Ben soon discovered that to buy timber even for a roof beam was not so easy as when Matty Winship had built his distillery. It had been more than a decade since the depredation of war had ended, but as far as the eye could see, the trees were still at most of middling size. The tall, straight beams for ship masts and keels were difficult to find and commanded a good price; and Theunis van Vechten predicted their second model would be built dear. The newspapers concurred, with the exception of Brooklyn’s only sheet, the newly founded Long-Island Courier, which did not attempt to hide its partisanship.
Prue thought, however, it was a point in favor of her schema that it did not call for any such rarefied timber as a ship. The structure’s stability would depend not upon its members’ prodigious length or girth but upon their being free of imperfections and cut to the correct size. They would need to be carefully balanced to relay weight to the ground in the proper fashion, and they would have to be ingeniously secured to the structure, that if any single member were to succumb to rot, it might be removed without danger to its neighbors. What the large model needed was not a few gargantuan trees but a great many, medium in size and uniform in growth pattern; the only problem Prue foresaw was to be able to get enough of them. And fir was not a rare or expensive wood; this was part of the reason she had chosen it.
Theunis knew they would not find sufficient timber to build the model in New York or on Long Island; but he thought if Ben set off up the North River, he would find both wood to his liking and limestone to use for the model’s abutments. Prue deposited the governor’s money, when it arrived, in the distillery’s account and signed Ben permission to draw upon it for his purchases. After tarrying for what he called a “wedding-week,” during which he sold his house to a family newly come from Virginia and put that money aside, Ben traveled northward in search of the materials. He was, he reasoned, nearly done with his surveying projects for the year; he believed he could tie them up upon his return and restore Adam van Suetendael to Joe Loosely’s employ for the season. Though he supposed he could get a better price if he were buying in the quantities required for an actual bridge, he thought Governor Jay’s letter, and the promise of a much larger purchase if the model succeeded, would convince merchants to treat him fairly. He kept his promise and wrote Prue frequently, though he would likely arrive home before the letters did.
She, in the meantime, continued to check on the progress of the first model. It was beginning to look weather-beaten but remained solid, which boded well. She took her daily measurements, and found it had hardly degraded in its weeks outdoors. She also returned to her ordinary business at the distillery—the general management she shared with her sister and Isaiah, and the rectifying of spirits in which she found herself once again alone, now that she had moved Marcel, against his will, to the countinghouse.
“No,” he had said, on his first day back. “I shall be more careful, Miss Winship.” Most people, she found, still called her Prue Winship, in the same way Patience remained a Livingston, or perhaps even more so because of the gin. Though she didn’t want to argue with Marcel, she was glad, for his sake, to see a spark of fire in his eyes.
“I can’t risk it,” she’d said simply.
“What else can happen? What other ill could befall me? The worst has already occurred and, as you see,” he had said with some force, “I am faring well.”
“You could have lost a hand or an arm. It might have killed you. And while I dislike depriving you of a vocation for which you feel passion and in which you show obvious promise, I feel I must do so out of regard for your granduncle. You may argue as strenuously as you wish, but I shan’t change my mind.”
He had continued to stand looking her square in the eye, but the next day had begun to learn bookkeeping.
Prue knew she had acted correctly, but now found herself in an awkward position: When Ben returned, she might have devoted her energy to working on the large model, were she not single-handedly responsible for rectifying the liquor. Her options were either to relent with Marcel Dufresne, which she did not intend to do; to find someone else with his talents, which seemed a remote possibility; or to do as Tem had suggested and pin down the ingredients, in precise amounts and a particular order, now and for all time. She could not effect the first two remedies and could not stomach the third. Therefore, she chose none.
Long ago—before she’d once traveled to Manhattan and before her father had reconciled himself to the fact he would never sire a son—she had thought the distillery would offer her incomparable freedom, a wide-open arena in which to prove her mettle. It had, and continued to do so; and Prue considered herself more in command of her own fate than, say, Patience, tied to a house, a sister-in-law, and three small children. Her freedom was immense, compared to Pearl’s. Yet the distillery also circumscribed Prue just as surely; her current dilemma did not seem to leave her any room to move at all. Making no decision was tantamount to deciding things should continue as they always had. Though she knew they would have to change soon enough, she chose the course of inaction.
She received news from Ben only a week after he left, that he had found an adequate quantity of fir, already hewn and cured and suitable for use in the model. He noted, however, that this purchase would tax the timber merchant’s capacity, and he wondered how they would procure sufficient materials for the bridge itself, were they fortunate enough eventually to build it. For the nonce, he recognized his concern as mere hope. He would hunt down their limestone, including suitable foundation stones, and return with all due haste.
It was another ten days before he returned, bearing receipts for three acres of timber and a few tons of Hudson Valley limestone. His first task was to finish the surveys he’d contracted to do for Mr. Whitcombe and out past Bergen’s Hill; his second was to hire men to dig two foundation holes for the model bridge in the sand of the mill yard before the frost. With this work completed, his small crew could spend the winter cutting the timber and limestone to specifications and building the small cranes they would employ to test their methods of construction; actual building might then commence with the first sign of a thaw. He ordered nails by the cartload from the local smiths.
“Is it not your good fortune,” he said over supper a few nights after his return, “to have married a man suited to such work?”
