Ben and Prue recovered slowly from the shock of their loss. As they did, they set about preparing themselves for the momentous spring. Prue wrote an advertisement for the New York and Albany papers and the Long-Island Courier. She described the nature of the project and the work to be had, the wages the workers would be paid, and the dates on which potential laborers might apply. When she distributed the workers’ pay that week, she asked them likewise to recommend any friends or relations for the work, and though she had felt no joy in weeks, their enthusiasm stirred her. The first date on which she had invited interested parties to apply for the work came early in March of 1800, and she and Ben were gratified when above thirty men from the near environs presented themselves. The second date, two weeks later, brought forty more, this time from farther afield—two from Baltimore, one from the village of New Hope in Pennsylvania, and a father and son from the wilderness in New Jersey. Others continued to arrive, singly and in small groups, as the weather improved. Most of these had some experience in building, and not one appeared drunk at the time of making his application, which Prue counted a blessing, given the proximity of the gin. A few had newly arrived from England and France; some had lost work or grown weary of their chosen professions; a handful were former sailors, who applied because they could no longer bear to leave home two and three years at a stretch. Ben was keen to hire them, as he felt certain they’d have learned good habits of discipline aboard ship. Men defected from mills up and down the river to volunteer; and a few came, it seemed, simply to gawk at the models. Ben remained in constant communication with Thomas Pope. He consulted the elder bridge builder four times on his method for marking out the positions of the two footings across the water from each other, as it remained Ben’s chief concern that he might mismeasure, and the twin levers would not meet precisely when they reached the middle of the straits. Ben also sent copies of his receipts for materials and a roster of the men he’d hired to the governor’s office, where an independent auditor would determine whether the bridge’s funds were being properly spent. Work would commence, if weather permitted, on Monday the twenty-fourth of March—the first full week of spring—but until then, the men were on holiday part-time, and Prue imagined Joe Loosely and the Philpots were doing a banner business.
She was relieved they’d ordered in oilcloth and tent poles, as they had need of them for all these men. Ben had them dig pits for their cook fires and a deeper one for their latrine, and provided them ample firewood and free access to the wells both at the mill and in the Winship dooryard. As they staked out their quarters, the field in which Matty Winship had grown barley began to look as if it housed an occupying army; the Hessians and the Fourth Prince of Wales had never seemed so numerous, nor sung such lewd songs late into the night.
To save time during the workday, Ben and Prue planned to provide the men a midday meal, exactly as Prue did at the distillery, so they put out an advertisement for two cooks. This turned up, providentially, a distant cousin of Abiah’s, from the village of Midwood. She lodged with the family until she found a permanent place with the van Suetendaels. Pearl, meanwhile, had developed a marked preference for the new downstairs bedroom, claiming she liked to be near the kitchen fire, though Prue suspected she liked it because it was farthest in the house from Tem and closest to the back door, thus facilitating her late and early rambles. The upstairs room that might have become Susannah’s remained empty.
On the first day of spring, Ben asked Prue, Isaiah, and Adam van Suetendael to accompany him while he marked out the boundaries for the bridge’s Brooklyn footing, where the work would commence. “Might’s well use these tools for something,” he said as he unpacked the velvet-lined cases in which he now stored them. His tone was wistful. “Mr. Pope and Mr. Avery assure me I can site the bridge properly if I take sufficient care.” Ben spoke only infrequently of his sadness over losing their daughter and resigning his commission, but seemingly overnight he had developed a fine mesh of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and a gray streak at the front of his fair hair. He seemed determined to restore his former good cheer, and Prue did not want to brake his progress by reminding him of change and sorrow.
That first chill spring day, she put her hand on his upper arm and said, “We could not ask for a better surveyor.”
Adam seemed unaware there could be any cause for sadness on such a momentous day; he clearly preferred the romance of being a surveyor’s assistant to the drudgery of hauling loads for Joe Loosely. Prue reminded herself that he was still only a boy, and could not be blamed for his high spirits.
Ben loaded his theodolite, spirit level, Gunter’s chain, four iron stakes, and a mallet into a wheelbarrow, and together they bumped it down the rutted lane to the strand. Adam carried the pole aloft as if he were marching in a parade. Work had not yet begun for the day at the distillery, but Isaiah was already on the premises—no doubt, Prue thought, to escape his four children. He and Prue both stood aside while Ben set up his theodolite with care on the site he’d previously marked as the center of the anchorage. He centered the instrument with its plumb bob and checked that it was level. Adam held the pole steady while Ben took bearings on it and on the tall pole they’d fixed across the river, and with these new bearings corroborating the old, he once again computed his distances. Isaiah helped him chain out the distances of the site’s four corners. Once they were marked, they measured again, and Ben concluded his calculation was true. Prue felt a lump of tears in her throat—a lump of sheer pride—such as she would not feel again until the day far in the future on which her daughter married; and she herself drove the stake to mark the first corner of the Brooklyn anchorage. “Ah!” she cried when she had finished. The mallet was heavy, and she had enjoyed putting it in motion. An event of such moment should, she thought, have such heft.
