The Charm School

A black-lacquered coach rumbled past, the muscular team straining up the red brickwork slope. It felt strange to tread these streets, this place of pretense. The inhabitants pushed hard at the wheels of commerce, yet their wealth was inherited, built solidly on the backs of the opium and slave trades. Not so different from his own father, Ryan reflected, though rather than trafficking in slaves he had merely owned them.

Ryan was considered a traitor to his class for enrolling in the radical Yankee institution known as Harvard. When he’d been dismissed from the university, he’d never thought to return to Beacon Hill again. Certainly he didn’t think he’d be welcome, having disgraced himself by running away to sea.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” Journey grumbled. “You should have written the plaguey female a note and said no thank you to her offer.”

Ryan scanned the discreet brass plaques identifying each house they passed. Greenwood, Appleton, Kimball, Lowell…they were known as Boston’s First Families, and they were a clannish lot.

“Some things, my dear Journey, demand a personal reply,” he explained. “Besides, I’m curious about this plaguey female, as you call Miss Isadora Peabody.” He patted the letter in his waistcoat pocket. “What sort of woman would make me such an outrageous offer?”

Journey grinned, his teeth flashing in his deep brown face. “You must have impressed the bloomers off her, Captain.”

“A frightening thought.”

They walked along a brutally trimmed hedgerow, coming to an intimidating Palladian manse near the corner of Chestnut and Beacon Streets. The Peabody home. Ryan had known some Peabodys in college—Quentin and Bronson. Relations of some sort?

He stood back, getting a crick in his neck as he looked up at the towering house. The glaring sun stabbed into his brain, reviving his headache. “I suppose we can assume,” he said to Journey, “that she did not make this offer because she is in need of money.”

“Probably not.” Journey tugged at the shining black wrought iron gate-pull. He let them both in and they crossed a rigorously disciplined garden, Grecian in flavor, with a shiny silver gazing ball on a pedestal in the middle of a box hedge maze.

The door knocker depicted Neptune with cheeks puffed out and a frown on his face. Ryan lifted the handle. Before he knocked, Journey said, “A question, Skipper.”

“What is it?”

“Have you found a translator for the next voyage?”

Ryan sighed, his head still pounding, the taste of rum old and sticky in the back of his throat. “My friend, it was all I could do this morning to find the floor beneath my bunk.”

Journey studied him, brown eyes probing with a depth that had been plumbed by years of friendship. “Why do you drink like that, honey?” he asked softly. “Why do you drink until you make yourself crazy?”

Ryan rapped smartly with the knocker. “Because it’s easier than staying sane,” he muttered. His life, he reflected, wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. He was supposed to be sitting on his front porch sipping a mint julep while a mute servant waved a punkah fan over his head. Instead, he’d become a sea captain in charge of a shockingly motley crew. A Southern man committed to a cause that had virtually destroyed his family.

The door swung open on silent hinges. Ryan found himself greeted by a butler in a plain broadcloth suit. The little gent appeared to be well familiar with the trappings of the socially acceptable, for in one brief glance he took in the expensive cut of Ryan’s suit and deemed it adequate.

“Yes, sir?” he asked.

Ryan bowed from the waist. “I am Ryan Calhoun, here to see Miss Peabody, if you please.”

The butler stepped back, allowing him to enter. He and Journey stood upon a plush Turkey carpet of red and violet. A gilt mirror adorned one wall, and in the corner was a plant stand without a plant on it.

“I shall see if Miss Arabella is at home,” the butler said.

The name didn’t sound familiar to Ryan, nor to Journey, judging by the jab he gave Ryan with his elbow.

“That would be Miss Isadora, would it not?” Ryan said.

The butler allowed his eyes to widen—whether at Ryan’s Southern drawl or at the mention of Miss Isadora, he couldn’t tell.

“You are here to see Miss Isadora?”

Ryan smiled patiently. “That’s correct. Is she at home?”

“I…” The diminutive man cleared his throat. “I shall inquire. If you like, you may wait in the parlor.” He gestured.

“Your man can go around to the servants’ entrance in the rear.”

Ryan expected the error. “This is Mr. Journey Calhoun, and he isn’t a servant, but my business partner.”

The calm, self-possessed man seemed to be unraveling by inches. He cracked the knuckles of his left hand. “I…I see. Would you please excuse me?”

