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.