Bleeker Street was bustling with people on their way to work, carts making deliveries to the various businesses and homes along the street, and a few people still stumbling their way home after a long and eventful night. Across from The Slope, the police had taken down the barriers surrounding The Slide, but it didn’t appear as though anyone had returned to the building yet. Whatever the case with their neighbor after the police activity, the rest of Bleeker Street was functioning as normally as it ever did.
“When did you arrive from London and where are you staying?” Beckett asked as they walked along the shabby but homey street. He figured ordinary conversation was the best place he could start to lift Noah’s spirits.
“I only just arrived the day before yesterday,” Noah said in a faint, despondent voice. “And I’m staying at The Grand Hotel on Bowery.”
“That’s right nearby,” Beckett said, stating the obvious because he had nothing else to say.
It was Noah’s turn to simply hum his answer instead of speaking.
As far as conversations went, theirs wasn’t starting off well. As high as Noah’s spirits had been in the club as he’d confessed his love to Marcus, they were low and depressed now. Then again, Beckett could hardly blame the man for feeling bad after what he’d just gone through.
“The restaurant is right around the corner,” he said, smiling and speaking cheerfully in the hope that he could lift Noah’s spirits again. “And how was your crossing?”
Noah glanced to him with a smile. “You’re kind, you know that?”
Beckett smiled in response. “I’m just trying to help a friend,” he said. “Remember? We decided that the two of us should be friends last night because we have a great deal in common.”
Noah laughed sullenly. “Do we?” he asked as they turned the corner and headed up Broadway. “Has the love of your life been bewitched by a devil who has stolen his heart?”
Beckett’s affable smile dropped. He didn’t know how to respond to that. He liked Jasper, and he’d watched with interest as his and Marcus’s romance had blossomed. The two of them were happy. But that didn’t mean he didn’t feel the deepest sort of sympathy for his new friend. He knew what it was like to pine for a man, after all. And who was to say that Marcus was meant for Jasper instead of Noah?
“Worse than that,” he said, smiling again and trying to keep things light. “The object of my affections hasn’t been bewitched by anyone, he’s just indifferent.”
Noah glanced to him, and his anxious look of misery softened into sympathy. He even reached out and patted Beckett’s shoulder. “Love is a tyrant, is she not?” he asked. “She ties us up in her silken webs, then leaves us dangling.”
Beckett laughed. “You have a way with words, my friend.”
Noah looked pleased to have been called a friend.
They crossed over Bond Street, then headed toward the newish restaurant Beckett had discovered a few months ago. The farther they walked from the scene of Noah’s embarrassment, the cheerier Noah seemed to be.
“I never asked last night,” Noah said as they entered the restaurant and helped themselves to a table. “How is it that a rather fine gentleman such as yourself spends so much time in a part of the city that even I can see is not quite the thing?”
Beckett laughed as he settled himself at the table and waited for someone to come hand them menus or take their order. “It is because I am one of those horrible men of leisure that you have heard so much about.”
“What, you have no job and no livelihood?” Noah asked, surprised. “You don’t look like it.”
“I do, in fact, have a job,” Beckett said, nodding to the young man who came to hand them menus. “But as it would happen, it is not a job that requires my presence all that often.”
Noah frowned as the waiter handed him a menu. “I do not understand,” he said. “What sort of job does not require your presence?”
The conversation was halted as they ordered, then as the waiter brought them coffee.
“My father owns a glassworks,” Beckett explained once they’d been left alone. “Quite a successful one at that. It produced plate glass for windows, and of late, my father has begun manufacturing casements and coverings for lanterns and streetlights.”
Noah’s brow shot up as he drank his coffee. “That sounds like it could be lucrative. Every new building needs windows, and there is so much construction underway these days.”
“There is,” Beckett agreed with a nod. “My father has made an obscene amount of money from his industry. Even before my sister and I were born. He is what high society likes to call ‘new money’.”
“Oh, I see,” Noah laughed. “London has that as well.”
There was something free and easy about Noah’s laughter. It made Beckett want to say things that would draw it out.
“My father employs me,” he went on, “but I don’t really have an aptitude for business. I manage his social calendar. Which includes promotional appearances and business luncheons as well as grand balls and an attempt to ingratiate ourselves with the loftier families of New York, the Astors and such.”
“EvenI’veheard of the Astors,” Noah said with a cheeky smirk. His expression shifted again—the man really was extraordinarily expressive—and he said, “So why, if you have your finger on the pulse of society, would you spend so much time downtown? I learned quite a bit while researching Marcus’s whereabouts, you know. Even though much of that research was done while still in London, by asking fellow members of The Brotherhood if they’d heard from him.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of your Brotherhood,” Beckett said. He glanced around quickly to see if anyone was listening to them. But few people spent their time at a restaurant with such good food eavesdropping on the conversations of others. “It’s rather like the society we’ve formed at the clubs of the Bowery. That society is the reason I spend so much time here instead of bothering myself with the Park Avenue crowd.”