The Purring Page

It had been raining in Speranza since lunchtime, the soft, patient November rain that does not so much fall as settle, like a cat deciding where to sleep. By half past five the cobbles of Via dell’Orologio shone like the back of a spoon, and the clock above the little square had gathered a necklace of drops along its iron rim.

Moira Hopes was in the inn’s kitchen, next door to La Pagina che Fa le Fusa, with her sleeves pushed up to the elbow and a lemon in each hand. She was weighing them, the way her grandmother used to, not on the scales but in her palms, feeling for the heavy ones. Heavy lemons are full of juice. Light lemons are full of promises.

On the windowsill, Toe sat with her immaculate white paws tucked beneath her, watching the rain run down the glass with the expression of a grey cat who has filed a formal complaint about the weather. Ashwaganda, the large ginger tabby, had followed Moira through the connecting door from the shop as he always did when butter was involved. He was now lying across the warm tiles in front of the oven, purring at a volume that made the copper pans hum faintly on their hooks.

“Friday the thirteenth,” Moira told them, zesting the first lemon over a bowl. The scent rose instantly, bright and sharp, cutting through the smell of rain and woodsmoke. “Thirteen slices. You know the rule.”

Toe blinked slowly, which in cat is a signature on a contract.

A Traveller Who Hid from Fridays

The bell above the bookshop door rang at a quarter to six. It was not the cheerful double ring of a regular customer, nor the hesitant half ring of someone who is not sure they are allowed in. It was a jangle, as if the door had been pushed by a gust of wind and a suitcase at the same time.

Moira wiped her hands on her apron and went through. In the middle of the shop stood a woman of about sixty, in a beige raincoat that had given up the fight some time ago. Her grey hair was flattened to her forehead. She held a small wheeled suitcase by its handle, and from the other hand dangled the skeleton of an umbrella, its spokes splayed out like the legs of a very tired spider.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said, in an English accent that Moira placed somewhere near the north. “I’m dripping on your books. I’ll go. I only — the bus driver said there was a bookshop, and a bookshop seemed like a dry sort of place.”

“It is the driest sort of place,” said Moira. “Books insist on it. Give me that poor umbrella before it suffers any further.”

The woman handed it over as if surrendering a weapon. “It broke at the bus stop. Of course it did. My train broke down in the valley this morning, and they put us on a replacement bus, and the replacement bus took a wrong turn, and here I am in a town that isn’t on my itinerary, and the last connection has gone.” She drew a long breath. “It’s Friday the thirteenth, you see. I should never have travelled today. I never do. Not once in twenty years. And the one time I do—”

She stopped. Toe had come through from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway, looking at her. Behind Toe, filling most of the doorway, came Ashwaganda, who regarded the stranger, decided she was acceptable, and began to purr.

“Oh,” said the woman, and something in her face loosened. “Oh, hello.”

“That is Toe, who disapproves of everything except people who deserve it,” said Moira. “And the large one is Ashwaganda. He approves of everyone, which makes his opinion less valuable, but he means it sincerely. I’m Moira. You’re very welcome.”

“Harriet,” said the woman. “Harriet Pell. From Whitby, originally. I was going to see the lakes. I’ve been saving for it for three years.”

“Then you’ll see them tomorrow,” said Moira, “and tonight you’ll see Speranza, which is smaller than a lake but has better cake. There are rooms at the inn next door, and the inn’s kitchen is where I’m standing most of this evening. Come and sit by the oven. You can drip on the tiles. The tiles have seen worse.”

Lemons on the Table

The inn’s kitchen was long and low, with a beamed ceiling and a scrubbed wooden table that had been scrubbed so many times its surface had gone soft and pale, like driftwood. Moira sat Harriet at the end nearest the oven, hung the raincoat on a hook to steam quietly, and put a towel around the woman’s shoulders as though she were a swimmer coming in from the sea.

“You’re baking,” said Harriet, looking at the bowls, the lemons, the paper bag of ground almonds, the eggs lined up in a row like a little choir.

“Lemon and almond cake. I make it every Friday the thirteenth.”

Harriet looked at her warily. “To ward something off?”

Moira laughed and cracked the first egg against the rim of the bowl. “To invite something in, if anything. But really, because it is a good cake and a date is as good an excuse as any. Do you know, here in Italy, thirteen isn’t traditionally the unlucky number at all? The one people here are wary of is seventeen. Friday the seventeenth is the day some Italians would rather stay home. Thirteen, for a lot of people here, is rather lucky. There’s an old expression, fare tredici, to make thirteen, which comes from the football pools. Getting all thirteen results right meant you’d won.”

