Jo & Laurie Read online

  “Knickers?!” Amy said. “That wouldn’t hardly be fair. I only got to take off my shoes, and Meg still complained!”

  “In Italy we swam naked,” Laurie said, causing all three March sisters to blush. “We jumped off the boat at Otranto, just near the lighthouse, and outswam the Medusas. Sorry, was that coarse?” he asked with mock innocence. Laurie’s mother, who had died long ago, had come from that country, and he forever used it to tease at the Marches’ rather more prim New England sensibilities.

  “The Castle of Otranto?” Jo asked. “From Walpole’s book?”

  “The very same,” Laurie said. “There’s a dull place, I tell you. Nothing but Turkish cannonballs all strewn about. And dust.”

  “I’m finished.” Amy stood up. “I’m going to find my friends. I made a plan with Poppet to go spy on all the most horrible boys.”

  Poppet was their Hannah’s niece—as well as Amy’s longtime friend—and there was no end to trouble when the two were together.

  “You and Poppet?” Jo raised an eyebrow. “Again?”

  Amy shrugged. “There’s a lot to spy on. They’re very horrible boys.”

  With that she ran off, nearly bowling over a tall, dark-haired young man with deep brown eyes, a serious expression on his handsome face, and a slight hitch in his walk. A war-wound that had not completely healed. A sign of the times, which, like so many of the fathers and brothers and uncles of Concord, he wore without complaint, almost without comment.

  It was Mr. Brooke, Laurie’s tutor—and Meg’s fictional suitor.

  “Miss March?” He bent over their blanket. “Would you be so kind as to accompany me for a walk down to the edge of the creek?”

  Meg held a gloved hand above her eyes to block out the sun and to try to identify the speaker. As soon as she did, she turned a deep pink that had nothing to do with the weather. “You’re too kind . . . Mr. Brooke.”

  Jo looked at Laurie, wryly.

  Mr. Brooke smiled. “I wouldn’t like you to become overheated. It’s such a frightfully warm day,” he continued.

  Here was the tutor in question, the one who had so dashingly swept Meg off her feet in the pages of Jo’s book. At least John Brooke has the dignity to never mention it, Jo thought. In fact, it was the first time he had spoken directly to Meg, and something in his earnest brown eyes made Jo wonder if he had the courage to do so now precisely because of her book. After all, she had only written him as Meg’s suitor because the poor fellow had spent whole months mooning over her sister without so much as a word.

  Not that Mr. Brooke had time for pleasantries. Since he took his wound in the war and had been sent home, he’d become a teacher. Twice a week he took the train back and forth between Concord and Cambridge, dividing his time between his duties as Laurie’s own tutor and as the sole instructor of a private preparatory course in ancient Greek and Roman readings. The Cambridge position had him tutoring local boys set to follow their fathers directly to the Harvard Club of Boston. “The Blasted Brookesian Brahmins,” Laurie called them, just gleeful to have escaped attendance himself, though his grandfather often threatened it.

  Not that anyone Brooke taught needed help securing a Cambridge future. Their family names—Adams and Peabody, Coolidge and Cabot, Forbes and Endicott—were already carved across the stone faces of half the buildings surrounding Harvard Yard. Still, Brooke dutifully plowed through Virgil and Homer and Catullus with the lot of them, just as he did with Laurie. The poor fellow was nothing if not dutiful.

  Meg hesitated, as if only just now realizing the implications of the two of them walking together. “Please don’t feel even the slightest obligation, Mr. Brooke. I shouldn’t want people to think . . . simply because my sister, well, and the story . . .” It was unbearably awkward, and she blushed the color of a spring rose.

  The effect was breathtaking, and not lost on Mr. Brooke.

  Jo found she could not look away, almost as if she were trapped in the front row of some dreaded holiday pantomime.

  Now he bowed. At least it was an awkward bow. Still, Jo eyed him with suspicion.