Abiah rolled her eyes, and Tem tossed her napkin at him. “I think it is rather your good fortune,” Prue said, “to have married a woman with such fine ideas.”
Pearl wrote, I thnk it ill becomes you Boath to speak of’t.
Ben laughed. “Modesty does not serve in all regards,” he said. “I think your sisters had best watch out, Pearlie, or I’ll start poking my fingers in the distillery’s pies as well.”
Prue laughed at him, but she did feel blessed to know he could look over the building of the model as well as, or better than, she could do herself.
Later that week, on the same day the first of Ben’s newly hired men went looking for lodging in the town, there was an accident in the brew-house, when one of the great agitating arms broke in the second mash tun. Neither Tem, Prue, nor Isaiah was in the brewhouse that morning—an unfortunate, though not an unusual, circumstance—but by Phineas Bates’s report, the agitator broke off with a stupendous crack as if of lightning, then became entangled with the machine’s other arms as they continued to turn and strain. The tank held three thousand gallons of water and grain; it was a powerful machine could stir all that, and the noise, by all reports, startled everyone in the mash room. They scuttled down the ramps and ladders from their own tuns, and up to the afflicted one. A worker new to the brewhouse—perhaps thinking the break his own fault—panicked at the racket of the agitators grinding one another to shards, and hurled himself over the side of the tank, no doubt with the intention of trying to fix it. He immediately became ensnared in the mass of splintered wood.
The distillery had a protocol for such circumstances. Every building connected to the power train had its warning bell; anyone could unwrap the rope from its cleat and alert the windmill keeper to disengage the drive shaft from the crown gear. In a heartbeat, the rumble of the whole works could grind down to silence. There was no untangling why some more seasoned hand did not, on that day, pull the bell at once, nor why they all crowded up that single ramp; but minutes elapsed before someone jumped down to ring for mercy. Before the signal reached the keeper’s ears, the ramp collapsed, taking almost twenty men down with it, and leaving the hapless worker drowning in the tun.
Prue had been in the stillhouse, where some of the machines ran off the waterwheel’s power and therefore kept humming while everything else fell quiet. The sound of the alarm bell reached her dimly, however, and the eerie silence of everything shutting down was unmistakable. She and Jens Luquer left the worm tub unattended and ran outside, to see the entire mill sprinting toward the brewhouse. “What happened?” Prue asked everyone around her. A few turned to her with puzzled expressions—either no one knew or no one could stop to tell her. She joined the crowd and ran down the yard.
Her elderly fermenting master, Elliott Fortune, was climbing the steep steps from the cellar. He’d been able to hear the tumult from where he worked, and as Prue hurried past, he held out a finger and said, “Some kind of accident, Prue. Don’t know what yet.”
Isaiah had reached the tun room first and was calling for ladders. The room was in chaos. Men were shouting, in pain or fear, and others were helping them from the wreckage of the collapsed ramp. The fall from the top had been only ten feet, but so many had fallen atop one another, they had injured those closest to the bottom; and the ancient wood of the ramp itself had cracked into splinters, full of nails. Prue took the arm of the person nearest her and, without remarking who he was, sent him for whichever doctor he could find. The ladders came in directly he left, and were passed hand to hand to those nearest the tun. Isaiah scrambled up one and stared down into it with what appeared to be blank horror. Prue was terrified to think what he might have seen, and quickly prayed that no one be harmed. The moment she’d thought it, she realized her prayer was no doubt useless; but she still hoped no ill had befallen anyone. Phineas, who’d been right beside Isaiah, scaled the other ladder and stood looking down, also clearly confused.
“What is it?” Prue asked. “Who is it? What happened?”
They didn’t notice her, however. They regarded each other a long moment before Phineas dropped his boots to the ground and slid over the side of the tun.
“Man in the tank, ma’am,” said one of the workers nearby.
People hushed each other throughout the room. Phineas held on to the rim of the tun with one hand, all that was visible of him. Prue picked her way nearer, noticing, as she went, that while some of the men were badly cut and in obvious discomfort, they all appeared to move and breathe. “Isaiah?” she said.
“Hold, Prue,” he said quietly.
Phineas’s hand began to move toward the back of the brewhouse. He stopped at the farthest extremity from where Prue stood. “I have him,” he called.
“Do you need help?” Isaiah asked.
Phineas’s hand slipped another few inches around. “Yes, sir,” came his reply.
Tem came in then, from who knew where, and said, “What’s going on?”
The whole room hushed her, as it had done to Prue, who now scaled the other ladder to relieve Isaiah of his watch. Before Isaiah could hand it to her, she looked down into the tun. The water in an active mash tun always bubbled as the sugar was extracted from the grain; but this foam was tinged pink with blood. Phineas was bobbing slightly, at the far side of the tank, with one hand holding the worker’s corpse. One arm had been torn off at the shoulder and floated free, near his bare feet; and the man’s skull had been crushed. The gray matter of his brain wafted behind him on the murky water.
“Oh, God,” Prue said, and felt she would vomit or faint.
“Go down, Prue,” Isaiah said. When she did not at once obey, he pressed the watch upon her and said, “Someone take her down.”
She felt two hands clasp around her waist, and she followed them back down the ladder, the watch chain dangling from her palm. She felt the watch ticking, but her breath could not penetrate the depths of her chest.
