Prue spent four years studying her father’s trade—the first two perfecting the manufacture of the product itself while learning the intricacies of the manufactory’s machines, and the second two training to run the business: learning the proper methods to care for the buildings and equipment, design and inspect casks, keep books, deliver goods, dun the company’s debtors, and distribute payroll while persuading the paid workers to take only a fraction of their due in wares. She seldom found herself at leisure, and when she did was often bone-tired or foggy-headed, but she was still resolved to study what she could of engineering. She learned that in the year of Tem’s birth, a bridge constructed entirely of cast iron had been built in Shropshire, and she pleaded with the Fly Market bookseller to order a volume detailing its methods. He scowled at her, and her father browsed the shelves elsewhere, as if to minimize his connection to her, but eventually she gave over her thirty-seven and a half pence and folded the bookman’s promissory note into her pocket. When the book arrived an age later, Prue applied herself to its diagrams of stress and strain until her mind ached.
“You’ll ruin your eyes,” her mother scolded in passing.
“Leave her be,” her father counseled, though Prue knew he neither approved nor disapproved of her fancy. It was a solace Cornelis Luquer also took an interest in the physical world. They could share their books and discuss their way through whatever seemed unclear.
At ten years old, Prue had thought it a marvel to travel to New York City and ponder her late misconceptions about the place. At fourteen, when Congress was sitting in that city while it awaited a more permanent home, Prue’s head was full of belts and batches, but she still thought about bridging the East River. It would ensure easy shipping of gin in winter, after all; she continued to dream about it when she stood gazing out over the straits. She brooded on the terrible thing she had done to Pearl, the one truly mean-spirited action of her life thus far, and still worried someone in her family would learn her secret. Though she no longer had as much time as she’d had in childhood to ruminate on death, she remained anxious it would come for her father or her sisters, to whom she grew daily more attached. Where once New York had seemed a sacred destination, she now made deliveries there in all kinds of weather, and had twice been pitched into the cold, salty water en route. She knew the streets on which a small pedestrian was likely to be run down, and those on which she could buy candy; she knew her father’s customers by name. She accompanied him regularly to the gloomy bank. Over time, his banker—Timothy Stover, who had the carriage and voice of a Quaker but lacked the sober manner—came to answer her questions as carefully as her father’s.
When she had begun her training, her sisters had been too small to be tutored in much besides kneading wads of dough and embroidering with huge needles and yarn. Though Johanna by then had spent half her day in bed with headache and the rest in her chair, working her lips and muttering, her face had lit up as if Jesus Himself had appeared in the room whenever Pearl had brought her handiwork for inspection. Johanna would slide her palsied fingers over the fabric with pleasure and deliberation; and when she’d descried whatever Pearl had made thereon—usually a series of stabs and lunges intended to represent flowers, trees, or the inevitable cat—she’d praise Pearl lavishly for it. Pearl must have sensed it was Johanna who’d nursed her in her fragile infancy, for she loved her out of proportion to the old woman’s personal merits. Prue’s praise, or their parents’, was welcome enough, but Johanna’s approbation made her bounce up and down as if she needed to use the pot. Prue knew she had no right to feel jealous; she was, after all, down at the manufactory all day, while Pearl spent hours in Johanna’s company. Still, Pearl’s glee irked her. Had Johanna possessed her sight, she would not have known what she looked upon.
“You can’t tell what it is,” Prue protested on one occasion.
Pearl crossed her black eyes at her, while Johanna merely lifted and shook her chin.
“You can’t tell what that is!” Prue shouted.
“I can, indeed,” Johanna squawked in return. “ ’Tis a barn cat, is it not, Pearlie?”
Pearl stroked Johanna’s wrinkled cheek in reply.
Johanna placed the piece of linen—which resembled nothing so much as bare winter branches—on her lap and stroked it. “Remember when you tried to knit a muffler, when you were hardly older than she, Prudence Winship? Jezus Christus, you may as well have tried to knit a sheep. Jezus, have mercy on her soul!”
Pearl laughed, her throat clicking quietly. Some of the neighbor children thought this sound eerie, but it fell easy on the family ears.
Prue tried to imagine what Ben would do in such a situation, but realized he was too blithe to get himself into such a corner in the first place. She stalked outside, determined to pull her jealousy out by the roots but feeling an ounce of coldhearted pleasure, meanwhile, that no one ever complimented Tem’s sloppy needlework or lumpy porridge. Prue disliked that as soon as Tem was big enough, she would also be trained at the distillery; Prue wanted to keep its secrets as her own, and would have told no one her hope that, as Tem hadn’t yet shown an aptitude for anything, she would also prove second best at making gin. Prue went over to the chicken coop to see if any of the hens had laid; and though they clucked as if she was a nuisance, they let her take three eggs.
Prue cupped them gently in her two hands, as she had no apron or skirt to gather up for a basket. It should have been enough, she reasoned, that Tem and Pearl had ferreted out their dark eyes and straight black hair from some dim corner of the cosmos; Tem was the prettier of the two, but they both had an enviable regularity of feature. Put another way, it seemed fair that if Prue herself was to have to make do with a head of kinky curls and a face that would never quite hang together, she should also be allowed more responsibility and entrusted with more arcane knowledge.
As she brought the eggs back in, she realized that Tem, while not marked by the same gloom that colored her own mind, was tainted in her own way: She was ever enthusiastic at the beginning of an inquiry, but her interest flagged once the subject became known to her. This struck Prue as potentially a more insidious defect than mere dark-mindedness, with which, after all, their mother had still managed to marry, bear three living children, and make a life for herself. Tem’s first day reading was full of struggle and delight, but when she discovered the days to follow would be equally strenuous, she began to slouch into the posture of a comma, her small head, to all appearances, too heavy for her spine to bear. She beamed with satisfaction when she learned to write her capitals, yet behaved as if it were a personal affront that she must also learn her minuscules. Prue thought she might pitch out of her chair when the topic of cursive script arose. Tem had no intrinsic talent for numbers, nor for any of the tasks that kept a household in order. Were she entrusted with the tinderbox, she couldn’t make the flint catch. Pearl, by contrast, could strike a spark as well as her parents, and deliver it safe into the hearth without causing a moment’s worry. Seeing that she liked the responsibility, Matty brought her a small silver tinderbox from New York and afforded it a place of honor on the mantel. Meanwhile, if Tem was even sent to poke a fire, it sputtered; if she was asked to dust a room, she would leave cobwebs in the corners and clouds of hair beneath the rug.
At the age of six, however, Tem seemed to know she could make up for her near-universal want of useful skill by cultivating her native sociability. It was clear to Prue her father was popular in the neighborhood as much because of the spirit he was born with as the spirit he distilled; and Tem had obviously chosen to emulate him in this regard. Her capacity to mimic was unrivaled in Prue’s experience; she could tremble in perfect synchronization with Johanna’s seemingly random fits of palsy, turn her gaze inward exactly as their mother did, and throw back at Prue the slight catch in her voice when she was afraid of something, thus nearly bringing her to her knees with embarrassment. In emulating their father, Tem learned to look the distillery workers—even the slaves—in the eye, call them by “Mr.” and their surnames, and commit to memory the names of their children, though they would never be brought by to play. She learned to walk down the street with her head held high and a smile on her lips, no matter how many gaps her departing milk teeth had left in her grin. She learned to whistle nearly as well as Pearl did. None of these talents could immediately be shown as handy as if; for example, she’d proven masterful at sums or had an unusual gift for language, but she clearly wasn’t stupid.
