The Charm School

by Susan Wiggs

  “Twenty, and that’s my final offer,” Ryan snapped.

  “Thirty,” the man countered.

  “Done,” Ryan declared before Isadora could intervene again.

  The Brazilian’s face lit up with a brilliant smile, and he hurried off to work.

  Ryan whirled on Isadora, lowering his voice to a furious mutter. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  “I am your translator.”

  “Then translate. Don’t advise me on what to pay.”

  “But five daughters and a dying mother-in-law? The ten extra pounds would mean the world to the poor man.”

  “Poor, hah. The old salt’s a bachelor who lives on his boat. The extra money goes to keep him in women, cigars, and curaçao.”

  “How do you know that?” she demanded.

  “It’s my business to know that. Now, the next time there’s any translating to be done, you give it to me word for word—without any of your back-slack.”

  He stalked away, feeling strangely invigorated by the spat. That was the odd thing about knowing Isadora. Sparring with her was far more fun than polite conversation with a dozen other misses.

  Lily hired a coach to take them up into the hills where her sister lived. While Fayette oversaw the masses of traveling trunks, Lily wafted a fan in front of her face. The smells of roasting coffee and burning sugar cane filled the air.

  In preparation for landing, Isadora had read a traveler’s guide and studied the engravings to learn the lay of the land. But no travelogue or sketch could have prepared her for Rio. She stood in a thrall of amazement, observing the busy, glittering paradise: a mountain called Corcovado, shaped like a man bending over and draped in emerald silk. The Sugar Loaf rock, massive and gleaming like pure marble in the hot sun. Botafogo, a sparkling diamond necklace that collared the turquoise bay. Overlooking all this splendor was a dazzling white edifice she recognized as Laranjeras Palace.

  Dear Lord Almighty, Isadora thought. I have died and ascended to paradise. She almost believed the fanciful thought, except for the rivulets of sweat that trickled unbearably down her back and between her breasts.

  “Ah, here’s our coach,” Lily exclaimed. “I cannot believe I’m nearly there. I can hardly bear the anticipation.”

  Isadora studied the coach with a twinge of suspicion. All but buried beneath a pyramid of luggage, the conveyance looked as if it might collapse at any moment. “Do you think we’ll be safe in that?” she asked.

  “Of course. It’s the way all people of fashion travel. Have you got everything you need?”

  “Yes, but I should stay here,” Isadora protested. “Captain Calhoun might need help translating—”

  “Not today,” Ryan said, striding along the waterfront. He retained his seaman’s rolling gate, though he wore beautifully cut shore togs—tight black trousers and a full, blousy white shirt, with a tangerine-colored waistcoat.

  He was with a dark, slender man of indeterminate race—he had the close-curled hair of an African, yet his skin was rich cinnamon in tone.

  “Edison Carneros, at your service,” he said, his bow like that of a matador before a cheering crowd. When he straightened, he looked directly at Fayette.

  Isadora felt the heat sizzle between them. That was the only way she could explain it. The moment their gazes connected, the two experienced a leap of knowing. Isadora glanced at Ryan to see if he, too, had sensed the sudden, undeniable interest.

  “He’s an agent of my consignee,” Ryan explained, clearly oblivious to Fayette’s reaction to Carneros. “Since he speaks excellent English, I’ll have no need of a translator.” His grin was dazzling, his eyes dancing.

  “Why, son, you certainly look pleased with yourself,” Lily observed.

  “The ice cargo,” Carneros said. “It is in a most excellent condition. Yours is the first ice of the season to arrive.” He fashioned his brown face into a mournful look that failed to disguise his glee. “He will rob me blind, making me pay such a sum for the ice.”

  Ryan laughed. “You’ll earn it back. Senhor Ferraro is no fool. He knows what it’s worth to be the first to fill his plant.”

  The coach driver helped Lily in, and Ryan offered Isadora his hand. He’d not been pleased with her first live translation with the harbor pilot. Clearly this was his way of showing it—by handling her as if she were a stranger.

