The Teapot Ring

Every morning, before she unlocked the door, Mora of the Last Cup picked up the house deck from behind the counter and read it.

Not the cards themselves. The order. A deck lies the way the last game left it, and Mora could read that the way other people read the post. The Rain Cloud on top meant Clove had lost and blamed the Rain Cloud. Both Moonlit Whales stuffed in together at the bottom meant Juniper had been in a hurry. A Sunbeam Squire turned upside down meant Tavi had won and wanted it remembered.

Then one morning she picked up the deck and found it sorted. Squires with squires, clouds with clouds, whales together like a sensible family. She stood there holding it like a letter with the writing washed off.

The next morning the brass rail along the counter had been polished. It shone, and it smelled faintly of something sharp and clean that was not her own brass polish.

The morning after that, she lifted the lid of her teapot and the ring was gone.

Now, the ring. Mora’s teapot was brown and round and older than most of her customers. Inside it, just below the shoulder, ran a brown ring that had taken eleven years to build. When Mora brewed, she looked in, and if the tea matched the ring, the pot was right. Someone had scrubbed the inside so clean it was white.

She made the morning tea anyway. She had no way of knowing whether it was right, and it wasn’t.

“This is not my usual,” Clove said, at his usual table. He had a sheet of paper in front of him and was ruling lines on it.

“It’s in your usual cup.”

“The cup is not the part that concerns me.” He turned the paper round. At the top it said Complaint, Tea, Concerning. “I’ve only done the heading. I thought you might like to watch it develop.”

Mora looked at him. “You can tell me,” she said, “or you can have tea and look mysterious. Same price.”

Clove chose to tell her. He began, “Tea, as a public amenity in the Hollow, has for many years—” and Mora went to see about the toast. When she came back he was still going, quietly, to the sugar bowl.

The sugar bowl, it should be said, steals cards. Nobody knows how. If its lid is left off during a game, sooner or later a card goes missing and turns up in the sugar. Mora fished one out about once a week with the tongs and gave it back to whoever was crossest.

So Mora wanted two things. She wanted to know who had been in her teahouse in the night. And she wanted her ring back.

Upstairs, in the front room, Purl the lamp-polisher was lodging while his own roof was mended. On his first morning Mora had asked how he’d slept. Purl had looked at his toast for a while and said he’d rather not say.

So she hadn’t asked again. Mora was the nosiest person in Lantern Hollow, and she went right up to “I’d rather not” and not one step further. Everybody in the Hollow knew it, which is why everybody in the Hollow told her things.

* * *

That night Mora waited up.

She turned the lamp low and sat on the high stool behind the counter. The deck was in front of her, a cup at her elbow, and the teapot in her lap where nobody could get at it. The window was deep blue. The gate lamp shone up the street. She heard the clock strike ten, and she heard it strike half past. She did not hear eleven.

She woke at six with a blanket over her shoulders.

It was the grey blanket from the landing cupboard, tucked in at the back, the way a person tucks in someone they don’t want to wake. The teapot was still in her lap. The deck in front of her was sorted. The lid of the sugar bowl shone so brightly that Mora could see her own face in it, and her own face was not pleased.

“Tucked in,” she said to the room. “In my own teahouse. By the very person I sat up to catch.”

* * *

So she asked round.

Juniper came in between bell rounds and drank her usual standing up. “I have six minutes,” she said. “Ask quickly.”

“Who’s been in here at night, tidying?”

“You,” Juniper said. “In your sleep. You nodded off at the counter, didn’t you? Who’s to say you didn’t get up and polish things?”

“And then tuck myself in?”

“People are capable of a great deal.” Juniper put her cup down. “Four minutes. It’s a good theory for four minutes.” And she was gone.

Mora smelled her own hands, to be fair to Juniper. They smelled of tea.

Tavi came in at noon with a box of card packs, leaned on the shining rail and admired it.

“A fleck,” Tavi said at once. “Down the chimney. A tidying fleck, very rare. There was one in the Glowmarket years ago that folded everybody’s washing.” Tavi stopped. “There wasn’t. I’d like there to have been. But it would explain it, and I could sell the speck after.”

By the afternoon Clove had reached the second page of his form, and he had a theory too. “An enthusiast for order,” he said. “Possibly from the steward’s office. I’ve checked, and it isn’t me. I’d have filed something.”

That made three theories, and every one of them was wrong.

* * *

That night Mora did not wait up. She went to bed at ten like a sensible person, and she took two things with her. One was the teapot. The other was the lid of the sugar bowl.

She left the bowl on the counter with its mouth wide open.

In the morning there was a card in the sugar.

Mora fished it out with the tongs and blew on it. It was a Lantern Page, and it was not one of hers. She knew her Lantern Pages. One had a bent corner, and the other had Clove’s arithmetic on the back. This one was worn so soft it bent like cloth. One edge was smeared grey, and the smear smelled sharp and clean. In the corner, in pencil, someone had drawn a little lamp.

