Brookland (24 page)

Matty Winship stood dry-eyed and unshaven beside Roxana's grave the next morning. Everyone called it a sign that the first crocuses had shot up in the Congregational churchyard; a sign of what, Prue didn't know. All Roxana's lost infants were buried at the Reformed Dutch, but Matty had chosen this spot out of some fondness for or gratitude to Will Severn. Abiah had tried to convince Matty to shave and had laid out a clean shirt, collar, and cuffs for him, but he had put on the same dirty clothes from the night before. His daughters stood by crying—and Prue felt herself part of the chorus in some tragic ancient play—but he did not even shed a tear when he shoveled the first spadeful of dirt onto Roxana's hollow-sounding coffin. It was a terrible sadness to have lost her mother, but to see her sprightly father so evacuated of himself only compounded the loss.

All that day he stood tall, his large, dirty head bowed in deference, as friends, neighbors, customers, employees, slaves, and even his banker, Timothy Stover, came to offer their sympathy. Many brought gifts, as if, Prue thought, one could barter even a peculiar mother's love for some material thing: Peg Dufresne made half a dozen baked pears, and hid them in the cellar to prevent their being eaten by visitors; Ben must have sat up half the night punching holes in a sheet of tin, and presented Prue with a homemade lantern whose punches represented a delicate filigree of vines. Prue stuck a candle into its bottom and set it in the spot where the cooling board had lately lain. Could they have gone out to the shed together, this might have provided some comfort; but she did not long allow herself to consider the possibility. Will Severn took her aside that morning to offer his friendship and any help he might give. She could not
bear the cedar scent of his clothes, the weight of his palm on her upper arm, or the aching sympathy his countenance betrayed, and she ducked away from him as soon as possible. She later saw him speaking to Pearl, who looked at him forthrightly, nodded from time to time, and kept turning new leaves of her book in passionate debate. Prue wondered at her self-possession. There stood a girl not even thirteen, blighted since birth and stunted in physical growth, who had recently lost her mother; yet despite all this, and the awkwardness of her method of conversation, she comported herself better than many an adult.

Prue was half frightened and half proud of her father's detachment and fortitude. She imagined he was waiting until he was alone to cry out to the heavens; and she set herself to wrap up her sniveling by day's end, in the event he needed her comfort later on.

He did not, however, appear to desire comfort; only sleep. When at last the house emptied, he sat his daughters and Abiah down at table. “I am sorry, Miss Browne, that your first year with my family should involve so much extra work, resulting from such sad events.”

“I, too, am sorry,” she said. She looked exhausted.

“I shall remunerate you fairly for your toil. I only wish it could have been in celebration of some happier event. Perhaps next time, it'll be my Prue's wedding.”

Prue was too tired to fret about whether this contained a double meaning.

“Girls,” he said, addressing Prue and Tem, who was slouched so deeply in her chair Prue thought she might slip out of it, “Mr. Horsfield can manage the distillery for a short while, but it is unfair to leave it under his sole management for long. I'll return to work tomorrow. You may do as you wish, but I'd like you back soon. The work will do you good.”

Tem curled even lower into her chair.

What shall I do?
Pearl asked. Prue had to crane her neck to read it.

“What do you mean?” their father asked, turning one palm up to face the ceiling.

What shall I do, to eese my Sorrow?

“You'll do as you always do, Pearlie. You'll focus on your reading and your needlework. Perhaps you'll be a good girl and help Abiah; she's quite a lot on her hands.” Pearl's face was darkening by the moment, and their
father's was following suit. “Do you want me to set you a task, gell? Teach yourself the French language. I'll bring you back a primer from my next trip to New York.”

& what shall I do with it? With whm may I speak this French besides the Chardonnen
^s
?

Tem buried her face in both hands, and Prue wanted to do the same; her father and Pearl had only, to her knowledge, had that single altercadon three years since, but it had put the fear of God in Prue.

“What are you asking?” Matty demanded. “What is it you're trying to say?”

That I want to work. That I want some Jobb to compleat
.

He shook his head and let out a great exhalation. Prue had not realized until then how he stank of liquor. “Pearl,” he said. “I may not be a wealthy man, but I am mighty comfortable. None of you
has
to work; Prue and Tem want to, so they can carry on the family business, but if they did not want to, you would all three be women of leisure.”

Pearl flipped angrily to a new page to retort, then stopped herself. She closed the book, worked the pencil through its hasp, cast Prue a reproachful glance, and left the table. “Well,” their father said. He looked as if he'd been stung.

“I'll be back at work tomorrow,” Prue said, and also pushed back from the table. Pearl's expression had made her shiver.

Tem said, “I, as well.” They both kissed him on his stubbled, juniper-scented cheek, and went upstairs, Tem with her eyes wide in confusion.

Pearl was sitting on Prue's bed, and had lit a candle in the new lantern.
Damn his eyes
, she wrote when her sisters came in.

“Shh,” Prue said. She felt it was she herself had been damned. “This is harder on him than you know”

“D'you think he'll cry now?” Tem asked.

“I do. I hope so.”

Yet half an hour later, after they heard his two boots fall to the floor and the bed ropes creak beneath his weight, his room fell silent.

The next day was awkward at the distillery, but Prue would rather have been busy than have all her time to think, as Pearl did.

