Read Online Brookland by Emily Barton - Free Book Online Page B

as Ben reached under her coat to tickle her ribs. “She wouldn’t make a mistake lightly.”
    â€œHey, hey,” Isaiah said, and pulled Ben off. They were both laughing. Prue was far more interested in her parents than in the boys, but she thanked Isaiah anyway.
    â€œWe’ll see,” Matty said. “Perhaps in the spring.” Prue thought she could hear in his voice the hope he might still, somehow, get a son. “Matthias Winship and Daughter,” he said, as if to see if it wanted alteration.
    Matthias Winship & Daughter
. It rang like a church bell; and though they might eventually have to append a final
s
for Tem, there were years to come in which it could be Prue’s private demesne. She would have repeated the name in her mind indefinitely had Ben not called out, “Look!” Her gaze followed where his finger pointed, and she saw her beloved bluffs of Ihpetonga, tinged pink against the darkening sky. “That’s our house, Iz!”
    Prue could make out a squat white structure near the ferry landing, and some Horsfield family sheets and britches hanging stiffly on their line. Their mother had died the previous year, and the washerwoman never quite seemed to get abreast of all their laundry. “Doesn’t look like much from here, does it?” she asked.
    Isaiah, holding on to Ben, said, “Easy.”
    There, farther south, were the sails of her father’s windmill, motionless in the still air and small as a doll’s arms. In the rosy light, the black crags—from whose slopes most of the cypress had been harvested tomake casks for the gin—looked neither majestic nor fearsome, but simply dull. She could make out the name of the establishment—Matth
s Winship, Distiller & Recter of First-Quality
Gin—beckoning to her in tall letters from one of the storehouses whose broad side faced the river. The cherry orchard was a cluster of bare twigs, and the Winship house, among the more prominent in the village, was a brown clump, like a bird’s nest.
    â€œYour place doesn’t look like much, either, does it?” asked Ben.
    â€œNo.”
    Far off to the right, she could just make out the Luquer Mill, and beyond it, the dark mouth of the bay and the blurred trees of the Governor’s Island. How fine it would be to have a bridge.
    â€œSo what do you say, Prue?” her father asked. “Shall we give it a go?”
    Already the light had gone more blue, and the sandy buildings of Winship Gin looked as if they’d been deserted for decades.
    â€œI’d like to,” she said, not looking at him. “I think we should. Let’s change the sign.”
    Two stray dogs gamboled past; when one went down spinning, the other skittered around it and barked. Matty Winship said, “That’s my girl,” but his enthusiasm did not sound genuine.
    Joe Loosely clapped his gloved hands. “She’ll make a fine distiller, Matty Winship. But you must paint my sign first. A deal’s a deal.”
    â€œI can do yours immediately, in the cooper’s shed,” Matty answered. “The side of my warehouse’ll have to wait till she proves her mettle at making liquor.”
    Prue was still young enough to feel spring might take eons to arrive, but she knew the manufactory needed undergo no visible change for her to begin her work there. Tem was fast asleep on their mother’s shoulder, as Maggie was on Mrs. Loosely’s, and Pearl would not have cared much about the conversation even if she’d understood it; the Horsfield boys were by now far ahead of her, chasing after the dogs. In this joy, she realized, as in the self-devised torments she’d suffered all those years, she was alone. Yet there was magic in this isolation. She was to be initiated into the mysteries.
    They arrived home before dark, all spent. The Looselys escorted the Horsfield children home, and Tem and Pearl woke up when they entered the