The Calhoun Chronicles Bundle: The Charm School

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 corset 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—”

She bobbed an awkward curtsy. “Captain, a moment of your time—”

“Allow me to introduce Mr. Dickie Warbass of the Customs Office,” he said, not even looking at her.

“How do you do.” Another hasty curtsy. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but I must—”

“This is the one, right here.” He thrust a document into her hands. “Mr. Warbass and I have been searching for half an hour for some form in Portuguese.”

She frowned down at the paper. “But Captain, I—”

“What does it say?” he asked. “I apologize for our haste, but Mr. Warbass has other duties to attend to this morning and we mustn’t keep him.”

“You have a launch?” she asked the official.

“Of course.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. Mr. Warbass could take her off the ship. Back to her mother and father and their baffled but familiar affection. Back to her brothers and sisters, so perfect and humorous that the world worshiped at their feet. Back to pining for Chad Easterbrook, praying he’d notice her. Back to the whirl of a society that did not welcome her.

Troublesome thoughts, for certain, but not nearly so troublesome as the idea of making a rough sea voyage in the company of strangers to a foreign land. She couldn’t believe she’d actually come this far.

She felt as if she were tumbling out of control through unknown waters, like a barnacle pried forcibly from the dock.

She inched her spectacles down her nose and peered over the rims to read the document. “It’s a copy of the consignment agreement with a firm called Ferraro and Son. Is that what you had in mind, Captain?”

He pointed to a space at the bottom. “My signature goes here, I presume?”

“Yes, and you’re welcome,” she said pointedly.

“Welcome to what?”