Sight-Tea

The cost of a laugh, in Hollow Ash, was six days and five pounds of the mill.

Nobody said it to her. They never did. The Tuesday order came back down to twenty pounds with a note about the season, and this time the season had the decency to be well under way. Two of the standing orders moved their collection to Thursday, which was neither here nor there and was a message all the same. And on the Monday a woman Hesper had known for nine years came in, bought nothing, said she had only been passing, and went out again.

Prue arrived at seven on the Tuesday, took her chair, and did not talk about the weather, which in eleven years had happened twice.

“I’ll say it once and then I’ll be quiet about it and you can be as cross with me as you like.”

“You’ve never been quiet about anything.”

“You laughed at him,” Prue said. “In your own shop, with the door open, and you didn’t put it away after.”

“He made a joke about a chicken.”

“Dear, I have sat at that window for eleven years and watched you serve four hundred people, and I have seen you be kind, and I have seen you be funny, and I have seen you be so polite to a man that he went home and wondered afterwards what had happened to him.” Prue turned her cup round on the saucer. “I have never once seen you not manage your own face. Not at my husband’s funeral. Not the day you took this counter. Not once.”

Hesper went on weighing.

“They’ll forgive you feeding him. They were always going to forgive you feeding him, because it’s the warden’s paper and it’s your licence and there’s nobody in this village daft enough to want you shut.” Prue picked up her cup. “They’ll not forgive you liking him. That’s the whole of it. That’s the only crime there is here.”

· · ·Scene break

The young carter came at half past eight that evening, when the shop had been shut an hour, and knocked on the lane door twice and then a third time, which was how it was done.

Hesper barred the door behind him and tied the bell back to the frame, and put the small pot on the trivet, the one with the chip out of the lid that had been her mother’s.

“You know what it does.”

“It shows you what you need.” He had his hat in both hands. He was twenty-four and he had a face like a barn door and he was frightened half to death. “That’s what they say.”

“That is what it does, and it’s not the same as what you came for, so I’ll ask you three times and you’ll answer me straight each time, because it only works on a man who means to be honest and there’s no use paying for it otherwise.” She was measuring while she spoke: four grams, the good green, the water off the boil and rested long. “Do you want to be told the truth of your own business?”

“I do.”

“Do you want it if it’s inconvenient?”

A pause, which was the right answer.

“I do.”

“Do you want it if it costs you the thing you came in here hoping I’d give you?”

He looked at the pot for a while.

“Aye,” he said. “Go on.”

Her hands were steady. They were always steady on the hearth; that was the last thing left of twenty-six years, a small warmth she could push down through a pot like a thumb through dough, and it took her about as much out of herself as carrying a sack of leaf up from the cellar. She poured, and she counted, and she set the cup in front of him and stood back against the dresser where she could not be looked at.

He drank it. He sat with it. His face went through three things, and the third one was anger.

“That’s a rotten trick, mistress,” he said at last, hoarse. “I’d have paid you double for a lie.”

“I know. Take your time.”

“I came to be told to go over the river. The wages are twice, and my mother says I’m to go, and everyone says I’m to go.” He put the cup down and looked at his own hands. “It never showed me the river at all. It showed me stood in the yard not saying it to him. That’s all it was. Me, stood there, not saying it, and him waiting, and the pair of us going in for our dinner.”

“Then it’s not the river you’re afraid of.”

“No.” He laughed once, wetly. “No, it’s not.”

He left her a shilling on the counter and she gave him eightpence of it back, and he went out into the dark to go and have a conversation with his father, which he would put off for nine days and then have.

Hesper washed the small pot and put it on the high shelf and sat down on the stool behind her own counter for ten minutes with the lamp out.

She had brewed sight-tea forty or fifty times since the war. She had never once brewed it for herself. There was no rule against it and no danger in it, and it had never worked on the person holding the pot, and every hearth-witch on the border learned that in her first year the way you learn that the handle of a pan is hot.

· · ·Scene break

Wednesday at eleven was fourteen lines, no query at all, and nine minutes.

Dabrel took the sheet off to the warden at the end of it, because Friday was Friday and he had never in his life let a thing sit, and that left Aurel Donnacha at the far end of the counter with the tin under his arm and nobody in the shop but Tamsin at the quern and a man asleep by the stove.

“Mistress Quill. A question that is not about the sheet.”

“Those are the expensive ones.”

“The carter’s boy came out of your door last night at nine and went up the lane like a man who had been hit in the chest with a plank.” He said it without any weight on it at all. “Dabrel has since had a full account of sight-tea from the chandler’s wife, who had it from her sister, and has repeated it to me at breakfast with footnotes.”

“Then you know as much as anybody in this village who’s never drunk it.”

“It shows a man what he needs rather than what he wants.”

“It does.”

“And it works only on somebody who has sat down meaning to be honest.”

