The Charm School (5 page)

She sneezed again. A pity the colorful season plagued her this way.

Chad Easterbrook’s note affected her in the same manner the autumn colors adorned the landscape. He turned her drab world bright.

Judging by their conversation the night before, she had no reason to hope that he would show her favor. But oh, she hoped. Hoped until she ached with it. Perhaps this time would be different. This time, doing his bidding would endear her to him.

She had to believe that. She had to believe there was an end to her loneliness. That something—someone— could fill the well of emptiness inside her. And that someone was Chad Easterbrook.

She sighed, holding herself very stiff and straight so that the busk of her corset wouldn’t stab into her. Closing her eyes, she allowed herself a small smile of triumph. Chad wanted her to participate in the afternoon’s diversion—a croquet match on Kimball Green.

She pictured the scene: Chad and his crowd wearing dress whites and assembled on the green for croquet. She glowed at the thought of being one of the happy group as they spent a lazy afternoon in laughter and sunshine. Thanks to Chad, she would soon be a part of his charmed world.

Lovingly, a smile playing about her lips, she folded his note and tucked it in the most romantic spot she could think of—beneath her busk.

It itched.

The memory of the ball reared in her mind. She pictured herself stumbling to help Chad with his romantic entanglement. Making a spectacle of herself by knocking over the plant. Being seen scratching her chest with a letter opener. Stammering an excuse to Mrs. Hallowell. Rushing off to find Ryan Calhoun at the harbor.

The thought of the red-headed Virginian, his lap draped with a half-clad woman and his belly full of rum, brought an unexpected twitch of disgust to Isadora’s mouth. No matter how deeply she humiliated herself, she had never sunk to that level.

She had finally met someone who was more of a disgrace than she was.

He would never know what a comfort he was to her.

She straightened her shoulders. Today would be different, she thought, holding back a sneeze. Today she’d redeem herself from last night’s fiasco.

First, a dress. Though she had absolutely no sense of fashion, she knew better than to wear black to a croquet match. She plucked up her skirts and hurried to her chambers, opening the walnut clothes press and peering inside.

Dear heavens. When had she managed to amass such a collection of black, brown and gray? She had black gowns with black lace. Black gowns with brown piping. Black gowns with gray eyelet. But there—off to one side. It was an ecru tea gown made for some awkward, forgotten social occasion. The dress was just the thing for an afternoon of croquet.

She rang for Thankful, and the maid arrived in a trice, setting her feather duster on the bed.

“Well, it’s different, miss, and that’s a fact,” Thankful said, picking up the pale India cotton dress.

“Do you think it’s too different from my usual style?” Isadora asked.

“Yes, it is.” With the brisk efficiency that had served her—and the Peabody family—well for three decades, Thankful took up her stay hook and freed Isadora from the black day gown. Then she held up the new dress. “Let’s see if we can make this fit.”

Isadora obediently put up her hands, and Thankful dropped the gown over her head, saying, “You know, your sister Arabella always looked so lovely in this color. The veriest picture, she was” — Thankful unapologetically put her knee in the middle of Isadora’s back and tugged hard “—stepping out with Lord knows how many gentleman callers …”

Isadora clutched the bedpost to steady herself as the maid struggled with the closures on the gown. She stopped listening to Thankful’s chatter. She’d heard the stories many times—Lucinda’s social triumphs, the duel that had almost erupted between two of Arabella’s suitors, Quentin’s habit of stepping out with a different young lady every night, Bronson’s liaisons with the best girls in Boston. As the maid prattled on and performed the punishing ritual of forcing the dress to contain her, Isadora tried not to wince. She had often wondered why a lady’s garments must hurt.

Corsets strangled, shoes pinched, ornamental combs dug into delicate scalps and society said

“Ahh,” and made admiring noises. It had always been a puzzle to her.

“Thankful,” she said, “I think the stays are as tight as they need be.”

“One more twist, there we are,” the maid said.