“By all means.” You officious little snot, he added silently as the butler scurried away.

“You should have sent me around the back,” Journey said. “The food and conversation’s better, anyway.”

“You’re no servant, damn it.” Ryan strolled boldly into the ornate parlor. A chandelier glistening with cut crystal droplets lorded over an arrangement of expensive furniture and objets d’art. A Revere tea service and an array of sparkling cut glass decanters graced a sideboard.

“Didn’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Journey said. “You recharted your entire life so I wouldn’t be a servant.” He leaned his elbow on the blue-and-gilt fireplace mantel, a slender Meissen vase in the center.

“That’s true,” Ryan said at length. “That’s for damned sure. And don’t think for a minute I regret it.”

A peculiar feeling washed over Ryan. He loved this man, loved him with a ferocity he’d never felt for his own brother. He and Journey had come up together, from sassy rough-and-tumble seven year olds to the men they were now.

The fact that one had been master and the other a slave hadn’t interfered in the friendship—at least, not at first.

Ryan checked his appearance in a gilt-framed mirror. Considering the night he’d had, he looked remarkably well put together, his red hair recently cut by Timothy Datty, the cabin boy. His collar and sky-blue frock coat were crisp and clean, thanks to Luigi Conti, the sail maker who was particular about such things.

He had been seven years old and formally dressed the first day Journey had been brought to him, he recalled. Father had made him wait in the hot summer parlor of Albion, and precisely at noon, Purdy had brought in a little boy with a skinny neck and huge eyes.

“This be my nephew Journey,” Purdy had said, her gaze cutting down and to the side in the manner of most slaves. “He’s a real good boy, ain’t you, Journey? A real good boy.”

And Journey had surprised Ryan. Instead of the meek, deferential countenance bred and beaten into the house servants and field hands, he looked Ryan directly in the eye and spoke in a high, clear voice: “I’m the best boy there is.”

That had been the beginning. The lazy, hot growing-up years had been a time of turbulence balanced with moments of exquisitely sweet tranquillity. They played and fought together, went fishing and boating on Mockjack Bay together. Ryan slept in a mahogany four-poster bed, Journey on a straw pallet on the floor; but more often than not, when Purdy brought breakfast in the morning, she’d find them both splayed out in the big bed. When Ryan went to church, Journey waited in the carriage outside. When Journey wanted to learn to read and cipher, Ryan taught him in secret, by the light of a tallow stub cribbed from the kitchen.

When Journey’s father was sold to pay off the debts of Ryan’s father, Ryan wept and raged with him.

By the time the boys turned sixteen, Journey was married and a father himself. Ryan had seduced a number of local girls, and debutantes from all the best families had begun to notice him.

Life would have gone on in this vein except for two extraordinary things. First, Ryan elected to attend Harvard, Yankee radicals and all. And second, he insisted on bringing Journey with him.

Journey had fought him every inch of the way. He adored his wife and children, who lived at a neighboring plantation. But Ryan was insistent, even lordly about it. No proper gentleman matriculated at a university without his manservant. It was Journey’s duty to go. He had no choice.

Ryan had a plan. He couldn’t even tell Journey, because the slave’s wrath and grief had to be convincing.

Ryan smiled into the mirror, remembering the day he crossed the Mason Dixon line and gave Journey his freedom. Journey had held the manumission papers to his chest, unable to speak as the tears rolled down his face.

Now their shipping enterprise had brought them one step closer to their ultimate goal—to buy Journey’s wife and babies, bring them north and set them free.

“Got to be something wrong with her,” Journey said, startling Ryan out of his remembrances.

“Wrong with who?”

“The plaguey woman.” Journey’s gaze tracked along one wall that was entirely covered by shelf after shelf of books. “Why would a body want to leave a house like this?”

“There must be something about this life she can’t abide,” Ryan whispered, thinking of his own reasons for leaving Albion. “Maybe we should ask—”

“Miss Peabody will receive you in the garden,” the butler said from the doorway. “This way, please.”

Ryan and Journey followed him along a tall, narrow corridor hung with portraits. The family tree, Ryan assumed, noting that each subject seemed to be extraordinarily handsome. Either the painters were expert flatterers or this clan had been bred for show.

