Brookland (8 page)

“No.”

Far off to the right, she could just make out the Luquer Mill, and beyond it, the dark mouth of the bay and the blurred trees of the Governor's Island. How fine it would be to have a bridge.

“So what do you say, Prue?” her father asked. “Shall we give it a go?”

Already the light had gone more blue, and the sandy buildings of Winship Gin looked as if they'd been deserted for decades.

“I'd like to,” she said, not looking at him. “I think we should. Let's change the sign.”

Two stray dogs gamboled past; when one went down spinning, the other skittered around it and barked. Matty Winship said, “That's my girl,” but his enthusiasm did not sound genuine.

Joe Loosely clapped his gloved hands. “She'll make a fine distiller, Matty Winship. But you must paint my sign first. A deal's a deal.”

“I can do yours immediately, in the cooper's shed,” Matty answered. “The side of my warehouse'll have to wait till she proves her mettle at making liquor.”

Prue was still young enough to feel spring might take eons to arrive, but she knew the manufactory needed undergo no visible change for her to begin her work there. Tem was fast asleep on their mother's shoulder, as Maggie was on Mrs. Loosely's, and Pearl would not have cared much about the conversation even if she'd understood it; the Horsfield boys were by now far ahead of her, chasing after the dogs. In this joy, she realized, as in the self-devised torments she'd suffered all those years, she was alone. Yet there was magic in this isolation. She was to be initiated into the mysteries.

They arrived home before dark, all spent. The Looselys escorted the Horsfield children home, and Tem and Pearl woke up when they entered the warm house, and were eager to tell Johanna of their travels. Pearl's
frantic whistling couldn't reach Johanna, who nodded absently at Tem's exclamations as she stirred the pot. While Tem shouted about the market and the food, Prue began to undress her, to get at her soggy diaper. Tem kept trying to push her off, but at last held her smock up to help.

“Did you not even go out to see it?” Prue shouted to Johanna. “It was remarkable.”

Johanna cast a glance over her shoulder, not quite in the direction of Prue's voice. “Don't you know I've seen enough already in this lifetime? No need to gape at anything more. You'll see, when you're a dried-up old woman such as I.”

“Oh, please, Johanna,” Prue's mother said. “It's your own fault you missed something wonderful. It's not the fault of your age.” But willfully or not, Johanna did not hear her; and she doled out their soup without saying another word.

In the middle of the night, Prue was awakened by a strange sound, a moaning as if some large creature lay wounded. At first the noise frightened her, but she saw her sisters slept through it; and as she listened, she realized it must be the ice of the river breaking to allow the tidal current to continue in its usual course. A heavy rain was drumming on the roof; the temperature must have risen since nightfall. While Prue sat up in her bed, the river groaned and made a long series of cracking sounds akin to an old barn crumbling. In a short while, however, this subsided to the sound of rushing water that so underlay Prue's every thought, she couldn't generally hear it unless she listened for it. At some point, she must have fallen asleep. In the morning, there was no trace of there ever having been an ice bridge, and the distillery and ropewalk were bustling earlier than usual, as if to atone for the previous day's “Saint Monday.” As she dressed her sisters, Prue wondered if she might have imagined the whole affair.

But her doubt could not persist, for her father brought the sign from the king's arms down to Scipio Jones's cooperage that very afternoon. Matty worked on it at odd moments over the course of the next week, and Israel Horsfield said her father would let none but Scipio advise him on it, and locked the shed when neither of them was there to guard it. Prue harangued Israel with questions, but could get no answer from him; so she began to pull at Scipio's cuffs, and even tried offering him some smoked pilchards as a bribe, at high cost to the fabric of her pocket. He
brushed her off, however, saying, “You'll enjoy it more if you let it be a surprise.”

The night before Prue's birthday, her father was out late, drinking, she assumed, with Losee and Joe; but, as it turned out, he'd been hanging the new sign, and had waited till most of the village had gone to sleep so it might come as a true surprise. Her tenth birthday, then, turned out to be another day of hubbub in the village, for everyone was either tickled by or angry about what her father had done. To the bottom of the shield, he had appended a crescent-shaped piece of wood on which he'd written, in bold white letters,
Jos. Loosely' Liberty Tavern
; and the beautiful rendition of the king's arms now depended from still another placard, depicting an eagle of liberty swooping down to snatch up the escutcheon in its sharp beak. Prue saw the brigadier general of the Hessians come pat her father on the back and laugh about this minor act of insurrection, though of everyone in Brooklyn, he should have been the most upset by it. She did not think she'd ever understand the reasons or motives for the war, but her faith in her father was nearly infinite.

That Sabbath evening, a balladeer came to town, and the Winships took their children to the Twin Tankards, as many families did, to hear the song. The balladeers were often disreputable-looking characters, with scruffy hair or gaps in their teeth; but they arrived almost as frequently as the New York papers and sang about the war and news in other towns, providing a good evening's entertainment. This singer wore a patch over one eye, which caused Pearl to hide her face in fear of him; but to Prue's delight, he sang not of battle, murder, or the ordinary perfidies, but of the freezing of the North and East Rivers, which he claimed was all the news, from Massachusetts to the Carolinas.

T
hat very week, despite her father's lingering doubts, Prue's training at the distillery began.

