The Magpie
“Mina,” said my employer, ruddy cheeked, as she carried a tray of teacups into the kitchen, “could you clear that last table while I get started on the washing up?”
“Of course, Mrs. Moyle.” I emptied coins from my apron pockets onto the worktable before going back out to the tearoom.
I made my way to one of the tables by the windows.
I recalled a man had sat there alone, eating scones with Mrs. Moyle’s homemade strawberry jam and clotted cream while reading a newspaper.
I hadn’t taken much notice of him; he’d been polite, quiet, and neatly dressed.
I didn’t think he was from Roche, but we saw a lot of his sort.
Probably a clerk working for one of the china clay companies or tin mines.
He’d left his newspaper behind, and I tucked it under my arm for Mrs. Moyle.
“Being a woman is no excuse for being uninformed” was a favorite slogan of hers.
More than a slogan, for my employer had taken it upon herself to teach me reading and writing (beyond what little I’d learned from my mother), saying I wouldn’t be of much use to her if I couldn’t read a list for market or write down a customer’s order.
While I supposed these were good reasons, I also thought she was lonely. We had that in common.
I carried the man’s dishes to the kitchen, brushing crumbs from the plate and emptying the tea strainer before setting them next to the washbasin. Upon opening the teapot to remove the leaves that had stuck inside, I froze.
The Magpie had been a welcome change for me in every way but one. Emptying all those pots, I had begun seeing shapes in the clumps of leaves. Everyday things like candles, or flowers, or crescent moons, but now and then a crown, or sword, or castle.
Sometimes after seeing a thing, I’d hear a bit of gossip that seemed related to it.
Like the time I saw a ring in the teapot at a table of young ladies, and after a few days I heard one had become engaged.
Another time, the sodden leaves formed a line across the bottom of a large teapot, and a month later we heard that the family was setting sail for America.
But once I’d seen a sickle shape in old Lady Rundle’s cup—right before she suffered apoplexy.
I’d chided myself for paying heed to it, yet it kept happening. And try as I might, I could no more not see those shapes than I could not smell the gin on my brother, Jack, when he came home from the clay pits (and the tavern) in the evenings.
In this pot, I saw a magpie, plain as day—tea leaves forming the black feathers, the glazed clay of the pot forming the white. Magpies were news bearers, and Mum used to sing an old nursery rhyme about them:
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told
One for sorrow. Near the magpie was a narrow, pointy shape that I couldn’t see as anything but a knife. Or, by its handle, more like a dagger.
“That’s the last of it, then?” asked Mrs. Moyle, turning from the washbasin, the red in her cheeks deepened by the steamy water.
Blinking away the worrisome thoughts, I replied, “It is, ma’am.”
The skin pricked at the back of my neck as I stuck my hand in the pot and dug out the wet leaves before handing it to her. My fingers trembled as I picked up the towel to begin drying.
Let it go.
But I couldn’t.
“Mrs. Moyle,” I said, trying to keep a lightness in my tone, “did you know that fellow who sat alone by the window this afternoon?”
My employer didn’t miss much, and she looked up sharply. But she answered mildly enough. “I’ve never seen him before. I imagine he was just passing through. Seems we see more strangers in Roche every day.”
“That we do.” Roche had grown with the clay mining in the years since Mrs. Moyle had opened The Magpie using money from the sale of her late husband’s livery business. It was why I’d found work here.
She studied me as I dried a saucer patterned with dog roses. “I’m always dreading the day a young man will catch your eye and steal you away from me, but this one was old enough to be your father.”
I laughed, feeling the color in my cheeks. “Nothing like that, Mrs. Moyle.”
She handed me the clean teapot to dry. “What then? I can see you working something over in your mind.”
I rubbed the pot’s gleaming surface with the towel. “You’ll think me a fool. I think it myself.”
“I’ve met fools aplenty, Mina, and I’ve never counted you among them.”
Sighing, I set the pot on a shelf next to the window.
Outside, mist gathered low along the ground in the garden, snaking slowly among the dried-up stalks.
Most of Mrs. Moyle’s flowers had withered in the heat of the last couple of weeks, but the red roses still bloomed, and a few sweet, creamy woodbine blossoms dotted the vines growing along the hedgerow in back.
