Jo & Laurie Read online

  Meg was weeping openly now, but Jo had little patience for her sister’s displays at the moment. “Ugh,” she said. “I’ll be glad when they finally get married so all this nonsense will stop.”

  “That’s Jo, ever the romantic.” Laurie chuckled.

  “And once they’re married, he will take her away,” said Jo. “Everyone is leaving.”

  “It can’t be helped,” said Laurie. “You must think of their happiness and not yours. That’s just how it is, I suppose.”

  Jo felt something within her wither. “And will you think of me, scribbling away in my attic, while you and Harriet spend your fortunes?”

  Laurie smiled sadly. “I’ll always think of you as a different sort of fortune, old friend. And I’ll treasure our friendship, no matter how far away I go.”

  “But not enough to come back.”

  Laurie’s mouth opened, then closed again. “I will be glad to meet you anywhere you go. You know that. We shall see each other in the West End, won’t we? You with your play and me with . . .” His words dwindled into silence.

  With a wife in tow. A wife of money and position who would keep him in England after Jo left. Their friendship would never be the same. They both knew the truth of that.

  She’d refused Laurie on the grounds that she was not fashionable enough to be his wife, that his friends would laugh at her and feel embarrassed for him. But she had never considered the opposite—that if Laurie chose a more fashionable wife, the wife would always stand between them, casting a very long shadow on their friendship.

  Or ending it.

  Laurie! Engaged! It was ludicrous, and she was angry, except she didn’t know what or why she was angry, only that she wished . . . oh, she did not know what she wished.

  The conductor was calling for passengers. Laurie squeezed Jo’s hand and climbed aboard. Brooke kissed Meg’s hand once, quickly but with feeling, then climbed aboard after him.

  The train began to pull away. Meg clutched her sister’s arm and said, “Oh, Jo, what will I do these few weeks without him?”

  Jo felt the weight of her sister’s arm. “He isn’t going for long, Meg. He’ll be back by Christmas, and you’ll be married.”

  “Soon,” Meg said. The train was pulling out of the station, taking Laurie and Brooke with it. “But not soon enough.”

  Meg really was weeping now. Jo was horrified to feel a tear tremble in the corner of her own eye.

  I will not weep, she thought. I will not I will not I will NOT.

  I had my chance.

  Laurie asked me first.

  He loved me first.

  But I let him go, and I don’t deserve him.

  I didn’t want him then, and I don’t want him now.

  Not now. Not ever.

  But Jo, of all people, knew a story when she heard one. Especially when the ending had been gotten so wrong.

  28

  MAKING PLANS

  As Amy’s health continued to improve, the Marches were able to turn their attentions to something more pleasant: the preparations for Meg and Brooke’s wedding.

  Thanksgiving was a small affair, with the Laurences away, but there was much to be grateful for, not the least that Amy’s smiling face with her oft-agonized “pug nose” was still among them.

  “Still with the laundry-clip?” asked Jo as she passed around the platter of carved turkey and the boat of cranberry sauce.

  “It will straighten, I swear, and since you already put it in your book anyway, I might as well continue to try,” said Amy, sounding a little nasal, since her nose was pinched.

  Jo threw a roll at her little sister and they all laughed.

  “Not all of us are blessed with Roman features,” sighed Amy, removing the clip. “Of course Laurie has a perfect nose, and a fortune. Life is never fair.”

  “No it is not, dearest, and the sooner we understand that, the better our lives will be,” said Jo easily, without even wincing at the mention of her old friend.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOW CHRISTMAS WAS only a few weeks away. There was so much to be done, and there were so many reasons to celebrate. Amy’s health. A new marriage. And a new engagement between Theodore Laurence and Lady Harriet Carmichael-Carlthorpe, to everyone’s apparent satisfaction.

  Meg was busy every hour now, working for the Kings during the day and sewing her trousseau by night. All of Meg’s salary was going to purchase cloth and thread, new boots and bits of lace. Not to mention pots and pans, dishes and silverware, to set up housekeeping for herself and Brooke. Still, it was not enough. Mama gave Meg a few of her own things to help fill out Meg’s trousseau. A few extra blankets, a spare set of kitchen curtains with a small rip in the corner.

  Jo helped out, giving her little bit of writing income to buy food for the wedding feast and a gift for Meg of new gloves and a hired carriage to take Meg and Brooke to the church on the day of the wedding. If she’d finished her sequel and been paid, she would have been able to afford something more—a new dress, perhaps. But she had not finished, so she had not been paid. She would not be paid new royalties for her first book until the next year, and the money from the last check was running perilously low.

  Their days were returning to normal, or the new rhythms that would approximate normal. Which meant that Jo could, and should, return to her sequel now.

  But for no reason she could discern, Jo was more despondent than ever. She chalked it up to melancholy over their father’s failure to appear. He had not even sent word that he was coming, that he’d received their letters. Mama had sent a new letter telling him that Amy was out of danger, but that one, too, had received no answer.

  Niles had sent Jo several letters during Amy’s illness, asking how the novel was coming, but Jo had not answered. There was nothing to say, not when every waking moment had been focused on Amy, on keeping her alive.