Isaiah dropped his boots to the floor and splashed into the tun. Whoever had helped Prue down the ladder passed her off to Tem, who put her arm around her; and they stood back, Prue with her breath short and her stomach clenched against what she knew to be forthcoming. There were splashing and squelching sounds, of something ripping and shifting underwater. Phineas and Isaiah hoisted themselves out and stood side by side on the ladders, soaked and dripping, with every eye in the room upon them.
“On three,” Isaiah said. “One, two—”
And on the third count they heaved up the corpse. Isaiah clutched one naked foot, and Phineas the bloodless arm still attached to the body; the brains spilled out like entrails. Prue could now see it was a Negro worker; she had remarked nothing but the gore when she’d stood atop the ladder. The room erupted in clamor, and someone shouted, “Jim!” Tem, who could take many things lightly, turned aside. Ben and one of his new workers came in; and Prue felt she might cry for joy at seeing him, though there was nothing he could do.
“Make way,” Isaiah said as they climbed down. “Someone go to the grain bins and bring flour sacks, to cover ’im.” They placed the body gently on the floor.
Prue heard someone run out. “Hoy!” he cried in the yard. “Dr. Philpot!”
She would rather have heard de Bouton’s name, but charlatan or no, she was relieved to know Tobias Philpot had arrived. Though his nose was thick from drinking and webbed with fine red blood vessels, his hair was still black as a boot. He entered, as always, at his leisure, and bearing a box containing bottles of his nostrum. Even if it had no medicinal value, it would prove a friend to the injured. His sleepy eyes lit immediately on the dead man’s body. Isaiah said to him, “No, it is too late. But there are a number who are hurt.”
Prue could not stop looking at the corpse. His face was not crushed past recognition, but she was galled that she would not have known his name had someone not called out, “Jim.” Prue had seen her mother waste away, and her father bloated and distended by the river he’d so loved, his eyes eaten out by sea creatures; she had seen Johanna ravaged by her tumor; but this, she knew, was death—this ugly stink and anonymity. The body was pooling sugar water and its own fluids on the earthen floor. Dr. Philpot was scanning through the wounded to help the direst cases first; and Prue thought what a comfort it would be to all of them if some gauzy spirit would cloud up from the dead man’s lips and observe the proceedings or waft out toward the straits. She watched the body intently, and if she could have willed this to happen, she would have done so. She would have made there be a spirit ferry and a place for the dead to live across the water; but she knew all the hope and fear in the world could not accomplish this.
“Is it our fault?” Tem whispered, so quietly Prue would not have heard her had Tem not been two feet away.
“I don’t know,” Prue said aloud. In all the years her father had run the distillery, she could not recall any part of a machine breaking off in use. Whatever had appeared worn during his inspection had been brought up for replacement or repair. She and Tem likewise checked their machinery often, and she wanted to say, Who can know when Fate might choose to take a man? Yet even to think this was callous. “We shall do what we can to find out.”
“Perhaps those of you who are hale and well can help bring the injured out-of-doors,” Dr. Philpot said, his voice deep and slow as molasses. God bless him, he did not ruffle easily. “It would be of great service.”
At once the men began to sort themselves, and those who were able, to help their brethren to their feet. The boy with the flour sacks came in, too late to be of much use. Prue thanked him, and covered the man’s ruined face and shoulder. She and Isaiah stood back as if to guard him, while Tem and Ben went outside with Dr. Philpot. Prue heard Ben ask her sister what had occurred. Isaiah was dripping on the floor and smelled like small beer. When everyone had left, Prue asked, “Are you cold?”
“It shan’t kill me.”
“I didn’t even know his name.”
“James Weatherspoon, late of Suffolk. He’s a wife and son, up in Olympia.”
“I feel we should pay the call ourselves.”
He nodded. “I’ll see about a cart.”
“First change your clothes.” He raised a hand, indicating he could not bother. She handed him his watch.
In the daylight, the men did not appear so badly maimed as they had in the dim brewhouse. They were all still talking about the accident. Isaiah set out at once for the stable, while Prue stood by blinking. Tem had called for gin to be brought out to everyone and was crouched on the ground, holding a worker’s hand. Someone had already dropped the flag to half-mast. “Operations will be suspended for the day,” Prue called out, though she did not suppose the Schermerhorns would have done the same for a mere worker. “And tomorrow, for Mr. Weatherspoon’s funeral. We shall resume production on Thursday.” The flag snapped as if for emphasis. “You will be paid your full wages for the missed days’ labor.” Tem glanced at her, but Prue couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “And I require Owen, and anyone else who would help him clean; and Jean Boulanger, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones’s apprentice. Please gather in the brewhouse at four.” She knelt down where she was, beside a fellow named Toonis Hansen, and helped him rebind the makeshift bandage on his right hand.
Isaiah came around, leading two black horses by the reins; they were hitched to a small cart, from the back of which two of the stable hands lifted a long board. The hands picked their way through the crowded yard and into the brewhouse. Ben was coming over to talk to Prue, and she said, “Isaiah and I shall carry the body to his wife. Can you help Tem look after things?”
Ben nodded.
