Jo & Laurie Read online

  Jo looked taken aback. Meg’s hurt, you ninny. She’s hurt and you didn’t even see it.

  Meg kept going. “When our sister died, you had your garret to disappear into. Amy had her—”

  “Mirror?” Jo volunteered.

  “Sketch-pad!” Meg was agitated now. “What did I have? What do I have now? What’s left for me, Jo? Being a governess?” She rubbed the back of her hand against her eye, and Jo suddenly felt as if her own heart were breaking.

  “What’s left, Meg, is for you to keep being Meg March, the best of us. My hero, and my beloved, absolute loveliest surprise. Let’s not ruin it by squabbling,” Jo said as she took her sister’s arm.

  She meant it, which Meg knew—as sisters do—and so peace was struck just as war had been declared.

  Also as sisters do.

  “Come on.” Meg smiled, suddenly picking at the bundle. “Let’s see what Mr. Laurence and Mama have sent you to wear.”

  Jo groaned. “Must we?”

  “Yes, we must. This is New York City, and we’re here to inspire you. If we’re all to be characters in a Jo March story, we should at least dress the part.”

  Jo flung herself down on the bed, rumpling Meg’s bonnet. “Fine. But if they’re the least bit frilly, I’m giving the whole lot to you. I don’t do frilly.”

  “You don’t? What a shocking piece of entirely new information,” Meg snorted.

  “I said, the whole lot,” Jo growled again.

  “Even better,” said Meg as she undid the bundle. “Now, what have we here?”

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT WEEK WAS unlike any other in the history of the world, or at least Jo’s world. Seven days of perfection, almost to the point of fiction. Even Mr. Brooke tagging along couldn’t dampen her spirits.

  Perhaps her sister was right.

  Perhaps they all were characters in a Jo March story now.

  In truth, she’d imagined such days before, but she’d always imagined them as the stuff of The Tall Taler—not Jo’s rather more Small Taler, as she had come to refer to her own domestic life. While a week at Mrs. Kirke’s boarding house was hardly the stolen rendezvous of thwarted lovers or shipwrecked castaways at some faraway Castle Otranto—as Jo herself might have written for Niles in the past—it was still so exotic, when compared to her pastoral Concord life, that it might as well have been.

  That week, Jo and Meg had no goblets of mead to toast with, but tiny cups of strong coffee. No nectar and ambrosia to feast upon, but thick slabs of toast and jewel-colored berry preserves. No brocade-and-ermine capelets or filigreed tiaras to don, but clever new boots with a row of inlaid mother-of-pearl buttons and a pair of hand-stitched kid gloves—thanks to Mama Abba and the elder Mr. Laurence!

  If the two girls and their male companions faced no dueling pirates and dastardly fisticuffs—the one exception being a rather heated exchange between Laurie and a leering, rough-mannered paperboy—they did find plenty of crowds to battle past and whole city blocks to navigate.

  And though sadly lacking in both galloping consumption and fainting spells, Jo found no shortage of other maladies of the heart and soul.

  Because this week, if there were no Roderigos, there was a Teddy.

  Every morning, the two good friends, usually accompanied by Meg and Mr. Brooke, set out for another day of carefree adventure in the city. Jo and Meg (with two new day-dresses to show off, as if they’d stepped out from the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Jo thought) and Laurie (with a trim new suit from the Laurences’ personal tailor that he cared not a whit about showing off) walked the streets of Manhattan until their feet ached, marveling at tall buildings and small discoveries as the city unfolded before them.

  Together the four of them ate filet de boeuf and sipped champagne at Delmonico’s, attended lectures on France under Napoleon III, visited the site where Roebling was planning his elegant new bridge across the East River to Brooklyn, and even picnicked on the Green at Central Park.

  Their days ranged from the exceptional to the overwhelming. One morning, they found themselves studying the gilded frames at the museum; that same afternoon, they accidentally wandered into the infamous tenement neighborhood of Five Points—west of the Bowery and south of Canal—where they encountered a scene of such squalor that it made the poor Hummels back home in Concord seem positively rich in comparison: mothers begging for food for their children, young boys fighting each other in the streets, and even a bar brawl that tumbled out onto the sidewalk.