  Now, though, Jo started to think again about her writing. It was absurd that she had written two versions of the story, neither of which had even come close to approximating what she wanted to say, what she meant to write.

  The possibility of losing Amy had been too much to bear. They would have broken under the weight of it, Jo was sure. The loss of poor Beth had been so terrible, it was hard even to think about. To lose another sister, to watch dear Amy suffer and die, Amy who (unlike Beth) had always been strong . . .

  To know that any of them, at any time, could be cut down by sickness and death . . .

  The only relief was that it hadn’t happened.

  Jo still had Amy and Meg. She still had Mama and Hannah and her home. And she must learn to be grateful for all she had. There were others with less, as Mama liked to remind them.

  So it didn’t matter that Meg would marry and leave home, that Jo could lose her best friend and ruin her career. They still had one another: Meg, Jo, and Amy. They were sisters, and they were still alive, together. It was enough.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE PROSPECT OF Meg and Brooke’s wedding was the one bright spot on an otherwise grim calendar, which seemed to stretch for weeks in either dour, dull direction. Not so for the one day circled in gold and pinned with lace on the calendar page: a Christmas wedding with friends and family, who would come to Orchard House to celebrate with them all.

  There was much to do before the date arrived: invitations to write, sewing to finish. Jo worked on the invitations while Meg continued to work on her trousseau: sewing petticoats and day-dresses, linens and tablecloths, any one of a hundred little things a housewife would need for her future life.

  The sisters often performed their tasks in Amy’s room to keep themselves cheerful. The doctor had insisted she not set one toe out of bed until the cough was gone entirely, so every bit of wedding business became an opportunity for Amy to prove that she was well. She argued with J
o about writing the invitations, with Mama about helping to festoon the house, with Meg about the choices of flowers, as if the arguments themselves were proof of her improving health.

  One afternoon, during another such argument, Meg told her there could be no question of roses for the wedding. “It will have to be the dried lavender and hydrangea blossoms, I’m afraid.”

  “No, no, no. Dried flowers are an abomination at a wedding. Can’t you have fresh roses, Meg? A few at least?”

  “I’m afraid not, dearest,” Meg said with infinite patience. “All of the vines have gone dormant for the winter by now.”

  “Christopher Columbus! I keep forgetting it’s already December,” Amy declared, throwing a ball of ribbons across the room. “I feel like I’ve been in this bed for a year.”

  Jo poked her head in. “Did I hear someone using my favorite expression?”

  Meg frowned. “You’ve really rubbed off on her. In all the worst ways, apparently.”

  Jo sat down on the edge of the bed and tickled Amy’s foot. “Don’t listen to her,” she said as Amy snatched her foot away. “I think it’s perfectly adorable.” Then she tweaked Amy’s nose, leaving a black smudge of ink behind.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Meg said. She ran to get a wet cloth to clean Amy’s face.

  Amy grabbed the little hand-mirror from the bedside table and saw the marks from Jo’s fingers all over her dreadful nose. “Look what you did!” she wailed. “You should be more careful.”

  Jo pinched her nose one more time for good measure. “Or you’ll do what?”

  “This!” And Amy stuck her finger in her own pot of ink and smudged it across Jo’s cheek.

  Jo only laughed. It was too much fun to tease her sister again, after so many alarming days. They were almost back to normal, if normal meant a constant low-level quarrel.

  Meg came back with the cloth and clucked over the two of them as she cleaned them up like the mother hen she would someday be. “You two are hopeless,” she muttered, wiping ink from Jo’s cheek. “What if Mama saw you behaving like this?”

  “She wouldn’t be at all surprised, at least by me,” said Jo. “She knows I’m hopeless. Only Amy here would shock her.”

  Amy groaned under the pressure of Meg’s cloth. “It’s just that I’m so booooored. Can’t I help with the invitations, at least, Jo? I promise not to get out of bed. I promise.”

  “I believe you,” said Jo. “And I’d welcome the help, except your handwriting is atrocious.”

  “That just proves I need the practice. Please, please may I? I have to have something to do before I go mad.”

  “You’re going to drive me mad,” said Jo.

  Jo met Meg’s eyes. Her sister wore a what-harm-could-it-do? expression, and she shrugged. “If they’re terrible, you could always redo them later without too much time lost,” Meg said to Jo. “Let her try?”

  Jo looked at Amy, who pressed her hands together in supplication. “Pleeeeease, Jo?”

  “Oh, all right. I suppose it can’t hurt.”

  Jo went and fetched her lap-desk and writing implements, including blotting-paper, a few quills, and her best steel-nib pen, along with a sample invitation she’d finished a few minutes before for Amy to copy. “You practice with this. Take your time and don’t be sloppy. I’ll be back later to check on your work.”

  Amy gathered the writing-desk onto her lap and beamed at Jo. “Thank you! I’ll do a good job, I promise.”

  “You’d better. Half your school assignments are illegible. We don’t want wedding guests wandering into Walden Pond instead of Orchard House because they can’t read your writing!” Jo reached out to tweak Amy’s nose again, but the youngest March ducked her head out of the way. “Aha! You are feeling better!” Jo exclaimed, fairly skipping to the door.