“Lucky man,” Isaiah said, “to be starting up a bridge and have a wife who relishes manual labor.”
When the other three stakes were driven in and flagged, Prue thought they didn’t look like much; it seemed one of their rolls of oilcloth could have covered such an area. But when the anchorage stood upon it, she knew it would be majestic indeed—the size of half the buildings of the manufactory lumped together, and stretching up as high as the cliffs of Ihpetonga themselves. All day she saw the distillery workers, out on their breaks, visiting the site as if it were holy ground. She was pleased it was not only to her those four iron stakes seemed imbued with extraordinary meaning.
Will Severn was delighted to have the new workers among the Brooklynites. Though most of them were fond enough of drinking, and for the first time in sixteen years the sounds of late-night dart games echoed out across the quiet streets, many of the workers were family men, and not a few showed up to Severn’s church their first Sunday in Brooklyn. To a man they were freshly shaven and in clean collars. “They are far from home,” he said, grinning, to Prue and Pearl, when they visited him to ask him to bless the beginning of the work on Monday. “They need shepherding and a sense they belong in this community. I am only too glad to welcome them; Heaven knows we had a few empty pews.”
Pearl was beaming. & it’ll be a boon for Rachal Livingston & Mrs Tilleys Daught, as surely there are at least 2 eligible Husbands in the groop?
“Pearl Winship, you mustn’t be so cruel,” he said, but he was still smiling.
’Tis in my Blood, she wrote, and cast Prue a glance that Prue didn’t know how to interpret.
“Nonsense,” he said. “And I shall be honored to bless your endeavor,” he told Prue. “Your workers have asked me to come speak to them tonight, in their open field. Perhaps you will join us?”
“If I can,” Prue said.
From her own kitchen table that evening, she heard his familiar voice carrying over the barley field. She did not feel inclined to go out, and Tem groaned at the suggestion, but Pearl and Abiah put on their coats when they heard him begin, and returned radiant an hour later.
When the cock crowed on the Monday morning, everyone in the Winship house was already up; from her bedroom, Prue could hear them splashing their faces and setting out plates. From the corner of her window, she could see the workmen stirring about their camp. She turned to Ben, who was giving her the tight-lipped smile that had graced his countenance of late, and nuzzled in against his throat. “Oh, dear,” he said, hugging her close before pushing her away to signal the start of the workday. “Are you ready?”
“It’s your bridge,” Prue said, and felt it to be so for the first time. “Are you?”
“I relish it,” he said, and pulled on a knitted jersey over his shirt.
During breakfast, Pearl wore the same dark expression she’d worn the day Tem had gone to join Prue and their father in the distillery. “Are you nervous?” Prue asked her.
Pearl shook her head calmly no.
“What, then?”
Pearl again shook her head. Prue could not stop watching her, though she knew her sister might construe this as a challenge. After a moment Pearl took a perfunctory sip of her coffee and wrote, I shld like to build a bridge.
“As should I,” Prue said, “but it will chiefly be Ben’s work hereafter.”
Pearl dropped her head to one side, as if weighing this.
“Come, Pearlie, don’t look so glum,” Ben said. “You shall see the works daily; and your sister and I will be sure to consider if there’s anything more you might contribute.”
Pearl did not reply. She brushed her spoon against the hominy in her bowl, but did not move to eat.
Tem said, “So, what’ll it be, Prue: two years before you can rectify again? I swear I don’t know what shall become of us.”
“I imagine I’ll be in the countinghouse before the morning is through,” Prue said. Pearl continued to play with her spoon. “I won’t be much use digging a foundation. And with Marcel to help you with the accompts, I can’t see how you could fail at the work.”
Tem chewed with one eyebrow skeptically raised. “I’ll be damned if we don’t change the way we rectify before the year is out.”
“I’ll be damned if we do,” Prue said, though even as she said it, she did not feel convinced.
“And you’ve nothing to worry about,” Ben offered Tem. “A bridge may be an enticing distraction, but I don’t think your sister can keep her mind off the distillery eight hours running. She talks about it in her sleep.”
“Do I?” Prue asked, but Ben only laughed.
