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  “Is it? I hadn’t been told.”

  “I suspect you have. You forget—I have met your mother, a woman who wages her marital campaigns as if they were great fleet actions with life or death at stake, which they are. Yet I doubt that love itself was ever the prize she sought. Not for herself, or for you.”

  Electra blushed. This was true—not only had her first encounter with this man been in the drawing rooms of Paris, where he no doubt had heard every bit of gossip about her that could be had, he had also heard her admit that her mother would gladly surrender her to Judge Henri Le Cherche. “Your brother feels no love for me. I am merely an object to him, and surely he can find another one in the drawing rooms of Paris. He will not pursue.”

  “My brother feels no love for anyone. That is irrelevant. And as for the things about you that might interest him, you combine a certain naïve freshness with sensual boldness. You have no frilly mannerisms; there is none of the tiresome simpering and rouge so common among husband-hunters. And there is the natural grace, the almost feral ease, with which you carry yourself. You are lovely, Electra Gates. In some moments, like this one when you are a bit confused and a little angry, you are ravishing.”

  “You are too forward, sir.” Electra looked directly at him, no turning aside, and he met her gaze completely and laughed, throwing his head back with the full-throated unselfconsciousness of a boy. Looking at that muscular neck, Electra felt her own throat close, her own skin heat.

  “My dear, in this room, on this ship, I am the only one with the power to say what is forward or not. But you needn’t fear me. I am immune to you, even as I recognize your charms.”

  “You are not … drawn to women?”

  “I have spent more hours in women’s beds, my dear, than the most expert husband-hunter has spent in dress shops and balls. I am simply a pragmatist. I have seen what people call love and I am not interested in it.”

  “If you expect to shock me, you will find yourself disappointed, sir.”

  “I do not wish to shock. Merely to be clear about both my own position, and yours. If I know my brother, Henri, your resistance has inflamed and enraged him, and in such a state he can be dangerous. He has great wealth and influence, and he is perfectly at ease using them to get what he wants. If your story of his proposal and your rejection is true, you have made the mistake of doing one of the few things that could make him determined to find you—you defied him.”

  “My story is true, sir.”

  “Then we will be running out the guns for practice tonight because we need to be perfectly ready when he catches us. And he will catch us.”

  “Knowing that he would pursue you, you still took me on board?”

  “My brother and I have worked at aggressive cross-purposes our entire lives. His sexual habits and business practices are known in certain specialized circles, Miss Gates, and I abhor them and pity him. Helping you hurts him. That is sufficient satisfaction for me. Do you know how my brother made his fortune?”

  Electra did not respond, not having the words for what she knew. She stayed as still as she could, attempting to betray none of her feelings, for this unbreachable, powerful, sad man across from her had stirred something in her and she wished to hide this from him—to reveal none of the tingling, alert channels opening in her body as she watched him lean back against a chest, a crystal wineglass in his hand and his liquid gray eyes still and clear upon her.

  “His public persona as a judge provides cover for the actual source of his wealth—the very wealth with which he purchased his judgeship. My brother specializes in providing certain clients with sexual delights in the way of a diverse group of specially trained young boys, girls, and women who do what they are told. The ones who do not are sometimes disposed of in ways that amuse another very special subset of his clients.”

  “Who would allow herself to be so used?”

  “They are not asked, my dear. They are abducted and controlled. There are many ways to control another human being, and his network is made up of men who, like him, take physical delight in exercising those many ways. Once subordinated and diminished beyond the ability to be interesting, they are sold or leased out to the highest bidders. You would be shocked to learn who seeks his services.”

  “Perhaps I would not be.”

  He leaned forward, looking at her more closely. “Perhaps you would not. You are an interesting woman, Electra Gates.”

  “Captain Le Cherche…” She stopped, unable to shape her question into words. He waited patiently, so quiet and attentively focused that she felt a flush of heat rise from the center of her body and spread. “There was a feeling I had when he stood in the room with me and told me he would take me as a wife. What he was feeling toward me at that moment…” She stopped again.

  “Hatred?” Basil Le Cherche said mildly. She nodded. “Yes, Electra Gates. Your understanding of him was quite accurate. No wonder you interest him.”