Harriet stared at her. “So today—”

“Today, in this kitchen, is just a wet Friday in November. Your bad luck crossed a border without its passport.”

For a moment Harriet said nothing at all. Then she began to laugh, a little helplessly, holding the towel around her shoulders. “Twenty years,” she said. “Twenty years I’ve taken the day off work. I’ve cancelled dentists. I once refused to go to my own niece’s engagement party because it fell on a Friday the thirteenth. And all along I could have simply moved to Italy.”

“Where you would have had to worry about the seventeenth instead,” said Moira. “Superstitions are like cats. Every country keeps its own, and they all believe they are in charge.”

Ashwaganda, hearing his species mentioned, rolled onto his back and presented his ginger stomach to the ceiling, which nobody took as an invitation, because everybody in Speranza knew better.

Why Twenty Years

Moira beat the eggs with the sugar until they were pale and thick and fell from the whisk in slow ribbons. She did it by hand, because the inn’s electric mixer had a temperament, and because she liked the rhythm of it, the small ache in her wrist that told her she was making something.

“May I ask,” she said, without looking up, “why twenty years?”

Harriet was quiet for long enough that Moira thought she might not answer. The rain ticked against the window. Toe hopped down from the sill, crossed the tiles on her white paws and sat by Harriet’s chair, looking up at her with green, unblinking eyes, the way a very good doctor looks at an X-ray.

“My husband,” Harriet said at last. “Geoffrey. He went out on a Friday the thirteenth to buy a newspaper and a lemon. I wanted a lemon for the fish. He had a fall on the steps outside the shop. It was his heart, they said afterwards, not the steps. It would have happened anywhere, on any day. I know that. I’ve always known it.” She smoothed the towel with both hands. “But I sent him out for a lemon. And it was the thirteenth. And somehow, afterwards, it was easier to be frightened of a date than to be sad about a man.”

Moira put the whisk down.

“And here I am,” Harriet went on, with a small, wobbly laugh, “in a stranger’s kitchen, surrounded by lemons. You couldn’t make it up.”

“No,” said Moira gently. “You couldn’t. I’m so sorry, Harriet. I would never have started zesting at you if I’d known.”

“Don’t be sorry. That’s the strange thing.” Harriet leaned forward and picked up one of the lemons from the bowl, turning it in her fingers. “I haven’t been able to look at one properly in twenty years. I buy those little plastic bottles of juice. Geoffrey would have been appalled.” She lifted it to her nose and breathed in. “It smells like our kitchen. It smells like Saturday mornings.”

Ashwaganda chose that moment to get up, stretch in three separate stages, pad over and lay his considerable head on Harriet’s foot. He began to purr against her ankle, a sound like a small boat engine in a calm harbour. Harriet looked down at him, and her eyes filled, and she laughed at the same time, which is a thing human faces can do that no recipe has ever managed to describe.

The Thirteen Slices

“Would you like to help?” Moira asked. “Only if you want to. You can also just sit and drip. Both are respectable activities in this kitchen.”

Harriet put the towel aside. “What do I do?”

“Zest the other lemon. Only the yellow, not the white underneath. The white is bitter. It’s the same with most things.”

So Harriet zested, carefully, frowning in concentration, while Moira melted the butter in a small pan and let it cool a little. The kitchen filled with the smell of butter and citrus. Moira folded the zest into the eggs, then the ground almonds, then a little flour sifted with a pinch of baking powder and a pinch of salt, and finally the melted butter and the juice of one lemon, which Harriet squeezed through her fingers to catch the pips, the way, she said, her mother had taught her.

“Now,” said Moira, pouring the batter into a round tin lined with paper, “flaked almonds on top. Scatter them like you’re feeding birds you’re slightly afraid of.”

Harriet scattered. The cake went into the oven. Moira set the old brass timer, the one shaped like a hen, and it began to tick in a way that sounded faintly smug.

“You said thirteen slices,” said Harriet. “Why thirteen, if the number doesn’t matter here?”

“Because it matters to some of the people who come in,” said Moira. “I started doing it years ago, after a customer told me she was frightened of the date, the way you were. I thought, well, what if the thirteenth thing were a good thing? What if the number meant a cake, and a full table, and nobody going home hungry? So every Friday the thirteenth I bake this and cut it into thirteen. Twelve slices go to whoever wanders in, the neighbours, the baker across the road, the postman if he’s late. And the thirteenth slice—”

“Goes to the cats?” Harriet guessed.