It was no surprise Pearl should turn out to be more studious. On the day Prue had explained to her what writing was, and what were its uses, she may yet have been, as their father called her, a “little piss-pants,” but she’d opened her mouth and bawled with happiness. She’d understood writing would free her from isolation, and had taken up the study thereof with a fierce dedication. Her diligence sobered Prue. Unlike Tem, Pearl would finish an evening’s lessons, then ask for more; and since the age of five, she had been able to write clearly enough on a slate for her words to be intelligible to people outside the family. As soon as she’d learned to express herself thus with any specificity, some of the pantomimes she’d thitherto used to assuage her desires became unnecessary, and from a distance she appeared a more ordinary child, except for her size; she was unusually slight, and Tem had shot up past her while they were still in diapers. (Prue wondered if this, too, might not somehow be her own fault.) Up close, anyone could see from the expression with which she listened that she was a bright child, a quick study. Pearl showed herself so capable of numeric manipulation, Prue had to turn her tutoring over to their father when Pearl was only seven. The patterns she began to devise for the ornamentation of pillow slips and napkins were proclaimed by those neighbors who still spoke of the Pierreponts (who early in the war had been exiled, as vociferous Loyalists, to the barrens of New Jersey, leaving their huge white house vacant) to be fine as any that family had brought from France. Anything that existed in nature she could draw with pencil or needle; and when nature ceased to provide sufficient inspiration, Prue and her father began bringing books unlike any they’d previously acquired home from their journeys westward. The library upon which he’d educated Prue had released its secrets only upon perusal of dense blocks of text, but for Pearl he bought The Cyclopædia of Natural Wonders and A Compendium of the Beauties of Art. The illustrations in these books were etched in more shades of gray than the water of the East River contained, and they were veiled behind sheets of tissue that crackled to the touch and hinted at intricacies they only half concealed. In this way, Prue and Pearl learned, by firelight, the flora and fauna of Europe, the Americas, and the Indies, the magnificent buildings of the Egyptians and the Chinese, the many-limbed gods of the Hindus, and the heroic paintings of Italy. Tem would sometimes glance at the plates, but if their parents would let her go out, she was happier rolling hoops and tossing quoits with the Luquer boys, doing imitations for them of pious Patience Livingston, whose jaw practically never moved when she spoke, or gathering huckleberries from the side of the road. It didn’t matter to Tem that the laundrywoman cursed her each Monday for coming home with grass or berry stains on her clothes. Books were not her pleasure—being out with people was; and if she devoted her learning to games, she was learning how to win them with moderate frequency. She made no apologies for her predilections, and announced them so adamantly, the adults made little effort to control her.
Prue’s sisters were as unlike in temperament as in interests. Tem was accustomed to being the center of attention in groups of children, and to earning their approbation through her mimicry; but she would prickle the moment she perceived a slight. Pearl, by contrast, possessed a workmanlike good cheer, which at the time Prue thought almost miraculous, given the hardships of her existence, but which she later came to remark in others who kept company with misfortune. Pearl seemed to have been born understanding how a neighbor’s unease could be disarmed with a forthright smile, and how pity could be brushed off likewise. As a result, when children squabbled in the market, their mothers would hold Pearl up as an example. “You’d not hear Miss Pearlie crying about it!” was often barked at a sniveling child; along with, “Be thankful you’re better off than that blighted little Winship, God bless ’er.” These scoldings had two effects: first, to make the berated child dislike Pearl, and second, to mortify Prue. Pearl, who should have been bothered by the neighbors’ example-making, bore it lightly, bowing her pretty head, and making sly remarks on her slate about the perpetrators once the sisters were past their purview. (Lees’t I don’t have the Blight of a Foul Temper lyk her Daughtr, she commented once, in response to something Mrs. Livingston had said; and about Mrs. Remsen, she one day simply wrote, Cow.)
Prue held out hope Tem’s inattention would prevent her wanting to come into the distillery; but the thrill of all the people and bustle clearly outweighed the difficult work the place would require of her. Her parents began discussing the possibility in the summer of 1788, when Tem had recently turned nine years old. Pearl was busy sketching the banner Matty would have his men carry in a forthcoming parade to support New York’s ratification of the Constitution. Prue found the verse Pearl had come up with,
Broklands Distillers,
Prowd & true,
Stand with Publius,
As shld you.
rather limping, but the two workers she’d drawn flanking a cask of gin were true as life.
“One’s enough in the business,” Roxana argued. She was wrapped in a shawl though it was warm outside, and feeding Johanna porridge from a bowl as if she were an infant. “Pearl’ll live with us always, but Tem we might manage to marry off.”
Pearl flared her nostrils from over her sketch, but Roxana was too busy with Johanna’s supper to notice. Johanna smacked her lips and closed her eyes after each bite, as if she could conceive of no better meal than this. Prue was confused by the scene: sad, afraid, and at one level relieved to see Johanna brought so low, and jealous to see her mother caring for her so artlessly.
Matty said, “I think we ought to let the girl decide. It’s only fair.” He looked squarely across the table at Tem, who was trying to draw a horse with a piece of charcoal. “What do you think, missy? You want to join your elder sister in the distillery?”
“Sure I do,” she said, without glancing up from her drawing.
Prue felt her temper simmering, but managed to hold steady. “Do you realize how hard the work is?” she asked Tem, trying to prevent her annoyance leaking into her voice. “Do you realize how much studying you’ll have to do?”
“It’s a different kind of studying,” Tem replied. “I shan’t have to sit still for it.”
Roxana looked peevishly at Tem, whom she had little notion how to manage. Matty, meanwhile, was laughing, and leaned across the table to pat Prue on the cheek. “She’ll be a different sort of apprentice than you were, won’t she?”
“I suppose.”
When Tem gave up on her drawing, Pearl put down her pencil, seized Tem’s charcoal, and drew an actual horse on top of the fat goatlike creature on the page. Later in the week, Tem and Prue marched proudly beside their father in the huge, noisy parade. Pearl was a mere spectator, holding Israel Horsfield’s hand; and the boisterous crowds along Broadway were so dense, Prue thought it was impossible her sister could have seen much. But that evening Pearl recounted the sights and sounds in great detail, and claimed thoroughly to have enjoyed her trip across the busy river on the barge. & w. so menny in Support, shurly our Lawmakrs will let us join the Fedural Union? she wrote.
“We can hope,” Matty told her.
I am certin they will.
Matty shook his head and laughed when, later in the month, the papers proved his small daughter correct. Support for the Constitution had been far from universal, but at last the State of New York had given its consent.
Matty and Roxana decided Tem would be brought into the distillery that September, when the neighborhood boys went back to school after harvest. Roxana had her hands full looking after Johanna, who was spending more and more time in bed, though Dr. de Bouton could deduce no cause but old age for her headaches. (He left her with some packets of white powder to be dissolved in water and sipped when the pains struck. Prue licked her finger and dipped it in one when no one was looking, and thought it tasted like ordinary kitchen soda.) Pearl would henceforward have to look after herself. Prue, meanwhile, was furious that she, who’d wanted to learn distilling with her whole heart and showed a true aptitude for natural philosophy, had not been allowed to begin studying until the age of ten. If only, she thought, she still believed in the Other Side and could fantasize sending Tem to the orphanage. If only, instead of pledging herself so single-mindedly to herbs and rectifying, she had given even a shred of her attention to God, who might help her through this crisis, which no one in her family seemed to understand. But how could she approach Him? If she asked her parents for guidance in this regard, they’d scoff at her; Johanna believed, but if it were possible to make her understand a question, there would be no eliciting information without also summoning forth her scorn, rage, and prognostications of hellfire. The domine still bored Prue, and she felt too awkward to ask guidance of the Friends. She did, at least, think she could find a few minutes in each workday to sit down by the water on the retaining wall and ponder her dilemma. The workers about the mill yard would wave to her, but she knew how to brush them off; and it was a relief to let her mind rest briefly while her father’s slaves heaved casks of gin onto barges, and up on the Schermerhorns’ wharf they loaded gigantic spools of rope. She observed how steadily Losee rowed his ferry across the straits. Weeks went by, and although she spent most of her free moments thus in fair and foul weather, she could not ascertain how to open a pathway of communication with the Infinite. She knew it was a difficult question, however, and told herself she shouldn’t mind if the answer took its time arriving.
