The Charm School (39 page)

But now she realized how shallow it was to want something that depended on the opinions and standards of others and had nothing to do with her alone.

Early in the morning she sat up in bed, goggle-eyed and slightly disoriented.

She blinked, looking around, taking in the thick flocked wallpaper and the Heppelwhite desk in the corner, the highboy and the French doors with their velvet draperies. Belatedly she recognized her own bedroom in her father’s house.

Home. She was home again.

And she felt like the stranger she had always been in this house.

She remembered the party last night, dancing until her feet ached and her throat was raw from talking and laughing, and knew that this was the way popular girls awakened every morning after a party. Pretty and popular. The things she had always wanted to be. At least, until Ryan had shown her that such qualities didn’t matter.

She got up and washed at the washstand and cleaned her teeth. Opening the parcel from the Silver Swan, she discovered more of the elegantly cut dresses Lily had given her, and she put one on, limiting herself to a single petticoat. She was trying to put some order to her hair when a knock sounded at the door.

“Come in,” she called.

Thankful, the maid, came bustling in with a tray. “Here’s your tea, miss, and a whole bunch of cards and letters.”

“Thank you. Set them on the side table.” Isadora smiled distractedly.

She kept thinking about the night before, the night all her dreams should have come true but had not.

Thankful lingered in the doorway, eyeing Isadora with ill-concealed curiosity and. something else. Admiration. Yes, the maid who had laughed at her, made sport of her in backstairs whispers, was suddenly fascinated with her transformation.

“That will be all for now. Thankful.” Isadora poured herself a cup of tea and sipped it as she looked through the cards and notes.

Invitations. A huge pile of them. Dancing parties, soirees, reading parties, intellectual debates, picnics, gaming nights, drives to the country.

Every sort of social event she had ever dreamed of.

Everything she had yearned for now lay before her on a silver platter.

The trouble was, she didn’t want this kind of life anymore.

The realization washed over her, and she dropped the letters. Dear God.

She’d spent years wanting something that didn’t even matter.

Last night’s celebration had seemed empty and meaningless without Ryan. The former insecure Isadora emerged briefly, wondering if he regretted his blurted declaration of love and was now avoiding her.

No. The new Isadora remembered the look in his eyes when he said it, and she trusted that look. Against all odds, the most exciting man in the world loved her. She should have guessed it long before. She should have seen it slowly happening, should have seen through his teasing. He had told her he loved her in countless ways, perhaps beginning with the singular act of cruelly throwing her spectacles overboard.

She’d been too thickheaded to realize what his actions meant.

“Stupid,” she said under her breath.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

Everything she wanted had been within her grasp—aboard the Swan. In Ryan Calhoun’s arms. But she had been so fixated on coming back to Beacon Hill, on conquering Chad Easterbrook and impressing those who had made fun of her, that she had been blind to what really mattered.

Ryan mattered. Ryan, and the way she was with him. The way she loved him.

‘ “Ye powers,” she said, yanking on a shawl, jamming on a hat.

“I do love him.”

Terror and joy rushed through her as she raced down the stairs, nearly overturning the tray in the foyer that was fast filling up with a new batch of invitations.

“I’m going out, Mother,” she called, tugging open the front door without waiting for an answer.

She must have been a peculiar sight, racing down the wet brick streets of Beacon Hill toward the waterfront, her hat trailing down her back on its ribbons and her skirt hiked almost to her knees.

Nursemaids pushing prams stopped to stare. Gardeners straightened from their tasks, and inquisitive faces peeked out of coach windows.

Isadora didn’t care; she barely noticed. It was only a short distance along the rain washed streets, yet she had never covered it on foot.

She was amazed to find that it took her only minutes to reach the waterfront.

The one thought in her mind was Ryan. She had to find him, tell him. what?

That she loved him?

What would have been the point? he’d asked her only the day before Did he mean there was no point because he didn’t think she could love him? Or because there was another reason they should not be in love?

