Free Brookland by Emily Barton Page B

said.
    â€œExactly 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, narrowbuildings 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?”
    â€œAnd 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