After breakfast, as they set out for the water, Pearl went up the Ferry Road to bring Mr. Severn down; and as on the day on which they’d first offered the drawings to public view, Prue was amazed how many of her neighbors had gathered to witness the sight. All the distillery’s workers were out in the mill yard, along with the ninety-odd men who would work on the bridge, and everyone who lived within walking distance of the manufactory was hurrying down the roads to get there before the bell rang to commence the morning’s work. Even some of the Red Hook fishing boats had anchored close to shore, and Losee, with an unfamiliar passenger in his boat, had diverted from his normal route and also dropped anchor nearby. All the local newsmen had come, and a ship flying the Union Jack and heading up toward Hell Gate sounded its horn at the gathering. Hats and hands went up in greeting as Ben and Prue walked down the lane. Isaiah, Prue saw, had bought a brand-new shovel for the occasion, and had tied some bunting in the colors of the flag of the Republic around its handle. In his other hand he had a bottle of champagne, which he’d evidently chilled in Joe’s icehouse, as it was sweating onto the sand at his feet. The Long-Island Courier had sent a writer to witness the occasion; C. Mather Harrison was nowhere in sight.
After what seemed an age, Pearl appeared at the top of Joralemon’s Lane, with Will Severn right behind her, and behind him, a devout few of the workers who’d attended his morning services. A gust of wind off the river whipped Pearl’s coat open and her dress back against her legs, and her cheeks were bright in the chilly air. Her grim expression was gone, and she waved to her sisters. Severn had his Bible tucked under his arm and, wrapped around his throat, a new blue scarf Pearl had made to replace the decrepit red one. Someone raised his hands and clapped when he saw them coming, and a few more followed suit. Their applause sounded hollow on that windy morning. Pearl kept waving, as if she’d been born to public adulation.
The crowd parted for Severn and Pearl to pass through to the site of the four staves. Prue and Ben took up their places before them, and Tem, Isaiah, and Pearl stood to their sides. Will Severn cleared his throat, and the workers and neighbors hushed each other and drew nearer.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, then smiled at Prue. Despite his gray hair, he seemed no older than she at that moment. “I am honored beyond expression to have been asked to bless this momentous occasion. This morning, the people of the village of Brookland begin a public works on a scale our nation has not yet known; a project that will be an honor to us, to the city and state of New York, and to the Winship and Horsfield families.” He licked his chapped lips. “Let us pray.” He removed his hat and was about to lay it on the sand when Pearl took it from him. When the men all removed their head coverings, they made a soft rustling sound, as of bird wings. Prue saw the men place their hats over their hearts before she closed her own eyes. “Dear Lord,” Severn said, “bless this bridge and the people who toil upon it. May the work progress without hindrance or accident, and may it be as pleasing to Your eyes as to the eyes of man.” He paused for a moment before saying, “Amen,” and in that moment, Prue prayed that if a sacrifice was necessary, Susannah be allowed to stand for it. She did not think she could bear the grief if one more person should die.
All around voices echoed, “Amen.” Prue could imagine her prayer scudding out across the water, as the other had done all those years ago. When she opened her eyes, Isaiah was holding the shovel forth to her. “No,” she said, “Ben should take the first spadeful.”
Isaiah said, “We both disagree,” and continued to hold it toward her.
Her breath caught in her throat as she took it from him; she had never imagined how momentous it could feel to put a shovel to this ordinary stretch of Brooklyn shore. She drove it in with the shank of her boot and, using her foot to guide it, drew up a few pounds of mud-brown sand. Her ears began to ring with excitement, and for a brief moment, her fingers tingled and everything within her field of vision was tinged pale violet. She caught herself in time, however, to pitch the contents of the shovel outside the bounds the stakes described, and the rowdy applause that followed brought her back to herself. Ben uncorked the wine, which gave a thunking sound, and a stream of vapor wafted from the bottle neck. He held it out to Prue, and she took a long draught. She had rarely drunk champagne, and found it dry on her palate and ticklish in her nose; but she drank deeply of it, and the workers whistled and hurrahed. Ben next took a long pull, then passed it to Tem; when Pearl drank from it, it made her sneeze, at which the whole crowd laughed. After Isaiah had had his swallow, he passed it to Will Severn, though everyone knew he didn’t drink. His hearty sip made the men holler and cheer. He blinked his eyes rapidly, looking quite pleased with himself, before passing it back into the crowd, where it traveled hand to hand until it was empty.
When the clapping and shouts had died down, Tem cupped her palms around her mouth and called out, “That’ll be that, for the holiday. Workers to the brewhouse, stillhouse, and tasking room. We commence, as usual, in ten minutes.” She said something to Isaiah, who walked off toward the windmill. A few minutes later the sails shuddered as the pinion connected with the drive gear and all around the machinery began to hum. Tem kissed Prue good-bye and set off for the mash room.
