Brookland (43 page)

Mr. Hendrik Stryker's letter arrived a week after the meeting with the mayor and aldermen. Stryker had spoken to the governor and had his permission to second Mr. Willemsen's enthusiasm for a viewing of the
entire plan. He requested Ben to bring up his drawings and model bridge for presentation as soon as business would allow. He added a note at bottom about his personal fondness for Matty Winship, which Prue considered a benediction.

Ben would present his proposal at Albany; yet however old-fashioned the men of the legislature might prove, he and Prue both thought they should be able to view her as a participant in the design without suffering bouts of apoplexy. Prue also wanted Pearl to accompany them, as she believed the pathos of her condition should bode well for their suit.

“And she played an important role in bringing the plan to its current state,” Ben added.

“Yes,” Prue answered. “That is the other reason why she should come.”

At a practical level, this meant Tem would be left, with Isaiah, in charge of the works. “For how long a period?” she asked.

“A week, or perhaps a fortnight,” Prue said.

“I don't know,” she responded, and turned to look out the window toward the loading dock. She was still mightily peeved about Mr. Fischer. Isaiah cast Prue a glance of frustration, but did not speak up.

“You've done it before,” Prue said, “and nothing ill befell you.”

“You were always nearby,” she replied, her back still to them and her arms crossed.

“And you never once sought me out. Isaiah will be here, as well.”

Tem said, “I, too, should like to travel.”

Isaiah let out an exasperated breath through his nose, and began patting down his pockets for his tobacco.

“It'll hardly be a pleasure tour,” Prue said. “Besides, people who have business that depends upon them don't travel. Father left the works only once in thirty years.”

“And you went with 'im,” Tem muttered.

“Before you were born!”

“You know,” Isaiah added, unrolling his pouch, “ 'tis said to be a family charm keeps the place from burning to the ground as Joralemon's distillery did. Without one Winship on the premises, I can't say what'd happen.”

Tem wheeled back around to face him. “Is that true?” she demanded. “I've not heard it.”

Isaiah kept packing his pipe. “Common knowledge.”

Tem looked skeptically toward Prue, who nodded. “Hang it all, then,” she said. “I'll stay, you superstitious louts. You'll excuse me if I head off to the stillroom and make certain it doesn't burn down.” She left the door ajar behind her, and galloped down the open stairs, calling a colorful stream of invective out into the air.

Prue continued to watch Isaiah try to start his unwilling pipe from the tinderbox.

“What?” he asked between puffs.

“Izzy, there's no such tale.”

He finally got a good start on the thing and said, “What of it? She's staying. The warehouses call.” Chuckling to himself, he went outside.

Prue was both pleased and surprised to find him capable of such humor.

Since that journey overland with her father twenty-odd years previously, she had never been farther than Wallabout Bay or across the river to her New York customers and the bank. Of course, she knew the geography of the region from the map they kept in the countinghouse, and could imagine how long it would take to deliver a shipment of gin to (or receive a shipment of empty casks from) Flatbush, Peekskill, Weehawken, or Trenton. Yet despite her proximity to the water and her absolute dependence upon it as a means of transporting her wares, she had never spent more than half an hour on its surface. “The prospect of sailing up Henry Hudson's River therefore pleased me,” she wrote to Recompense:

In my girlhood, my father had read me accounts of th'exploration of this river, with its awesome granite cliffs & clusters of native villages. When your father had gone northwards, I'd imagined him amidst such unspoiled scenery, & in the low, drifting river fog of early morning.

Pearl had the laundress wash their stockings and chemises, and herself starched their collars stiff as plates. Prue left Isaiah detailed notes about the workers' payment and what provisions he should apportion to the slaves; traveled back and forth across the river to settle her accounts, both credit and debt; and did her best to finish training Simon's grandnephew, Marcel Dufresne, to work the herb press without her supervision. Prue considered him a gift from Heaven—a slight, delicate creature,
but unusually smart, and with a sensitive nose and palate. Had he not come, she did not think she would have been able to go to Albany, as rectifying could not have continued during her absence. Prue also spent time contemplating her father's travel box, which still smelled of him, though it had sat empty but for cobwebs and a lone collar stay up under the eaves for decades. She wanted to crawl in and simply breathe that evanescent odor, but instead she placed their folded dresses in along with books, blank paper, and her father's travel desk, knowing these relics of the workaday world would dispel that last trace of his scent. Pearl added sufficient supplies for a few weeks' needlework, extra pencils, and a bar of store-bought soap. The small bridge and drawings would be wrapped twice in oilcloth, as they had been to go to New York, and bound with rawhide thongs. Prue thought she might pray over them as well. She and Ben resolved not to test the model bridge thoroughly until they had used it for show, as they could not take it to Albany if they discovered how much weight could break it, or if weeks out in the elements destroyed its fine color.

