“Now then,” said Mama, taking off her gloves, “what’s this row I’m hearing? My Meg and Jo arguing?”
“Not at all, Mama,” said Jo. “We were discussing my reader mail, that’s all.”
“And how all her readers want Jo and Laurie to marry,” Meg added, with a merry gleam in her eye.
“Don’t tease her, Meg. It’s her book and her characters, and she must be free to pursue their fates without anyone’s input. Even ours.”
“Even when she borrows us so mercilessly for her books, and writes us embarrassing fates, and makes us a national laughing-stock?” Amy demanded.
“You’re hardly a laughing-stock.” Mama smoothed Amy’s glossy curls. “And yes, even then.”
“Hmm,” Amy said, and frowned. Her cheeks were pale, as if the thought of appearing in Jo’s sequel were a humiliation. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a say in what Jo writes about me.”
“Because it’s not about you, goose,” Jo said. “Not the real you. Just the version of you I’ve invented.”
“If the character is an invention, why couldn’t she be named something other than Amy March?”
“Christopher Columbus!” Jo exclaimed again. “Everyone’s a critic.”
While Jo scowled and stomped around, the youngest March picked up the bundle and read the return addresses. Two letters had traveled all the way from someplace called Rochester, Minnesota, and another all the way from San Francisco.
Amy thrilled to imagine the journey that letter had taken—perhaps on horseback across the Rocky Mountains and the plains, past Indians and cowboys and wagon trains headed for Oregon. Or else it had been sent on a steamship that traveled down the coast, then sent by wagon across the Isthmus of Panama, and up from Florida on yet another steamship. Perhaps it had been captured by pirates, ballooned on a desert island.
She said as much to Meg, who laughed and said, “Marooned. And what kind of pirate would want Jo’s mail?”
“A bored one, I’d imagine,” said Jo.
Amy pouted. “I don’t see why you have to tease me,” she said. “The two of you went to New York and had all kinds of adventures without me! I always get left behind! I only get to stay home and imagine an adventure. Jo’s old mail is as close as I ever get.”
Meg touched her chin and said, kindly, “You will have your own adventures one day, dearest. Jo and I never went anywhere, either, when we were your age.”
“Jo won’t even write me an adventure,” said Amy.
“I told you, I don’t want to describe so many foreign cities! Especially ones I’ve never even been to!” said Jo.
“But you will go one day—you’ve been invited to Paris and London. You’ll be there before you know it! Unlike me, who shall never leave Concord,” said Amy.
“Beth never left Concord and she was the happiest of us,” said Jo.
“Beth was a saint!” said Amy. “And I shall never measure up to her. I’m sorry you’re left with me, Jo! I know Beth was your favorite.”
Jo reeled backward as Meg held up her arms, horrified. “Amy! Don’t say such things!”
“All are loved equally,” said Mama, trying to soothe her youngest, “in this peaceable cottage.”
“That’s not true,” said Amy. “In Jo’s book I am vain and ridiculous, and Beth is sweet and perfect and is gifted a piano.”
They all turned to the piano in the middle of the room, which had stood silent for so long now; none could bear to play since Beth’s death.
Next to the fire, Jo finally found her voice. “Do I not set aside money every month for your art lessons and charcoals and paints?”
“You do.”
“And to keep you in ribbons and bows?”
“I have enough ribbons.”
Jo shook her head. “Amy, you are as dear to me as Beth, and it grieves me to think you believe otherwise.”
Amy set down her basket and sighed. “Of course I don’t.”
“There,” said Meg, as she and Mama came between the sisters and enveloped both in a hug.
“We are all we have,” said Mama, and they all heard the tears in her voice. “Love each other, my dears. Remember that. In the end, there is little else that matters.”
The sisters resolved to remember. They broke off the embrace, and Jo ruffled Amy’s hair. “You shall have an adventure someday, and in your own very real life—not just in my sequel.”
Amy sighed. “It’s just so tedious to wait for someday!”
“Darling,” Mama said. “If you’re so interested in Jo’s letters, perhaps you would help her answer them?”