Her mother's chief fear was that her hair would catch in a drive belt, so instead of dressing it, as she had always done, in two fuzzy auburn braids, she wound it onto the back of Prue's head and fixed it with a comb. Prue was pleased when she saw herself in the looking glass. The coiffure wasn't more flattering than the former one, but it made her look eleven or twelve, which she counted as progress. Roxana was also concerned lest some article of Prue's attire snag in the machinery, so she bought some sturdy gray linen from Mrs. Tilley and had Johanna make Prue a pair of close-fitting knee britches, such as boys wore. Johanna had to feel every stitch with her fingers, but her sewing was still expert, and the britches came out well enough. They fastened beneath the knee with tortoiseshell buttons, for whose fanciness Ben teased Prue, though he did not seem to mind the britches themselves. Between these and the new hairstyle, Prue no longer fully resembled a girl, and she knew this would be even more pronounced when the cobbler finished her long work boots. But she told herself she had never been popular with the Livingstons, the most feminine girls in the neighborhood. It was impossible to risk losing the regard of those who'd never held her in any; and Ben would no doubt value her more highly now that her clothes allowed her to run more quickly and fight like a boy.

Prue's father didn't worry about her hair or her clothing, having, as he did, at least some native faith in her common sense. Prue intuited, however,
his concern about her aptness for the task she was undertaking. She was quick at writing and arithmetic, but she knew the prospect of teaching her the art and science of distilling daunted him, not only because of her sex. Even before she began her training, she understood the business was complex: There were raw materials to acquire and wastes to dispose of, machines to be kept in good order and on strict schedules of time and temperature, a few score men, of varying abilities, to be fed and clothed if they were slaves, and properly directed, kept off the bottle, and paid their wages if free; and there was the product itself, which sold only because it was of the finest quality. “But I'll tell you what the real trouble is,” he told her the day they began. He sat down on his chair in the countinghouse, so their eyes might be on a level. “The process is sufficiently arcane, even now I sometimes find myself surprised it transmutes grain into alcohol and not into gold.”

“I won't be dismayed,” Prue said, though when he spoke in terms of alchemy, she was.

He smiled at her with his lips pressed tight. “That's my girl,” he said.

She nodded. She wasn't certain he meant this as a compliment.

“Good. If it suits you, I'd like to begin with the process itself, of distilling and rectifying spirits. Although it's the more complicated aspect of what you'll have to learn, I assume if you understand it, you'll apprehend the business side of things more easily. If not, we can always train up that little Izzy Horsfield. He'll make a good manager, mark me.”

“He always seems worried about something,” Prue said.

“Exactly my point. For your part, it's enough if you can make gin.”

She inhaled a deep breath, took a sip of the coffee she was drinking despite its bitter taste, now she was a working person, and, wondering if she'd been wrong to volunteer for this task, followed her father down the open stairs to the mill yard.

Prue had always thought the buildings of the distillery were arranged in the most pleasing and symmetrical fashion possible, though now they did not look especially welcoming. The brewhouse, in which the distilling process began, sat at the southern end of the property, where Joralemon's Lane joined the Shore Road and raw materials might be most easily delivered. As the gin progressed through the stages of its manufacture, it traveled from building to building and tank to tank, heading northward toward the ropewalk and the ferry. The four long, narrow
buildings in which most of the work was done—the brewhouse, cooling house, stillhouse, and rectifying house—were clustered away from the water, toward the foot of Clover Hill, to decrease the danger of flooding; and between the buildings and the straits was the hard-packed sand of the mill yard, in which the workers took rest and exercise, and in the center of which stood the countinghouse. Matty Winship and Israel Horsfield kept their paper-strewn office on the second story, and reached it via the outdoor staircase, against whose weathered planks their boots resounded whenever they went up or down. The office had windows on all four sides, so they might look out on any part of the works while seeing to other business. The ground floor was an empty room, swept clean weekly by a slave named Owen; there was thus always a suitable space in which to address the workers and give the wage-earners their pay, regardless of the weather. (Prue knew neither the ropewalk nor the sawmill nor the gristmill had an assembly room; but her father had once told her he'd been treated like a pig as a journeyman, and had rankled under the indignity. “Mind, I don't provide 'em with French cravats or silken hose,” he'd said, “but they do as they're told without grumbling if they can warm their hands by the stove of a winter afternoon.”) At the northern waterfront edge of the property stood the casking house and storehouses, and those other buildings whose function supported, but was not integral to, the whole endeavor of making liquor: the cooperage, smithy, stables, slave quarters, privies, and cook shed. Past these, Matty Winship owned a stretch of open strand between his works and the Schermerhorn rope manufactory. If ever his business boomed enough to warrant it, he could expand northward.

From her visits to the manufactory, Prue had gathered the making of gin was hot, noisy, fragrant, and complicated, but she did not know how much so until her father led her down into the mill yard that morning. He began by asking her, “You know that I grow barley?”

“And Indian corn, vegetables, and juniper.” She loved when the men hauled up kelp from the straits to fertilize the fields. It had a familiar, almost human stink.

He waved good morning to John Putnam, the brewhouse's foreman, who was hurrying past with a sheaf of papers in one hand. “Good. I grow barley for the gin, but not nearly enough to supply the works entire;
and I'm no maker, either. I buy the remainder of my grain from Mr. Remsen and Mr. Cortelyou, and from a fellow in Nassau County, when the local supply won't suffice. Mr. Cortelyou has made his fortune selling malted barley to me and to the Longacre Brewery, up in Queen's County. And it all goes down to the Luquer Mill to be ground. You know why it comes and goes in wagons?”

Some men were shouting outside the stillhouse, but her father didn't seem concerned. Prue had lost her train of thought in watching them, and didn't know the answer.

“So it doesn't get wet on a barge, monkey. Come, you've got a fine noggin there. Let's put it to use.”