No matter. She knew now, knew with a certainty that mocked her for not recognizing it sooner. Why hadn’t she understood, when he’d held her, kissed her, made love to her, that it was love she was feeling?

Because life had taught her to mistrust her own feelings, to obey convention and rules. Ryan had taught her otherwise. Nearly laughing or weeping with the knowledge, she barely noticed when it began to drizzle again. Through the thickening cold mist, she spied the familiar topgallant of the Swan and hurried toward it.

Harbor pilots had brought the bark into its berth and stevedores swarmed over the wharves and decks, discharging cargo. Isadora spotted Timothy Datty and waved at him, cupping her hands around her mouth. ‘ “I need to see Captain Calhoun,” she called.

From a distance, Timothy’s posture seemed to change. Was it a trick of the light, or did his face pale, his shoulders hunch?

Then she saw it. A sodden black ribbon suspended from a yardarm.

Isadora forced herself to back up and stand under a canvas awning as she waited for Datty to come down the gangplank. She heard the drumming of rain on the awning, the mournful cry of a gull, the whinny of a drayman’s horse.

Timothy stopped to hail a fisherman in oilskin slicks, spoke briefly to the man, then approached her.

She didn’t want to hear it, whatever awful thing he was about to say to her.

She wanted to clap her hands over her ears, but that would be wrong, that would be cowardly, and if she had learned anything from Ryan it was courage.

She went toward Timothy, meeting him halfway between the awning and the ship.

She stood in the rain, in the gray, dripping chill that surrounded the wharf, feeling each droplet on her face, feeling the water drip down her temples and not caring that she was getting drenched.

“Where is Captain Calhoun?” Her voice didn’t waver, didn’t betray the dread that had started inside her the moment she’d seen the black ribbon through the curtain of rain.

“There was t-trouble last night,” Timothy said, breathing fast with nervousness.

“Please, Miss Isadora, come in out of the rain.”

“Say it, Timothy,” she said.

“Quickly.”

She noticed, with a dull thud of hopelessness, that the other crewmen were slowly coming toward her, hats in their hands, gazes cast down.

“The harbor guard boarded us last night. Said they’d heard we had fugitive slaves, said w-we was to surrender them immediately.”

“Ryan would never surrender.” She caught a sob in her throat and held it off, determined to hear what had happened with a stoicism that did honor to Ryan’s bravery.

“We held off the guard as best we could,” Ralph Izard said.

“There were words, but no one came to blows.” He cleared his throat.

“There was nothing to find, anyway. The skipper and Journey, they’d already put Delilah and the little ones aboard the schooner.”

Isadora closed her eyes.

“They put out to sea, didn’t they? They set sail right into the storm.”

“They didn’t have much choice. The guard gave chase—they had a skiff and a longboat—but, only to the mouth of the harbor. Then they fell back.” Izard squeezed his soggy hat in his hands.

“The storm drove them back.”

“And the schooner?” Isadora asked.

Silence. It roared at her from a void.

Timothy’s shoulders shook with unrestrained sobs. The Doctor snuffled loudly, and William Click put his hand on the cook’s arm. Gerald, Luigi and Chips stood around, wringing their hands helplessly.

Without their skipper they foundered like a rudderless ship.

Izard gestured at the fishermen, who were busy offloading their catch of codfish.

“The crew of the Gail sighted them off George’s Bank and tried to give aid, but the swells were too big.”

“It wasn’t any kind of weather for sailing,” Chips said, his voice thin with horror.

“They saw the schooner go down,” Izard said as gently as he could.

Isadora heard a terrible roaring in her ears, more awful than the roar of the sea in a storm.

“But surely—please God, surely—they escaped in launches.”

“No, miss.” His long, mournful face was gray with suffering.

“There were no survivors.”

In the deepest part of her, something shattered. Something died.

Timothy reached for her hand but she didn’t take it. She was made of glass; the slightest touch would cause her to fly to pieces.

I should weep, she thought. I should start to weep now and never stop. But it wasn’t that simple. The magnitude of her loss was too immense for weeping.

