Free Brookland by Emily Barton

warm house, and were eager to tell Johanna of their travels. Pearl’sfrantic 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.
    â€œDid 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.”
    â€œOh, 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. Hebrushed 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