Calhoun Chronicles Bundle

by Susan Wiggs

  “And where is your home district, Mr. Calhoun?” Miss Helena’s voice was as attractive as the rest of her, so soothing it was almost bland.

  “I’m a Chesapeake boy, ma’am. Born and raised at Albion Plantation on Mockjack Bay.”

  “And how are you finding life in the capital?” asked Miss Helena.

  “I like it fine, ma’am, though I fear I’ll soon be homeless. I’ve been living at a boardinghouse near Snow’s Park, but the place has been sold and must be vacated. I despair of finding new lodgings.”

  Miss Helena’s face lit up, radiant as a Raphael Madonna. “You should come to Georgetown, then. Our neighbor, Dr. Rowan, lives alone in a large town house and, well, you know it’s just a crime what they pay even the most gifted professor. I’m certain he would welcome a boarder.”

  “Helena,” Miss Abigail said, her voice harsher than her sister’s, her diction more clipped, “surely Mr. Calhoun doesn’t need our help in finding lodgings.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, pleased to see opportunity opening with such ease. “I’d be grateful for any help.” He grinned down at her, pretending to have no notion at all that he’d displeased Miss Abigail.

  The orchestra broke in with a long, tuning A. Butler snapped to attention like a guard on duty. “The ‘Emperor Waltz,”’ he announced. “Miss Cabot, if you would do me the honor.” He held out his hand to Helena.

  Jamie should have given Abigail time to compose herself, but he didn’t. He turned to her too quickly and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. Naked yearning and inconsolable heartbreak, coupled with a strange, almost weary joy. Her hands, clad in soiled gloves, knotted nervously together. She was the very picture of misery. He wasn’t doing a very good job of playing the hero.

  “Miss Cabot, may I have the pleasure of this dance?” he asked, favoring her with a practiced bow and a smile that had worked on more women than he cared to remember.

  She glared up at him, face pinched, eyes narrowed. “No, I think not, but thank you for asking.”

  At first, the rejection didn’t even sink in. Only once in his life had Jamie been rejected by a woman. Of course, that episode had been eclipsed by the ensuing events. Since that day, he’d always believed being turned down by that woman had been both the best and the worst thing ever to happen to him. But he had never forgotten the brief, vicious sting of that feminine no.

  “You don’t care to dance?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve never been fond of going in backward circles. In fact, I’m quite weary of it.”

  “Very well. Then I’ll let you lead.”

  She blinked in surprise. Her extremely blue eyes—surely her best feature—studied him with new curiosity. “That would be unorthodox.”

  “It would. Do you disapprove?”

  “No.” She craned her neck to search past him. “However, my father would.”

  Jamie decided not to press his cause. Franklin Cabot was the whole reason for this tiresome game in the first place. “In that case,” he said, “I insist you mollify my bruised affections with a stroll in the gardens.”

  She laughed aloud, a startling burst of merry sound. “I’m not like your other women. I think you would survive without mollification, Mr. Calhoun.”

  “Why do you say that? I might be very fragile,” he pointed out.

  She laughed again, even louder this time, drawing a few stares but seeming not to notice. “In that case,” she said, “I shall cruelly leave your shattered heart to be swept up with tomorrow’s ashes.” With that, she walked away. She had a curious gait, quick but uneven. Now she was fleeing again, but this time he wouldn’t let her go, couldn’t afford to.

  “Please stop following me,” she said without slowing her pace or looking at him.

  “I can’t help myself. You’re the most interesting person I’ve met all night.”

  Another laugh, this one curt and bitter. “Then you’d best introduce yourself to more people,” she advised. “I warrant you can do better.”

  He placed his hand beneath her elbow and steered her toward the French doors. “Your modesty is becoming, but unnecessary.”

  At her pull of resistance, a surprising heat stirred between them, and he held her elbow more firmly. He hadn’t been expecting to feel genuine curiosity about her. Normally he preferred his women beautiful and brainless. They posed no challenge. No threat.

