Brookland (31 page)

Prue was aware of a slight nervous stoop in her own posture. “It wasn't a dream born of fancy. You know I have studied the art of building ever since I could read, and I have been considering some of the laws of natural philosophy since last summer, since I saw the springboard Cornelis built over the millpond. The dream merely showed me the manner in which I might bring these laws to bear on a structure.” She blew on a spoonful of her stew as if this gesture could protect her from her sisters' scrutiny. “Or perhaps it did not show me, but I believe it has pointed me in the correct direction.”

“No other bridge has met with Brookland's approval,” Tem said, her tone still combative. “And the plans have been put forth by some of the great engineers of our time. Why should yours fare differently?”

“Because all the previous proposals would have blocked traffic on the straits. The bridge I envision would cross the East River in a single span.”

Tem slapped the table again. “That's impossible.”

Prue half wished to yell at her and half to go upstairs and sulk. Instead of either she said, “I haven't worked it out mathematically, but I believe it can be done.”

Pearl wrote,
I'm good at Mathematicks. I shall help
. Prue didn't especially want her help.

“No. Prue,” Tem said, “you aren't thinking.” She drained her glass of milk. “I'm no expert, but I do know that to build an arch requires a latticework, a wooden centering beneath it, to support it while you build. A
centering
, until the keystone is in place. Can you imagine the size of the support you speak of? It's not possible. It would block the entire river for months.”

“This bridge wouldn't need a centering. That's much of the beauty of the plan.”

Tem looked skeptically at Pearl, who was scrutinizing Prue. Tem said, “Well, I think you're barking mad. That's my opinion.”

Pearl put her spoon down, and turned to a new page.
Neither here nor there
, she wrote.
But P, I thnk every Arch in History,—every last Corse of Bricks over a Doorway,—has been built on a wooden Centering, wh
^ch
was dismantl'd when the Mortar was sett
.

“Yes,” Prue said, “you are both correct. But simply because something always has been done doesn't mean it must be. I don't believe anyone else has yet arrived at the method I propose; but surely Euclid and Sir Isaac Newton will solve the conundrum, if I put it to them?”

Pearl flared her nostrils, less scornfully than their mother would have done.

Prue had known they would be skeptical; this was why she had hesitated to explain herself. But if the bridge was ever to be built, she would have to learn to steel herself against such doubt. She further recognized that the only evidence against the idea's lunacy was to have witnessed the vision, and she did not yet have means to show it to her sisters. She
would be patient. “Tem,” she asked, “do you imagine you could look after things awhile? So I might find out?”

“ ‘Things.' “

Do'n't be difficult
, Pearl wrote.
Or course she means t
^h
Distillery
.

Tem exhaled through her nostrils again. “For how long?” she asked.

“I don't know. Not an age.”

The fire popped, and outside, some horses walked past at a clop, their riders singing:

Yes, gin's the man,
If any can,
To steal a man from 'is bran-dy!

The men burst out laughing.

Prue said, “There's no reason you couldn't manage. You know the works as well as I.”

“But I haven't your disposition.”

“I always thought you considered that a blessing.” Prue also thought, in passing, her sister hadn't her intelligence, either; which wasn't fair.

Tem cracked a wan smile and said, “Hmm.”

“I realize I'm asking a favor of you. But I think it will be worthwhile. At least I see no other way to prove my idea reasonable. Have we an agreement? For a few days only, to begin.”

Tem took and chewed a mouthful of food, then said, “I shall not be held responsible if a batch goes feints or the stillhouse catches fire.”

“Certainly not, unless it's your fault.”

Tem was regarding her with a frank, inquisitive expression that told Prue her sister found her both pedantic and odd; but this was not news. “Prue,” she said.

“If there was an emergency, of course I'd come see to it.”

“Is feints an emergency? Where should I find you?”

“I don't know yet,” Prue said. “I can't figure it out unless you give me leave to do so.”

Tem had the fingers of one strong hand splayed on the table. She touched their tips to the surface, each in turn, then said, “Very well. I shall never get to be master, otherwise.”

Prue leaned over to hug her, and Tem shied away, as if to be caught doing her sister a good deed might sully her reputation.

I wold help you all I can
, Pearl repeated. Once again, Prue chose not to respond.

After clearing the dishes, Prue went upstairs, in case its two wide, low-ceilinged rooms might conceal some hitherto undisclosed spot in which she might work out a plan for her bridge. There was, in fact, only Roxana's fold-out desk, in what was now Tem's room. It was no wider than Prue's hips or deeper than her forearm; a piece of furniture Abiah slapped at with a dust rag only when it became so encrusted with soot and spiderweb it made one's teeth shake to look at it. Prue sat down at it anyway, pulled out its desiccated blotter, and tried resting her elbows on it. The wind was now rattling the windowpanes. Prue had seen her mother sit in this spot only to reconcile the household accounts in her haphazard manner; she never wrote a letter, and never received one. Whom did she have to write to, when she had turned on her family and made no friends in her chosen home? Wondering what this desk might have been used for by some more outgoing mother, Prue thought Roxana's life had been sadder than she herself had realized.

She rested her forehead on her palms, the heels of her hands pressing into the sockets of her eyes, and watched the pattern of dim aurora borealis as she thought through the buildings of her distillery. She did not imagine she could plan a bridge in her office, with Tem and Isaiah wandering in and out. The storerooms were quiet, but too dark.

The assembly room would do, however. It was large enough to pace; and Isaiah and Tem might at least think twice before coming to question her. It would be no trouble to have a table and chair brought in, and she could move them to the side when she needed to gather her men.