Prue turned Mr. Hansen over to Elliott Fortune and followed the cooling board back to the cart. Isaiah handed her up, climbed up himself, and steered the horses gingerly to turn around. They kept flicking their heads back and forth; they knew something was amiss. Isaiah stank of mashed grain; and she thought how a chill could kill him exactly as it had killed his father. She also thought how her mother had lived in terror of such an event as had occurred that day. As if he could read her thoughts, Isaiah said, “This is what Roxana always feared would happen,” as they cleared the gate.
“Exactly as I was thinking. But do you ever recall it happening, in our fathers’ time?”
“No,” he said. “Never anything so serious.”
“Nor do I. The only accident was my father’s death.” She still did not believe she’d ever know if he’d slipped from the retaining wall or meant to step down; but it was best to maintain the former conjecture.
“God rest his soul,” Isaiah said, as he steered them through the afternoon traffic on the Ferry Road. His teeth were chattering.
As they drove, Prue pictured the Luquers driving up the Shore Road with her father in their wagon.
That Prue had been able to imagine Ann Weatherspoon’s reaction to their arrival could not lessen the pain of thus witnessing another’s distress. She was a slight woman, with a toddler on one hip, and she came undone exactly as Prue and her sisters had three years before. “I am sorry,” Prue said, as she climbed down from the cart. “I realize no one desires the ministrations of a stranger at such a moment, but please allow me to offer my condolences.”
Ann Weatherspoon simply stood with her mouth open, evidently unable to catch her breath.
Prue felt she herself might begin to cry. “Please, allow me to help,” she said. The child reached his fat hands out to her, and Prue lifted him from his mother’s arms. He was heavy, as if stuffed with grapeshot, and as soon as Prue had hold of him he kicked to be free. Relieved of his weight, Ann Weatherspoon collapsed forward toward the cart. Prue said to Isaiah, “I think you’d best get Mr. Severn.”
“Can you manage?”
Prue widened her eyes at him, and he ran off toward the turnpike, his clothes clinging to his body. Prue could manage because the widow did nothing those next few minutes but lean against the cart and cry out her husband’s name. Prue held the struggling child on one hip and stroked the woman’s thin back with her other hand. Isaiah had disturbed Mr. Severn at his lessons, but he came right away; and as the neighborhood women began to gather, Mr. Severn released Prue and Isaiah to return to the distillery and the awful business of the afternoon. Prue insisted they stop off at Isaiah’s house for a change of clothing.
Pearl must have heard the machinery rumble to a halt, for she was helping the doctors as she could when Prue and Isaiah returned; half the workers from the ropewalk also seemed to be on the premises, some helping, others looking around in a daze. The following day both mills shut down, and the workers gave Jim Weatherspoon—a second-generation freeman, Prue learned, who’d been eager to advance in his chosen profession—a long funeral cortege. By the graveside, Will Severn delivered a moving sermon, in which he expressed his conviction that Jim Weatherspoon had been reborn, whole and at peace, in the Higher Realm. Ann Weatherspoon would not look at him, and simply cried into her handkerchief as her son toddled around, pulling at people’s coats and skirts and digging in the dirt. When the service ended and the burial began, the company began to stream toward Olympia, but Peg Dufresne came limping over to Prue to comfort her, as if a member of her own family had been lost. Prue had never noticed the limp before, but supposed it had come on gradually, now Peg was getting to be an old woman. She drew Prue aside, toward the cemetery fence, and said, “It’s a terrible shame. I can see by your countenance you feel bereaved.”
Ben was standing by, waiting. Prue said to him, “Go on, if you like. We’ll catch up.”
He touched his hat to Peg and walked out with Tem and Pearl.
Prue said, “Tem keeps saying such things are bound to occur; but I feel the worst of it is that it could have been avoided.” There had not yet been a hard frost, but the grass was crunching under their feet. “Perhaps if we’d better inspected the agitator, we would have seen it was cracked or failing. Even if not, the power could have been cut off from the machines in an instant, but by all accounts, he dove in.”
Peg was scanning Prue’s face with her kind, dark eyes. “There’s no changing that, however.”
“I suppose I lose sleep easily.”
“Are you taking care of the widow?”
“We’ve given her what her husband was owed, and a month’s extra wages,” Prue said. “I can also employ her, if need be.”
“She already works. She takes in laundry.”
“I didn’t know,” Prue said. She herself had been married less than a month, but could well imagine the woman’s feelings of helplessness and loss. “Peg, what are the neighbors saying?”
Peg licked her lips but didn’t respond.
Prue went on, “I know something’s amiss.”
Peg said, “Oh, Prue, people will say anything. A few have called it a bad omen about your bridge; Jana Friedlander hopes it isn’t the river taking revenge on you for your treatment of Losee, which I told her is absurd. Some say these things happen if you leave a manufactory in the care of a nineteen-year-old woman.”
“But the accident happened while I was there,” Prue said. Still, she had heard Peg plainly: “These things” included Marcel’s accident as well. “Tem can manage without me when the need arises.”
Peg laid her dry palm on the side of Prue’s face. “I know,” she said. “You know Simon and I believe in all of you, don’t you?”
Prue did, even without her saying so. “Of course. You’re the only people who never treated Pearl as if she were a changeling.”
Peg glanced off as if Pearl were still nearby. “Prue, your distillery provides as much work as anything else in this village. You employ more men than farm our fields. So I think it only natural people should worry what would become of them should you fail in your endeavor.”
