By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The First Pot
A Crestwick Chronicles bonus scene — two years before Something Wicked This Way Brews

I came to Crestwick on a Tuesday in March with two suitcases, a box of jars wrapped in newspaper, and the firm intention of leaving again by summer.
That is the part nobody believes now, so I may as well put it down while it’s still true in my own memory. I did not come home. I told myself I had come to a town, a particular small town on the wrong side of a lake, the way you might tell yourself you have stopped at a service station — temporarily, for a specific reason, with every intention of getting back on the road. The reason was a lease I had signed without seeing the building, on a shop I had inherited the right to without ever being told why. I meant to open it, sell it, and go. I had a whole speech prepared for myself about how I was not the sort of woman who got attached to places. I delivered it, more than once, to the inside of the car.
The building did not care about the speech.
It sat on the corner of Wick Street and the lane that has no name anyone agrees on, a narrow brick front gone the soft red of a thing that has weathered a great many Octobers, with a bowed window and a door that had clearly been painted green by someone who loved it and then left it to fade. There was a bench out front, bolted to the brick, the wood silvered and patient. And above the door hung a small wooden sign, hand-lettered, that said THE LOOSE LEAF, and hung very slightly crooked, in the way of signs that have been straightened a thousand times by people who could not make it stay.
I straightened it. Of course I did. I had a key in one hand and a box of jars under the other arm, and I set the box on the bench and reached up and nudged the sign level before I had so much as opened the door, because that is the kind of person I am, or was, or have always told myself I am.
It did not stay level. I want to be precise about that, because it matters later. It went crooked again before I had the key in the lock, the way a thing does when the building underneath it has its own opinion.
Inside it was cold and it smelled of dust and old wood and, underneath that, very faintly, of bergamot, which made no sense at all and which I chose not to examine. The shelves were bare. The counter was sound. There was a kettle on a back hob that looked older than I was, copper gone dark, and when I lifted it the weight of it settled into my hand like a tool that knew me. Someone had left it full. Two years of letters had been forwarded to a solicitor and a stranger had been paying a stranger’s rent and the kettle, somehow, was full. I did not ask who. There are questions you learn not to ask out loud, in a family like mine, and the habit had followed me even here, where I had decided I had no family and no history and only a building I meant to be rid of.
I unpacked the jars first. I don’t know why. There was no shop yet to put them in, no labels, no trade — but a box of jars is a thing that wants shelves, and the shelves were there, and my hands wanted the work. Skullcap. Nettle. Linden flower and lemon balm and the chamomile I grow myself and trust no one else to dry. I lined them along the lowest shelf where the light from the bowed window came in slantwise and turned the glass to honey, and I stepped back, and for one unguarded second the shop stopped looking like a thing I was selling and started looking like a thing I had made.
I shut that down. I am very good at shutting that down.
Then I filled the old kettle from the tap, because the forwarded water in it had no business in anyone’s cup, and I set it on the hob, and I waited for it the way you wait for a kettle, which is to say badly, looking at nothing, thinking I would be gone by June.
The cat arrived while it was heating.
I did not let him in. I want that on the record too. The door was shut. I had not propped it, had not so much as cracked it for the cold air, and yet when I turned around from the hob there was a cat on the inside windowsill, gray as a held breath, sitting with his tail curled over his feet and his eyes on me with the flat, ancient patience of an auditor who has found a discrepancy and is prepared to wait all afternoon for me to find it too.
“This is not my cat,” I told the empty shop.
The cat blinked, slowly, in a way that did not concede the point.
“I’m not staying,” I told him.
He looked, very deliberately, at the jars on the lowest shelf, and then back at me, and if you have never been condescended to by an animal then I cannot explain to you the particular quality of the silence that followed.
The kettle came to the boil.
I made the first pot the way I always make the first pot of a place, which is plain — nothing clever, nothing for selling, just the chamomile from my own garden and a little linden, because a building you mean to leave still deserves to be asked how it’s feeling. I warmed the pot. I measured by hand. I poured the water in a slow ring and watched the leaves lift and turn and settle, the way they do, opening into the heat, giving up the year they’d been keeping folded inside them.
And the shop — I have no better word for it — the shop exhaled. The bergamot smell deepened and warmed and became something else, something green and steeped and welcoming, and the cold went out of the corners, and the light off the jars went gold all the way to the back wall, and somewhere under the floorboards I felt a thing I had spent a great many years teaching myself not to feel: a place recognizing me. Not liking me. Recognizing me. The way a lock recognizes its own particular key and turns without being asked twice.
I stood very still and let it happen, which I had not meant to do.
I poured two cups, which I had not meant to do either. One for me. One I set on the sill beside the cat, who did not drink it, because he is a cat and not a fool, but who looked at it, and then at me, with something that on a person would have been approval and on him was simply a verdict delivered and closed.
I drank mine looking out the bowed window at the bench and the silvered wood and the crooked sign I could not keep straight, and I thought about June, and I did not believe in it anymore, and I knew that I didn’t, and I lied to myself about it anyway for another two years, right up until the morning I found a dead man on that bench and the lying stopped being possible.
But that was later.
That first afternoon there was only the tea, and the gold light, and a gray cat who had decided something about me that I would spend years catching up to. I named him before I left that evening, which is how you know I was already lost. I called him Fig, for no reason I could give you, except that he looked like a creature who knew where all the sweetness was buried and had no intention of telling me until I’d earned it.
He has never once been wrong about that.
I locked up at dusk. I straightened the sign on my way out, gently, the way you do a thing you know won’t take.
It was crooked again before I reached the car.
I left it.
— Jessie Clark
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