Chapter Text
It was simply perfect.
"That fireplace goes straight through to the second room. You have your stove over here. Cold water only from this pump, but the pipes in back come up from the steamworks."
Dori turned around slowly in the middle of the front room as Glóin son of Gróin ran down the list of amenities. His gut was adamant: this was the very place.
True, the apartments were not very big, but cosy was hardly faint praise for his purposes. A sitting room, a nook of a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bath and water closet were all he really needed. It was the quality that mattered most, and the clean limestone walls and intricate tiling spoke of talented hands. The sounds of the street had faded the moment the sturdy oak door was shut—not that Locket Street was noisy to begin with—and all was snug and quiet.
This was in fact the sixteenth set of crafter’s apartments that Dori had been shown over the past week, and each of the others had been dismissed upon first sight, sound, and smell. He had thought himself prudent in engaging local landlords, for who would better know the hidden gems of the town? Yet his faith had proven misplaced as one by one they had taken him to bustling streets crowded with restaurants and public houses, boasting of traffic and travellers as if he wanted either of them.
Glóin was his last resort, and to his chagrin it now seemed obvious that only a fellow dwarf of Erebor could be counted upon to know what a proper tea house was meant to look like. Dori gazed contentedly through the little round glass window that looked out onto the street, which was a respectable boulevard of jewellers, scribes, and tailors. He lived only a few blocks away, though admittedly where the road was not quite as nicely cobbled, and a short walk would bring him home to Ori every evening for dinner and then again for breakfast and to see him off to lessons.
"Well?"
Flirting was unlikely to get him very far with a married dwarf, but Dori cast an arch-browed look at his best angle nonetheless. Smitten he might be, but he was no fool and would not be rushed. He set out upon a thorough inspection of the premises, aware of Glóin's gaze following him admiringly. His eyes took measure of the floor space and the height of the ceilings. He felt each wall for signs of damp and tested first the cold pump in the kitchen and then the hot water in the back room.
Curtains, he thought as he investigated the little alcove kitchen. Trimmed in silk, a muted purple perhaps, hiding away any untidiness. In the sitting room, he entertained the phantom images of a low, graceful table and an elegant couch for reclining in front of the fire. On the opposite hearth, in the bedroom, a warg's pelt would be just the thing. Would there be space? He did not wish to stint on the size of the bed, but certainly there had to be a hearth rug.
He schooled his features into calculated disinterest. "How much?"
"Forty-five for the year. In coin, paid upfront." Glóin added, a touch apologetically: "A lot of overhead expenses with tea."
Dori's cheeks flushed. He knew it all too well. There was a world's difference between moonlighting from his tinker's cart and opening his own establishment. He had already resigned himself to spending every copper penny from his inheritance in preparation. Accommodations and furnishings were only the beginning. There was food and drink to buy, and only the best would do. He would need to arrange for delivery of firewood and contract out his messaging and laundry. Bedsheets, candles, oils, soap—none of it could come cheaply if he did not wish himself to be thought mean.
"Forty," he said, tallying up the niceties that could be bought with the extra money. "These rooms have sat empty for more than a month, the way that pump creaked."
Glóin snorted and gave him a sly glance. "It's too much storage and too little shop for the merchants, but you'll be doing your crafting in the bedroom. It's worth forty-five to you, but I will knock off one piece because we're countrymen."
Dori refrained from pointing out that they were kinsmen as well, in blood if not on paper. "Forty-one and you install a proper bath. Stone, not wood or iron. Four feet by three by one and a half, minimum."
"Forty-three," Glóin countered. "I'll only need to tear it out again if you've gone out of business by year's end."
"Forty-two," Dori said firmly, "pending my approval of the bath, which is to be finished within the next fortnight."
Glóin tugged on his beard in a show of irritation, but the little smile on his lips suggested that Dori might have had him at forty-one after all.
"Agreed."
It was too late for regrets. A scroll case was drawn from Glóin's pocket in short order, and their terms were recorded in neat, precise wording. Glóin signed with a flourish and then passed the quill to him.
Dori paused for an instant, nib poised above the paper. The price might have been fair, but it was no trifle. His heartbeat was galloping, and his mouth ran dry. He had never spent such a sum all at once in his life, and surely neither had his mother, who had scraped every spare fleck of gold from not only her own earnings but from the dwindled fortunes of too many lost kinsmen. They were the last now, him and Nori and Ori. He was head of the family and charged with managing his share of their modest wealth as he saw fit.
If he did not spend it all, he might never spend any of it. He would hold it, tight-fisted, and perhaps he would tell himself he was keeping it in trust for Ori, and not for those who would never come back to claim it. Yet a business meant more than his own profit. A business was something for a family to take pride in, and it seemed somehow fitting to trade those last coins and little treasures of Erebor in order to set down their roots in a respectable place and put their days of travelling to an end.
He touched quill to contract. Dori son of Helri.
"A tea house in the Blue Mountains," Glóin said, chuckling. "Who would believe it?"
Dori looked around at all the empty possibility of his new shop and drew a deep breath. They might not believe it, but perhaps the curious would come to see for themselves. His door would be open then, and he would be waiting with tea and scones and his most welcoming smile. Only luck would decide whether they stepped through the doorway, but he trusted that if they did, a taste of his hospitality would be enough to bring them back for more.