“So,” Ben said, “shall we?”
Prue nodded, and watched Pearl escort Will Severn back up the hill. They were both still laughing about the champagne.
Ben had determined that to build a strong foundation, the hole on the Brooklyn side would have to reach a depth of more than thirty feet. Even at such a depth, the excavation would not reach bedrock, but it would reach a dense, firm soil into which the piles to support the foundation stone could be driven to refusal. While the idea of digging a pit of this size only to found the structure on sand daunted Prue, she also understood Ben’s reasoning was fundamentally sound. For the time being, Ben explained to the men the precautions they’d take for safety; and until the hole reached a depth of a few feet, they would be doing nothing all day but shoveling sand into wheelbarrows and either carting it away or using some of it to erect a barricade against nosy children. This no more required two supervisors than it required Prue to pitch in to the labor; so after she watched the workers begin, she waved Ben good-bye and went to find Tem in the brewhouse. Tem goggled at her as if she’d seen a ghost, but Prue said, “See? It’ll be months before you have cause to worry about the flavor of your gin.”
“I prefer to worry about it every day. I believe that does the most good,” Tem said, and went back to leaning on the side of the tank to watch the hot water pour in.
The new workmen made good progress on the foundation hole. After three days of digging, it became necessary to shore the excavation up from the inside, so Ben ordered the men to construct a cross-braced scaffold within the pit. The vertical and horizontal boards and diagonal rakers laddered down the four sides of the hole and, as a secondary benefit, provided a means for the men to descend once the hole grew too deep to jump. Building at each new level took time, as did erecting a barrier good enough to keep out the naughty, the hapless, and the devil-may-care and removing the sand a sufficient distance from the site. Nevertheless, the excavation proceeded at a rate of about a foot per day, which, though she had little experience against which to judge it, Prue thought excellent fast.
Ben managed everything beautifully, to the point of building a thatched roof to keep rainwater out of the hole. He installed a small hand-powered pump to the same purpose and determined that if necessary, he could run a belt to the waterwheel and operate it continuously, without wasting one man’s labor. Prue wished there were some work she might do to further the bridge along; but as long as she continued to be obstinate about the rectifying, the distillery would need her. When it came time to begin digging the foundation on the other side, either she or Ben would have to cross the river every day. Until then, she counted the hours until she could begin dividing her time between the two tasks. She could think of no better way to distract herself from her sorrow—and for such a worthy end.
Only a week passed, with the hole no deeper than a mean bedroom was tall, before it began to fill with groundwater. A man had stood knee-deep in water all morning, operating the pump as quickly as he could, before Ben realized the water level would never decrease at such a rate. Many of the rest stood by, eating sandwiches; a few of the more industrious went looking for extra wages, loading rope at the ropewalk; and the laziest went back to their tents to nap. Ben brought Prue up from the countinghouse to consult upon the issue.
They arrived at the pit to find the thoroughly begrimed fellow at the bottom leaning exhausted against the wall nearest the pump. “Sorry, Mr. Horsfield,” he said to Ben, “but I don’t see as it’s making much difference if I pump or if I don’t.” The water was creeping upward as he spoke.
“Climb out,” Ben told him. The man sloshed up the latticework, his boots releasing torrents of brown water back into the hole, and wiped his hands on his backside once he’d arrived on dry ground. “Foot and a half deep, would you say?”
“Bit more.” The man gestured to his britches, which were wet to above the knee.
“ ’Tisn’t so bad,” Ben said to Prue, “except that it isn’t going anywhere.”
Prue looked to see how far distant the waterwheel actually was. “As you say,” she offered, “you can provide it power, and keep it going in perpetuity.”
“I think I should order a second pump straightaway,” he said. When she nodded, he put his hand to his brow in salute and set off toward the New Ferry—just past the ropewalk, and’a far faster journey, with its trim boats, each rowed by a younger man than Losee—to visit the company in New York that could order his second pump from Philadelphia.
During the days they awaited its arrival, Ben loaded all the men on barges and took them to New York to dismantle the rotting woodwork of the Old Market Wharf. As they did so, the poor of the precinct stood by waiting for the boards, which they trucked off either to patch their dwellings or to burn for firewood. Once the area was clear of debris, Ben and Adam took their bearings time and again, as they had done at home, until at last Ben felt secure marking out the perimeter of the foundation. Prue could see little of this from the distillery, but if she climbed Clover Hill and stood atop their newly repaired back fence, she could look across the water. Just as when she’d been a girl, she could observe, through the manufactories’ smoke, the tiny shapes of men moving across the ground.