In the meanwhile, Tem was being outfitted for her work, and the pleasure she took in her new, boyish clothes made Prue’s teeth itch. Tem had harangued their mother with requests for a leather vest, such as craftsmen wore, until at last Roxana had relented. Prue and her father had gone down to the tanner past the Luquer Mill the next morning and brought back a small, supple, dark brown length; Roxana had taken it to the seamstress the following day, though as she’d left the house, she’d complained quietly but audibly about having to leave Johanna alone in the house. Pearl had volunteered to stay behind, but the whole situation had left a sour taste in Prue’s mouth, both because no other slave in Brooklyn was treated better than the children of the family and because her parents seemed not to mind Tem’s peacockery at all. The afternoon Roxana brought the vest home from the seamstress, Tem put it on with her knee britches and high boots and paraded around the kitchen as happily as the rooster strutted around the yard. “Do I look a picture?” she asked, with an unconcern for the question’s propriety that nearly sent Prue over the rafters. “I wish we had a big looking glass, like the Livingstons’. I want to see how I look.”
“You look fine,” Prue said. She noticed Pearl stabbing rather more forcefully than was necessary at her needlework.
Their mother said, “I need to rest,” and walked toward the stairs. “Wake me when it’s time to start supper.”
“It hardly matters what you look like,” Prue said. She began to brush down her boots of the day’s caked dust. “You’ll be working.”
“I disagree,” Tem said. “I know the men watch to see what you do and how you do it. Daughter of the proprietor, and all that.” She picked her two long pigtails up in the air. “I think I should cut my hair, to complete the picture.”
“Och God,” Johanna muttered from the corner. Her eyes were closed and she had her palm to her brow.
Pearl quickly wrote, How is’t she only beer us when we’re contemplating Mischief? and held it up to Prue.
Johanna, who seemed to know nothing of the interjection, went on, “You’ll not hear the end of it.”
Tem said, “If I’m to work like a boy, I would have hair like a boy. And so should you,” she added, nodding her head toward Prue.
“Then bring me the scissors,” Prue said.
You shall not? Pearl wrote.
“I shall, unless you want to do it.”
Pearl’s small face darkened. Johanna continued muttering in Dutch and rocked her chair to and fro.
Tem handed Prue the scissors, point-end first. “To here,” she said, indicating her collarbone. She drew up a chair, sat on it with her back to Prue, and untied her ribbons.
Prue looked inquiringly at Pearl, who still appeared vexed, but placed her slate and needlework on the chair. When Pearl took the scissors, they seemed large in her hand.
Tem’s hair was fine and straight, except where the ribbons had kinked it, and it cut as easily as muslin. As the hair fell to her feet, Pearl began to laugh her quiet laugh. “Shh,” Prue told her.
Tem said, “I needed a haircut,” and the last few tendrils snaked to the floor. Pearl had cut on a slight diagonal, and gave the scissors back to Prue to straighten out the line. Prue was amazed at how satisfying it felt to feel the hair come free. When she’d finished, she wiped the stray bits from the back of Tem’s vest and said, “All done. Let’s have a look at you.”
Tem stood and turned to face her sisters. Her hair hung in a lank curtain to her nape, exactly as Isaiah’s did, and seemed to end abruptly, as if the missing length would always suggest its absence. Pearl was hissing delightedly, and covered her mouth with both hands. In a moment, Prue’s eyes grew accustomed to Tem’s new appearance, which forced her to admit the shorter hair somehow made her pretty sister even prettier. “What’s’a matter?” Tem asked.
“Nothing,” Prue said. “I think you’ll like it.”
Tem went upstairs to look in their small glass, shouted “Hoyay!” and vaulted down the steps on her return. From bed, Roxana called out, “Can’t you leave me in peace for an hour?” Tem kissed her sisters on their cheeks. “I love it,” she said.
Pearl bowed, her face red. Prue said, “Sit down. I’ll put your tails back in.”
For what might have been the first time in her life, she sat obediently. Johanna was still stewing in her chair, which creaked over the floorboards as she swore beneath her breath; Pearl was still laughing. When Prue tied the ribbons back in, Tem’s pigtails stuck out slightly, resembling paintbrushes.
At that moment, Matty came in from the distillery, banging his boots against the doorsill to clean them. Tem ran to present herself in her new guise as distillery worker. “Holy Christ,” he said, and looked to see who’d done it. The scissors sat unclaimed on the table. He wiped his palm across his mouth, then stifled a laugh. “Which one of you did it?”
Tem said, “Pearl did.”
Pearl grabbed her slate and quickly wrote, Prue help’d.
“She did, did she?” He took one of Tem’s pigtails in each hand, and pulled on them to tilt her face upward. He shook his head at her. “I’ll have my work cut out for me when it’s you who’s sixteen.” He patted Tem’s cheek, said, “Hello, Johanna,” and went up the back stairs.
Some sort of a row ensued, but when her parents appeared half an hour later, Prue thought she heard a trace of her mother’s old humor when she commented, to no one in particular, “There’s punishment on the Other Side for these kinds of transgressions. That’s all I’ll say.”
This was the first instance in which Prue caught sight of Pearl’s deep strain of waywardness. Until then, she had thought her middle sister as good as gold, perhaps as the result of her own execrable actions against her. Prue was mollified to think Pearl might, after all, be merely human, and she herself free from blame. She kept an eye upon Pearl, to see when and how her perversity might again show forth.
Its next appearance came in November, when much of the talk from Mrs. Tilley’s to the mill yard centered on Congress’s decision to make New York the official, if temporary, center of the new nation’s government. “Does it mean we’ll see Mr. Franklin and Mr. Jefferson when we go to the bank?” Prue asked Israel Horsfield.
He shook his head equivocally. “It’s possible, of course, but I don’t suppose it’s likely. They’ll be busy men, with a great deal of lawmaking to accomplish.”
“Still,” Prue said, “they’ll have to eat.”
“And drink. Believe me, we’re counting upon it.”
Gossip also dwelled on the influx of emigrants from France. It would be another year before that far-off country exploded in turmoil; but as rats are the first to sniff out a ship’s imminent demise, some workmen must have had the premonition that all was not right. Brooklyn’s recovery from the devastation of the late war had also, to Prue’s surprise, been robust; it was a good time for a man to come try his fortunes in King’s County. By November, a number of émigrés had arrived in Brooklyn with nervous expressions and beautiful clothes. Providentially, the Hicks brothers had that very summer decided to parcel off a portion of their sizable farm into city lots, upon which a tradesman or shopkeeper might build a home. They were calling the spot Olympia, as if it were not merely a few new streets in an old village. There had been no Frenchmen in Brooklyn since the Pierreponts had been exiled during the war, but at the time Tem came into the distillery, Prue began hearing colorful French curses in the saw pit out past the Twin Tankards and over the rising posts and beams of Olympia’s homes. The whine of the van Vechten sawmill, a few hundred yards north of the ferry, pierced the neighborhood air far more regularly than theretofore; and Prue watched the progress of all the new buildings with interest, when she could spare the time from her work. She was busier now than she’d previously been, for in addition to helping her father in the usual ways, she was helping him train Tem. As Prue had suspected, Tem showed interest in learning any new thing the distillery might present her, but her attention flagged during the weeks necessary to acquire a particular skill. When Tem grew bored she also grew irritable. Prue found the autumn long and trying.
The immigrants meanwhile opened forges and a chandlery, a dry-goods shop down by the tannery and the Luquer Mill, a farrier’s, and even a perfumery, dealing in flower waters and aromatic oils, which Prue haunted under the pretense of educating her nose. Soon enough, some of the Frenchmen had purchased a plot from the Cortelyous—north of the ferry in the direction of Wallabout Bay, but close by Olympia—and begun to erect a church of their own. Domine Syrtis was by then an ancient man who shuffled around his house in a dressing gown; he had requested a replacement from Amsterdam, and apparently even in private did not deny the need for a new house of worship. The French church, which opened that autumn, began to draw a good crowd on the Sabbath, which Matty Winship remarked to Tem and Prue with some surprise. “I thought we were all heathens,” he said, leading them along the low catwalks above the fragrant, steaming wort.
