Brookland (10 page)

Prue stayed in the fermenting room longer than she had in the other areas of the distillery; though the place itself was gloomy, she found Mr. Fortune congenial, and they agreed the process of making wash was as delicate and important as any she would need to learn to become a distiller. Near the end of May, however, he pronounced her ready to move on, and her father again came to oversee her personally. She had not known enough to value such supervision when she'd begun her training that winter; but now she knew how much else he had to attend to, and considered herself lucky when she could command his time and attention.

“Now, this'll be a fine spring for you,” he told her, as he walked her around the periphery of the still house, with its four great copper stills all shining and burbling, crowned with snaking copper tubes that reminded Prue of her own hair. “This is the real business of distilling, and the part that'll make or break ye. If you can't get proof spirit out of that wash, you might as well throw up your hands and jump in the river; because
river water's worth as much as the product will be. Do you think you can pay close attention and master it?”

Prue said, “I do.” She had learned, in a few months at the distillery, that even when her confidence in herself wasn't strong, she could sooner or later make good on a promise by diligence.

“Hmm,” he said, “I've almost begun to think so myself. But it's no use raising my hopes; it's not everyone can be a distiller. It's here in the stillhouse, you know, the alchemy begins.”

Talk of alchemy continued to make Prue nervous, but she found even the most equivocal expression of her father's faith gratifying.

Each wash-still, she learned, had a thermometer attached to its side, because the heat of its contents was of paramount importance. “The men tend the still fires with great care, because the interior temperature must remain at all times above one hundred eighty and below two hundred twelve degrees Fahrenheit. For what happens at two hundred twelve?”

“Water forms blisters, and boils,” Prue said dutifully. She hoped none of the men was listening to her catechism; in truth, they all seemed too absorbed in their work to notice her.

“Quite so. At two hundred thirteen degrees, all the wash would go bubbling up the pipes, and we be left begging for alms on the streets. But at two hundred eleven, the alcohol in the still vaporizes, without producing steam. Those alcoholical vapors ascend from the still into the copper worm,” he said, pointing to the snaky tube overhead on the nearest wash-still, “and the worm makes its way down the inside of this tank.”

Here he led her to a wooden tub as big as a mash tun. Water was splashing noisily in through its top, and equally loudly out through its bottom, into a chute in the floor. “This is called the worm tub,” Matty told her, “and the water that surrounds the worm is constantly refreshed direct from the river. The alcoholical contents of the worm are thus kept cool, and as a result, the vapors within condense into liquid.”

Here Prue's mind began to wander—she knew nothing of condensation except as it affected a jug of cool water or her house's window glass; she couldn't say why it should become liquid. But watching the noisy worm tub, a question arose to draw her back from her peregrinations. “Where does the water go from the bottom?”

“The warm refuse from the bottom of the tub travels down the pipes
and out to splash over our waterwheel, which provides ancillary power for the pumps here and in the rectifying house, as we're far from the windmill, and a waterwheel's easier to manage than a whole ‘nother mill.” He watched her a moment to see if she'd understood, and went on, “ ‘Ancillary'—”

“I know,” she said, “I remember. It's Latin, from
ancilla
, a servant.”

“Christ a'mighty. Your mother said the Latin wouldn't stick.”

Prue felt awkward about her father's compliments, chiefly because she knew his doubts about her would be confirmed if ever she bungled a task. Whatever good opinion he had of her also seemed fragile because she knew it would vanish if he learned what she'd done to Pearl. As a result, she often dreamed up scenarios in which he uncovered her secret through stealth, or in which she herself accidentally revealed it. These fantasies made her skin creep, but she could not force herself to leave them off.

