One may go there to drink tea, sera, and enjoy some excellent conversation.
Enough laudanum at the Rememdium, enough poppy-milk to soothe her mind and sanctify her dreams; enough thought of the scrapes and little cuts that littered her body, or the burning ache in her stomach from where his fingers -- Catch-fingers -- had touched her. Enough of it all. When she checked out, the attendant had said, "Sera Wynsee, you do not look so very well," and the seamstress had said, "I have bags to sell, and I am not broken anymore, menna, not at all. Where is the tea house? I -- I have heard one may enjoy some excellent conversation there."
"That is not all that may be enjoyed there," the attendant had told her. "But are you sure?"
"I am quite sure."
"Sure like a little girl, or sure like a grown woman?"
"Sure," she said. "I am sure."
"You still look ill, Sera Wynsee."
"I am fine. I am just fine. And also sure," she said, "that I would like some tea."
And so the white-clad attendant gave her directions, and some time later, the seamstress in a borrowed dress kicked the mud from her boots just inside the doors of the tea house. She smelled women within, with their wax odors and their powders. Women and spices. Eastern perfumes clogged the air. Girl-chatter echoed in the rafters. The stink of lye and wood-ash circled about like invisible motes in stagnant gusts. She wondered if they had sugar cubes.
When she spoke to one of the girls there -- the most inviting one, whose eyes were not as sunken as the others, whose fingernails were the most freshly painted with lacquered berry-stain -- the seamstress said, "Nela. That is the name Menna Olwak said to me.
"Nela. I would speak to her, if you please."