Because the composition of the New York earth differed so from Brooklyn’s, so, too, did their method for digging into it: There were no shovels, but two-man teams, one member of which steadied and turned a drill three feet in length and an inch and a half in diameter, while the other drove it in with a sledgehammer. This was grueling and dangerous work, but the men had good eyes, and the sheer repetitiveness of the motion seemed to keep them on their marks and prevent them from shattering one another’s hands and forearms. One man had his toes broken and another his thumb crushed the first day, but the New York doctor expected both would recover; Ben reminded the men to redouble their care thenceforward. He also said they worked in what appeared to be a kind of trance, in which they were cognizant of nothing but the swing of the mallet and the turn of the spike; often, they did not hear him when he called them for a break or to move on to the next phase of work.
Ben had, while on his northern surveying expedition, observed in mining operations some of the most modern techniques in blasting, which he put to work in gouging out the New York foundation. When the deep, narrow holes pocked a sufficient area, the men filled them a third full with gunpowder, each charge employing about two pounds. The men then dropped fuses—reeds filled with black powder—into the holes, and tamped the remaining space with clay to contain the explosions. Though Gregor Joralemon had volunteered for the commission of lighting the fuses, it was dangerous work, and Ben did not hire him for it. While most of the crew took cover a good distance away, one division ran through lighting the fuses, then hurried to safety. From across the river, Prue would see the rising cloud of dust and rubble, and a moment later hear the deep rumble of the exploding shots. Each time, she prayed Ben had reached safety and none of the others had been killed or maimed. When the dust settled, the men returned to the site of the explosions, swept out the debris, and recommenced hammering in their drills. In the first days of blasting, a number of the men were injured by the blowback of the exploding charges—they were cut and abraded, and a few temporarily lost their hearing. Such wounds were painful and, in the case of loss of hearing, distressing, but none kept a man from working for more than a few days. The men loaded the scree onto punts and sent it to Manhattan’s North River side, where an entrepreneur named Comfort Hull was expanding a broad swath of waterfront. The Brooklyn crew did likewise with their excavated sand.
Such blasting had previously only been employed in tunnels and mines, and never in Manhattan. Ben reported that the children of the neighborhood gathered by the score to watch; and the newssheets, while skeptical of the enterprise’s safety, explained it well enough to allay the citizens’ fear.
The second pump soon arrived by boat from Philadelphia, and Ben attached both of them by long belts to the waterwheel’s crown gear. They whirred and screeched incessantly, but they emptied the hole of water, and half the men could then return to work on the Brooklyn foundation. At last Prue believed she could contribute to the work.
“I don’t know,” Ben argued. “I don’t know how well they’ll take orders from a woman. You might remain in the distillery awhile yet. Tem needs you.” Prue stood looking over the edge of the Brooklyn pit. “Surely digging a foundation hole doesn’t require constant supervision?” she asked. He shrugged his shoulders.
“They might grow accustomed to me, if I am with them only a few hours a day. The rest of the time I can spend back in the distillery, where they accept direction from me without difficulty.”
Ben must have sensed the pique behind her otherwise calm words, for he relented. While he loaded the New York division onto their barge the next morning, Prue set up the workers on the Brooklyn side. “I like your britches,” one of them said to her; a few others sniggered.
Prue had encountered this before, and told herself not to lose her temper as Tem would have done. Nevertheless, she could not ignore it. “Further commentary upon my attire will result in your dismissal,” she said, holding her face as placid as she could. “If any of the captains hears of such talk, you will report it to me or to Mr. Horsfield immediately. My apologies for being blunt; I see no other way.”
The fellow glowered at her like a child caught out at mischief and unable to admit his wrong. But over the hour she supervised them that morning, and when she came to check on them again in the afternoon, the men respectfully called her either “Mrs. Horsfield” or “Miss Winship,” and did not smirk when she made suggestions about the digging.
In the kitchen that evening, Ben asked her how it had gone.
“I suppose there will eventually have to be a proper Brookland supervisor,” she said. “I shan’t be able to divide myself between the foundation and the distillery and have both come out aright. The captains must have someone to report to.”
I cld do it, Pearl wrote.
Prue waved her fork at her. “You can’t command fifty men with pencil and paper. It’d take too long to disseminate your orders.” Abiah clicked her tongue in sympathy. “Besides, I’m certain not all of them can read.”
Thn teech me to Rectify.
When Prue knit her brow over the suggestion, Pearl underlined it and pushed it closer toward her.
Tem said, “It isn’t the worst—”
“No,” Prue said. “It’s too dangerous.”
I’m not a Child, Pearl wrote on a new page. & I’m a good Student.