“But we shall not,” Prue said. “That’s why we’re building the new model—to test our methods of construction; to be sure.”
“I understand, but I’m not certain everyone does. I don’t mean to offend you.”
Prue said, “I am merely surprised to hear so many people think that way, when the bridge has already brought employment for a few, and may yet prove a boon to many.”
“Prue,” Peg answered, “you’re ignoring the obvious point: People see omens if they wish to see omens. Everything is a sign, when you’re looking for a sign.”
Prue shook her head. Peg was no doubt correct. “I think we should go eat Ann Weatherspoon’s cake. It doesn’t look right to keep away.”
Peg inclined slightly toward her. “You’ll simply have to prove them wrong.”
They walked past the rising heap of the new grave toward the gate. Peg’s limp seemed more pronounced, walking uphill.
Winter was drawing nigh, and Brooklyn’s scrubby brown hills, black rocks, and gray sky looked bleak as anyplace Prue could imagine. She was grateful to Peg for speaking plain, but troubled that her neighbors could think an accident—brought on in part by its victim’s inexperience, and certain not to recur—a sign from above. At the same time, it numbed her to think the life of a husband and father could be undone in an instant, and in service of something as ultimately meaningless as the manufacture of liquor. And she worried about the bridge. Even in building Mr. Severn’s church, some had been injured by saws, mallets, and the inevitable slips of attention; a project of the bridge’s magnitude could not possibly go forward without some loss of life. Prue also knew that from the ancients forward, people had believed a bridge takes a human life during its building, to propitiate the water spirits against the sin of walking above them. A bridge didn’t have to span the divide between the living and the dead to require this sacrifice; to cross a body of water is always, at one level, to bargain with the Devil.
Prue was glad to have Peg beside her when she arrived at the Weatherspoon house. It was low of ceiling and stingy of windows, and had never been meant to hold more than a man and his family, without even the comfort of a fireplace in the second room. Now more than a hundred workingmen, half with their wives and broods in tow, were filing through to pay respects, as were a few of the landowners and businessmen. Prue’s own dark thoughts made it difficult to be among her men and her neighbors; but Peg’s reassurance kept Ann Weatherspoon’s pound cake from turning to ashes on her tongue.
It was necessary to shut the brewhouse the rest of that week, but Tem and Prue employed many of the men in building a tun to replace that which had been marked with Jim Weatherspoon’s blood, in constructing new ramps and ladders, and in checking each mortise and tenon in every building, that any man who worked for the Winships might do so in the peace of knowing the platform he stood upon was sound. The men thus had ample opportunity to come into contact with Ben’s small crew of six, all of whom were at that time digging foundation holes in the sand of the mill yard. These were aligned parallel to the river—the large model would span nothing but bare strand—and almost sixty yards apart. Soon the men would drive piles into the bottoms of the pits to support foundation stones as large as those Matty Winship had placed under the distillery’s buildings. This was not how they would build the actual foundation on the New York side, if the model proved a success: They planned to blast into the perdurable rock of Manhattan Island and build into the resulting hole. Ben and Prue both reasoned, however, that if the model bridge could hold when resting upon two foundations sunk into sand, a real bridge could certainly be built with one end that much more securely anchored. The holes he was digging were only five feet deep, but Ben built picket fences around them, that no one might stumble in. He held out hope he might receive his two great stones before the killing frost; if not, he would not see them until after the thaw. He also began assembling the pieces for the two cranes, each of which would be lifted and lowered by means of a Schermerhorn rope wrapped around a block and tackle and turned by a crank. Two strong chains depending from the crane’s far end would hold the timber to be moved, and a single man would work the crank to lift the piece into position. It would be an excellent device for saving men’s labor, if Ben could be sure to build it both strong enough to do its appointed work and light enough for men to maneuver it without difficulty.
He set up shop in the assembly hall, and for the remainder of the winter, whenever Prue was upstairs in the countinghouse, she heard his stonemasons’ chisels clanking, and the rasp of the carpenters’ planes and saws. She would have liked to do some of the work herself—and saw Pearl’s longing when she happened by the assembly hall’s windows—but it was out of her hands now. Ben was the chief architect, and Ben had a commission from the state. It would be regular work, completed by professional laborers; and with each day that passed, Prue thought the bridge became less a thing of her fancy and more a citizen of the everyday world. The workers’ heaps of stones, stacks of wooden beams, and barrels full of wooden dowels grew daily farther toward the rafters, until at last space had to be cleared for them in the storehouses. The cast-iron pulleys for the cranes arrived from the local foundry; and Prue kept up a passionate correspondence with Thomas Pope in Philadelphia, telling him of the model bridge’s progress out in the weather and of how Ben’s work proceeded. She thought it greatly to the famous bridge architect’s credit that he answered her assertions and queries as thoughtfully as he might have done had his interlocutor been a man; and she was glad it was he Governor Jay had chosen to inspect the larger model as it progressed.