  Abigail Cabot was not beautiful and she was far from brainless. She was short both of stature and of temper. Yet he found himself intrigued by her. He wondered what it would be like to explore the thoughts behind those vaguely unsettling, midnight-blue eyes.

  “Believe me,” she said, “I’m not being modest.”

  He guided her toward the northeast gate. “It’s an overrated virtue anyway.”

  “I’m not going outside with you,” she said, trying to disengage her elbow from his grip.

  He could tell by the flaming color in her cheeks that she was thinking of the private liaison she’d interrupted earlier in the evening. “Miss Cabot, your virtue is safe, I promise.”

  “Why should I trust you? I don’t even know you.”

  “Trust yourself, then. A man can’t take a woman’s virtue unless she surrenders it. You don’t appear to be the surrendering type.”

  To his relief, she seemed satisfied with the comment. Dropping her resistance, she accompanied him out to the shadowy patio.

  “Beautiful night,” he commented.

  “Not really.” She angled her face to the night sky. “It’s only slightly above average.”

  “Are you always this argumentative?”

  “Just objective.” She pointed at a broad constellation. “The North American Nebula is barely visible tonight, the Double Cluster in Perseus is unimpressive and we can only see a glimmer of Barnard’s Loop.”

  In most women, a smattering of knowledge was charming, but Abigail did not offer the explanation in order to charm him, he could tell. Nor did she possess only a smattering of education. She probably had an encyclopedic knowledge of the night sky, and God knew what else. The woman was beyond irritating—she was literal, contentious and prickly.

  “Fine,” he said. “It is an average night. What of the wedding? Was it an average wedding?”

  She pushed her finger absently at her lower lip, showing no comprehension of the fact that he was teasing. “Heavens, no. It was distinctly above average.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because it was a love match.”

  “Now, that,” he said with a chuckle, “is overrated.”

  “Love?”

  “Indeed.” He couldn’t begin to tell her how deeply he believed that.

  “Then obviously you have never been in love, or you wouldn’t say that.”

  If only she knew. But of course, she never would. “And you. You’ve fallen in love?”

  She held his gaze with hers. “With every bit of my heart.”

  Her absence of coyness and stark honesty inspired a stir of feeling that took him by surprise. And she was so completely misguided that he felt compelled to point out her error. “Lieutenant Boyd Butler,” he said, playing a hunch.

  She ducked her head and shifted her gaze away.

  “Then why is he dancing with your sister?”

  “I know you’re from the coast country, sir, but you don’t appear to be stupid. My sister cannot enter a room without causing half a dozen men to fall in love with her. Mr. Butler is no different.”

  “So you claim to love him, but he is smitten with your sister.”

  “This is really none of your affair.”

  “But I feel compelled to point out something you don’t realize,” Jamie said. “You’re not in love with Boyd Butler. You never were.”

  She bristled and scowled at him. “I most certainly am. How would you know, anyway?”

  He ignored the question. “When did this epiphany happen?”

  “I’ve known him since we were children. Our fathers are friend
s. It was no epiphany, sir. It’s something that has been building for years. But tonight…” Her voice trailed off, and her pointy, intense face turned sweet and soft, startling him. “Tonight we shared a special moment.”

  A rather one-sided moment, but he didn’t call attention to that. “And what does it feel like, your great love for the lieutenant?”

  She frowned. “Like…finding the solution to a mathematical problem simply by inspection and intuition. Even though he doesn’t reciprocate my feelings, simply knowing that I love him makes me happy.”

  “There,” he said. “That proves you don’t love him.”

  “What? The fact that he makes me happy?”

  “Yes.” He took her hand, feeling its small warm shape inside the snug glove. “Falling in love does not make a person happy. Tell me, have you ever fallen on your face?”

  She frowned at him in suspicion. “Yes.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think they call it falling in love? When you truly fall in love, you’ll know it. You will weep with the knowledge.”

  “Nonsense. Why would I weep?”