  “But he doesn’t even know me. Why would he feel hatred? And hating me, why would he propose marriage?”

  “You inspired hatred because you attracted him beyond his ability to be indifferent to you. That is all that was necessary. Had I left you ashore he would have plucked you up in a matter of hours. And I am firmly against my brother’s habit of plucking things up.”

  A call down from the masthead: five approaching ships. It took only a matter of minutes for Basil Le Cherche to leap up to the highest crosstree with a glass, to train it on the lead ship, and return to Electra. “Our time is come even before I expected,” he said, smiling faintly. “My brother approaches.”

  NEAVE

  How Be Your Best Begins

  Lilly was twenty and I was nineteen when the returning servicemen got us fired by needing our jobs. Since she’d started at Mr. Case’s spa she’d tripled his cosmetics sales. Women drove thirty miles for Lilly Terhune’s advice on how to handle problematically thin brows. I was baking at the Bigelow Diner and successfully tripling the number of customers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which were pie days at the Bigelow. But in 1945 we were supposed to marry a returning hero and have kids and dinner parties that ended with Cherry Surprise Jell-O cups, recipe available on page 52 or on the side of your Jell-O box! Lilly must have turned down five proposals that summer and fall. She was looking for romance, which she saw as something related to but not necessarily the same as marriage. I was looking for romance too, but in my mind, in a corner too secretive and dimly lit to actually admit existed, romance involved pursuits and captures, heart-stopping dangers and erotic escapes, the abandonment of the self to the other. In other words, I had a very limited social life.

  She dragged me along with her on an odyssey to the best furrier on Newbury Street and talked the both of us into four-year credit plans for two raccoon coats. “A girl’s got to bait her hook,” she said, spreading them out on our bed for us to admire when we got home to Lynn. Lilly Terhune was surely a baited hook if ever there was one. She was double-booked every weekend. I wasn’t, but that wasn’t the fur coat’s fault.

  We lost our jobs just after we bought those coats. Lilly turned to me with perfect faith, convinced that I could come up with something wonderful for us to do that also generated cash. We lay side by side in bed at night and talked about desire. Not Jell-O. We wanted adventure, risk, diamonds, travel, love. Not Jell-O. Lilly slept like a log all night and spent all day certain I would figure out a life full of diamonds and big cars. She didn’t bother to strategize beyond that herself—she was sure I’d manage to make it happen, whatever it turned out to be.

  I made an inventory of our talents and found more of them, of a more interesting kind, in my sister’s possession than in mine. How many women had come to her in that corner store and learned how to turn every head in a room with a dab of red glycerin, a line of kohl, some turmeric powder, and a snug skirt? I’d watched, transfixed, while every single one of them had left with a package in her hand whether she could afford it or not. Lilly could turn a d
umpy jam-smeared housewife into a pagan goddess of love, and if you don’t think that draws women like ants to sugar on the sidewalk, you don’t know anything.

  Mr. Case hadn’t even apologized to Lilly when he told her to turn in her apron so he could give it to a guy who’d spent the war in San Francisco, putting Coca-Cola and cigarettes onto cargo ships.

  “He’s useless,” she’d fumed. “Mary Lou Evans came here last week and there he was, ringing up a high-beam gloss for her when she very specifically needed a matte. He didn’t ask her about her evening plans, or her outfit. You know high beams smear like crazy. It was a dinner date with a new prospect beau! Smearing, messy … and that high gloss doesn’t do anything for her skin. Totally wrong.”

  No matter. Lilly was fired.

  I followed her into unemployment soon after. I’d started at the Bigelow right after high school graduation, waiting tables. Waitressing is not like baking. There’s no satisfaction in waitressing, and you have to interact with sticky children and the occasionally hostile or stupid customer.

