Jo & Laurie Read online

  It was all very Pickwickian, until (on her way home to America in triumph, no longer an obscure authoress but a genuine phenomenon) Jo had herself kidnapped and removed to Australia by pirates. There she escaped her captors by hiding a key under her tongue, undoing her locks, and running away in the middle of the night.

  As one does.

  She was about to gain passage on a ship home to Boston when she met Amy’s Roderigo getting off a steamship in Sydney Harbor. He had survived the shipwreck and was sending a letter home to Amy to let her know he was alive, but that he had been maimed in attempting to escape and could not bear to let his beloved see his mutilated form.

  I am doomed to love your sister forever, he said to Jo, weeping as he pressed the envelope into Jo’s hands, but I can never be hers now.

  Let her find someone else and be happy.

  And so the fictional Jo March returned home, sadder and wiser. Each of the sisters had her own special adventure, but ended up where she’d started: living together at home with their mother and the servant, Hannah.

  Only this time, because of Jo’s success as a novelist, they would not be destitute but live as rich old maids, able to order the world to their liking.

  Fin, she wrote, and readied the manuscript to take to good old Niles.

  It was the end of summer, the end of August, and Jo March had finished her book at last.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN MR. NILES announced he didn’t like this direction for the book, either, Jo nearly threw it at him. She was starting to suspect that he didn’t know what he wanted. That he should write it himself if he didn’t like any of her efforts.

  “I’m sorry, Miss March. It’s just not right still. It’s too . . . much.”

  “Too much?”

  “Much too much. Roderigo maimed? Giving Amy up forever? Readers would have my head, and yours, too.”

  “I can take that part out. The maiming.”

  “It’s not just the maiming, Miss March. That is just one example out of a dozen. You’ll have to start over, I’m afraid, the better to serve both your characters and your readers.”

  A great weariness came over her, as if she’d been drugged. “I can’t start over, Mr. Niles,” she said, feeling tears starting at the corners of her eyes. “I can’t bear to look at it another minute.”

  “You must,” he said. “Your way lies somewhere between feminist determination and melodramatic whimsy.”

  Jo wanted to clutch the sheaf of papers to her chest and run, not walk, to a different publishing house. Any publishing house. Any that would let her write what she wanted without constantly telling her she was wrong. “You were the one who asked for more melodramatic whimsy, if I recall. You said you could sell sweetness or the Josephine March special.”

  He nodded. “I remember. But this is not what I meant. It’s . . . well, lacking in good taste. Though I’m sorry to say it.”

  “Shakespeare was constantly writing shipwrecks and kidnappings and dramatic changes in fortune. No one ever says his work is lacking in good taste.”

  “Shakespeare was not a young lady from Concord.”

  Jo had never in her life uttered a scream—she disdained girls who did—but she very much felt like uttering one now. Everything she did was wrong. First it was too little. Too quiet, too staid, too idealized. Now, it seemed, she’d gone too far in the other direction: Shipwrecks and kidnappings were all too much.

  Because she was a young lady.

  From Concord.

  Did Lady Harriet have to deal with such nonsense?

  Jo suspected not.

  But if Jo were ever to have a prayer of getting paid, of buying new boots for Amy or new gloves for Father or paying off her family’s war debts, she’d have to start again.

  Start fresh, Niles said. Give them excitement and romance, but make it realistic. In good taste. Cleverly wrought. Well-paced. With truthful yet heartwarming encounters between several flawed if likable characters.

  “Sounds easy enough to me.” Niles looked at her from across the desk. “Don’t you agree?”

  She didn’t agree at all. Absolutely did not.

  But all she said was, “You’ll have your sequel by the end of the month, Mr. Niles. At the very least before Thanksgiving, I assure you.” It was early September now, and she could dash the thing off in two months, she was sure.

  “But will it be . . .”

  “The right sequel? I suppose you’ll have to tell me that for yourself, won’t you? You and your partners. Somewhere between dull and whimsical. In good taste.”

  She would not scream. She would not.

  “I trust you, Miss March. If you tell me you have written the ending your readers would want—on both sides of the pond—I will believe you. You know what they want. Them, and you. They want a little adventure, a little romance, but mostly they want the girls to decide their own fates. Not to be flung about by chance.”

  She thought of the girl who had tapped her shoulder at Steinway Hall.

  What she would have wanted.

  Jo wanted to protest that was exactly what she had written: that the little women of her story had determined their own fates. They had not let the men decide for them. They each got to choose: one married and widowed, two unmarried by their own choice, and Beth gloriously still alive in the book. But together still, as they should be.

  They belonged to themselves, and no one else.

  It was clear to her that Niles, and perhaps all men, had no idea what it was that little women actually wanted from life.

  Niles didn’t see it that way. He seemed to think it was she, Jo, who didn’t know what she wanted. “When you know what you want,” he was saying, “you’ll know how to end the story.”

  She wasn’t sure she understood him. “Me? What do I have to do with it?”

  “When Josephine March, the author, knows what she wants, Jo March the character will as well. Do you understand?”

