The Charm School Read online

  Praise for the novels of Susan Wiggs

  “The Charm School draws readers in with delightful characters, engaging dialogue, humor, emotion and sizzling sensuality.”

  —Costa Mesa Sunday Times

  “Will appeal to fans across the board.”

  —Library Journal on The Charm School

  “In poetic prose, Wiggs evocatively captures the Old South and creates an intense, believable relationship between the lovers.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Horsemaster’s Daughter

  “Wiggs is one of our best observers of stories of the heart. Maybe that is because she knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.”

  —Salem Statesman-Journal

  “[A] delightful romp…With its lively prose, well-developed conflict and passionate characters, this enjoyable, poignant tale is certain to enchant.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Halfway to Heaven

  “A bold, humorous and poignant romance that fulfills every woman’s dreams.”

  —Christina Dodd on Enchanted Afternoon

  “A rare treat.”

  —Amazon.com on The Firebrand, an Amazon.com

  Best of 2001 title

  “With this final installment of Wiggs’s Chicago Fire trilogy, she has created a quiet page-turner that will hold readers spellbound as the relationships, characters and story unfold. Fans of historical romances will naturally flock to this skillfully executed trilogy, and general women’s fiction readers should find this story enchanting as well.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Firebrand

  “Wiggs’s uncomplicated stories are rich with life lessons, nod-along moments and characters with whom readers can easily relate. Delightful and wise, Wiggs’s latest shines.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Dockside

  “Empathetic protagonists, interesting secondary characters, well-written flashbacks, and delicious recipes add depth to this touching, complex romance.”

  —Library Journal on The Winter Lodge

  “With the ease of a master, Wiggs introduces complicated, flesh-and-blood characters into her idyllic but identifiable small-town setting, sets in motion a refreshingly honest romance, resolves old issues and even finds room for a little mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Winter Lodge (starred review)

  “Wiggs explores many aspects of grief, from guilt to anger to regret, imbuing her book with the classic would’ve/could’ve/should’ve emotions, and presenting realistic and sympathetic characters…another excellent title [in] her already outstanding body of work.”

  —Booklist on Table for Five (starred review)

  “A human and multilayered story exploring duty to both country and family.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts on The Ocean Between Us

  Also by SUSAN WIGGS

  Historical Romances

  THE DRIFTER

  THE LIGHTKEEPER

  Chicago Fire Trilogy

  THE FIREBRAND

  THE MISTRESS

  THE HOSTAGE

  Calhoun Chronicles

  A SUMMER AFFAIR

  ENCHANTED AFTERNOON

  HALFWAY TO HEAVEN

  THE HORSEMASTER’S DAUGHTER

  THE CHARM SCHOOL

  Contemporary Romances

  LAKESIDE COTTAGE

  TABLE FOR FIVE

  SUMMER BY THE SEA

  THE OCEAN BETWEEN US

  HOME BEFORE DARK

  PASSING THROUGH PARADISE

  Lakeshore Chronicles

  DOCKSIDE

  SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE

  THE WINTER LODGE

  SUMMER AT WILLOW LAKE

  JUST BREATHE

  SUSAN WIGGS

  THE CHARM SCHOOL

  To the most charming group of people I know:

  LIBRARIANS.

  You probably don’t remember my name,

  but you saw me every week. I was the quiet child

  with the long pigtails and the insatiable appetite for

  Beverly Cleary, Carol Ryrie Brink and

  Louise Fitzhugh. I was the one you had to tap on the

  shoulder at closing time, because I was still sitting

  on a stool in the stacks, poring over Ramona’s latest

  adventures or sniffling as I read Anne Frank’s diary.

  I was the little girl with the huge wire basket on

  the front of her bike—for lugging home a stack of

  books that weighed more than I did. I never thought

  to thank you back then, but I didn’t understand how

  very much all those hours, and all those books, and

  all your patience meant to me or to the writer I

  would become. But I understand now. So this book

  is dedicated to you, to all of you, in gratitude for

  bringing books and readers together.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part One: The Ugly Duckling

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two: The Bird of Passage

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Three: The Bird of Winter

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Four: The Swan

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Afterword

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the usual suspects: Joyce, Alice, Christina, Betty and Barb. Also to Jill, Kristin and Debbie, who make this business much less isolating. Thanks also to my editors, Dianne Moggy and Amy Moore-Benson, who helped to shape this work with sensitivity and finesse. The passages from

  Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling (translated from the Danish by Jean Hersholt) are drawn from copy number 1990 of the 2500 Limited Editions Club, copyright 1942 for the George Macy Companies, Inc. The author humbly acknowledges her debt to the wisdom of the great storyteller, who wrote “Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan’s egg.”