The birds were at the haws, and we’d have to pick them soon if we were to have any for jelly.
“Sometimes,” I began slowly, “I see things in people’s teapots. Shapes, or likenesses. It often seems as if those shapes are trying to say something to me.”
“You’re a tasseographer,” said Mrs. Moyle in wonderment.
I raised my eyebrows. “Tassy . . . what?”
Her blue eyes were full of interest. “Tasseography! I’ve read about it but never knew anyone who could do it.”
“What is it, ma’am?” I asked, finding some comfort in the idea that the things I was seeing had a name.
“The reading of tea leaves. They form shapes that are symbols of certain outcomes—births, deaths, marriages, and the like. Did your mother read them, by any chance?”
I frowned. “Not so far as I know.”
“There are women who earn money by it; it’s a kind of fortune-telling.
Once, a customer left a copy of The Times that had an article about it.
There’s a school for young ladies on an estate in Yorkshire that teaches it.
” She smiled. “My grandmother always said women with red hair could divine things, especially freckled ones like you, my dear.”
My mother’s hair had been dark, but now that I thought of it, we’d had strangers in the house sometimes for tea.
Only when Da was at the mine. Mum sat with them, and she’d send Jack and me outside to hang laundry or peel potatoes.
After they’d gone, Mum would tell us not to pester Da by talking about the guest, and she’d give us a bit of bread with jam.
Once when I sat down to eat it, I saw her pluck a sixpence coin off the table.
“I think I might be wrong about my mother,” I said.
Mrs. Moyle gave me a knowing nod. “I daresay some would call it the devil’s work, and maybe she thought it best to hide it. Not that I set any store by such ideas.” She eyed me more keenly. “Did you see something in that gentleman’s cup? Is that what made you ask about him?”
“I did. I saw a magpie.”
She frowned, thinking. “I know some people believe a magpie’s bad luck, but my grandmother believed that magpies bring news from the spirit world, and that they’re a sign we should pay attention.”
I swallowed. “I saw a dagger, too.”
Now her brow clouded. “I can understand why that would worry you. I wish there was something I could say to set your mind at ease, though I expect all will be well.” More cheerfully, she added, “We may see the man in here again. People don’t forget my scones.”
I smiled. “No, they don’t.”
“Why don’t you go sit in the front room, and I’ll make you a cup of tea. Take the chill off your thoughts before you go out into the fog.”
“That’s all right, Mrs. Moyle,” I protested. “You’ll want a rest yourself.”
“There’s plenty of time for that when the house is quiet this evening.
” The tearoom was in an old cottage with fresh thatch and a door painted the color of grass shoots.
Mrs. Moyle slept in a small bedroom upstairs.
“You can continue reading about young Catherine Morland’s adventures,” she said.
“I’m anxious to hear what you think of her! ”
My employer wouldn’t have it otherwise, so I went out and settled in one of the armchairs in front of the coal stove.
The Magpie was about the coziest place I’d ever been in.
The cottage had last been home to a bookshop.
Mrs. Moyle had removed most of the bookcases and filled the space with odds and ends of battered tables that she’d whitewashed for both “uniformity” and “practicality”—her idea being that white tables meant she could do without white cloths, which would always be tea stained.
The white furnishings against the old house’s dark flooring and wood paneling reminded me of the light and dark feathers of the bird the place was named for. Mrs. Moyle had chosen the name well, as I doubted more gossip was exchanged anywhere else in the village.
She had made the room cheery by hanging colorful paintings against the white plaster above the wainscot.
She arranged flowers from the kitchen garden in little vases on the tables—fresh in the spring and summer, dried all the rest of the year.
The money she saved on tablecloth laundering she spent on pretty lamps and fine white candles for the darker days of autumn and winter.
She’d filled the few remaining bookcases with her own collection.
Novels of high adventure, gothic terror, and romance, and books on things like flowers and birds that were filled with pretty illustrations.
Some customers even read them, and Mrs. Moyle was kind enough to loan them out if anyone asked.
I read them myself when business was slow.
Jack said working at The Magpie had made me a different person, and I had to admit it was true in some ways.
But I thought the books were as much to blame as the job itself.
I opened a small drawer in the tea table next to my chair—my favorite hiding place for the books I was reading—and took out Northanger Abbey.