The Charm School. Сьюзен Виггс

Mrs. Calhoun, I’m so sorry,” she said, crossing the room to take the lady’s hands. “I—what did you say his name was?”

      “Ryan. Ryan Michael Calhoun.”

      “What a marvelous coincidence,” Isadora said, hugely pleased to feel a sudden sense of purpose. “You needn’t bother with Mr. Easterbrook at all. I can take you directly to Ryan Calhoun. Tonight, if you wish.”

      “What?”

      “I know exactly where he is, Mrs. Calhoun.”

      Two

      Now our ship is arrived

      And anchored in the Sound.

      We’ll drink a health to the whores

      That does our ship surround.

      Then into the boat they get

      And alongside they came.

      “Waterman, call my husband,

      For I’m damned if I know his name.”

      —“A Man of War Song”

       (traditional)

      “What did you say your name was, sugar-pie?” Ryan Calhoun asked the woman in his lap. She and the others had arrived in bumboats even before the Silver Swan had moored. The harbor lovelies hadn’t waited for the docking; they did their most brisk business swarming aboard a ship that had dropped anchor after being at sea for months.

      Thus, the Swan had found its berth courtesy of a harried harbor pilot, with a half-dozen bawds accompanying him.

      “Sugar-pie suits me just fine,” she said with a moist-lipped laugh, then fed him a generous gulp of rum from the engraved silver flask he’d bought in Havana.

      He raised no objection when the whore slipped the costly flask into the top of her worsted-silk stocking. Nothing could dampen Ryan’s spirits tonight. Dressed in his favorite lime-green waistcoat—with no shirt underneath—he sat on the high deck of the fastest bark in Boston; his crew reveled wildly as the moon rose over the harbor, and a vast quantity of sweet liquor boiled through his veins. Life for Ryan Calhoun was good indeed.

      “’S’all yours, sugar-pie,” he said agreeably. “’S’all yours.”

      “Aye-aye, skipper,” she said with a giggle.

      He leaned forward so that his face was almost buried in her cleavage. Then he shut his eyes, his gently spinning head echoing the constant motion of the ship at sea, the ship that had been his home for the past nine months. What better life had a man but this? he wondered—a successful voyage, a well-endowed woman encumbered with nothing so inconvenient as a mind of her own, and a bottle of sugary Jamaican rum.

      He breathed deeply of the soft, faintly sweaty flesh. Female musk. There was no more evocative substance the world over. So what if this woman had no name, so what if she was coarse, so what if she stole from him? She possessed the only thing worth having. It would take a better man than Ryan to quibble with Nature herself. Showing unsteady reverence, he kissed one breast, then the other, pressing his mouth into the softness pushed up by an artfully inadequate corset.

      “Ooh, skipper.” Unblushing, she brought one long leg around his midsection. “I came here for more than teasing.”

      He opened his eyes and blinked up into her painted, fleshy face. She had few qualities that properly belonged to a lady but for the shape, the name and that precious essence. He wondered if he was still sober enough to stagger off to his stateroom with her.

      Leaning back in the deck chair, he could see into the gangway leading to the orlop deck. A man and woman in a hammock swayed with a familiar rhythm, the woman’s legs bare to the hams and hanging over the sides of the webbed sling. Another couple slept atop a coil of rope, a bottle cradled between them. Amidships, Chips and Luigi Conti made music with mouth harp and whistle while Journey, the steward, pounded out a rhythm on a skin drum. Dancing couples reeled and laughed, bumping into barrels and crates. Someone had unlatched the hen coop, and a few biddies ran around the deck in hilarious confusion.

      Something distant and sober inside Ryan suddenly came to attention. For once in his misbegotten life, he’d succeeded. And not in a small way, but in a way all the world would notice. He’d made a voyage in record time; he’d delivered a fortune to the ship’s owner.

      If only his father had lived, perhaps he would have acknowledged Ryan’s achievement. That would have been a first.

      Ryan felt a peculiar thickness in his throat. He’d succeeded. He wished he could freeze this moment in his heart and keep it there forever. He wished he had someone besides a nameless prostitute to share it with.

      He banished the darkness and resolved to enjoy his triumph.

      “A toast!” he roared, holding the woman’s clasped hand aloft like a prize-fighter. “To the Swan, and to all her brave crew!”

      “To us!” the men bellowed, clinking mugs.

      Ryan aimed a crooked grin at his companion, who had begun squirming suggestively in his lap. “Sugar-pie, my legs are going numb.”

      She screeched with laughter. “I hope that don’t affect the rest of you.”

      “We’ll see when we get to the stateroom.”

      Her hips ground down on him. “Who needs the stateroom?”

      He had a fleeting thought of privacy, but the rum—and the whore’s sly fingers—coaxed a dark, desire-filled laugh from him. With slow, teasing movements he plunged his hand beneath her skirts. He found the stolen flask but passed it right over in pursuit of richer treasures.

      No doubt the puritanical Mr. Easterbrook would be appalled to see such revelry on his ship, but Ryan banished the last of his scruples. No proper Bostonian would show up now. Anyone who strayed to the docks at this time of night deserved what he saw.

      “I feel quite wicked being out so late,” Isadora confessed to Lily Raines Calhoun. She leaned back against the burgundy leather seat of the hooded clarence. Her father, who always demanded the best, had had the carriage fitted with a curved glass, like a show window, in the front. Lily and Isadora sat side by side on the rear seat, watching the city through the glass.

      A waning moon cast the State House dome in pale gray; misty orbs of gaslight glowed along State Street, and shadows haunted side streets and Merchants’ Row.

      “Your driver looked a mite startled when we told him we wanted to go to the harbor,” Lily remarked. “I do hope this won’t cause trouble with your family.”

      “Believe me, Mrs. Calhoun, since the age of fourteen, I’ve done nothing but cause trouble for my family.”

      Lily turned, the light on her face flickering from pale to gold in the swinging glow of the carriage lantern. “Whatever can you mean?”

      Isadora toyed idly with the strings of her lace cap. “Until I was fourteen, I lived with a maiden aunt in Salem. I only saw my family once in a great while.” She thought back to the long, dreamy years with Aunt Button when nothing mattered more than spending a few hours reading a wonderful book. “It was an arrangement that suited all of us very well indeed. But when my great aunt died, I had to return to the house on Beacon Hill. I’m afraid I’ve been a trial to them ever since.”

      “I can’t imagine you a trial,” Lily said.

      “Yes, you can,” Isadora replied with gentle censure. “You’re too kind to say so. A plain spinster, awkward in conversation, clumsy on the dance floor—I’m a trial, especially to the Peabodys.”

      “We all have our own unique gifts. It is incumbent upon the larger society to discover them.”

      “And if they do not?”

      Lily Calhoun turned on the seat so that she was facing Isadora. The shifting lamplight glazed her face with