“Oh, you can handle me.” Laurie laughed. “At least, you always have. Quite well, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Jo smiled, despite her annoyance.
A sweaty lock of sun-streaked gold-brown hair flopped into his eyes, covering half of his cheerful, ruddy face. “I have always belonged entirely and devotedly to you, since long before you had such a great many passionate fans, Milady Shakespeare.”
He tried to manage a bow, but it looked rather like a stagger and only sent more letters flying. Though an athlete, Laurie could often be awkward; though intelligent, he could often be a fool; though rich as a Cherry King, his tastes tended toward the acquired rather than the obvious. Jo suspected he’d had more than enough of finer things, and was interested in something more substantial. What that might be, however, she could not bring herself to yet imagine.
She reached out to place her hand gently upon his flushed cheek. “It’s true, dear boy. Even before I had a single reader, I had a singularly devoted you.”
She kept smiling as she reached for his ear . . .
“Undeniably.” Laurie’s eyes were on hers, as they so often were, these late-spring days. “I remain your first and your greatest—”
. . . and twisted as hard as she could.
“OWWW! SWEET GODLESS HEATHEN BEAST! What sorry man would have you?! Atrocity, thy name is woman! This must be hate mail!”
With that, Laurie howled and tossed the whole load of envelopes into the air, where they flew like so many handfuls of confetti about the room.
As befits the wedding of a Cherry King, Jo thought. Just so long as it’s not mine.
3
UNWRITTEN
The next day, Jo found herself in front of Meg’s students while Meg found herself in bed with a spring cold and a borrowed volume of The Necromancer—Flammenberg’s latest, just translated from the German. Jo was irritated that Meg had gotten her hands on it first (just as she’d done with the Dickens before that!), especially since, in return, all Jo had gotten were two very bored children squirming in front of their equally bored substitute governess.
“Why must we practice our handwriting again?” The older daughter (Beatrice, or Bethany, was it? Belinda?) regarded Jo with some skepticism. Jo didn’t blame her; the lesson was so sodding dull, Jo would have wanted to break her own slate over her teacher’s head had she been asked to do it herself. At that moment, their makeshift parlor classroom seemed very much the prison it was—to pupils and teacher alike.
“Why, indeed?” These are Meg’s students, Jo thought; they’ll need a Meg-like answer. Unfortunately, Jo rarely had a Meg-like anything, let alone an answer. Instead, she leaned forward and stared into the child’s eyes. “So that, Sweet Countess Belinda, when called upon to handwrite pirate maps with immense clarity or else be made to walk the plank, you are not fed to the sharks.”
“Really?” Belinda’s braids snapped as she startled to attention.
Jo sighed. “No.”
“It’s for writing tidy market-lists,” the girl’s brother said from his own blot-stained paper, a smirk on his lips. (Leopold? Leon? Lewiston?) “And tidy recipes. That’s what girls do, Belinda.”
Jo frowned at him. “Girls do a great many things, my esteemed Master Leopold.”
Belinda looked up at her thoughtfully. “Until they get married?”
“Course not,” Leopold snorted. “When they get married. That’s their job. The cooking and the laundry and the shopping-lists.”
“Oh.” Belinda sounded disappointed.
Leopold smiled. “Now, the man of the house, he could very well be a sea captain out walking the plank. I intend to go to sea, myself. To India.”
“Only India?” Jo raised an eyebrow.
“India has tigers in it,” Belinda said, wistfully.
“But we’re respectable, so at least you won’t have to be a governess,” Leopold said, looking at Jo. “Will she?”
“Will I?” Belinda looked nervous.
Jo thought about answering both of them—with a sound slap—and then thought the better of it, given the March Quaker streak and her family’s general distaste for violence. “These are all excellent lines of questioning. And seeing as the rather delicate topic of relations between the sexes seems to hold such interest for you,” she said, sternly, “I’ve just the thing.”
She pulled out a dog-eared copy of Byron, the most scandalous of her entire collection—which accounted, truthfully, for the dog-earing bit. “Copy the entire page of verse, please. Top to bottom. With care. Lord Byron deserves your best handwriting.”
As soon as the ledgers came out and the book was propped open, the room fell utterly silent. Leopold was immediately glued to the page, and Belinda’s eyes went wider and wider as she read in silence, her mouth forming a small O.
Jo watched with satisfaction as their hands shook, copying (savoring!) every inappropriate word and graphic descriptor, while the clock plodded most non-Byronically toward her freedom.
When she could take it no longer, she stood and stretched, pacing the length of the carpeted hallway outside the parlor prison.
This was why she wrote the first book, wasn’t it? To be free? Freedom, after all, was the whole point, was it not? Byronic or otherwise. Freedom to create, to do as she pleased. Freedom from poverty and servitude. Freedom from war debts, from worry about who would pay the coal man and the butcher. Freedom from having to be the kind of girl who grew up to only write grocery-lists.
Freedom to go and write whatever she liked . . .
Like Good Wives, for the Roberts Brothers?
Jo paced the hall.
If not for that, then what? Why bother?
But the thought triggered another, a memory of the last time Jo had posed such a question. It was the fateful night Amy had burned Jo’s first finished manuscript to ash in a fit of spiteful sisterly pique. The shock of the loss had sent Jo spinning to her darkest place, hurtling her into one of her bone-chilling, soul-killing winter moods that—no matter how merry she seemed—was always waiting right outside her own heart’s door. Beth had sat with Jo in bed for hours that night, gently patting her older sister’s heaving shoulders while she sobbed and threatened to never write again.
“Why bother?!” Jo had cried.
“Mama Abba says you’re writing your way out from the shadows to the light, every day,” Beth told her. “Writing your way back to Orchard House, and to us, as you build your castles in the air. So you can’t stop, you see? You must never stop, Jo, because I need you here with me. In our castle.”