The bell above the door of the Hollowmere Tea House gave a thin, irritable jangle, the sort of sound it made when a damp shoulder pushed it open without ceremony. Rain had been threatening since the post came, and the light through the front windows had gone the color of weak tea. Dessa Pickerel was on her knees behind the counter, sorting a crate of dried meadowsweet into linen-lined boxes, and she stayed on her knees for a moment longer than she needed to before she stood.
Mud. That was the first thing. A figure stood just inside the threshold, dripping onto the worn flagstones in a way that suggested a long walk and a worse road. He wore a coat that had once been respectable, now peppered with the pale, chalky dust of the marsh tracks. His boots were heavy. His hair was darker where the rain had caught it, plastered against a pale forehead.
Dessa straightened the small of her back with a slow breath and came round the end of the counter. Her apron smelled faintly of last night's chamomile, the ghost of it rising into cooler air as she moved.
"We're not properly open yet," she said, and found, as she often did, that her voice came out with the warm rasp of a kettle just taken off the boil. "Another ten minutes and the kettle will be. If you can wait."
The man on the mat blinked. He had a face that was all angles and not quite enough flesh on it, the kind of face that suggested long rides and short meals. His eyes were quick, the color of a tarnished mirror, and he looked, she thought, as if he were trying to remember the words to something he had rehearsed on the road.
"I can wait," he said. Then, with a small, apologetic lift at one corner of his mouth, "I have waited a long time already. Another ten minutes will not break me."
"What brings a man in a coat like that to the front door of a tea house in this weather?" Dessa asked. She did not say it unkindly. It was the sort of question a person asked in the marsh villages, where strangers were rare enough to be catalogued and commented upon by the time the post came back round.
"Memory, mostly," he said. "And a direction from a woman in Waldringfield who said there was nowhere else to try." He shifted his weight. Water pooled in the imprint his boot had pressed into the mat. "I am looking for the woman who keeps this house. I was told she might be old. That she might remember things other people have let go of."
Dessa raised an eyebrow, the left one, the one she had long suspected of plotting its own career. "You were told wrong on one count. The woman who keeps this house is not in the kitchen, and she is not in the back room, and she is, in fact, standing in front of you with a handful of dried meadowsweet. My name is Dessa Pickerel. I have been the keeper of this house for two years now. The woman you mean was my great-aunt. She passed last autumn."
Something in his face moved. It was not grief, not exactly, but the way a person looks when a road they had been certain of turns out to fork.
"Passed," he repeated, quietly, as if testing the word for weight.
"Last autumn," Dessa said again, more gently. "The leaves were turning. She was not unwell. It was, in her way, a planned departure. She had a great deal of opinions about how such things should be arranged."
"I see." He drew a slow breath. "I am sorry. I did not know her, but I had built a sort of idea of her. On the road. It is foolish, I know, to grieve a person one has only imagined, but there it is."
Dessa tilted her head. There was a precision to his words that did not quite match his coat. "You have me at a disadvantage," she said. "I have not even your name, and you have come through the rain to ask for a person who is no longer at home."
"Fen," he said, after a pause. "Fen Imbry."
She waited, but no further title came. The Imbrys were a name in these parts. She knew the elder branch, and the cold house they kept three miles north of the village green. She did not know of a Fen among them. She filed the name in the back of her mind, in the place she kept the things she had not yet decided to be curious about.
"Fen Imbry," she said. "Come away from the door. You'll catch your death in a draft. Stand there and you'll have a draft for a week. The fire is laid in the front room. I have to attend the kettle, but you are welcome to sit and be warm and watch the pond."
He glanced past her, toward the long window that looked out over the Hollowmere water. The reed beds were turning the color of old bone in the rain, and a moorhen was working the far edge in a slow, head-down prowl.
"It's smaller than I thought," he said, half to himself.
"Everything is," Dessa answered, "once you stop looking at it from a great distance."