Tem's bedroom was chilly and dark, and it was time to light the upstairs fires, but Prue felt anchored to the prim desk by iron weights. She heard Tem speaking downstairs; it sounded like a monologue, but one could never tell, from any distance, if Pearl was participating. When Prue sat at this desk, the eaves were so close to her head and shoulders, they almost forced her to duck down. She felt again how strait her mother must have found this house, and wondered if Pearl did as well. No, she knew Pearl did—she was always volunteering for whatever project was at
hand, always escaping to the rectory, and Prue thought if she did not keep an eye on her, Pearl would try to go help Tem run the distillery this next short while. But what could be done? It was tragic she'd been born as she had—tragic, and Prue's fault, no matter if their mother had thought otherwise—but Prue had obviously long since lost God's ear. She could not change Pearl's circumstances simply by wishing to do so.

Prue thought if she could bridge the distance between here and the Other Side; if she could build a monument to expiate her sin and her folly, and to embody the love she had borne her parents, who'd crossed over too soon, before she was ripe to understand them; if she might take this wealth of money and skill her father had bequeathed her, and
do
something with it, for the public good and perhaps to the general wonderment—if all, if any, of these circumstances might come to pass, Will Severn could keep to himself, and Ben could remain in the wilderness, and she could never move a hair's breadth closer to knowing where the dead resided, yet she would be happy the rest of her days.

W
ednesday the twenty-fourth of January, 1798, dawned clear. Prue disliked looking around her for signs—it seemed almost as childish as fearing the shades clamored for gin in Manhattan—but she couldn't help seeing the day as auspicious for a new endeavor. She went down Joralemon's Lane before anyone else in her house had even awakened.

She lit the stove in the assembly hall first thing, then went to Owen's shed to retrieve his broom. When Isaiah arrived at seven, he knocked, opened the door, and stood blinking at her, as if he could not understand what he saw “Prue?” he said. “Is aught amiss?”

“No,” she replied, but he was obviously wondering about the broom. “I need a quieter place to work for a spell. I thought I'd set up here.”

He removed his hat and pushed the brown hair back from his brow. “Is something wrong with our office?”

“No, but I need a bit of privacy.”

“I see,” he said. He unbuttoned his coat.

“I shall put up a table and chair, and when we need to use the room, we'll move them aside. I have some reading to do, and then some ciphering and drawing. For a structure.”

Without waiting for her to finish, Isaiah said, “I apologize if I'm dull, Prue. Baby Joan has the colic, and we don't get three hours' sleep.”

“I'm sorry,” Prue said. She had no direct experience of the colic, as Tem had been the last infant she'd known, and she'd been unusually sturdy; but Isaiah did look awful.

Isaiah said, “Do you require my assistance?”

She looked around at the plain walls, and out at the fine view down to the water and up to the cooling house. “Might you take Joe Loosely's shipment to him?”

“Of course, but you know he prefers to receive his goods from you.”

“Tell him I'll bring his next myself.”

Isaiah nodded. “I'll bring the coffee down, soon 's the stove's lit.” He went out, and up the stairs to the office; a moment later she heard him banging the grounds out from the previous evening's pot. Shortly afterward, the mill bell rang, calling everyone to work. Prue found herself imagining Tem, supervising the morning's mashing in her galoshes; and it seemed unwise to leave her in command of anything. Yet Tem was never so foolish as Prue thought her—she was more high-spirited than truly irresponsible—and, Prue reminded herself, a bridge would be worth a great deal of inconvenience.

A quarter hour later she walked north to the carpenter's shed, and found him measuring out boards to replace some worn latticework over the cooling floor. Isaiah had hired the fellow, Jean Boulanger, only a few months before; he still regarded Tem and Prue with some disbelief. She asked how long he would need to build a simple table, as large as the one she shared with Tem and Isaiah, for the assembly room.

Jean frowned at her and checked his measurement.

“It is a matter of some importance, Mr. Boulanger.”

“A proper table?” he asked. “If it can be a plank on sawhorses, I can get wood from van Vechten today.”

“Good,” Prue said. “You finish that work for the cooling floor, and I'll go up to Theunis's this morning. You'll let me know the moment the wood arrives?”

He nodded, but the trace of his frown remained.

Gray-haired Scipio Jones waved to her as she stepped outside. She waved back, elated at the prospect of beginning that afternoon. She began to list the items she would need to borrow or acquire: a chair from the house, compasses and a protractor, a straight edge, a right angle. But it was idiotic to think she'd sit down Thursday morning and begin to plot and draw. She may have had the shape of the thing clearly in mind, but visions didn't tell a person how high an arch would need to soar above high water to admit a tall ship, nor what stone and mortar would serve
best for an abutment, nor how wide a roadway must be for two carriages to pass abreast and not mow down the foot traffic.

She had a great deal to learn, and thought she required a collaborator with a thorough understanding of mathematics and the laws governing natural philosophy—in a word, Ben. As she could not, however, separate this practical need from what had grown into almost a full-time longing for his scent and the cowlick at the back of his hair, she tried to put him from her mind. Instead, she went up to the countinghouse, took a nip of Isaiah's strong coffee, and decided to head up to the sawmill.

Isaiah was in the yard ticking off casks against his list, while the blinkered drays stamped and burred in the cold air. “I can take Joe's shipment after all,” Prue told him. “I need to go to van Vechten's.”

Isaiah held his index finger up, then returned to his list. When he'd finished, he folded the papers into the crook of his arm. “Hang it, it's quiet this morning. Let's both go.”