Five Porcelain Cups on the Sideboard

The great carved chestnut gate of the Bend Teahouse groaned heavily on its rusted hinges as Rosalía Morán pushed it open with both hands. For three whole winters nobody had opened the shutters of that river house built on oak stilts at the loveliest bend of the Oreb. Through the leaded windows, filmed with dust and dry leaves, the clean morning light gilded the curved beams that held up the wide veranda hanging over the calm water of the backwater. The shut-in air smelled of smoke-seasoned wood, of black tea leaves asleep in glazed clay jars, and of the green, wild scent of the first buds on the white cherry trees in the garden.

Rosalía set her leather case down on the terracotta tiles of the hall. Against the back wall, behind pierced lattice doors, stood the rosewood sideboard that had belonged to her great-aunt Matilde. Rosalía slid back the brass bolt. On the top shelf, lined up on a strip of moss-green velvet that had not lost its colour, sat five cups of fine porcelain with gilded rims, hand-painted with cherry blossom, willow branches and water that seemed to move with the light.

"In this house no one drinks a sip of tea without first laying a weight of truth on the pine table," said a deep voice behind her, one she knew far too well.

Rosalía turned around. Leaning against the frame of the service door that led to the boat shed, a carpenter's plane in his right hand and pine shavings tangled in his leather apron, stood Julián Valls.

He had the same dark, direct gaze as his elder sister, Beatriz, the herbalist of Altasierra, but broader shoulders, and hands weathered by the oak of ship's ribs and the iron of the shipyards, hands that could raise a keel with chisel and mallet without the slightest tremor.

"Don't look at me as if I were a ghost from the churchyard, Rosalía," he said, taking a firm step toward the middle of the room and drawing a sealed paper from the pocket of his grey wool coat. "It was my grandfather who built this veranda forty years ago with his own chestnut boards. Your aunt Matilde's deed of gift makes it perfectly clear under communal law that this building belongs in equal halves to your family's bakery and to my family's carpentry."

"My cousin Elena said in her last letter that you'd gone off to the coast to build warships, Julián."

"I went to learn how to bend ribs with hot steam so they don't split in the winter frosts. But a Valls never lets a house built with his family's timber rot because its heirs can't be bothered."

Rosalía stared at him. Six winters ago, before the guild lawsuits split their families into two camps, Julián used to row upstream to her family's landing every Sunday afternoon just to bring her baked apples and listen to the stories she read from old books. The years in the shipyards had hardened his boyish features, but not the way he looked at her: with a quiet attention, as if nothing in the world were more urgent.

"The house has three main beams sagging from the damp of the river floods, Julián. And the town council wants to turn this sacred bend into a noisy coal wharf unless we reopen the teahouse with a proper communal licence before the new moon."

"To open according to the charter we need five guild witnesses to sign the accord over those five cups, Rosalía," he said, pointing at the rosewood sideboard with the tip of his tool. "And you and I know better than anyone that in this valley nobody signs a pact without first sitting down at the table to settle old accounts."

Rosalía ran her eyes over the coffered ceiling, where her great-aunt had had elderflowers and tea leaves carved on every corbel. She remembered the afternoons when Matilde taught her to warm the porcelain before pouring in the boiling water, so the shock wouldn't crack the glaze. Without a word, she lit the little stove, warmed two of the five cups and poured into them the last black tea left in the jars: if they were going to be partners, it would be done the way this house did things.

"To the teahouse," said Julián, raising his. "And to the shipyards on the coast, that taught me how to bend ribs. He took a sip and frowned, bewildered: the tea, steaming a second before, had turned icy in his mouth. Rosalía set her own cup down on the sideboard without tasting it. Aunt Matilde had written it down, and the cups of the Bend were never wrong: Julián Valls had just lied to her."