Steeped in Deceit: Verbenas Vexation

The bell above the door of Verbena Nightshade's tearoom was not a bell at all. It was a length of silver rod suspended from a black ribbon, polished to a mirror shine, and when Sage Rowan pushed the door open the rod struck the doorframe with a clear, ringing tone that lingered longer than any brass bell had a right to. The sound curled through the room like smoke, and Verbena Nightshade looked up from the counter with a smile that had been waiting for them.

"Tessa Brookhollow." Verbena's voice arrived before her gaze did, low and unhurried, a Welsh lilt softening the consonants. "And you bring the new proprietor of the Wickerton house. How kind. How very, very kind."

The tearoom occupied a long, narrow space behind a stone-fronted shop on Brookhollow's High Street. Sage had walked past it a hundred times and never once seen a customer emerge. The windows were dressed in dark green velvet, and the door bore no sign, only a small brass plaque engraved with a single sprig of verbena. Inside, the air carried the dense, resinous perfume of something older than any leaf Sage could name. Cedar, perhaps. Orris root. A hint of dried peel and something metallic, faintly bitter, that caught at the back of the throat.

Tessa stepped past Sage and set her hands on the polished mahogany counter. Her fingers were steady. Her voice, when she spoke, was the careful, warm instrument Sage had come to know over the past three days.

"I came for the appointment, Miss Nightshade."

"You came for the appointment." Verbena tilted her head. A strand of black hair fell across her cheek, and she did not brush it away. "Yes. You wrote, and I replied, and here we are. Tea?"

"We did not come for tea."

Verbena's smile widened by a fraction. "Everyone who enters this room comes for tea. They simply do not always know it yet."

She turned without waiting for an answer and moved toward a copper kettle that sat on a small iron stove at the back. The kettle was old, dented along the spout, and yet the flame beneath it burned a colour Sage could not quite place, somewhere between blue and the green of new holly. Verbena's hands moved with the sureness of long practice. She lifted a ceramic jar from a shelf, untied its lid, and breathed in once before spooning its contents into a clay teapot shaped like a sleeping fox.

Tessa's gaze flicked to Sage. A small question lived in her eyes. Sage gave the barest nod. Stay the course.

"You wrote to me," Verbena said, her back still turned, "about the Wickerton estate. About what was found there. About the cup, I assume, since you are a woman who deals in cups, and you do not waste words."

"I wrote," Tessa agreed, "because you are the only person in this village who has dealt with Lily Wickerton's family for three generations, and because Marjory Kett kept a ledger that mentioned your name."

"Marjory." Verbena set the teapot down. The sound it made against the counter was soft, almost apologetic. "Now there is a name I had not expected to hear spoken in this room again."

She turned. Her eyes were the pale grey of rain on slate, and they moved from Tessa to Sage and back with the unhurried precision of someone reading a page she had already memorised. Sage kept her face still. Tessa kept hers warmer.

"Sit," Verbena said, gesturing to a low table set with two cups and a third, empty, drawn up as if for an absent friend. "Or stand. I find people tell more truth standing and behave more politely sitting. Choose your weakness."

Tessa pulled out a chair. The legs scraped against the floorboards, and Sage took the place beside her, leaving the third cup untouched.

Verbena poured. The liquid that came from the fox-shaped pot was not tea in any colour Sage recognised. It was a deep, shifting bronze, almost amber in the light, and when it settled in the cup it gave off a thread of steam that rose in a perfect spiral before dissolving.

"Do not drink," Verbena said lightly. "It is not for you. It is for the room. The room likes to be attended to."

Sage watched the steam and said nothing. Tessa set her hands flat on the table and waited.

Verbena settled into the third chair, the one that had been waiting empty, and drew her own cup toward her. She did not drink from it either. She held it between her long fingers and regarded Tessa over its rim.

"You want to know about Marjory Kett."

"I want to know about the blend she accused you of stealing. The family blend. The Nightshade blend."

Verbena's expression did not change. The stillness of her face was the stillness of a held card.

"The Nightshade blend," she repeated. "You have done your reading."

"Marjory's ledger was thorough."

"Marjory's ledger was a spiteful thing dressed up as a record. But yes. The blend." Verbena set the cup down. "It belonged to my mother's mother. It belonged to her mother's mother before that. Seven generations of women who pulled a particular root from a particular bank of the river where the alders grow thick, and dried it under a particular moon, and blended it with a particular black tea from a plantation that no longer exists. The recipe was sung, not written. When my mother died, the song died with her, and the root was gone from the riverbank, and I rebuilt what I could from memory and from what my mother had written in the margins of her books."

