Jo & Laurie Read online

  And he especially didn’t want to imagine what Mrs. March would have to say to him.

  Mr. Brooke eyed him from over his Greek text.

  Laurie turned back to his small window and its rushing stream of soot and scenery.

  That’s not the worst of it, though, is it?

  Why you’re so out of sorts?

  It wasn’t, and he knew it.

  Because he had a much bigger problem than Grandfather and the dowager, or Mrs. March and Meg, or even Harvard and Mr. Brooke.

  It was Laurie himself—at least when it came to one person in particular. The only person who mattered, who had ever mattered.

  Jo.

  He had still failed to say the one thing to her, the thing that he had wanted most to say. She seemed as far away from him as ever—close in proximity, but not in her affections.

  Not the way she was in his.

  And I’m so afraid that I’ll never be able to reach you, Jo.

  He let out a great sigh. The girl was impossible.

  In fact, it was Laurie’s great sigh that first gained Jo’s attention, across the aisle. “I know,” she said, sympathetically. “It does seem terribly dull to be going home already! But think of all we shall have to remember and talk about for years to come.”

  “It’s not that,” said Laurie. “Only that I was thinking how angry Grandfather will be that I left the Ducal Ball after less than an hour.”

  “As he should be,” said Mr. Brooke, over his tome. He gave his young charge a disapproving frown.

  Laurie looked from Brooke to Jo to her sister. “Meg, do you mind switching places with me for a bit? Mr. Brooke was just telling me he’d love to show you some basic Greek conjugations.”

  “Of course,” Meg said, looking only somewhat embarrassed, as clearly Mr. Brooke had said nothing of the kind.

  Mr. Brooke gave Laurie an odd look, then held up his Greek ledger. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  As Meg and Mr. Brooke fell into conversation, Laurie slid into the seat across from Jo.

  “Don’t worry so much about your grandfather, Teddy. You had great fun seeing Dickens,” said Jo. “Better for both of us that way.”

  Laurie only smiled. “Great fun, yes. But it will come at a cost.”

  “Not your cost, surely,” said Jo.

  “Yes, mine,” sighed Laurie. “Most likely. I suppose I’ll soon find out. You know, this may come as a shock to you, but I’m rather behind in my studies,” he said ruefully. “It’s quite possible that there will be no place for me at Harvard next year.”

  “No wonder your grandfather was fussing about it.” Jo shook her head. “I’m sorry, Teddy. But you said it yourself: Dickens was a must. How could you miss it?” As she spoke, she dabbed at a spot of ink that had dropped onto her skirt.

  “That’s not it.” He leaned toward Jo. Then stood, holding out his hand. “I can’t do this here. Come on.”

  Jo followed Laurie down the aisle of the swaying car and through the doors. Now they were standing on the platform between the hurtling, whistling, rattling train cars.

  “How is this a better place to talk?” Jo shouted, holding on to the rail.

  “It’s not. But I have to say it. It can’t wait.” Laurie clutched the rails in both hands. “I promised myself I would do this while we were in New York, so this is my last chance, Jo.”

  Jo frowned. Laurie took a deep breath.

  “I needed you at the ball. I didn’t want to be there without you. Why do you think I left to come find you?”

  “I thought because—you know,” Jo said, loudly.

  Laurie shook his head. “I don’t know, Jo.”

  “Because you enjoy Dickens,” she shouted. “Not to mention you did purchase two tickets. Well, four, actually.”

  “I left for you. Because that’s where I wanted to be. With you is always where I want to be.” It was glorious, to finally get it out, to not be carrying it around, a secret weighing on his heart. Like the velvet box in his pocket. “I—”

  Jo held a hand up. “Teddy, stop it. Just stop. I don’t—I can’t. Please don’t.”

  “You have to hear me out, at least one day, Jo.” He tried not to sound desperate, but it was how he felt.

  Jo looked pained. “Not today, Teddy, please.”