“Will we have to go?” Tem asked. Prue wished she’d phrased the question differently; she herself was curious about the new church.
“Never fear. Your mother wouldn’t have it.”
Tem reached her paddle down into the wort and splashed it around, releasing billows of steam.
“Easy, easy,” their father said. “You must be gentle with it. As with your mother. I don’t know if Pearlie’s worn her down or if it’s Johanna’s frailty, but she tolerates less than she used to.”
“I’m gentle,” Prue said.
“I know”
“And she needn’t care for Johanna the way she does,” Tem said. “No one else in Brookland treats their slaves like royalty.”
“That’s enough from you,” he said. “Your mother loves Johanna. When she arrived in this country, she knew no one but me, and when we bought Johanna of Mr. Remsen, she found her first and only friend. That’s enough said against her.” He crouched down to pick a brown oak leaf from the tank, and said no more.
It wasn’t long before those believers who’d been raised outside the Dutch church thought if a motley bunch of Catholics could get up the money, so could they; and a limping Mr. Whitcombe who lived down by Gowanus Creek took out a subscription for a Congregational assembly. Prue thought no one would contribute to his venture. Ben had told her that whenever Mr. Whitcombe rode to town, he passed by the ruins of the Cobbleskill Fort, which was haunted; so he must have had some truck with the dark forces. Prue also thought it about as likely her father would contribute as that he would sell one of his daughters. She was only sixteen, however, and underestimated the power of convention. Joe Loosely convinced Matty it would be uncivil for a family of the Win-ships’ prominence not to contribute at least a small sum, though Roxana’s eyes flashed fire when she heard of her husband’s donation. Thereafter, Matty professed a tepid interest in the progress of the new church and rectory, out near the end of Buckbee’s Alley, where it abutted the Jamaica Turnpike. He packed a picnic one day and took his three daughters up there, on the theory Tem and Prue should use every available opportunity to observe construction, as the distillery would one day need to be expanded. Pearl had no need to go, but disliked being left behind. While Tem ruminated over her bacon sandwich, Pearl wrote questions on her slate, erasing with her sleeve when the need arose, so that by midafternoon, the fabric was caked hard with dust. That evening, Prue spread Mrs. Friedlander’s calendula salve on Pearl’s forearm to relieve the prickly rash the chalk dust had raised.
The minister, from the same institution that had failed to convert Matthias Winship, never arrived. Word soon came from Boston that this Reverend Mr. Crowley had been thrown by a spooked horse only a week after receiving his calling, and had subsequently died of internal bleeding. On hearing the news, Roxana said, “It’s a sign from the Laird. Now we’ll never have to go.” But Prue felt a yearning for the church. She hoped it would be less grim than her grandfather’s, which she remembered all these years later; but part of her thought, if she was as dire a sinner as she had always suspected herself, and as Pappy had called her, it might be best to learn how to amend her behavior.
Mr. Whitcombe apparently wrote back to Boston right away to request a replacement; and was informed, in due time, that a newly minted Reverend Mr. William Severn would arrive in Brooklyn as soon as he could tie up his father’s estate. “More tragedy,” Roxana commented, shaking her head. “It’s what churches bring.”
In November, while loafing out by the retaining wall with both her sisters, Prue chanced to hear Losee cry, “Over!”
She looked out to see him hunched over his oars and approaching his pier, with a gray-haired passenger and a number of crates sinking his boat low in the water. Tem was chewing on a sliver of birch bark, and Pearl was barefoot in the sloppy sand on the far side of the wall, her feet and lips pale blue, starting to search for mussels for their supper. They both looked expectantly to Prue, as if it were hers to give permission to run up to the ferry.
“Give me the bucket,” she said. “Where are your shoes?”
Pearl lifted her hands in ignorance and slung the bucket, empty but for her neatly folded jersey, over one shoulder.
“If you aren’t too cold, it’ll be fine.”
Pearl nodded.
Tem and Prue were wearing their work britches; Prue assumed Pearl’s bare blue feet would attract no more attention than this. She disliked taking her out in public when she did not have her slate at hand, but if they waited, the commotion would blow over without them. They went up along the Shore Road, Pearl’s feet at first leaving damp half-moons of footprint.
Losee, meanwhile, was shouting for wheelbarrows and, when the Winship sisters arrived, was as red-faced as a steamed lobster. A couple of Joe Loosely’s stable boys were standing by with the barrows almost dangling from their lazy hands.
“Next time, I’ll charge you double fare for all that rotten detritus,” Losee was saying. “And you’ll have to pay Loosely’s boys, they don’t work for free. Godverdomme!” A waiting passenger handed down a cup of water from the bucket. Losee said, “Thank you,” took a sip, and splashed the rest over his inflamed face. The passenger in the boat recoiled slightly, with an expression as if he had a dried pea in his shoe.
“With all due respect, sir, there will not be a next time,” he said. His overcoat was threadbare, and he was wrapped nearly to his knees in a patched russet muffler. “Had anyone bothered to tell me Brookland did not adjoin New York, I should not have betaken myself to the latter.”
“No one bothers to say what’s common knowledge. Unload, boys.”
“He don’ wanna pay,” said the smaller of them.
“I shall compensate you fairly.”
“A man can’t take the stage to a place can only be reached by water,” Losee added.
A crowd was gathering, so the Winship sisters slipped up the open stairs to the dock. The children of the neighborhood had a sixth sense for unrest, and the end of the Ferry Road was clotted with young Luquers, van Suetendaels, Cortelyous, and Livingstons. Ben and Maggie Horsfield clambered up the stairs right behind their friends; and a pod of speckled harbor seals heaved themselves onto the nearby black rocks, their whiskered faces glistening as if with interest as they wagged their heads.
“Where are we taking these?” the small boy said. He staggered under the weight of the first heavy crate.
“To the parsonage.”
Losee broke out in a grin. “The new minister, have we? I’m sorry, then, I was so taciturn while I rowed you over; but it’s hard work, you know, hauling such a load.”
“Indeed. Careful with that, there are plates inside,” he said to the larger boy. The minister held out one hand to Losee and removed his hat briefly with the other. “I am William Severn. Am I to assume you are a member of my congregation?”
Losee shook with him but said, “No, sir. Reformed Dutch.”
“Ah.”
“You know, your church isn’t finished.”
As Prue watched him, she could see he wasn’t such an old man as at first she’d thought him. His hair had perhaps gone gray from some shock, but it framed a youthful face. He might have been handsome, if not for the undershot chin. “Are you certain?”
Losee hoisted himself out of the boat, and put a hand down for the minister. “Only one church going up. The house is done.”
The minister climbed up as if unaccustomed to boats. Losee, by contrast, always looked strange on dry land, so hunched and powerful were his shoulders and bowed his legs from decades in the confines of his dory.
Mr. Severn said, “I closed up my late father’s home with all due haste to come serve the people of this town.”
Mrs. Tilley moved toward him from the edge of the crowd. “Reverend Mr. Severn,” she said, “I’m Adeline Tilley. I own the shop up on the turnpike.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, still looking cross.
“We’re pleased you’ve arrived; and we are so sorry for the delay in the church.” She twisted her apron nervously in her hands. The plain Livingston daughters, Patience and Rachael, giggled; they were surely thinking, as Prue was, that Mrs. Tilley hoped to snare the young minister for her daughter. “I don’t know how, but we shall find a place for you to preach this Sunday.”
