The Calhoun Chronicles Bundle: The Charm School

She obeyed mechanically, her hands quicker than her mind. Another blister, this one on her left hand, burst as she took hold of the rigging.

“Get down from there this instant,” Lily called, her voice strident with fear. “Both of you.”

“Thank you,” Isadora said, staring with gratitude and incredulity at Ryan. “Truly, you saved my life.”

“I don’t appreciate having to save lives,” he grumbled, starting to climb down. “Don’t scare me like that again.”

Something in his voice gave her pause. With an unaccustomed prickle in her throat, she climbed down, groping carefully with each foot and then following it with the opposite hand. Her palms stung, but she didn’t care. The sensation of falling, and then of having Ryan catch her, had been extraordinary. Mere fright didn’t begin to cover it.

“Did you get hurt?” he asked.

“No.” She sent him a tremulous smile. “I’ve never scared anyone before. Not in that way, I mean.”

“Then in what way?”

She fixed her eyes on each successive rung of the rigging and spoke from a place she had always kept private. “I suppose I was quite frightening to the young men who were sent to dance with me at parties.”

He gave a derisive snort. “Then those young men were more yellow than greasy dogs.”

She didn’t want platitudes from him; she didn’t expect sympathy. “They never knew what to say to me, nor I to them, so it was awkward all around. As I said, frightening.” She felt her foot strike the planks of the deck and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Land sakes, child,” Lily scolded fiercely. “What were you thinking? You could have been killed.”

“And would have been if you’d shrieked a mite louder, Mama,” Ryan said.

“I couldn’t help myself. I generally shriek when a disaster is at hand.”

“No harm done.” Isadora felt suddenly as awkward as she had with the reluctant suitors of Boston. High in the rigging, looking across the vast sea at a land of such mystical beauty, she had felt like a different person. Now, with the solid oak deck swaying beneath her feet, she was herself again—ungainly, tongue-tied Isadora. She’d bared too much of herself up there. Ryan knew things she’d never told another soul.

Without daring to look at him, she said, “I’m afraid I’ve got some blisters. I’d best tend to them in the galley.”

She hurried away, but the wind carried Lily’s voice: “I know you weren’t happy with this arrangement, Ryan, but must you try to get rid of her by throwing her overboard?”

Twelve

A capital ship for an ocean trip

Was the Walloping Window Blind—

No gale that blew dismayed her crew

Or troubled the captain’s mind.

The man at the wheel was taught to feel

Contempt for the wildest blow.

And it often appeared, when the weather had cleared,

That he’d been in his bunk below.

—Charles Edward Carryl,

Davy and the Goblin: A Nautical Ballad

The disaster came so swiftly and so completely that there was, Ryan conceded, a certain poetry in its magnificence. He’d felt the ominous heavy air when he and Isadora had been up on the mast. Though he had focused his attention on her to an alarming—and surprising—degree, a detached practical part of him had seen the power of the coming storm.

The untrained eye might have noted the darkish underbellies of the clouds. The optimistic sailor might have heeded the proximity of Rio and thought that perhaps they’d reach safe harbor before the violent squall struck.

Ryan knew better. A wind gall, luminous in its strange halo on the edge of a cloud, promised heavy rains to windward. He’d concealed his reaction from Isadora and his mother, but the moment he’d broken free of them he had convened the watch and sent them rushing about, battening the ship for a storm.

It struck within the hour, a long wall of wind and heavy seas pitching in from the far Atlantic. A swell hit the ship with such force that her timbers reverberated stem to stern, the vibrations driving up into the legs of those on deck. Gale winds plucked at the shrouds like a clumsy musician playing a badly strung fiddle.

Ryan and Izard met in the chart room. The chief mate’s eyes said what his voice would not—Ryan’s beginner’s luck had run out. Here was the storm that would test his true mettle as a skipper.

“We’ll heave to and make her fast,” Ryan said.

Izard didn’t argue. He merely nodded. An open hatchway let in a gust of wind that swept the charts off the slant-topped table. Wordlessly Izard stowed the charts and turned down the lantern.

As the ship plunged into its inevitable roll, Ryan passed Journey in the companionway. “Check on the women,” he said tersely. “Tell them to keep to their quarters.”

Though a chilling dread seized him, he couldn’t deny the tingle and spark of excitement that churned through him as he rushed out to the deck. Acres of foam surrounded the ship.

He shouldn’t like this, but God help him, he did. He desired the sea as he desired a woman’s body. The sea was his mistress, one with the power to heal, nurture, love, torture…or destroy at her caprice. Like a woman, she was dark, mysterious, unpredictable—impossible to skim over the surface; a man had to plunge in and sink deep.

“Heave,” he ordered. “Heave and sink her.”

The men didn’t need to be told twice. With a rusty whir of the hawse pipe, the heavy-weather anchors spun out and plummeted downward.

Scrolling waves rose higher and higher, and the Swan climbed helplessly to a foaming peak, then dove with breathtaking speed into the trough. Ryan stood in the cockpit with the second mate, both men mute with awe.

“We’ll be swamped,” Click promised him.

“I’ve got Craven and Pole manning the pumps.” Ryan heard a grinding sound, and regarded the cables while the stern fishtailed helplessly. “We’ve got to run before it,” he shouted.

“We’ll be lost for sure,” Click bellowed back. “We might have to jettison our cargo to boot!”

A crushing sense of defeat pressed at Ryan. Christ, not the cargo. The storm had grown mythically ugly, with the seething seas and the smoky clouds a vision of hell. He took a deep breath and bellowed the order past his own reluctance. “Up anchor, and take a double reef in the mains’l for hoisting!”

He knew in his gut it would take more men than he had to navigate the yawing ship through the gale. He refused to let himself think of disaster. Refused to think about his shame if he had to turn the ship over to the underwriters.

Timothy Datty came running, the wind blowing his feet out from under him. “My fault, skipper,” he said. “I fouled a rope.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Aye, sir!” the boy shouted.

“Carry on, then.” Ryan wrestled with the tiller and Timothy went aloft. He reefed the topsails. Luigi set the staysails, and the ship raced before the wind, sweeping up and down the swells, on no set course save that determined by the unrelenting storm.