Jo & Laurie Read online

  “She has a long and storied literary career, obviously.”

  “But whom does she marry?” asked Niles.

  “Marry?!” Jo felt the rage bubbling up inside her chest as her face reddened. “I . . . she . . . doesn’t know what she wants, just like my readers don’t know what they want.”

  Now she could feel the blush warming and spreading across her entire face, perhaps her body, as a sudden image of Laurie came to mind. Laurie laughing in the damp noon heat, his shirtsleeves rolled about his elbows. Laurie racing boat leaves in the creek, his trousers rolled about his ankles. Laurie and Jo, at their swimming-hole a few weeks back, with far more than wrists and ankles bared between them—

  She tried to shake it off, but other thoughts crowded in. Everything she had wondered, might have wondered, might have wanted; everything she couldn’t admit, not even to herself—

  Christopher Columbus!

  “Perhaps she’ll never marry. Or marry every cabbage in the garden. Or eschew cabbages entirely, discovering she has a proclivity for . . . for tomatoes!”

  “Tomatoes?”

  “She—we don’t know, Niles. That’s the whole point!”

  Now Niles was tapping the manuscript between them for emphasis. “But your readers do know what they want, Miss March. They want their little whalebone-corseted hearts set afire.”

  Her skin was hot as a furnace now.

  “We do also have brains, Niles.”

  “Yes, brains that want happy endings. Weddings. Not Romeo and Juliet snuffed in Verona. Romeo and Juliet in domestic bliss in their Tuscan villa. You are—Jo is—allowed to want those things. And dare I say? To have them.”

  Jo reached for the tin of peppermints. It was all too much. She opened the tin, hesitated, leaving it open. “I won’t do anything that hurts my family.”

  “Hurt them?” Niles stood up, pushing off from his desk. “How are you hurting them? With any luck, you’re making them rich beyond their wildest dreams.”

  “Theirs or yours?” Jo arched an eyebrow. He arched one back.

  “You’re being unreasonable,” they said, one to the other, almost in unison.

  She rose from her chair and plucked her gloves from the desk—sending another page of her abandoned manuscript sliding to the floor. “I’m going.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss March. If you didn’t want to write about your family, you should have said so before you signed our contract. Your family is what readers on two sides of the pond have bought and paid for. I thought we discussed this.”

  Jo shoved the peppermint tin across her publisher’s desk, sending the candies rolling in every direction.

  “And I thought I already said no.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “LET ME AT that Niles,” Laurie growled, pacing the length of the Orchard House dining-room. “I’ll flatten him. Christopher Columbus, I will.”

  “You won’t,” Jo moaned. “You can’t.” Her voice was muffled, as she had collapsed in a heap at the dinner-table.

  Meg and Amy sat on either side of her, protectively; they had been taking turns patting her heaving, sobbing shoulders since she’d returned home from her meeting.

  “Watch me.” Laurie glared, though there was no point to it, as Mr. Niles was not there to see or care. “It can’t be that bad,” he muttered at no one, for the fifteenth time.

  “It is. He hated everything. He said they all did.” Jo could barely get the words out. “It’s back to the beginning. There’s no way around it. They want romance. Weddings. The full Vegetable Valley.”

  “Is it really so awful?” Laurie said, now crouching next to Jo.

  Jo dropped her head into her arms. “I won’t make a scandal of the March family.”

  “I don’t mind,” Amy said, squeezing a walnut between the jaws of a little nutcracker. “I’m naturally tempestuous, you realize. Scandal-wise.”

  “What a surprise,” Meg said as the nut exploded, sending bits of shell shrapnel scattering across the crocheted rug.

  Jo sat up in spite of herself. “You can’t rescue me this time, Teddy. You can’t solve everything and save everyone, as much as you want to try.”

  He looked at her helplessly. “I have to do something, Jo. Let me do something.”

  She straightened in her chair. “No, Laurie. Let me. I have to take care of this. And I will . . . I just don’t know how. Not the way Niles wants me to.”