Ashwaganda lifted his head with sudden interest.

“Absolutely not,” said Moira, and Ashwaganda lowered his head again in the manner of a disappointed senator. “The thirteenth slice goes to whoever needed the day to turn out differently. I never know who it will be until they arrive. It has gone to a schoolboy who failed a test. To a widower who forgot it was his anniversary until the evening. To a tourist who lost her passport and found it again under the seat of the bus. I’ve never once had to throw it away.”

A Black Cat at the Window

While the cake baked, Moira put the kettle on and took down three jars from the high shelf. Harriet watched her measure dried chamomile flowers, pale green leaves of lemon verbena, and a few thin curls of dried lemon peel into a round teapot.

“This is the infusion that goes with the cake,” Moira said. “I call it the Thirteenth Cup, which is a grand name for something very simple. Chamomile because it’s soft and smells of hay and summer. Lemon verbena because it tastes the way lemons would taste if they were feeling gentle. A little peel for brightness. No caffeine, so it won’t keep you up in a strange bed. I’m a bookseller, not a herbalist, so I make no claims for it except that it is warm and it tastes nice and it takes five minutes to steep, and those five minutes are yours.”

She had just poured the water when Harriet let out a small cry and pointed at the window.

Outside, on the narrow ledge, sat a cat as black as the inside of a coat pocket. It was soaked and indignant, its fur spiked with rain, and it was staring through the glass at the kitchen with a pair of round yellow eyes.

“A black cat,” Harriet whispered. “On Friday the thirteenth. Well, that settles it.”

“That,” said Moira, opening the window just enough, “is Pepe, who belongs to the baker across the road and visits this kitchen every evening at exactly this time because he has worked out when the butter comes out. Come in, Pepe, you ridiculous creature.”

Pepe poured himself through the gap like ink, landed on the counter, shook himself thoroughly over the clean tea towels, and jumped down to the tiles, where Toe greeted him with a long, flat look of total disapproval and Ashwaganda touched noses with him in a friendly, absent-minded way.

“You know,” Moira said, handing Harriet a dry towel for the cat, “where you come from, in parts of Britain, a black cat is supposed to be good luck. Sailors’ wives used to keep them, so the story goes, to bring their husbands home safely. I’ve always liked that. The same cat, the same colour, and in one town people cross the road to avoid it, and in another they leave the door open for it.”

Harriet knelt, slowly, and held out the towel. Pepe considered it, then considered her, then walked into the towel as though he had been expecting it all along. She rubbed his wet fur, and he began to purr, a thin, rattly purr like a bicycle freewheeling downhill.

“Whitby,” Harriet said quietly, still kneeling. “Geoffrey’s grandmother always kept a black cat. Because of the boats. I’d completely forgotten.” She looked up at Moira. “How can you forget a thing like that?”

“Fear takes up a great deal of room,” said Moira. “It pushes the furniture against the walls. Sometimes you have to move it out before you find what was behind it.”

Thirteen Good Things

The hen timer rang. Moira opened the oven and the kitchen was flooded with the smell of toasted almonds and warm lemon. The cake had risen gently and settled again, golden at the edges, the flaked almonds browned like little roof tiles. She tested it with a wooden skewer, which came out clean, and set it on a rack by the window to cool.

While it cooled, she poured the infusion into two thick cups. It had turned the colour of pale straw, and it smelled of meadows and lemons. Harriet held hers in both hands and breathed in the steam for a long time before she drank.

“Would you like to try something?” Moira asked. “It’s a little game I play with myself on difficult days. You count thirteen good things that happened today. Not big things. Small ones. It sounds silly, and it is silly, but it’s a pleasant kind of silly.”

Harriet looked doubtful. “My train broke down. My umbrella broke. I’m in the wrong town. I’m not sure I can reach thirteen.”

“Then let’s see how far you get. I’ll keep count.”

Harriet sighed, and then, slowly, began. “Well. The train broke down in a valley that was, I have to admit, very beautiful. There were clouds lying in the fields like sheep. That’s one.”

“One,” said Moira.

“A man on the replacement bus gave me half of his sandwich. Mortadella. I’ve never had mortadella. It was lovely. Two.” She was warming to it. “The bus driver told me about the bookshop. Three. The umbrella broke, but it broke at the bus stop, not on the walk, so I only got half as wet. Four. Is that cheating?”

“Optimism is never cheating. Four.”

