The Charm School

The Charm School by Susan Wiggs

ISBN 1551664917

The Charm School.

Susan Wiggs was educated at Harvard and became a mathematics professor before turning to writing full time. Her dedication as an author has paid off as she has won many awards for her writing.

Susan Wiggs lives on an island in Puget Sound, Washington, with her husband and daughter.

Also available in MIRA Books

The Lightkeeper The Drifter

DID YOU PURCHASE THIS BOOK WITHOUT A COVER?

If you did, you should be aware it is stolen property as it was reported unsold and destroyed by a retailer. Neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this book.

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B. V. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

MIRA is a registered trademark of Harlequin Enterprises Limited, used under licence.

First published in Great Britain 2000 MIRA Books, Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1SR Susan Wiggs 1999

ISBN 155166 491 7 580001

Printed and bound in Spain by Litografia Roses S. A.” Barcelona

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

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 she 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.

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. Special thanks to Marcy Posner and Robert Gottlieb, whose enthusiasm never flags.

The passages from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling (translated from the Danish by Jean Herscholt) 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 that “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 Andersen, The Ugly Duckling (1843).

CHAPTER 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 illfavored, 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 entrance way 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 Bos-ton 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 sidewhiskers, 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 gate leg 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.