The Charm School by Susan Wiggs
Twenty-Five
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
Being 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 undammed 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.
Ryan had been so different. He loved her. Not the idea of her. Not her status, her family, her looks, her fortune. But her, pure and simple. The idea was so new and alien to her that she hadn’t grasped it until too late.
The discovery of her condition had sent her into an emotional maelstrom from which she almost didn’t emerge. Once again, the physician was called, this time trying to quiet her hysterical weeping. But in the end it was not medicine, but love that saved her. The universe was trying to tell her something. She might not be able to forgive herself for failing to tell Ryan she loved him, but a larger force was at work. The baby was a statement that what she’d shared with Ryan was special and magical, it was something that not even death could take from her.
To deny life to the baby, to hold herself off from the world because of her grief, was unacceptable. It was time, she’d decided at last, to rejoin the living.
Her first order of business was to take up the cause against the institution responsible for destroying Ryan and Journey and his family. She had started attending rallies, going deeper and deeper into the middle of a core of radical abolitionists who would stop at nothing in order to end slavery.
Thus she found herself at her parents’ ball, garbed in a silly costume for a masquerade, trying to pretend she wanted to be here.
In truth she had a secret purpose. She had contacted the Boston Abolition Society. When her parents found out, they would be appalled, of course, for slavery was one of those things they did not approve of but would never have the poor taste to make an issue of.
Isadora intended to do more than make an issue of it. She had learned, through one of the Abolition Society meetings, of a ship outfitted expressly to facilitate the escape of slaves. A virtual ghost ship. No one knew its name, its skipper and crew, or its home port. It was probably a rumor, some people said, but the ship was known to sweep into Southern ports in the dead of night, load itself with slaves and sail to the safety of Canada so swiftly that no pursuit could overtake it.
Isadora thought the legend a romantic idea, even if it wasn’t true. And if it was, she intended to dedicate her life to supporting the endeavor.
She had received a cryptic message tonight, saying that an important contact would be made at the masquerade. Intrigued, she had donned a costume and delighted her parents by making an appearance.
Restless with her thoughts and trying to avoid the prying stares of the guests, she pressed herself back in a half-domed alcove window—but still she heard them.
“She’s the black sheep of the family in more ways than one,” whispered a gossipy voice Isadora was not supposed to hear. “She is so different from the rest of the Peabodys. She’s tan as a savage, and her brothers and sisters are all fair as the springtime.”
Couldn’t they find someone else to talk about?
“But she’s so handsome, so striking. It’s a wonder no one noticed that before,” came the reply. “They say she could have anyone she wants for a husband, but she’s turned so strange lately....”
Isadora left the alcove, unwilling to hear any more. The startled speakers—two of her mother’s friends—made a great show of fluttering their fans and clearing their throats and appearing totally innocent.
As always, she would pretend she hadn’t heard. She would greet her parents’ friends cordially. She would stiffly dance with the hopeful men who used to duck when they saw her coming, but lately lined up to partner her.
The pain and humiliation she used to feel at being snubbed at these affairs seemed so trivial now. For she had known the highest heights of joy and the deepest depths of despair. Enclosed in a sort of strange numbness, she endured.
True, the day would come when she would have to reveal the truth about her condition. All of Beacon Hill would buzz with the story of the Peabodys’ wayward daughter and her reckless Southern sea captain. She had already determined that she would disappear with the child before scandal could touch it. Perhaps, like the ghost ship that ferried ex-slaves to freedom, a ship would come for her, sweep her away to some far-off land where it was safe to raise a child in the sunlight of approval and love. She owed that much to Ryan. She owed that much to the love they had shared.
Preoccupied with these thoughts, she favored several gentlemen with a dance. They were mostly her brothers’ friends from Harvard, costumed as cavaliers and vampires and knights in tin armor. Chad Easterbrook, garbed in the toga of a Greek god, claimed the long waltz, intent on monopolizing her. At the end of the dance he steered her through the French doors to the verandah. They walked down three marble steps to the central fountain in the back, a carp eternally spitting into a huge seashell basin. In the chilly darkness he took her hand in his.