“I’ve not inherited Father’s nose, but there’s no reason to suppose she hasn’t,” Tem said. “She certainly hears better than either of us.”
Ben said, “I think it sounds a fair solution.”
Prue thought she’d simply turned to him, but the way he bent down to study his roast made it clear she’d been glaring. To Pearl she said, “I don’t doubt you’d excel at rectifying, as you excel at everything to which you turn your mind. And yet—”
But before she could finish her thought, Pearl had turned the page and written, Everything to whch you allow me to turn my Mind.
Prue’s breath came up short. At once she recognized the truth of what Pearl had written; but she did not intend to be swayed. “What do you suppose should have happened to Marcel, had he been unable to cry out when the press fell upon his hand?” she asked.
“Might have bled to death,” Abiah said.
Before someone notic’d his Distress? Pearl wrote. But she did not wait for Abiah to finish sounding out the letters before she added, Only a Fool turns is Back on a Machine of that sise.
Ben was cutting his roast into small pieces with a deliberation he rarely accorded his food.
“It is dangerous work, and I shan’t have you do it,” Prue said. “I could not bear it if any ill befell you.”
Pearl hit the heel of her hand against the table, making the plates and flatware jump and the cider slosh in its cups. Then she went into her room and shut the door. No one said anything for a long moment, until Ben said, “Eventually, you know, someone must be with the Brooldand crew full-time, and you’ll have a conundrum then.”
Prue did not answer him, but later that night, when they were already in bed, she told him she thought the day’s experiment had gone well enough to continue. It would be a pleasure beyond words, she told him, to have some share in this work; and he agreed things might go on as they were awhile longer. She could not have anticipated, however, that the memory of Pearl’s suggestion, and her shame at having rejected it, would leach the joy from both aspects of her work. Prue returned to the Brooklyn crew the next morning but found, in her sourness, she could think of what they were doing as nothing more than digging a big hole; and when she returned to the rectifying house that afternoon, it was hot and unpleasantly fragrant from herbs. The press’s open jaws seemed to taunt her. She had been working them for eighteen years without incident; and all at once, her prided art seemed the worst kind of drudgery.
Despite her ill mood, however, the distillery kept running, and the foundation holes for the bridge progressed in due course; they had reached their appointed depths by the end of May, and the men began the grueling work of driving in the huge timber piles that would support the’Brooklyn anchorage. No matter how Pearl’s words—never repeated, but inscribed in Prue’s memory—rankled, there was satisfaction in bringing the first phase of the work to completion without loss of life. And though it was small solace, Prue looked forward to being able to disconnect the pumps. Their constant whine had kept half of Brooklyn awake at night, and engendered many complaints. Prue hoped Patience’s screaming babies would at last allow their parents some rest.
On the New York side, the bridge would be founded in the blasted-out schist, but the Brooklyn footing required a foundation stone so vast, it had taken the quarry the entire spring to mine it. As it had floated down the Hudson on eight tethered barges, there had been rumors it had stopped the flow of traffic in both directions; Prue thought it would be only a matter of time before it appeared in the balladeers’ songs. When it arrived at Winship Gin, Jens Luquer saw it from the stillhouse window, and without thinking sounded the warning bell, closing down the works. Though he was later abashed to have been so frightened by the thing, it proved just as well production had ceased, for Ben needed every hale man in the village to attach the ropes to it and lay down the logs along which it would be rolled. He had already sent notice to farmers as far off as Bedford and Midwood that he would need to borrow their teams of oxen when the great stone arrived; now he sent out runners to call the favor due. The next day, twenty-three teams of oxen arrived. Prue had never seen so many of the beasts. She had thrilled at their great size and strength when her father and Ben’s had set the foundation stones for the distillery; now they seemed to fill the entire mill yard. Ben strung the lead ropes from the stone over a set of pulleys twenty times larger than those for the cranes; from the pulleys, he attached the ropes to the snorting beasts. And with the distillery’s men in the water, fighting to hold the barges steady, and the bridgeworks’ men alongside them, trying to coax the stone along, he gave the command to begin heaving it up toward shore.
It took four days to drag it to the brink of the pit, and though no lives were lost in the process, some limbs were broken, and Prue shuddered to think what might go afoul when at last the stone settled into place. As she and Tem watched from the countinghouse, she kept thinking of Susannah, who would have been a fat, six-months baby by then, and was instead all desiccated skin and brittle bone. She continued to pray Susannah’s life would prove enough for this monstrosity she’d dreamed. She thought her prayers must have been answered, for when the stone settled into its place on the morning of the fifth day, with a crash that shook the distillery buildings and sent a wave out into the river that slopped onto the wharves of New York, everyone was still safe. She oversaw the payments to the farmers, and ordered out liquor for the men.