Prue, meanwhile, began to suspect a life might be quickening within her. She had no unmistakable signs—or was not certain what those might have been—but after the wedding, she had continued to employ Mrs. Friedlander’s preventive methods only sporadically, and she had last caught sight of her menses in the autumn. By the New Year, she felt a fullness in her gut she imagined could be no other thing. At first the prospect of a baby disturbed her—how would she care for it, after all, while they built a bridge?—but as she went about her work at the distillery, she began to feel giddy with the possibility. Ben’s birthday arrived before hers, in the dark days of January, along with a heavy snow; and she gave him no gift but her disclosure. He watched her a moment in the dim light of dawn and the bedroom fire he’d just kindled, then asked, “Are you certain?”
“No,” she answered. The room was still frigid, and her breath formed plumes in the air. “Come back to bed.” He curled up around her under the covers. In the few minutes he’d been out of bed, his feet had grown cold as blocks of ice. “I haven’t consulted Mrs. Friedlander, but I believe I know”
He reached around her to put his hand on her belly and said, “I feel foolish for not having noticed. When do you suppose it will come?”
“I don’t know,” Prue said, feeling no doubt more foolish than he. “I imagine in the summertime.” She rolled over to face Ben, and found him smiling at her.
“Perhaps the second model will be complete by then. A perfect plaything for a little Horsfield.”
“Oh, it’ll be a long while before the creature can play.”
“I know,” he said, and wrapped her more snugly in the bedclothes. “When may I tell Isaiah?”
“Why don’t we tell everyone at once? Let’s have them to dinner after church on Sunday.”
“With all their children? Oh, Christ,” he said.
“Ours’ll be shouting and fighting like that soon enough.”
“I know,” Ben said, and kissed her before he left the bed. He stopped in at the countinghouse that morning to issue the invitation to Isaiah.
“Happy birthday,” Isaiah said. “I hope it augurs well for the year for you.”
“I think it does,” Ben said. It was a dull winter day, but he looked bright as a blue jay. “Thus far, I’d say it’s the best year of my life. Though last year comes close on its heels.”
“Don’t be so quick to judge,” Isaiah called after him as Ben trotted downstairs to his own men. To Prue he said, “He looks like he ate the Christmas pudding.”
Prue held both palms up in the air. “Perhaps he did.”
“Hmm,” Isaiah said. Prue suspected he knew their secret. “Someone has to go to the bank today. You or I?”
“I’ll go with the shipment,” Prue said. “I’d be glad for the distraction.”
He shook his head at her as he took the pile of deposits from the safe. He counted out a hundred federal dollars—the amount they kept in case of emergency, though no emergency of such financial magnitude had ever yet arisen—and replaced it. Then he tallied up the rest for her.
“Is it me,” she asked, “or does the week’s take look slight?”
“A bit,” Isaiah said, “but nothing to worry on. We’re often sluggish from Twelfth Night to the thaw”
Prue accepted his answer—she tended to forget, from season to season, that business did not remain the same year-round—and had it corroborated by Mr. Stover at the bank.
Both families were thrilled at the news of the baby’s imminence, and Tem and Isaiah made a series of toasts on its behalf. “You shall have to name it Archimedes,” Isaiah quipped, raising his glass to Prue.
Or Ptolemy, Pearl wrote.
“Sir Isaac Newton,” Isaiah said.
“It may very well be a girl,” Patience counseled, “in which case you shall have to call it something ordinary, such as Alice.”
“Oh, not Alice,” Ben groaned, but he would have done so no matter what Patience had suggested; she had that sort of voice.
The child never lived to be called anything, however. Only a few nights after Ben and Prue made their announcement, Prue awakened with a start from an unpleasant dream she could not quite recall, and did not at once recognize her surroundings. After a moment, the room she still thought of as her parents’ sprang into place—the small desk and its uncomfortable chair, the wardrobe, with Ben’s britches hanging over the door, a fire screen Pearl had embroidered with flowers, which was tucked into a corner and difficult to make out. Ben lay burrowed under his pillow, and in the starlight, Prue saw it was snowing outside. When she stood to add wood to the fire’s embers, a rush of warmth coursed down through her belly. She did not at first think it unpleasant, merely foreign enough to catch her attention. Then she recognized it as pain. When she looked down, a black, shiny pool was blossoming between her legs.
She must have cried out as she sat back down, because Ben recoiled as if he’d been struck, and she heard her sisters stirring across the hall. Ben gathered his wits and said, “Prue?” He sat up with one hand on her back. The other settled gingerly on her leg.
When he touched her, she could feel her heart racing and the ache in her gut. She doubled forward, and her head bowed down toward the space between her calves. She could smell the iron in her own rich blood.
“Prue,” he said, “should I get Dr. de Bouton?” He looked around the room and said, more loudly, “Pearl, Tem? Abiah?”
Prue shook her head no, feeling her hair brush against the blanket. “There’s nothing they can do,” she said. Her breath felt hot upon her own legs and face.
“Surely—”
“Nothing.” She sat up, and the blood drained first toward her legs, then out of her. “Please, just get me some water and a cloth. I need to wash.” Mrs. van Nostrand’s forget-me-not was burning against her chest; she had forgotten to remove it for the night.
Tem and Pearl stumbled in at that moment, and both stood looking at the scene before them. After a moment, Pearl sat down on the bed and put both hands on her sister. Tem stepped into the hall and called out, “Abiah? Quickly.”
“Coming,” Abiah said from downstairs.
“Bring water and cloths,” Ben said, and began to work Prue’s nightshirt up over her head.