  After this last, John Brooke quickly urged Laurie and the ladies back north. (“Really, Mr. Laurence, what were you thinking, bringing ladies into this—this den of iniquity?”)

  Although Jo was secretly a bit thrilled to have seen said infamous den of iniquity with her own eyes, if only as fodder for future stories, Meg relived it all with such a heavy heart as they crawled into their warm bed that night that Jo was ashamed. “That mother with her babe! I shall never forget the sight! The poor thing had such a fever, I could feel the heat from three feet away!” Meg had cried.

  They didn’t say the obvious thing, of course. That it was their sister Bethie who would have taken the child to her bosom. Beth who would have wept at the needs of such a family, just as she had at the Hummels. If it had been winter, she would have pressed her own cloak into the hands of the first desperate mother she encountered, then wrapped her own scarf around the cold shoulders of the next.

  Yes, and then contracted scarlet fever and died of it.

  Which is precisely why your little sister isn’t here, and you are.

  Because, while life is not fair, it is logical.

  Jo lay in bed that night feeling the heavy darkness settled upon her once again.

  Danger was one thing, of course; destitution, especially that of poor women and their children, was quite another. Mama Abba, like Beth, would have urged Jo to see the poorer residents of the great city less as potential characters in her private dramas—less the personification of misfortune itself!—and more as human beings.

  So Jo tried to do, for the sake of the poor creatures as well as her own soul.

  And for her lost soul.

  For Beth.

  Still, every day brought a new discovery, most more pleasant than Five Points. When Jo and Meg, Laurie and Brooke returned to the little boarding house on the dark end of each day, they recounted everything they’d seen and heard, said and done. The younger two raced each other like schoolchildren as they bolted up the stairs and across the landing, each to their own little doors; the elder two lingered, taking their quiet leave at the bottom of the stairs as they went their separate ways. Jo—in such a hurry to write down everything she’d seen and heard, the better to remember it and write about it later—nearly forgot about Meg and Brooke’s budding, or not-so-budding, romance.

  Because the truth of it was hard to untangle.

  The more Jo watched her sister and Mr. Brooke together, the more she was certain that Meg had feelings for him, whether or not she would ever allow it. Her sister’s face and entire manner brightened in his presence, a rose in bloom. And Jo had to acknowledge that John Brooke, as staid and serious as he was, was a good man, a decent man, and Meg could do worse than to throw her lot in with his.

  Jo desperately didn’t want her sister to leave her, but she also deeply wanted her sister to be happy. And she could hear Meg’s question, lingering still—What’s left for me, Jo?

  If only she knew the answer.

  But romance or the lack of it aside, the week seemed to Jo but one long moment, suspended in a suffusion of pleasant new opportunities and even pleasanter old memories and—pleasantest of all—Laurie’s generous, boyish laughter. The result was a sunbeam and a bubble and a dream of the rarest and realest sort; unsurprisingly, the more—and yet, somehow, less—pressing matters of Plato (still unread) and books to write (
still unwritten) fell by the wayside.

  It was not a week of writing, but not for lack of effort. Jo dutifully sat at the uncomfortable little mahogany writing-desk in front of the window of her room every night—gas lamps in the street illuminating her blank papers along with the moonlight and the candle-wax—but still no words came. When she forced them out, by way of threatening and bargaining and cajoling, she’d only find herself crossing them out, crumpling the page in the starker light of the next morning. She was as absolutely, irrefutably stuck in New York as she had been in Concord. Finally, she told herself she had no choice except to abandon quill and ink altogether.

  You shall write about this someday. But not today.

  Today you are too busy living it.

  It was enough, for now. It had to be.

  On Friday afternoon, when a summer storm drifted into the city, Laurie suggested another ramble. “A good day for tea, isn’t it? And Grandfather’s given us a whole list of tea-rooms to try, what do you say?”