  Ignoring propriety, he brought up his hand, grazing his knuckles along her cheekbone. She seemed so shocked by his boldness that she didn’t move or speak. Her skin was silken and fragile beneath his touch. He heard the breath catch in her throat, and suddenly he wanted to push her, to tempt her. But he didn’t, because her odd, prickly attitude shook him. He dropped his hand.

  “Because, my dear Miss Cabot, it will hurt so much.”

  Three

  At Number 32, Dumbarton Street in Georgetown, Abigail nearly stumbled in her haste to reach her chamber. She, Helena and her father had arrived home late, and by that time her discomfort was extreme. She managed a cordial good-night to her sister and father, then retreated to the privacy of her third-floor room. The narrow stairwell of the Georgian-style town house never seemed steeper than it did after a night of dancing and engaging in pointless conversation.

  Before retiring, she and Helena had unfastened each other’s bodices and corsets so as not to wake Dolly. Many ladies of quality thought nothing of rousing their personal servants at all hours, but Helena and Abigail would never dream of doing so. The housekeeper had left a ewer of hot water on the wash-stand, and it was still lukewarm. Abigail threw a handful of Epsom salts into the basin, set it on the floor and poured in the water. Then, issuing a sigh of relief, she untied and removed her shoe. With an even deeper sigh, she sank her right foot into the water and shut her eyes. The sharp pains that arched through her foot were as intimately familiar as the loneliness that crept upon her at odd moments.

  She leaned back in the chair, glowering at the discarded prisonlike boot she had worn for as long as she could remember, day in and day out. When she was small, she used to pray for the ugly, twisted limb to grow into a dainty well-shaped foot that matched the left one.

  Now that she was grown, she had given up praying for the impossible. She’d been born with the affliction and she would die this way. In between, she would stumble through dances and promenades with her secret concealed beneath the hem of her gown. That was to be her lot in life, and she was determined to accept it. With weary eyes, she stared at her bad foot in the water.

  Her mother had died moments after giving birth to Abigail—an undersize newborn with a deformed foot. What a terrible curse that must have been to Beatrice Gavin Cabot, renowned for her fortune, her pride in being married to an ambitious young senator and her joy in her first daughter, Helena. What grief Abigail’s mother must have suffered, holding her malformed second baby while bleeding to death. In Abigail’s mind, the tragedy was always and inexorably linked to her imperfection. It was something she lived with every day, a shadow that moved beside her with every crooked step she took.

  But maudlin thoughts were as annoying as they were pointless, so she pushed aside her bleak reflections and lifted her foot from the warm water.

  She shed her gown and undergarments, hanging them in the dressing room and putting on a floor-length nightgown and robe. Donning a pair of carpet slippers, she left the room as quietly as she could. The slippers did not correct her limp as well as the specially made shoe did, but she had only a short way to go. Opening a low, narrow doorway at the end of the hall, she climbed the stairs to the roof.

  The midnight sanctuary welcomed her. It was the one place she always belonged, because it belonged wholly to her. Ever since she was very young, Abigail had harbored an intense fascination with the night sky. At the age of five, she suffered terrible troubles in her sleep, and took to creeping to the window at night and sitting for hours, staring up at the stars. As her schooling progressed, she used to devil her tutors with questions about the vast universe until she exhausted their knowledge. Finally her father had engaged an impoverished mathematics student at Georgetown who’d given her a map of the stars and a folio of photographs made of the stars and planets.

  She’d saved her clothing allowance for years in order to build her rooftop sanctuary—Abigail’s folly, her father and sister called it—but they had learned long ago not to argue with her about her abiding passion. And so Abigail Cabot became the only woman in the capital to own an observatory.

  It was not ideal, for the thick atmospheric conditions at sea level often interfered with her stargazing. Still, she made do, only occasionally yearning for clearer, brighter skies.