She gestured toward the front room and watched him unlace his boots with the careful fingers of a man who was used to doing it in the dark, in worse places, with the door not yet closed behind him. The mud on the flagstones she would deal with after. The bell had done its small, complaining work, and the kettle, behind the kitchen door, was beginning to whisper.
When she came back with the tray, he was sitting in the chair by the window with his coat folded across his knees. He had not taken the chair by the fire. He had taken the chair that faced outward, and his hands were folded in his lap, and he was looking at the water as if it owed him a small debt of attention.
"Milk?" Dessa asked, setting the pot down on the low table between them.
"Black, please," he said. "No sugar. I was brought up to consider sugar a moral failing in tea, which is a position I have not yet recovered from."
She poured. The stream of tea made a small, dark sound against the white of the cup. Steam came up, and with it, the green, soft-rotted scent of a meadow that had been cut too late in the year.
"Tell me about this memory," Dessa said, settling into the chair opposite, "and I will tell you whether you have come to the right door, or only to a door."
Fen Imbry took the cup in both hands. He breathed into it, the way a person does when the warmth is a kind of welcome they have not had for a while.
"My mother had a song," he said. "A song she sang to me when I was small. I do not remember the words. I remember the shape of her mouth when she sang it, and I remember that it had the effect, on a child, of making the world seem, briefly, to be the right size. The right height. The right temperature." He paused. "I have spent eleven years looking for that song. I have asked musicians. I have read folk collections. I have sat with old women in ale-houses from here to the coast and offered them small coin to sing what they remembered of their own childhoods. Nothing. Nothing has it. Nothing is even close."
"And someone told you my great-aunt might have it."
"Not the song itself," he said, and his voice dropped half a note. "Not the words, even. A woman in Waldringfield, a fisherman's wife, she said that the old woman at the Hollowmere tea house had a way of finding things people had forgotten. Songs, in particular. She said there had been a man who lost the name of his brother and went out of her door with it. She said there had been a child who forgot the way home and was sent back along it. She said the old woman kept a record of the missing."
Dessa's hands went still on her cup. She thought of the small, leather-bound book in the drawer of the writing desk, in the back bedroom, under a folded square of her great-aunt's wedding shawl. She thought of the names in it, the careful script, the way each entry had a date beside it and a small, dry note about the weather.
"That," she said carefully, "is a great deal of story for a fisherman's wife to have told you in a single sitting."
"I gave her a shilling," Fen said, with a small, wry half-smile that did not reach his eyes. "And I am not above saying so. People will tell you a great deal for a shilling, if the asking is done politely. I have made a small study of it."
"You are, I take it, some kind of scholar."
"A naturalist, of a sort. I write things down. I have spent time on the continent. I catalogue, I observe, I make notes. It is a useful trade for a man who does not know what he wants to do with himself, and it keeps the body fed."
"And it has brought you, at last, to my front door, in the rain, looking for a lullaby."
"Yes." He set the cup down, precisely, in the ring of damp it had made. "Yes. It has brought me to that."
Dessa looked at him. The fire had taken hold of the back log and was beginning to speak for itself in small, dry voices. The moorhen had moved on. The rain had settled into the kind of steady, fine-falling weather that suggested it meant to stay for the afternoon.
"My great-aunt," Dessa said, "did not keep songs. She kept names. She kept a record, as the woman told you, but it was a record of what people had misplaced. The name of a dog. The name of a child. The name of a road. She believed that a forgotten name was a small death, and she believed that most of them could be found again, if you knew where to look."
"And the songs," Fen said. "Did she keep any of those?"
"She kept a few." Dessa's voice softened without her permission. "She kept the ones that had no other home. The ones that no one else could be bothered to learn. She had a great ear, and a great deal of patience, and she wrote them down in a small book that I have not yet had the heart to open, because her handwriting is a kind of company, and I am not sure I am ready to be without it yet."
Fen Imbry nodded, slowly. "I understand that," he said. "I have a notebook of my own that I have not opened in two years. The handwriting of a person one has lost is a kind of haunting. A tolerable one, usually. But a haunting."