Tessa's voice was patient. "Marjory wrote that you took the blend from her."

Verbena's laugh was a single, soft sound, almost a sigh.

"Marjory wrote a great many things. Marjory wrote that I had seduced the vicar. Marjory wrote that I had poisoned the blacksmith's dog. Marjory wrote that I had called down a fog on the day of her sister's wedding, and that the bridesmaids had been found wandering the lanes at midnight with no memory of how they arrived there." Verbena turned the cup slowly on the table. "Marjory wrote with a very fine pen and a very ugly heart."

Sage felt the small, cold pressure of recognition. She had read the village records. She had read the complaints. Verbena's name appeared in them like a stitch pulled too tight.

"The blend," Tessa said. "Specifically."

Verbena regarded her. "Specifically, then. Thirty-one years ago. My mother had been dead six months. I was twenty-three. I came to Brookhollow because I had heard there was work for an herbalist, and because I had nowhere else. I brought with me a single tin of the blend I had managed to recreate, enough for perhaps thirty servings. I offered it to Marjory Kett's mother as a gift, in the old way, in the way it had been offered for seven generations when a new herbalist came to a village. The elder women of the family accepted such gifts. They tasted them. They judged them."

"And Marjory's mother accepted it."

Verbena's mouth tightened. "Marjory's mother tasted it and said it was right. Marjory's mother was a careful woman, and she knew the taste of the old blend, and she said it was right. Marjory was not in the room. Marjory was seventeen, and she was already a person who required the room to be arranged around her convenience. When she learned what had been given, she came to my door and informed me that I had stolen a family recipe, that the blend was hers by right, that I would surrender every grain of it or face the consequences."

Tessa said nothing. The tearoom was quiet save for the faint hiss of the kettle and the small, rhythmic tick of a clock on the mantel that Sage had not noticed until now.

"I did not surrender it," Verbena said. "I could not have, in truth. The tin was empty. I had given all of it. But Marjory did not want the blend. Marjory wanted the principle of the thing. Marjory wanted to be the kind of woman to whom one did not give gifts without first begging permission."

Sage felt a muscle in her jaw tighten. She kept her eyes on Verbena's hands, on the long fingers curled around the cup.

"What happened after?"

"After, Marjory went to the constable. After, Marjory wrote to the guild in Bristol. After, Marjory told every customer in her aunt's shop that I was a thief and a charlatan and worse. After, my reputation in Brookhollow became what it is now, and I learned to keep my door closed and my windows green and wait for the sort of customer who does not require the room to be arranged."

Tessa's voice was careful. "And the blend itself?"

Verbena stood. The chair made no sound as she rose. She moved to a cabinet against the far wall, dark wood inlaid with a thin line of silver, and opened it. Inside, on a shelf lined with faded velvet, stood a single tin. It was small, no larger than a child's palm, and the paint on its lid had worn through to bare metal in the shape of a sprig of verbena.

Verbena did not touch it. She stood before the open cabinet with her hands at her sides.

"I have kept this tin for thirty-one years," she said. "It is empty. It has been empty since the day I gave its contents to Marjory's mother. I keep it because my mother kept such a tin, and her mother before her, and because an empty thing, kept properly, is sometimes more useful than a full one."

Sage looked at the tin. She looked at Verbena's reflection in the glass of the cabinet door. She looked at Tessa, who was watching Verbena with an expression Sage had learned to read as the one Tessa wore when she was deciding how much of a thing to believe.

"You rebuilt the blend from memory," Tessa said. "You still sell it."

"I sell what I can make. It is close. It is not the same. Marjory knew it was not the same. Marjory's mother knew it was not the same, and accepted it anyway, because the woman who made it had made it in the old way, with the proper root, and the proper moon. I have not found the proper root since."

"Marjory's ledger says you stole the recipe from her aunt."

Verbena closed the cabinet. The latch clicked with a small, final sound.

"Marjory's aunt was a kind woman who sold dried sage and rose petal and never understood the first thing about the work I do. Marjory's aunt gave me a room above her shop in exchange for help with the heavier lifting. Marjory's aunt died in the winter of the year I came to Brookhollow, and Marjory inherited the shop and the ledger and the habit of writing down whatever served her purpose."

