Brookland (62 page)

“Do you need a moment?” Prue asked.

Pearl nodded, and Tem said, “If you like, we can go with Ben in the wagon, and you can find another ride.”

Pearl turned to her sisters with a careworn smile, then approached Mr. Severn. He stepped aside toward the graveyard fence, and Pearl followed him. They were nearly hidden in the shadows of the bare ash trees.

Prue walked over toward Susannah's bright little headstone, and Tem followed her. “Glad to see she's finally got a suitor,” Tem said,
and pulled at her collar again. She was unused to the dress, and said it itched her.

Prue said, “Excuse me?” She was thinking of Susannah.

“Like to come with us?” Simon Dufresne asked as he walked toward the road.

“No, thank you,” Prue answered, and Tem added, “Ben has one of our wagons.” Peg raised her hand in greeting, and Simon touched his pale brim to them before walking on. To Prue Tem said, “I believe you heard me.”

Prue turned and glanced over her shoulder, to see if she could still make out Will Severn and her sister there under the trees. If Tem was correct, this would explain Pearl's absences, and Will Severn's solicitude toward the family, but Prue wasn't certain she could accept this explanation. “I don't know what I think,” she said.

Tem laughed quietly. “But you see, it isn't up to you.”

Prue mentally bade her daughter's bones good-bye, and she and Tem walked arm in arm toward the gate.

Ben was waiting on the turnpike with the team, and leaned down to help them both up. “Hello,” he said, kissing Prue on the cheek. “Where's Pearl?”

Tem said, “She'll be along.”

Ben wrapped his arm around Prue's waist, then took the reins again. Brooklyn's few smoking streetlamps did little to dispel the evening's gloom, and petered out altogether as Ben drove past the Remsens' bare fields toward Boerums' estate. When they arrived, the whole hillside was dotted with the dark forms of horses and carriages, mostly tethered to trees.

“I've eaten enough funeral cake to last me the rest of my days,” Tem said.

“I, too,” Prue said. “Pray there'll be no more for a good long while.” But all she could think of was Pearl.

Prue had made her way through a whole pint of ale before Pearl arrived on the minister's heels. Her cheeks were pink, and Prue immediately jumped to read this as a sign; but it was cold outdoors. Nevertheless, Pearl did not meet her eye.

“Tem?” Prue said, as she watched them help themselves to tea.

Tem said, “You often treat me as if I couldn't lace my own boots, and here you are, doubting what looks you square in the face.” She took Prue's empty cup along with her own to the sideboard, which sagged in the middle, it was so heavily laden with food and drink.

Ben was engaged in conversation with Theunis van Vechten, so Prue kept watching Pearl. It was, in fact, clear as day she was in love with Will Severn, and clear he was solicitous of her as well. Prue could see in the way her sister moved that every inch of her knew, at every moment, how close or far Will Severn was. What shocked Prue was that Pearl had never told her; and even more than this, that she herself had neither noticed nor suspected her of the slightest intrigue. Her sister was twenty-two years old, and quite pretty, if small. A man accustomed to her peculiarity might easily fall in love with her; and Pearl had always been the largest-hearted of any of them, having been able to love a difficult old woman like Johanna as much as her own father. Why, Prue asked herself, had she never considered the possibility of Pearl being courted? Before she could work it through, Tem brought her a fresh mug of ale. The distraction irritated her, though at the same time, Prue felt relieved to have some new object upon which to concentrate.

“Are you unwell?” Ben asked her, when Theunis chanced to be drawn into another conversation by Simon Dufresne. “I don't know if I've ever seen you so quiet.”

“I'm fine,” Prue said, “only thinking.”

Ben nodded, as if to say it had been quite a year, all around.

When they left that evening, they rode home in silence, with Pearl stretched out in the back of the wagon and watching the dull black sky go past. As they drove along the dark road, Prue thought it was no wonder her neighbors thought the ruined fort haunted; but she felt no ghostly emanations as they drove past it. “Pearl?” she asked, turning around on the seat. She could barely distinguish her darkly clad sister from the wagon bed.

Pearl reached up to touch Prue's sleeve so she would know she'd heard her.

“Why did you not ride down with us after the funeral?”

Pearl opened her arms wide, her hands the brightest objects in sight. How could she answer, in a moving wagon, in such darkness? Prue had no choice but to sit with her question until they arrived home; and as
soon as they did, Pearl scooped up her cat from the hearth, went to her room off the kitchen, and shut the door. She did not offer an explanation the next morning, and Prue felt she could not hound her for one.

Severn's words had done little to comfort the grieving parents, and nothing to assuage the general suspicion Boerum's death had been a sign of worse to come. Everyone but Scipio's apprentice was shrewd enough to avoid saying anything to the Winships or Horsfields, but rumors wafted into the countinghouse, along with the sounds of the port and the odors of fish and smoke. It was a fine bridge, some of the neighbors thought, but it had angered God by its pretension; others seemed to believe, as Prue herself did, to her great shame, that it would not rest until a life had been sacrificed to its construction; one of the New York news sheets ran a column the next day claiming the bridge was a dreadful idea, and any reasonable person had known from the start it would fail—though thus far, excepting its cost, it was going according to plan, and with remarkably little mishap. The sadness of knowing everyone around her had concerns about her bridge yet would not express them to her was nothing compared to the sadness of having lost her daughter; yet the two circumstances were bound up together somehow, and left Prue feeling hollow with grief.

“What I don't understand,” Prue told Tem, as they worked together at the hydraulic press, the steam of its operation bathing their already slick faces in a fine warm mist, “is how they could have turned against it so rapidly. They all signed our petition.”