  They stood on opposite sides of the platform, facing each other across the coupling, where the train cars pitched and shook and groaned at each other. Listening as the swaying steel rattled beneath them.

  Laurie sighed. “Fine.”

  The train was picking up speed as it pulled out of Manhattan, fleeing north into the Bronx and following the curve of the Hudson toward New England. The trees grew thicker as the houses grew sparser, but here and there the glint of the water shone through the trees.

  North. Concord. Orchard House.

  Home.

  The whistle sounded, and Laurie shoved the door open to the next car, pushing his way inside.

  16

  ANOTHER SEQUEL

  A dark cloud hung over Orchard House.

  After the trip, Laurie grew sulky, avoiding Jo whenever he could. She could see him pout by the windows at the Laurences’ estate, turning away when he caught sight of her face in the glass. If he went out to get the carriage or walk into town, he refused to even look in the direction of Orchard House, as if it were not simply Jo but the entire cottage itself that pained him.

  “Where’s Laurie?” Amy pouted. “It’s as if he’s suddenly decided he’s too good for us! That, or that we’re frightful dollards.”

  “Dullards,” Meg said, automatically.

  “It’s hardly our affair, what Laurie thinks of us—or what he chooses to do or whom he chooses to do it with,” Jo scolded. “Most likely he isn’t thinking of us at all, but rather occupied getting ready for school in September.”

  Meg wisely said nothing, just as Mama Abba—the well-trained mother of daughters—had instructed her.

  But where Laurie had been, there was now a hole in the March family, and it wasn’t only Amy who noticed.

  Jo missed him, but she was determined to “buckle down” and work on her sequel, as she had not in New York, where there had been too many distractions.

  I don’t have time for the silliness of boys, their hurt feelings and pouting expressions.

  Not when there’s a book to write and money to earn.

  And truthfully, there was that.

  Money that Mama Abba needed to run the house, or that could be sent to Father for food or boots, or that could buy new shoes and a coat for Amy, who had grown since last winter.

  The need for money, and for someone to work to earn it, was not something Laurie would ever understand, Jo thought, as she often had. With Father still down South on a quixotic mission and the March family’s fortune squandered, Jo’s little bit of writing income was her family’s main source of support at the moment.

  Jo was essentially the man of the house, and she took that responsibility seriously.

  Someone must.

  A new book, and the bit of income it afforded, might finally free them from the grip of poverty. She might be able to pay off Father’s war debts, even secure a dowry for Meg. Art lessons for Amy. The idea of the family being comfortable again—and on the strength of Jo’s quill—gave her such pride she could scarcely breathe.

  Such hope.

  She couldn’t let Laurie change everything, not because of his boyish fixation on her. They both needed to be smarter than that, and if Laurie wouldn’t, then Jo must.

  It was only alone in her garret, late at night, when Jo sat with her toes tucked up beneath her night-dress, petting the cat, and wondered at the great brokenness between them.

  * * *

  • • •

  DESPITE ALL HER efforts, however, the idea of romance was s
till in the air. Since returning from New York, there were other disturbances.

  And these, too, were allowed whatever space and time they needed to work themselves out, as dictated by Mama Abba’s wisdom—as, again, the mother of girls.

  Meg went about sighing all the time and looking at her reflection in mirrors, patting her hair and her clothes with an air of dissatisfaction. More than once, Jo had found her elder sister staring out the window at the road as if waiting for someone, all the while ignoring some bit of sewing or a loaf of rising dough in front of her.

  “What is it out there?” Jo whispered playfully in her sister’s ear, as Meg took in the view of the little lane between their house and the Laurences’. “Do you see fairies?”

  “I think she’s under an enchantment,” Amy echoed. “That, or a toothache.”

  “I believe this is something closer to a fever,” Jo said, giving Meg a poke.

  But Meg just blushed and refused to answer.