At this, Amy perked up considerably. The idea of sending letters to London and Paris and California was the most excitement she’d felt in weeks. “Oh! May I, Jo? Please?”
Jo heaved a great sigh. “I suppose someone should. I can’t bear to write them all back myself.”
“And it will be good for you, Amy dear,” said Mama. “A less teddy-us way to practice your writing.”
“But I insist on seeing every one before you send it,” Jo cried. “I won’t let you send anything that would embarrass me.”
“Jo, honestly. Your sister would never embarrass you.”
Amy flung herself down on the sofa. “I’m already exhausted thinking about answering Jo’s mail, and I haven’t even started.”
“You do look tired,” Mama said, smoothing back Amy’s hair and letting her hand linger a moment on the white forehead, the pink-spotted cheek. “You may write three letters today, if that suits you. To get started.”
So Amy went to work on Jo’s letters, starting with the oldest. There were at least a hundred to get to, which would take Amy a month at this pace, and she grew tired just thinking about all the work she’d have to put in.
But she wrote carefully, in her best handwriting, as if she were Jo: How pleased I am to hear you enjoyed my novel. I am hard at work on the sequel, and will take your ideas under advisement. Yours most sincerely, Josephine March.
She worked for hours, until it got dark.
“There,” said Amy, bringing them to Jo at dinnertime. She felt weary beyond measure, and fuzzy-headed, as if she’d been awake all night with insomnia. “Now tell me I didn’t do a good job of it.”
Jo took the letters and read them approvingly, though she found several spelling errors and more than one comma splice. “If you’re going to impersonate me, you have to use proper grammar! I thought this whole experiment was to give you more practice with your writing, not to showcase your deficiencies.”
“Jo,” said Mama, “don’t chastise your sister. She is doing you a favor, after all.” Then Mama’s face changed. She looked alarmed. “Are you all right, my dear? You look pale.”
Amy swayed a little and grabbed the table to steady herself. “I do feel a little strange. I thought I was just tired from all that writing.”
“Were you playing with little Christina Hummel this morning? The sick baby?”
“Just keeping her from eating grass, Mama, while Hannah helped with the baking. She was stuffing leaves into her mouth by the handful.”
“Hmm,” Mama said, looking serious. “You’re much too warm, Amy.” She looked panicked, and Jo remembered that tone of voice, that fear. This was how Beth’s sickness began. Always with the Hummels. Always with the fever.
Jo looked up at Amy’s pale face and couldn’t help but be reminded of Beth on her deathbed. “Hannah, get us warm blankets and a compress. Now!” she said, rattling their old, faithful servant.
Amy shook her head. “I’m fine, I’m telling you. There’s nothing to worry about. If anything, I’m just a little cold.”
Then she lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes.
Amy coughed into her hand, and they heard it: the beginnings of a rattle at the bottom of her lungs.
“Amy!” Jo
cried. “You are terribly sick!”
“To bed with you,” Mama said, and shooed Amy upstairs. “The mail can wait.”
21
ANOTHER PROPOSAL
Amy’s illness, as it turned out, was not so serious as they had feared, thankfully enough. A cough and a low fever kept her in bed and from answering any more of Jo’s mail, but it was hardly more than a little autumn cold, one that would surely go away after a few days of rest. The panic that had set in the house had been unwarranted in the end. Amy was not Beth, and she would not suffer her sister’s fate.
Jo tried to turn toward answering the letters herself, but between the demands of her readers and the stubborn denials of her editor, she could hardly bear the thought of writing a word—not to the readers of Little Women, nor continuing with its sequel.
It was Laurie who’d upset her so, Laurie whom she argued with, constantly, in her own head. Stubborn fool, she’d call him. Determined to ruin us both.
To these scenes she always added some dash of melodrama. The wind rising outside. A blizzard. A cyclone.
Or else they were on a steamship in the middle of the Atlantic, waves dashing on the deck. Then they’d run into hidden rocks and the hull would split, sending them all to their watery graves.