  Laurie went back to walking the room; an out-of-sorts Jo always meant an even more out-of-sorts Laurie. That much they all knew.

  “Roberts Brothers Press? They’re no different from the rest of them, publishers and editors and newspapermen. All a barrel of snakes!”

  “Mr. Niles isn’t like that,” Jo said. “You don’t know. They can’t all be like that.”

  “Grandfather says so, every time we go to New York. He says you can’t listen to people like that.”

  “People like that?” Jo looked appalled. “What people? Tradesmen? Workmen? Writers, Laurie?” When the two friends fought, this was why. Laurie could never really imagine any sort of life beneath his own set of rooms on the second floor of the Laurence house, and Jo could hardly imagine the view from up there. Two windows connected them; that was all. One had given a youthful Laurie a glimpse of the March family parlor, and the other had given the March girls a view into Teddy Laurence’s sitting-room.

  Two windows. A few dozen panes of wavering glass.

  Was it really ever going to be enough to bridge the whole worlds—of day-dresses and kid leather gloves and carriages and careers; of farms and root-cellars and weeding and candle-stubs—between them?

  Jo wondered.

  “Come on, Jo. It’s a coarse business.” Laurie was still pacing, red-faced. “Men like that? They’re dishonorable. They only speak lies—”

  “Or worse. The truth.” Jo sat up.

  “I don’t understand a word either of you are saying.” Amy took a handful of walnuts from the mason jar on the table and began to crack them. “But here. You’ll feel better.”

  “Will I?” Jo asked sadly.

  “Of course you will.” Meg put a cup of tea in front of her. The cup and saucer rattled the quiet in the room.

  Jo didn’t move.

  The sisters looked at each other. “What’s happening?” Amy whispered. Meg raised a finger to her lips.

  Laurie touched the cool window glass with his fingertips, staring out into the shadows. A moment later he sighed as if he’d suddenly made up his mind about some question he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  He looked down at Jo. “So, then. Romance? That’s what we need, Mr. Snodgrass, old chap?”

  Jo felt the smallest simmer of relief—as always—at the reappearance of their old nicknames. “So it seems, Mr. Weller. I believe little whalebone-corseted hearts are to be set afire, as it were.”

  “I see I shall have to bequeath you something of my considerable understanding of the subject, Mr. Snodgrass. Sadly, even your most Vegetarian fates hardly merit a bit of melted whalebone at all.”

  Amy laughed. Meg elbowed her.

  Laurie stepped closer to the table, looking affectionately down at Jo’s mop of brown curls. He took her usual bundle of paper from its place on the top shelf, then placed her old ink-pot in front of her with a thump. “And at what temperature does whalebone melt, precisely, Mr. Snodgrass?”

  He held out her quill.

  “I don’t believe it’s entirely clear, Mr. Weller.” She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from giving him the personal satisfaction of so much as even a chuckle. Still, she dipped her quill into the ink.

  “I suppose marrying vegetables is somewhat tiresome.” Laurie sat backward on the chair next to Jo. A heap of long arms and even longer legs spilled awkwardly in either direction from the chair ba
ck. “So I’m assuming that instead of marrying a cabbage, Jo dies in a shipwreck off the coast of the New World, old chap?”

  NANTUCKET, Jo scratched, without missing a beat. “They go down like a stone. Old chap.”

  “With her young Florentine lover?”

  VENETIAN, she wrote, perking up. “Passionately so.”

  Laurie nodded, matter-of-fact. “Proper remains?”

  NOT A ONE, Jo scribbled back. “Utterly dashed to pieces against the shoals.” The thought made her smile. That damnable Laurence boy. There was no staying in a properly miserable mood when he was around.

  He knows me too well.

  Laurie watched her, increasingly amused. “And her life’s work, Mr. Snodgrass? Forever lost? Pages floating on the waves?”

  AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. Jo frowned. “In the lifeless arms of the Venetian, possibly. Or, you know . . . the author.”