Thenceforward, their father was a man transformed. His care for the distillery was as meticulous as before, but the animating spirit had left it. He had always taken care of his appearance and worn clothes of good
stuffs, although wort or basil oil might spill on them. Now he did not even brush his hair before drawing it back in its tail, and he sported a scrubby, grizzled beard. He no longer bothered to wear a cravat, so the neck of his shirt gaped open, and his coats started to wear thin at the elbows. One afternoon in the brewhouse, Prue overheard John Putnam say to one of his underlings, “Looks like Mr. Winship's out to win a new bride.” Prue would have given her teeth to be able to strike him; instead, she stood up to her full height—admittedly, not very impressive, but the best she could muster—and stared him down. He later apologized to her, after the mash room had closed for the night.

Each day, Prue told herself grief took a good while to heal. As that winter blossomed into spring, and as spring passed into summer and summer to fall, she continued to miss her mother—or the mother she remembered from her childhood, who had been half melancholic and half minx. She understood, however, it was the natural order of things to lose one's parents; and she could see how it might be more difficult to lose one's chosen mate. Still, she kept waiting for her father's reserve to crack. All her life, he had been a man of good spirits and occasional temper; but Roxana's death had sucked away all his humor and fire. He no longer seemed to care if a batch of spirit came up proof, or if Tem, on a dare, climbed out onto the sails of the windmill. Surely, Prue thought, some circumstance would arise to raise his hackles, or make him laugh or cry; but whatever that circumstance might have been, it never seemed to come. In the meanwhile, Prue learned from Israel Horsfield that her father had told the truth about the Junto: Those men of even moderate learning were meeting at the Ferry Tavern Wednesday nights, to discuss such topics as whether Brooklyn should incorporate, the likelihood of bridging the East River, the necessity for organized street sweeping, and the practicability of forming a professional watch and a fire company. “Everyone is giving his all—who knew old Simon Dufresne still had so much vinegar in him,” Israel told her when she accosted him out smoking a cigar by the retaining wall in the middle of the afternoon. “But your father never seems to do his reading, and contributes little to the discussion, except to second another man's point.” He picked a stray fleck of tobacco from his tongue. He was squinting at her, either in response to the water's glare or as if not certain how much he could divulge. “Of course we all have sympathy for him. My children
were much younger when my Amy died, and I didn't know if I could last a week without her.”

“But you did. You have.”

“Not without some heartache, and hard work as well. So we must pray your father turns the bend. We give him every opportunity at the club—offer him the choice of the next week's topic, every week. But he never takes us up on it. I still have my hopes the business'll turn him around.”

“I, too,” Prue said, then nodded, as if the double affirmative could make it so.

M
atty Winship went on for years in the half-waking state he'd fallen into after Roxana's death. Though his blithe spirits had vanished, he maintained all his faculties, and fulfilled his responsibilities to the letter. Then, one bright morning in November of 1794, he came looking for Prue in the stillhouse, where she was shouting at the men to remove some wood from one of the fires. She had been delayed that morning, as she'd been engrossed in a report in the
New-York Journal
of Mr. John Jay's mission to avert war with England; and now she was in a foul temper. “Miss Prue,” Matty said. She looked up and saw him standing there polite as a suitor, with a tasting beaker in his hand. “A word, please.”

She had been sharp with the workers a moment before, but softened her tone, and stepped aside to speak with him.

“May I ask you to taste this?” he said, holding it out to her.

She glanced around; the men were all watching, but there was no time to go outside. She sniffed at the beaker. Its aroma was unremarkable, but the liquor had a peculiar harshness as it went down her gullet. She sipped it again, and noticed a distinct burnt flavor.

“Ah,” he said. She must have pulled a face. “You notice it, too.”

“It's off,” she said.

“Five hundred gallons,” he said, shaking his head.

“No doubt the next'll be better.”

He continued to shake his head no. “I fear I've lost the trick of it,” he
said, as quietly as he could and still be heard above the room's roaring fires.

“Everyone gets feints every now and again. Even you.” She felt odd, offering him comfort—it had always been his job to assure her ruined product was not a personal failing but built into the cost of manufacture. It was his money, after all, about to be dumped into the straits.

He looked preoccupied, and didn't answer her.

“Leave it for now,” Prue said. “I'll finish this morning's rectifying, and you'll try again in the afternoon.”

He let out a plosive breath and said, “Very well. I'll take over for you here.” He put out a hand to touch her shoulder.

When she went to the rectifying house, she feared his feints had been due to some defect in the essences or the stills. But by the time the bell rang announcing lunch, she had made progress toward another five hundred serviceable gallons of Matthias Winship & Daughters gin, and expected it could go down to the casking house by day's end. After the lunch of pottage Abiah brought down from the house, Matty went back to the rectifying room, and ruined a hundred gallons of Prue's batch. Then he disappeared for the remainder of the afternoon. Some of the men said they'd seen him walk south on the Ferry Road. Prue would not have found him had she not borrowed a new English book on the varieties of bridge architecture from Cornelis Luquer and wanted to return it at the end of the day. Dusk was already falling, but when she rounded the bend into the Luquers' mill yard, she spied what she believed was her father's form, squatting on the roof above the trash rack, a few feet out over the straits. He must have had a handful of pebbles, as he was pitching something into the water. Prue wondered if her eyes were deceiving her—the river was flowing briskly and pebbles were unlikely to skip. “Father?” she called out, but he couldn't hear her above the current. “Daddy?” she said, more loudly, and moving closer.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, then settled back facing the water. When she crept onto the small roof behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, he still didn't turn around. “Feints again,” he said.

She had difficulty hearing him above the rush of the water and the plash of the Luquers' breast-wheel. “I know. But what of it?”