  When I’d alienated one customer too many, Mr. Bigelow told me to help the baker, a seventy-year-old heavy smoker with bad eyes who dropped ashes in the bowls as he mixed. During the war years the Bigelow family had an intimate and vaguely illegal relationship with the local members of the rationing board. They’d cultivated friends who sold things that fell off trucks so the Bigelow kitchen had always been awash in lard and sugar, giving it a steady customer base through the rationing years. Late in 1943 the baker came down with a bad case of serial hangovers and I found myself basically in charge of all the Bigelow’s baking. My first week I turned out a raft of blueberry and peach pies. They were gone in an hour. Word spread that something had happened to the pies at the Bigelow, and customers lined up for them. Mr. Bigelow fired his baker and gave me a raise.

  My first week as the Queen of Pies at the Bigelow Diner I was in the kitchen by five a.m., fanning whole bananas sliced lengthwise into crescents over butter-yellow pools of custard. I laid them out like pinwheels, and over that I slathered a sheet of chocolate custard. Big hit. I would sit happily in that diner kitchen on Friday nights, looking at what there was to work with and doing some prep work for Pie Day. The smell of baking pies called up afternoons in Mrs. Daniels’s living room and Saturday mornings in Violette’s kitchen. I’d sit in my little calm, orderly paradise, going about the business of snickerdoodles and hermits.

  Lilly mocked me. “Another dateless Friday night,” she’d say, shaking her head at me. “If you’re putting the guys off on purpose, go ahead, but if you want to learn how to change your social life, I’m around for consultation.” I ignored her.

  The first pie that I considered truly my own was a banana butterscotch. Next came a plain butterscotch with sweet-cream ganache. I had learned about ganache from Violette and I loved the sound of the word. I’d hum it under my breath as I melted semi-sweet chocolate into heavy cream: ganacheganacheganache. Jane and Snyder polished off the test-drive first pie in an hour. Jane got almost hysterical about it. We had to cut her off at piece number three before she made herself sick. Jane ended up helping me brainstorm pies, which led to what I came to think of as the Jane pies: M&M’s pie with little rivers of M&M’s running through them; banana pinwheel and peanut butter cream pie (with nuts and without); s’mores pie with crushed graham-cracker shells and thin sheets of melted chocolate under broiler-toasted pillows of marshmallow. People stood in line for Jane pies. No matter: I was replaced by a guy who’d spent his war playing poker in Newport News. He knew as much about pies as he knew about lipstick. Mr. Bigelow said he’d love to keep both me and potato-peeler boy, but there wasn’t enough cash in the cash flow. At Mr. Case’s spa, where Lilly had once ruled the cosmetics department, the lipsticks disappeared and an underwear display popped up. At the Bigelow, standard berry and pumpkin things got baked, but the long lines for Pie Day dwindled, dwindled, vanished.

  So we found ourselves unemployed, in a world that seemed designed to keep us that way. I lay in bed at night and tried to plot a way out, but I only looped back to the reasons that Lilly and I were trapped and would never lead the lives we were born to lead. This kind of thinking gets you nothing but deeper into the weeds, and besides that, it isn’t restful. Finally I slept.

  I dreamed of burning beds and fog. I dreamed of a little sleeping cabin as small as a coffin, no mirrors anywhere, and in the dream I found this terribly troubling. I wanted a mirror. I had vanished inside myself as well as in the dream world. I was nowhere. I was no one. I couldn’t remember what my eyes looked like, or my lips! I was gone, but not gone. In my dream mind I suddenly knew that if I had mirrors I could look in them and see what I was. I could build a house with mirrors, glassy surfaces reflecting like light on water! Inside the house all was safe. Outside the house all was danger. There were dogs in the house—dozens of dogs, all baking cakes. I woke.

  The next morning I stood before the bathroom mirror and looked at myself very carefully. I stayed there long enough to make other members of the family bang hard on the door and demand that I hustle it up. I drank four cups of coffee, and took the idea that had shaped itself in me to Lilly. “Cosmetics,” I said to my sister. “You did all the cosmetics invoices and ordering at Mr. Case’s. I don’t see why a couple of girls with cash on them couldn’t buy blusher in bulk as well as he could. We’ve got a little cash, me from the diner and you from Mr. Case’s. The most important thing to have when you start a business is customers. And you’ve got customers.” This was true—all the regulars looking to fix their lives with foundation, concealer, eye shadow; all the women who opened like flowers when someone told them that yes, they would profit from a lip liner as well as a stick—they all needed Lilly. There was nobody in Mr. Case’s store now to tell them these things but the useless Mr. Underwear. Mr. Case, guilty about firing her, let her leave her card at the counter, and her ladies began picking it up and calling her.

