Jo & Laurie Read online

  “You just wait for my wedding. All the preserves in the kingdom, Hannah. They’ll be yours—and you won’t have to can a one.” Amy winked wickedly.

  “Lovely, my dearest. Are we invited to the wedding ceremony, then?” Mrs. March asked, draping her shawl over the little hook on the wall. “I’m not sure I have something suitable enough for the wedding of a proper king.”

  “You’ll need Parisian silk,” Amy decided. “With the finest whalebone stitching, sewn right into the seam like a corset. It’s au currant,” she said.

  Like the raisin. Jo smiled. She never corrected Amy anymore. The idiosyncrasies of Amy’s speech would surely give way to womanhood soon enough, and Jo found herself already missing them. Plus, they had been such great material in Little Women, First Part—which was what Mr. Niles had now taken to calling the first book, in hopes of pressuring her into the second.

  Jo sighed.

  “Au courant,” Meg corrected. She always corrected her sister, as the French tutor and governess that she was.

  Amy ignored her, as the ungoverned student that she was. “And petticoats and puffed sleeves . . . opera gloves . . . and satin brocade slippers . . . and ribbons! Loads and loads of ribbons.”

  “Don’t worry.” Meg smiled at their mother. “Jo will write you something lovely . . . but then make sure everyone knows your dress is borrowed.” She rolled her eyes at Jo. “I told you that Belle lent me her dress in secret!”

  “Better borrowed than scorched!” Amy made a face at Jo.

  If Amy had suffered the shame of the pickled limes, Meg had endured the shame of the borrowed dress, having scorched the back of her own—even though Jo had given herself that particular shame in the story and set it at Mrs. Gardiner’s party instead. Still, everyone who had been at the real Moffat ball knew which March girl that particular scorch mark had belonged to . . .

  This is why I can’t write the sequel. Who knows what it would do to them? I’ve already wounded Meg’s pride by pairing her off with Laurie’s tutor when he’s never even said a word to her.

  “Now, what fun would a dress be with no scorch marks?” A booming voice followed them inside, and the sound made everyone smile.

  Jo pushed back her chair. “Exactly. That’s what makes it a story, you ninnies.”

  Theodore Laurence—affectionately called Laurie—burst into the room, lighting the whole place up as he entered, just as he always did. Laurie was Jo’s best friend, their next-door neighbor, and, luckily for Jo, the sort who didn’t care too much for books—not even hers, not even when he appeared in them.

  Quite the opposite; he insisted he’d never even read them.

  Today, though, he carried inside an armful of paper envelopes, dropping a few at every step.

  “Get out of my sight, you horrid boy!” Jo groaned. “Shoo! You’re banished. I can’t handle you and another one of your deliveries most foul.”

  The Laurences lived across the road from the Marches—and routinely brought in their mail as a favor. Laurie took his duties as Jo’s postman with a great deal of mock seriousness, just as he did every new opportunity to tease her.

  “Oh, you can handle me.” Laurie laughed. “At least, you always have. Quite well, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” Jo smiled, despite her annoyance.

  A sweaty lock of sun-streaked gold-brown hair flopped into his eyes, covering half of his cheerful, ruddy face. “I have always belonged entirely and devotedly to you, since long before you had such a great many passionate fans, Milady Shakespeare.”

  He tried to manage a bow, but it looked rather like a stagger and only sent more letters flying. Though an athlete, Laurie could often be awkward; though intelligent, he could often be a fool; though rich as a Cherry King, his tastes tended toward the acquired rather than the obvious. Jo suspected he’d had more than enough of finer things, and was interested in something more substantial. What that might be, however, she could not bring herself to yet imagine.

  She reached out to place her hand gently upon his flushed cheek. “It’s true, dear boy. Even before I had a single reader, I had a singularly devoted you.”

  She kept smiling as she reached for his ear . . .

  “Undeniably.” Laurie’s eyes were on hers, as they so often were, these late-spring days. “I remain your first and your greatest—”

  . . . and twisted as hard as she could.