Tessa set her hands flat on the table. The bronze liquid in her untouched cup had gone still. The spiral of steam had long since dissolved.

"And now," Verbena said, turning back to them, her pale eyes bright in the dim room, "Marjory is dead, and her ledger has fallen into hands that are not hers, and you have come to ask me what I know about Lily Wickerton's cup and the brew that was put into it."

Tessa did not blink. "Did you sell anything to Lily Wickerton in the weeks before she died?"

Verbena smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a woman who had been waiting thirty-one years to be asked a question she had already answered in her own mind a thousand times.

"My dear," she said, "I have not sold a thing to Lily Wickerton in twenty years. Lily Wickerton banned me from her estate in the spring of the year her mother turned against her. I have not crossed the Wickerton boundary since. I have not sent a parcel. I have not written a letter. If a thing from this room reached Lily Wickerton, it reached her without my hand on it, and without my knowledge, and I would very much like to know who put it there."

The clock on the mantel ticked. The kettle hissed. The third cup, the one Verbena had drawn up for the absent friend, sat between them, untouched, catching the green light from the stained glass above the door.

The silence after Verbena's words had the texture of old parchment, dry and brittle.

Sage Rowan shifted in the chair by the cold hearth. The wood creaked. They had been so still for so long that the sound seemed loud enough to wake the dust motes drifting in the slanted green light. Beside them, Tessa's hands remained flat on the table, pale against the dark wood, but her shoulders had drawn up a fraction of an inch.

"Then," Tessa said, and her voice had not changed, not one degree of warmth lost, "you have a grievance against Lily Wickerton, and you have a grievance against the Brookhollow ledger. But you have no grievance against me, and no grievance against this house. Why have you waited thirty-one years to speak of it, Verbena? Why now, when the shop is in my hands and Lily Wickerton is in her coffin?"

Verbena's smile did not waver. It sat on her lips like something carved.

"Because, my dear," she said, "thirty-one years ago there was nothing to be done. Thirty-one years ago, Marjory Brookhollow held the deed to half the goodwill in this village, and her sister held the other half, and the two of them together could make a woman disappear from a parish register with nothing more than a whispered word and a signature on the wrong line. I was alone. I had a recipe and a cart and a mouth that no one in Brookhollow would credit. What was I to do? Take my complaint to the magistrate at Ashvale and watch Marjory's husband laugh me out of his court?"

She lifted one hand and let it fall.

"Now," Verbena said, "Marjory is dead. Her sister is dead. Lily Wickerton is dead. The ledger is in the hands of a girl who inherited a shop she did not build and a debt she did not incur, and Lily Wickerton's cup is in the hands of a constable who has not yet decided whether to arrest the wrong woman."

Sage felt their own breath catch. The constable. She meant Rowan Ashvale. She meant the man who had stood in the tea shop that morning with his hat in his hands and his eyes on the floor, asking Tessa questions she had answered three different ways without ever once contradicting herself.

Verbena rose from her chair. The movement was slow, deliberate, the rustle of her skirts loud in the quiet room. She crossed to a tall cabinet against the far wall, one Sage had not noticed before, dark wood carved with leaves and berries that looked, in the stained-glass light, almost black. She opened it with a key from her belt. The hinges gave a small, oiled sigh.

From the second shelf she drew out a square of folded paper, yellowed to the colour of weak tea, and brought it back to the table. She did not sit. She laid it on the wood between the three of them, and her long fingers pressed it flat.

"Read it," she said. "Then ask me your questions."

Tessa looked at Sage. Sage looked at the paper. Then Tessa reached for it.

The paper was thick. It had the weight of something that had been handled many times and folded along the same creases until the creases had become soft as cloth. Tessa unfolded it carefully, and Sage leaned forward, and the three of them looked down together at the document beneath.

The ink was brown. Not faded brown. Old brown, the brown of iron gall that had oxidized in the air for twenty years and more. The handwriting was precise. Verbena's, Sage thought at once, though they had never seen Verbena write a word.

It was dated the twenty-third of September, twenty years past.

It began: This agreement, made between Marjory Brookhollow of the village of Brookhollow, tea-merchant, and Verbena Nightshade, travelling herbalist, witnesseth as follows.

Sage read on. Their lips moved slightly, though no sound came out.