The condensed alcoholic vapors went by the name of low-wine. From the worm, it flowed into low-wine receiving-backs and was brought back up again to the spirit stills, where it was redistilled to increase its potency. “If any of the low-wine acquires a foul odor during the second distillation, we call it feints and give it up for lost, letting it run off into the river. The spirit proper, however, spills into its own receiving-backs in the cellar, and there Mr. Horsfield and I test the batches to bring them up to a standard strength. Until they reach it, we keep sending them back for further distillation; and one never knows how many trips through the spirit still will make a batch perfect. Sometimes only one additional distillation is required, sometimes three. And when it's strong enough—twenty times stronger than gin—we mix it down with spring water and call it proof spirit.”

“So when do you make the gin?” Prue asked.

“In its own due time,” Matty answered. “But what gives gin its particular taste happens in the rectifying stills; what we're making here has no real taste nor smell a'tall.” She must have looked vexed, because he patted her on the head and said, “Never you fear—I'll do my best to teach you. But each thing in its turn. Manning the stills is a tricky business, and a great deal can go wrong in the worm. I'll learn you that, and then, God help us both, we'll get on to rectifying. Perhaps by the time you're twelve.”

Prue's eyes widened—she hoped not to have to spend a solid year and a half in this hot, noisy room. Then, too, she was fixing to spend her entire life here; she might as well get used to it.

“I'm only ribbing you,” he said. “You won't surprise me if you move on to rectifying soon enough; you've been a quick study thus far. But for now, you work here.”

Prue remained in the stillhouse through the summer, and indeed found distilling more complicated than the processes she had hitherto attempted. The art of keeping the fires at the correct temperature—which sometimes involved reaching briskly in with tongs to roll a flaming log, as big as she, out onto the tile hearth—required one to overcome one's natural aversion to fire, and she wondered if she'd ever master it. Being anywhere near the fires was misery, and made the beating sun outdoors seem almost a relief. Stills were finical: If the heat was to distribute evenly around their bases, the whole affair had to be shut down and polished every fourth workday. The worm sprang leaks, it seemed, as often as it worked properly, breeding lazy speculation while someone climbed into the empty tub with a lantern, searching for a hole the size of a pin; and the flannel at the worm's base, meant to trap any foul-smelling oils released by the process of condensation, frequently clogged the apparatus entire. Prue found the work frustrating, however, for a more basic reason: Having spent six months in uninterrupted study of the distillery, she was beginning to have opinions about how things should be done. If she voiced them to her father, he'd hear her out; but in his absence, the men would wince as if she were imbecilic or speaking in French, then awkwardly return to their work. She had no doubt it was difficult for grown men to listen to a half-grown girl; but she knew her vision to be as clear as anyone's around her. She resigned herself to keeping her opinions private until she grew taller.

The rewards of all this work were threefold. First, in late July, her father began taking her down to the receiving-backs and instructing her in how proof spirit's potency was judged, both by objective measurement and by the way it burned the tongue. Prue delighted in any aspect of her appointed profession that smacked of science; and Israel Horsfield shook his head over Prue's glee the first time she introduced the hydrometer into its small glass vessel to measure the spirit's specific gravity.
“She'll be a regular Galileo Galilei,” he told Matty, scratching his pointy chin.

“Do you know what you've got there?” Matty asked Prue.

Prue examined the new instrument, bobbing in the vessel. “Looks like twelve thirteenths the weight of water,” she said, though she didn't understand precisely why the instrument should be calibrated in this way. “That's proof spirit, is it not?”

“Absolutely,” Matty said. “But it's not off by a tenth of a point? Because it makes a difference here.” He examined the vessel himself, and pronounced her assessment sound. “I'll be damned, Israel, but she's as meticulous as we are.” To Prue he said, “So we give it the second test. Remove the hydrometer, and take a wee sup from that vessel—but mind you, it burns, so no more than a drop to your tongue.”

Prue felt flush with having read the hydrometer correctly, and tilted the beaker into her mouth. Her sinuses at once filled with fire, and the next moment, she was spluttering, with tears and mucus running down her face. Both her father and Israel Horsfield were laughing at her.

“Next time you'll know,” her father said, and brought her up, choking, into the mill yard and out to the pump for water.

