The Calhoun Chronicles Bundle: The Charm School. Сьюзен Виггс

sequence as if through a wall of water. She reached for the curling ribbon a second too late. It went taut, upending the large plant. The alabaster pot shattered against the marble floor.

      The abrupt movement and the explosion of sound caused everyone to freeze for precisely three seconds. Then all gazes turned to Isadora. The Harvard men. Her mother’s friends. Gentlemen of commerce and ladies of society. Trapped by their stares, she stood as motionless—and as doomed—as a prisoner before a firing squad.

      “Oh, Dora.” As usual, Isadora’s elder sister Lucinda took charge. “What a catastrophe, and right in the middle of Arabella’s party, too. Here, let me untangle you.” A moment later a housemaid appeared with a broom and dust shovel. A moment after that, the ensemble started playing again.

      The recovery took only seconds, but to Isadora it spanned an eternity as long as her spinsterhood. Within that eternity, she heard the censorious murmurs, the titters of amusement and the throat-clearings of disapproval that had dogged her entire painful adolescence. Dear heaven, she had to get away from here.

      But how did one escape from one’s own life?

      “Thank you, Lucinda,” she said dutifully. “How clumsy of me.”

      Lucinda didn’t deny it, but with brisk movements she brushed off Isadora and smiled up at her. “No harm done, dearest. It will take more than a dropped plant to ruin the evening. All is well.”

      She meant it, she really did, Isadora realized without rancor. Lucinda, the eldest of the Peabody offspring, was as blond and willowy as Botticelli’s Venus. She’d married the richest mill owner in Framingham, moved to a brick-and-marble palace in the green hills, and every other year in the spring, like a prize brood mare, she brought forth a perfect pink-and-white baby.

      Isadora forced herself to return her sister’s smile. What an odd picture they must make, she thought. Lucinda, who had the looks of a Dresden china doll and Isadora, who looked as if she had an appetite for Dresden German sausage.

      Her moment of infamy over, Isadora finally escaped to the study. It was the classic counting-room of a Boston merchant, appointed with finely carved furniture, books bound in tooled leather, and a goodly supply of spirits and tobacco. Breathing in the familiar smells with a sigh of relief, she shut her eyes and nearly melted against the walnut paneling.

      “Heave to, girl, you look a bit tangled in your rigging,” said a friendly voice. “Something foul-hook you?”

      She opened her eyes to see a gentleman sitting in a Rutherford wing chair, an enameled snuffbox in one hand and a cup of cider-and-cream punch in the other.

      “Mr. Easterbrook.” Isadora came to attention. “How do you do?”

      She imagined she could hear Abel Easterbrook’s joints creak with rheumatism as he levered himself up and bowed, but his smile, framed by silver side-whiskers, radiated warmth. “I’m in fine trim, Miss Isadora.” He seated himself heavily against the coffee-colored leather. “Fine trim, indeed. And yourself?”

      I’m still madly in love with your son. Horrified at the thought, she bit back the words. One social blunder per hour should suffice even her.

      “Though I’ve committed foul murder—” she gestured ruefully at the open door, indicating the Boston fern being carried off to the dust bin “—I am quite well, thank you, though the autumn weather has given me a case of the grippe. Did your ship arrive?” She knew Mr. Easterbrook’s largest bark was expected in and that he was anxious about it.

      He lifted his cup. “She did indeed. Found a berth at harbor tonight, and she’s set to discharge cargo tomorrow. Broke records, she did.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The Silver Swan grossed ninety thousand dollars in 190 days.”

      Isadora gasped, genuinely impressed, for matters of business interested her. “Heavens be, that is quite an achievement.”

      “I daresay it is. I have the new skipper to thank.” Easterbrook toyed with the chain of the money scales on the gateleg table by his chair. Isadora liked Abel Easterbrook because he treated her more like a business associate than a young—or not so very young—lady. She liked him because he had fathered Chad Easterbrook, the most perfect man ever created. Neither of which she would admit on pain of death.

      “A new captain?” she inquired politely.

      “He’s a brash Southerner. A Virginia gent, name of Calhoun. Had such impressive sailing credentials that I hired him on the spot. I judge a man by the cut of his jib, and Calhoun seemed well clewed up.”

      She smiled, picturing a grizzled old ship captain. Only a man as conservative as Abel would call his employee “brash.”

      He took out a handkerchief and buffed his snuffbox until it shone. It was painted with the Easterbrook shipping emblem—a silver swan on a field of blue. “He’s still aboard the Swan tonight, settling the sailors’ bills. Hope to have a new sailing plan from him before the week is out. Next run is to Rio de Janeiro.”

      “Congratulations,” said Isadora. “You’ve had a marvelous success.”

      Abel Easterbrook beamed. “Quite so.” He lifted his cup in salute. “To you, Miss Isadora. Thank you for keeping an old salt company. And to my speedy new skipper, Mr. Ryan Calhoun.”

      He barely had time to take a sip when a footman came in and discreetly handed him a note. Abel excused himself and left the study, grumbling about a business that couldn’t run without him.

      Isadora hung back, savoring her solitude, and mulled over Mr. Easterbrook’s news. Ryan Calhoun. A brash Virginia gent. Isadora wasn’t brash in the least, though sometimes she wished she were.

      She used the moment of privacy to adjust her corset, wishing she knew a curse word or two to describe the whalebone-and-buckram prison. On impulse, she picked up a dagger-shaped letter opener from the desk. Unable to resist the urge, she inserted the letter opener down the bodice of her gown to scratch at the rash that had formed there.

      As she eased her discomfort, she chanced to look into the oval mirror hanging on the wall behind her father’s desk.

      Peering over the thick lenses of her rimless spectacles, she saw herself for exactly what she was. Her hair was the color of a mud puddle. Her eyes lacked the pure clear blue so prized by her parents and so evident in her siblings. She had none of the gifts of laughter and beauty her brothers and sisters possessed in such abundance. Instead, she wore a sullen expression, and her nose was red from the sniffles.

      If the Peabodys were a family that believed in magic—and being proper Bostonians they most certainly were not—they would call Isadora a changeling child: dark where the others were fair, pallid where the others were fashionably pale, round where the others were angular, tall where the others were petite.

      The unforgiving mirror reflected a discontented creature in matronly black bombazine stretched over a bone-crushing corset. At her mother’s insistence, she wore her hair in a Psyche knot, for the Grecian mode—a topknot with streamers of cascading tendrils—was considered the height of fashion. The problem was, her long, unruly hair stuck out in all directions, and the delicate tendrils resembled fat sausage curls. She made the very picture of youth drying up like a fig on the shelf. The image filled her with such an immense self-loathing and shame that she wanted to do something desperate.

      But what? What? Could she not even think of an imaginative way to banish her own misery?

      Enough, she told herself, giving her bodice a last good scratch with the letter opener. As she did so, the door to the study blew open, and a fresh wave of revelers poured into the foyer. They brought with them the crisp smell of autumn and gales of cultured conversation.

      Too late, Isadora realized the guests could see straight into the office. She froze, the letter opener still stuck halfway down the front of her. Loud male laughter boomed from the foyer. “Good God, Izzie,” said her brother Quentin, standing amid a group of his friends from Harvard. “Is this your imitation of fair Juliet?”

      Too