  “Yes, please!” Jo snapped shut her journal. “Let’s have an adventure.”

  “No, thank you,” Meg demurred, smoothing the ribbon at her tiny waist. “I’d prefer to not muddy a perfectly lovely day-dress I’ve only just had made.”

  “And I shall keep Miss March company. I have some long-overdue correspondence I need to catch up on, I’m afraid.” Mr. Brooke nodded at Meg, who blushed.

  “As you like,” she said. Jo responded with a meaningful look.

  Meg meaningfully ignored it.

  9

  SAILING AWAY

  Within the hour, Laurie and Jo set off on their adventure. Laurie procured a poorly made umbrella at twice the usual price. (“Forty cents, Teddy! That’s what I would have to earn, for the price of a few steel ribs and a shoddy bit of oiled cloth!”)

  Now properly armed against the elements, they roamed onward, down the length of Broadway, in search of a particularly Parisian tea-room that the elder Mr. Laurence had made them promise to visit.

  Before long, they reached the edge of a great, crowded wharf, and beyond it, the even greater gray harbor. Beyond that, the vast expanse of the Atlantic yawned at them.

  “Ho, Jo! Look!” Laurie gave a shout and pulled Jo excitedly toward the broad platform before them, over to the place where the wooden walkway was crowded with passengers and families and friends, whole streams of people arriving and departing, along with the loved ones assembled to see them off and welcome them home again. Sailing ships of all stripes floated there, great three-masters meant to cross the Atlantic and a number of steam vessels as well, including the famous sidewheel steamer the SS Baltic, one of the fastest ships ever made. The dock was a threshold, teeming with people going to and fro. Like a train station, she thought, only a thousand times bigger and more frightening.

  Laurie let go of Jo’s arm and stepped across the walk, leaving both his friend and their umbrella behind, as if the ships were magnets and he was powerless before them. The scene did not have the same effect upon Jo; the longer she stood watching, the harder it was to know if she was exhilarated or terrified.

  She closed her eyes and tried to decide the matter for herself. She knew she was being ridiculous. She’d always wanted to go to Europe; she couldn’t imagine anything she’d wanted more. So why did the sight of the shipyard set her spinning? Was it the feeling of freedom all around her? Or the feeling of being trapped in some way?

  I’m not afraid. And I’m not being wild and queer. I’m not. It’s Teddy who’s being strange, ever since we arrived. Strangely charming. Strangely gallant. Strangely handsome.

  What’s so very wrong with that?

  But now all Jo could feel was the fluttering nervousness beneath her ribs, the great knotting lump that should have been her nearly empty stomach, the goose-bumps pricking up along the seam of exposed flesh at her wrist, just beneath her new linen puffed sleeve. The thought of all that water beneath her, the fathomless dark depths of the ocean and herself in it, cold and alone . . .

  “Smell that!” Laurie took a great whiff of air, wagging his head. He looked back at her. “Come closer! You’ve got to feel it!”

  As she stepped forward to his side, she could see what he meant; the wood-planked platform was vibrating beneath their feet as the crowd shoved between and beyond them.

  Now the two friends stood side by side at the edge of the harbor. She angled the umbrella to cover them both, but he didn’t even notice.

  “It’s such a city, Jo!” Laurie’s face was ruddy with excitement, just as it had been all day. “And those enormous steamships. Beyond them only the big, wide ocean. Then nothing at all until London and Paris and Rome, whatever we want.” He was in one of his moods.

  Unstoppable and unapologetic, Jo thought. She had come to know his moods well, and to love them better.

  She kept her eyes on the ship nearest them, which steadily swallowed a ramp full of departing passengers into a shadowy opening in its hull. It swayed in its berth with the rocking motion of the waves.

  “Shall we join them?” Laurie took her gloved hand in his warmer, larger one.

  She let her eyes flicker over to him. His face was sparkling with mischief; he didn’t seem to notice the change in her mood at all. “Is that a question?” she asked.

  He squeezed her fingers. “Every boat is a question, don’t you think, Jo? Whether or not to get on and sail away, forever and ever, world without end?”