  The rejection was harsh simply because he was so charming about it. He kept one hand on hers, the other pressed to the small of her back. She knew with mortified certainty that he would feel the dampness of her sweat.

  “What do you think of Rio?” he asked as she stepped up to the footboard. His tone was dismissive; he didn’t care about her answer.

  What she wanted to tell him was that it was astonishing, magical, enchanting. A paradise she had seen only in dreams. “It’s very attractive,” she said tersely.

  He handed her up and she seated herself beside Lily under the colorful fringed awning.

  “Fayette,” called Lily, “are you coming?”

  The maid mumbled, “Yes’m.” But she never stopped staring at Carneros, nor did he take his eyes off her as he helped her into the coach. A magnetic energy seemed to charge the air around the pretty dark-skinned maid and the slender, debonair agent.

  “Go with God,” Carneros said softly, addressing all the ladies but not taking his eyes off Fayette. “Until we meet again—farewell.”

  The coach lurched, then started up the dusty road.

  “Really, Fayette,” Lily said in a scolding voice that failed to mask her indulgence. “We’re not an hour in port and you’re flirting already. What am I to do with you?”

  “Don’t know, ma’am,” Fayette said vaguely, leaning against a corner awning pole with a distant look on her face. “I surely don’t know.” She sighed sweetly and lifted one hand in farewell. Carneros returned the gesture, but Ryan had already turned away.

  Isadora directed her attention to the scenery. She spied the mercado in the distance, pinwheels of color and sound, bright sunshades stretched over mounds of melons and pineapples and fruits she had never seen before. They passed busy bodegas and a church with an airy song coming from the choir, and a flock of nuns moving down the street. Black-skinned servants and laundresses with baskets balanced on their heads passed in droves up and down the road.

  “There’s too much of it,” she said. “It’s so hard to take it all in.”

  “You have three glorious weeks here before setting sail again,” Lily said. “You should make it a point to see a new sight each day. That’s something we learned while touring the Continent, isn’t it, Fayette? Something new each and every day. Fayette? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

  “No, ma’am,” the maid said dreamily.

  When the road wound around a hill they came to a cluster of houses. The dwellings, set into the side of the hill, were pink-and-white confections of dusty pastel plaster. On all of the verges, seemingly in every rock and crevice, something grew: fuschia, bougainvillea, crimson and white poinsettia.

  The coach went on into a thick forest, but it was like no forest Isadora had ever seen. The trees grew immeasurably tall; they had thick glistening leaves and some blossomed with mysterious huge yellow-tongued flowers. Lush ferns carpeted the floor. Birds, the same green and yellow as the foliage, swooped here and there, and somewhere close by, a secret spring trickled.

  She leaned back against the seat and trembled, simply trembled, for she felt as if she had landed in the middle of a dream, and she was terrified of waking up.

  Yet when the coach ground to a halt on the crushed seashell drive of a vast pink villa, she dared to believe it was real.

  The driver gave a whistle. A herd of houseboys swarmed over the carriage, helping them out and chattering away in a charming patois as they liberated the luggage. Isadora was delighted and challenged by the language. How different it was from her textbook Portuguese. The rapid, colorful slang barely gave the nod to the formal mother tongue.
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br />   She caught the eye of one of the boys and smiled pleasantly, greeting him in her best Portuguese.

  He and his friends giggled uncontrollably.

  Lily asked, “What did you say to them?”

  “I hope I said it’s a pleasure to be here, but the way they’re giggling, I can’t be certain.” She found the boys enchanting. She could not be certain of their race. They were not black in the way Journey and the Doctor were, but neither were they Anglo. Their faces and bare legs were the color of the café com leite the port authorities had served at the landing.

  She found it interesting that their race was indeterminate—and that it did not seem to matter in the least.

  A high-pitched squeal issued from a colonnaded walkway leading from the main house. Lily became alert like a hound on the scent. She whirled around and answered the squeal with one of her own.

  “Rose! Oh, my darling Rose!”

  The two women fell into each other’s arms with such heartfelt emotion that Isadora and Fayette held hands and gulped back tears as they watched.