“Please,” Prue said, “it’s cold,” but she could see the nightshirt was stained dark, as was the sheet and no doubt the mattress.
Abiah said “Mercy,” when she arrived, and first thing set to diapering Prue. Then she wiped her with a clean rag, took the nightshirt, and began to strip the bed. Prue huddled on the floor while she did this.
“It’s no matter,” Ben said.
“They’ll be ruined,” Prue said, though she could not imagine why she cared.
“I’ll take them,” Abiah said. She took all the bedding, and the mattress was indeed stained. She laid cleaning cloths on top of it, then remade the bed with fresh sheets. Prue lay down immediately, and drew the covers close around her.
Pearl had neglected to put her book around her neck, and sat by helplessly, stroking Prue’s arm and leg. “It’ll be all right,” Prue told her, but Pearl didn’t look convinced, and even Prue didn’t believe herself. This was just repayment, she thought, for the curse she had so long ago laid on Pearl and on her own mother; this was a fair bargain. Everyone except Abiah sat with Prue until she fell back asleep, and the last sound she heard was of Abiah working the pump in the cold yard.
When she awoke in the morning, Dr. de Bouton was speaking to Ben at the foot of the bed. Pearl half reclined beside Prue, fingering the frizzy tips of her sister’s hair. Prue could not meet her sister’s eye, so fresh was her guilt alongside this new pain; and for the first time in her life, Prue thought she understood why their mother had so often looked on them as intruders.
“Good morning, there, miss,” Dr. de Bouton said.
Prue looked at his familiar black brows beneath his shock of bright gray hair, but couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Prue?” Ben said gently.
“There’s nothing to be done, is there?” she asked.
Dr. de Bouton sat down on the other side of the bed. “Not immediately, no. But you’ll recover soon. And there will be another, by and by.”
“As I told you,” she told Ben, her throat full of accusation, though she didn’t know why. She shut her eyes again. A moment later she heard them file out and the latch rattle shut on the door.
As she lay in the bed in which her mother had given birth to three daughters, miscarried an untold number of children, and finally died, Prue thought of the dogged manner in which Roxana had knit that small white jacket for Pearl, when any fool could have told her the baby wouldn’t live a week. At the time, her singleness of purpose had frightened Prue, but she now saw her mother had worked the wool as an incantation, as a spell to keep away the encroaching darkness. Roxana would have scoffed at this explanation, but it was the truth; and Prue wished she herself knew a similar charm to ward off disappointment and pain. She feared the only true protection might be a clean conscience, which she would not have until she admitted her crime to Pearl; and she did not believe herself capable of owning up to such treachery.
All she dared hope was that if her bridge meant to take a life, this one she had just lost would suffice. If it could prevent anyone else being killed, she felt she might, in time, reconcile herself to the sacrifice.
Later in the day, Pearl brought her a baked potato, its nether part wrapped in a checkered napkin. The potato looked so odd, and Pearl so strange holding it, Prue laughed despite the unease she’d been feeling about her sister, and Pearl broke into a smile and hissed. Prue had never before eaten a potato without benefit of butter or salt, but she was hungry enough to have eaten it without chewing, had that been possible. Pearl sat down beside her and wrote, I’m glad yr mending. There’re more, dwnstairs, if you like.
“Perhaps in a while.”
You know there will be Another, Pearl wrote, and patted her own belly, perhaps in case Prue thought she was still speaking of potatoes.
“I don’t know,” Prue said. She did not wish to discuss it, but felt she had to, now Pearl had begun. “Our mother had a rotten time of it.”
Yr diffrent, Pearl wrote. I am certin of it.
Prue watched her sister closely. How easy it should have been, all these years later, simply to tell Pearl what she had done; but Prue could not. She did not believe she could survive the exposure of such meanness. Meanwhile, she was grateful for her sister’s reassurance. “Thank you,” she said. “I hope you’re correct.”
She did differ from Roxana, however. She could remember, from the years before Pearl was born, her mother suffering weeks of illness, which could only have been her loss of the unborn children. She would emerge pale and subdued from her room, and mourn for weeks on end. Prue’s father had been unwilling to answer questions, and she had learned only the sketchiest facts from Johanna. But though Prue also felt, as her mother must have, that her heart was broken, the following day she had a strong desire to return to the distillery. Ben and her sisters tried to convince her otherwise, but though her body still ached, she would not be told no. Isaiah’s expression of pity when she walked in the countinghouse door almost turned her around, but she persevered; and when later she found herself sweating as she worked the lever to express the fragrant essence of juniper, she felt better for the exercise, and glad to have something to distract her from her grief
And as if as a sign that circumstances were improving, the spring thaw arrived early in 1799, though it brought with it the state legislature’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. Support for the act was much stronger in Brooklyn than Prue might have supposed. Many of those who rejoiced on the streets or in Loosely’s tavern were slave owners themselves, but at most of only one or two domestic servants; only she and Pieter Schermerhorn still kept large numbers of slaves for their manufactories. The act, Prue realized, struck a fine balance between pleasing those who relied upon slave labor to make their living and assuaging those who opposed it on moral grounds: All adult slaves were to remain in bondage for the rest of their lives, though they would henceforward be called “indentured servants,” and all children born after the coming Fourth of July would be freed in the i 8zos, after having given their best years of service to their masters. As matters stood, then, she was free to retain her current workforce for the distillery; and if she had to man all the stills and tuns with paid workers twenty years hence, she had ample time to determine how she would manage to pay them. She could not purchase slaves for the bridgeworks; but with the fervor for abolition so much in the air, she had never for a moment supposed the state would allow her to buy souls with its money.