  Jo couldn’t help but smile. He looked like one of Meg’s pupils, all wonder and eagerness at the thought of tigers and India and gangplanks. “No end at all?”

  “Why not?” He said it again, eyes still on the steamer ship. “Don’t you just want to climb that ramp and go?”

  She tilted back the umbrella for a closer look. “Is that what you want, Teddy? For me to wave you off with this rather fetching new lawn pocket square your grandfather gifted me? Cry adieu from the dock while you sail off to the high seas?”

  “Don’t be daft, you turnip-head. You’d be standing next to me on the very tip-top deck. The highest one.” He scrutinized the Baltic, then pointed. “That one, I think. Right up . . . there.”

  She considered the specks lining the upper deck of the vessel in question. “It’s awfully high.”

  “For you?” He scoffed. “Not high enough. If I know my Jo, you’ll be captaining that ship by the end of our first day at sea.”

  “Then we’ll make it to London in no time. Perhaps we’ll make it in time to see Little Women in the West End.” She laughed.

  “We’ll sail this fine, seaworthy vessel down the Thames ourselves!” He saluted the sea briskly. “Aye, Captain March! Next is Paris! You shall have your shipwreck yet, Milady Authoress!”

  Jo burst out laughing. “Oh, you’re such a boy, Teddy!”

  “Why, had you forgotten?” He took another deep breath of the salty, steamy harbor air. “Don’t I look like one?” He turned toward her now, offering his face up for inspection. “Eh?”

  She regarded the familiar features of his face for a moment, then sighed. “Who knows?”

  “I beg your pardon?” He sounded insulted.

  Jo reached up to pinch his cheek with one damp kid glove. “If you want to know the truth, dear boy, sometimes I forget you have a face at all.”

  “Hey now!”

  “Sometimes you just look like . . .” She considered it.

  “Like what?” His eyes met hers.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know . . . like me, I suppose?”

  “You?” He quirked an eyebrow. “That’s a new one.”

  “It’s not, actually. Not remotely. I just don’t tell you half the things I think.”

  “Not half?”

  “Not a fraction.”

  “Now, that’s hardly fair, seeing as you know my innermost thoughts.”

  Jo smiled. “All
right, then. To me, you look like . . .” It was hard to put the truth into words, even if it was just a truth about her dearest friend. “I don’t know, me, but not me, exactly. More like . . . an appendage?”

  “Your foot? Maybe a hand? I’m trying to decide how insulted to be.”

  “No, Teddy. A soul . . . or maybe a sunburst? Like sunshine itself. Like the sun.”

  It sounded ridiculous. There was nothing Jo hated more than not being able to speak the truth, especially not to those she loved best. Especially not to Laurie.

  But the truth is a hard thing to speak, especially when you don’t know it yourself.

  “A ball of flame and light? Are you a blind goose? What else do I look like? Better yet . . .” Laurie caught her fingers in his, and her stomach tightened. He pulled her toward him until they were face-to-face, a still island in a circle of crushing passersby. “What does this look like to you, Jo?”

  There it was. The current that ran between them, whenever she let it. Whenever he walked into the room, or even passed in front of his window all the way across the lane from hers, it was there. She felt it now. Crackling with fire, with life, with something. Some unspeakable Teddy-ness. Every time she glanced his way or caught his eye by accident, it was another trembling tilt of the candle, another drop of hot wax against cold fingers. She didn’t know if it was pleasant or painful, only that it was . . .

  You know exactly what it is, honestly.

  Why do you lie to yourself? To him?

  How long do you think this strange truce with the truth will hold?

  “What does this look like?” The words came from her lips before she realized she was saying them. She took a step backward, smiling awkwardly. “Happiness. Summertime. Childhood. My best friend . . .” She stopped short, ducking away beneath their shared umbrella, looking down at her muddy boots.

  You little idiot, you’ll ruin everything. You have to fight it. Fight or run!

  “Jo,” Laurie began, from the other side of the umbrella. His voice was low.