“I must never stop or we shall never have anything to eat but bread and water,” Jo moaned into the quilts, sobbing harder. “Never mind any castles.”
As Jo thought of it now, she wondered if it were still true. Like perhaps all writers, Jo wrote not just because she wanted to, which she did, and not just because she needed to earn a wage, which she did, but because she must. Because she needed a way—and a place—to live. Despite the darkness. Even if only a castle in the air.
Jo had always known she was meant to be a writer; it had forever been her earliest memory and the most important thing in her life. She couldn’t remember why or when she’d first believed it might happen. She’d just always known—and with an absolute surety she’d never felt about anything else—that she could be one, at least in terms of natural talent and proclivities.
She was perhaps wild and queer—as she liked to say—and truly rubbish at a great many things, but at this one thing in particular, this writing thing, she was good. Better than good.
She, Josephine March, was meant to be a writer of books. A great many books. Her mind, her soul, her imagination—sometimes it even felt like her very body itself—were bursting with all that she had to say. And now not only had she written a book, but she had published it as well.
She was a writer.
So why couldn’t she write?
4
VEGETABLE VALLEY
I hate writing,” Jo announced the next day, standing in her stockings and petticoats on the back veranda. She’d been trying to work all morning on her manuscript, with no luck at all, and had given it up for the moment.
Instead, she’d wandered outside, as she so often did when her muses abandoned her, to pester her sisters as they worked in the broad-striped family kitchen garden—lanes of bold colors and patchy greens—that occupied the full length of the house, all the way from the back of the veranda to the fringe of forest thicket lining the property.
Vegetable Valley, Jo called it. When she found herself particularly stumped, she would come outside to rub a few tomato leaves and smell the life on her fingers. Today, though, not even the newly hatched tomato leaves seemed to have any effect.
Standing on the edge of the porch, her quill still tucked into her ink-stained cap, she looked a bit like a privateer . . . on laundry day.
Give me back Meg’s little pupil prison. Anything is better than this.
“No, that’s not true. I don’t hate writing; I absolutely, positively loathe it.” She took a carrot from the woven basket that sat at the edge of the cellar door and began to clean it against one of the few unspoiled folds of her writing apron. “Good Wives are now Dead Wives. I’m going to tear up my new contract.”
“And good morning to you, Josephine.” Mrs. March looked amused from the ancient rocking-chair at the corner of the porch, where she was snapping peas. She eyed her daughter as she did most mornings, checking for signs of Jo’s shifting temperament as if it were another Concord spring storm.
Jo smiled ruefully.
“Did you sleep at all last night, my dear Jo? I’m beginning to worry about you.”
“I don’t know, Mama Abba. Day, night . . . they’re all starting to blur.” She bit into the carrot, crunching loudly as she continued to bemoan her fate. “I loathe it. (Crunch.) I loathe myself when I try to master it. (Crunch crunch.) I loathe all of Concord (crunch) and Orchard House (crunch crunch) and this . . . this carrot . . . for being . . .”
“Here?” Amy suggested, looking up from her sketch-pad, over near the rose garden.
Jo held high the half-eaten carrot, waving it wildly as she spoke. “The scene of my probable and most tragic demise.”
Mrs. March chuckled and snapped another pea spine. Meg looked up from her place in the middle of the vegetable beds, but kept quiet—and kept weeding.
“Oh,” Amy said, her hand with the charcoal hovering above the page.
“Does no one care?” Jo wailed.
“Jo. Please.” Meg sighed. “We all know you hate writing; you say it every time you have to write. We are not unsympathetic. On the contrary, we are well aware of your writing storms.”
Amy rolled over on her stomach, giving up momentarily. She went back to studying her face in the dull reflection of their mother’s good mirror, sketching herself with a satisfied smile. “There. I’ve got the nose bit just right.”
“And?” Jo said, insulted, ignoring her little sister.
“And it doesn’t seem to change anything. If you hate it so much, quit!” Meg sniffed. Her nose was still reddened from her cold, but she had determined not to waste another day in bed—which was just as well with Jo, as it had given her the opportunity to start devouring The Necromancer before Meg could change her mind.
But now, with a deadline plaguing her, not even Herrman and Hellfried and their supernatural cohorts or Flammenberg himself had been able to distract Jo for long. The most passionate of the March girls was suffering the worst of all worlds: no time for reading, and no success with writing.
She was left, as a result, with no alternative but to resort to the most trusted and time-honored, if most time-consuming, occupation of all writers—belly-aching about needing to work instead of working.
The ritual did require an audience, however; for a great many years, that service had been dutifully performed by Beth. But Beth was gone, and Jo was left alone with her ill humors—which was what had brought about this little visit to the garden now.
“Quit?” Jo snorted. “Quit?! What else is a person like me supposed to do? Govern children?!”
Meg arched an eyebrow. “I should say not. After yesterday’s little Byron assignment, you’ve been banned from my students for life.”
“Well, there you go. I’m doomed. Doomed!” Jo paced up and down between rows of cabbages, the family cat trotting behind her. “I hate writing and I hate this book.” She grabbed each side of her ink-stained, raggedy writing cap and yanked it down the sides of her head. “Frankly, I believe the feeling is mutual. My silly book also despises me. My editor will fire me.”
“Then I suppose it’s a very good thing you aren’t a writer,” Meg said, yanking out crabgrass with both hands. “Wait—oh. Oh, dear. Too late!”
Jo looked at her sister suspiciously; it wasn’t like Meg to joke. But the oldest March child kept a straight face as she continued to pull weeds out from around a particularly knotty root.
“What’s the real problem, Jo?”
Jo did not answer Meg immediately. Instead, she paced Cabbage Lane, turning around at the intersection of Tomato Hill and Zucchini Park. Finally, she stopped in her tracks.