“People are fickle, Prue,” Tem said, and brought the full weight of her body to bear on the lever. Steam billowed out as the essence of angelica trickled into its bucket. Tem unlocked the lever with an expert swagger.

“But why do they see a connection in the first place?”

“Sorry?”

Prue swept the spent herbs into the slop bucket. “What has Jacob Boerum's death to do with the bridge?”

Tem wiped her sleeve across her brow as Prue laid fresh angelica on the press. “Geographical accident. People can't help looking for a cause.”

“I don't understand why it must be this one.”

“Because it's a great gamble, and people fear it as much as they desire it.” She watched the press grimly as she brought its jaw down. Ever since Marcel's accident, and despite their scorn for the superstitions of others,
they'd both been leery of the machine, as if it were hungry for blood. “I wish I had some better explanation, Prue,” she said. She stepped back and leaned against the nearest post. “But I don't.”

“I think I do,” Prue said. She looked around to make certain no one else was within earshot. “Two men of influence have stood against this bridge from the start, and they both believe in omens.”

Tem said, “No. You cannot—”

“How difficult would it have been to insinuate some passing words of malice that awful day?”

Tem stepped forward again to unlock the machine. “Why don't you banish that thought from your mind,” she said, “because it doesn't do you any good there. Losee and Joe would never—”

“We don't know,” Prue said. And she found that the more she tried to relinquish the thought, the firmer became its grip upon her.

There were no stranger happenings in Brooklyn the rest of that winter than the ordinary spate of turned ankles, rotten potatoes, head colds, and damp firewood. The abutments stood grandly above the gray river, and withstood the onslaught of snow and sleet. Their foundations held firm through the rush of spring thaw, and Prue knew she should be satisfied with the work and pleased the workers would be back among them soon. But she was concerned and preoccupied with the opinions of her neighbors; and perhaps even more so with her sister Pearl. Surely, Prue thought, it should have come as no surprise that Pearl had an interior life as rich as any other's; that she should love and be loved, that she should keep secrets. But that her sister should keep secrets from
her
seemed impossible. In whom else might Pearl confide? She was neither close to nor distant from Tem, and Abiah could still barely read to understand her thoughts; to whom should she have spoken of love but to Prue? Yet Pearl had said nothing, and continued to say nothing, though her absences, explained by “walking,” kept on. Prue supposed it was possible she and Tem had jumped to conclusions; but she did not think so.

She did not, however, question Pearl. She could not articulate why, except that it seemed more correct—perhaps even nobler—to wait for an admission than to demand one. It seemed what propriety required of her, as, after all, Pearl had not been caught doing anything bad, merely
suspected of doing something human. Nevertheless, as she went about her business, Prue ate herself out with care, worrying about Pearl and the bridge and Susannah. March's heavy rains came as an unimaginable relief, for they promised construction would soon recommence and give Prue something singular on which to focus her attention.

I
n March of 1801, the same month in which Thomas Jefferson began to serve as President of the United States, all of Ben and Prue's captains and two thirds of their laborers from the previous year returned to sign up once more for the construction. Prue could spare little time for news beyond her own mill yard. At first she worried where the remainder of the workers had gone; but the returnees drew along many new recruits in their wake. Ben had employment to offer every qualified man who applied, and they came by the score. Ben hired fifty more than he had the previous year, though it meant they would have to spill over into Isaiah's fallow field, a circumstance bound to make Patience scowl. As there was still a balance to be struck between Prue's desire to have a hand in the construction and the workers' native (and, Ben said, understandable) distrust of a forewoman, she would continue to share her responsibilities with Marcel Dufresne. Marcel was delighted with the arrangement. Though his desire to become a rectifier was still likely to be thwarted, to manage a crew at work on the bridge was a man's job, a far sight better than totting up sums in the ledgers. He spoke nothing of this to Isaiah, only to Ben.

Instead of two divisions, the workers split into four that season, and Matthias Osier and Alphonsus Weatherspoon became foremen to help manage the extra men. Two crews would continue to work on the abutments, jobs that required ever more refined skills as the workers progressed closer to the tops of the structures and needed to begin chiseling
out decorative scrolls and vines in the stone. The other two would begin to construct the twin levers on the iron foundation rods that had been set into the faces of the abutments the autumn before. Because there were fewer men on each task, the work seemed to progress more slowly, though with the same care and attention as previously. Ed and Pete Domer proved to have an innate understanding of the method for constructing the levers, so by May, Prue had promoted them to captains of the Brooklyn lever's team. They were both young, and had had little good fortune and less recognition in their lives until that point; when Prue announced their new positions, their boyish faces lit up with pride.

As spring progressed, the levers began to emerge from the abutments, far more slowly than Prue had imagined. The method they'd devised for the second model proved sound at the larger scale; but to move members as heavy as those the bridge required simply took longer than either Prue or Ben had known. For each nascent lever, Ben had built its crane, employing the pulleys to allow one man to do the lifting work of a dozen. No matter how well the men greased the ropes and oiled the machines, these screeched loudly enough to wake the dead, and the harbor seals that had been accustomed to sunning themselves on the wharves moved, barking and snuffling, down to Red Hook. With great care, and with his ears stuffed with cotton wool and his head turned aside to avoid the awful sound, the crane operator would crank to draw a single piece of shaped timber up off the ground or a barge. These pieces of timber were unwieldy, but as the crane man cranked, two other men would guide the crane's tip with ropes, thus swinging the timber close to its proper alignment.