Brookland by Emily Barton Page B

the palate and nose, have a taste that stamped it as
Winship
gin, a thing a man would willingly plunk down his wages for when beer could be had at half the cost.
    So into the autumn of I78z, Prue spent whole mornings roaming Brooklyn and asking if she might pick spices from her neighbors’ gardens, or begging specimens of rarer varieties from Mrs. Friedlander. She knew this behavior—even more than her knee britches—made Mrs. Livingston click her tongue. She could not operate the press without assistance,but one of the slaves would help her crush whatever leaves and berries she acquired. And under her father’s tutelage, she learned to taste and smell her herbs indoors and out, in the hot stillhouse and down by the cool river, by themselves on a fresh palate and in combination with other herbs and food. Her father brought her a small ledger from New York, and to its lined pages she entrusted inexpert drawings of plants, along with detailed notes on their tastes and interrelationships. Each week, she brought this book to her father for review; and though he chuckled over her sometimes zealous choice of adjectives (“The lemon balm was ‘sprightly,’ was it? I’ll take your word, missy”), he seemed pleased, overall, to find her palate educable and her attention not yet flagging. He began to speak so often of her progress to the family that Roxana’s eyes would glaze over when ginger and cinnamon came up at table.
    â€œMight you teach her to cook and bake in the off hours?” she asked him one evening. “It’d prove a far sight more practical; and I daresay she already knows her spices better than I do.”
    Matty laughed. Tem, meanwhile, had finished her meal, and began marching around the kitchen, hollering commands to invisible workers. She had never been to the distillery, so she’d copped most of her phrases from what she’d overheard on the wharves. Though Prue thought she herself should have had enough poise to disregard her sister, Tem’s mimicry nettled her.
    At the end of November 1782, a preliminary peace treaty was at last signed at Paris. Word did not reach Brooklyn until late December. The war had lasted all Prue’s sentient life, and she realized that although she’d known it would someday come to an end, and had hoped with her father it would come to this one, she had always half considered it a permanent fixture, like a house. It would take some while, the men speculated down at Loosely’s tavern, for the Crown to pack up its troops and send them home; so the Cortelyous had time left to grumble about pocked fields and poached pheasant, and the Winships might yet earn a tidy profit from the soldiers’ love of the barroom. No one knew how long the occupying forces would remain, but to celebrate, Matty Winship put in an order for a doll-sized rectifying still, to be made to order at the English foundry from which all the original equipment had come. He had a talent for drawing, and when he explained the manner in which he thought she might practice her future art upon a gallon of spirit at a time, and showedher his delicate pencil sketch, she thought him as good as an Old Master. When the still arrived in early spring, she began to use it exactly as he had described, while the fires of the rectifying house roared and spat all around.
    Prue had been using her new still a few weeks when Congress declared the official end to the war; and soon after came the order for those soldiers garrisoned in Brooklyn to return home across the sea. Those few remaining Loyalist families who had not yet left New York voluntarily began to pack up their homes to move to Canada; Prue saw how awkwardly they were treated at Mrs. Tilley’s or on the street. She had imagined there would be general jubilation, but there was little; the process of making peace had dragged on so, most of the neighbors seemed weary. After all the complaints the occupying