  “There can be no obligation where there is affection, Miss March. I would be honored. Truly.” He smiled, and for the first time, Jo noticed the warmth in his voice. Begrudgingly.

  “Oh! Mr. Brooke! In that case, a walk would be lovely,” Meg said, holding out her gloved hand and allowing herself to be pulled to her feet.

  Laurie and Jo exchanged a glance. “Well, I’ll be,” said Laurie with a grin. “Perhaps truth shall follow fantasy, after all.”

  Jo threw a strawberry at him in annoyance as Mr. Brooke extended a stiff elbow to her elder sister.

  “Do you think she might actually like him?” The thought came to Jo, sudden and strange. “Could Meg be flirting?”

  “No,” Laurie said dismissively. “That? That’s not what flirting looks like.”

  “How would you know?” Jo looked over at him.

  “Because I’m told I’m an excellent flirt?” He kept his eyes fixed on Meg as Mr. Brooke plucked a willowy cat’s-tail from the riverbank, presenting it to her. “At least, better than that.”

  “Really, now? Who, pray tell, would have told you that?” Jo felt her face turning a confused sort of pink. Was it the thought of her best friend looking at another girl the way Meg was looking at Mr. Brooke right now? Or was it the thought of losing her sister to a happy ending Jo had never meant to happen?

  “Look, wouldn’t your sister be, you know, giggling or something? Isn’t that what girls do? When they flirt?” He reached for the biscuit that sat untouched on Meg’s abandoned plate.

  “How should I know? And that’s the last of them.” Jo held out her hand expectantly. “Fair is fair.”

  Laurie ripped the roll into two halves. Jo took the bigger biscuit half, and Laurie smiled.

  They sat in companionable silence for a while, wilting under the sun, until Laurie suddenly got to his feet. “Damn the heat. Damn the gloves. Damn Brooke.” He looked down at Jo and held out his hand. “Would the lady be so kind as to accompany me down to the damnable swimming-hole? So we can swim in our damn knickers like the good Lord intended us to?”

  Jo looked up at him. Her girlish hat was now cocked at a ridiculous angle on his sweaty head, and his shirt was covered with crumbs.

  “Not Italian-style?”

  “This is Concord, milady. Not a Turkish cannonball in sight. The natives would never allow it.”

  Why not? Another adventure, and Jo was always up for a dare.

  So she smiled and gave him her hand. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE WATER WAS bracing and cold, if Medusa-free. While not the Adriatic, it still took the breath from their chests and the blush from their faces. There, surrounded by moss and overgrowth, splashing in the same dark green water they’d been swimming in since they were children, everything became and remained as normal as it ever had been or ever could be.

  It was a place for secrets, the swimming-hole. Their secrets. It always had been.

  It was true that most girls wouldn’t have gone swimming in their britches with the boy from next door—but most girls weren’t bohemian writers setting out to make a name for themselves as the voice of their generation, and most boys weren’t Laurie.

  Besides, they weren’t only best friends—they were loyalists. Neither one of them would ever tell.

  “I’m meant to write this book,” Jo finally said, treading water.

  “You will,” Laurie said, treading next to her.

  “But I hate it.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I don’t know if I have another one in me.” She felt her knickers swishing back and forth beneath the water.

  “Then don’t write it?”

  “But I have to! For money, Teddy. I signed a co
ntract. Good Wives. The Roberts Brothers say the story’s not finished the way it is.”

  “They do?” he asked. “Is it or isn’t it? Wouldn’t you know? Aren’t you the writer?”

  “You would think.”

  “So?” The word gurgled out with a mouthful of pond water.

  “So I don’t want to write it,” Jo said, simply. “I can’t make it . . . tidy. Tie up all those loose ends in a nice, neat bow. They’re ours to tie . . . or untie. I won’t do that to my family. Marry them off like that.”

  “So . . . don’t.” Laurie was looking at her strangely now, almost as if he had never seen her before. She could only imagine what she looked like, soaked through her two undershirts, with at least one, maybe two vines in her hair. Not that she cared, although it was maddening to realize she might, a little.