“That’s kind of you,” he said. As he tried to step through the crowd toward her, the wheel of one of the barrows caught between the planks of the dock, and the two crates it carried pitched onto the ground. “Dammit!” cried the boy who’d been wheeling it. The crates’ nailed tops burst open, and as if they’d spewed forth candy, the younger children all surged forward, shouting, to inspect what was spilling out—an assortment of books, plates, kitchen utensils, and smaller articles, all packed in wood shavings. Tem and Pearl were subsumed in the melee in an instant.
“Hey!” called Losee. “That’s enough, you little rag pickers!” But they continued to dig and exclaim. Joe Loosely came outdoors to see what the commotion was, and leaned against the stone wall of his tavern to pack his pipe.
Ben approached Prue, with his hands guiltily in his pockets. “Both your sisters in there?” he asked.
She said, “Yes.”
“Mine is, too.”
“Where’s Isaiah?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “You know him, he doesn’t like a squabble.”
Prue glanced anxiously back toward the fray. “Do you think we should get them out?”
“Undoubtedly. But you know, Pearl never has any fun.”
Prue had never considered Pearl’s plight thus, but immediately realized he was correct. “I suppose she can’t cause much harm.”
Losee and Mrs. Tilley began pulling the kids away. “Who is this—Maggie Horsfield? You should be ashamed of yourself! Rummaging in the possessions of your new minister. Where’s your—Ben! Take this child home.”
Maggie said, “Sorry, Mrs. Tilley,” with an inflection that suggested she called her something rude behind her back. Ben beckoned to Maggie, and she walked glumly out toward him.
Either her desertion spurred a more general one or the children had determined there was nothing titillating among Mr. Severn’s household goods, for Losee and Mrs. Tilley at last succeeded in clearing them. Pearl’s face lit up with a toothy grin. She stopped halfway back to pick a splinter from her foot. “Serves you right,” Prue told her, but without much spirit. Pearl looked at her sister quizzically, aware of her equivocation. She pulled her bucket up over her arm again and pushed her wispy fringe back from her brow.
Mr. Severn’s possessions were strewn as if an animal had rooted through them, the books and trinkets spilled alongside a trampled tablecloth, a lady’s fan, a timeworn wooden bowl. Prue had not known the particulars of a life could look so sad as they did, tumbled on the dock of a foreign town. The minister was blinking as if to hold back tears, and Prue was suddenly ashamed of herself for allowing her sisters to behave as they had. Mr. Severn knelt uncomfortably, as if his knees pained him, and began to dust down his possessions and return them to their crates. Mrs. Tilley crouched just as clumsily; and even Losee, next to whom the new minister resembled a sapling, stooped to rectify the wrong, his face still rosy.
Prue expected the guilty children to run off, but they were as transfixed as she by the sight of three grown people working together so somberly. In the distillery, men grunted as they heaved loads, and shouted encouragement and taunts to one another; it was likewise with any labor she’d witnessed in the streets. These three worked in a silence that made the splashing of the day’s calm river seem garrulous. One of the seals barked on the rocks, and others joined it in chorus. When the boxes were reloaded, with the boards that had so tenuously held them shut laid in alongside them, Joe walked down to his stable hands and said, “Take the minister’s things up Buckbee’s Alley. Be cautious of the ruts in the road, and unload as he asks into the house. You’ll accept no gratuity for your service.”
“It is not the lads’ fault,” Severn said.
Joe shook his large head. Prue was accustomed to seeing him drinking with her father; this dark expression was unusual but must have made clear to the new minister that Joe Loosely could be taken at his word. The crowd parted to let the wheelbarrows pass, and Mr. Severn wrapped his muffler tighter around his throat before following, his head bowed as if he could thus hide his blush. The boys steered up the paved center of the Ferry Road, and the rest of the neighborhood remained rooted to the dock. Prue caught Jens Luquer’s eye, but he quickly turned away, engrossed in the scratching of his nose, as he, too, ought to have been in the distillery. Patience Livingston, who spent her leisure time sewing homely garments for the poor, and who peered down her nose at children who wasted their free hours on pleasure, pulled her shawl up the back of her neck and ducked out toward the street. Ben said, “I’ll take Mags home before she gets in trouble,” and, with a palm on her back, steered her toward their homestead.
Prue said good-bye to him; her sisters didn’t acknowledge Maggie’s departure. “Come,” she said, giving a tug to one of Tem’s short braids. “The mash tuns are to be cleaned today, and Johanna will wonder what’s become of Pearl’s mussels.”
“Do I have to do it? My bones ache,” Tem said.
“You do. I’m sorry.”
She muttered, “I’m sure Johanna hasn’t even noticed she’s gone.”
Some of the Schermerhorns’ workers were out on break from the ropewalk, and three of Mr. Remsen’s slaves had his dinghy belly-up for repair on what was still called Butcher’s Wharf, though Prue had never known a butcher to work there. She thought they had all surely seen the scuffle at the landing and were sending the Winship daughters their disapprobation. Pieter Schermerhorn opened the French door from his office to his balcony and stepped out for air; as if nothing unusual had happened, he waved to the girls as they approached.
“Hi, Mr. Schermerhorn,” Tem called out.
“Hello, Miss Temmy,” he replied. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” He winked at them. “Where are Miss Pearl’s shoes?”
“Don’t know, sir,” Tem said, and began to giggle as soon as they’d passed him.
They all knew he envied their father; he was a bachelor, sharing the rope manufactory and his home with his widowed cousin, Wilhelmus, and between them they could not scrounge up even so much as a daughter or niece to whom to leave the thriving walk. At the distillery gate, Pearl pointed up toward their backyard privy and excused herself; Tem and Prue went to the brewhouse to find their father and finish their day’s work. He and a dozen men were deep inside and bent over the first two mash tuns, scrubbing.
“Hi, Daddy,” Prue said.
He peered up from the great vat and wiped his sweaty cheek against his shoulder. “Long break,” he said, but he smiled at them. If he’d been indoors all that while, he wouldn’t have heard of their adventure.
“We’ll come in.”
“We’re nearly done, miss,” said someone deep in the yawning tub.
Tem cried, “Woo-hoo!”
“Mind your manners, there. You’ve both done good work today. Go up and wash,” their father said. “See if your mother wants any help.”
Tem was watching Prue as they went outside, but Prue didn’t want to risk saying anything. The fires were still roaring in the stilihouse. “Should we tell them about what happened?” Tem asked as they started toward the hill.
“I don’t know yet.”
Pearl was down in the shallows, with her skirt drawn through her legs and tucked into her apron band. She was searching for mussels, and she beckoned frantically to her sisters. “We should help her,” Prue said.
“I don’t want to pick mussels,” Tem said. “I’m exhausted.”
“Oh, come,” Prue said, and tried to lift her up, but Tem bore down and made herself heavy. Prue began tickling her, and kept tickling until she fell, yelping, on the hard-packed sand. Then Prue pulled Tem’s boots off, and began running with them down toward the water. Tem quickly caught her, and brought her down; and when they’d tired themselves out, they helped Pearl with the mussels. Pearl looked annoyed by their antics, or perhaps, Prue thought, she was troubled by what she’d done that afternoon. If so, it would serve her right; on the theory her lot was difficult enough, their parents rarely scolded her, but Prue was glad if participation in a scavenging mob made a mark on her conscience.
Johanna was napping by the fire when they returned to the house, her mouth a gash of large yellow teeth and the spaces where teeth had formerly been. “See?” Tem whispered. “She didn’t even notice you were gone.”
Pearl appeared unconvinced. She placed the mussel bucket by the table, and took another bucket out to the pump for water in which to boil them. Prue brought up two fistfuls of parsnips from the cellar. When the door banged shut behind her, Johanna awakened, rocking upright in her chair and gripping her dress above her heart. “Who’s that?” she asked. Her eyes were, by then, completely filmed over with cataract, for which Dr. de Bouton could do nothing. It made them gleam like opals. Prue thought something looked strange about Johanna’s face, but assumed it was a trick of the firelight.
