Another visitor to The Last Teashop.
I am back to drizzle as my constant companion and I’m glad this house is well-built, with a slate roof rather than thatch. It’s irrational but I have this belief that all this rain would not only have finally, somehow, made it through the bulk of a thatched roof by now but, even more ridiculous, that the reeds, or straw, or whatever it is that makes up thatch, would have started sprouting.
I am chuckling at my own idiocy when the door opens. A cloaked figure, hood up, all but stumbles through. I leap to steady them, and steer them towards the fireside chair. There are other chairs in the room, I forget how many, maybe it changes, but it’s rare for my customers to sit in any but this one.
My visitor removes their cloak before sitting, revealing an older woman in the plain brown robes of a nun. I know very little of the temple’s nuns and monks. My haphazard memories throw images of priests and priestesses in bright, ornate costumes, enacting rituals and conversing with worshippers. The quiet movement of people in brown behind those gaudy showpieces comes to me vaguely at best.
Regardless, my visitor is exhausted and clearly in need of a large mug of my Gumboot Tea. I set the kettle to boil and ask. “What will you miss from your life?”
She sighs and gazes into the fire, as if she can read an answer in it. “I doubt I’ll miss anything. It’s a relief to be free of the endless cycle. Wake, pray, eat, pray, work in the garden – giving thanks to the goddess as I do so, pray, grab a hurried bite for lunch, clean – and rejoice I my work to glorify the goddess, pray, eat, pray, bed.”
Then why become, and remain, a nun? My expression must show my confusion as she sighs again and goes on.
“I was the third daughter of a minor noble family. Not the clever one, not the pretty one, so I was sent to the temple. Sent and told to make good connections for my family among the notable and noble-born priestesses and their acolytes. I did as I was told, and my family profited from my influence as a teacher of the novices – high noble girls who came to the temple for a year, then decide whether to continue on the path of priesthood or return to the secular world of politics and marriages.
“My family profited, as I said, arranging business partnerships and even a marriage, and they moved on with their lives, forgetting about the dull, plain sister in the back corridors of the temple.”
I serve her tea, she breathes in the scent and her face relaxes. She takes a sip. “They need this at the temple.”
I perch on my stool by the counter. “Where do you think you’ll be going, when you decide to resume your journey?”
The nun snorts. “Not to the goddess’s home of marble and clouds, that’s for certain. I’m hoping for something natural. Somewhere wild and overgrown. Where I don’t have to weed, or hoe, or sweep, or polish. And where I definitely don’t ever have to pray to some hoity-toity woman in the sky I don’t even believe in.”
Who’d have thought I’d encounter an atheist nun. Or maybe she was agnostic.
She looks as if she’s making ready to leave, I only have time for one more question. I decide on one that matters more to me than her religion, or lack of. “My last visitor was a forester. I think you would have known him. How?”
That garners a smile, equal parts fond and sad, as she stands and gathers her cloak, wrapping it around her once more. “The temple backs on to his woods. He used to bring wild blackberries and forest herbs for the kitchen. Even the occasional rabbit, although he wasn’t supposed to. He was a good man.”
She bows her head to me and leaves. Nuns have nothing but their stories for payments and I feel well-recompensed.