  “Don’t write it? Just like that?” She kicked her legs beneath her.

  “Just like that,” Laurie said.

  “But it’s meant to make us our fortune,” Jo said, mulling. “My family, I mean.”

  “A fortune? From a book? I’ll be damned.” He went under the water, then came bursting back to the surface, shaking and spraying water from his hair like a hound. “Do you care?”

  “Spoken like a true Laurence.” Jo tipped her head back until the cold crept all the way up her pooling brown hair to her forehead. She kicked harder, grazing his leg with her toe.

  “Was that a yes?” He looked confused.

  She yanked her head forward, letting the water drip into her eyes. “Not everyone is a Laurence, Teddy.”

  “But you’re a March.” He grabbed a handful of the ferns growing out of the bank, holding himself above the water enough to stop kicking. “Marches don’t care about that sort of thing. That’s part of their—your—magical . . .”

  Jo leaned on his shoulder and he pressed his chin against the top of her head, putting an arm around her to help keep her head up from the surface.

  “Magic,” he said.

  “Really.” Jo smiled, moving slightly away so that she could look him in the eye.

  His eyes twinkled. “You’re the writer.”

  Now she could feel his pruned fingers against her arm as he supported her weightlessness easily against him. “Life could be easier. Just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s not a weight on Mama Abba . . . on all of us. But that doesn’t make it a virtue, either. Not for my family. Not for me.”

  He pulled her arm around his shoulder so that he was holding her steady. “You and your family, Jo. That’s what makes Orchard House so wonderful.”

  “Please do give me a church sermon in your underwear in this watering-hole.” She rolled her eyes, feigning annoyance. “That would be such a lovely follow-up to that already perfect picnic.”

  He laughed. “I’m allowed to think you’re wonderful, Jo. I’ve never pretended not to.”

  She rested her chin on his cold shoulder. His shirt stuck to his muscled body like a second skin, and she found herself looking away. “Being poor doesn’t make anyone wonderful, just like being rich doesn’t.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said quietly, letting one hand fall on her back at her waist, as if to better support her. “I just mean—you shouldn’t worry about it. Grandfather and I . . . we’d never let anything happen to you. To any of you.”

  She knew he spoke the truth. She’d seen it herself, they all had, when Beth needed special doctors, special medications, special treatments.

  Jo shivered. “That’s the thing. I don’t want to let anyone—not you, not your grandfather—let me do anything. I want to . . . let myself . . . if there’s letting to be done.”

  Even if it means writing the damnable book.

  She had done well so far, hadn’t she? She and her sisters didn’t need to make rich matches and fortunate marriages. That wasn’t the story that she was going to tell. Not at all!

  “You’re the writer,” he repeated, though he didn’t move his hand away. How strange it felt, the growing warmth pressing through the cold, cold water. So comfortable and familiar and welcome, and yet . . . and yet . . .

  “We should go,” Jo said, suddenly breaking free from his arms. She kicked across the pond and climbed up the rock, shrugging back into her clothes, dripping wet. “Race you home.”

  Laurie’s only answer was a great leap past her, leaving his coat on the shore.

  And with that, they raced all the way back to Orchard House—chasing and hollering and stumbling, frightening every chattering magpie along the path—until they collapsed in the garden, breathless children again.

  6

  DRAFT ADVENTURES

  It took a short three weeks for Jo to finish her first draft.

  From late May to mid-June, she largely didn’t come out of her attic garret; she ate bread or apples or cold boiled potatoes for most meals, and worked in solitude at all hours of the day and night, burning her way down through her last bits of beeswax. She didn’t see much of Theodore Laurence, either, who had seemed—puzzlingly—to have disappeared.

  Her mother and sisters, fortunately, were used to such behavior by now—as was the family cat, who stayed up with Jo most nights, until inevitably curling up to collapse in exhaustion on ink-smeared stacks of paper as the sun rose.