  More than once, Mama Abba had to bring her back to the present with a simple “Meg,” spoken in her firm but gentle voice, and Meg would startle and go back to whatever chore she’d been neglecting.

  How dreary were girls in love! Jo found herself stomping out of the room whenever Meg got that dreamy, distant look on her face. Over John Brooke! It was stuff meant for novels, not real life, where there were chores to be done and money to earn.

  And John Brooke is hardly the stuff of a protagonist, Jo sniffed.

  But if the feminine airs of the house were definitely starting to irritate Jo, Amy had positively wept with envy when Meg told her about the Ducal Ball and Lady Hat, museums and the opera, the rooms of crystal and marble. “Oh, Meg! How lucky you were, to be there to see it! I shall never get to attend such an event, never!” Only the promise that one day, when she was older, Amy would get to wear the silvery House of Worth polonaise herself (and be the envy of every girl in Concord) gave her reason enough to pause her complaining.

  “I shall wear it with my best rose ribbon,” she said, pausing to smooth it flat with her palm, again and again, on the dinner-table.

  “You won’t, though, because in another week of this nonsense, you will have worn it threadbare,” Jo said.

  But it was no use, and the fact that Meg was only her old self when describing balls to Amy only made Jo more bothered.

  Even Mama was starting to irritate Jo. Every day her mother would bring her a bit of toast and a question—

  “So, darling, how is the story coming along today?”

  “Fine,” Jo would answer some days.

  “Horridly,” on others.

  “Same as when you asked yesterday,” finally—because whether or not it was there, what Jo heard was her mother’s gentle reproach that she hadn’t finished it already.

  Even old Hannah, the servant, seemed always to be wanting to ask her questions about the book, such as who would live and who would die. “Just not my girls, Jo. Not you, or Amy or Meg. I can’t have that again, not even if just in one of your stories.”

  And if Jo reassured anyone at all, about any of it, the questions only brought more questions.

  “I don’t know!” Jo would protest. “So please let me alone so I can find out for myself!”

  Because it was true.

  She didn’t—she simply did not know the fates of her characters.

  Not yet.

  With any luck, the proper ending would come to her one of these days. Or at least she hoped it would.

  So Jo continued to chase it, hiding herself away in her attic garret, scribbling away as fast as she could on a new version of the story, one with less ordinary feminine courage and more danger.

  Once again, she married Meg to Brooke—she suspected that, this time, neither of them would object—but then that was too boring.

  So instead, she killed him off in a distant war. Like Lord Byron, freedom-fighting abroad. A heroic death. Something more interesting for old Brooke to do than talking ancient Greek and visiting her sister, which he did any afternoon when he wasn’t in Boston, meandering past the hedge to sit in the parlor with Meg and drink tea.

  Filling the hole that Laurie was leaving behind.

  Jo couldn’t imagine what they found to talk about so often. One could only tolerate so much discussion of the weather.

  And balls!

  So Jo made their fictional lives more interesting. She sent Laurie to school and Brooke into a foreign army, giving Meg a tearful speech begging him to stay. The next day she’d rip up the page and have Brooke break Meg’s heart by casually mentioning his recent visit to a society lady whose attention he’d caught. (From what she’d gathered of the Ducal Ball from both Meg and Laurie, this bit of the story might not be confined to fiction.) Then she’d send Brooke home from the war, wounded in action, a shattered man unable to work or support his new bride.

  Jo’s fingers were black with ink by the end of the first week home. She finally settled on marrying off Meg and Brooke in the usual way, finished the book, and sent the pages off to Niles.

  They were quickly sent back to her.

  That ending was declared “too nice” for his editorial sensibilities, so Jo killed off John in a fit of pique, leaving his lifeless corpse on the battlefield, and leaving Meg a widow.

  There were no twins this time, the better to let Meg find love again. So there was, at least, some solace.