  Amy looked intrigued. “Was he rich? This Venetian?”

  “Penniless.” Jo smiled as she wrote. “But not so much a German Emerson. More of an Italian Byron, really.”

  “Scandal upon scandal,” Laurie said. He clapped his hand upon Jo’s back. “Sure to sell loads. Highest marks, my dear Snod. Congratulations. You’ve done it. Now just, you know, write it all down.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Jo laughed.

  He yanked her up from her seat, forcing her to her feet. “What are you waiting for? Get up to your garret and write, Snodgrass!”

  “Let me use your study, dearest Weller, and perhaps I shall.”

  “Even better.” He bowed and offered her his arm.

  “Wait for me,” Amy said. “I’ve just got to put away the nutcracker.”

  But by the time Amy returned from the cellar, Jo and Laurie were already out the front door, with the rejected manuscript harmlessly hidden under Laurie’s arm.

  “Wait!” Amy cried. “I can catch up—”

  “You have chores to do before dinner.” Meg shook her head at her youngest sister. “Let them be,” she said. “Those two.”

  “But I never get to go, and it’s such a tremendous house with so many paintings to look at.” Amy sulked. “And they’re not even talking about anything. They never are. Just loads and loads of nonsense.”

  Meg patted her sister’s arm. “Only they know what they’re talking about, Amy, but I do believe—in their own way—it’s not nonsense.”

  “Shipwrecks and sunken manuscripts and Jo’s Venetian?!” Amy looked at Meg, confused. “If that’s not nonsense, what is it?”

  Meg circled her arm affectionately around her little sister’s slender shoulders. “He’s Jo’s Cherry King, don’t you see?”

  “I do,” said Amy. “But does she?”

  Meg pinched her chin fondly. “Fair question, Mr. Winkle.”

  It really was.

  7

  ENCHANTMENT

  Deciding to slander the character of your family in the pages of your as-yet-unwritten novel was one thing. Actually doing it, as it turned out, was quite another.

  Jo had taken to working in the upstairs study of the Laurences’ house, as if she needed the physical space between herself and her real family in order to turn them into the things they were not, the things that they needed to be, at least on the page.

  Laurie had taken to lurking about the house while she did—or, as he liked to call it, helping.

  It was slow going—for both!—but Jo was determined to make it work. “Roderigo and Rodanthe! I have to do this, Laurie. It’s my job.”

  He glared from his current perch, draped across the divan, a pillow balanced on his face. “I don’t like it.”

  “My having a job?” Her eyes widened.

  An exasperated groan came from beneath the pillow. “You not having any fun. Which means me not having any fun, drearily enough. I only wish I knew how to unchain your beastly days from my own. We used to have such a romp, Jo!”

  “Go have fun, then.” She sighed. “Romp all you like. Romp for both of us, my boy. You shouldn’t have to suffer just because I’m suffering. You’re not the writer, as you’re so fond of telling me.”

  “Good thing, too. That’s all I mean to say.” Laurie rolled off the divan, wandering across the room to busy himself with rearranging the books on Grandfather’s shelves. More of an artist and a musician than a reader, he tended to sort them by color, to Jo’s endless chagrin.

  “You don’t understand. I’ve never not been able to write a book before.” Jo was now out of her chair and banging around Laurie’s drawing-room as if she owned the place—which, she reminded herself, no matter how many years they’d spent next door to each other, she didn’t and never would.

  “I know,” Laurie said, settling back onto his favorite perch, the piano bench. He started to play a sweet melody—Tchaikovsky’s very newest, that had just arrived from the Continent: “None but the Lonely Heart.” Jo only knew it because he’d made a point of playing it for her before, whenever he was in one of his more plaintive moods.

  She sat down next to him, almost automatically. It was hard not to, when he played for her. His hands moved absently over the keys, the melody sweet as honey. It was soothing, sometimes hypnotic.

