The Mustard Pot

Keir read Blythe’s note three times before deciding that supper probably meant supper.

There were no qualifications. No mention of light, the garden, his carelessness or an opportunity to discuss their crafts. Only a place, a time, and I should like to see you without a queue behind us.

He liked that enough to become suspicious of it.

At forty-one, he had learned that people sometimes wanted the man who could send a golden bird around a room and sometimes wanted a golden bird around a room. The distinction often became clear when he sat down.

He capped his coil before he left the house. Checked it again on the stairs. The little habit made him smile in a way he would have preferred nobody to see.

Blythe was already at the eating house, taking off her gloves finger by finger. She wore the same dark green dress as the day before, with a different ribbon at the throat. Or perhaps the ribbon had been there yesterday and he had been too occupied by her hand on his coat to notice.

“I checked it twice,” he said, holding up his wrist.

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“You were looking.”

“I was looking at your hand. It is in much the same place.”

He sat down more abruptly than he intended.

She seemed pleased about it.

The eating house had six tables, a stove and a woman who regarded indecision over the menu as a personal slight. They ordered the pie. There was one kind.

“I ought to explain yesterday,” Blythe said.

“I’ve heard the explanation. Copper line. Open coil. Fool in doorway.”

“When Nerida came in.”

He took his hands off the table.

“You stepped back.”

“I did.”

“You needn’t account for every movement.”

“I know. I am choosing that one.”

The woman brought water. Blythe waited until she had gone.

“Nerida helped choose the shortlist for the high conservatory. My garden is on it. She believes a closed composition requires a certain…”

“Closed artist?”

“I was going to say discipline.”

“That sounds better.”

Her mouth tightened. “She taught me a great deal.”

“I’m not disputing that.”

“You make it sound as though wanting what she values is ridiculous.”

Keir looked at the little notch in the table between them. He had done it again: dismissed the door before discovering why anyone wanted to go through it.

“I don’t think your garden is ridiculous.”

“I didn’t ask whether you approved of it.”

“No. You asked me to supper. I seem to have got confused.”

She looked at him for another moment. Then she unfastened the ribbon at her throat by one small degree, as if allowing the evening room to improve.

“I wanted you to know why I moved. It wasn’t because I thought you had done anything wrong.”

“Except at the gate.”

“That was thoroughly wrong.”

He laughed. “All right.”

The pie arrived. Blythe cut through its lid with more force than it needed.

“And I am thirty-seven,” she said, “which is too old to step away from someone merely because my teacher has entered a room.”

“I still stand straighter when the man who taught me lampwork walks past. He is mostly interested in whether I’ve paid him for oil.”

“Have you?”

“Usually.”

She looked at him.

“Yes,” he said. “I have. I wanted to seem disreputable.”

“You nearly succeeded.”

There it was: the laugh he had suspected she kept elsewhere. Quick, low, entirely unlike the measured smile she gave visitors. He wanted to hear it again before the evening ended.

They ate. She asked him whether running-light was tiring, then listened to the answer instead of telling him it looked effortless. He asked how she chose which moments to keep.

“Most of them I don’t know I want until they are gone,” she said.

“What do you do then?”

“Make something else. Be annoyed.”

“A rigorous method.”

“It has served me for eighteen years.”

He could picture her at nineteen making the first flower, fierce with certainty, long before he had known her. There was something touching about a life continuing all that time without consulting his imagination. He had a habit of meeting people as though they had only just arrived.

“The amber one,” he said. “What was it?”

She considered him over her glass.

“A honey jar.”

“I thought it would be something grand.”

“You didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t.”

She told him about the empty workshop and the bread. Not much; enough. He did not try to turn it into a lesson about her character. He asked whether the jar had survived.

“Tamsen broke it six years later. She still claims the table moved.”

“Tables can be vindictive.”

“Not mine. I supervise them.”

He was still laughing when she reached for the mustard.

