The Calhoun Chronicles Bundle: The Charm School

An unwanted inner voice told her she used to hide behind them. She hushed the inner voice. It was not up to Ryan Calhoun to drag her out of hiding.

She lifted the heavy lump of sodden fabric out of the tub and slapped it on the deck. Picking up the tub, she staggered toward the rail to empty it. The weight of it unbalanced her, and she lurched forward. The tub sloshed over, a fount of gray wash water exploding upward and drenching Ryan Calhoun from head to toe.

His stylishly cut red hair. His exquisite lace neck cloth. His silken turquoise waistcoat. His creased trousers and gleaming boots.

Isadora stood back, blinking and aghast. Then a satisfying sense of justice settled over her. “Oops,” she said.

She expected fury from him, but he surprised her. He threw back his head and roared with laughter.

What a singular way to cope with a humiliating mishap, she thought, puzzled by his mirth. She studied his tanned, wet throat and curling long hair and strong white teeth and dancing eyes. He was so quick to laugh at his own expense.

“Touché, Miss Peabody. Touché.”

“The pleasure was mine, I’m sure,” she said. She had the most inexplicable urge to smile at him. Determinedly she kept her face blank, her mouth grim.

He whistled as he strolled down the deck, water squishing from his boots. Isadora stared after him, intrigued. The seamen on duty stared, too, elbowing each other and whispering.

Papa had warned her that travel by sailing ship meant days of tedium.

Papa, for the first time in his life, was wrong.

One morning at sunrise, after the changing of the watch, Ryan was walking the starboard rail when he came across the sail maker crouched on deck with Isadora.

Despite living in tiny quarters with a minimum of amenities, she clung to her lubberly fashion of wearing a tightly bound gray or black dress, a bonnet and that idiotic knotted coiffure. Yet the wind, far more persistent even than Isadora’s stubbornness, plucked long strands of hair from her bonnet and swirled them in the sun until the exposure made her hair glisten with gold highlights.

Between Luigi and Isadora lay a pile of ropes and pulleys. “This,” the sail maker said, holding it out to her, “is a heaving line. You throw it with a monkey’s fist, like so.” He demonstrated. Then Isadora took a turn with it, beaming when she succeeded.

“And this one?” She held up a decorated knot.

“A cat’s-paw. And this one, see, it’s got a knot to hold a line on a gangway, this is a Turk’s head.”

She took up the next one. “What do you call this back splice?”

“A dog’s cock,” Luigi said matter-of-factly.

Miss Isadora dropped it as if it had burned her. “Ye powers.”

Laughing to himself, Ryan approached them. “A lesson in your sea-going jargon?” he inquired.

Luigi winked, twitching his mustache. “The lady, she is a fast learner.”

“Then perhaps one day you’ll tell her how we refer to heaving in a line a bit.”

She stood up. “And what would the answer to that one be?”

“If the back splice makes you blush, I don’t think you’re ready to hear.” Goaded by one of his famous impulses, Ryan cocked out his arm. “I was about to take the morning longitude sights and thought you might like to join me.”

He told himself he’d invited her as a small reward. She had been performing the exhausting task of nursing his mother and Fayette. She’d earned a little civil conversation.

She eyed him suspiciously. Over the past several days they had circled one another with cautious interest. Ryan could never be certain what she would do next, this “idler” he’d taken on to do the translating and clerical work. As the crew settled into the predictable rhythms of life under sail, there was a subtle, indefinable difference in the air about them.

Ignorant of social graces, these rough sailors, these sons of Neptune simply accepted her. Ryan had expected them to defer to her, to behave differently in her presence, but instead, they took it upon themselves to initiate her into their way of life.

One day she might be seated on a crate with Luigi, mending sail with a big hooked needle. The next might find her laughing as Gerald Craven, the jibboom man, taught her to play a tune on the Portuguese accordion. In the galley, she showed the Doctor how to make fudge. Once, Ryan came out of the chart room to find her holding Chips’s hand in her lap. The sight gave Ryan a sudden hot sting of annoyance until he realized she was picking a splinter out of the carpenter’s hand.

She made friends of them. This willful young woman from Beacon Hill, who came from people who wouldn’t deign to let a boy like Timothy Datty black their boots, had suddenly taken on a different role aboard the Silver Swan. She wanted to know about Luigi’s impressive array of tattoos and what each one meant. She asked after Gerald Craven’s children, knowing they had come down with the measles shortly before the Swan set sail. She conversed readily and easily with Chips, ordinarily a quiet man who contented himself with his hand-carving. The Doctor let her dry her stockings in his galley, a privilege he wouldn’t afford Ryan. And even William Click, the unpopular second mate, was wont to sit with her of an evening, smoking his pipe and listening as she read from one of the many books she had brought.

“How are my mother and Fayette today?” Ryan asked as they made their way toward the chart room.

“Little better, I fear. I managed to get them to sip some broth, but they are both still reluctant to leave their beds.”

“Some folks never get their sea legs,” he said, then eyed Isadora, noting the way long trails of hair had been plucked from their pins. “You don’t suffer the mal de mer. What is your secret, Miss Peabody?”

“I’ve learned to be very cautious about what I eat.”

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. Were her cheeks less round? Did he detect dark circles under her eyes? “You’ll fall ill of weakness,” he warned her. “You’ll waste away.”

She laughed softly; she seemed to laugh far more readily at sea than on land. “I daresay I’ve a long way to go before facing that calamity, Captain.” She took a deep breath of the morning air. “Indeed, my health is much improved aboard this ship. I’ve not sneezed or sniffled since we left Boston.”

It was true, he realized with a start. The watery eyes, the reddened nose, the explosive sneezes—he’d seen none of them lately.

Ralph Izard stood on the foredeck, turning to greet them as they approached. “I think we can bring up the sea anchor, skipper,” he said to Ryan. “Seas’ve calmed a good bit since last night.”

“We’ve dropped anchor?” Isadora asked with a frown.

“A sea anchor,” Izard explained. “We used a drogue thrown overboard to keep the bow to the direction of the sea.” He indicated the windlass. “I was about to bring it up.”

“May I?” she asked, her face lighting up.

Izard glanced at Ryan, who shrugged. “Mind your fingers—we don’t want them pinched by the rope.”

Mr. Izard gave her a handspike and showed her how to insert it into the body of the windlass cylinder. Positioning herself behind the foremast, she began to work the apparatus. Slowly the thick rope, wet and hung with seaweed, began to emerge from the water.

“Steady now,” Izard said. “Keep her steady, and the rope will coil around it all of itself. Shall I give you a hand?”

“Don’t you dare,” she said, her voice strained. “I can do this.” Grinding away at the windlass, she made a very strange sailor—though her full skirts and landlubber shoes impeded her progress. A long, rolling wave lifted the bow at a sharp slant.

“Careful,” Ryan said. “Chips lifted out some of the planks to get at the dry rot, and—”

“Oh!” The heel of her shoe caught in a crevice between some of the missing boards. The next happened so quickly Ryan was powerless to stop it. Her feet came out from under her, and she let go of the handspikes. The rope spun wildly on the spool, winding her hair around it along with the twisted line. A second later, she lay against the foremast, bound there by her own hair. Her face had paled to a pasty white.

“Miss Peabody!” Ryan dropped to his knees. “Are you hurt?”

“No, but…it pulls at my scalp. Can you free me?”

“It does too hurt,” he snapped, making a few tentative attempts at untangling her. “You were dragged by the hair and your head slammed against the mast. So quit trying to be valiant and admit it hurts like hell.”

She bit her lip. “It hurts like…the dickens.”