Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) Read Free

for you to play with.
    â€œDoes Eliza know my age, Abba?” I asked, looking up.
    â€œShe has a houseful of young children and two grown men to care for. I doubt she knows her own age,” Abba said. “But there’s more, Louy. She wrote on the back side, as well.”
    I turned the paper over. “It’s a postscript. She says ‘There’s a theater here.’ ” The 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.
    â€œYou’ve arranged this,” I said, giving her a quick hug.
    â€œYou need time away.” With her free hand, Abba sketched a circle in the air that encompassed my household duties, the young students I taught in our parlor to earn 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 leisure time for their offspring.
    In my mind, I was already thinking of the plays I would write and help produce with the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company, for I have always loved the stage. My plays 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.
    I accepted the invitation with alacrity, believing as I often did in those earlier days that what I most needed was time away from my beloved family, time alone, to be simply me, not daughter or sister. I thought I wanted privacy, solitude. Indeed, I had risked Father’s impatience by quoting a little too frequently from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House : “I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.”
    â€œBe a butterfly,” said Abba.
    I had tried. But in Walpole I had grown lonely without my family.
    And now they were joining me, and Sylvia and I were putting the final touches on the new Alcott parlor. Her voice called me out of my reverie.
    â€œIs it straight?” she asked again. “Maybe another picture over the doorway,” she suggested. “There’s plenty of room for an embroidered motto or something long and narrow.”
    I pretended to consider so as not to hurt her feelings, but the answer was no. Sylvia, when she wasn’t with me, lived in her mother’s Commonwealth Avenue mansion amidst a plethora of embroidered mottoes, watercolors, bronze gargoyles, chinoiserie cabinets, and other clutter. When it came to decorating, the Shattuck women did not know when to cease. In that, they were indicative of the times. Abba, however, and my father, Bronson Alcott, the philosopher of Concord, preferred simplicity in their immediate surroundings, less rather than more, so that when one walked into a room one did not feel quite menaced by the many fragile objects lurking within. It was a question of finances as well as aesthetics. The Alcotts could not afford fripperies.
    Sylvia read my expression and grinned. “No embroidered mottoes,” she agreed. “No shelves of porcelain shepherdesses. Then we are done. I don’t think I have ever worked this hard.”
    â€œWe are done, and your labor will be rewarded,” I promised. I sat on the blue settee and looked around, sensing those other rooms that could not be seen. They were waiting, as was I, for the three-o’clock omnibus that would bring the rest of the Alcotts to Walpole.
    I admit, dear reader, to feeling a certain pleasure and even pride, though Father would have disapproved of such a lack of humbleness. The cottage on Main Street was the first house I had ever prepared for habitation without Abba’s guidance. All the while, as I had mopped floors, wiped windows, placed furniture, I had been guided by Abba’s invisible presence, and I was certain she would approve.
    This