The sleeve of her dress brushed his wrist. An ordinary touch, through cloth. His coil was closed; there was no magical consequence, no artistic excuse for the way he suddenly wanted to turn his hand beneath hers.

She noticed him notice.

Neither moved for a moment.

Then she took the mustard, put too much on her plate and looked irritated with herself.

· · ·Scene break

After supper they walked to the north steps, where the river below the bridge carried the reflections of ordinary lamps. Keir had his house to return to and a dusk circuit still to make; the course in his coil could wait within the evening, but not an entire night. Blythe had her own seven turns ahead.

He disliked discovering that he wanted the time between those obligations to be longer.

“You are going to show me something,” she said.

“Am I?”

“You keep looking at your wrist.”

He had been thinking of how her sleeve had touched it.

“I could.”

“You don’t have to.”

“That is a very effective way of making me want to.”

She sat on the low wall, leaving room beside her. No still-light here, no copper threshold, nothing that his work could spoil. He uncapped the coil and drew a fine gold thread out between his fingers.

It curled in the air, caught the movement of the river and became a moth.

A poor one. One wing longer than the other. He had not made it for an audience and it showed.

Blythe leaned forward.

“It’s looking for something.”

“It has no thoughts. It’s only following the light I give it.”

“Then you are looking for something.”

“That sounds inconveniently likely.”

The moth drifted toward her shoulder. He let it go where it wanted, which was only another way of saying where his attention had already gone.

It landed on the mustard pot.

Blythe looked down at the little brown jar still in her hand.

“Oh,” she said.

Keir stared at it. Then he began to laugh.

“I didn’t mean to take it.”

“I wasn’t going to accuse you.”

“You are laughing as though I stole an entire chair.”

“Would you have supervised it home?”

She tried to look severe. Failed. Her laughter came freely now, and the moth trembled on the mustard pot because his hands were shaking.

“Stop,” she said. “You will dislodge it.”

“It’s not alive.”

“It can still have a preference.”

He wanted to kiss her so badly that the laughter left him breathless for a different reason.

She stopped laughing first.

“Keir.”

“Yes.”

“Put it away.”

He looked at the moth, then at her face. There was no disapproval there.

“The light?”

“Yes. I want to know which part of this is you.”

He gathered the thread, let the moth go, and closed the cap.

The wall was cold through his coat. The river kept making its small, unpersuaded sounds. Without the moving gold she looked more real: the slight wind-reddening at her cheek, the line where her hair had escaped its pin, the brown jar resting against her knee.

“This part,” he said.

She set the mustard down.

“I’d like you to kiss me.”

He had imagined her being less direct, which showed how little he knew her and how much he wanted to find out.

“Here?”

“Unless you object to the company.”

“The mustard seems discreet.”

She laughed once, and he leaned toward her. Stopped close enough that she could make the last small distance if she wanted.

She did.

Her hand came to his jaw, the same decided hand that had caught his coat. He kissed her without a trick, without a fine bright thing to draw attention away from what he wanted. She answered with a softness that unsettled him more than boldness would have done.

When they parted she did not take her hand away.

“Yes,” she said, quietly, as if she had been asked a question by something other than words.

He touched her cheek. “Again?”

“I was hoping you would be quicker to suggest it.”

The second kiss was less tentative. He felt her smile against him and stopped trying to make the moment look like anything.

Later they returned the mustard pot. Blythe did it herself, with an expression that discouraged comment. The woman at the eating house took it back and said, “People usually take spoons.”

Outside, Blythe stood with her hands in her pockets.

“I have to go,” she said.

“The garden.”

“Yes.”

“And I have to walk.”

“The course.”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other, mildly astonished to find that their lives had become inconvenient in the space of one supper.

“Come on Thursday,” she said. “In daylight. There are things I would like to show you.”

“With the cap on.”

“With the cap on.”

She kissed him once more before she left. On purpose, in the ordinary lamplight, where anyone walking down the steps might have seen.

Keir waited until she had turned the corner. Then he opened the coil and began his circuit.

For the first time in years, the moth kept trying to settle.