My Short Story Sweets and Spirits Ball from the Eve of Love Anthology
Ten love stories on the eve of midnight
We invite you to enjoy Hearts Through History’s debut anthology—The Eve of Love, as we take you through three hundred years of family tradition—a New Year’s Eve Costume Ball where love conquers all.
Chapter One
Tokyo’s foreign quarter of Tsukiji
December 30, 1872
“I wasn’t the one who insisted upon Hoppin’ John,” Oliver pointed out as he and Lydia passed a copse of leafless cherry trees, their spindly branches scoring the wintery sky. “That was you.”
Lydia straightened as though taken aback by a most preposterous suggestion. “But it was you who said it was an important New Year tradition in the American South.”
He and Lydia were talking. Not just talking, they were having a playful tête-à-tête while strolling the Grand Oriental Hotel gardens like any other young couple in Tsukiji.
How long had he wanted this?
“I did, and it is,” Oliver said with exaggerated obstinance. He doubted a dish of American beans and rice had ever been so thoroughly debated in the city of Tokyo by a Scottish woman and a British man. Then again, they were in the foreign quarter, and anything was possible in the modern world.
Sharp winds off Tokyo Bay turned Lydia’s cheeks crimson. Shoving her hands deeper into the dark fur muff at her neat waist, she nodded as though having reached a definitive conclusion. “Then we’ll include Hoppin’ John. The Americans ought to have one of their New Year traditions represented at the ball.”
“That means eliminating one of the other late additions,” he reminded her. “Chef Yamaguchi said he couldn’t add any more dishes.” The Grand Oriental chef had accommodated all the “urgent” menu requests Lydia had made over the past few days. With the ball scheduled for the following night, the esteemed chef had drawn the line at Hoppin’ John.
Lydia came to a halt before the sea wall separating the hotel grounds from the bay. Her muff quaked. She must be rolling her hands inside. Her frustration was adorable.
Their gazes met, and the aching need that always strained him when she was near increased tenfold. He loved the color of her eyes. The hue reminded him of Scottish grasslands under a blanket of morning dew.
“How can we eliminate a dish?” she asked. “That would be unfair.” Oliver wanted to swipe his thumb across her pleated brow and leave a kiss in its wake. “The Dutch are expecting their oliebollen. If they don’t fill themselves to the gullet, the belly-slitting goddess’ sword will go straight through them.”
Yesterday, to a very perplexed Chef Yamaguchi, she’d explained how fried dough balls coated the Dutchmen’s bellies in oil, so the goddess’ sword slipped off. “The Voulgaropoulos family asked specifically for a cake with several coins baked inside that would bring luck to guests who discovered them on their plates. Then there’s the Gunnarsson family. They’ve been residents since the Japanese gave us Tsukiji. They have three daughters of marriageable age. We must have a pudding with a peeled almond inside. If one of them gets it, she’s sure to find true love in the coming year. That’s their country’s tradition.”
Gossip around Tsukiji was that Lydia needed to make a match in the coming year, or her grandparents would insist she return to Scotland. Fortunately, the gossip also indicated Lydia had no desire to leave Tsukiji.
Oliver could help her stay. That would mean courting, which would mean him proposing they court, and the prospect of proposing a courtship had left him paralyzed. Until today.
Probably owing to years spent negotiating wartime engineering crises, this afternoon’s New Year’s Eve ball crisis had kept his shyness in check. He was the seventh of ten siblings in a family headed by a father whose regimental style rivaled that of Oliver’s more diligent superiors in the Union army. Most of the men in his family had gone to war. His grandfather had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. His father had fought in the Afghanistan war from ‘39 until ’42. Oliver had gone to the United States to join the war effort because fighting wars in foreign places was what Collingsworth men did.
After the war, he and his mates—brothers by choice—among whom were fortune seekers, pleasure seekers, and a few lost souls like himself, had gone westward and hadn’t stopped until they’d reached Japan. Away from the authority of his father and the military, Oliver’s shyness had become less of an everyday affliction and more of an occasional problem that tended to strike whenever he attempted to deepen his friendship with Lydia.
But today, they’d finally bantered, and it’d been better than he’d imagined. It’d electrified him.