  “OWWW! SWEET GODLESS HEATHEN BEAST! What sorry man would have you?! Atrocity, thy name is woman! This must be hate mail!”

  With that, Laurie howled and tossed the whole load of envelopes into the air, where they flew like so many handfuls of confetti about the room.

  As befits the wedding of a Cherry King, Jo thought. Just so long as it’s not mine.

  3

  UNWRITTEN

  The next day, Jo found herself in front of Meg’s students while Meg found herself in bed with a spring cold and a borrowed volume of The Necromancer—Flammenberg’s latest, just translated from the German. Jo was irritated that Meg had gotten her hands on it first (just as she’d done with the Dickens before that!), especially since, in return, all Jo had gotten were two very bored children squirming in front of their equally bored substitute governess.

  “Why must we practice our handwriting again?” The older daughter (Beatrice, or Bethany, was it? Belinda?) regarded Jo with some skepticism. Jo didn’t blame her; the lesson was so sodding dull, Jo would have wanted to break her own slate over her teacher’s head had she been asked to do it herself. At that moment, their makeshift parlor classroom seemed very much the prison it was—to pupils and teacher alike.

  “Why, indeed?” These are Meg’s students, Jo thought; they’ll need a Meg-like answer. Unfortunately, Jo rarely had a Meg-like anything, let alone an answer. Instead, she leaned forward and stared into the child’s eyes. “So that, Sweet Countess Belinda, when called upon to handwrite pirate maps with immense clarity or else be made to walk the plank, you are not fed to the sharks.”

  “Really?” Belinda’s braids snapped as she startled to attention.

  Jo sighed. “No.”

  “It’s for writing tidy market-lists,” the girl’s brother said from his own blot-stained paper, a smirk on his lips. (Leopold? Leon? Lewiston?) “And tidy recipes. That’s what girls do, Belinda.”

  Jo frowned at him. “Girls do a great many things, my esteemed Master Leopold.”

  Belinda looked up at her thoughtfully. “Until they get married?”

  “Course not,” Leopold snorted. “When they get married. That’s their job. The cooking and the laundry and the shopping-lists.”

  “Oh.” Belinda sounded disappointed.

  Leopold smiled. “Now, the man of the house, he could very well be a sea captain out walking the plank. I intend to go to sea, myself. To India.”

  “Only India?” Jo raised an eyebrow.

  “India has tigers in it,” Belinda said, wistfully.

  “But we’re respectable, so at least you won’t have to be a governess,” Leopold said, looking at Jo. “Will she?”

  “Will I?” Belinda looked nervous.

  Jo thought about answering both of them—with a sound slap—and then thought the better of it, given the March Quaker streak and her family’s general distaste for violence. “These are all excellent lines of questioning. And seeing as the rather delicate topic of relations between the sexes seems to hold such interest for you,” she said, sternly, “I’ve just the thing.”

  She pulled out a dog-eared copy of Byron, the most scandalous of her entire collection—which accounted, truthfully, for the dog-earing bit. “Copy the entire page of verse, please. Top to bottom. With care. Lord Byron deserves your best handwriting.”

  As soon as the ledgers came out and the book was propped open, the room fell utterly silent. Leopold was immediately glued
to the page, and Belinda’s eyes went wider and wider as she read in silence, her mouth forming a small O.

  Jo watched with satisfaction as their hands shook, copying (savoring!) every inappropriate word and graphic descriptor, while the clock plodded most non-Byronically toward her freedom.

  When she could take it no longer, she stood and stretched, pacing the length of the carpeted hallway outside the parlor prison.

  This was why she wrote the first book, wasn’t it? To be free? Freedom, after all, was the whole point, was it not? Byronic or otherwise. Freedom to create, to do as she pleased. Freedom from poverty and servitude. Freedom from war debts, from worry about who would pay the coal man and the butcher. Freedom from having to be the kind of girl who grew up to only write grocery-lists.