  The two sisters made an entrancing pair. Lily was as pale and delicate as her namesake, and Rose was as bold and vibrant as hers. She wore an extraordinary garment—a tiered skirt that showed her shapely ankles and bare feet. Her blouse was cut low in the neck. Isadora could tell for certain that Rose wore no corsets and petticoats under the loose, light costume.

  When Lily made the introductions, Rose embraced both Fayette and Isadora in turn. “Welcome to my home,” she declared. A touch of Virginia still accented her words, but her speech also had the rhythmic cadences of Brazil. She laughed at their stares and plucked playfully at Lily’s multilayered skirts. “We dress for the weather at Villa do Céu, and so must you. Were it not for the hot-blooded nature of our menfolk, we would probably go about in the nude.”

  Isadora stifled a gasp. Yet lightning did not strike simply because a woman mentioned something earthy. She decided she liked Rose very much indeed.

  As Rose led the way under the blossom-draped colonnade, she looked up and saw that each flower was a perfect orchid.

  Isadora knew she was going to enjoy Rio.

  Thirteen

  Be good and you will be lonesome.

  —Mark Twain,

  Following the Equator

  Hot, sweet and languid—those were the dominant impressions Ryan had of Rio. After concluding his preliminary business with Ferraro’s agent, he arranged for the cargo to be discharged. Luigi, who spoke his native tongue with the team of Italian stevedores, had matters well in hand.

  Before hiring a rig to convey him to his aunt’s in Tijuca, Ryan stood at the loud, busy waterfront and felt himself slowly fill up with a splendid feeling so rare that at first he couldn’t identify it. But it had a name—pride.

  Pride that he had done something of consequence, and done it so well that even strangers on the wharves had learned who he was. Captain Calhoun, who carried a tiny crew and too much sail. Captain Calhoun, who had won a bonus for coming in days before his due date.

  The wharf rats learned his identity as quickly as the shipping agents and local merchants. “I have the finest diamonds for sale,” hissed a smiling young man with oily hair and restless hands. “Come and see my selection.”

  Ryan cheerfully declined the suspicious offer, only to find the oily merchant replaced by a soft-hipped whore. “You have been long time at sea,” she purred, running her tongue around her lips in a gesture that should be outlawed. “I make you happy, happy today.”

  “Card game?” another man asked. “Faro or dice?”

  Ryan grinned from ear to ear. He hadn’t even gotten paid yet.

  And then, because a sudden hollowness opened up inside him, he held out his arm to the whore and asked, “What’s your name, sugar-pie?”

  In the end, he realized he’d never even heard it. All he remembered was the ripeness of her, the intoxicating musk, the way her soft body opened to him, the way he sank into her. Yet the act had a disturbingly mechanical nature. He pleasured her, yes, but in a curiously detached fashion. And, in a curiously detached fashion, he found his own pleasure as well, and paid her handsomely for the encounter.

  Late that afternoon, he emerged from the brothel with a head muzzy from drink, a body sated by sex and a jumble of confusing thoughts and misgivings. He had been offered contraband riches, sex, gambling, strong drink. At one time such things had been all he desired in life and he would have happily accepted. Yet now such pleasures held only faint allure for him. Instead, he went out to look at the teeming market and terraced hills and pastel palaces of Rio, and one thought tugged at him: none of this meant anything unless he had someone to share it with.

  Someone who looked at the world with wide-eyed wonder. Someone who drank in new sights and sounds with a passion belied by her sober mien. Someone who took a new experience and clasped it to her breast like a precious treasure.

  “The coach is ready,” Journey said, coming toward Ryan. “What the matter?” He peered at him. “You look sick.”

  “Maybe. In my mind,” Ryan said, and he walked toward the carriage.

  His Aunt Rose made an embarrassing fuss over him, exclaiming at his height, his handsomeness, the clarity of his cerulean eyes, the glossiness of his auburn hair.

  Lily looked on, indulging her for a few moments before saying, “He’s my son, Rose dear. Not a show horse.”

  “You should see me when I’m sober,” he said, swaying a little.