They passed through a glassed-in verandah and then emerged onto a clipped and sculpted yard. Paradise in miniature, Ryan thought, noting the vine pergolas and pruned yew trees, At the far end stood a gazebo with a domed roof and open sides. In the middle sat a woman in black, her head bent as she read a thick book in her lap.

“Miss Peabody?” Ryan said.

She looked up, blinking owlishly as if she had come from a dark place into the light. A pair of spectacles sat low on her nose, and she seemed to see better by peering over the top of the lenses.

“Yes.” Her voice squeaked, and she cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said again. “Captain Calhoun. I am indeed pleased that you’ve come.”

He stood before her, watching her hands, expecting her to extend one for his kiss. Instead, she clutched the book very hard, displaying fingernails that had been bitten ragged. She had, of all things, the indirect, cowed look of a slave. As if she feared she might be beaten at any moment.

Discomfited by the thought, he opted for a formal bow from the waist. “This is Mr. Journey Calhoun, my associate and steward of the Swan.”

She clutched the book tighter. “Oh! I was expecting a note, not two grown men! I’m—um—pleased to meet you.”

Ryan had never met a more socially gauche woman in his life. He dared not look at Journey, for if their gazes met, they would surely dishonor her with a fit of sniggering.

She cleared her throat again and used one finger to push her spectacles up the bridge of her nose. Said nose was red and swollen; either she was unwell or the book had moved her to tears.

She sneezed violently into a crumpled handkerchief. Unwell, Ryan decided.

She tucked the handkerchief up her sleeve. “My apologies. It is the grippe, I fear.”

“Do you suffer from it often?”

“Constantly, Captain. Except in the springtime. Then it is the hay fever that plagues me, though I can seldom tell the difference between the two ailments—” She broke off, looking horrified. “Forgive me for going on about such a disagreeable subject.”

“I find nothing disagreeable about discussing you, Miss Peabody,” Ryan said, forcing his gallantry to its limits. He was here to refuse her offer, so he might as well do it politely.

She finally seemed to remember the book she was holding. “Pardon me,” she said, shutting the tome and setting it on the marble table beside her.

He turned his head to see its title. The symbols on the cover looked only vaguely familiar; he had made a point of sleeping through the classics at university.

“Ptolemy,” she said.

“In the original Greek,” he guessed.

“Oh, indeed. I wouldn’t want to read Ptolemy any other way. He has such a distinctive authority in the original.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Ryan said. He could hear a chuckle starting in Journey’s throat. “I take it you have a facility with languages.”

“Yes, yes, I do. I was fortunate to have been tutored by my late great aunt, who was quite the scholar in her day, and I also attended Mount Holyoke. I am conversant in Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese and have a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew.”

She was probably more knowledgeable than the majority of Harvard graduates, Ryan guessed. Curious. Why would her wealthy parents allow a girl such latitude?

“Miss Peabody,” he said, “I came in person because any other way would fail to do justice to the incredibly generous offer you made me.”

She pressed her nail-bitten fingers into a steeple. “Then you will take me? I’m going to Rio on your ship?”

“No.” He said it swiftly to kill the blooming hope on her face. “It is not that you are lacking in any way,” he hastened to add. “The fault is with me, and with my ship and crew. The Swan is a working vessel filled with working men. We could never live up to the standards of such a genteel lady as yourself.”

She flinched, looking down and to the side. Submissive, defeated. Ryan had the feeling he had drowned a kitten, and the feeling made him angry.

“I should think you’d let me be the judge of that,” she ventured timidly.

He gestured across the yard toward the house. “Nothing on the Silver Swan can compare to this. You cannot trade paradise for months in cramped quarters in the company of seamen.”

“I can, if only you will let me.”

What an irritating, intractable thing she was. Ryan paced the deck of the gazebo. “Ma’am, you seem to think your service as a translator is all that is required of you on this voyage. Rivera, our former translator, was also an able navigator.”

“Celestial or instrumental?” she asked.

“Both,” he fired back.

“Fine. I am versed in both. I’ve studied the Bowditch and have taken courses in spherical trigonometry.” Her timidity fell away as she spoke.

A low whistle came from Journey, who stood in the yard near the gazebo.

“I don’t use Bowditch,” Ryan said, struggling to hide his surprise.

“There’s no need. The position can be figured without it,” she agreed.

