The Calhoun Chronicles Bundle: The Charm School. Сьюзен Виггс

charm and beauty of the others. She whisked her off to Salem and the Peabodys barely noticed.

      Aunt Button and Isadora had a jolly time there—Isadora became better educated than any boy. Aunt Button taught her that there was nothing unseemly about this. Isadora’s appearance simply didn’t matter to her. Nor did it matter to Isadora.

      Until the day Aunt Button died and Isadora was forced to return to the Beacon Hill mansion of her parents.

      She would never forget the look on her mother’s face when she walked in the door. Her words were simple: “And here is Isadora, back with us again.” But it was the expression on her face that lived in Isadora’s heart and shaped all the days and months and endless years that came after.

      The bright, untidy fourteen-year-old had no idea how to transform herself into a society belle. She knew too much Greek, Latin, Hebrew and mathematics to be popular and cared too much about social responsibility to be trusted.

      So here she stood, dying by inches. Shriveling like a prune in the pantry, plain and colorless and feeling more desperate than ever. She wished her parents would leave her to her books and studies, but they kept thrusting her out into society where she gasped like a beached fish. And by shoving her before the shipping heirs and Harvard princelings, they had inadvertently sparked a dream in Isadora—the dream of Chad Easterbrook. It was absurd, really, to yearn for such a perfect specimen of manhood, but she couldn’t help herself. She kept thinking that if she tried hard enough, she might one day come to mean something to him.

      Picking up a button hook, she strained her arms to reach the back. Yanking at one of the buttons, she heard a tearing sound, but she didn’t care. She would never wear this abominable dress again.

      When she had stripped down to her chemise, she remembered Chad’s note—slightly damp—tucked between her breasts.

      “Oh, Aunt Button,” she whispered to the empty room. “What shall I do? What can possibly save me now?”

      She wanted to burn the note. She should burn it. But in the end she did something much, much better. She did exactly what her Aunt Button would have done: she gave in to her strengths, such as they were.

      Walking purposefully to the writing desk by the window, she dipped a quill and composed a note of her own.

      Four

      A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious…. A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

      —Samuel Eliot Morison,

      Maritime History of Massachusetts

      “This collar itches,” Journey complained. “This waistcoat chafes in my armpits.”

      “Stop whining,” said Ryan. “I have a headache the size of Atlantis and I’ve got no idea what we’re doing here.”

      “Wasting time, when we should be trying to save your sorry white backside,” Journey observed, running a long finger around the neckline of his boiled collar. “These shoes pinch,” he added.

      Ryan whirled on him, seeing stars from the sudden movement. But after a few seconds he focused and saw that yes, he really was here, halfway up Beacon Hill at the Belknap intersection, on a mission so incredibly foolish he wondered if he might still be drunk from the night before.

      “It’s not my backside that needs saving,” he said.

      Journey, who was magnificently tall, looked down his nose at Ryan, who was also tall but not magnificently so. “Then explain why I had to be the one to run your creditors off this morning.”

      “What creditors?” Ryan demanded. “And how the devil did they find me?”

      “Our arrival was announced at a party in one of these very strongholds,” Journey declared, gesturing. The solid brick mansions huddled shoulder to shoulder, a united front against the encroachment of riffraff. The staid facades of the houses and clipped greens of Boston Common stood in implacable denial that anything so upsetting as poverty existed in the world.

      Ryan had come here often in his Harvard days. He’d attended stuffy essay readings and anemic musicales in this rarefied neighborhood. But when, foolishly, he tried to seek friendship based on something deeper than wealth or athletic prowess, he encountered a deep-rooted snobbery that raked over his senses like the holystone over a ship’s deck.

      “This morning’s creditors were Mr. deLauncey of Harvard Trust and his associate, Mr. Keith,” Journey explained. “Apparently their generosity ends when a man leaves Harvard.”

      Ryan trudged on. “And on top of everything, my mother decides to come back from Europe.”

      “Uh-huh. And you know what else? She’s coming to Rio with us,” Journey said.

      Ryan stopped again, reeling. Disbelief pounded harder than his headache. “What?”

      “She and her maid, Fayette, signed on as passengers. She wants to go see your aunt in Rio.”

      “Excellent. I’ve always dreamed of spending weeks at sea in the company of my mother.” With slow, plodding steps he continued walking. He loved his mother, he always had, but the two of them inhabited different worlds. Lily Raines Calhoun was like a hothouse gardenia—beautiful, delicate and overpowering when she was in full bloom.

      She had no inkling of what he planned for this voyage and why it was so important. He hoped like hell she wouldn’t interfere.

      “Do you suppose your mother will tell Mr. Easterbrook that you lied about your skipper’s credentials?” Journey ventured.

      Ryan glowered at him. “You’re making my headache worse. And the money he made off me should stop any inquiries.”

      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,