Brookland by Emily Barton

imagined. When she’d peered at Manhattan previously, she’d looked down from the top of Clover Hill; but now she was looking up, and the warehouses along the waterfront loomed over her. As the party drew nearer New York, the ice grew ever more thickly littered with trapped boats. (“Little shallops and sleak periaguas were left where they lay,” Prue wrote to Recompense, “with buckets & lengths of rope strewn in their hulls. Groups of boys approach’d them with obvious curiosity, but either found nothing worth pilfering or else desisted in the clear view of such multitudes.”) Some distance north, Prue thought she saw Losee’s flat-bottomed ferryboat, tethered to what looked to be the market wharf and in no danger from the huge freighter that rested nearby. There were also more mongers on the New York side—an old man selling chestnuts from a kettle fire, and a blind woman shaking a tankard for pennies in exchange for paper twists of popcorn from a basket at her feet. Two slaves were out making music with a mandolin and a Jew’s harp; and some New Yorkers were trying their wooden-bladed skates on the bumpy, uncongenial ice.
    â€œHold, Prue,” her father called from behind her. She stopped to wait for them, and the rest of the children slowed around her as if they were a school of fish. As he drew nearer, Matty asked Isaiah, “Where’re your folks? Do they know you’ve gone off?”
    â€œThey know. I’m in charge,” Isaiah replied, his somber face indicating he could be trusted.
    Matty put his gloved hand on Prue’s shoulder. “And you; is New York as you thought it would be?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” Prue replied. She hadn’t thought it would seem so marvelous to step up off the water onto a wooden dock as solid and lichen-stained as any in Brooklyn. “I’m not sure what I thought.” How workaday New York appeared when she saw it face to face! The height of the warehouses was awe-inspiring, but their windows rippled just as oldglass did in Brooklyn, and the buildings were clad in the same weathered shingles and Holland brick. Women of all shapes and ages were hurrying past with dirt on their hems and pigeons in their baskets, and men went by on business, their furrowed brows intent on not remarking the change in the view. The children had climbed up into a market about the size of Brooklyn’s, but with more permanent-looking wooden stalls. Prue smelled the familiar odors of blood, fish, chickens, and hay. There were bonfires in this market and out in the street; people were huddled around them for warmth. “Where are we?” she asked her father.
    He crouched down beside her; a horse and calash whipped past. “This is Old Market, where poorer folk do their shopping,” he said. Some of the king’s soldiers were passing around a wineskin. “The Fly Market is on up the way,” Matty continued, inclining his head northward, in the direction of the bustle. “That’s where the ferry lands, and where the real truck is done.”
    â€œWhy do they call it Fly Market?” Isaiah asked. Ben added, “Indeed; that’s disgusting.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Matty answered them. “Imagine it’s something Dutch.”
    Roxana was also crouched down, trying to remove molasses from Tem’s mittens with spit and a handkerchief. Tem looked around at the people bustling past, while Pearl whistled a titmouse’s chipper call and stalked after Maggie Horsfield, who made herself blind and deaf to her.
    â€œI’d like to see it,” Prue said, though in truth there was nothing she didn’t want to see.
    â€œI’ll show you everything I can while we’re here.” Matty went around to them all, taking the decimated pear cores and tossing them in the gutter. Ben had eaten all of his, swallowing the seeds. “At the very least, Fly Market, the taverns I