  The swiveling domed structure was patterned after the private observatory of Maria Mitchell, the most eminent astronomer in the country, now retired and living on her pension from Vassar Female College. But Abigail had a gift even the great Professor Mitchell lacked. She could see sharper and farther with her naked eye than anyone on record.

  She had always been blessed, or cursed, depending on how one looked at it, with almost inhumanly acute vision, always the first to see a ship on the horizon, or a flock of migrating geese overhead. Her strong perception of color showed her springtimes so green her eyes smarted, and autumns so intensely orange and gold that her heart ached. Struck by the beauty around her, she often felt twinges of sentiment she didn’t understand.

  When she picked out constellations others couldn’t see without a telescope, people used to think she was playing a hoax, but a series of tests at the university and the Naval Observatory proved her claim. Perhaps this was how nature had compensated Abigail for her damaged foot.

  The moon had set, creating a better field for naked-eye viewing. For a few moments, she forgot her ennui about earthly matters, sat down on a low stool and lost herself among the stars. Although the sensation was decidedly unscientific, she felt herself moving beyond the earth, beyond the known world into something infinite and mysterious.

  Drawing in a breath of crisp autumn air scented by wood smoke and drying leaves, she swept the sky with her gaze.

  “Hello, Mother,” she whispered to the woman she had never known. “I danced tonight. With Lieutenant Boyd Butler. It was so wonderful. You would have been proud of me—” She broke off, her musings rudely invaded by the image of her nearly falling, then finding herself caught in the arms of the insolent Jamie Calhoun.

  She scowled away the memory and continued. “The vice president’s son. Can you imagine, Mother? Of course you can. Father was a politician’s son, too. Perhaps it’s in our blood to love men who govern. Mr. Calhoun—another man I met tonight, but he’s quite a different sort than Lieutenant Butler—claims it is not love at all because it doesn’t make me want to weep and rage and pound the floor and tear my hair out. Of course, none of it matters, anyway. Boyd Butler will never know what is in my heart, and it will be another of my secrets. So. I just thought you’d want to know that. Good night, Mother. I love you.”

  Abigail’s whisper faded into the chill air. She came up here every night not just to engage in fanciful one-sided conversations with a ghost, but to study the sky. And not just because it was beautiful and vast and mysterious, though it was all of
those things. She was looking for something.

  She was looking for a comet.

  When she told this to people, they often looked baffled and shook their heads. “Wouldn’t it be easier to find a needle in a haystack?” they would ask.

  Abigail never expected it to be easy. She didn’t ever expect to give up, either. Helena might sort through their mother’s jewels and pictures, looking for her in old keepsakes, but Abigail knew better. If she were ever to find her mother, it would be up in the vast night sky, hidden among the stars.

  “Good morning, Papa dearest.” Bursting into the dining room, Helena sang the greeting off-key, causing him and Abigail to wince. “Good morning, sister dearest.” Leaning down, she kissed each of them. “And what a beautiful day it is.”

  Their father smiled indulgently and set aside his Washington Post, which he had been studying with deep absorption. Removing his silver-rimmed spectacles from their perch on his nose, he stood to hold out Helena’s chair for her. “Indeed it is.”

  Abigail had supplied him with the same information a few minutes before, but he must have forgotten. She smiled at Helena, too; she couldn’t help it. Someone as comely as her sister should be an object of flaming envy, but the fact was, Helena’s looks were no more her fault than Abigail’s foot was hers.

  Their father offered Helena a basket of biscuits and jam, and she thanked him with a smile. “Coffee?” he offered.

  “Yes, please.”

  A maid stepped forward to fill her cup.

  “Abigail?” their father asked, “would you like some coffee?”

  “I drink tea, Father. Thank you, though.” She drank tea at breakfast every single morning.

  Abigail loved the mornings when the three of them had breakfast together. Franklin Rush Cabot was not a demonstrative father, and time spent with him was precious. Sometimes she thought Helena avoided serious talk of marriage because she did not wish to leave their father. He was the only constant in their lives, the sun around which they orbited.