“The grey cat looked at me as if I were worth looking at. Five. The ginger one sat on my foot. Six. You gave me a towel. Seven.” Harriet’s voice was steadier now. “I smelled a lemon and it made me think of Saturday mornings, not of that day. That’s eight. I think that’s the biggest one. Can I count it twice?”

“You can count it as many times as you like. Eight and nine.”

“I found out thirteen is lucky in Italy. Ten.” She laughed. “I remembered Geoffrey’s grandmother’s cat. Eleven. And this tea is delicious. Twelve.”

She stopped. She looked at the cake cooling by the window, at the three cats on the tiles, at the rain sliding down the dark glass, at the scrubbed table and the empty bowls and the little heap of lemon peel she had made herself.

“I can’t think of a thirteenth,” she said.

“That’s all right,” said Moira, picking up the knife. “It’s the one that’s usually still in the oven.”

The Neighbours Arrive

Moira cut the cake into thirteen slices, which is harder than it sounds, because thirteen does not divide a circle the way a sensible number does. Every year she pretended to do it by eye and every year the slices came out slightly different sizes, which she said was part of the charm and which Toe clearly regarded as a moral failure.

As if they had smelled it from across the square, which they probably had, the neighbours began to arrive. The baker came first, shaking rain off his cap, to collect Pepe and stayed for a slice. Then the woman from the haberdashery, who said she had only come for a needle and left with a slice wrapped in a napkin. Then the postman, very late and very wet, who ate his standing up and said nothing at all except, at the end, a deep and reverent “Mamma mia.” Then two students from the language school, a grandfather with his small grand-daughter, the young couple who had just opened the flower shop, and a man nobody knew who said he was only passing through, as people in Speranza so often are.

Harriet found herself handing out slices on saucers, saying “prego” in an accent that made the grand-daughter giggle, and being told by the baker, in a mixture of Italian and enthusiastic hand gestures, that the cake was very good but not as good as his, which Moira translated as “he loves it.”

One by one the slices went. Eleven. Twelve.

When the kitchen had emptied again and the door had closed on the last cheerful “buonanotte,” there was one slice left on the plate. It was, as it happened, the largest, and it sat there under the lamp like a small golden wedge of evening.

Moira put it on a plate and set it in front of Harriet.

“Oh, no,” said Harriet. “No, I couldn’t. Surely there’s someone who needs it more.”

“I don’t think so,” said Moira. “I think it’s been waiting for you since twenty years ago, on a Friday, when someone went out to buy a lemon.”

The Thirteenth Thing

Harriet ate it slowly. The cake was soft and slightly damp in the middle, the way almond cakes should be, with a fine crumb that tasted of toasted nuts and butter. The lemon came through bright and clean, not sharp, just awake. The flaked almonds on top crackled faintly under the fork. Pepe had gone home with the baker, but Toe had taken his place on the windowsill, and Ashwaganda had resumed his post on Harriet’s foot, as though the foot were his and he had merely lent it out for the evening.

When she had finished, Harriet put down her fork and sat very still.

“Thirteen,” she said.

“Thirteen what?”

“The thirteenth good thing. I’ve found it.” She looked at Moira, and her face was wet again, but it was the good kind of wet, the kind that comes after a long time indoors. “I travelled on Friday the thirteenth, and everything went wrong, and I’m in the wrong town, with a broken umbrella and a suitcase full of damp clothes. And it’s been the best evening I’ve had in twenty years. I didn’t hide. That’s the thirteenth thing. I didn’t hide today.”

Moira did not say anything for a moment. Then she reached across the scrubbed wooden table and put her hand over Harriet’s, briefly, the way you might cover a candle flame to keep it from a draught.

“Geoffrey would have liked this cake,” Harriet said.

“Then you’ll have to make it for someone,” said Moira. “That’s the only rule. Whoever eats the thirteenth slice has to bake the cake for somebody else, one day. It doesn’t have to be a Friday. It doesn’t have to be the thirteenth. It just has to be for someone who needs the day to turn out differently.”

“I don’t have the recipe.”

Moira smiled, took a pencil from behind her ear and a clean index card from the drawer under the counter, and began to write.

In the Morning

Harriet slept that night in the small room at the top of the inn, the one with the slanted ceiling and the window over the square. She told Moira the next morning that she had slept straight through, without waking once, for the first time in longer than she could remember, and that she had dreamed of the sea at Whitby and a black cat sitting on a harbour wall.

