Read The Horsemaster's Daughter Online
Authors: Susan Wiggs
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
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 great-nieces. 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 of Massachusetts
“T
his 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, with a shiny silver gazing ball on a pedestal in the middle of a box hedge maze.
The door knocker depicted Neptune with cheeks puffed out and a frown on his face. Ryan lifted the handle. Before he knocked, Journey said, “A question, Skipper.”
“What is it?”
“Have you found a translator for the next voyage?”
Ryan sighed, his head still pounding, the taste of rum old and sticky in the back of his throat. “My friend, it was all I could do this morning to find the floor beneath my bunk.”
Journey studied him, brown eyes probing with a depth that had been plumbed by years of friendship. “Why do you drink like that, honey?” he asked softly. “Why do you drink until you make yourself crazy?”
Ryan rapped smartly with the knocker. “Because it’s easier than staying sane,” he muttered. His life, he reflected, wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. He was supposed to be sitting on his front porch sipping a mint julep while a mute servant waved a punkah fan over his head. Instead, he’d become a sea captain in charge of a shockingly motley crew. A Southern man committed to a cause that had virtually destroyed his family.
The door swung open on silent hinges. Ryan found himself greeted by a butler in a plain broadcloth suit. The little gent appeared to be well familiar with the trappings of the socially acceptable, for in one brief glance he took in the expensive cut of Ryan’s suit and deemed it adequate.
“Yes, sir?” he asked.
Ryan bowed from the waist. “I am Ryan Calhoun, here to see Miss Peabody, if you please.”
The butler stepped back, allowing him to enter. He and Journey stood upon a plush Turkey carpet of red and violet. A gilt mirror adorned one wall, and in the corner was a plant stand without a plant on it.
“I shall see if Miss Arabella is at home,” the butler said.
The name didn’t sound familiar to Ryan, nor to Journey, judging by the jab he gave Ryan with his elbow.
“That would be Miss Isadora, would it not?” Ryan said.
The butler allowed his eyes to widen—whether at Ryan’s Southern drawl or at the mention of Miss Isadora, he couldn’t tell.
“You are here to see Miss Isadora?”
Ryan smiled patiently. “That’s correct. Is she at home?”
“I…” The diminutive man cleared his throat. “I shall inquire. If you like, you may wait in the parlor.” He gestured. “Your man can go around to the servants’ entrance in the rear.”
Ryan expected the error. “This is Mr. Journey Calhoun, and he isn’t a servant, but my business partner.”
The calm, self-possessed man seemed to be unraveling by inches. He cracked the knuckles of his left hand. “I…I see. Would you please excuse me?”
“By all means.”
You officious little snot,
he added silently as the butler scurried away.
“You should have sent me around the back,” Journey said. “The food and conversation’s better, anyway.”
“You’re no servant, damn it.” Ryan strolled boldly into the ornate parlor. A chandelier glistening with cut crystal droplets lorded over an arrangement of expensive furniture and objets d’art. A Revere tea service and an array of sparkling cut glass decanters graced a sideboard.
“Didn’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Journey said. “You re-charted your entire life so I wouldn’t be a servant.” He leaned his elbow on the blue-and-gilt fireplace mantel, a slender Meissen vase in the center.
“That’s true,” Ryan said at length. “That’s for damned sure. And don’t think for a minute I regret it.”
A peculiar feeling washed over Ryan. He loved this man, loved him with a ferocity he’d never felt for his own brother. He and Journey had come up together, from sassy rough-and-tumble seven year olds to the men they were now.
The fact that one had been master and the other a slave hadn’t interfered in the friendship—at least, not at first.
Ryan checked his appearance in a gilt-framed mirror. Considering the night he’d had, he looked remarkably well put together, his red hair recently cut by Timothy Datty, the cabin boy. His collar and sky-blue frock coat were crisp and clean, thanks to Luigi Conti, the sail maker who was particular about such things.
He had been seven years old and formally dressed the first day Journey had been brought to him, he recalled. Father had made him wait in the hot summer parlor of Albion, and precisely at noon, Purdy had brought in a little boy with a skinny neck and huge eyes.
