Louisa and the Missing Heiress (34 page)

“Perhaps Preston and Queenie will take the same train,” I said. “If so, wouldn’t you love to hear that conversation? Oh, if only I could be there to take notes . . .”

“Speaking of strange couples, young Constable Cobban has been honored with a dinner and a pay raise for his investigation,” Sylvia said. “He sent me flowers. Did he send you flowers as well, Louy?”

“He did. I gave them to the Home.” I hadn’t forgotten his harsh early judgment of Dorothy. We never really made up that quarrel, for he was stubborn and would never, ever admit he had been completely wrong in his character assessment of Mrs. Wortham. Sweet Dorothy. Laid to rest.

“And so does Beatrice get her revenge on the faithless Claude?” Sylvia asked. We were in my attic workroom once again, discussing the story I had begun weeks before but put aside when a friend was murdered.

“She does,” I said, putting down my pen. “A somewhat cruel revenge. A blood-and-thunder revenge. Claude will repent and spend his life regretting the wrong he did her. This story is for Dorothy.”

“It is finished?”

“Quite. See?”

I handed her the manuscript. An envelope mixed in with the pages fell to the floor and I hastily picked it up and tucked it safely into my pocket. It was a letter from the editor of the
Saturday Evening Gazette
. My story would be published in an autumn issue.

Gentle Readers,

 

It was the summer of 1855 when I first began to associate potato cellars with corpses. Dear. That does sound strange, doesn’t it? Especially coming from the famous Miss Louisa May Alcott. But in 1855 I was still the unknown Louy Alcott and I was badly in need of wholesome air, sunshine, and serene days, having spent the previous Boston winter investigating the murder of my close friend Dorothy Brownly, and being almost run over by carriages and threatened with a candlestick by a blackmailing valet.

I was twenty-two years old and that sad and dangerous winter had awakened in me pleasant childhood memories of Concord, of racing through meadows, climbing trees and spending entire days out of doors, reading and daydreaming—activities impossible to fulfill in the narrow lanes and busy streets of Boston. Moreover, I wished for more time and energy to write. I had sold a couple of “blood-and-thunder” romance stories under a pen name, and a collection of children’s fables, but I had a nagging sense of nonarrival, of not yet writing what was most important for me to write, what only Louisa Alcott could write. There was a name, Josephine, and an image of a tomboyish young woman surrounded by a loving, but difficult family, but I had no more than that.
Little Women
was still quite a way from its conception.

I remembered that restless time again today, when Sylvie visited. She has grown plump with the years and looking at her now, with her cane and her several chins and her strict schedule of naps, it is amusing to remember her as she was decades ago, lithe and eager for adventure, my companion in danger.

Perhaps her perceptions of me are similar. I am no longer the unknown, struggling authoress in her chilly and dark attic. I look a bit “the grande dame,” I fear, though my cuffs are still ink-stained.

 

 

SYLVIA ARRIVED WITH a package that had been waiting for me downstairs on the hall table.

“It’s from London, Louy,” Sylvia gasped, breathing somewhat heavily from her climb up the stairs. She sat opposite me and leaned forward with such eagerness I thought she might open it herself. The brown package almost disappeared into the folds of her bright green plaid dress. Sylvia has buried two husbands, but refuses to wear black.

“London! Yes, I know the handwriting,” I said, taking the package. “It is from Fanny Kemble. Dear Fanny. There is a letter, and another voume of her memoirs.”

Fanny Kemble, if you are of that group that does not recall names easily, was, in her day, the finest Shakespearean actress on both sides of the Atlantic. She was one of the few of her profession who could play both wicked Lady Macbeth and girlish Juliet with wondrous credibility. To see Fanny onstage, wringing her hands and sobbing “Out, damned spot! Out, I say. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” why, that was to know great acting. Especially when she gave us a private enactment of that scene, in Walpole, where there was indeed a great deal of blood in the cellar.

She was a great friend of the family and one of the joys of my girlhood was to see pretty Fanny standing behind Father, hands on hips or pointing at invisible causes and perfectly mimicking his expressions and mouth movements as he earnestly expounded on his principles.

“Fanny visited you in Walpole, didn’t she?” asked Sylvia. “I think I remember her there, in that summer of ’55. This morning I have been thinking of Walpole, and potatoes.”

I patted Sylvia’s hand with great affection. Only a friend so old, so true, could say “I have been thinking of potatoes” and feel confident I would understand exactly what she meant.

“Yes,” I said, reaching for the scissors in my sewing basket. “When we had our little theater.” I cut the string and the brown paper fell away. On top of the volume (so new I could smell that wonderful fragrance of printer’s ink!) was a likeness of Fanny. She looked much the same except that like Sylvia, her chins had multiplied and her black hair looked unnaturally so. She must have had it dyed. I passed the photograph to Sylvia and a moment later the maid arrived with a tea tray. “Four lumps, right?” I asked Sylvia, picking up the sugar tongs.

