Lid Off

Ottoline Keane stood on the top step with a bowl, singing, and smelled their own onions coming up the hill.

Ottoline keeps the Grove’s onion row, and eats supper standing. The Terraces argue across the pot every night in two halves, and a Beast who sits down sits on a side. In all their seasons Ottoline has never sat down at supper, so neither half can claim them.

The Supper Round was going, one half starting it and the other coming in on the wrong line, on purpose, as always. Ottoline sang both.

Then the smell came up the steps from below: onions gone soft in a pot, and sage, and warm bread. Ottoline knew those onions. They were from the row Ottoline minds, sent down to the Dye Yard in a barrow.

The singing faltered and heads turned, and somebody called down the steps, puzzled and hopeful, asking who was doing a second supper.

Ottoline looked down the steps. The dyer, Piet Ferrabee, left before the bowls went round, and there they were in the Dye Yard below, the lid of the oldest vat in both hands, standing back from the steam.

The pot was still going round. Ottoline could stay where they were, standing, on nobody’s side, or take bowls down the steps. To leave supper first is the one thing the Grove looks up at, and both sides would look.

Ottoline set down their own bowl, filled two more from the pot, and went down the steps with one in each hand.

Both sides looked up. Ottoline felt them all the way to the bottom, embarrassed, and kept going.

In the Dye Yard the lid lay on the cobbles. A wooden rack sat across the open vat with rows of soft slow sticks along it. Anouk Feld sat beside it, watching them take the steam. Piet sat on the yard wall, very still, as if listening to the heat go out of the vat.

“Supper,” Ottoline said, holding out the bowls.

Piet looked at the bowls, and at the steps, and started to laugh, and Anouk laughed too.

Ottoline stood between them with empty hands, on their feet as always. Down here, for once, there was only one side to stand on.