Brookland (17 page)

Here, too, a few people tittered in agreement. Pearl worked open the top button of her coat and began fishing for her book as he went on. “Anyone can love that which is intrinsically lovely, but nobody, without God's grace in his soul, can love one who is not to some extent lovely. It is mother-love where one loves unlovely things, for a babe is not lovely. It is nothing at first; it is all yet to be: But the mother discerns wonderful things in the child. There is a love that can love beauty, and nothing else; there is a love that can love excellence, and nothing else; there is a love that can love a being that is without excellence or beauty, and love him into it. It is divine love that here I mean. I will read you the next verse. Men and women, you are in danger of losing your souls on this verse more than on any other part of the whole Bible. More people make shipwreck on this passage of Scripture than on any other. The whole shore along here is thick with wrecks.”

Pearl touched her sister's sleeve. Prue looked over to see she had written:
Is this what we've been missing all along, w. y
^e
Domine?

“No,” Prue whispered.

Then he's good
, Pearl wrote on a new page.

The people beneath were silent, and Prue could hear his pages rustling. “ ‘I say unto you,' ” he read, his voice growing fuller by the moment, “ ‘love your enemies.'

“ ‘Oh yes,' say many, ‘if they confess, if they acknowledge their wrongs, I will forgive them, and love them.' Well, let us read on.

“ ‘Bless them that curse you,'—and
while
they are cursing you—'do
good to them that hate you,'—and whose hatred is burning like fire—‘and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father, which is in Heaven'; for that,” he said, “that is the spirit which is to make you the children of God. ‘For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good,' on liars, on thieves, on murderers, on those who betray their families and friends; for though they are benighted and corrupt, yet are they not human beings, who have eternity before them? If God does not hold out hope to them, who will? And if God does not love them, who shall? ‘—and sendeth rain on the just as the unjust.' ”

Pearl had let the book drop down on its chain, but she was holding tight to the pencil in her small hand. Prue could picture Severn's face before her, his brown eyes bright with emotion. She wondered if it was possible to love a man on such short acquaintance.

“If all farmers had rain according to their personal merits,” he continued, “there would be queer farming abroad.” Again, people laughed. Prue thought, if Pappy was looking down from Heaven, he was considering ways to punish this infidel. “But God sends rain on the just and the unjust, because by nature as well as by spiritual grace He seeks perpetually to win men, through gratitude, to service and to love.

“ ‘For if ye love them which love you,' ” he read, “ ‘what reward have ye?'

“Why, that is commerce, exchange, shilling for shilling. Anybody can do that.

“ ‘Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only,'—that is, if you greet only those that belong to your church, or think as you think, or act as you act—'do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.'

“And how is that?” he continued. Could he feel her there, above him? Could he feel the glow of holy love awakening in her breast? “It is by the temper of divine benevolence. No man is a Christian because he is a professor of religion. No man is a Christian because he loves to go to church, or read his Bible, or say his prayers. No man is a Christian who has not the spirit of Christ; and the spirit of Christ is a spirit of beneficence. If you are tenderhearted, if you are gentle, if you are kind, if you are slow to anger, if you are easy to forgive, if you love your enemies, and even those that spitefully use you and persecute you, then you have Christ's spirit, and you belong to God's family, and you will someday, not long from now, be raised up with Him in bliss. Let us rise.”

And there was a rustle of skirts and shoes, and the benches creaking below. Pearl was shaking her head no. “What?” Prue asked.

I shu'n't have done it
, Pearl wrote.

“It's done,” Prue whispered. The warbling notes of a hymn began to rise up through the floorboards. “You'll make up for it some other way.”

Prue and Pearl remained in the countinghouse, safely beneath the level of the windows, until they heard the last parishioner shut the assembly room door. In almost any other family, Prue thought, a visit to church would be considered either salutary or a plain necessity; only in theirs was it a transgression. She felt giddy with her secret, and could see Pearl did as well. They kept it to themselves all week and returned the following Sunday, and week after week thereafter. Looking back as an adult, Prue knew her parents must have suspected their destination, given the regularity of their disappearances; but at the time, she felt safely swaddled in her secret, protected by it from anything unpleasant about the world or her own character. She felt Mr. Severn was opening up the heavens for her.

Late that winter, when the river was frozen halfway across, Johanna's bruise hardened into an egg-shaped cyst with tentacles that snaked off toward her nose and up into her hair. Prue believed she had seen the growth forming all that while beneath Johanna's white muslin cap, but at last it protruded unmistakably. The morning Prue's mother first saw it, she questioned Johanna about it, but Johanna would give no answer but to draw her shawl closer around her shoulders and shake her head. Roxana ran out for Dr. de Bouton. It was a bright, bitter Saturday morning; Roxana opened and shut the door quickly, but still let in a fine spray of glittering snow. When she returned, she reported in a low tone that de Bouton's servant had had to rouse him from bed. Prue and Pearl had taken over the preparation of breakfast in her absence, and she had nothing to do but pace the kitchen floor. “How could we not have known?” she asked of no one in particular as they waited for the doctor to finish his examination. The fire popped and settled.

Prue kept silent. She knew she ought to have spoken up in the autumn, when first she'd seen the bruise; but she could not undo what was done.

The doctor took his time with Johanna, who answered his questions in her loud, cracked voice. When at last de Bouton emerged, he closed
Johanna's door softly behind him. His woolly hair was standing on end; Roxana had allowed him no time to comb it, and he appeared not to have slept the night before. “Should you go upstairs?” he asked Pearl. Pearl gripped on to Prue's hand, as if this could prevent her exile.