The early thaw, meanwhile, meant that by mid-March the mud season had commenced, turning the roads once again to sludge and shoes of all descriptions brown and noisome. The neighborhood children, wild with the pent-up energy of having been trapped indoors all winter, tore stumbling through the streets with mud on their clothes and in their hair. After a few days, one could see even fastidious mothers such as Patience simply brushing the caked dirt from their coats and allowing them back out again. Just as in the autumn, it rained for days on end, clotting the river with brackish debris and making the roads all but impassable.
“But it’s good news, overall,” Ben told her. “Pearl shall have her jonquils, and we shall begin our model bridge weeks sooner than we anticipated.”
Both he and Prue were fascinated by the performance of the first model, and sent tracts of observations to Mr. Pope in Philadelphia. The model now creaked if one stepped on it—Prue thought because its primitive abutments had shifted on their base, Ben because every boy in the neighborhood had done his utmost to break it—and its northern side had acquired a faint patina of moss in its months outside; yet the thing still held. Day after day they tested it under weights of various sizes; and though Prue thought it would soon deflect under such pressure as they placed upon it, it remained solid, exactly as a bridge should. Prue was happier with this than she could explain—though the model was diminutive by real-world standards, it had been their first attempt at bridge building, and they had gotten it fundamentally correct.
“When do you think it’ll be complete?” she asked him.
“Sometime this summer, I’ll wager. And the moment it’s done, I’ll build a room onto the house for your sisters.”
Pearl had been looking wan from her sleepless nights in Tem’s company, but as soon as the weather improved and she could resume going out for her long walks, her color once more brightened. Her interest in her needlework declined as her interest in being outdoors grew, and her fair skin freckled from all the time she spent out tending their vegetable garden and wandering the country lanes a stone’s throw from town. All those years later, she was still visiting Will Severn’s house at least one evening a week, though she could not have believed she owed him a debt any longer; and when their conversations were heated, she would fill sheet after sheet, later in the evening, in continuing with Prue whatever the original argument had been.
The second model was Ben’s project. He had no need of Prue’s assistance, while until she did something to change the way they rectified, the distillery did. Ben’s six men were eager to begin their real work; and Ben vowed to keep them on as foremen if their current project proved successful and the governor gave permission to attempt to bridge the straits. Though they were only seven people, they worked with tremendous speed and dedication. The two anchorages were complete on their foundations by mid-May, and the levers began to spring from the abutments in June. Once he had proven that the cranes worked to hoist timbers into place, Ben wrote Mr. Pope to inquire when he might come to inspect the miniature bridgeworks and issue his report to the state. Mr. Pope replied that his own work on the Schuylkill detained him at present, but that as he had business of his own to conduct in New York in early September, he would be pleased to view the bridge then.
As Prue watched the progress of this model, she felt doubly joyful: because it appeared to be working according to plan, and because exactly as Pearl and Dr. de Bouton had promised, she had found herself with child again as soon as the weather turned warm. This time she did not tell her family anything until the size of her belly obviated an announcement. Dr. de Bouton told her she could expect the child to come sometime in the Christmas season, by which time, she reflected, the model would be long since complete, and plans might even be under way for the bridge itself. At first Prue did not dare hope this child might survive; but as it grew and stirred within her, she began to think she had at last ridden out the effects of her misdeed. Perhaps she and her sister would live henceforward as two mortals bound by ties of love and convenience, and not by any more sinister thing.
She ceased wearing britches, as they made her growing womb look somehow obscene, but she found all her mother’s fears had been unwarranted; she was careful with herself, but her skirt posed no danger near the press or the drive belts. The baby left her tired, and she began stopping work in the late afternoon to go out and take measurements on the small model and inspect progress on the large one. By midsummer, she could walk through the arch in the pyramid and out onto the promenade of the bridge itself. In terms of its height, it was no more impressive than standing on the balcony above any room of her distillery: The model bridge would be, at its zenith, barely fifteen feet from the ground, and the approaches were considerably lower. But when she stood out upon the miniature roadway, watching the ships cruise by on the straits, she could already imagine herself standing far above them and pausing for the view in the middle of the river. Even those newspapers skeptical of the project as a whole reported favorably on the structure’s beauty. Though it only spanned the dull brown mill yard, the bridge had clean, delicate lines; it was now clear it would “ornament the river as elegantly as a simple flower behind the ear ornaments a fair woman’s nape,” C. Mather Harrison wrote—rather poetically, Prue thought—in the Argus.
Ben finished the model in August. The workers did not let out a shout when they slipped the last timber into place and nailed it in; Prue simply left the casking room one afternoon and saw one of the men standing on the bridge’s very apex, stretching his arms up toward the sky. Ben came toward her, his eyes as bright as on their wedding day. “Will you cross the East River with me?” he asked.
And though Prue was beginning to feel awkward when she walked, she said, “Oh, with pleasure.”