  Jo gave a great sigh and sank down in her chair. “I don’t think I actually do, Mr. Niles. But I suppose I shall have to endeavor to, for your sake.”

  “For both our sakes,” Niles said, and offered her the tin. “Mint?”

  17

  HEARTACHE

  So it happened that the next day—as Jo was deciding that even Dickens would have run mad with an editor as fickle as Niles—who should visit her writer’s garret but Theodore Laurence himself.

  She answered the knock expecting to see Amy with tea and toast, but instead it was Laurie, his face long and his eyes contrite. “Mr. Weller requests an audience with Mr. Snodgrass,” he said. Though he tried to keep his tone merry, his face said exactly the opposite: He was in earnest.

  She dreaded Laurie in earnest. It didn’t suit him at all.

  Jo had just been deep in consideration of burning her latest manuscript draft. Instead she looked up and with practiced irritation said, “This isn’t the Pickwick Club, Teddy. I’m working.”

  He sat on a tuft of rags, his knees nearly up around his ears. When did he grow so tall? Jo wondered. How long has it been since he’s been up here?

  “Meg told me you were done with your book.”

  Jo decided then and there never to tell Meg anything again as long as she lived. “I was,” she replied, “but once again, Niles has squelched all my efforts. So I am back to square one. As in, once more.”

  “Oh,” said Laurie, eyeing the sheaf of papers sitting on an upturned washtub, a leaking quill sitting on top. “Sorry to hear it.”

  “Not as sorry as I am.”

  A moment passed as they sat in silence.

  He looked over at her. “And how do I make out in this version?”

  She smiled. “Murdered in the street by ruffians.”

  “Oh?” Laurie’s eyes lit up. “Defending your honor?” />
  “Refusing them half a penny for the poor-box,” she said, almost gleefully.

  Laurie scrunched up his face. “A stingy fate for a friend, don’t you think?”

  Jo squinted at him. “A friend? Is that what you are now? A friend wouldn’t disappear for a month over a simple quarrel.”

  It was September now, the air was crisp and bracing, and yet upstairs in the attic it was as humid as an August day due to Jo’s mounting anxiety over the latest draft.

  Laurie pressed his hand to his heart and gave her a small bow. “That’s why I’m here. To beg your forgiveness. I am sorry, for everything. I was an idiot.”

  Jo nodded. “That’s the first thing you’ve said in ages that I agree with.”

  He stood and shut the door behind him, in his familiar way, and she felt a momentary return of the old panic. Anything he said to her now, he could say within earshot of her mother and sisters, surely.

  She looked back down at her papers. “Must you close the door?”

  He sighed, and turned back to her with a somber expression. “I’m afraid I must.”

  Perhaps she had made a mistake in letting him get so close, and giving him the wrong idea. Boys liked to joke about girls being swoony, always talking about romance and love, but in Jo’s opinion, boys—especially Theodore Laurence—were as ridiculous as any girl she’d ever known.

  Then, as if to prove her point, he sat down on an overturned basket and said, “I’m sorry we fought, Jo. I’m sorry for everything. I believe—I was jealous.”

  She avoided looking at him. “Jealous? Of what?”

  “Everything. Your writing. Your freedom, most likely. The space you keep between your art and whatever else might distract you from it.”

  Jo listened.

  “You can pursue your writing when I must give up my music to go to university. All this business about business, and no thought at all of what I want.”

  She was suddenly caught up with rage. Jo would have cut off her hair and dressed as a boy herself if it meant she would get to attend university.

  The whole world lay at Laurie’s feet—money, travel, society, every opportunity Jo herself would wish—and he’d give it all up to sit in obscurity every day, writing and rewriting the same rotten story at an editor’s whim?

  Jo would never have squandered an opportunity like Harvard. All those books to read, all those things to learn! And here he was, moaning about it like he was being sent to prison.

  Money is wasted on the wrong people, she thought. Foolish boy, never to be grateful for his grandfather’s generosity.

  Jo set down her quill. “I’ll make you an offer: I’ll take your place at Harvard, and you can stay here and write my book for me.”

  “Deal.” He reached out to shake her hand. “So long as it’s a concerto and not a book. And I can compose it on a piano and not at that horribly cramped little desk.”

  The wistful look in his eye softened her anger. Because, deep down, she knew it was all true, all of it: the entitlement and the opportunity, the wistfulness and the loss.

  His music is the mother he misses. The life he will never know. The book I cannot remember how to write.

  She took his hand and gave it a firm shake. “Now then, I can cut off all my hair to make you a girl’s wig, but we will have to do something to give you a bosom . . .”

  He laughed. He didn’t realize she was only partly joking.

  Nor had he let go of her hand yet.

  “I had hoped . . . ,” he started. Then he looked out the window, uncertainty crossing his face.

  He turned back to her. The pause became longer as he searched her own expression.

  If he were waiting for her to say something to prompt him to continue, he was going to be waiting a very long time.

  The little garret seemed to grow even quieter. She could hear her own heart beating. Meg and Amy arguing over the tea, downstairs in the parlor. Outside, a dog howling his way down the dusty middle of the lane after a squirrel, barking like mad—but still the sound was better than what she knew was coming.

