For one hour, the Long Table was everything Mother Bettony had promised it would be. The hearth she was still laying when the Green Kettle opened was finished and warm, the whole of the town came down to sit at the one long board and be fed. There was barley and marrow broth, a nettle and bacon pie the size of a cart wheel, buttered river greens, a crock of the soft white cheese she cures behind the apothecary, and cider enough, she thought, to last the week. She went from seat to seat in her floury apron telling every guest exactly what was in the bowl in front of them, and for one hour Dellriven ate together.

And then Rain came in off the high path the way she comes in everywhere, polite as a Sunday and twice as smooth, that forked tongue already tasting the room from the threshold, reading every pot on the table off the warm air before she had even entered the room. Behind her came the crew, and I will do my best to account for them, though they moved too fast and too cheerfully to count. They were small, child-like even. Before the letters begin, there were a handful of Downs children among them I did recognize, I will not name here out of mercy. However, the crew numbered ten in total so that does not account for all in attendance.

What followed I can only describe as the most efficient meal I have ever watched. They did not fall on the food the way hungry people do. They ate it the way the tide takes a sandbar, steadily, thoroughly, and without any apparent hurry, and yet the pie was gone, and then the broth, and then the greens, and then the cheese she had meant to last a fortnight, and every time Mother Bettony came out of the back with another crock to fill the gap it went the same way the last one had. And here is the part the whole street has been retelling since. Bettony, who prides herself above all things on telling you what is in the dish, met her match at her own table, because Rain named every ingredient before she could, off the taste alone, down to the pinch of dried lovage in the broth that Bettony had not mentioned to a soul, and corrected her once, kindly, on the cheese. I watched our plainest, most honest cook stand there with an empty crock in her hands, out-tasted in her own supper room, and laugh until she had to sit down.

By the second hour the cider was drunk, the shelves were bare, the hearth was going cold for want of anyone left to feed, and the crew went back up the trail as easily as they had come down it, the red coat last of all. And that, the neighbours will tell you, is the true scandal, because the serpent-pirate who has emptied cellars up and down this coast for longer than the dockmen have been alive, who is known from Harrowmere to the Faded Lands for lifting a good copper pot in the night and never bringing it back, took nothing at all from the Long Table but the supper. She even left behind one thing: a copper pot, polished bright as a coin, that belongs to no one in Dellriven and that Mother Bettony has set on the mantel and will not explain.

Half the street wants a notice sent to the Bureau and the pirate charged for the ruin of an opening night. Mother Bettony will not hear it. “They came hungry and they went honest,” she told me, tart about it, wiping down the board for the next night. “That is the whole of what I ask of anyone who sits here. I will cook more.” Then she looked at the copper pot on the mantel a good while, and said nothing else.

The Long Table opens again tonight and prepare for the possibility of an eventful evening.

Rue Ashdown is the Chronicle’s wellness correspondent for the Whispering Groves pages. Tips, openings, and a good remedy for a cough may be sent to her by owl.