“I declare, you should follow the example of your mother and sisters, miss.

They never seem to mind sacrificing a bit of comfort for fashion.”

Isadora didn’t argue. The maid, like everyone else in the world, simply could not understand what had happened with the middle daughter of Boston’s leading couple. She was the product of the same careful breeding that had given Beacon Hill her gorgeous sisters and gallant brothers. Yet Isadora was nothing like them. Not even close.

“There you are,” Thankful pronounced, stepping back and wiping the sweat from her brow.

“Will there be anything else, miss?”

“No, thank you.” Isadora smoothed her hands down over the skirt, feeling better already. A pretty gown was the thing to win Chad’s attention.

She picked up a small hand mirror on a side table. By holding it out in front of her, she could admire the dress in individual pieces—high, puffy sleeves, ribbed panel, taut bodice, full skirts.

Setting aside the mirror, she noticed Thankful had left behind her feather duster. Rather than ring for the maid again, Isadora decided to take it to her. Hurrying along to the servants’ back stairway, she didn’t realize until it was almost too late that Thankful and the kitchen maid, Tilly, were gossiping in the stair.

“thought I was going to have to call you to help truss her up,” Thankful was saying, a chuckle in her voice.

“I’m glad you didn’t summon me,” Tilly replied.

“I would have been consumed by the giggles.”

“And that dress. Wait ‘til you see. She looks like a mishap in a sail-making factory.”

Isadora froze. Ordinarily she was quite awkward and given to noisy retreats, but not this time. This time, she felt as small as a mouse as she gripped the smooth-turned railing and made her way up the stairs. This time, her feet—as mortified as the rest of her—made not a sound.

Not a sound as she climbed up the stairs, walking slowly though she wanted to run to escape the hissing laughter wafting up from the landing. Not a sound as she moved along the carpeted hallway, not a sound as she pushed open the door to Arabella’s chamber, not a sound as she stood on the looped round rug in front of the cheval glass.

And then, looking at herself in the tall mirror, she made a sound. A sob.

The cut of the dress widened her figure to epic proportions. The pale linen washed her of all color save for the hot flags of shame that burned in her cheeks. Hanks of hair slipped from her Psyche knot, and the sausage curls on either side of her face grew wet and droopy as her tears soaked into them.

What had she been thinking, dressing this way? Who would ever want such a creature as this abomination in the mirror?

She returned to her own room and opened the French doors, walking out onto the balcony into the middle of an autumn day so glorious that its beauty mocked her.

She looked over the edge of the balustrade. It was a long way down.

If she should happen to trip, if she should happen to fall, who would miss her?

She stood teetering on the brink, feeling a peculiar darkness close around her. How seductive it was, the idea that her misery could end so swiftly.

So permanently. And so dramatically, with Chad Easterbrook’s note tucked close to her heart.

But in the end, she turned away, as cowardly of her own impulses as she was of everything else that required a backbone.

How long, she wondered, had she despised herself? She knew she hadn’t come to her unhappy state of self-loathing quickly or without deliberation. It had taken all of her endlessly long maiden years to reach it.

Sinful, Isadora told herself. And self-indulgent to feel this terrible. But then, she was a sinful creature. Every dark and unattractive impulse resided within her—sloth, envy, covetousness, yearning. Desire. She was guilty of all that and more.

From the time she left her great aunt’s house, she had been taught that a young lady must be pretty and popular. An accident of birth had placed her smack in the middle of two gorgeous sisters and two perfect brothers. How wonderful life must seem to them, how thrilling to awaken each day and know that it would be a pleasant one.

Isadora knew what happiness felt like. She had been happy once. She had been happy with Aunt Button.

She closed her eyes, thinking back to the days of her youth. When Isadora was five. Aunt Button came down from Salem. Strong-willed as a military general, she had no use for pretty things, and that included pretty greatnieces. She amazed Isadora by being more taken with her conversation and interests than with the 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.

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 a/Massachusetts i

“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.