  Freedom to go and write whatever she liked . . .

  Like Good Wives, for the Roberts Brothers?

  Jo paced the hall.

  If not for that, then what? Why bother?

  But the thought triggered another, a memory of the last time Jo had posed such a question. It was the fateful night Amy had burned Jo’s first finished manuscript to ash in a fit of spiteful sisterly pique. The shock of the loss had sent Jo spinning to her darkest place, hurtling her into one of her bone-chilling, soul-killing winter moods that—no matter how merry she seemed—was always waiting right outside her own heart’s door. Beth had sat with Jo in bed for hours that night, gently patting her older sister’s heaving shoulders while she sobbed and threatened to never write again.

  “Why bother?!” Jo had cried.

  “Mama Abba says you’re writing your way out from the shadows to the light, every day,” Beth told her. “Writing your way back to Orchard House, and to us, as you build your castles in the air. So you can’t stop, you see? You must never stop, Jo, because I need you here with me. In our castle.”

  “I must never stop or we shall never have anything to eat but bread and water,” Jo moaned into the quilts, sobbing harder. “Never mind any castles.”

  As Jo thought of it now, she wondered if it were still true. Like perhaps all writers, Jo wrote not just because she wanted to, which she did, and not just because she needed to earn a wage, which she did, but because she must. Because she needed a way—and a place—to live. Despite the darkness. Even if only a castle in the air.

  Jo had always known she was meant to be a writer; it had forever been her earliest memory and the most important thing in her life. She couldn’t remember why or when she’d first believed it might happen. She’d just always known—and with an absolute surety she’d never felt about anything else—that she could be one, at least in terms of natural talent and proclivities.

  She was perhaps wild and queer—as she liked to say—and truly rubbish at a great many things, but at this one thing in particular, this writing thing, she was good. Better than good.

  She, Josephine March, was meant to be a writer of books. A great many books. Her mind, her soul, her imagination—sometimes it even felt like her very body itself—were bursting with all that she had to say. And now not only had she written a book, but she had published it as well.

  She was a writer.

  So why couldn’t she write?

  4

  VEGETABLE VALLEY

  I hate writing,” Jo announced the next day, standing in her stockings and petticoats on the back veranda. She’d been trying to work all morning on her manuscript, with no luck at all, and had given it up for the moment.

  Instead, she’d wandered outside, as she so often did when her muses abandoned her, to pester her sisters as they worked in the broad-striped family kitchen garden—lanes of bold colors and patchy greens—that occupied the full length of the house, all the way from the back of the veranda to the fringe of forest thicket lining the property.

  Vegetable Valley, Jo called it. When she found herself particularly stumped, she would come outside to rub a few tomato leaves and smell the life on her fingers. Today, though, not even the newly hatched tomato leaves seemed to have any effect.

  Standing on the edge of the porch, her quill still tucked into her ink-stained cap, she looked a bit like a privateer . . . on laundry day.

  Give me back Meg’s little pupil prison. Anything is better than this.

  “No, that’s not true. I don’t hate writing; I absolutely, positively loathe it.” She took a carrot from the woven basket that sat at the edge of the cellar door and began to clean it against one of the few unspoiled folds of her writing apron. “Good Wives are now Dead Wives. I’m going to tear up my new contract.”

  “And good morning to you, Josephine.” Mrs. March looked amused from the ancient rocking-chair at the corner of the porch, where she was snapping peas. She eyed her daughter as she did most mornings, checking for signs of Jo’s shifting temperament as if it were another Concord spring storm.

  Jo smiled ruefully.

  “Did you sleep at all last night, my dear Jo? I’m beginning to worry about you.”

  “I don’t know, Mama Abba. Day, night . . . they’re all starting to blur.” She bit into the carrot, crunching loudly as she continued to bemoan her fate. “I loathe it. (Crunch.) I loathe myself when I try to master it. (Crunch crunch.) I loathe all of Concord (crunch) and Orchard House (crunch crunch) and this . . . this carrot . . . for being . . .”