“It’s Prue,” Prue said. As Johanna still look frightened, she shouted, “Prue! Preparing supper!”
“God in Den Haag!”
Prue placed a wooden bowl on, the table to catch the parsnip peelings. Pearl brought the water in and dumped it into the cauldron. She took the paring knife rather brusquely from Prue. “Hey,” Prue said.
But Pearl was cross about something. With the knife still in hand, she made a wringing gesture, which Prue took to mean she was to leave her with the parsnips and go wash.
“I was thinking of frying them in butter,” Prue said.
Pearl nodded as she began to pare. The skins flew in an expert arc into the bowl.
Tem went out wandering the minute their supper was cleared from the table; and Prue thought she herself would never have been allowed out after dark, at nine years old.
When the dishes were done, Prue went upstairs to retrieve the book she was reading, and Pearl followed close behind her. May I shew you something? she wrote, touching Prue’s arm before holding the slate out to her.
Prue sat down on her bed, her index finger folded into the book.
Pearl tucked the slate into her waistband and pocketed her chalk, crouched down beneath the table under the eaves, and began to pry up the nails holding the loose plank to the floor. The hole held the sisters’ few treasures: rounded bits of sea glass, shells, buttons scavenged from the British officers, and Nell, now that both Tem and Pearl considered themselves too old to play with her. From the hole Pearl brought up a slender, leather-bound volume, with golden lettering on its spine: Les chefs-d’oeuvres d’art franfais, Tome I.
“Pearl,” Prue said. She hadn’t seen this book before, and knew it was ill-gotten. She put her own reading down and took it from her. Unlike the penny editions she and her father often chose, this book had marbled endpapers, and the edges of the pages were gilt. Its text was dense, apparently in French, but here and there were steel engravings as finely detailed as any Prue had seen, of fat nudes, and heroic figures, scantily clad, in poses of action. She could not help giggling over it. “Great God, Pearl, where’d you get this?”
Pearl winced but looked at her sister hopefully, as if she might somehow expiate the sin.
Prue handed it back to her. She felt the very roots of her hair tingle with the intoxicating idea Pearl had done something bad, and with the fear it was somehow her own fault, both for inaugurating Pearl’s life with a curse and for not calling her back from the fray at the landing. “You shall have to give it back, then.”
Pearl shook her head no.
“Pearl—”
She drew out her chalk and slate. I’d have to say I stole it.
“Well, you did steal it. You must return it.”
Pearl looked at Prue as if it were impossible she should thus be scolding her. He’ll be so angry,—Mothr & Fathr,—
“Of course they’ll be angry,” Prue interrupted. She meant to keep her temper, but her voice was starting to rise. “All the more reason—”
Pearl quickly erased with her sleeve. “Shh!” she hissed. It was one of the only sounds she could make, occurring, as it did, not by action of the vocal cords but between the tongue and teeth.
But it was too late. “What’s that?” Roxana called up the stairs. She was halfway up before Pearl could fit the book back into its hole, and when she stepped into the room, Pearl was crouched guiltily in the corner. “What are you doing?” Roxana asked. She looked to Prue. “What’s she doing?”
Prue was accustomed to reporting on Tem. Pearl had never been on the wrong side of this arrangement, but of course knew of it, and glared at her. Prue wondered if her mother had even known about the hole. She continued to look at both girls.
“Give it here, then,” Roxana said, as if they’d stood stalemated for hours. She knelt down, her knees popping, and extended her hand.
Pearl gave the book over, then sat looking up from beneath her fringe, her eyes round as saucers. Roxana flipped the book back and forth and frowned at it. “Your father didn’t buy this for you, I take it?”
Pearl had left her slate on the bed. Instead of passing it to her, Prue said, “It fell out from the new minister’s things.”
Roxana flipped it over again. “Matty?” she called into the hallway. “Can you come up?”
“Just a moment,” Matty said. Prue could hear him depositing his pipe on the hob and his newssheet on the chair.
Roxana met him at the top of the stairs with the book. “Reverend, Prue says the new minister lost it somehow, and Pearlie picked it up. I didn’t even know he’d arrived.”
Matty Winship was in his house shoes, but even so, the two large steps he took to enter the girls’ room were fearsome. “You were part of that mob?” he asked Pearl, his tone restrained but obviously displeased.
Prue held Pearl’s slate out to her, but she neither took it nor made any other sign of response. “She—”
“I’m speaking to Pearl,” Matty said. “Answer me.”
Pearl retreated farther beneath the table.
“Answer me!”
“She doesn’t have her slate,” Prue said, and continued to hold it out to her.
“She doesn’t need a damned slate to nod,” he said. He grabbed Pearl’s upper arm and pulled her out to the middle of the room. Whether or not he’d actually hurt her, she was twisting violently from him, and exhaled a long, rasping breath that must have been a shriek. “Answer me, damn you!” He wrenched her around and slapped her cheek. Her small face froze in surprise.
“Matty—” Roxana said.
He held up his palm to her in warning. “No. I did not raise them to—Christ! Answer me, Pearl: Did you swarm the minister?” He shook her. “Did you pick like a scavenger through his goods?”
She continued to twist away from him and was, by then, howling almost silently and had begun to cry. Prue had never imagined he could handle one of his daughters so roughly; she could see his behavior confused Pearl as much as frightened her. Prue tried to think of something to say that might induce him to let her sister go, but her mind was blank.
“It is too much, Pearl. Do you hear me?” he yelled. His voice was beginning to go hoarse. “Too much!” All of a sudden he released Pearl’s arm. She crumpled away from him, and held her hand over the spot he’d gripped. “I have never once raised a hand to you, not once, because I have never known a sadness such as I felt at your birth.”
“No, Roxy.” Prue realized her father was not hoarse at all—he, too, had begun to cry. “You have no idea how much your trouble pains me,” he said to Pearl. “If I were a religious man, I’d have been on my knees every day of your life, praying God to make your lot otherwise. But Pearl, if there were a God, could He have done this to you? No. No God would let little children be maimed. No God would give you a life in which you’ll never be free to leave this house or have a family of your own.”
Prue could hardly believe her father had said all this aloud, and wished he might retract it. She thought her mother’s blank expression indicated similar disbelief, though it might also have been shock that Matty Winship, the household’s only blithe spirit, had lost his temper. Prue coaxed Pearl into her lap. Tem would have spilled out in all directions, but Pearl still fit snugly, nursing her upper arm.
Matty wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’m sorry, Pearlie. It’s nor here nor there, is it? This is your lot. Tem and Prue will carry on at the manufactory, and they love you. They’ll look after you.”
Roxana sighed and sat down wearily on Prue’s bed.
“It’s only the truth, Roxy.”
“She’s ten years old.”
He once again gruffly wiped his nose. “So, very well. I cannot give you an easy life, nor meaningful work, as I can give your sisters. What matters most to me, then, is that you should grow to be a good person.”
“She is good,” Prue said.
“Good enough to steal from a man who’s just buried his father and come to live among strangers?”
Pearl flailed in her sister’s arms. Prue first tried to contain her, then realized she was grabbing for the slate, which Prue reached down from the bed and handed to her. Pearl took it, and heaved a sob. I’m sory, she wrote, though the chalk skipped over the spot where a tear had fallen.
“It was a gross incivility, Pearl. And what for?” He took the beautiful book from Roxana and opened to a page. “This book isn’t any better than those I bring you, though it’s prettier bound. I give you the best I can. You don’t even read French.”
Prue heard Tem walking softly up the stairs, unlike the usual way she clambered. She must have sensed something amiss.
“There’s nothing for it but to march you up to the minister to make your apologies.”
Pearl sat bolt upright and wiped her slate. No, she wrote.
“No?”
“We can do it for her,” Roxana said.
He turned to his wife with his lips parted in amazement. “What good would come of that? She’ll apologize herself.”
Pearl wrote, UNFAIR, and held the slate out before her, her head turned to one side as if, by not seeing him, she could render herself deaf to his command.