The first paragraph set out that Verbena was possessed of a certain recipe, known in her family for four generations, for the preparation of an eldrenberry cordial said to promote sleep and the easing of sorrow. The second paragraph set out that Marjory Brookhollow had requested leave to prepare and sell a similar cordial in her tea shop under the name Brookhollow's Evening Rest, and that Verbena had granted this leave on certain terms. The third paragraph set out those terms.

Verbena was to be paid one half of all monies taken for the cordial in the Brookhollow shop, quarterly, for as long as the cordial was sold. Verbena's name was to appear on the label. Verbena was to be credited as co-author of any printed advertisement for the cordial.

The fourth paragraph contained Marjory's signature. It was a hurried signature, the kind made by a woman who had somewhere to be. The witness signature beneath was a looping scrawl that Sage did not recognize. The fifth paragraph was a single line.

This agreement to remain in force for the natural life of the eldrenberry cordial in commerce, or until mutually rescinded in writing by both parties.

"There," Verbena said. Her voice was very soft now, almost gentle, which made it more frightening. "There is your proof. There is your receipt. There is the document I carried to Marjory Brookhollow's back door on a September evening twenty years gone, when she was so eager for the recipe that she signed whatever I put in front of her, and so sure of herself that she did not read the small print."

Tessa's thumb ran along the edge of the paper. "I have never seen this."

"No," Verbena said. "You would not have. Marjory hid it from her sister. Marjory hid everything from her sister. Her sister thought the eldrenberry cordial was Marjory's own invention. Her sister died believing it."

Sage looked up from the paper. "Did you ever receive payment?"

Verbena's pale eyes met theirs. In the green light they looked almost colourless.

"I received one payment," she said. "Three pounds and sixpence, in a brown envelope, slid under my cart wheel on the morning of the second quarter day after we signed. I never received another. I wrote to Marjory. I called at the shop. I waited in the lane at the back door for an hour one winter dusk and was told by the kitchen girl that Mrs Brookhollow was not at home. Mrs Brookhollow was at home. Mrs Brookhollow was in the parlour with her ledgers and her cat and her sister, and she had decided, somewhere in the first six months of our agreement, that Verbena Nightshade was a woman who could be cheated without consequence."

"The kitchen girl," Tessa said quietly.

Verbena tilted her head. "What of her?"

"Describe her."

"Why?"

Tessa did not answer. She looked at Sage, and Sage understood. The kitchen girl at the Brookhollow shop, twenty years ago, would have been a girl of twelve or thirteen. The kitchen girl at the Brookhollow shop, twenty years ago, would have been Lily Wickerton.

Verbena's mouth twitched. It was the first time Sage had seen her lose the shape of her own smile.

"Lily Wickerton was a small, sharp child," Verbena said. "She had her mother's eyes and her father's temper, and she did not like me. She never liked me. I sold her mother a sleeping draught once, when the mother was alive and the father was dying, and Lily decided from that day that I was a poisoner and a witch and a danger to be kept at the door. She told Marjory I had tried to bewitch the cat. She told Marjory's sister I had put something in the bread. She told anyone who would listen that Verbena Nightshade was not to be trusted with so much as a pinch of dried rosemary."

She paused. The kettle had stopped hissing. The room was very quiet.

"I did not blame her," Verbena added, more softly. "I did not blame her then, and I do not blame her now. A girl who has watched her mother swallow a sleeping draught and never quite wake from it has every right to be afraid of the woman who sold it. Lily Wickerton was afraid of me for the rest of her life. She had reason. She had more reason than she knew."

Tessa set the paper down. Her hands were steady. Her face was not.

"You said on the night that Lily Wickerton died, you were here, in this room."

"I said so."

"Can anyone confirm it?"

Verbena smiled again. This time it was a real smile, brief and sharp as a knife edge.

"Ask Pim," she said. "The child was here until the bell rang for compline. Ask the child what colour the candle was when we sat down to read. Ask the child whether I left this room before the bell. The child sees everything. The child forgets nothing. That is the only useful thing about Pim."

Sage looked down at the contract. The signature, Marjory's hurried signature, seemed to stare up at them from the brown page like an eye half-closed.

"The eldrenberry cordial," Sage said. "Is it still sold at the Brookhollow shop?"

Verbena turned her pale gaze on them. She looked at them for a long moment, as if she had only just remembered that Sage was in the room.

"It is," she said. "It has been sold every winter for twenty years, under the name Brookhollow's Evening Rest, with no mention of me, no share of the takings, and no acknowledgement that the recipe exists outside Marjory's own invention. It is sold in blue tins with a white label. It is sold for nine shillings the tin. It is sold, I am told, to this day."

