The House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe

Author:Katherine Howe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2012-04-20T17:20:11+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Bosworth Street

Boston, Massachusetts

April 30, 1915

The door swung open on a merry crowd of fancifully hatted women, clinking glassware, low-hanging cigarette smoke, and the smell of cooking butter. Sibyl loitered in the entry, pulling off her gloves. She flopped them against her palm, craning her neck to look over the heads of the diners. She spotted him, pressed into the corner of a wooden booth, and Sibyl shot her hand up, waving to get Benton’s attention. Lifting his chin with an answering smile, Benton started to get to his feet, nearly shouldering aside a long-aproned waiter balancing a platter laden with covered dishes. The waiter unloaded a torrent of French on him that Sibyl gleaned rather than overheard, due to the ambient roar of the restaurant, and she laughed.

By the time she wove her way to his table Benton was standing, hands in his trouser pockets, ducking his head with embarrassment after his tongue-lashing. He took Sibyl’s hand in both of his and said, “I thought for sure I’d be thrown out of here before you made it to the table.”

“Serve you right if you did! He almost lost his Welsh rarebit, you know. That would’ve been a disaster,” Sibyl chided.

He helped her out of her coat, settling it on the hooks on the high end of the booth, and gestured for her to take the seat across from him. Sibyl didn’t usually dine in restaurants, and she enjoyed being in the noise and bustle of the room at midday. The restaurant, a venerable French institution in downtown Boston, echoed with wooden chairs scraping under the weight of diners, voices rising to make themselves heard over the din. The room was narrow, tiled in black and white, with a marble bar along one side and the row of wooden booths along the other. Several waiters swanned among the tables, platters overhead.

Benton gazed at her over his spectacles, and then looked down at the menu, chuckling.

“What is it?” Sibyl asked, noticing his laugh.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.

“What? Now you have to tell me,” she insisted.

He looked back at her across the table with a small smile. “It’s nothing much,” he said. “You had the biggest grin on your face just now. I wasn’t used to it.”

Sibyl’s eyebrows rose, and she brought an abashed hand to her cheek. “I did?” A blush crept down her hairline, warming her skin.

He smiled more broadly. “You did.”

Sibyl laughed softly, through her nose, and hid behind the menu under pretense of studying it closely.

The indifferent waiter reappeared, jotting down Benton’s poorly accented order with a hint of disapproval, including a request for a pâté en croute over Sibyl’s napkin-twisting objections. Then, after they each swallowed a long drink of water, and spent the requisite amount of time admiring the surroundings, exclaiming over how delicious everything looked at other tables, and expressing relief that the rain had begun to let up, Benton leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.

He hesitated, and then closed his hand over Sibyl’s where it rested next to her water glass.

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