Matty shook his head no. “You may agree to go peacefully in the morning, or I shall drag you there right now. But you will go.”
Pearl held up her word again, and Matty let out an exhausted breath before grabbing her out of Prue’s lap. The slate slipped from her hands.
“Put your shoes on,” he said. Prue had never seen his face so mirthless. He tried to force Pearl’s feet into a pair of clogs by the door, but she hissed and spat, wriggling in his grasp like a trapped fox. Half her hair had come loose from her braids and hung around her like the strings of an old black mop.
“Those are Tem’s,” Prue said. Tem herself was standing, weirdly quiet, out in the hall. She was still in her work boots, with her loose-fitting coat unbuttoned over the leather vest. “They won’t fit her.”
“I don’t care if they’re Louis Philippe’s. Put them on.”
Pearl was bawling by now, but she put her feet in the shoes, which were too large for her. With the book in hand, their father marched her from the room. The shoes rang like a volley of gunshots across the hall and down the stairs, and both Tem and Prue winced when they heard Pearl stumble on the bottom step. Matty cursed under his breath as he pulled on his boots; then the door slammed shut behind them. Tem stood unusually still. Their mother reached a hand up to the nape of her own neck and closed her eyes. “I am so sorry you witnessed that,” she said.
Prue was uncertain what to say; if it would be worse to ask her to explain what had transpired or to let it pass. She watched her mother rub the base of her own skull.
After what seemed an age passed, she straightened up, and Prue could see from the glaze over her eyes how exhausted she was. She looked at Tem as if she hadn’t noticed her previously. “Where were you?” she asked, her tone too flat to convey any accusation.
“Down at the Remsens’.”
Roxana nodded, as if this were where Tem ought to have been after dark. “Why don’t you both wash your hands and come sit by the fire with me till Daddy and Pearl come home.”
Prue said, “You should lie down.”
Roxana smiled as she sometimes did when she was sad—the corners of her lips dropped, but the expression was more tender than a frown. “I’ll rest in the parlor. But I’ll have to speak to your father when he returns.” She reached over and rubbed the spot between Prue’s bony shoulder blades, as if she were a baby in need of soothing. Then she patted her and made her way toward the stairs.
The girls still had water in their pitcher from the morning. Tem sat without even fidgeting while Prue rinsed her face. Tem gave her a towel and asked, “What happened?”
Prue sat down beside her. “Pearl pinched a book from the minister’s things.”
Tem’s mouth became a delighted O.
“Nay, don’t,” Prue said.
“I know it isn’t funny, but I’m glad, for once, she got to do something rotten.”
“I am, too,” Prue whispered. She was also still disturbed by the scene she’d witnessed. At long last she took her volume of Vasari downstairs.
Despite the rumpus, Johanna was snoring in her room off the kitchen. Pearl’s sleek mottled cat stood coiled up facing a corner, its tail switching behind it. Roxana was in the parlor, with her stocking feet up on the arm of the divan. Such a scene—in which there were no games to play—would ordinarily have made Tem shout out in complaint, but she took up her father’s newssheet and tried to apply herself to it.
The clock cycled through more than an hour before the kitchen door opened and shut. Prue knew it would have been polite to remain reading, but she had not learned a thing about Simone Martini, though she’d dutifully turned her pages; and her mother and sister also sprang up to crowd through the hallway to the kitchen. Pearl was so pale she looked almost gray, but their father had neatened her hair. She stood looking at the floor until her cat came and rubbed against her leg. Tears filled her eyes at once. She picked the cat up and carried it upstairs, its yellow eyes over her shoulder reflecting the firelight as she ascended. Matty poured himself a dram of gin, drank it in silence by the fire, and said, “He wasn’t angry.”
Roxana blinked and sat down.
“He took one look at her and saw what misery she’d suffered. Must have thought me an ogre. He seems kind; perhaps he was a bit of a scoundrel as a lad. I volunteered her to help him set up house, or whatever such a little creature might do, but he declined.”
“Sounds like a decent fellow,” Roxana said. Prue couldn’t detect even a ripple of sarcasm in her tone.
“Yes, I think so. I hope you won’t mind, but I offered him our assembly room for his church.” He poured himself a second cupful, and before he drank it, handed it to Prue. “Aniseed.”
Prue smelled it and stuck her tongue in. She was beginning not merely to appreciate gin, but to like it. “It’s good when it tastes like licorice.”
“Yes.”
“Why’d you do that?” Roxana asked. As her husband did not respond, she added, “I assume he accepted.”
Matty nodded. Prue gave him back his cup.
“Hmm,” Roxana said, and again took her fingers to the back of her neck.
Matty shrugged his broad shoulders. “He’s a good man, Roxy, and someone owed him a bit of kindness after what he suffered this morning. Besides, it was the assembly room or Whitcombe’s barn; and I can’t suppose even you hate the church enough to ask a man to preach among cattle. I certainly don’t.”
So, against Roxana’s silent disapproval, Mr. Severn preached the Gospel under the roof of a nonbeliever that Sunday, as he would continue to do until the following March, when the church’s roof would at last be in place, and the plaster upon the lath. That week it was the scandal of the town that the Winships did not bother to take their daughters to church even when the services were in their own backyard; but Matty told the girls not to listen to gossip. He said, “We don’t have to pretend we’re aught but what we are, to do a fellow a good turn.” He could not have known how much Prue yearned to sit on those makeshift benches and pray to God and Mr. Severn to forgive her and Pearl for their various sins.
Pearl held her grudge all the next day and refused to look any of her family in the eye. Johanna, idly burning their breakfast, had either been aware of the histrionics the night before or could smell Pearl’s sulking; for she commented, “Och God, just like her sister, just like Prue,” to all who passed. Prue heard her say it to her mother as Roxana grabbed two of Prue’s ugly pot holders and removed the ruined oatmeal to the compost.
Prue watched her from the doorway as she left the pot out by the well to cool and later be scrubbed. “Don’t worry,” she said. Her voice carried in the crisp morning air. “She no longer knows what she says.”
But Prue knew what Johanna meant, and still hoped the rest of them would never discover it. Her mother and Johanna were such good friends, she could not imagine Johanna had kept her secret all this time; yet her mother had never mentioned it. Pearl’s ears had certainly pricked up just then, but it was clear she was spoiling for a fight. Prue now saw there truly was something odd about Johanna’s face—a purplish swelling, as of a large bruise, where her cap was pushed askew near her left temple. On any other morning she would have mentioned it straightaway.
More than her father’s uncustomary wrath, what had vexed Prue about the previous evening’s incident was to have seen Pearl reduced so swiftly to a near-animal state. When her slate was not at hand, she was, Prue realized, hardly better able to express herself than a dog. And although Prue had never before thought much about the way the right forearm of Pearl’s every dress was caked slick with chalk dust, this now saddened her. She went up late that afternoon to Mrs. Tilley to inquire if something might be purchased to aid her sister. Gray-haired Mr. Severn was standing by with a list of provisions in hand and his ragged muffler wrapped tight around his throat. He smiled bashfully at Prue when she entered, and motioned for her to conduct her business first. Prue walked to the counter, and the minister turned back to examining the dry goods. She kept her eye on him. Mrs. Tilley appeared most interested in how the minister discomfited Prue; but on request, she brought down a catalogue of goods that featured a small silver note case on a chain. Pearl could wear this around her neck, with its wooden pencil holding fast the clasp, yet have her hands free like an ordinary person. “What would it cost?” Prue asked.
“Four pounds, and I’m sure worth every shilling.”
Prue whistled through her teeth, and when she saw Mrs. Tilley’s expression, recollected this was not acceptable practice outside the Winship home and distillery. “Sakes,” she said, and felt herself blushing. “I’ll have to ask my father.” The pencils wouldn’t last Pearl long, either; she would have to buy a bushel of them.
