The Charm School

by Susan Wiggs

  He treated her with a perfect parody of courtesy. “Our first night aboard the Swan,” he declared. “We must drink a toast.”

  “I don’t drink strong spirits.” Her voice was quick and nervous.

  “Then I assure you, we’ll only serve weak ones,” Ryan said. A warning look from his mother stopped him from going on.

  “Have you any Cochituate water?” she inquired.

  “No, I don’t have any Co-kit-tuate water,” he said, unable to resist mimicking her prissy accent. “This is a sea voyage, not a temperance crusade.”

  He and Journey helped the ladies to their seats around the captain’s table. Once they were under way, formal meals like tonight’s supper would be rare, so Ryan intended to enjoy this one, Miss Peabody notwithstanding.

  As Journey poured wine from the decanter, Fayette caught his eye. “I best get to the galley,” the maid said, fixing him with a censorious glare. “I don’t hold with no wine-drinking.”

  Journey set his hands on his hips. “Girl, you’ve known me all my life. Don’t be looking at me like I got some disease.”

  “Maybe you do, Journey-boy,” Fayette said in a tone Ryan recognized from his boyhood. “You all uppity now.”

  The moment could have crackled with tension, but Journey laughed easily. “No, ma’am, I’m like any other man.”

  “Hmph.” She made a fuss over spreading Lily’s napkin in her lap. “Uppity.”

  “All men are, Fayette,” Lily said. “Every last one of them.”

  Ryan knew, when news of Journey’s freedom had reached Albion, some of the field hands had threatened to revolt. The very idea that one of their own was now living as a free man had inflamed them. Lily, newly widowed and ready to set sail for England, had postponed her trip in order to quell the hot tempers and improve living conditions for the workers.

  Isadora Peabody watched the exchange, her face draining to a pasty white. Lily laid her hand over Isadora’s. “You’ll have to excuse us, my dear. We’re family, every last one of us, and we shouldn’t be performing like this in front of company.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m not company. I’m an ‘idler,’” Miss Peabody declared.

  For some reason, everyone laughed, and the tension eased as Fayette took Journey aside and the two of them went up on deck.

  “He is your steward,” Lily said. “Do you think he should stay?”

  “Let them go, Mama. There are things they can speak of only to one another.”

  “They’ve not seen each other in a great while. What can she possibly tell him?”

  He sighed, feeling Miss Peabody’s gaze on him. “Mama, I’ve always considered myself a blood brother to Journey, but I’ve never lived in that skin. Fayette has.” Ryan ached for the man who had been his only steady friend since they were boys. He ached for Delilah, the wife Journey missed so much that sometimes Ryan heard him weeping at night, fiercely, sobbing between his clenched teeth. But when morning came, Journey always faced the day with ready strength, boldly committed to their enterprise.

  If this present voyage went well, Journey would be reunited with Delilah and their children inside a year. It was the only thing that mattered in Ryan’s life.

  The Doctor and Timothy Datty arrived with supper on a two-handled platter. The last meal before setting sail was always lavish—roasted turkey, warm fresh bread, leeks and carrots and a good red wine from the Languedoc. They spoke of the heading they would take out of Boston harbor; of Lily’s long tour of the Continent; of fabled Rio and of the aunt Ryan had never met. Or rather, Ryan and his mother spoke while Isadora listened with rapt attention. Aunt Rose had married a Brazilian coffee planter and lived in a lofty castle as grand as any storybook fortress. She and Lily had not seen one another in twenty years.

  After supper, Lily excused herself to retire for the night. Ryan accompanied her and Isadora out into the companionway. Isadora hesitated in the low arched doorway and cast a glance through the hatchway where the night sky shone with silver stars.

  Lily paused at the door to her cabin. “It’s early yet. Ryan, why don’t you take Miss Isadora on a turn around the deck?”

  It was all he could do to keep from groaning aloud. “A turn on deck?” he echoed. “This is not a pleasure cruise.” And his feelings for his clerk were anything but pleasant.