Heavens be. Surely he was not her contact.
“It is so very good to see you up and about again,” he said, gazing at her hungrily from beneath the silver filigree circlet he wore around his tumbling black curls. “I’ve done nothing but think about you since you returned from your voyage.”
“I hope you’re exaggerating,” Isadora said wryly, “else I would think you quite empty in the head.”
He laughed as if she were joking. “I tell you, it’s true. Isadora, I have dared to flatter myself into believing that at one time you showed me great favor.”
She saw no point in lying. “Chad, there was a time when you were all I dreamed of—”
“I knew that.” He pulled her close, his arms tightening around her.
She realized then that he’d known all along about her worship of him. He had known, and he had chosen to ignore her. It was one thing for him to be oblivious of her ardor; quite another to know of it and coldly disregard it.
Suddenly she wanted to be away from him. “Chad—”
“Isadora, let me finish. You’ve surely guessed my intentions by now. I want to marry you. We’ll be—”
“Please, Chad, I—”
“No, listen. You are the most fascinating creature I’ve ever known, and I can’t possibly ever be worthy of you, but I shall try. Already father has made me full officer in the company. He was quite impressed by my role in deflecting the scandal away from the Swan.”
A chill eddied over her. “I don’t know what you mean. What scandal?”
“We nearly lost our reputation thanks to that unlamented scoundrel, Ryan Calhoun. When the Swan first came into harbor, I guessed correctly that she was transporting fugitive slaves. I acted quickly and saved the company from embarrassment, not to mention heavy fines.”
She wrenched away from him. “It was you, then. You alerted the authorities about Journey’s family.”
“It’s the law,” he said. “I would have been guilty of conspiracy if I’d failed to report my suspicions. And remember, our shipping company does business in the South. We can’t afford to lose the cotton and tobacco cargos.”
She was tempted to stand her ground, to lash him with a lecture on the rights of man and spout the rhetoric she had learned at her abolition meetings. But she knew it was no use. The man hadn’t the wit to recognize another’s humanity. Another’s intelligence. Most especially in a black man, and certainly not in a woman like her.
She stepped back and looked him in the eye.
“I never knew you until now, Chad. It appears I liked you better when I didn’t know you.”
“What—”
“Pardon me.”
He grabbed her arm, his brow descending like an ominous storm cloud. “Do I understand this correctly? You’re refusing me?”
“You always were a clever sort,” she said, glaring at the hand still gripping her arm. “Please let go of me now.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Do you think you can refuse me? You’re not so respectable now that you’ve been on a ship with a crew of seadogs and escaped slaves.”
Ah. Someone finally had the nerve to speak the truth to her face. She knew then that she had not come through unscathed.
“I found their company far more pleasing than anything I’ve found in Boston,” she retorted.
“Which proves your lack of judgment. I knew Calhoun was scum from the moment he entered Harvard, him with his idiotic Virginia drawl and the cheap women he consorted with.”
“I’m pleased to tell you, I am one of those ‘cheap women.’ Do you still want me?”
“I fear I have no choice, since your disgrace happened aboard my vessel.”
“But why would you, the mighty Chad Easterbrook, want such a social pariah?”
His face clouded, then grew naked with desire. “Marrying you now would be beneath me, but I could raise you up. You are unique among women, but I expect you to be damned grateful to me for the rest of your days.”
Isadora had forgotten the name of the particular punch she used. Either a roundhouse or a sidewinder; at one time Gerald Craven had taught her the terms. But she did recall, with satisfying swiftness, the precise use of the punch. Her arm, still muscular from her travails on the ship, came around with great force, her fist smashing into Chad Easterbrook’s face.
He lost his grip on her, arms paddling the air before he staggered against the rim of the fountain.
She placed her hands on his shoulders and heaved him in.
Hands on hips, she looked down at the cursing, sputtering ruin of her childhood god. “Oh, Chad, you’re all wet. And your pretty costume is stained with moss. Whatever are people going to say?”