The Revelation of Louisa May (25 page)

“You were out of breath,” Louisa said, remembering. “But I didn't think anything of it.”

“When I was almost at Hillside I realized that I couldn't keep Beth's basket. How could I explain why I had it? I couldn't afford to have anyone guess that I had come back to Hillside. So I tossed it in the underbrush. I was shocked when I saw it in the kitchen.”

“Why did you leave the gun in the post office?” Louisa asked. “When I found it I immediately questioned the story that George was guilty. He couldn't have known about our secret spot. And if he was going to run, wouldn't he keep the gun?”

His admiring smile was a pale imitation of what it had been a few days earlier. “I tried to retrieve it last night, but you insisted that I come inside with you. And I didn't dare sneak
out later; you so easily hear me from your room.” He sighed. “I should have done it anyway.” He got to his feet and faced her. “What made you first suspect me?”

Louisa pulled the wooden horse out of her pocket. “I found this at the clearing. But Henry carved it only that morning. No one could have taken it except him or you. And he was in jail.” She turned the horse over in her hands. “At first I thought it was left there deliberately to cast suspicion on Henry. That's why I took it away. But once I discovered that Henry had been in jail the entire time, I thought it must have been left accidentally.”

Fred's grin was twisted. “I wanted a memento of him to take back to school with me. It must have fallen out of my pocket in the struggle. I didn't even know I had lost it.” He placed his palm against his forehead as though he was trying to remember.

“And then there was the money,” Louisa said. “Why did you take it?”

“To make it seem to be a robbery,” Fred said. “And it worked, didn't it?”

“Until you paid Henry's fine. That made me wonder how a poor man could do that. But when George told me that you gave him a lot of money, I realized where the money had come from.”

“I'm sure it's not a consolation,” Fred said, “but I also paid Dr. Bartlett, the general store, and the stationer. You can hold your head up high in Concord now.”

Louisa held herself very still for a moment, collecting herself. She slowly got to her feet. “Don't make me complicit in your crimes. I'm poor, yes, and I hate it. But I've never stolen a penny. Nor would I let my debts be paid with stolen money. That you would think I would that tells me everything about your character.” Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. “And how little you know about mine.”

“I've not been a saint, but not a complete sinner, either. I should have told you everything, but I was afraid.” Fred balled his fists up as though he was trying to keep hold of something that was slipping away from him. “Can't you forgive me?”

“Aren't you forgetting the worst thing? The thing I find most inexcusable?”

Not meeting her eyes, he scuffed the dirt with the toe of his boot. “What?”

“You tried to fix the blame on George.”

Fred replied, “I would have much preferred to use Miss Whittaker as my stalking horse, or Pryor. But you, as always, were too clever for me. You cleared her, and George was the only one left.”

“While you were at it, why not blame Father? Or Henry?”

Fred looked at her with horror. “I could never do that! They're my friends, and great men.”

“But George was expendable? After all, he's only a slave when all is said and done.” Louisa was implacable, her jaw clenched and eyes blinking to keep from weeping.

He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. “Louisa, it wasn't like that. George was the only suspect who you would be content to let go free. There were so many ways to rationalize George killing a man like Finch.”

“And how did you rationalize it, Fred?” Louisa tasted bile in her mouth to match her bitter words. “What excellent reason did you use to justify killing a man and deliberately incriminating another?”

Fred's hand dropped. “So you can't forgive me, then?”

Her silence was his answer.

Fred turned away and gazed down at Hillside. To Louisa his tragic posture was that of an exile looking upon his home, knowing it was lost to him forever. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Right now, I'm going back to the house to make my father an omelet. I'll tell him everything and we'll decide what to do together. But I doubt he'll want to turn you in. He thinks of you as a son. He likes you better than me, if truth be told.”

“Louisa . . .”

With a quick but definite shake of her head, she silenced him. “Whatever we choose to do, it will take a day or two before the sheriff is involved. An enterprising young man can go anywhere in that time.”

“So that's it?” he asked. “Just like that, our history and our future wiped out?” His voice was rough and without looking at him, she knew he was crying.

“I would have stood by you if the killing was all there was. Even the robbery. But what you tried to do to George was cowardly and unforgivable. I thought better of you.” She walked past him without looking back. Only when she got to the kitchen door did she glance up the hill to where he had been.

Fred was gone. But Beth and her father were waiting for their breakfast.

“Jo, don't get despondent or do rash things,
write to me often,
and be my brave girl, ready to help and cheer all.”

D
earest Marmee
,

I can't tell you how overjoyed we all are that you are coming home! We have missed you terribly. Beth is beside herself with happiness and Father did a little jig in the parlor when he thought no one was watching
.

I want to make sure this letter makes the evening post, so I'll be brief and just tell you the news so that when you return we can concentrate on celebrating
.