“One. I’m trying to slim,” she said. “But you are too thin, Louisa,” she said sternly. “You must eat more.” She stirred her tea and eyed the little cakes that sat beside the white teapot. They had been frosted with pink icing, which I found very disagreeable but Sylvia obviously found tempting.

“I need little,” I protested, “and eat as appetite demands.”

“Not like the old days,” said Sylvia. “Remember those breakfasts you put away in Walpole? Bacon and ham and porridge and toast. Then eggs. You ate like a field hand and stayed slender.”

“Perhaps because I had to eat quickly before Father returned from his morning ramble and found me in the kitchen gorging on forbidden meats.”

We laughed, thinking of Father’s stern vegetarianism and the ruses the rest of the family had used to avoid that strict regimen. Sylvia eyed the pink cakes again and looked so wretched that I put one on a plate and handed it to her.

“If you absolutely insist, Louy,” she said, eagerly attacking it with a fork.

Outside the window, past the shoulder frills of Sylvia’s plaid frock, I watched the gardener clear away a thick mass of last year’s leaves from the lavender beds in preparation for spring, and it reminded me of the lavender bed beside the kitchen door in Walpole, New Hampshire, and just steps away from that country garden, the ravine where I ran each morning.

I was revisiting in my memory those granite cliffs, the clear blue sky with hawks circling overhead, when I heard Sylvia sigh and was brought back to the parlor, to the red plush chairs and carved table and striped wallpaper.

“I can’t quite remember, Louisa. That summer, did you perform your comic scene before or after the body was found in the potato cellar? What a strange place to find a body! I still feel faint when I think of it.”

“It did put us off potatoes for quite a while, as I recall. Another cake?”

“I couldn’t. Well, maybe a small one. Perhaps you should write about that summer in Walpole,” she suggested. “Do you still have your journal from that time?”

I did, but even without my diaries I remembered clearly what I had written about that summer. It was a sketchy entry, which meant of course there was much I did not say. “Pleasant journey and a kind welcome. Plays, picnics, and good neighbors.”

Good neighbors indeed. Except for the occasional murderer.

 

 

IN JUNE OF THAT YEAR I had received a letter from an uncle who owned a farm in Walpole, New Hampshire, inviting me to come spend time with him. Yes, he was the unfortunate owner of the already mentioned potato cellar, but I must not rush the story. Pacing is important.

I received a letter. An invitation, handed to me by Abba, my mother, who had been concerned for me, since in the weeks before I had endured far too many hours exploring the darker and often dangerous side of family life when large fortunes are at stake.

“It is from Uncle Benjamin,” I said, hanging my damp cloak on a hook and sniffing the pot of soup simmering on our old black stove. We still, at that time, lived in the little, somewhat run-down house on Pinckney Street of Boston’s Beacon Hill, though even the rent for that modest residence was becoming difficult to meet. It had been a winter of hard work and vegetable broths.

That day Abba was cooking potato soup, I’m afraid to say, though I did not yet know the association I would soon make with that vegetable. “I haven’t had a letter from him for years. What can this be about?” I sat on a stool near the warm stove to dry off my skirts and tore open the envelope.

“I have no idea,” said Abba, stirring the pot and looking, to use a phrase, like the cat that has swallowed the canary.

The letter was on old shipping letterhead, for Uncle Benjamin had done well in that industry before settling in Walpole with his books and various hobbies. It was also brief. “Come visit, my dear,” he had scrawled. “I could use some companionship. Fine weather up north, though I understand it’s sodden in Boston. I’ve a litter of kittens for you to play with.”

“Does Uncle Benjamin know my age, Abba?” I asked, looking up.

“He can be forgetful,” she admitted. “Widowers get that way.” Uncle Benjamin had been married to Abba’s sister, who had died a few years before. “But there’s more, Louy. He wrote on the back side, as well.”

I turned the paper over. “There’s a theater here,” the old-fashioned spidery writing with the arabesque capitals continued. “The Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company, a flock of young people who would look kindly upon your joining them.”

Abba was humming as she stirred and looked up at the cracked, flaking ceiling.

“You’ve arranged this,” I said, giving her a quick hug.

“You need time away.” Abba, with her free left hand, sketched a circle in the air that encompassed my household duties, the little school I ran to earn a little money, my baskets of take-in sewing with which I earned a little more money. Father was a philosopher and while they make for very interesting conversation, philosophers do not provide much of a secure living for their offspring.

“I will go, then,” I said. And in my mind, I was already thinking of the plays I would write and help produce with the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. They would all be comedies. I’d had enough of tragedy, and death.

It would seem, though, that they hadn’t had quite enough of me.

ANNA MACLEAN
is the pseudonym of Jeanne Mackin, an award-winning journalist and the author of several historical novels. She lives in the Finger Lakes area of New York with her husband, artist and writer Stephen Poleskie. Visit her Web site at
www.­annamaclean.­net
.