  “Of course.” Rose hugged him. She smelled pleasantly of coffee and flowers. He hoped it masked his own less pleasant scent of liquor and cheap perfume. “Forgive me, Ryan. I wasn’t blessed with children of my own, so I must do all my mothering when I can.”

  “And you do it with a natural grace,” he assured her, smiling despite a pounding headache. “Where is Isadora?”

  Lily and Rose exchanged a knowing glance. Ryan cursed himself for letting his eagerness show.

  Isadora came down the carved cypress stairwell, uncertainty evident in her stiff posture. “I—I apologize for keeping everyone waiting—”

  “Nonsense, my dear,” Rose interrupted. “We keep no schedules at Villa do Céu.”

  “House of the sky,” Isadora softly translated. “What an enchanting image.”

  “Now that we’re all together,” said Rose, “let us go in to supper.” She led the way across the arched foyer. Lily linked arms with her, and Ryan was confronted with the prospect of partnering Isadora.

  He found the notion absurdly appealing.

  He cocked out his elbow. “Shall we go?”

  She sent him that startled, I-can’t-believe-you’re-being-nice-to-me look that gratified him even as it broke his heart. Had no one ever shown this poor woman a bit of courtesy?

  She wrinkled her nose and pruned her lips in disapproval. “Captain Calhoun, what sort of business were you conducting?”

  He didn’t feel ashamed, exactly. Sheepish, perhaps. “I took care of a…personal affair as well.”

  “So I gather.”

  “It was a long voyage, Isadora. It’s not natural for a man to…do without.”

  “I’m certain I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “I’m trying to explain myself so you can include it in your report to Easterbrook.”

  “Why, how dare—” She stopped as his mother and Aunt Rose came into view.

  He pressed his arm against her until she took it. “Thank you, Captain,” she murmured.

  “Now that we’re ashore, you should call me Ryan.”

  “I couldn’t possibly.”

  He gestured at his mother and aunt who crossed the patio ahead of them. “The other ladies do.”

  “Your ladies of the night, I presume,” she said tartly.

  “That would be ‘ladies of the afternoon,’” he explained. “And for the record, there was only one. You are keeping score, are you not?”

  She made a strange wheezing sound, but couldn’t seem to get a word
out.

  “I meant my mother and aunt,” he said, taking pity on her.

  “They call me by my given name.”

  “They’re related to you.”

  He winked at Isadora. “That can be arranged.”

  Her gaze darted away. “You shouldn’t tease.”

  Maybe I wasn’t. The idea was too absurd and too startling to voice aloud, yet the instant it occurred to him, it sent down roots that reached deep inside to a tender place in his heart. It was the oddest notion that had ever occurred to him. Isadora Peabody? The prim, bashful Yankee who dreamed of Chad Easterbrook?

  Ryan had clearly been too long at sea.

  Isadora had no appetite for supper, though the meal was both delicious and exotic. There was avocado seasoned with vinegar, yams and beefsteak and two kinds of wine, melon and guava and lemony ice shaved from the large block Ryan had brought his aunt as a gift.

  Yet for all the bounty, Isadora could only pick at her food. She felt jumpy and out of sorts, and she wasn’t sure why. Eagerness, she decided, studying the ochre walls of the dining room, the arched doorway and windows with their carved wooden screens. That, and a decided enchantment with this strange new place, with the fragrance of orchids and tamarind trees and the strains of soft guitar music that came from the servants’ wing.

  And disillusionment with Ryan. The moment he’d reached shore, he’d gone looking for a woman, which he had made a point of explaining to her without apology.

  “There’s so much to see,” Lily declared. “And in such a short time.”

  “It doesn’t have to be short,” Rose said. “You could stay with me.”

  “Here?”

  “Of course. What is there at Albion for you?”

  Lily took a sip of her wine. “Albion is my home. It’s where I raised my son and buried my husband. My stepson has two children I barely know. I spent too long on the Continent. I can’t stay away forever.”

  Ryan eyed her keenly. “Father’s dead and I’ll never live at Albion again, Mama. I think Aunt Rose has a fine idea. Let Hunter have Albion. He never needed us anyway.”