"Yes," Dessa said, and felt the word, as she said it, go to the bone of her. She took a sip of her own tea to cover the small catch in her throat. "Yes. That is exactly it."
The kettle, in the kitchen, began to lift the lid in its slow, complaining way, as if to remind her that the second pot would not brew itself. She set her cup down.
"Stay where you are," she said. "I will make us a fresh pot. And when I come back, you will sing me whatever you remember of the shape of the song, and I will see what I can do. I cannot promise you anything. I am not my great-aunt, and I do not yet know the contents of her books. But I will listen. That, at least, I can do."
"Thank you," Fen said, and it was the first time he had used the word, and he used it as if he had been saving it for the right moment, and as if the right moment had arrived.
From the loose-lidded cupboard beside the range, Dessa brought down the enamel jug she had grown to trust for steeping. It was a pale, mottled blue, the sort of thing a chemist might have used in another century, and it had been her great-aunt's before it was hers. She liked it because the spout poured clean, and because when she tilted it over a cup the stream came in a single, unbroken thread, as if the jug knew exactly how to behave.
She set it on the scrubbed deal of the kitchen table and considered the row of jars on the shelf above the basin. Dried chamomile, yes, and in reasonable quantity. The apple peel was the question. She had not thought to keep any from the autumn pressing, but her great-aunt had. In a jar without a label, near the back, tied with a twist of brown paper, there were curls of russet skin, brittle as old leaves, smelling faintly of something between cider and stored sunlight. Dessa undid the paper and tipped a small measure into her palm. The peel crackled, and a fine dust of cinnamon-coloured spice lifted from it and made her blink.
She crumbled it small between her fingers as she crossed back to the range, and let the fragments fall into the warmed jug. The chamomile followed, a generous pinch, loose and pale. The kettle, by then, had worked itself up to a true complaint; she lifted it off the iron cradle with a folded cloth and filled the jug to its halfway mark, then set the lid on askew so the steam could rise without escaping altogether.
While the infusion took itself in hand, she stood for a moment with one hip against the table's edge and listened to the front room. There was no voice from it, no creak of chair, only the soft working of the old house around her and, very faintly, what might have been a half-breath of humming from beyond the door. She could not be certain. It might have been a bird at the thatch. It might have been the wind in the flue. She did not go and check. Some things were better left to be heard or not heard by accident.
The minutes went by in their small domestic way. She rinsed the cups that had been left drying on the board, though they were already dry. She wiped the cloth round the rim of the jam-jar of honey her great-aunt had preferred, and set it a little more squarely in its place. She found a saucer to put the spoon upon, because she had been brought up to put the spoon upon a saucer. These were the actions of a woman alone in a kitchen, and they soothed her without her needing to name why.
When she judged the colour of the brew had deepened to a proper amber, she set the jug on a folded napkin on a tray, along with two clean cups, and the honey, and a small plate of the biscuit her great-aunt had called Shrewsburys, though they were nothing of the kind. She picked the tray up and went back through the green baize door.
Fen Imbry was sitting where she had left him, in the chair by the window, with his good leg crossed over the other and his hands loose in his lap. He had taken off his hat again, and his hair fell forward against his brow, and in the grey light of the morning his face had the unfinished look of a sketch a person had abandoned for the day. He looked up when she came in, and she saw that he had been listening after all. Not to her. To the room. To the kettle, perhaps, or to whatever faint sound it was that she had half-heard from the kitchen.
"Better?" she asked, setting the tray on the low table between them.
"Better," he said, and his voice had that small, slightly surprised warmth of a man who had not expected to mean it.
She poured for him first, the thread from the jug falling true into his cup. The colour of the tea was a darker gold than the last pot, the apple peel having given up its ghost into the hot water and made it rich. The scent, when she bent her head, was faintly of orchards, faintly of hay, and underneath both, the clean, slightly bitter note of chamomile that her great-aunt had always trusted for the digestion and the temper alike.