  Isadora blinked rapidly, eyeing the open sky. Then she said, “Um, I suppose…I—” She held her hands clasped tightly across her middle. “Captain Calhoun, I am in your service, and I know quite well that you are most certainly not obliged to squire me around.”

  “And you are not obliged to accept my squiring.” He felt a twinge of exasperation. He caught a warning glance from his mother. “But there is no law on land or sea that outlaws an evening stroll.”

  She looked outside again, her yearning palpable. The woman was as easy to read as an amateur card cheat. “No, there is not.”

  Lily murmured a good-night and went to her quarters.

  Resigned, he cocked his arm out at the elbow. “Shall we?”

  She nodded but didn’t take his arm, preceding him up the companion ladder. Her crinolines and tight laced-up boots made the going chancey. She hesitated midway up the ladder. It was too dark to see what the trouble was; then Ryan heard a quiet ripping sound and an “Oh, dear.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I seem to have stepped on the hem of my petticoat. I’ll just…just…oh, dear!”

  She fell backward, slamming into Ryan. He reeled against an upright stanchion. The air left him in a whoosh and for a few seconds he couldn’t breathe. Reflexively he’d flung his arms around her midsection when they’d collided. He hung on, marveling at the taut, hard shell of her corsets. Christ, how did the woman breathe?

  “Oh heavens,” she said in a small, mortified whisper. “I’ve squashed you flat.”

  “I’m fine,” he said quickly, setting her on her feet.

  She tottered a little, then grabbed the side of the ladder. “Captain Calhoun, I am terribly sorry.”

  She was so meek, so humble. This was the perfect opportunity to swath himself in the mantle of righteous anger, to declare her entirely unsuited to her duties and send her ashore. She’d offer no argument now.

  But he studied the downward angle of her head, the shoulders sloping in defeat, and he thought of her in the garden that day, a dark weed amid the flowers of Beacon Hill, the spinster pining for a shipping heir, and realized that, with a word, he could squash her flat.

  “Try holding your skirts up out of the way,” he suggested brusquely. “And tomorrow, wear fewer petticoats. And do lose the iron maiden.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Iron maiden. That damned corset.”

  She took hold of the ladder again. Ryan stood on alert, ready to catch her in case she came crashing down. She didn’t. She scrambled up and waited topside for him to follow.

  When they emerged onto the deck, a brilliant night greeted them. The southerly breeze sang lightly through the shrouds.

  “Everything’s battened down and shipshape,” Gerald Craven said, his bald head gleaming in the starlight as he made his way toward the galley. “I took care of that stowage problem.”

  “Excellent, Mr. Craven.”

  “I understand badly stowed cargo and ballast can create a problem of balance,” Isadora said as Craven left.

  Ryan was amazed she knew even the first thing about ballast. “You’ve been reading again.”

  “Charles Dana. He explains why it’s so hazardous to have the cargo poorly stowed. In heavy seas, anything left out on deck could come loose and damage the ship—or the crew. In the hold, cargo rolling around could unbalance her.”

  When she spoke of things she’d learned in books, she shed some of her awkwardness. As she stood holding the rail, he could see the strength of her grip on the varnished wood, the set of her shoulders as she faced outward from the darkened harbor. She wanted this voyage, wanted it badly. He didn’t have to ask
her why. He knew. Thinking of her parents and siblings and the way the Peabody family functioned, he knew.

  He wished she’d find another ship to make her escape on.

  She pushed her glasses down her nose and lifted her gaze to the sky. “I love the autumn constellations,” she said. “Is it the cold, do you think, that gives them such clarity?”

  “Perhaps. Why do you wear the spectacles if you’re always having to peer over them in order to see?” Ryan asked, impertinent and not caring that he was.

  “My mother feared my eyes had gone weak from too much reading, so she insisted on the spectacles. To be honest, I think I see better without them.”

  He bit his tongue to avoid saying something insulting about her mother. “So we’re off with the tide,” he said, changing the subject.

  “I thought they’d never finish loading the cargo. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much ice.”