  Jo could see it in Laurie’s face—despite their earlier quarrel, he was still set on romance, and he was still set on her.

  Foolish fickle heart, to choose so wrongly for itself.

  “I was hoping,” he began again, “that during our time in Manhattan, we would have come to an—an understanding.”

  “An understanding of what?” She raised an eyebrow.

  Laurie suddenly found something very interesting on the toe of his left shoe. “Of the future,” he said. “Our future. Yours and mine. I did try to bring it up on the train ride home.”

  Obstinate boy!

  “Oh, Teddy, please don’t!” she groaned. “I’ve already told you—”

  His face erupted. “I will, Jo. I will and you must hear me now. It’s no use; we’ve got to have it out, and the sooner the better for both of us,” he answered, flushed and excited all at once. “I tried in New York—so many times. But you wouldn’t let me. But we must, old girl. Listen, please.”

  Jo gave a great sigh and threw up her hands. Here it was, at last—and now she must be done with it.

  Laurie continued, “I’ve loved you ever since I’ve known you, Jo. I couldn’t help it; you’ve been so good to me. I’ve tried to show it so many times, but you wouldn’t let me. You wouldn’t even wear the dress I had made for you. Now I’m going to make you hear, and you must give me an answer, for I can’t go on so any longer. I can’t leave it until I return from Harvard. You might meet someone while I’m gone, and I can’t have that, Jo. I can’t.” He knelt before her and took her hand in his.

  “I thought you’d understand! I wanted to save you from this,” said Jo, who found this situation a great deal harder than she expected. Her hands were trembling even as she pushed him away.

  “Save me from what?” he implored, still kneeling.

  “From me,” said Jo, simply.

  My messes and scrapes and moods and shadows. My queer temperament and career. My inability to live on the same plane of existence as every other person on earth . . .

  “Jo.”

  Her eyes were wild. “I wish you wouldn’t care about me, not in that way.”

  “It’s no use, Jo; I do care. I care so much. I know I’m not good enough for you, but I hoped you’d love me, and I thought that you might—” And here there was a choke that couldn’t be controlled. Jo felt tears come to her eyes as well.

  He took another breath. “Because I love you, Josephine March. I always have, and I always will. I think you know that, because I think you love me, too. I read your book, Jo. It’s all in there. The two of us. We’re meant to be together.”

  “Teddy?!” Jo was stunned. “You read my book?”

  “Of course I read your book,” said Laurie, looking aghast at the very idea that he had not. “I loved it, just as I love everything you do. You’re a beautiful writer.”

  Jo pinked, her hands fluttering in agitation.

  Of course Laurie had read her book. He was her dearest friend. It was the one proclamation that truly moved her. Yes, of course she knew he loved her, but until today she did not know he loved her book.

  She didn’t know why it made such a difference, but it did. Maybe because of the truth of it. The idea that, if he loved her book, he loved her, honestly and wholly. Regardless of all her crazed complexity.

  The two of us. It’s all in there.

  Laurie wrung out his handkerchief. “I had to say something before I left. Before you meet someone else and marry him. I’d be hanged before I let that happen!”

  Jo rolled her eyes. “Laurie, I’m not going to meet a man while you’re away at school and elope with him. I’m going to be stuck here at home, with no hope of meeting anyone. The thing is, I’m never going to get married.”

 
How could she make him understand that she would never marry, would never become someone’s property, never give up her name and her writing, to play house with any man. Not even for him. No matter how she felt about him.

  “You will not marry?” asked Laurie. “Honestly, Jo?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not going to marry anyone, Teddy. Especially not you!”

  He went pale, but whether from anger or disappointment, she couldn’t tell. “Why especially not me?”

  “We’d fight constantly. We couldn’t possibly make each other happy. We are too alike, short-tempered and bossy. We would drive each other mad—like my mother and father. They have the same temperament, and so Father is either off to war or still in the South after the war is over. Yes, he is there to do good deeds, but he is also there to get away from Mother.” At last, the truth of the Marches’ marriage had to be said. Why was Father always away? Because it was more peaceful that way, for everyone.

  Laurie refused to hear it. “We are not your father and mother.”

  Jo shook her head. “Your father married someone unsuitable and broke your grandfather’s heart. This would be the same.”

  “No, not in the very least. This is our own story, Jo. Yours and mine, not my parents’ or yours.”

  “We couldn’t make each other happy,” she said in despair.

  “We could. We already make each other happy. Don’t you see? We’ve been as good as married for years now.” Laurie stalked to the window to look at the place where the little post-office he’d made for them to exchange notes sat in the hedge between their houses, a reminder of happier times. He took off his coat. Why was it always so hot in this room? If he didn’t know better, he’d think Jo was trying to sweat him out of her life. “There’s no one for me but you, Jo.”

  “Teddy,” she cried. “I can’t marry you. To be a wife and mother, to give up my writing? I can’t! I won’t!”

  “We’ve been through this, Jo. I would never ask you to give up your writing. I know how important it is to you. And I would never want to take your talent away from the world.”