  That’s how Be Your Best was born. We looked around and found out that setting up a storefront of our own was out of our cash flow’s range. But there had to be a better way. Why, I asked my sister, couldn’t we sell cosmetics right in customers’ homes? Who needs a store?

  We gave a party at our house and invited all the ladies from Mr. Case’s who’d ever bought so much as a tiny badger brush from Lilly. We got $10 worth of orders, which translated to $3 of profit. I considered that enough of a sign to sink a good part of our savings into a bulk order of cosmetics. Ladies needed Spring Breeze Eau de Cologne more than they needed a plastic bowl and if they didn’t, they bought the cologne anyhow. We had solid proof.

  The second Be Your Best party was at Ellie Goertling’s house, and four ladies showed up. We’d promised Ellie a hostess gift and she swore she’d get us at least eight women. I brought a blueberry pie. Lilly applied makeup, gave advice, swore eternal friendship to everybody there. We spent seventy cents on the pie, fifty cents on Lilly’s hostess gift, and made thirty cents that night. We thought we were sunk. But when Lilly called each of those ladies to see if they wanted to host their own parties, she got four yeses on the condition that we brought a pie. We decided to keep going.

  We’d learned about credit and we used it to buy stock and turn our bedroom at home into a storage facility for future orders. Blush and liner and matte finish and Romance Glow were stacked ceiling-high. Mom was quiet at first and then kind of mad. She started making comments about pride and waste and lessons, never directed at us but always in the air. Ask the woman directly what was on her mind and she’d say rump roast. Why this circle, circle, circle around what was really on her mind? Speak up! I wanted to cry. Come out in the open and fight like a man! Lilly called me an idiot. “You don’t want to know what’s on her mind,” she said. “Easier to deal with circle, circle, circle.”

  Maybe it was easier for Lilly, but it made me crazy. I said as much to Lilly, who told me lots of things made me crazy so what was new? Boo-hoo, she said. Get over it, Mis
s Prickly, Miss Sensitive. This made me rude at the dinner table, which led to Daddy reaching out and delivering a quick slap to my shoulder, which nobody, nobody at all, commented on the unfairness of, since it was Daddy doing the slapping.

  Boo-hoo. Get over it.

  I marched up to our bedroom, squeezed between the stacks of foundation and brushes, and sat on the bed. I felt sullen. Trapped. I looked around me and tried to imagine a way out. There was no doorway into my future visible from that little crowded room. I had to flee. I had to summon the nerve to plunge into the possibly fabulous (possibly horrible) unknown: to leap. Every story in the world that I loved told me that this was so.

  The next day I emptied everything from the savings account that held all my pie-baking earnings and I rented Lilly and me a warehouse space as well as the couple of huge rooms and the kitchenette on the floor above it. I committed us to a one-year lease and arranged for a telephone line. I bought two mattresses and made Snyder help me move them into the rooms above the “office.” We dragged a desk up the stairs, then all the cosmetics we’d stored in our childhood bedroom.

  Jane cried, because she thought everything should stay exactly the way it always had been, and even Snyder looked a little anxious as he helped us move. “It’s just so strange,” he said, looking around. “I mean, it’s just some rooms and a stove. Weird.”

  “Think of it as my superhero lair,” I said.

  Lilly and I weren’t the only ones who had to rethink work after the war. Snyder had lost his job at the munitions plant along with everyone else when it closed to refit itself for peacetime appliances, and he hadn’t gotten a toe-hold on the world since then. The returning vets hadn’t just taken our jobs—they’d taken the ones Snyder might have had. He trudged from day to day, still the boy who lived in his childhood room to the left of the landing at the top of the stairs. Snyder looked so small, so young, standing in our dusty warehouse with his hands drooping at his sides, watching us move on and away. “It’ll be all right,” I said, not because I believed this but because his unhappiness suddenly made me feel protective. “Thanks for helping with the move.”