“Let them hear whatever you have to say,” their father said. Tem was fastening the buttons of her work vest as if nothing were amiss.

De Bouton looked down at his boots before turning to Matty. “Your woman has developed a lesion to the brain. I know not how long it festered there before appearing, but from its form I deduce it is cancerous in nature, and not some more benign growth.”

Roxana raised her hands to her mouth and walked to the window.

“Can such a tumor be removed?” Matty asked. Prue knew de Bouton had excised a growth from the breast of one of the van Vechten daughters, who still lived and breathed, though she was ever in poor health.

The doctor took a breath and stifled a cough. “Perhaps in some cases, yes. But I fear that both its location and Johanna's advanced age make its removal unadvisable. I fear, quite simply, that I should kill her in attempting to effect a cure.” Prue heard her mother crying behind her, but felt she could not move with Pearl gripped on so tight. Prue's fingers began to go numb. “I am sorry, Mrs. Winship,” he continued. “I know she is dear to you, that you have treated her more kindly than many a servant, let alone a slave.”

“Indeed,” Roxana said quietly.

“What may we do to ease her suffering?” Matty asked.

Dr. de Bouton shook his head. “There is little to be done. Cool compresses, the medicine I have given you for headache, clear broth.”

“Very well,” Matty said. He slipped some coins from his pocket into de Bouton's palm. “We are all sorry to have disturbed you so early.”

Dr. de Bouton bowed to Roxana before letting himself out into the biting cold.

It was a workday; both Tem and Prue were dressed and ready for the fermenting room, in whose operations Tem was at the time being trained. Pearl at last let go of Prue's hand and ran to their mother. Many went to them and put his arms around them both. To Prue he said, “This is terrible news. Will you be able to perform your work today?”

Prue felt a chill flicker up her spine; she could not deduce the correct answer. “Yes, sir. I suppose so.”

“Good, then. Go tell Mr. Horsfield what has transpired, and that I shall be down as soon as I am able. Then off to Mr. Fortune with you. You, too, lambkin,” he said to Tem.

Tem caught Prue's eye, then looked pointedly to the pot that still bubbled over the fire. Prue shook her head no, took their coats from their hooks, and led her sister out the front way to avoid the knot by the kitchen door.

“A fine morning it'll be without any breakfast,” Tem grumbled.

The air was so cold, Prue felt it weighing against her chest. “We'll manage.” The doctor had left the gate open, and Prue pulled it to. The girls started down the ravine in silence. Some of their father's workers were also late, and hurried past to arrive at the distillery before them.

“Will Johanna die, then?” Tem asked after a moment.

“I believe so.”

Tem exhaled a vast plume of breath. “I can't imagine it.”

“Perhaps we shall keep her awhile longer yet,” Prue said, though in her guilty heart she knew she half wished they would not.

She sent Tem straight down to Mr. Fortune, and herself went to the countinghouse to speak to Mr. Horsfield. As she climbed the open stairs, she could not help the thrill that coursed through her body. The next day, she would follow this same route to hear Mr. Severn's sermon; and surely his words would, however unwittingly, build a shelter in which she might take refuge from her guilt and fear.

I
n the second year of Tem's apprenticeship, the distillery outgrew its bounds. Matty Winship did not know whom to thank for his good fortune—the swarms of new immigrants, now escaping the bloodshed in France, who had to spend for everything they desired; the federal government, newly installed in Manhattan and thirsty for gin; or simply all those who'd suffered the privations of the war and now loosened their purse strings in the general atmosphere of prosperity—but he did not think he'd be able to meet demand for his liquor two years down the pike. On hearing the news, Tem began strutting around, certain her own contribution had played some pivotal role in this success. Prue, by contrast, couldn't sleep for two nights, so vivid were her fantasies of customers whose gin had not arrived coming to pound on their door. By the Friday of the week, she was so tired, objects seemed to wiggle when she stared at them, and when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she resembled a raccoon. Israel Horsfield called her out from the brewhouse midmorning, and took her up to the countinghouse to talk. He was a tall, slim man with angular features, and as kind as she knew he was, Prue worried he planned to chastise her.

“What've I done?” she asked as they entered the office.

He had a tight grin on his face that disturbed her more than a frown would have, but he said nothing. He closed the door behind them, and took his seat at the great desk. As her seat was beside his, she took Tem's, across the table. Out the window, she could see men unloading empty casks from two barges.

“What've I done, Mr. Horsfield?” she repeated.

“Nothing, Prue,” he said. “Your father's a bit worried about you, though.”

“Why so?”

His grin relaxed and broadened, and he more closely resembled Ben. “You've been looking wan of late. He's concerned—well, it's a difficult subject to raise, which is why it's somehow fallen to me; but we're all concerned you may have lost your heart somewhere.”

“My heart?” she asked. She wondered if he meant Ben or Mr. Severn, and her cheeks began to prickle with warmth. “No, sir. I can't sleep for worrying about the orders we won't be able to fill.”

Israel closed his eyes and raised his palm to his head. “Should have known. You're just like your mother, a'en't you?” Prue wasn't flattered. “I'll make you a coffee,” he said. “You could use it.”

“Thank you,” she said, and went back to looking out the window. She tried to count the casks and failed. She heard Israel banging grounds from the pot into the slop bucket.

“Prudie Winship, it means business is good. You should be pleased. Do you know what your father plans to do?”