Brookland by Emily Barton Page A

said, but the press looked fierce.
    â€œIf 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.
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œCan 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 findit 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.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œSoon enough we shan’t be taxed any longer,” Prue offered.
    Her father began wiping down the press once more. “Not by the Crown; but mark well, wherever there’s a government, an honest man has fees to pay. And you will, too, if you become a distiller.”
    Prue did not care for that “if.”
    That day, she watched him work and smelled the various extracts he produced; and later in the week made some of her own, with his help with the lever. She came to understand how a gifted rectifier introduced these sundry essences in novel and harmonious proportion to the final distillation of spirit, such that their individual properties would be less evident than the balance of the whole. The product had to be recognizable to