She sat down again, slowly, and folded her hands on the table.

"And now," she said, "Lily Wickerton is dead, and the cup she drank from on the night she died was a Brookhollow cup, and the brew in it, whatever it was, came from a Brookhollow tin. I did not put it there. I do not know who did. But I will tell you this, my dears, for what it is worth. If you mean to find out who put the brew in the cup, you will need to know what was in the brew. And if you mean to know what was in the brew, you will need to open a tin of Brookhollow's Evening Rest and read the leaves at the bottom."

The cottage door closed behind them with a sound like a long-held breath released. Sage Rowan stepped onto the path, and the wind struck her face at once, carrying the green smell of the lane and the sharper note of the river below. Rowan Ashvale paused to button his coat, and the brass buttons caught the weak afternoon light.

"She didn't tell us everything," he said.

"No," Sage said. "She never does."

They walked in silence down the lane. Pim was waiting at the stile, swinging their legs against the lower bar. When they saw Sage and Rowan, they hopped down and fell into step without a word, small and quick between the two adults.

"The lady in the cottage," Pim said, after a while. "She's angry."

"Yes," Sage said.

"She's been angry a long time," Pim said. "But it's got a new edge now. I could hear it when I was on the stairs."

Rowan glanced down at the child. "You have good ears, Pim."

"I have good everything," Pim said, with the matter-of-fact pride of a child who has not yet learned to be humble. "Tessa said you'd come back to the shop. She said to bring the herbalist if she would come."

Sage stopped walking. "Verbena?"

"She said bring her or don't come yourself," Pim said. "I think she was joking. I wasn't sure."

The lane opened onto the village street. The Brookhollow tea shop stood at the corner where the cobbles widened into the small square. Its windows were lit, and through the glass Sage could see the gleam of copper kettles and the soft blur of the dried-flower garlands that Tessa hung for the winter. The brass bell over the door gave its small bright note as they entered, and the warmth of the room closed around them like a hand.

Tessa Brookhollow stood behind the counter with a teapot in her hand. She was a woman of perhaps thirty, with steady eyes and the particular calm of someone who has learned, by long practice, to listen more than she speaks. Her apron was tied with the precise bow of someone who ties it the same way every morning. When she saw Sage and Rowan, her expression did not change, but when she saw who came in behind them, her hand tightened on the teapot's handle.

Verbena Nightshade entered the shop the way a cat enters a room that does not belong to it: slowly, with full awareness of every surface and every scent. Her black cloak fell behind her in folds. Her pale eyes swept the shelves of labelled tins, the rows of glass jars, the framed print of the Brookhollow crest above the counter, and came to rest on Tessa.

"Miss Brookhollow," Verbena said, and inclined her head a fraction. "Your aunt kept a beautiful shop."

"She did," Tessa said. "So do I."

"And you are fond of it."

"I am."

Verbena smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a woman who recognised a kindred possessiveness.

Sage stepped forward. "Tessa, we need to look at the eldrenberry cordial. The Brookhollow's Evening Rest. We need to open a tin and read the leaves."

Tessa set the teapot down on the counter. The sound was small but final.

"The cordial is not a curiosity," Tessa said. "It is a remedy. It is sold to people who cannot sleep, who have lost a child, who have lost a husband, who have lost the belief that tomorrow will be better than today. I do not open tins of it for amusement."

"Lily Wickerton drank from one of your cups on the night she died," Rowan said. He said it quietly, the way one says a thing that one wishes were not true. "The cup was a Brookhollow cup. The brew came from a Brookhollow tin."

Tessa's hand, which had been reaching for a clean cup, stopped in mid-air. She looked at Rowan. She looked at Sage. She looked at Verbena, who had begun, with great interest, to examine a jar of dried chamomile on the nearest shelf.

"Who told you that?" Tessa said.

"The leaves in the cup," Verbena said, without turning from the chamomile. "Or rather, the absence of leaves. The brew was strained through a cloth so fine that no leaf survived. But the stain on the cloth, if the cloth still exists, would tell the story. Or the stain in the cup, if no one has washed it. Or the stain on the dead woman's lips, if anyone thought to look before the family closed her coffin."

Tessa's eyes came back to Verbena's hands. Verbena, reaching for the chamomile jar, had pushed back the cuff of her left glove to free her fingers. The silk fell back a half inch, and in that half inch Tessa saw what no one else in the room had thought to look for.