As she completed her preparations, Prue could not refrain from walking out to the old stone fence, which had been heaved and tumbled by many winters' frosts. She stood atop its crumbling edge and looked off to the northwest with an intensity of observation she had not mustered in some while. She could recall the heat of her rage at the unborn Pearl, but she could also see how the landscape around her had changed in her lifetime—how her own works and the Schermerhorns' had grown, and how the smokestacks now so clouded the atmosphere, the view was in places even more obscured than it had been in her childhood. North of the ropewalk, Mr. Fischer had built his ferry house, and beyond the water, the city of New York had grown vast and dense; it had spread up past its canal, and what had hitherto been tiny hamlets had been subsumed into the urban bustle. The windows and spires that had once taken her breath in awe were eclipsed now by the sheer magnitude of what had risen around them; and this was to say nothing of the political changes that had occurred,—a federal government come and gone, a mayor and board of alders put in place, the Bank of the United States come to rival the Bank of New-York. A quarter century did not seem time enough for so much to have changed; yet, for all Prue and her sisters had grown, their world had done so even more dramatically.

She could have gone to church to pray, but in her heart she still believed God favored the river. She asked the ordinary things: safety in their travels, success in their errand, good fortune for Tem at the works. She also asked permission to assay the bridge; she asked God's blessing on it, and could not tell if the old man heard her. A few fishermen rode the tidal current down toward Red Hook, where mussels and scallops could be plucked aplenty for a poor man's supper once the heat of the year had passed. Losee drifted in to his landing and rang his bell. Prue saw neither of these as a sign.

Though Prue and Pearl had long since banished Tem to sleep in their parents' room across the hall, she wakened them next morning when she tossed so hard in her sleep, she pitched herself to the floor. The rooster began almost at once to screak in the yard, and when they all arrived downstairs, Abiah had for the first time in years managed to burn the coffee. Pearl was subdued, and Prue wondered if she saw it all as bad omens and did not want to make her sisters quail by remarking it. Prue's whole frame flooded with relief when Ben pulled up in one of the distillery's wagons, with yellow Jolly tethered morosely to its front along with one of his blither brethren. As the scroll and model bridge were both large and unwieldy, she assumed he had loaded them down directly from the countinghouse.

“Piss of a horse,” he said as he came inside. Jolly burred in evident disgust. “Don't know if I ever saw four such pretty women look so low”

Pearl attempted a smile for him. Tem said, “I am besieged with nightmare at the thought of her leaving.”

& she prevents the rest of us Sleeping
, Pearl wrote.

“My brother claims the sincerest belief in your fitness for the task,” Ben said to Tem, “and as for you, Pearl, the salt breeze will revive you. Prue is always pensive. Abiah, that leaves you to merit my concern.”

Prue said “Hey!” at the same time Abiah said, “I shall not be glad till you're all home safe again.”

“Is this all your things?” Ben asked.

Pearl did not appear convinced by his good spirits, but she nodded toward the trunk, which he hoisted up and placed abaft the wagon's seat.

“Well, your shipment is ready to leave when you are,” he said. “Tem, Abiah, will you see us off?”

Tem made a wavering sound of assent, and Abiah began to stack the
plates. They all rode down to the wharf together. One of Prue's own boats would carry them to Mount Pleasant, a port village a short distance up the Hudson, with a shipment of Winship gin. Thence Ben had arranged they would travel with the product of a local textile mill up to Saugerties, and thence on the mail boat to Albany, as at that time, no shipments of their own wares were slated to go any farther north.