  “Here?” Amy suggested, looking up from her sketch-pad, over near the rose garden.

  Jo held high the half-eaten carrot, waving it wildly as she spoke. “The scene of my probable and most tragic demise.”

  Mrs. March chuckled and snapped another pea spine. Meg looked up from her place in the middle of the vegetable beds, but kept quiet—and kept weeding.

  “Oh,” Amy said, her hand with the charcoal hovering above the page.

  “Does no one care?” Jo wailed.

  “Jo. Please.” Meg sighed. “We all know you hate writing; you say it every time you have to write. We are not unsympathetic. On the contrary, we are well aware of your writing storms.”

  Amy rolled over on her stomach, giving up momentarily. She went back to studying her face in the dull reflection of their mother’s good mirror, sketching herself with a satisfied smile. “There. I’ve got the nose bit just right.”

  “And?” Jo said, insulted, ignoring her little sister.

  “And it doesn’t seem to change anything. If you hate it so much, quit!” Meg sniffed. Her nose was still reddened from her cold, but she had determined not to waste another day in bed—which was just as well with Jo, as it had given her the opportunity to start devouring The Necromancer before Meg could change her mind.

  But now, with a deadline plaguing her, not even Herrman and Hellfried and their supernatural cohorts or Flammenberg himself had been able to distract Jo for long. The most passionate of the March girls was suffering the worst of all worlds: no time for reading, and no success with writing.

  She was left, as a result, with no alternative but to resort to the most trusted and time-honored, if most time-consuming, occupation of all writers—belly-aching about needing to work instead of working.

  The ritual did require an audience, however; for a great many years, that service had been dutifully performed by Beth. But Beth was gone, and Jo was left alone with her ill humors—which was what had brought about this little visit to the garden now.

  “Quit?” Jo snorted. “Quit?! What else is a person like me supposed to do? Govern children?!”

  Meg arched an eyebrow. “I should say not. After yesterday’s little Byron assignment, you’ve been banned from my students for life.”

  “Well, there you go. I’m doomed. Doomed!” Jo paced up and down between rows of cabbages, the family cat trotting behind her. “I hate writing and I hate this book.” She grabbed each side of her ink-stained, raggedy writing cap and yanked it down the sides of her head. “Frankly, I believe the feeling is mutual. My silly book
also despises me. My editor will fire me.”

  “Then I suppose it’s a very good thing you aren’t a writer,” Meg said, yanking out crabgrass with both hands. “Wait—oh. Oh, dear. Too late!”

  Jo looked at her sister suspiciously; it wasn’t like Meg to joke. But the oldest March child kept a straight face as she continued to pull weeds out from around a particularly knotty root.

  “What’s the real problem, Jo?”

  Jo did not answer Meg immediately. Instead, she paced Cabbage Lane, turning around at the intersection of Tomato Hill and Zucchini Park. Finally, she stopped in her tracks.

  “What’s the real problem, you ask? How are we to distinguish between real problems and imaginary problems? When my real problems concern themselves with matters so entirely fictional, so utterly—”

  “Hand me that trowel?” Meg tossed another handful of muddy grass.

  Jo did. She squatted on her heels in front of Meg, rattling the bucket between them dramatically.

  Meg let go of the root and wiped her hands on a rag. “The real problem, Jo. I’m still waiting.”

  Jo shook the bucket in frustration. “Is my current poverty of imagination not a real problem?”

  “Indeed,” Amy said, poring over the mirror.

  “Indeed, Jo. And we shall help you fix it,” Meg said patiently, as she had to her little sisters a thousand times before.

  “Indeed?” Jo rattled the bucket again. “How are you going to help me fix it, Meg? Will you pay a visit to Mr. Niles tomorrow? Write my pages for me, the day after?”

  “I suppose so, if that’s what it takes. You’re my sister.” Meg picked up the trowel again. “I’ve been fixing your problems since the day you arrived. What makes you think I can’t fix this one?” She had a point.