The skin at Verbena's wrist was pale, but at the very edge of the glove there were three small marks, each no larger than a fingernail, each with the raised and slightly glistening look of a burn that had not fully healed. They were not fire burns. They were not iron burns. They had the peculiar puckered shine of a burn made by something both wet and hot, something that had eaten a fraction into the skin before it was wiped away.

Tessa said nothing. She reached past Verbena, took the chamomile jar from the shelf, set it back in its place, and turned to the kettle.

"Sit down," Tessa said, to the room at large. "All of you. Pim, bring the small tablecloth."

Pim darted. Verbena drew her glove back over her wrist with a small, precise motion, and took the chair that Sage pulled out for her. Rowan sat across from her. Sage stood by the counter, watching Tessa's back.

Tessa made the tea in silence. The kettle lifted, the water fell, the leaves bloomed. She brought four cups to the small table, and a plate of the thin oat biscuits that her aunt had always served with the strong brews. Verbena reached for her cup with both hands, the silk gloves pale against the dark blue porcelain. She sipped. She closed her eyes.

"The chamomile is good," Verbena said. "Better than I remembered."

Tessa sat down. She picked up her own cup, and over the rim of it she looked, very steadily, at Verbena's hands. Verbena did not flinch. Verbena smiled, the small closed smile of a woman who knows she has been seen and intends to do nothing about it.

"You have been handling raw essence," Tessa said. "Not the dried kind. Not the prepared kind. The raw. The wet kind. The kind that burns through silk if you are not careful, and that leaves a mark the body does not easily forget."

The room went very still. Pim, who had been pouring a second cup for themselves, set the teapot down without a sound. Rowan's hand, which had been reaching for a biscuit, stopped. Sage, by the counter, felt the small cold weight of recognition settle in her chest.

Verbena lifted her cup again. She drank. She set the cup down, precisely, in the ring of damp it had made on the tablecloth.

"My dear Miss Brookhollow," Verbena said, "you have the observant eyes of your aunt. She too could tell, from the state of a man's fingernails, what he had been pouring into his morning tea. It is a useful inheritance."

"That is not an answer," Tessa said.

"No," Verbena said. "It is not. But it is the only one I will give in your aunt's shop, under her crest, in front of her niece." She paused. "I will tell you this much, because I think you have already guessed it. The brew that killed Lily Wickerton was not the cordial your aunt made. It was not brewed in your kitchen. It was not poured from your tins. But it was made from the same plant, in a way your aunt never used and never taught. Whoever made it had the recipe. Whoever made it had access to raw essence. And whoever made it knew that Lily Wickerton would be sitting at your table on the night in question."

Tessa's knuckles whitened on the cup.

"You are saying one of my regulars did this."

"I am saying," Verbena said, "that the cup was yours, the table was yours, the evening was yours, and the death was not. And I am saying that if you do not find out which of your customers brought the brew to your table, the village will decide for you. And the village, my dear, is not kind."

Pim, who had been standing behind Tessa's chair, put a small hand on Tessa's shoulder. Tessa did not look up, but her free hand rose and covered the child's fingers for a moment.

Sage set her own cup down.

"Then we open the tin," Sage said. "We read the leaves. And we find out what was in the cup that was not meant to be there."

Tessa looked at her. Tessa looked at Rowan. Then she rose, went behind the counter, and took from the locked drawer beneath the till a small key on a blue ribbon. She went to the shelf that held the evening blends. She reached, with the careful hand of someone who knows exactly where each tin stands, for the third from the left on the second row. The tin was blue, with a white label. She brought it to the table and set it down in the middle, where the four of them could see it.

The brass bell over the door gave its small bright note as someone pushed it open from outside. A draught moved through the shop, and the dried flowers above the counter swayed.

Rowan stood. Tessa turned. Pim peered over Tessa's shoulder.

In the doorway stood Dovie Finch, her shawl drawn tight, her face the colour of old paper.

"Forgive me," Dovie said. "I have just heard. About Lily. About the cup. I thought you ought to know, Miss Brookhollow. I was the one who poured the tea that night."

The tin of Brookhollow's Evening Rest sat between them on the table, blue and white and still sealed. Outside, the first drops of rain began to fall on the cobbles of the square. Verbena lifted her cup, drank the last of her tea, and set it down again, precisely, in the ring it had already made.

"Well," she said, very softly. "Now we begin."