In truth, the trigonometric formulas were all black magic to Ryan, but he wasn’t about to admit it to this smug female. “So you understand a thing or two about navigation. That does not qualify you for this venture.”

“I daresay I know more than a thing or two.”

She lifted her chin in defiance. Defiance. Ryan imagined her on his ship, defying his orders.

“What’s the proper position for the royal yard?”

“Thirty-six degrees to the larboard beam…until you reach the equator. Then it changes to starboard.”

He turned his back to hide his amazement, looking out at the lawn as he asked, “Then tell me how to haul out into the stream.”

“You reef the studding sail gear.”

He refused to look at Journey, knowing he’d find him grinning from ear to ear. “And what about the chafing gear?”

“That’s simple,” she retorted. “You put it on and leave it there.”

“I concede, Miss Peabody, that you have startled and impressed me with your knowledge. But understanding the finer points of seamanship requires more than—”

“Good God, Calhoun, it really is you,” called a voice from the verandah.

Miss Peabody made an uncomfortable little whimper in her throat. Ryan shaded his eyes as a party of white-clad young people came hurrying toward him.

He recognized the men from his Harvard days: Quentin Peabody, famous for his tennis serve and infamous for his phenomenal stomach, which held vast quantities of liquor. His brother Bronson, so attractive he was almost pretty, was deeply studious and well-liked. Foster Candy, a braying ass of a fellow—or a veritable hog when it came to wallowing in the gossip pit—and Robert Hallowell whose only memorable quality was his family’s wealth. And finally Chad Easterbrook, Abel’s son and heir. He was graced with a godlike handsomeness and a frighteningly vacant mind.

They arrived in a tumble of laughter and introductions, and Ryan made the acquaintance of the ladies—Lydia Haven and Isadora’s sister, Arabella, who resembled a fashion doll in a dressmaker’s shop.

“What a pleasure to see you, Calhoun,” Quentin declared in the lazy, academic drawl of the longtime university man. “You made quite the stir when you lit out from Harvard, old chap. Quite the stir.”

“People at Harvard are easily stirred.” Ryan gestured at Journey. “I’d like you all to make the acquaintance of my business partner, Mr. Journey Calhoun.”

They just stared. Then Foster stepped forward, bowing from the waist. “The pleasure is ours,” he shouted, enunciating each word carefully. “I am sure.”

Journey grinned. “I’m African, sir. Not deaf.”

Their laughter had a nervous edge, but Quentin managed to turn the attention from Journey to Isadora. She sat like a statue, her face pale, her eyes cast down. The liveliness that had animated her moments ago had vanished.

“Do my eyes deceive me?” Quentin asked with a gamin chuckle, “Or is it true? Is my sister actually to be found in conversation with a gentleman rather than with her nose in a book?”

The others laughed. Isadora managed a tight, uncomfortable smile.

“Oh, do stop,” Arabella protested prettily, shaking a white lace fan. “Can’t you see you’re embarrassing poor Izzie?”

Isadora responded by sneezing violently into her handkerchief.

“Bless you,” Chad Easterbrook murmured automatically.

She sent him a tremulous smile, shy and curiously sweet. Judging by Chad’s expression, he had no appreciation of what was immediately apparent to anyone with half a brain—the poor girl was quite thoroughly in love with him.

“How was your croquet match?” she asked softly, her voice wavering a little.

“Oh, capital,” Chad said. Offhandedly he added, “Though you were missed, of course.”

“Yes, indeed.” Lydia Haven brushed out a flounce in her white dress. “You certainly were. It is always so amusing to have you around, Izzie.”

“Thank you. But…as I was compelled to inform Chad, I’m unwell. I’m…ah…” She sneezed again, pressing the rumpled handkerchief to her reddened nose.

“What can be keeping the refreshments?” Bronson wondered aloud. “I asked for lemonade to be served out here. I’ll go inquire.”

The women gathered in the gazebo, and the men wandered away, Foster and Robert lighting their pipes. They fell into conversation, none of it terribly interesting. Ryan realized he’d had a better time discussing navigation with Isadora. He listened with only one ear to the men’s talk. Until Foster addressed him directly.

“I’m told—though, of course, I have no experience of this—that as soon as a gentleman leaves the college, he finds himself in quite a calamity.”