“No,” Mr. Severn said. He came closer to her and fumbled in his pocket for his purse. “Please. It would be my pleasure.”
Mrs. Tilley now looked even more annoyed, Prue presumed because she was considering her own daughter’s prospects. “Mr. Severn,” she said sternly. “Don’t you think our distiller can better afford such an expenditure than you?”
“Without doubt,” he replied. He took out two pounds sterling and laid them with care on the counter. “But my heart goes out to the girl. It is a terrible lot, to be so isolated. This is all I have, for now, but perhaps you’ll allow me to place the rest on credit—”
Prue said, “I can’t—”
“I owe your father a debt of gratitude, Miss Winship, for giving a home to my church. If he would come, I could repay him in spiritual tender, but I cannot force his conscience.” He tugged the muffler away from his throat; it must have been stifling hot, and looked itchy. “Please, Prudence.”
No one ever called her by her full name, and it buzzed in her ears. She said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Severn.”
When she left, with the receipt for the case in her pocket, he followed her outside and shut the jingling door behind them. “May I have a word?” he asked. He hunched down in his shoulders to make himself more her size.
Prue nodded. Mrs. Tilley was watching with interest through the glass panes in the door.
He said, “Your shopkeeper is a good woman, but one can say nothing in front of her without having it broadcast like grass seed over all the town.” He had coaxed a smile from her, and nodded as if pleased. “When the case arrives, do you tell Pearl it came from me. She seemed in such torment when your father brought her to my house, and if she won’t look me in the eye, I see no other way to apologize.”
“I will, sir. But I feel it is unequal payment.”
He drew his chin deeper under the muffler.
“That is, I feel we should do something for you as well.” She looked him over. What could such a person need? He had a home and a hired woman; he would have a wife soon enough, if either Mrs. Tilley or Mrs. Livingston had her way. “I’m not a very good knitter—my father is training me for the distillery, as you may know—”
“Yes, it’s quite the topic—”
“But I could offer to make you a new muffler, as your old one—as your old one appears to be much worn.”
He put his hand up to his throat as if to ask if this threadbare thing was that to which she referred. “This? Oh,” he said. “No. I couldn’t part with it. My late mother knitted it for me.”
“I’m sorry,” Prue said, both because she was sorry he’d lost his mother and because she was sorry she’d made the gaffe. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I understand,” he said.
“Pearl is a very good knitter,” she offered, though she wanted to kick herself for doing so. “And she works wonders with an embroidery needle.”
He nodded. “Well. If ever she forgives me for having been the cause of her dishonor, perhaps she’ll tell me about it herself.” He looked back through the door’s six small panes to Mrs. Tilley, who was dusting her shelves with unusual vigor. “I should finish my business here,” he said.
Prue said, “Thank you again,” and as she walked back toward the Ferry Road, felt the eyes of the neighborhood upon her.
The note case arrived after the New Year; it was larger and heavier than Prue had imagined, but would still provide Pearl a degree of freedom she had theretofore lacked. Mrs. Tilley looked tart when Prue wrapped it in her handkerchief to bring it home. Pearl’s whole face lit up when she opened it; and though Prue saw her parents wonder whence the money for the object had come, they had the decency not to ask until later, in private. Pearl put the case around her throat immediately and was never again, in all her days, seen to go so much as from one room to the next without it.
Prue waited until she had Pearl alone by the back fence to tell her the case’s provenance. Pearl drew her lips in to think about it. She was not yet adept with the contraption, and took a moment to free the pencil from its hasp and turn the book in the correct direction to write. Becaus he pity’d me? she wrote.
“I think he rather regretted how Father treated you,” Prue said.
Pearl continued to chew on her lower lip. Yr th’un should never have spoken.
Prue could not respond to this. She wished she had not so elicited her father’s rage, but knew she’d been correct about the stolen book. “He said if you’d forgive him, he’d like to see some of your needlework.”
Pearl raised her thin eyebrows, in perfect imitation of their mother. She flipped to a clean page. What’ e think I stoal it for?
“What do you mean?”
Patterns. She glanced back toward the house, then wrote, You want to go to the church, do’n’t you?
Prue was unnerved by the person watching her—a child who looked much younger than her years, yet stood staring at her with steady black eyes. It was no use hiding things from her; her parents would pass on someday, but Pearl was forever. “Very much,” she said. “I have always wanted to. Since before you were born.”
I, too, wish to go.
“I’ll take you, then, this Sunday.”
Tem’ll poak fun at me.
“We shan’t tell her.”
Pearl closed her book and patted it where it hung above her belly. She swayed a little as she walked back to the house.
That Sunday, Prue had her father’s keys hidden in her pocket when she offered to take Pearl out for a walk. They stood by the back fence and watched as those neighbors of English descent filed down the lane to the mill yard and entered the assembly room. When the door shut, Prue drew Pearl out into Joralemon’s Lane, and they hurried down against the stiff wind rising from the river. At the distillery gate, Prue paused and said, “It’s too cold to walk up barefoot, but we’ll have to be very quiet.”
Pearl turned up her collar and kept walking, casting a disparaging glance over her shoulder at her sister as she went.
As she placed her hand on the plain banister, Prue glanced into the room. The benches were arranged so the parishioners had their backs to the door and the outdoor stairs. Prue recognized Mr. Severn—facing them at the far end of the room—from his gray hair and bashful posture, but through the ripples of the window glass, and as she was moving, she could not see if he had seen them. She wanted to hide her face, as if this could prevent her from being recognized.
She had never before noticed the sound of the countinghouse lock, but it clicked and shuffled as she turned the key. Pearl was staring at it as if she could will it to be silent. At last the door gave and let them in. Prue wished the parish would strike up a hymn, but all she could hear was Mr. Severn’s muffled voice coming up through the floorboards and the occasional creak of someone moving below.
She shut the door behind them and went to take Pearl’s coat, but Pearl shook her head no; they could see the plumes of their breath, and there would be no lighting the stove without giving themselves away. Prue did, however, lean down to remove her shoes, and she helped Pearl out of hers while she was there. She placed them on the rough floorboards as gently as she would have laid down a baby.
Mr. Severn was difficult to hear from the far side of the room; so, with infinite care, they crossed the cold floor in their stocking feet, skirting the great desk and the stove with its kettle on top. Prue knew Mr. Severn was standing, with his Bible and some papers on a stool, at the far northern end of the assembly room. The windows above where he stood were behind the paper-strewn desk and looked out on the rectifying room, cashing room, storehouses, and ropewalk. Their father had left two of their mother’s coffee cups, filthy with stains and grounds, on the bookshelf beneath the window. The sisters sat down on the floor and turned their backs to the shelf. They were so nearly atop where Mr. Severn stood, Prue could feel the reverberation of his voice before she could make out the text of what he was saying.
She knew nothing of church. She had understood little in her childhood visits to the domine, and since then had been given no Bible, no catechism, no lessons in doctrine. She heard nothing familiar but the quaver in the voice of the shy, good man beneath her. She knew nothing but the way her heart called out to God, unheard by any but Pearl. She saw Pearl had closed her eyes to listen, and she did the same.
Through the baffling of the floorboards, Mr. Severn’s voice sounded intimate, as if he were alone and simply musing aloud. “. . . on the subject of our relationships of temper and feeling to our fellow men,” he was saying.
Prue did not follow, but she trusted she would.
“ ‘Ye have heard that it bath been said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.” ’ The Gospel of Matthew says this on the principle, I suppose, that half a loaf is better than no bread.”
To Prue’s surprise, the congregation laughed. She and Pearl both opened their eyes. The pews creaked as people must have leaned forward to hear him better.
“People fulfill the last of the maxim without taking much pains about the first,” he went on. His voice had gained a little strength, a little melody. “The art of hatred is quite thoroughly developed among mankind; it is one of those graces that do not need much nourishing. But the art of loving one’s neighbor is a different one, inasmuch as most people are not altogether lovely”
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. ye 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.