"Your great-aunt's mixture?" Fen asked, with a glance into the cup as she passed it across.
"More or less," Dessa said, settling into her own chair. "She would have known the proper measure. I have put in what I think is right, and we shall see what we shall see."
He lifted the cup, considered it for a moment as if weighing whether to trust her, and drank. The first sip he took with caution. The second with the small, inward nod of a man who has been given something that has done what was asked of it. He closed his eyes for a moment over the rim.
"You have a good hand for it," he said, without opening them.
"We shall see," Dessa repeated, and smiled, and drank from her own cup to hide the small, ill-deserved pleasure of the compliment.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The tea house kept its small noises around them, the click of the brass on the hearth, the slow tick of the clock on its bracket, and somewhere out toward the reed beds, a moorhen giving its absurd, waterlogged complaint. Dessa's great-aunt had used to say that a cup of tea properly made earned you five minutes of doing nothing, and that those five minutes were the only honest sort of rest the world knew how to give. Dessa had not believed her when she was young. She believed her now, and tried not to make a ceremony of believing her, and failed a little.
The second cup had gone down about as far as the first when Fen Imbry, without any preamble that Dessa could afterwards point to, began to hum.
It was very soft at first. So soft she might have imagined it, might have mistaken it for the wind in the flue, or for the small, private sound a man sometimes makes when he is not quite sure that the next sound he makes should be heard. She did not look at him. She looked instead at the steam coming off her cup, and at the way the morning light from the window made a pale ladder of itself across the boards of the floor, and she let the sound of him find its own level in the room.
The tune, such as it was, did not resolve. It moved in a small arc, the way a bird moves between two perches that are not quite opposite, and it kept coming back to a note that was not quite the same each time, as if the song could not decide whether it was remembering a major or a minor. There was something in it that Dessa thought she had heard before, somewhere, in some drawing room or schoolroom or rainy afternoon, but she could not have said where. It did not press itself on her. It stayed where it had been put down, the way a careful child puts down a glass.
He hummed, and stopped, and after a while he hummed again, a little louder, a little more steadily, as if the first try had been a test of the room and the room had passed. Then he began, very tentatively, to shape a phrase with his mouth, and Dessa caught the ghost of a word, or perhaps two words, half-syllabled, more breath than voice, before he let them fall again into the hum.
Dessa held still. She had been the sort of governess who knew how to sit in a room with a child who was about to do something difficult, and she had learned, in the years after, that the skill was not the kind one advertised. You simply did not move. You did not look. You gave the difficult thing as much air as it needed, and if it decided to come out, you were very careful not to appear surprised that it had.
After a few more minutes, Fen Imbry stopped altogether. He opened his eyes and looked at the window, and then at his own hands, as if he were not quite sure they belonged to him.
"That is about as much of it as I have," he said, and his voice was rougher than it had been, as if he had been walking a long way and had only just noticed the distance. "I can hear the rest of it, somewhere. As if it were being played in the next room, and someone had shut the door."
Dessa nodded, and took another sip of her tea to give herself time.
"My great-aunt would have known what to do with that," she said. "She would have sat with it for an afternoon, and then she would have hummed it back to you, and you would have said, yes, that is it, or no, that is not quite it. And she would have written it down in her book with the date at the top of the page and the name of the person who had brought it, if she knew the name, and a guess at the place it came from, if she had one."
"And if she did not have one?"
"Then she wrote 'place unknown', and she meant it kindly."
Fen Imbry smiled at that, the smallest possible smile, the sort a man makes when he is grateful to a stranger for understanding a particular small shame.
He lifted his cup and drank again, and this time, when he set it down, his hand did not tremble. The colour had come back into his face, in the thin, weather-bitten way of a man who is used to having it taken away, and he sat more squarely in his chair, as if some of the weight had shifted off his shoulders and onto the floorboards.
"I have taken up too much of your morning," he said.