  Part One

  The Ugly Duckling

  “What nice little children you do have, mother,” said the old duck with the rag around her leg. “They are all pretty except that one. He didn’t come out so well. It’s a pity you can’t hatch him again.”

  And the poor duckling who had been the last one out of his egg, and who looked so ugly, was pecked and pushed about and made fun of by the ducks, and the chickens as well. “He’s too big,” said they all. The turkey gobbler, who thought himself an emperor because he was born wearing spurs, puffed up like a ship under full sail and bore down upon him, gobbling and gobbling until he was red in the face. The poor duckling did not know where he dared stand or where he dared walk. He was so sad because he was so desperately ugly, and because he was the laughingstock of the whole barnyard.

  When morning came, the wild ducks flew up to have a look at the duckling. “What sort of creature are you?” they asked, as the duckling turned in all directions, bowing his best to them all. “You are terribly ugly,” they told him, “but that’s nothing to us so long as you don’t marry into our family.”

  —Hans Christian An
dersen,

  The Ugly Duckling (1843)

  One

  The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.

  —Henry James,

  The Portrait of a Lady

  Boston, October 1851

  Being invisible did have its advantages. Isadora Dudley Peabody knew no one would notice her, not even if the gleaming ballroom floor decided to open up and swallow her. It wouldn’t happen, of course. Disappearing in the middle of a crowded room was bold indeed, and Isadora didn’t have a bold bone in her body.

  Her mind was a different matter altogether.

  She surrendered the urge to disappear, relegating it to the land of impossible things—a vast continent in Isadora’s world. Impossible things…a smile that was not forced, a compliment that was not barbed, a dream that was not punctured by the cruel thorn of disappointment.

  She pressed herself back in a half-domed alcove window. A sneeze tickled her nose. Whipping out a handkerchief, she stifled it. But still she heard the gossip. The old biddies. Couldn’t they find someone else to talk about?

  “She’s the black sheep of the family in more ways than one,” whispered a scandalized voice. “She is so different from the rest of the Peabodys. So dark and ill-favored, while her brothers and sisters are all fair as mayflowers.”

  “Even her father’s fortune failed to buy her a husband,” came the reply.

  “It’ll take more than money—”

  Isadora let the held-back sneeze erupt. Then, her hiding place betrayed, she left the alcove. The startled speakers—two of her mother’s friends—made a great show of fluttering their fans and clearing their throats.

  Adjusting her spectacles, Isadora pretended she hadn’t heard. It shouldn’t hurt so much. By now she should be used to the humiliation. But she wasn’t, God help her, she wasn’t. Particularly not tonight at a party to honor her younger sister’s engagement. Celebrating Arabella’s good fortune only served to magnify Isadora’s disgraceful state.

  Her corset itched. A rash had broken out between her breasts where the whalebone busk pressed against her sternum. It took a great deal of self-control to keep her hands demurely folded in front of her as she waited in agony for some reluctant, grimly smiling gentleman to come calling for a dance.

  Except that they seldom came. No young man wanted to partner an ungainly, whey-faced spinster who was too shy to carry on a normal conversation—and too bored with banal social chatter to try very hard.

  And so she stood against the block-painted wall, garnering no more attention than her mother’s japanned highboy. The sounds of laughter, conversation and clinking glasses added a charming undertone to the music played by the twelve-piece ensemble. Unnoticed, she glanced across the central foyer toward her father’s business study.

  Escape beckoned.

  In the darkened study, perhaps Isadora could compose herself and—heaven preserve her—wedge a hand down into her corset for a much-needed scratch.

  She started toward the entranceway of the ballroom and paused beneath the carved federal walnut arch. She was almost there. She had only to slip across the foyer and down the corridor, and no one would be the wiser. No one would miss her.

  Isadora fixed her mind on escape, skirting a group of her brothers’ Harvard friends. She scurried past a knot of her father’s cronies from the Somerset Club and was nearly thwarted by a gaggle of giggling debutantes. Moving into the foyer, she had to squeeze past a gilt cherub mirror and a graceful Boston fern in a pot with four legs.

  One step, then another. Invisible. She was invisible; she could fly like a bird, slither like a snake. She pictured herself lithe and graceful, fleet of foot, causing no more stir than a breeze as she disappeared into nothingness, into freedom—

  Deep in one of her fantasies, she forgot about her bow, which stuck out like a duck tail festooned with trailing ribbons.

  She heard a scraping sound and turned in time to see that a ribbon had tangled around one of the legs of the fern pot. Time seemed to slow, and she saw the whole 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.