The rain had stopped. The cobbles of Via dell’Orologio were drying in pale patches, and the clock above the square had lost its necklace of drops. The first bus to the lakes left at nine.

At the door of the bookshop, Harriet stopped, her suitcase handle in one hand. In the other she held a paper bag that Moira had pressed on her: a few spoonfuls of the Thirteenth Cup infusion, wrapped in greaseproof paper, and the index card with the recipe in Moira’s looping pencil, and a lemon. A heavy one, full of juice.

“I’ll be back,” Harriet said. “Not for the cake. Well. Partly for the cake.”

“Come on a Friday,” said Moira. “Any Friday you like.”

Toe watched from the radiator shelf as the bell rang softly behind Harriet. Ashwaganda went to the window and pressed his large ginger forehead against the glass, purring so that it misted, and watched her cross the square, pause under the clock, look up at it, and then walk on toward the bus stop without once checking the date.

“Well,” said Moira to the cats, gathering up the saucers. “That was a lucky one.”

Neither cat disagreed.

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From The Inn’s Menu: Moira’s Lemon and Almond Cake

This is the cake Harriet ate the thirteenth slice of: soft, a little moist in the middle, fragrant with lemon and toasted almonds. It is mostly ground almonds with very little flour, so it stays tender for days. Makes one 22 cm (9 inch) round cake, which you can cut into thirteen slices if you feel brave, or into eight if you feel sensible.

Ingredients

• 4 medium eggs, at room temperature
• 150 g caster sugar
• Finely grated zest of 2 unwaxed lemons
• Juice of 1 lemon (about 3 tablespoons)
• 200 g ground almonds (almond flour)
• 50 g plain flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• A pinch of salt
• 100 g unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
• 2 tablespoons flaked almonds, for the top
• Icing sugar, for dusting

Method

1. Heat the oven to 175°C (155°C fan, 350°F). Butter a 22 cm round cake tin and line the base with baking paper.
2. Beat the eggs and sugar together for 4 to 5 minutes, by hand or with a mixer, until pale, thick and doubled in volume.
3. Stir in the lemon zest. Mix the ground almonds, flour, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl, then fold them gently into the eggs with a spatula.
4. Fold in the melted butter and the lemon juice until just combined. Don’t overmix: you want to keep the air you beat in.
5. Pour into the tin, smooth the top and scatter over the flaked almonds.
6. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until golden and a skewer in the centre comes out clean. If the top browns too quickly, cover it loosely with foil for the last 10 minutes.
7. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack. Dust with icing sugar once completely cool.

Moira’s notes: for a gluten-free version, swap the plain flour for the same weight of potato starch or a gluten-free flour blend (and check your baking powder is gluten-free). The cake keeps well for three days in a tin and is, if anything, better on the second day. A spoonful of thick yogurt on the side never hurt anyone. This cake contains nuts, eggs and dairy.

A Cup for This Story: The Thirteenth Cup

A gentle, caffeine-free lemony infusion made for a rainy evening, a slice of cake, and five minutes that belong only to you.

• 1 teaspoon dried chamomile flowers
• 1 teaspoon dried lemon verbena leaves
• A few curls of dried or fresh lemon peel (only the yellow part)
• 3 or 4 flaked almonds, lightly toasted in a dry pan, if you like a soft nutty note
• 250 ml just-boiled water

Put everything into a teapot or a mug with an infuser, pour over the water, cover and steep for 5 minutes. Strain, add a little honey if you like, and drink it slowly, somewhere warm, preferably with a cat nearby. It pairs beautifully with the lemon and almond cake above.

Herbal infusions are for enjoyment, not medicine. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication, living with a medical condition, or allergic to plants in the daisy family (such as chamomile) or to nuts, please check with your doctor or pharmacist first.

Moira’s Reflection

Most of us carry a date, a place or a small object that we quietly step around, because something once happened near it. There is nothing foolish about that. But sometimes the thing we are avoiding has, over the years, grown much bigger than the memory it was protecting. A lemon is only a lemon. A Friday is only a Friday. And now and then it is worth baking something on exactly the day you used to fear, and letting the kitchen fill up with neighbours.

So tonight, if you like, try Harriet’s game: count thirteen small good things from your day. You may find the thirteenth one is still in the oven. And if you’d like to tell me about yours, or about a day you once hid from, the comments are always open, and the kettle is always on in Speranza.

Not sure which story to read next? Tell us how you’re feeling tonight and Moira will pick one for you. And if you’d like more evenings at the bookshop, the Tales of Speranza are waiting on the shelf.