Atop the gigantic stone on the Brooklyn side, and within the pit on New York’s, Ben and Prue instructed the men in beginning to construct the stone feet of the abutments. This was not quite the method Matty Winship had used to secure the buildings of his distillery against the fluctuations of the sand, but it was similar; Prue hoped it would suffice to steady something as large as the bridge. The evidence suggested it would. As the twin abutments grew, the men filled some of the excavated sand and rubble back in around them, so that the structures seemed to grow from the ground itself.
Prue learned from her men that at the work’s commencement, the two teams had laid a wager with each other as to who would finish their foundation first. Everyone suspected the Brooklyn side would take longer under a female supervisor than New York’s would under the bridge architect himself, so the New York crew had given Brooklyn’s a ten-day handicap. When young Aiphonsus Weatherspoon told her of this, realizing only too late it was something he ought not to have related, Prue wished she were Tem, so she might swear about it or drink herself into oblivion at the Twin Tankards. In repeating the story to Ben, she nearly shouted with frustration. But when her team at last lost the bet, she assumed their debt, and out of her own pocket treated the men to a night at the Liberty Tavern. In this way she both filled Joe’s coffers—she hoped tempering his opposition to the bridge—and earned the reluctant respect of her men. Weatherspoon, Domer, and Osier had never begrudged her their admiration, as it was she who had originally given them employ; but they were bashful of her in front of the other men, so their support had hitherto done her little good.
It soon became obvious that building the anchorage required constant supervision, and Prue made a deal with Marcel Dufresne: They would trade off days overseeing the Brooklyn work crew, that both might continue to fulfill their duties in the distillery. Ben continued to take the boat each day to Manhattan.
Had Prue never before spent a sleepless night, she felt the Brooklyn anchorage should have caused her to do so. All its crenellations and spires required the genius of a master builder, and who was she but an amateur? New York’s pyramid would be equally complex, but she trusted Ben better than she trusted herself. Night after night, she imagined wagons and pedestrians ascending the roadway via the vaulted tunnels in the two structures’ middles, then imagined some ill-placed stone plummeting free, or a passing stonemason expressing disgust at the way she had her workmen mix their mortar.
“I don’t see why you fret so,” Ben said one morning as his barge was about to embark for the New York side. “There shall be no second-rate masonry, no mortar squelching out from between stones. We are building according to the most modern and scientific methods, and those of our men who are not expert craftsmen now shall be so before the frost.”
Prue thought it typical he should address her concern with blithe good cheer. She was still too wrought up about the previous evening’s dream to answer him.
“Prue, really,” he said. “If you’re so concerned, have Marcel supervise the men for the day, and come across with me. I’ll make sure you know how it should be done.”
“You needn’t patronize me,” Prue said.
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “And you needn’t worry over something you understand perfectly well.”
Though Prue did not concede his point, she left Marcel in charge of the Brooklyn works and spent the day observing Ben’s methods for finishing and laying stones. The experience drove home what she had always known: that it was best to check the plans thrice before making any irrevocable step, and that attention and care could avert most accidents. She could not force herself to love the work as Ben did—she was still sometimes raw with sorrow over Susannah’s death, and learning of the men’s wager as to her competence rekindled her jealousy of her husband—but she could try to imitate his good cheer with the workmen.
In this manner, and with a building season of unprecedented good weather, the anchorages stood nearly complete on both sides of the river by November of i 800. Before the close of the season, the footings supported the stubs of the iron struts from which the arms would soon spring. Though the blunt-topped pyramid would eventually rise another twenty feet into the air, and though the Brooklyn abutment yet lacked all the distinguishing marks that would make it a fancy, these stone constructions had a gruff beauty all their own, and they dwarfed the landscape from which they sprang. Pearl’s original elevation for the bridge had seemed massive when first she’d drawn it, and the second model—still being tested each day for its responses to weight and weather—had been large enough to bridge a body of water in its own right; but nothing had prepared Prue for the sheer size of the emerging structure. In relation to houses, manufactories, the straits, and even the cliffs of Ihpetonga, the footings seemed to have been left behind by a race of giants. They were on the same scale as the mountains Prue had viewed up the Hudson; nothing local could compare to them. As she went about the work of the distillery, Prue sometimes glimpsed the Brooklyn anchorage from the corner of her eye, and she would feel as if she’d suddenly turned a corner in a strange city and come upon it, by accident, for the first time. At such moments she felt an emotion she could only describe as awe—a brightness in the chest; a sense of wonder that such a thing existed in the world, quite apart from her role in creating it. She realized with humility what a marvel it was such a bridge could be built at all, let alone partly by the authorship of her own hand.