I’m stubborn? When every word out of your mouth is an insult? You’re killing me, Jo. I want you to be with me.
And to her invisible audience, Laurie or her readers or both, she’d always exclaim, I won’t marry Jo March to Theodore Laurence for anything! I belong to no one but myself, in fiction and in life.
Jo was in the middle of writing such a scene in a chapter called “Heartache,” which borrowed too heavily on Laurie’s real proposal, when Brooke arrived to call on Meg one glorious October afternoon. From her attic Jo watched him walk up the lane, his lips moving as if he, too, were arguing with himself—or else someone else whose happiness and his seemed always at odds.
They had seen him only once in the few days since the Autumn Splendor Ball at the Gardiners’. It hadn’t taken him long to gather his things from Mr. Laurence’s house and have them sent to Boston. A trunk of books and clothes and who knew what else had gone out one morning. Meanwhile, Lady Harriet and Kate Vaughn were still visiting, and his hours had been taken up with picnicking with the two ladies and showing them around his favorite Concord places: the little pond where the geese gathered, the apple-trees laden with fruit. Jo and Meg had stood at the window and watched them walk down the lane together, arm in arm in arm.
When Brooke invited Jo and Meg to join them on one of these rambles, Meg had nearly begged off, saying she couldn’t bear to watch Harriet gloat over Brooke. Only Jo’s insistence that she’d feel worse staying home had convinced her to come along.
Still, she’d been unusually reserved and quiet, even for Meg. Brooke had noticed and said he hoped she was feeling all right.
“I’m quite all right, Mr. Brooke,” Meg said. She’d returned to her governess position with the Kings on the first of September after having the summer off. “Just tired from overseeing my little charges.”
“I certainly understand that feeling, Miss March,” Brooke said kindly. “Do make sure you take care of yourself. I wouldn’t want you to make yourself ill.”
“Thank you.”
Jo watched him watching Meg. Perhaps she’d been wrong about Brooke and Harriet; he did seem to still be interested in Meg. Perhaps he would choose love over money in the end, Jo could only hope.
“Oh, it must be so difficult to be a governess,” Harriet said, clutching Brooke’s arm. “You must have the patience of a saint to work with children.”
“Only the ordinary kind, my lady,” Brooke said. “But the work can be very rewarding, if you let it.”
For the first time, Jo felt she understood Brooke, and pitied him. Not just the fictional version she’d made of him, but the real-live one. It couldn’t be easy for him to find himself in Harriet’s sights, after all. To be faced with such great temptation: love and happiness versus stability and security and position. That is, if the dowager lady allowed the match, of course. But if he won Meg’s heart, then he was more than worthy, and Meg was worth a thousand Lady Hats.
Now, as Brooke came up the lane to the door of Orchard House, Jo looked at the messy scribblings of her manuscript and felt a rising despair that nothing she had written was approaching the version that would please Niles. It’s no use, she thought. She’d written one book, and one would have to be enough. She had no sequels in her. She’d have to think of something else to write.
She tore up the sheaf of paper and took out a new one, her quill poised over the creamy, blank page. But nothing new was coming to her, either. There were no Roderigos to meet, no swooning ladies in towers, no Cherry King. There were only the leaves going yellow outside, and the rising wind, and the whole winter ahead of her with no Laurie, no Dickens. No money, either, for Christmas presents for her sisters or her mother or Hannah.
She thought of her father down South, going through another winter in his old boots and coat. How she had wanted the money from the sequel to send him some new ones!
But the blasted story wouldn’t come. The future was just like the page in front of her—a blank. She was a failure. She couldn’t conceive of a future for her sisters or herself, on the page or in real life; she’d stolen them for fiction and cursed them all as a result.
Brooke’s knock on the door gave her a reason to get up. Jo ran downstairs to answer the door, for Meg was reading to Amy, who had turned the corner, and Mama was out on a call. Even Hannah was out back plucking a chicken for tomorrow’s dinner; only Jo was idle and could greet their guest.
Of course, she thought, with not a little self-loathing.