"You have taken up none of it," Dessa said. "It was going nowhere in particular in any case. I had planned to sweep the front step and to lose an argument with the kettle, which I have now done, and so my day is in fact ahead of schedule."
He laughed at that, and it was a better laugh than the one she had heard downstairs, less guarded, as if something had been eased by the second cup and by the long, soft passage of the humming, which had done its own small work in the room whether he had meant it to or not.
She poured him a third cup without being asked, and he accepted it without comment, and for a little while longer they sat in the kind of quiet that is not silence, only the sound of two people being careful with the same morning.
He finished the tea in his own time, and then he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and brought out a coin. It was not a coin Dessa had ever seen before, or perhaps it was a coin she had seen and had forgotten; in either case, she could not at first read the face of it, for it was so worn down by years of pocket and hand that the legend had been reduced to a pale ghost of itself, and the metal had taken on the dull, breathing sheen of a thing that has been carried close to a warm body for a long time.
"This is what I have," he said.
He put it on the counter beside the saucer, and Dessa looked at it, and the coin lay there between them like a small brown button with a hole in the middle, and that was the whole of it.
"I cannot take that," she said.
"You can. I would like you to."
"It is not payment. It is a keepsake. I can see that it is a keepsake."
"It can be both. It has been both, for as long as I have had it."
She did not touch it. She left it where it lay, and the morning light came through the window and lay upon it as it lay upon the wood, and the coin took the light and held it for a moment before giving it back, and in that brief, borrowed shine Dessa could make out the barest suggestion of a profile, a curl of hair, a worn motto she could not read.
"It belonged to my mother," he said, and his voice was steady in the way of a man who has decided it is going to be steady. "She carried it from the day she was married to the day she died. After she died, my brother put it in a drawer with her other things, and he meant to give it to me, I think, but he could not find the moment, and then he put it off, and then it was too late to put it off without it being a thing in itself. He gave it to me at the door, when I left for the continent, and he said, 'You will know what to do with it,' and I have been carrying it ever since, and I have not known what to do with it, and I am not sure I know now, except that I would like it to be here, on this counter, in this room, for as long as you will let it stay."
Dessa looked at the coin, and then she looked at Fen Imbry, and then she looked at the coin again.
"I am not a museum," she said. "I am a tea house. People leave things in tea houses, and sometimes the things are meant to stay, and sometimes the things are meant to go home with the person who left them, and I cannot always tell which is which."
"Then keep it for now," he said. "If it becomes a problem, you may send it after me. I am not hard to find, when I choose to be found. When I do not choose to be found, I am impossible, and so it is best to act while I am still in the mood to be reached."
"And if I keep it and it stays, what shall I do with it?"
"You may do nothing with it. You may sweep it out with the morning's crumbs. You may put it in a drawer with the sugar and the clean napkins. You may give it, one day, to a person who needs a small thing to carry. You may spend it, if you can find a country that will take it. You may do any of these. I would only like it to be here."
Dessa put her hand flat on the counter, two inches from the coin, and she did not close her fingers around it, but she did not move her hand away.
"You are a strange man, Fen Imbry."
"I have been told so. It has never been a complaint, exactly, but it has never been a compliment either."
"It is neither. It is only an observation. You come into my tea house with a face like a rained-on road, and you ask for a thing I cannot promise you, and I find it for you by accident, and now you would leave me your mother's coin."
"Yes."
"Most men would leave a shilling."
"I am not most men. You will have noticed."
"I had noticed."
The kettle, behind her, ticked once against the hob as the last of the water inside it cooled, and a draught from somewhere under the door stirred the hem of her skirt, and the reed-brake outside gave its long, slow whisper against the glass, and Fen Imbry stood and pushed his chair in and straightened the collar of his coat, and the small ceremony of his leaving began, and Dessa knew that she had perhaps a minute more of him, and perhaps less.
She put her hand on the coin.
It was warm.
