the shape, the name and that precious essence. He wondered if he was still sober enough to stagger off to his stateroom with her.
Leaning back in the deck chair, he could see into the gangway leading to the orlop deck. A man and woman in a hammock swayed with a familiar rhythm, the woman’s legs bare to the hams and hanging over the sides of the webbed sling. Another couple slept atop a coil of rope, a bottle cradled between them. Amidships, Chips and Luigi Conti made music with mouth harp and whistle while Journey, the steward, pounded out a rhythm on a skin drum. Dancing couples reeled and laughed, bumping into barrels and crates. Someone had unlatched the hen coop, and a few biddies ran around the deck in hilarious confusion.
Something distant and sober inside Ryan suddenly came to attention. For once in his misbegotten life, he’d succeeded. And not in a small way, but in a way all the world would notice. He’d made a voyage in record time; he’d delivered a fortune to the ship’s owner.
If only his father had lived, perhaps he would have acknowledged Ryan’s achievement. That would have been a first.
Ryan felt a peculiar thickness in his throat. He’d succeeded. He wished he could freeze this moment in his heart and keep it there forever. He wished he had someone besides a nameless prostitute to share it with.
He banished the darkness and resolved to enjoy his triumph.
“A toast!” he roared, holding the woman’s clasped hand aloft like a prize-fighter. “To the Swan, and to all her brave crew!”
“To us!” the men bellowed, clinking mugs.
Ryan aimed a crooked grin at his companion, who had begun squirming suggestively in his lap. “Sugar-pie, my legs are going numb.”
She screeched with laughter. “I hope that don’t affect the rest of you.”
“We’ll see when we get to the stateroom.”
Her hips ground down on him. “Who needs the stateroom?”
He had a fleeting thought of privacy, but the rum—and the whore’s sly fingers—coaxed a dark, desire-filled laugh from him. With slow, teasing movements he plunged his hand beneath her skirts. He found the stolen flask but passed it right over in pursuit of richer treasures.
No doubt the puritanical Mr. Easterbrook would be appalled to see such revelry on his ship, but Ryan banished the last of his scruples. No proper Bostonian would show up now. Anyone who strayed to the docks at this time of night deserved what he saw.
“I feel quite wicked being out so late,” Isadora confessed to Lily Raines Calhoun. She leaned back against the burgundy leather seat of the hooded clarence. Her father, who always demanded the best, had had the carriage fitted with a curved glass, like a show window, in the front. Lily and Isadora sat side by side on the rear seat, watching the city through the glass.
A waning moon cast the State House dome in pale gray; misty orbs of gaslight glowed along State Street, and shadows haunted side streets and Merchants’ Row.
“Your driver looked a mite startled when we told him we wanted to go to the harbor,” Lily remarked. “I do hope this won’t cause trouble with your family.”
“Believe me, Mrs. Calhoun, since the age of fourteen, I’ve done nothing but cause trouble for my family.”
Lily turned, the light on her face flickering from pale to gold in the swinging glow of the carriage lantern. “Whatever can you mean?”
Isadora toyed idly with the strings of her lace cap. “Until I was fourteen, I lived with a maiden aunt in Salem. I only saw my family once in a great while.” She thought back to the long, dreamy years with Aunt Button when nothing mattered more than spending a few hours reading a wonderful book. “It was an arrangement that suited all of us very well indeed. But when my great aunt died, I had to return to the house on Beacon Hill. I’m afraid I’ve been a trial to them ever since.”
“I can’t imagine you a trial,” Lily said.
“Yes, you can,” Isadora replied with gentle censure. “You’re too kind to say so. A plain spinster, awkward in conversation, clumsy on the dance floor—I’m a trial, especially to the Peabodys.”
“We all have our own unique gifts. It is incumbent upon the larger society to discover them.”
“And if they do not?”
Lily Calhoun turned on the seat so that she was facing Isadora. The shifting lamplight glazed her face with fire. Very deliberately, with her dainty gloved hands, she reached out and removed Isadora’s small rectangular-lensed spectacles, letting them dangle from the black silk ribbon around her neck.
“Why then, my dear Miss Peabody,” she said in her lazy, lovely drawl, “they aren’t seeing you at all.”
It was something so like Aunt Button would have said that Isadora felt a sudden lump in her throat.
“They are the Peabodys of Beacon Hill.” Isadora used her haughtiest accent, coaxing a smile from Lily. “They see the world as they think it should be seen.”
“Perhaps you’re in the wrong world, then.”
“It’s the only one I know, Mrs. Calhoun.” Isadora turned a rueful smile out the window. A newcomer—and a Southerner at that—couldn’t understand. In families like the Peabodys’, nothing changed, ever. It was the sacred mission of each generation of Peabodys to carry on exactly as their parents had before them, and so on until the end of time.
Misfits like Isadora were culled from the herd. Put off somewhere until weariness and middle age rendered them harmless. In old age, they could actually become useful as Aunt Button had. They could watch over the misfits of succeeding generations.
There had to be something else, Isadora often thought. But what? She yearned to fly away free, to escape. But what she wished to escape was her own life, and that was the one thing she couldn’t get away from.
She wanted to slap herself for even thinking in such bleak terms. Willfully she pulled her mind away from depressing thoughts and turned back to her companion.
Lily Calhoun stared straight ahead, her front teeth worrying her lower lip. “I’d best warn you about Ryan,” she said. “He’s the black sheep of his family, though I’ve never cared for that term.”
Isadora’s interest was piqued. Perhaps she and this Ryan Calhoun had something in common. “Is he a constant trial?”
“A trial? My dear, he could charm a pearl from an oyster.”
Isadora’s interest waned. She had nothing in common with a charming person.
“I had hoped that coming north would instill in him a sense of responsibility. Instead, the first thing he did upon leaving Virginia was to set his manservant free.”
“He had a slave?” Distaste coiled in Isadora’s belly.
Lily nodded. “He and Journey were like brothers.”
“And he freed his ‘brother.’”
“He did indeed.”
“Bravo,”
