“Your typesetters go too far.” She glared, repeating the warning not to change a word of her text for the twentieth time.
“Yes, well.” He snapped shut his peppermint tin. “When women of polite society are allowed to speak like common sailors, you are welcome to terminate their employment yourself, Miss March.”
“And I look forward to the day, sir.” Jo pursed her lips.
“I am confident you shall meet it.” Niles smiled. For despite all indications to the contrary, the two were fond friends. Niles reminded Jo of her father, who had left Concord years earlier to join the Union army as a chaplain. Mr. March had come home only once in all that time—when the Union prevailed and the war was won, three years ago. Shortly thereafter, he’d left once more to volunteer in the Reconstruction efforts in the South, helping to build schools and churches for previously enslaved people. And though his letters usually came frequently, the March women felt his absence keenly.
But Jo still had Niles, and if they fought, they fought well, each considering the other the more harmless version of their species. (The dollar a story Niles paid to run Jo’s wild romantic adventures didn’t hurt, either. Neither did the fact that subscriptions to his circular, The Tall Taler, had gone up by forty-three since engaging her. Forty-three!)
“Call it what you will. No one will read it, anyway.” Jo tapped her fingers along the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. “I don’t know why you believed you could sell it.”
“Perhaps.” Niles nodded.
“I should have used a different name instead of my own,” she sighed. “Eustacia. Thomasina.”
“Possibly.” He nodded again. “Eustacia Emerson is lovely. I’m quite partial to Thomasina Thoreau, but Hildegarde Hawthorne could also do just fine.” He winked.
Hawthorne. That was his name, the other Athenaeum chap!
“Fine.” She picked at the string about the parcel. “Take my daft little book of scribbles and do with it as you will.”
“I’ve seen dafter. Trust me.”
“Trust you? You have no sense of anything, least of all publishing! Why, you couldn’t sell Romeo and Juliet if I wrote it for you.”
“Admittedly a bit somber for my taste—I do prefer a happy ending to my sensation stories. So do our Tall Taler readers. Why couldn’t Romeo have married Juliet and settled down in a nice Tuscan villa? A sequel by any other name . . .”
The author bit her lip; it kept her from responding in a discourteous manner.
“Now give it here,” the editor said, sliding his fingers impatiently across the blotter atop his desk and taking the manuscript from her hands.
“Take it.” She scowled.
Manuscript obtained, Niles traded his peppermints for the bottle of peppermint schnapps he kept in the bottom of his drawer for special occasions.
“A toast!” he offered, pouring two thimblefuls into two cups.
Jo grudgingly accepted.
“To our Little Women!” her publisher cried. “And to the bright future of Jo March, Thomas Niles, and Roberts Brothers! May 1868 prove to be a banner year for us all!”
Jo clinked her glass against his. It seemed rude otherwise. With a final sigh and a shake of her curls, the author drank to her defeat. The editor drank to her success.
Little Women it was.
1869
ONE YEAR LATER
1
HAPPY ENDINGS
Christopher Columbus! I don’t believe it,” Jo said, shaking her head at the small mountain of carefully inscribed paper envelopes covering the round dinner-table of Orchard House, the Marches’ neatly kept cottage farm. “Who are these people? They just keep coming.”
The old cottage didn’t answer.
Jo shifted uncomfortably in her horsehair-cushioned seat, and even the soft lawn collar of her new day-dress didn’t make her feel better. This could partly have been due to the particular circumstances of the dress itself; Thomas Niles had sent one for each of the March women, all the way from Boston by carriage, at an expense never before undertaken by any Orchard House resident, with a note: For Our Dearest Little Women, with Greatest Admiration for Our Most Productive Partnership, and with the Hope of Many Future Successes. Respectfully, Mr. Thomas Niles, Editor & Partner, Roberts Brothers.
The dress was fine. It was the implication of the note that made Jo squirm. Two thousand copies, sold out almost from the start! Certainly, the book’s popularity had surprised everyone, particularly its eighteen-year-old author. But future successes? Beyond Mr. Niles’s promotion to partner? That meant future books about her family. And successes meant expectations. Expectations she wasn’t sure she could meet. She’d wanted the book to do well, naturally, but—
“Believe what?” Amy, Jo’s little sister, called up from the root-cellar, where, as usual, she was foraging for something better than the dull piece of bread and scrape of butter she customarily had for her tea. The last of the raisins, most like. “Coming from where?”
“Where else? That book, of course!” Jo shook her head. Her chestnut ringlets were bound up in rags that were meant to make her look exotic, but only succeeded in making her look like one of their old homemade rag dolls. (Perhaps, as her older sister, Meg, had pointed out, because they’re made from the very same rags.)
Nineteen-year-old Meg was distressingly traditional, which accounted for her taste in the most tediously earnest boys—the one thing both Jo and Amy could agree upon. Otherwise, the three March girls did not agree on much, though they loved each other dearly.
A small shout echoed up the cellar steps. “Don’t yell. You know it upsets Marmee.” Jo heard the sarcasm in the tone; she could imagine the smirk on her little sister’s face.
“Don’t . . .” Jo picked up an envelope and tore off the corner with her teeth. “Do not start!” There was a pause—and a crash—and Jo imagined the baskets of last year’s potatoes that had most likely been upset on the stone cellar floor. It was a bright sunny day in May, and Jo wished she felt more sanguine about her success and less rattled by its expectations.
Then she heard Amy’s voice. “You were the one who gave her that treacly nickname, Jo! She’s Marmee forever now, in thousands and thousands of copies of a book everyone in the world mistakes for our real life!”
Jo tossed the letter over the grating and into the dining-room fireplace, picking up another. “Oh, you ridiculous tartlet. Blame Mr. Niles! He insisted.”
The stomping that accompanied the declaration brought Amy up the stairs and into the small, warm dining-room where Jo sat.