  “White gold. Our success depends on getting it quickly to harbor in Rio. If the consignees are happy and I negotiate a nice cargo for home, the entire voyage should make Mr. Easterbrook happy.”

  “I’m curious.” She turned to face him. The glow from the binnacle lamps flickered over her rounded cheeks, the lenses of her spectacles. “You are so very ambitious, so very set on earning a fortune at this.”

  “Surely that doesn’t offend your Yankee sensibilities,” he said. This voyage, for Ryan, had many more complicated reasons, but he was quite clear on what he would do with the earnings.

  “Heavens, no. But you must admit it’s unusual for a Southern gentleman to become a Yankee skipper.”

  He was disgruntled at the way she had commandeered a place on the ship, yet curious all the same. “May I say something quite personal?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “No.”

  “Then go on.”

  “Miss Peabody, I think we’re both the black sheep of our families. I because I refuse to build my fortune on the backs of slaves, and you because you…” Damn. He’d talked himself into a corner now.

  “Because I’m the plain spinster in a family of beautiful and popular socialites,” she finished for him. “You are quite correct, Captain Calhoun.” She started to walk away.

  He caught her arm. “Do not put words in my mouth. That’s not what I meant.”

  She stared at his hand on her arm for so long that he felt awkward and released her. “I see. Then what, pray, did you mean?”

  “Simply that…Oh, hell. Are you always this sensitive?”

  “Yes. It is one of my great failings.” She looked toward the bow. They could see the silhouettes of Journey and Fayette there, shadows against the lights along the shore. They stood with their heads bent close, deep in conversation.

  “They’re speaking of home,” Ryan explained. “Fayette can tell him things…no one else can possibly know.”

  “Why would he want to hear news of the place where he was in bondage?” she asked.

  Ryan hesitated, then decided there was no harm in telling her. “Because he left a part of himself behind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His wife and children. They belong to our neighbors, the Beaumonts.”

  Her gasp ended on a quiet, heartfelt sob. “Dear lord,” she said. “Then freedom for him is exile.”

  “It was a hard choice to make.” Ryan remembered how he’d lain awake night after night, agonizing as the day of his departure for Harvard drew closer. “If I freed him, he would never be able to see his family again. But if he remained a slave, he’d live as half a man, bound to me for all his days, and his children after him.”

  Miss Isadora Dudley Peabody burst into tears.

  Discomfited, Ryan groped in his pocket and found a clean handkerchief. “I take it you have strong feelings on the issue of slavery?”

  “That’s precisely it. I thought I did, but until this moment I never quite grasped what it means. You did the right thing.” She blew her nose audibly, then rushed the handkerchief in her fist. “I’ll launder it for you,” she promised.

  He almost smiled, but stopped himself. He didn’t need anyone’s approval, let alone the admiration of this prissy Boston woman. They were worlds apart; it was simply the circumscribed closeness of shipboard life that gave the illusion of intimacy.

  “I had best retire,” Isadora said. “I know I shan’t sleep a wink, but I promised myself I would try.”

  She started toward the companion ladder. Her feet, enclosed in the flimsy little boots with high, wobbling heels, moved uncertainly over the deck. The shoes, he decided, would have to go. So would the Beacon Hill matron costume. The voluminous black-and-gray skirts and petticoats, the rigid shell of the corset, all the trappings of propriety had no place on a working ship. Her damned hair alone was a problem, too, since she insisted in scraping it all up into a knot on her head and then letting those curls trail down in the front. So the hair, too, he decided. She’d have to change that along with the dress and the shoes.

  He smiled at the image. Getting the very proper Miss Peabody to slap about on deck like a barefoot sailor would prove a challenge indeed.

  Ryan had always enjoyed a challenge.

  Eight

  You know how often we have longed for a sea voyage, as the fulfillment of all our dreams of poetry and romance, the realization of our highest conceptions of free, joyous existence…. Let me assure you, my dears…that going to sea is not at all the thing that we have taken it to be.