But the day after this humiliation came her second reward: the new sign announcing the distillery's name. Scipio Jones whitewashed the words that had previously graced the side of the storehouse, but her own father climbed up the ladder to trace the outlines for the new letters, which Scipio then painted over the course of the next few days. Her father may yet have regretted his lack of a son, but Prue felt stirred when she first saw the black letters, shadowed in gray, gleaming out toward the port for all to see. Henceforward, those traveling across from Manhattan would see
Matth
^s
Winship & Daught
^r
, Distillers & Rectifyers of I
^st
-Quality Gin
, and Prue felt sober and proud, knowing that everyone in Brooklyn and New York now knew a studious girl was learning to make spirits.

Prue's third reward was to be allowed to learn rectifying. She knew this was the place her father's art shone, and the part of the process he most feared she might be unable to master. “I don't mean to belittle you by saying it,” he told her as he led her into the rectifying house—a building smaller than the stillhouse, yet similarly equipped with stills, and dominated by a looming iron hulk of a machine, with its great flat jaws
yawning open—“but the truth is, when I was an apprentice, there were four others besides me, and none of them ever got the knack of it enough to start a place of 'is own. Everything you've learned until now is important, but it's all for naught if the rectifying goes afoul.” Prue wondered why it had to be that everything could be ruined at each stage of the process; and she continued to stare at the gaping mouth of the machine. The men were piling up wood for a fire. “That's the press, little goat, the thing your mother most fears. Promise me you won't lose a finger in it; she'll never let either of us forget it.”

“I promise,” Prue said, but the press looked fierce.

“If you learn it right, rectifying'll be your great joy here,” he said. She could not tell if he intended this to placate or frighten her. “There's no other task requires such knowledge and mastery, nor none that gives a man such pride in his work at day's end. From an odorless spirit, a gifted rectifier makes a product that delights the senses and buoys up the heart. Isn't that a fine thing?” She was too nervous and confused to answer. “That's all right, piglet,” he said, and worked his fingers into her tightly bound hair. “You'll see.”

By means of this hydraulic press, he extracted the pungent essence of juniper as well as various other berries and herbs. Their first day in the rectifying room, he showed her how the press worked—how he wiped down the lower surface, laid the herbs to be extracted on it, and used his whole body weight to depress the lever and bring down the top jaw. Prue was amazed a single man could operate a machine of such gargantuan size; Matty explained the workings of the hydraulic mechanism to her, and showed her the place where the water dripped out from the hinges. The essence of the material—in this case, lavender plucked from their garden—trickled into a small vessel at the side of the machine, in an amount Prue thought disproportional to the quantity of herbs they'd placed in it. After unlatching and lifting the jaw, Matty once again wiped off the pressing surface, and let Prue help him work the lever on the next batch.

“And attar of lavender goes into gin?” she asked, trying to enjoy the sweet fragrance wafting into the room, and trying to dwell less on the danger of the work.

“Can do, but it needn't,” he said. She knew her eyes must have widened, for he went on, “I'd think by now you wouldn't be surprised to find
it all so complicated. There's no fixed receipt for gin, love, not in general. For Winship gin, I've my own certain way, but I still make the slightest adjustments from one batch to the next. It's the great pleasure of the work, and the place a gin man proves 'is mettle.”

Prue was shocked to know this whole manufactory was devoted to making a product whose recipe was no more precise than that for bean soup; and for the first time she sincerely doubted her fitness for the business. She could follow instructions well enough; but the idea of having to invent them anew for each day's gin discouraged her. “What goes in it, then?” she asked.

“The all-important juniper, of course.” The Winships cultivated the evergreen bushes in their dooryard as other families tended roses. The sharp scent of the berries, ripening year-round, was so much a part of Prue's olfactory landscape she noticed its absence wherever else she went about town. “But one can flavor the liquor with a myriad of other spices and sweets. I've used orris, angelica, lemon peel, cardamom, coriander; and the master I studied under used everything from sweet basil to China tea. But that was in England, of course; there wasn't any tea tax there.”