking.

“Daddy gave me enough for all of us,” Prue said to Ben, who reached under her cap to tug on her earlobe in thanks. Her heart leapt at his weird gesture; she understood it to differ from the aggression Tem wreaked upon her. At least, it felt sweeter. As he took his hand away, she grabbed his wrist, and saw that although there were still red tooth marks in the skin, Tem hadn't drawn blood. He pulled away and shouted for his pear, once more shaking the bitten hand. Persnickety Maggie frowned at the selection of sweets still available to her, and lastly Prue turned over the sixpence and took her own, dripping warm molasses on the paper and her mitten.

“Thank you, Prudie. Now, eat that up,” Peg said to Pearl, who had her whole face buried in the fruit and molasses running down the yoke of her coat. “Good girl.” Then Peg winked at Prue and called out, “Fresh hot pears!” to a group from New York skidding past.

The children walked along more sedately then, sucking on their pears and the sheepy fibers of their mittens. When Prue turned to see where her parents were, they were walking gloved hand in gloved hand. Her mother's face, so recently clouded with worry over Ben and the sturdiness of the ice, was bright, if not from pleasure, then at least from the brisk weather. When Prue turned forward again, she drew in a breath of delight, for before her were the sights she'd dreamed of all her life, even larger and more vivid than she'd imagined. When she'd peered at Manhattan previously, she'd looked down from the top of Clover Hill; but now she was looking up, and the warehouses along the waterfront loomed over her. As the party drew nearer New York, the ice grew ever more thickly littered with trapped boats. (“Little shallops and sleak periaguas were left where they lay,” Prue wrote to Recompense, “with buckets & lengths of rope strewn in their hulls. Groups of boys approach'd them with obvious curiosity, but either found nothing worth pilfering or else desisted in the clear view of such multitudes.”) Some distance north, Prue thought she saw Losee's flat-bottomed ferryboat, tethered to what looked to be the market wharf and in no danger from the huge freighter that rested nearby. There were also more mongers on the New York side—an old man selling chestnuts from a kettle fire, and a blind woman shaking a tankard for pennies in exchange for paper twists of popcorn from a basket at her feet. Two slaves were out making music with a mandolin and a Jew's harp; and some New Yorkers were trying their wooden-bladed skates on the bumpy, uncongenial ice.

“Hold, Prue,” her father called from behind her. She stopped to wait for them, and the rest of the children slowed around her as if they were a school of fish. As he drew nearer, Matty asked Isaiah, “Where're your folks? Do they know you've gone off?”

“They know. I'm in charge,” Isaiah replied, his somber face indicating he could be trusted.

Matty put his gloved hand on Prue's shoulder. “And you; is New York as you thought it would be?”

“I'm not sure,” Prue replied. She hadn't thought it would seem so marvelous to step up off the water onto a wooden dock as solid and lichen-stained as any in Brooklyn. “I'm not sure what I thought.” How workaday New York appeared when she saw it face to face! The height of the warehouses was awe-inspiring, but their windows rippled just as old
glass did in Brooklyn, and the buildings were clad in the same weathered shingles and Holland brick. Women of all shapes and ages were hurrying past with dirt on their hems and pigeons in their baskets, and men went by on business, their furrowed brows intent on not remarking the change in the view. The children had climbed up into a market about the size of Brooklyn's, but with more permanent-looking wooden stalls. Prue smelled the familiar odors of blood, fish, chickens, and hay. There were bonfires in this market and out in the street; people were huddled around them for warmth. “Where are we?” she asked her father.

He crouched down beside her; a horse and calash whipped past. “This is Old Market, where poorer folk do their shopping,” he said. Some of the king's soldiers were passing around a wineskin. “The Fly Market is on up the way,” Matty continued, inclining his head northward, in the direction of the bustle. “That's where the ferry lands, and where the real truck is done.”

“Why do they call it Fly Market?” Isaiah asked. Ben added, “Indeed; that's disgusting.”

“I don't know,” Matty answered them. “Imagine it's something Dutch.”

Roxana was also crouched down, trying to remove molasses from Tem's mittens with spit and a handkerchief. Tem looked around at the people bustling past, while Pearl whistled a titmouse's chipper call and stalked after Maggie Horsfield, who made herself blind and deaf to her.

“I'd like to see it,” Prue said, though in truth there was nothing she didn't want to see.

“I'll show you everything I can while we're here.” Matty went around to them all, taking the decimated pear cores and tossing them in the gutter. Ben had eaten all of his, swallowing the seeds. “At the very least, Fly Market, the taverns I serve, and the bank, in which I keep your future fortune.”

The way Roxana blew air out her nostrils made it seem
fortune
was an exaggeration. “We'll head home before they all tire out,” she said. “We can't very well carry six of them.” Prue saw then that her mother's cheer was superficial; it had not erased the sad lines at the corners of her eyes.

“Ben and I can carry ourselves,” Isaiah said. “And I can carry Maggie.”

His sister shot away from him, as if this were a punishment.

“Shall we, then?” Matty asked.

“To Fly Market!” Ben cried. He grabbed Isaiah in a playful stranglehold, unseating his hat, and Isaiah struggled to throw him off. Ben sometimes reminded Prue of a setter pup—good-spirited, but somewhat lacking in sense. Still, she wouldn't turn up her nose if her father brought a puppy home from the market instead of a book. Ben dragged Isaiah on, both of them yelping, and took the lead. Prue picked up Isaiah's hat, and Pearl, having given up on Maggie, whistled a tune to herself and slipped her sticky mitten in Prue's free hand. Matty put his arm around Roxana's shoulders.

“What do you think, Roxy?” he asked quietly. “A boy'd be fine.”

Prue pricked up her ears. “I've enough to do with the three little beasties,” Roxana answered. “Those Horsfields'll burn their father's house down, mark me.”

“But a boy—to carry on the business.”

“We've already tried. Three is enough. Maybe if the one wasn't tainted.”

Prue pointed out to Pearl a white horse trotting past, its rider with a plume in his hat. Pearl continued to whistle and nodded her head with what looked like interest, but Prue knew she'd heard every word. The Horsfield boys sped ahead.

“Mmm,” Matty said. Prue may have been a week shy of ten years old, but she could hear he wasn't finished on the topic.

“Let's catch up with them,” she told Pearl, and began to run. Tem grabbed her other hand and the hat, and they galloped on until they were a few paces shy of the boys. Maggie was crying at being left behind, and Prue thought she caught Pearl smiling about it. None of the children knew where they were going, but Ben stopped at every street corner to look back to Matty Winship for guidance. Then he'd set off at a run again, dragging Isaiah with him, skirting around the bonfires and dodging the traffic and other pedestrians. In this fashion, perhaps a quarter hour later, they arrived at a much larger market, its wooden stalls thronged with Thursday shoppers despite the miracle of the weather. Prue was delighted to see such a crowd, though surprised to see so few black faces among the white. (“They only farm a good ways north of the market,” her father told her the next day. “They've less of a need for slaves.”) As
Prue looked out to the water, she saw it was indeed Losee's dull green boat tethered to the wharf, where he'd left it the evening before.