  —Harriet Beecher Stowe,

  Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands

  Isadora dreamed of a pack of wolves snapping at her from all sides, chewing the heels off her shoes, ripping her petticoats to shreds. Rudely stirred from sleep by a piercing whistle, she lay in her bunk at dawn and knew the wolves in her dream were actually misgivings.

  She inhaled air so damp it seemed to drench her lungs. Her back ached from lying huddled in a cramped space in the dark. Last night’s turkey and claret sat ill in her stomach, and when she rose to avail herself of the chamberpot—that in itself a disgusting operation she endured only by scrunching her eyes shut tight and refusing to think of it—she smacked her head on a beam so hard she saw stars.

  Sitting on the edge of the bunk, she rubbed her head and peered out the woefully tiny portal. Indeed, they had left their berth in the harbor and were now at anchor; they’d be headed out to sea any moment.

  The night before, she’d managed to struggle out of her corset and had slept in her chemise. She eyed the garment—a Corset Amazone that her mother had ordered specially from Freebodys—with loathing. The great fallacy of the corset was that it did not sheer off fullness; it merely displaced it to uncomfortable locales. Captain Calhoun had not been far wrong in calling it an iron maiden, after a medieval torture device.

  Resigned, she stood up to don the corset. A sharp pain shot up her leg, stealing her breath. She sank back to the bunk, holding out her left ankle. It resembled a great sausage, swollen and discolored. Gingerly she touched the bruise, wincing at the pain. She must have injured herself when she fell off the ladder—directly onto Captain Calhoun.

  This is not a pleasure cruise. His sarcastic words, uttered the night before, still rang in her ears.

  Dear lord, had she ever actually thought she belonged on this voyage?

  People had told Isadora all her life that she was foolish. Now, at last, she was fulfilling the prophecy. What possible business did she have on a ship, living among men of dubious repute and bound for the pirate-infested waters of the south Atlantic?

  Gritting her teeth, she struggled through the ordeal of getting dressed, her conviction hardening with each moment. She was Isadora Dudley Peabody of the Beacon Hill Peabodys. She should be home reading a book or embroidering slipper tops, perhaps drinking tepid coffee from a china cup. Not bumping around in a tiny cabin trying to tie her own stays and bring order to her wild, waist-length hair.

  Perhaps, she thought, her urgent fingers grappling with stay wires and corse
t hooks, there was still time to turn away, to back out. If she hurried, she could get herself on a lighter boat or launch; surely there were any number of skiffs plying back and forth across Boston harbor.

  Yes, that was the thing to do. That was precisely it. She looped her hair a few times and stabbed it into place with some pins, rammed on her bonnet and spectacles and hastened out of the cabin. Pain blazed from her ankle, but she forced herself to keep a steady gait. A wall of sea-fresh air greeted her in the companionway. Through the hatch, she could see men running to and fro, their faces intense as they discharged their duties, their voices raised in jolly song:

  “All hands on board!

  Farewell to friends!

  ’Tis the signal for unmooring

  We’re bound across the ocean blue,

  Heave your anchor to the bow,

  And we’ll think on those girls when we’re far, far away,

  And we’ll think on those girls when we’re far, far away.”

  Ryan Calhoun stood on deck and once again Isadora was struck by the dazzling male beauty that emanated like sunlight from him. He was sipping from an enameled metal mug and speaking with a customs official. They referred to a mass of scrolled papers strewn across the navigators’ desk. Though she hated to interrupt, she knew she had to act fast to get herself back home where she belonged.

  Home? The house on Beacon Hill? When had she ever belonged there?

  She thrust aside the questions. Though she might be a misfit in her own life, she was even more out of place here on this ship, where men in rope-belted trousers scrambled up rigging and masts and swore even when they knew a lady was around.

  “Captain Calhoun,” she said, puffing a little as she hoisted herself up the companion ladder to the next deck. She hobbled along on her injured ankle. “Captain, I must speak to you of a—”

  “Ah, Miss Peabody.” Ryan nodded brusquely at her. Then, rude as Foster Candy, he turned back to the port official. “I’ve already furnished three copies of the manifest, sir. As to that claim form, I—”