“Hello, Mr. Brooke,” said Jo, opening the door to see his serious face, his jaw working as if he were lost in thought. “Is everything all right?”
“Hello, Miss Jo,” he said. “I hope so. Or that, if it isn’t, it will be soon.”
This was promising news. Jo felt her mood lighten just a bit. Perhaps this would be the longed-for moment she’d been expecting since their return from New York—that John Brooke would finally declare himself to Meg, and be done with it.
How much it would please Mama, and Meg, too, to have the question settled. If only Meg would accept him! And Brooke would keep Meg close to home. If she must lose her sister—and it was becoming increasingly clear that she would, if only Meg would allow herself her feelings—at least she would not go far.
So, Jo had been wrong about Brooke and Harriet, after all. She’d never in her life been so glad to be wrong.
She settled Brooke in the drawing-room, then clattered upstairs in a breathless rush and flung open the door so hard, it left a mark on the wall.
Amy let out an eep of terror, and Meg declared, “My goodness, Jo, is the house on fire? Why are you in such a hurry?”
“Brooke is here. For you, Meg.”
Meg looked pale, then set down the book she’d been reading. Jane Eyre, Jo noticed—how appropriate. One governess reading about another.
Meg was hesitating, pulling at the curl over her forehead. “I don’t think I can talk to him now.”
Jo yanked her sister to her feet. “Go, go,” she said. “I’ll read to Amy. Where did you leave off?”
“Jane has just left Lowood school. She is about to arrive at Thornfield Hall.”
“Ah, this is the best part!” cried Jo. “Go on, I’ll read it to her. See what Mr. Brooke wants! Don’t you want to know?”
Meg froze as if in terror.
Jo held her cold hands. “My dearest, if you love him, you must accept him. You don’t need to take care of anyone but your own heart.”
“Oh, Jo! I can’t.”
“You must.”
“Meg!” cried Amy, coughing a bit from exertion. “Tell us everything he says.”
“Now, not everything needs to be shared,” Meg replied, but she went down with a determined tilt to her chin.
Jo picked up the book Meg had discarded. “All right!” she said. “Now you shall hear all the most chilling parts of the story, for Thornfield Hall is haunted by a ghost.”
Amy clutched the covers and coughed some more. “Don’t tease me!” she cried. “You know I’m afraid of spirits, Jo March.”
“I do not tease you, for Thornfield is haunted, I say. But I promise it will turn out all right in the end.”
“For who?” Amy begged.
“For everyone. Or mostly everyone,” Jo said, and began to read.
* * *
• • •
DOWNSTAIRS, MEG AND Brooke decided to go outside, the better to avoid being overheard by the rest of the family. They walked a bit down the lane, alone.
She heard the first of Mr. Brooke’s questions, but she had to confess she missed the rest of it because of the roaring in her ears.
“Marry you?” she asked. “Is that really what you want?”
“It is. I have thought for a long time what I would do when I was finished as Laurie’s tutor. Now I shall go back to Boston to my pupils, but before the winter I would like us to be married, Miss March. It’s all I’ve thought about for some time. If you’ll have me.”
Meg was quiet for a while. They walked down the lane toward the stream, and Meg thought again about Jo’s nickname for Brooke. Babbling Brooke. Her sister thought she was so clever, but Jo had woefully underestimated this quiet, honorable young man who reminded Meg so much of her father.
“Are you all right, Miss March?”
“Yes. I’m just thinking. It’s a lot to take in.”
They walked to the stream together in companionable silence, with only the sounds of their footsteps, and a few noisy birds, for company.
For some time Meg had been noticing her own feelings toward Brooke changing. In New York, for instance, she had been so pleased by his attentions at first, the quiet way he looked at her, as if trying to memorize her face against some future loss. The night of the Ducal Ball, he’d been everything she’d ever hoped for—attentive, careful, polite. Except when Lady Harriet appeared, and turned everything on its head. Only when they had returned to Concord had she started to believe she’d imagined the whole thing. Brooke had come by two or three times a week to visit with her. Surely he cared about her as much as she cared about him.
Jo & Laurie Page 18