  After the three weeks, the poor thing was so covered with black inky spots that Jo had taken to calling her Midnight. The attic, her Bestiary.

  When Amy asked, one morning at breakfast, what she was writing about, Jo only offered the most Jo-like of replies: “Something truly terrifying. Our fates.”

  Meg quieted Amy with a single sisterly look, and after that, everyone knew better than to ask again.

  Once Jo had finished the raw words, it took another several days for her to ink a final copy, another day to get up the nerve to bring it in to Roberts Brothers, and then another week for Thomas Niles to read it.

  What an interminably long week it was!

  Not even the traditional Independence Day festivities—the Sunday School parade to the Old Hill Burying Ground, or the reading of the Declaration of Independence—could distract an anxious author awaiting judgment. To Jo, even the triumphant ringing of the Old North Church bell sounded positively ominous.

  The very next day, the author appeared in person at the Roberts Brothers offices, where her editor broke the news.

  The news was not good.

  * * *

  • • •

  THOMAS NILES SLID the tin of mints across his desk apologetically. “I’m sorry, Miss March. I’ve discussed it with my investors at great length. We just can’t publish this.”

  Jo stared. “What are you talking about? You asked for another book and I wrote it. You wanted a sequel; there’s a sequel.”

  “But that’s not it.”

  “What do you mean, that’s not it?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not the right sequel.”

  “I’m the writer, aren’t I? I wrote it, didn’t I? How is it suddenly not right?” She’d made Meg a bravely stoic nurse helping soldiers in the war, and sent Amy off to Europe to become an artist. Independent women, all. Paragons of self-determination, moral clarity, and spiritual fortitude. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “The problem, Miss March, is that I can sell two kinds of stories. Sweetness or scandal. True love conquers all, preferably culminating in a ball, a wedding, a nice piece of land, and dimpled babies—”

  “Or?”

  “Or the Josephine March special. Roderigo and Rodanthe. Rugged heroes, heaving bosoms, love and loss . . . and boom! The point of no return. Murder. Betrayal. An inheritance lost and gained. Everyone dies at the point of the blade.”

  “I see.”

  “Or there’s always creatures, I suppose. Winged, horned, spewing flaming dung—up to you.”

  “Flaming dung?�
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  “Or mermaids . . . mermaids are big this year! Huge!”

  He tossed her pages back on his desk. They scattered out of order, floating off the table and down to the floor.

  Jo felt a wave of anger, then frustration, then exhaustion. The shame only came about last. “Well, I suppose that’s that, then. I’m sorry, Niles. I’ve let you down.”

  “Sorry? You’re my author, Miss March. I’m your editor. It’s your sworn duty to let me down, over and over again, just as it’s my duty to set you back on your path again, over and over again. You cajole; I threaten. You threaten; I cajole. This literary husbandry is the very foundation of our glorious profession. Our lives rather depend upon it, I’d say.”

  Jo managed a small smile. She knew when Niles was coddling her, but she appreciated it all the same.

  She took a steadying breath. “Now what?”

  “Now? Now you fix it, Miss March.” Niles waved his hand at her imaginary process. “Go back to work. Do whatever it is you do. The sisters are a mess.”

  “Mess is a rather general term,” she said, trying not to scowl.

  “Beth is hardly in the story, for one thing.”

  “That’s not true.” Jo squirmed in her chair. She’d avoided saying what happened to Beth for a reason. She couldn’t imagine Mama Abba reading about Beth’s death and reliving the pain all over again; it was all any of the Marches could do not to weep every time one of them so much as spoke of her. Even their letters to their father had hardly mentioned Beth since the funeral.

  Because her pain isn’t a story, and because her story can’t have an ending. She can’t be gone both in the book and in life.

  My Beth can’t have an ending.

  Niles sighed. “Then there’s the matter of Jo.”

  “Jo? What’s wrong with Jo?” That one she hadn’t expected.

  “I wouldn’t know—that’s why I’m asking,” said Niles, exasperated. “You don’t seem to want to say what happens to her at all.”