Prue further marveled that the first season of building had ended without loss of life. (The newspapers also remarked this. Mr. Harrison attributed it, in the Argus, to “Benjamin & Mrs. Horsfield’s punctilious care in supervision”; the others, to luck.) There had been numerous injuries—burns, fractures, blows to the head; in the worst thus far, a rope transporting a large stone had broken, and the impact had shattered both feet of unlucky George White, whom Dr. de Bouton believed would never walk again—but none had proven fatal. The men were superstitious enough to spit to protect themselves at the beginning of each day, and religious enough to visit Will Severn’s church far more regularly than the locals; but ancient Elliott Fortune, who’d grown friendly with some of them while drinking his evening pint, told Prue they all believed, more or less sincerely, she must have done some kind of witchcraft to protect the works. She had known Fortune all her life, and considered telling him her thoughts about Susannah and the miscarried child protecting the works; but she soon thought better of it, and kept silent. If the workers wanted to think she’d blessed the place, she would accept that benediction.
The laborers could not stay the winter. Though there was a few weeks’ extra pay to be earned laying in stores for the next building season and securing the building sites against vandalism, there would be no work thereafter; and no matter how hearty they claimed to be, the men could not sleep in tents through the frost. Prue and Tem managed to find places for some in the distillery, and others found positions with the Luquers and Schermerhorns. A few traveled up the straits to Queen’s County to see if employment might be had at the Longacre Brewery. Olympia was still growing, so there were floors to lay and laths to plaster; the same was true in Manhattan, which continued to swallow up her forest in northward expansion, and to replace old farmsteads with city blocks. The rest of the men would return to their families, some bearing the fruits of eight months’ labor, while those who’d taken advantage of the proximity of the Liberty Tavern and the Twin Tankards would go home with lighter pockets. Before leaving, however, many signed contracts to return the following April. Ben and Prue counted this a true success. If any spell had been cast, Prue thought, it was in the care the men gave their work. She was anxious to retain such meticulous laborers as long as possible.
The last stragglers had left the encampment by late November. Where ordinarily would have stood the dry stubs of a year’s mown grain, the ground was pocked as from musket fire from hundreds of tent staves, and worn bare from the traffic. What dull brown grass remained was matted down in circles, as if deer had lain there. “Looks like the war all over again,” Mr. Livingston said to Prue in passing.
“I daresay we are less harmed by my bridgeworks than by enemy occupation,” she replied.
Mr. Livingston fingered the fine brim of his hat. “I hope you prove correct. Good day, Mrs. Horsfield.” He continued up the Ferry Road toward Joe’s tavern.
Prue stalked along her fence. She was riled by his unkindness, but remembered that he had been almost ruined by the quartering of British troops; no doubt the sights and sounds of the war remained fresh in his memory. Furthermore, she knew he was skeptical of the bridge, and supposed she should expect him to lash out against it.
Though the distillery still hummed and the docks still thronged, Brooklyn seemed quiet with the bridgeworks shut down. For eight months, it had kept her and her husband busy from dawn to dusk, six days a week; without its clamor and tumult, even the proprietor of a flourishing manufactory had time to mourn a lost child, and to wonder why no sign of one who might take her place had yet appeared. As Prue paced the length of her back fence, looking northwestward to Manhattan, she could remember the intensity with which she’d believed that city another sphere of existence. She could almost imagine the past twenty years hadn’t happened: that her parents and Johanna still lived, Will Severn had never come among them, and Ben and Isaiah were simply her dear friends, the web of obligation that now bound them as far from her imagination as the empire of Japan.
The distillery was preparing to ship large orders to fuel the debaucheries of Christmas and Twelfth Night and to provision the taverns before the waterways froze. This was what Winship Daughters Gin did every year at this time; but of course, a great deal had changed. Each time she looked out to the river, Prue saw the Gothic archway rising from her property and the great pyramid looming on the far horizon. If Susannah had remained with them, she would have been nearly a year old: sitting, perhaps crawling, and with a mouth full of teeth. She might have known how to say a thing or two, “Mama” or “dog.” Prue knew it was foolish to imagine she had bartered one for the other—she scoffed at herself for it, much as she derided herself for ever having thought the damned lived in New York City—yet the thought persisted, and with it, its own irrational mathematics. Would she give back this bridge, she asked herself, if she might have her daughter? What galled her more than her propensity to ask was that she didn’t know the answer. Prue hoped wherever Susannah Horsfield had gone, she was pleased with the work her parents had done, and did not curse them for having inadvertently traded her for it.