Mora stood very still with the tongs in her hand.

Lamp polish. That was the smell on the rail. A card carried for years in an apron pocket, beside a polishing cloth. Somebody who polished a rail that didn’t need it, and a sugar-bowl lid, and the inside of a teapot. There is only one person in Lantern Hollow who polishes the empty brackets too.

She looked up at the ceiling.

* * *

Purl came down at seven, as he always did, with his hair flat on one side and his eyes half shut. The card lay face up on the counter beside his cup.

He looked at it for a long moment.

“That’s mine,” he said.

“It was in my sugar.”

“It does that, your bowl. I’d been meaning to mention it.” He sat down slowly. “I’d been looking for that.”

Mora poured his tea. “You can tell me,” she said, “or you can have tea and look mysterious. Same price.”

Purl put both hands round the cup. “I’ll tell you. Then can I have the tea?”

“Then you can have the tea.”

“I can’t sleep in a strange bed,” Purl said. “It’s a good bed. I want that said. It just isn’t mine. I lie up there counting the boards in your ceiling. At home, when I can’t sleep, I go out and polish the bracket by my door, and I’m gone in ten minutes. Polishing is the only thing that makes me tired.” He looked at the rail. “So I came down. You’ve been doing that rail with the wrong cloth, by the way. I’m not saying it to be rude.”

“You’re saying it.”

“It’s been on my mind.” He looked at the deck. “And I sorted that because it was in a terrible state.”

“It was in the state the last game left it,” Mora said. “That’s how I know who won.”

Purl was quiet. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

“And the blanket?”

“You were asleep at the counter. It gets cold about two. I wasn’t going to wake you up to explain myself.”

Mora found she could not be quite as cross about that as she had planned.

“On your first morning,” she said, “I asked how you’d slept.”

“And I said I’d rather not say. I didn’t want to complain about your bed.”

“So I stopped asking.”

“You did,” Purl said. “I was grateful.”

Then he put his cup down. “I’m sorry about the teapot. I thought the ring was a stain somebody hadn’t got round to. I had it out in four minutes with salt and a soft cloth, and I was pleased with myself. I shouldn’t have been. That was years of your work, and I took it off like it was nothing.”

“Eleven years,” Mora said.

“Eleven years,” said Purl.

Mora did not tell him it was all right, because it wasn’t yet. She got on with the bargain instead, which was more use to both of them.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” she said. “The kitchen is yours from three till five. I’ll leave the kettle on the warm plate. You polish every cup on that rack.”

Purl looked at the rack. There were a great many cups on it.

“I hate doing the cups,” Mora said. “I’ve hated it since I was nine. Not the teapot. Never the teapot.”

“Never the teapot.”

“And the deck you leave exactly how the last game left it, even if it’s a disgrace.”

“Even if it’s a disgrace,” Purl said. He thought about it. “I do the cups my way.”

“Do them any way you like, so long as I’m not the one doing them.”

“Then that’s fair.”

“It’s fair,” Mora said, and pushed the toast across.

* * *

For the rest of the week Purl slept. He came down at three with his cloth over his shoulder, went back up at five, and slept till seven like a man who had been paid for it. Once Mora woke at four and heard him singing very softly in the kitchen, the old lamplighter’s song, all fourteen verses. She was asleep again before the ninth. Every morning the cups stood on the rack in shining rows, and the deck lay where the games had left it, and Mora read that Clove had blamed the Rain Cloud.

And Mora brewed everything strong. There is only one way to bring back a teapot ring, and that is pot after pot after pot.

Her customers complained all week. Juniper said it had taken four seconds off her round, and she wasn’t sure that was allowed. Tavi bought a cup and tried to sell it on as a tonic. Clove’s form reached a third page under a new heading: Tea, Strong, Unreasonably.

By Friday the ring was back, a shade darker than before. Mora brewed, looked in, and the tea matched it exactly.

She poured Clove a cup. He tasted it, put down his pen, and began a speech about it. For once Mora stayed to hear the end.

“That was a good speech,” she said, when he had finished. “And that is the best tea I have ever poured.”

On Saturday the roof was mended, and Purl came down with his bag packed and his clean cloth folded on top. He paid for his room. Mora offered him another cup just as he stood to go, the way she does with everyone, and he stood at the counter a while longer than paying takes.

“I don’t sleep on Tuesday nights,” he said. “Not at home either. It’s the night before I do the whole wall in Beacon Court, and I lie there doing it in my head. I wondered if I could keep the Tuesday hour.”

Mora looked at the rack of cups. Then she looked at Purl.

“Same price,” she said.

So every Wednesday after that, when Mora came down, the cups shone in rows. The teapot sat on its shelf with its ring untouched. The deck lay exactly as the last game had left it. Mora read it like the post. Clove had lost, and blamed the Rain Cloud. And across the Hollow, under his own mended roof, Purl the lamp-polisher was fast asleep, and Mora thought it the fairest bargain she had ever made.