She did not pick it up. She only laid her palm over it, and felt the warmth of it through her skin, and the warmth was the warmth of a thing that has been carried a long time by a person who loved it, and she thought, for the hundredth time that morning, that this was the trouble with running the tea house: that the things left on the counter were not always things, but were sometimes pieces of the people who had left them, and so to take them up was a kind of holding, and to put them away was a kind of promise, and to sweep them out with the morning's crumbs was a kind of forgetting she was not sure she had the right to do.
"Then I will keep it," she said. "For now. While you are in the mood to be reached. And if it becomes a problem, I will write to you, and you must tell me where to send it."
"I will tell you."
"Where shall I send it?"
He smiled at that, the same small smile, and shook his head.
"We shall see," he said. "We shall see when the time comes."
He held out his hand, and she took it across the counter, and his hand was warm and dry and rough at the knuckles, the hand of a man who has written a great deal and shaken a great deal and held a great deal, and the handshake was brief and proper and over before it had properly begun.
"The lullaby," he said, as he let go. "You asked me, downstairs, if I knew it."
"I asked you if you had ever heard it."
"You did. And I said I had not, and that was the truth, as far as it went. But there is more to the truth than the truth, as far as it goes, and I would like to give you the rest of it now, while my hand is still warm from yours and my face is still behaving itself."
Dessa folded her hands on the counter, and waited.
"I have not heard it," he said. "But I have carried it. For a long time. Since before I can remember. My mother sang it to me when I was small, and then she sang it to me when I was less small, and then she sang it to me when I was too old to be sung to and pretended I was not, and then she died, and I went away, and the song went with me, though I did not know it was going with me, because it had not yet found its way back to a tune. It was in me the way a stone is in a shoe, the way a splinter is in a finger, the way a name is in the mouth of a person who has forgotten the face but not the sound. I could not sing it, but I could feel it, like a word on the tip of the tongue, and I could not get it out."
He paused, and swallowed, and the tears were drying on his face in pale streaks, like the tracks of small rain on a window.
"And then I came into your tea house this morning, and I asked you for a thing I could not name, and you brought me tea that smelled of the place my mother came from, and you sat with me while I drank it, and I did not know that anything was happening, only that I felt warmer, and that the weight in my chest had shifted an inch to the left. And then I went home. And on the way home, between the lychgate and the bend in the road, the tune came back to me, all of it, every note, in the right order, with the words under it like fish under ice, and I stood in the road and I sang it, very quietly, so as not to frighten the birds, and it was whole. It was the first time I had heard it whole since she died, and it was her voice and it was my voice and it was the voice of the road and the wind in the reeds and the bell in the church tower, all of them singing it together, and it has not left me since."
Dessa did not speak for a long time.
The reed-brake whispered.
The kettle ticked.
The morning went on being morning.
"The tea house," he said at last, "is exactly what people say it is."
He bowed to her, a small bow, the sort a man makes when he is grateful to a stranger for understanding a particular small shame, and the same sort he had made when she had first explained the book, and the same sort he had made when she had refused the coin and then accepted it.
He walked to the door, and he put his hand on the latch, and he turned back.
"I will come again," he said. "I do not know when. But I will come again."
"I will be here," Dessa said.
He nodded, and opened the door, and the morning came in, smelling of wet reed and distant rain, and he stepped out into it, and the door swung shut behind him, and his footsteps went away down the path, and then there were no footsteps, and then there was only the tea house, and the coin on the counter, and the warmth of his hand still in hers, and the long, slow work of the morning, which had only just begun.
Dessa stood for a long time with her hand where the coin was, and then she lifted it, and looked at the coin, and the face on it was too worn to read, and the motto was too worn to make out, and the metal was warm from her palm and from his, and she thought that this was the trouble with running the tea house: that the things left on the counter were not always things.
She put the coin in the drawer with the clean napkins and the spare sugar, and she shut the drawer, and she went back to the kettle, and she began, at last, to lose her argument with it, all over again.