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“…the taste is a hush from far away
at the very moment when I sip it
trying to make it last in the knowledge
that I will forget it in the next breath
that it will be lost when I hear the cock crow
any time now across the dark valley.” -W.S. Merwin, “Drinking Tea in the Small Hours”
London has different fogs, different tannins. There are forty tea-scents in Marylebone alone. Forty percent of people you meet at any given time will have just drunk it.
Cases in which tea was involved: 7. Clients who smelt of tea: too many to count.
Earl Grey says silence, says stay. Kettle left on: Murder. Kettle clicked off: murder all the same.
Tea stain on John’s chair, a fingerprint.
Tea is truce, peace, memory, war.
Spoons clicking the bone, sugar stirred to dissolve in Moriarty’s black eyes.
Sherlock scents leaves, blood-brown, in sacrifice, shoots Magnussen and leaves in a fog, touches the tarmac again in another.
John doesn’t smell of oolong but something sharper, fear, paralytic, soluble toxin, violet and linden and hops, sheets from the cupboard, Mary’s moon perfume, top notes gone missing.
“I’m not going to forgive you,” he says,” for nearly killing yourself again.”
Leaves opening in hot water is agony, hope in the brewing, whole fields of it, carpets, London blanketed in fragrant, astringent; foggy fields of evergreen.
Baker Street is together in one cup, plain black and steeped stiff, steeped to stay, stain, leave the china dark. (Pattern the walls, the chairs, with their sweetened bitter, their fortunes.)
Or that’s what he’ll think, Sherlock, when he comes home, to afternoon-John at the table with more than one cup, well-brewed.