“It does.”

“Then I should like to know,” Aurel said, “what it would show me.”

He was turning the tin round in his hands, a quarter at a time, and she saw that he had made the whole thing sound light on purpose and had done it badly, which from him was practically a shout.

“You’re joking.”

“Half. I am told it is a permitted trade of the house.” A faint, dry lift at the corner of his mouth. “The order says tea as the house provides, and I have read the order rather more often than is healthy, and I do not believe the warden of this township has the least idea what he has authorised.”

“You’ve been saving that up.”

“Since Monday.”

“It’s very good,” Hesper said. “The answer’s no.”

The tin stopped turning.

“I’ve a reason and you’ll have it plain, because you’ve never once asked me for anything and I’m not having the first time be a thing I fob off.” She put both hands flat on the elm, which she had not meant to do. “It works on the honest. You’re the most honest man I’ve met in twenty years and I’d have it working before the cup was down. And I’d be stood four feet off, holding the pot, watching a man’s face while he finds out what he needs.”

“That is what you do. You did it last night.”

“For a carter’s boy who wants to cross a river. Not for you.” She heard her own voice go flat and exact, which was what it did instead of shaking. “I’ve no business seeing that. Neither has anybody. And if the warden ever asks me what dealings I’ve had with you outside that book, I will answer him truthfully, and I brewed him a working that showed him the inside of his own head is not a sentence I can put in front of Colm Ferris and still have a licence on Friday.”

Aurel considered this for what she counted as four seconds.

“That is a sound reason,” he said. “I withdraw it. I am sorry to have asked.”

“Don’t be sorry. Sign the sheet.”

“You have kept the sheet. Dabrel took it at ten past.”

“Then go away,” said Hesper, “and take the tin with you.”

He went. He put his hat on outside the door before he put it on his head, which was a thing he did, and she had no idea why, and she had noticed it on the fourth day and had thought about it since.

The reason she had given him was true and she had not told him one word of a lie, and it was not the reason.

The reason was that she had known, for a week and a half, exactly what the cup would show that man, because she had watched him stand in her doorway for a month and a half looking at a warm room the way other men look at a fire in the winter; and that the moment he drank it and found out, she would be standing four feet away with a pot in her hand and her face entirely her own business, and he would look up.

And she wanted him to. That was the whole of it, plainly stated, in a shop at twenty past eleven in the morning, by a woman of forty-nine who had spent eleven years being sensible for three hundred people.

· · ·Scene break

“Your hands are going.”

Tamsin was in the kitchen doorway with the flour scoop, and Hesper looked down and found that she had been standing at her own counter for some while with a dry cloth in one hand and nothing in the other, doing nothing at all, and that the right one had gone through it twice while she stood there.

No toast. No room watching. No kettle, no pot, no boiling water. A dry cloth, and an empty shop, and the middle of an ordinary Wednesday.

“It’s the weather.”

“It’s not the weather. It’s not the mornings either, it’s gone eleven.” Tamsin came in and put the scoop down and stood on the other side of the counter with her arms folded, twenty-two years old and absolutely immovable. “I’ve watched those hands four years. I know the mornings and I know the cold and I know when there’s people in and I know the day the mill sends a note. This is none of them.”

“Tamsin—“

“What did he say to you the day the pot went?”

The quern had stopped. The man by the stove slept on.

“That’s not yours,” Hesper said.

“No.” Tamsin picked the scoop back up. “No, it’s not. I’ll go and grind, then.”

She was at the door at a quarter to five, an hour and a quarter early, with her shawl on. She had never in four years left that shop before six.

“I’m not cross with you,” she said, not turning round. “I want it on the record that I’m not cross with you, because it’s going to look like it for a while.”

And she went.

· · ·Scene break

The shop at ten o’clock had no lamp, the stove down to nothing, and the smell of the day’s leaf standing in it.

Hesper got the small pot off the high shelf, the one with the chip out of the lid, and set it on the trivet, and weighed four grams of the good green with a perfectly steady hand.

She asked herself the three questions out loud, because that was how it was done, and she answered them out loud, and her voice sounded ridiculous in an empty room and she did it anyway.

She poured. She counted. She sat down on the stool with the cup in both hands and drank it while it was hot.

And nothing happened, because nothing ever did. It had never worked for the one holding the pot, not for her, not for her mother, not for any woman on this border in living memory, and she had known that with total certainty when she took the pot down off the shelf.

She looked into the cup and saw leaf.

She had wanted to be told. That was all this was: a woman of forty-nine sitting alone in the dark with good green going cold in her hands, wanting somebody — anybody, a working, a pot, a chipped lid, her own mother if she had still been here to ask — to say it to her so that she would not have to be the one who decided.

She washed the cup and put the pot back on the high shelf.

She did not give herself an instruction. She stood in her own dark shop and understood that there was no longer one she would obey.