We have heard good news from our “package.” He and his own packages made it to Canada safely. I'm so proud that we helped in a such noble cause. There have been no more packages, but that may be because Mr. Pryor has retired. He decided he had too many secrets to be useful anymore
.

Mr. Emerson decided not to charge Miss Whittaker. He said it is enough that she will never darken his door again. He is going on a lecture tour for several months out West. This time, though, he didn't ask Henry to stay at the house. Henry is busy writing, and I think staying at the Emerson house would only be a distraction. Lidian Emerson is quite capable of looking after herself and the children. (They've come back from Boston with new clothes and fancy airs—but Ellen is once again my student and the barn is being used as a school again.)

I told you how Fred left school and joined a merchant ship. I doubt he will return to Concord again
.

You told me to write every day, and I have. Father and I are getting much better now that I am pouring all my bad temper onto the page. I've a story I want to show you when you come home. Before you say anything, Marmee dear, let me tell you that these tales of blood, thunder, and romance will never be published. Or if they are, not under my own name. But they do seem to suit my temperament more than sweet stories with morals and heroines who are too good to be true!

Travel safely
.

Love
,

Louisa

A
t the time of her death at age fifty-five, Louisa May Alcott was a wealthy woman. She supported her parents, Abba (“Marmee”) and Bronson, and her three sisters. After decades of poverty, Louisa ensured that her parents' last years were comfortable and debt-free. She had earned every cent with her pen and wrote more than thirty books.

Louisa began writing in her teens, frequently entering what she called her creative “vortex.” She wrote so furiously that she trained herself to be ambidextrous; when one hand tired, she switched her pen to the other. Her first (unpublished) novel was called
The Inheritance
. There is no record about when Louisa wrote the novel, but we know it was finished by the time she was seventeen. So I took the liberty of having her write it during this story and describing the plot to Fred. It was only rediscovered in 1988.

Unusually for the time, Louisa was able to earn a living writing gothic romances and horror stories. Since these stories were not considered ladylike, she wrote under an assumed name, A. M. Barnard. Even today, scholars are discovering new stories by A. M. Barnard, also known as Louisa May Alcott. She made a good living, but her earnings in her early years of writing were never quite enough to support her entire family and pay off the debts they owed.

During the Civil War, Louisa was determined to help the Union cause. She went to Washington, D.C., to work as a nurse in a hospital. She wrote home about the terrible conditions she saw there as well as the bravery of the injured troops. Later she turned her letters into
Hospital Sketches
, a slightly fictionalized account of a nurse's experience in a military hospital. It was published under her own name to great acclaim.

Louisa's writing was not her only souvenir from her war service. She contracted typhoid and was dosed with a medicine containing mercury. She suffered ill health for the rest of her life, possibly from heavy metals poisoning.

In Louisa's mid-thirties, after she had had moderate success as a writer, her publisher approached her with a proposition: to write books for young girls. Louisa was hesitant. She preferred her “blood and thunder” stories. The publisher was insistent and finally she agreed. But the only stories for girls she could think of were her own experiences at Hillside as a teenager. With the wholehearted support of her family, she began writing scenes from her childhood.

For those readers who have not yet had the pleasure of reading
Little Women
, there are four fictional March sisters, each distinct from the other but charming in their own way, just as in the Alcott family. The main character, Jo March, is a tomboy with literary aspirations. Louisa modeled Jo upon herself and the other girls on her own sisters.

Louisa thought her first pages were quite dull, but to appease her publisher, she sent them anyway. He agreed they
were dull. But happily, he gave her story to his young niece, who couldn't get enough of the March sisters. He decided to publish the book.

Little Women
was a huge sensation, much to Louisa's surprise. The novel was so successful that her public immediately clamored for a sequel. For the rest of her life, Louisa had only to write about the March sisters to have an instant bestseller. While the money was gratifying, Louisa admitted that she would have preferred to have written novels with more adult themes.

Little Women
reads like a biography of the Alcott family. In fact, if you visit the Alcott house today, the docents will use the names of the Alcott girls and their March counterparts interchangeably.

Louisa's sisters' fortunes were echoed in the novels. Anne, her older sister, is Meg in the stories. Like Meg, Anne married a local man and had two sons. When Anne's husband died, Louisa wrote
Jo's Boys
and assigned the royalties to her nephews.

May is Amy in the novel, and like Amy, she was an artist. Louisa paid for May to go to Paris, where she became a successful painter. May married a count and had a baby girl, Lulu. Sadly, May died a few weeks later. Louisa raised the little girl.

Sickly Lizzie's counterpart was Beth, and alas, like Beth she died young, probably having contracted scarlet fever from one of her mother's charity cases.

Louisa's relationship with her father is central to understanding her character. Louisa admired her father but resented that his principles seemed to preclude him from earning a living. Bronson Alcott preferred to think and write rather than work, subjecting his large family to poverty that at times grew desperate. Based on her personal experience, Louisa once described a philosopher as “A man up in a balloon with his family at the strings tugging to pull him down.”