An eerie calm settled over her as she turned away from the crew of the Swan.

“Where are they?” she asked.

“Where are … the bodies?” The calm pressed upon her, smothering, choking J her.

“Miss Isadora, they went down with the ship. There was no saving them in a storm like that. Please, miss, come to the galley. The Doctor will make some tea …”

She ignored the pleading voice, ignored the murmurs of sympathy, ignored everything but the cruel thunder of the ocean in her ears.

Blood no longer ran in her veins. It was ice, pure ice, as cold as the ballast that had weighted the Silver Swan on its mythical voyage to paradise.

CHAPTER Twenty-Three.

A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth.

Jane Welsh Carlyle (1825) Boston, June 1852.

Oeing invisible used to have its advantages. Isadora Dudley Peabody wished people would stop staring at her. She wished, with all of her heart, that the gleaming ballroom floor would open up and swallow her. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if the event occurred. Disappearing in the middle of a crowded room was bold indeed, and Isadora Peabody had lately earned a reputation for boldness.

Being bold, defiant even, was the only way she could get from one day to the next without shattering into a million pieces. After that rainy morning on the wharf, she had closed herself into a cocoon, refusing to eat, unwilling to sleep, unable to cry.

Those first few days after the loss at sea would remain a blur to her.

The authorities had come to question her about the slaves hiding aboard the Swan. She had looked them in the eye and declared that she knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the fugitives.

There was a token search for the missing schooner. The shores were combed for flotsam and God forbid bodies. But none were found. Ryan and Journey and his family had disappeared off the face of the earth as if they had never existed. Isadora had forced herself to post a letter to Lily, but the effort had sucked everything out of her. She was empty.

The crew of the Swan had all gone their own ways, drifting apart like ice flows in the spring thaw.

Isadora hadn’t spoken. Had barely moved. Her parents called in a physician, and she had surrendered to his ministrations until he grew exasperated with her lack of response.

The fool. Couldn’t he understand that his patient was dead?

She had died, as horribly and as completely as Ryan had in the great cold briny deep. But, to her annoyance, she kept breathing. Her body kept functioning. She could not will it to stop.

The tragedy surprised no one. Ryan Calhoun was well-known for flouting protocol, he and his African business partner, the two of them so utterly unconventional that it seemed the world wasn’t ready for them yet. Perhaps that was why they couldn’t survive.

Was Journey better off, she wondered, with his wife and children in the deep hereafter? Was it better to be united in death than separated in life?

Isadora had yearned for death. She’d tried to will herself to surrender to the darkness, yet life for her persisted no matter what.

Then, a fortnight ago, she had come to a realization that had thrust her decidedly back among the living.

She had dragged herself from bed, more sick with nausea than she had ever been on shipboard, and while she’d hung retching over the wash basin she had realized what the matter was.

She was expecting Ryan’s child.

The knowledge had un dammed the tide of her emotions. Long-suppressed grief lifted its shackles, and the shock of feeling sent her, sobbing, to her knees. She’d wept as she had not been able to weep before, letting out all the love, all the aching, shining, unspoken love she’d felt for Ryan. He was dead, and she was going to have his baby.

She carried the secret knowledge inside her, trying to discover a way to bear the feelings of anguish and joy. The one thing she did not feel was shame.

They would all expect it of her, once the scandal broke, but even then she knew she could not be ashamed of what she had done with Ryan Calhoun, what she had felt for him, what she had given him. And what he had given her.

The most painful issue to face was that she’d never told him. She had not recognized that the passion and tenderness and excitement she felt for Ryan all added up to love. She’d been so involved in herself and her life in Boston that she had failed to see what was right in front of her.

The man she loved was Ryan. She was amazed that she had been able to look at him and not see the truth.

Until Ryan, she had never learned to recognize love, to trust it.

Because love in her family was not something given freely and unconditionally, but was a commodity that depended on a very specific protocol and set of values. Whatever virtues she possessed meant nothing unless they came in a lovely, refined package.