Brookland by Emily Barton

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.
    â€œDo 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?”
    â€œAbsolutely,” 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.
    â€œNext 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 jawsyawning 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.”
    â€œI promise,” Prue