  She leaned her head on his shoulder. She liked the feel of his arms moving beneath her, even now, when her mind was occupied with other, more horrible things. “I’ve never not been able to do anything before, come to think of it. Not if I truly cared about it.”

  “Dancing,” he teased, his eyes twinkling.

  “Depends on the quality of the slippers, I suppose. And whether anyone will see us.” She lifted her head, swallowing a smile and remembering how she had written about how they’d met in her first book.

  “Dull-witted parlor talk?” He looked at her sideways.

  Jo considered. “How dull?”

  His hands moved more quickly now. “As dull as feather-hatted ladies? As a church picnic? As Grandfather when he drones on about my taking up the law at Harvard?”

  “Those are three different dulls, entirely,” she protested.

  “Not if you’re me.”

  “Fine,” Jo said, giving up. “Some things are perhaps a little harder than others. But not writing. Not for me. That’s supposed to be the easy bit, Laurie. Maybe my only easy bit.”

  “I agree,” Laurie said, turning his focus back to the piano.

  His head rocked carelessly, longish locks of brown curls hanging in his eyes like the forelock of a pony. Jo knew the look well, the one that came with the moments when he became suddenly oblivious to everything but the music. The moments when he was even foreign to her.

  This is what it looks like, then. From the outside.

  His hands moved across the keys in ripples, pushing ahead only to draw back again.

  Making something.

  Jo knew how it felt to be in a room with other people but to still be utterly alone. To be lost to herself in a world only she knew existed. To rejoice in the thrill of it, to dread the end of it. To feel the guilt and the fear that nothing in the world of the living might ever again feel so true, or come so close.

  The fear that I live in the wrong world. A castle in the air, made of shadows and light, where no one can reach me . . .

  Now Laurie sang the words as effortlessly as he played.

  None but the lonely heart

  Can know my sadness;

  Alone, and parted far

  From joy and gladness.

  Heaven’s boundless arch I see

  Spread out above me.

  Oh, what a distance drear to one

  Who loves me!

  None but the lonely heart

  Can know my sadness;

  Alone, and parted far

  From joy and gladness.

  Alone, and parted far

 
; From joy and gladness.

  My senses fail,

  A burning fire

  Devours me.

  None but the lonely heart

  Can know my sadness.

  His voice was clear and tender, but as always, the effect was not without a certain sorrow, though Jo never could say why. She’d also never dared ask, unusually enough.

  He has a shadow-castle of his own. I can hear it.

  His melodies come from heartache, she thought. Even my jovial Laurie.

  Perhaps all melodies do.

  Jo suspected it had something to do with his mother, who seemed to have been an Italian soprano with no small reputation of her own, in her day. Jo tried to imagine her now, beautiful and bosomy, powdering her face in some dressing-room while a cherubic Laurie toddled around, upsetting vases of roses from undaunted suitors and generally destroying everything in sight. Then she tried to imagine her beloved Teddy, wailing and reaching for his mama when she was no longer there . . .

  The last notes faded away.

  “So?” he said, letting his hands drop into his lap. “What do you think you should do?”

  It took Jo a moment to remember he was talking about her book.

  She sighed. “I just . . . I don’t know if I’m telling the right story. And it matters, Laurie,” she finally said. “At least to me. Whether or not anyone else seems to understand.”

  “Why, the story matters, of course it does. But you can’t possibly have time to write if you spend every waking moment worrying about what to write. Take it from me.”

  Jo frowned. “Whatever would you know about worrying?”

  Laurie laughed. “Nothing at all; that’s absolutely my point. My expertise lies in not worrying!”

  “Ah, the plight of the forever gentleman.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, some of us must both work and worry. We can’t all practice Teddy Laurence’s fine foolosophies.”

  “But I’ll teach you!” Now he leapt up from the piano. “What you need, Miss March, is a change of pace . . . or at least a change of scenery. That’s why I’ve made a plan for us, a good one. Come on.” He grabbed her hand, a delighted look on his face.