Although the distillery would not open for another hour, some of the slaves had arisen early to load up the hoy; and as they rounded the corner from Joralemon's Lane, Prue saw perhaps two dozen men, both slave and free, standing around the yard, fiddling the sand with their bare toes, smoking and talking. Two men were raising the ship's single spritsail on its halyard. Ben urged the horses to halt. Marcel Dufresne, apple-cheeked as a child, reached up for Prue's hand and said, “We wish you great success in your journey.”

“Thank you,” Prue said. A few hats came off their respective heads. “You'll be careful with the press?”

“I'll treat it like royalty,” Marcel said.

Isaiah said, “I'll make certain; and I'll keep my eye on Miss Tem.”

As a man loaded the trunk onto the boat, Tem stood with one palm over her chin, her elbow supported on the other arm. She said, “I shall miss you something fierce.”

“And I, you,” Prue answered. “Trust in Isaiah, should anything go amiss.”

“Something surely will.”

“No. You'll manage it.” She took Tem in her arms. Though at first Tem shied like a frightened horse, she soon softened. It was galling how much Prue loved her; though perhaps somewhat less so than how excited she was to leave all her work and worry in her sister's hands for a fortnight.

When she had let Tem go, Ben handed Prue and Pearl down into the boat and climbed in beside them. “Make us proud, Tem,” he said to her as they pushed off.

“Devil take you,” she said back.

As they made their way into the current, clumps of observers waved their handkerchiefs from the Schermerhorns', Butcher's Wharf, and Losee's and Fischer's landings. The ordinary folk to whom Prue and Ben shouted their farewells were, she knew, their greatest supporters and
those for whose opinion the assemblymen would care least. But she would carry the image of them northward and cherish it in the event all did not go as they hoped. All nine of the Luquer siblings had gathered on their dock and the trash rack roof, and they whistled and hooted to the swift boat as it sailed into the Upper Bay. Pearl waved back so hard Prue thought she might fall overboard. Her throat grew tight at the prospect of leaving Brooklyn.

The delivery boat skirted to the north of the Governor's Island and entered New York Harbor, which to Prue seemed wide as a veritable sea. As she breathed in its familiar salt fragrance, she felt a pang for her father, who had so yearned for the ocean in his youth.

Are you thinking of Daddy?
Pearl asked.

Prue did not know how her sister had gleaned this. She nodded.

I can almost smell him
.

“I, too.”

Shortly, the little hoy tacked to leeward and entered the mouth of the Hudson. To the west clustered the villages of Hoboken, Pavonia, and Weehawken, where poor Mr. Hamilton had been murdered, while to the east spread Manhattan, who appeared unfamiliar seen from her other flank. The North River wharves were not half so busy as their sisters to the east. After the boat sailed past a row of fashionable houses, their backs to the river behind deep, enclosed yards, Prue regarded the district of poor dwellings and eagerly wondered which of them might be those dens of thieves and prostitutes and fences for stolen goods she had heard populated the area. A tannery's stink announced its presence long before the boat drew nigh; and donkeys and goats grazed in ramshackle lots.

“ 'Tisn't much to look at, is it?” Ben asked, leaning onto the gunwale on Prue's other side. “Homesick already?”

“No.”

He glanced at Pearl and said, “I'm certain it'll go well.”

Prue liked the sureness on his bright face. She wished she could lodge it in her own bosom.

“Here,” he said. He backed off the gunwale and, pulling his sleeve over the heel of his hand, wiped down the flat tops of two casks. “Seats fit for princesses, and a view as fine as any in Europe, or so I'm told.”

As she sat down, Prue fidgeted to make her skirt comfortable. Pearl
began to smile. A fine late-summer breeze was licking the river into soft peaks, and northern Manhattan looked like home as they skimmed past it—rolling meadows and stands of birch and elm, punctuated at wide intervals by beetle-browed Dutch houses and the occasional herd of ruddy kine. Jersey was lush with ripe corn and riotous gardens of squash and sunflower. And once they had passed the last of Manhattan's docks, the river was quieter than Prue had known a river could be. The wind cracked in their single spritsail, and the water plashed against their sides; the crew chatted together when there were no orders to convey; and the Tems cried before diving for fish or swooping back over land. The hubbub of the docks, which had played as the burden note beneath nearly Prue's every memory, was nowhere to be heard.