Ryan lifted one eyebrow. “I’ve done all right.”

“But isn’t it true that all your tailors and gaming friends, so generous to Harvard men, are apt to call in their markers?” Foster persisted, his eyes narrowing with slyness. “Perhaps not. Perhaps they sent their dun notes to your dear mama.”

Ryan flexed his fist and took a step toward him. Journey planted himself in his path. “Easy, Skipper,” he said quietly. “Remember why we came here. Remember what’s important.”

Ryan took a deep breath. He had to stay focused on the business venture.

He ignored the talk until Isadora’s name came up.

“There’s a family joke, you know,” said Quentin in a low voice, “that our parents had to tie a codfish cake around Izzie’s neck to get the cat to play with her.”

Foster Candy made a choked sound of amusement. “There, old stick, I daresay I’d charge a steeper price than a fish cake!”

“Lemonade,” Bronson called, helping the butler wheel a wooden cart across the lawn.

The refreshments arrived and the talk started up again, but the drink tasted bitter to Ryan. As he stood back and watched the laughing, white-clad croquet party and Isadora sitting like a black crow on her stool, he wished he had never come here.

“She lives in hell,” he muttered to Journey.

“There are many kinds of hell. Some worse than others.”

Ryan knew Journey was thinking of his family, still in bondage in Virginia, their only hope of freedom resting with the fortunes of the Silver Swan. Yet Isadora Peabody suffered in her own way; that was apparent enough. While Southern families institutionalized their inhumanity, claiming a moral right to keep slaves and justifying it in the oddest of fashions, this proper Yankee society had its own subtle brand of torture.

It was a calculated cruelty, razor sharp, aimed at the most vulnerable. Miss Isadora had no defenses against the biting cleverness of her croquet-playing, lemonade-drinking peers. Timid socially, yet gifted with a fierce intellect, she was regarded as an aberration. Different and not to be trusted.

She was regarded as “poor Izzie.” But already Ryan realized she was “not-so-dumb Dora.”

Chad Easterbrook, vast in his mental absence, clearly had no notion that she worshiped him. Perhaps, then, it was the perfect match, Ryan mused cynically, leaning against a pergola and watching as Isadora sneezed yet again, and Chad blessed her and she gazed up at him as if he’d offered her the moon on a platter. He was capable of only selfish thought, and she suffered from an excess of thoughtfulness. Between the two of them they made a whole person. Possibly even an interesting person.

Except that it was clear to Ryan that they were not a couple. Lydia Haven commandeered the young man’s attention with all the determination of a battle chief leading a charge. He was hers, following her across the lawn like a trained spaniel and leaving Isadora to snuffle ungraciously into her handkerchief.

“We should go,” Ryan said. “Miss Peabody,” he continued, taking her hand and bowing, lifting it to his lips. “Your offer was more than kind, and for that I thank you. Good day.”

“But we haven’t—you can’t—”

Feeling terrible, he left her stammering. He heard one of the other young women sigh. He and Journey found their own way out and Ryan was relieved to leave the stifling atmosphere of the Peabody mansion behind.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Journey asked.

“Don’t you dare suggest it,” Ryan said, adding in his best Boston accent, “old chap.”

“But she speaks six languages—”

“No.”

“She’s miserable here—”

“No.”

“She’s a hell of a lot more interesting than the ladies you brought aboard last ni—”

“Damn it,” Ryan almost shouted, “no.”

Isadora refused to take no for an answer. So what if Ryan Calhoun turned out to be as shallow and mocking as Quentin and his friends? He had something she wanted—a way out of Boston. And she was determined to get it.

As she waited in the brick-fronted Merchants’ Exchange offices of Abel Easterbrook, she allowed herself a brief, satisfying moment of gloating. Though he didn’t know it, Captain Calhoun himself had given her the key to obtaining the post.

“Ahoy, Miss Isadora!” Abel opened the door to his inner chamber and greeted her with a bewhiskered smile. “Welcome aboard.”

“I shan’t keep you long, sir, for I know you’re busy.” She seated herself in the chair he held for her. Lithographs of ships and lighthouses graced the bradded-leather walls of the office and stacks of ledger books filled the shelves. She folded her gloved hands, inhaling the scent of ink and tobacco and paper—the scent of commerce.