“This be my nephew Journey,” Purdy had said, her gaze cutting down and to the side in the manner of most slaves. “He’s a real good boy, ain’t you, Journey? A real good boy.”
And Journey had surprised Ryan. Instead of the meek, deferential countenance bred and beaten into the house servants and field hands, he looked Ryan directly in the eye and spoke in a high, clear voice: “I’m the best boy there is.”
That had been the beginning. The lazy, hot growing-up years had been a time of turbulence balanced with moments of exquisitely sweet tranquillity. They played and fought together, went fishing and boating on Mockjack Bay together. Ryan slept in a mahogany four-poster bed, Journey on a straw pallet on the floor; but more often than not, when Purdy brought breakfast in the morning, she’d find them both splayed out in the big bed. When Ryan went to church, Journey waited in the carriage outside. When Journey wanted to learn to read and cipher, Ryan taught him in secret, by the light of a tallow stub cribbed from the kitchen.
When Journey’s father was sold to pay off the debts of Ryan’s father, Ryan wept and raged with him.
By the time the boys turned sixteen, Journey was married and a father himself. Ryan had seduced a number of local girls, and debutantes from all the best families had begun to notice him.
Life would have gone on in this vein except for two extraordinary things. First, Ryan elected to attend Harvard, Yankee radicals and all. And second, he insisted on bringing Journey with him.
Journey had fought him every inch of the way. He adored his wife and children, who lived at a neighboring plantation. But Ryan was insistent, even lordly about it. No proper gentleman matriculated at a university without his manservant. It was Journey’s duty to go. He had no choice.
Ryan had a plan. He couldn’t even tell Journey, because the slave’s wrath and grief had to be convincing.
Ryan smiled into the mirror, remembering the day he crossed the Mason Dixon line and gave Journey his freedom. Journey had held the manumission papers to his chest, unable to speak as the tears rolled down his face.
Now their shipping enterprise had brought them one step closer to their ultimate goal—to buy Journey’s wife and babies, bring them north and set them free.
“Got to be something wrong with her,” Journey said, startling Ryan out of his remembrances.
“Wrong with who?”
“The plaguey woman.” Journey’s gaze tracked along one wall that was entirely covered by shelf after shelf of books. “Why would a body want to leave a house like this?”
“There must be something about this life she can’t abide,” Ryan whispered, thinking of his own reasons for leaving Albion. “Maybe we should ask—”
“Miss Peabody will receive you in the garden,” the butler said from the doorway. “This way, please.”
Ryan and Journey followed him along a tall, narrow corridor hung with portraits. The family tree, Ryan assumed, noting that each subject seemed to be extraordinarily handsome. Either the painters were expert flatterers or this clan had been bred for show.
They passed through a glassed-in verandah and then emerged onto a clipped and sculpted yard. Paradise in miniature, Ryan thought, noting the vine pergolas and pruned yew trees, At the far end stood a gazebo with a domed roof and open sides. In the middle sat a woman in black, her head bent as she read a thick book in her lap.
“Miss Peabody?” Ryan said.
She looked up, blinking owlishly as if she had come from a dark place into the light. A pair of spectacles sat low on her nose, and she seemed to see better by peering over the top of the lenses.
“Yes.” Her voice squeaked, and she cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said again. “Captain Calhoun. I am indeed pleased that you’ve come.”
He stood before her, watching her hands, expecting her to extend one for his kiss. Instead, she clutched the book very hard, displaying fingernails that had been bitten ragged. She had, of all things, the indirect, cowed look of a slave. As if she feared she might be beaten at any moment.
Discomfited by the thought, he opted for a formal bow from the waist. “This is Mr. Journey Calhoun, my associate and steward of the
Swan.
”
She clutched the book tighter. “Oh! I was expecting a note, not two grown men! I’m—um—pleased to meet you.”
Ryan had never met a more socially gauche woman in his life. He dared not look at Journey, for if their gazes met, they would surely dishonor her with a fit of sniggering.
She cleared her throat again and used one finger to push her spectacles up the bridge of her nose. Said nose was red and swollen; either she was unwell or the book had moved her to tears.