  In truth, she was glad to pawn the invitations off on Amy, even if it meant she had to redo them later. Something else was nagging at the back of her head all of a sudden, whispering ideas at her. Try this, it said.

  “Where are you going?” Meg asked as Jo disappeared around the corner.

  “To the attic,” Jo called back over her shoulder. “I have a scene to write.”

  In fact, it was the cheerful teasing between the sisters that had inspired her, given a bit of juice to an enterprise that even yesterday she’d felt was still out of reach. With Amy taking over her one wedding task, Jo found she had the time and inclination to write a scene for her novel that had appeared, quite suddenly, in her head: the fictional family reunited and preparing a wedding.

  What joy it was to write her way into happiness, even if it was fiction! In the first pages of her sequel, she could wave her wand and solve all their problems. The war was over, Father returned, the sisters were safely well and whole. The fictional John Brooke had gone to war, been wounded, and yet returned safely to Meg. For life and love are very precious, she wrote, when both are in full bloom.

  It was like fortune-telling. If she could imagine it in fiction, it could still be real in life.

  Selfishly she gave Meg three more years at home with her family before the wedding. She couldn’t resist keeping her sister for herself just a little while longer. She had Father return to his ministry and Beth recovered from illness. And Jo—Jo was much the same as she’d ever been, alternately content and frustrated with her lot, because the author did not know what her character’s story should be.

  Should she go out into the world and come back wiser?

  Should she stay, and learn to be content with her lot?

  I’ll figure it out later, Jo decided at last. Write happiness for the rest of the family. Her heroine she would leave alone for now.

  As for Theodore Laurence, she did not write much about him, not at first. She left him away at school, as he was in life. She couldn’t bear to think of him, or his very fancy, very suitable fiancée.

  Was he making a good decision, one that would lead to everyone’s future happiness? Or was it another mistake, one in a long line of rash, stubborn decisions that would lead to tears, cutting himself off from the friends who loved him most?

  When it came to telling Laurie’s fortune, Jo’s crystal ball was blank.

  The truth was that the fictional Theodore Laurence was as much a puzzle as the real one. She couldn’t stop thinking of his words at their last parting: I’ll always think of you. I’ll treasure our friendship, no matter how far away I go. It left her breathless, on the verge of tears every day, as she composed and then burned letter after letter to him.

  Don’t go, she wanted to say. Not so far away. Not where I can’t reach you.

  Don’t turn your back on life in Concord, not because of me.

  You will always be my dearest friend. No wife can change that.

  But she didn’t know that a wife wouldn’t change that. It was entirely possible that she would. Already Jo could glimpse the future Meg, the mother and wife, busy and bustling and content with her small lot. They would be sisters always, but things between them would change when Meg was not in the next room. She would have her own house, with her own husband and children, and keep her own counsel more and more. The secrets and stories the two of them shared now so easily would be different. Neither Meg nor Jo would mean to change, but the change was there, lurking just off-stage, ready to make its presence felt.

  If she could sense such a change coming between herself and Meg, how much more distance would there be between herself and Laurie? Not only the ocean between them but a wife. A fortune. An entire life lived apart.

  Even if they didn’t mean for their friendship to change, it would. It would without anyone trying to change it at all.

  So she did not write much about Laurie, or about herself.

  For Meg and Brooke, Mama and Father, Amy and Beth, she wrote every happiness.

  She would give this to her sisters: the
promise of a future as beautiful and bright as they were.

  As they had every right to hope for, even if Jo did not.

  29

  AN ENGAGEMENT PARTY

  As it happened, Laurie wrote to Jo first, requesting her presence at a gathering of friends and family in Boston “to celebrate our engagement,” he wrote. Himself and Harriet, he meant, and a small part of Jo mourned, remembering when the word “our” would have included her.

  By then Amy was out of bed and puttering around the house more and more, helping Mama with her own small chores and beginning her lessons again. She’d done such a good job with the invitations that Jo gave her high marks for penmanship, something she’d never done before. So Jo’s presence was not as needed at home as it had been of late, but still she hesitated, not certain if she wanted to go.

  If she should. Could she bear it?

  Mama, who seemed always to understand Jo better than Jo understood herself, took the letter from Jo’s hands and looked at Laurie’s handwriting. It would mean so much if you were there, Mr. Snodgrass, she read.

  She gave Jo back the letter and said, “You should go. You will never forgive yourself if you don’t.”

  “But I don’t much like Harriet. Mama, you should have heard her in New York. The snobbery was thick as molasses.”

  “You like Laurie,” Mama said. “He’s your friend. And you might not get many more opportunities to see him, if they do plan on living in England.”

  Jo made a noise of frustration and sank down on the sofa. “Fine. But I’m only doing this for his sake.”

  Mama turned to Meg, who was practically squirming while she braided Amy’s hair. “What about you? I’m sure you’d see John while you were there, as he is sure to be invited as well. And your sister will need a traveling companion.”

  “Oh, Mama, may I?” Meg asked.

  “Of course you may. Send word to Laurie as soon as you can, and Hannah and I will get your trunks.”