  But when it came to choosing a second suitor, Jo came up empty. The perfect man for her dear Meg just wouldn’t come to mind. Perhaps Laurie would be an acceptable substitute—they certainly had enjoyed each other’s company in New York, enough to make her believe, momentarily, that Laurie and Meg might one day be more than friends.

  But somehow, that didn’t feel possible anymore.

  Jo was beginning to think her sister was too good for the fickle Laurence boy, who by all accounts had flirted with Lady Hat under her very nose—and then had the audacity to demand Jo’s undying loyalty for life. He didn’t know what he wanted, or whom. He was no better at this than she was.

  Boys!

  So how should plain old Jo March manage to figure him out?

  Since Laurie was determined to punish her for being herself and for following her passion—as he wasn’t allowed to follow his—she decided to let his fictional double suffer without his happy ending.

  So the authoress wrote him off entirely, sent him to London to work in his grandfather’s office, toiling away in obscurity forever.

  Dollard, as Amy would say.

  After doling out such a fitting punishment, Jo found the writing a little easier than she had, if only by an imperceptible margin.

  As before, the fictional family took inspiration from the real one, but all the details were changed. In the novel, Jo sent herself and Amy to New York for an adventure instead of herself and Meg. The youngest March, so pleased to wear the latest fashions, fainted dead away at the opera (from an overcrowded, overheated room), but in swooning managed to catch the eye of a dashing new character named Roderigo, an Italian with a waxed mustache, an entire orchard of lime-trees, and a secret, possibly sinister past.

  For several days Jo agonized over the source of her Roderigo’s secret. Perhaps he’d run away with a bishop’s daughter and afterward lost his family fortune to political unrest. Or perhaps he was swindled by his own brother, since the two of them had once loved the same woman.

  No, she had him beg Amy to elope with him to Australia, where he had the chance to regain his fortune in a mining company.

  Amy denied him, of course, tearfully refusing his offer on the grounds that it would break Marmee’s heart.

  As it would.

  She promised to wait for his return, but instead he was lost in a shipwreck in the Pacific, and Amy spent the rest of the story weeping lovely big tears into her pillow, tended to by Beth, who had taken ove
r Meg’s old job as governess to the Kings.

  Beth, Jo thought. If only the real Beth had such luck. On the pages, Jo could bring Beth to life, let her play with her dolls and her piano, have her bring the contentment she had always ushered into Jo’s life and the family’s house.

  But when she put the quill down, once more Jo felt her heart seized by the loss of her, the sister who had been the kindest of them all.

  It was too much to bear.

  Real life was never as satisfying, nor as just, as fiction was. It made Jo furious whenever she wrote about it, even thought about it.

  In real life, poor girls remained poor, and fathers lost their fortunes in quixotic business deals, and wealthy people swept in and upended everything.

  Sisters, even the most beloved, sometimes died.

  Silences fell.

  Promise me, Beth had said right before she took her last breath.

  Promise me, Jo. Write your way back to the light. Stay in the land of the living. Don’t follow me into the silence.

  Jo wiped her eye with her sleeve and picked up her quill.

  Oh, Beth, I’m trying.

  She turned back to the page, and to fate—this time, her own.

  So what of the tomboy Jo March?

  In the novel, Jo met a friend of Dickens at a reading of Great Expectations at Steinway Hall, a literary scholar with frayed cuffs and kind eyes. They spent a week enjoying each other’s company at lectures and readings and cafés. But the man’s health was poor from hours spent holed up in musty libraries.

  Tragically, he died of consumption over the winter, leaving Jo bereft but determined to continue his work.

  He also managed to leave her just enough in his will to attend a ladies’ college outside of London, a very modern place with exquisite ancient buildings and execrable food.

  Heaven.

  In the novel, Jo March began a correspondence with Dickens himself, starting by breaking the tragic news that his dear friend had died.

  Dickens wrote back encouraging letters about her novels, using his connections with an editor in London to have her newest creation published to great acclaim. Thus began a great literary friendship.