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He kissed me with those lips, she thought again.He made me swoon with them. And now he curls them in disgust at my proximity.
She went cold all over.
“Please.” The word came out of her lips without her consent—it was out of pure desperation.
“I cannot be trusted to be alone with you and behave like a gentleman,” Laurie quipped in a harsh, deep voice. “This is unbearable.”
He turned on his heel and practically ran away from her.
Dear Beth,
‘Poor thing, she was born with a weak heart.’
That’s what everyone said about you when you died, did you know that? You probably did. But it was a lie. You had the strongest heart of anyone I have ever known. You bore it all with such strength and kindness; you did not let the pain make you bitter or sorrowful. You gave us all such joy, Beth. Such joy.
You are here still, in our hearts.
The angel of the house.
Watch over our sisters as they drift away from the house and into the world, will you? Watch over Justin. He is going to ruin himself one of these days, I just know it. And I am powerless to help him.
I am floundering in my own despair of staying behind—I won’t be any use to anyone like this. You would not feel this way. You would not grow sad or despondent, I know it. You would be strong, as I never can be.
Watch over me now, dear Beth. I need it now, more than ever.
Eternally,
Your sister
fourteen
She did not want to go back home after the funeral. It no longer felt like home.
Was this the way her life would be from now on? Alone in this big, empty house, surrounded by her dead relatives, haunted by her dreams of a different life? No travel, no grand, free life full of cats and gossip like her aunt’s?
No swordplay, no one to call her ‘Jo’ and tell her it was just as well that she was being ‘improper’? No one to whisper secrets to under the covers on a long winter’s night? No one to console, to worry about, to bother, to delight?
How quickly life had changed.
How rich had she been at the beginning of the year, with her sisters and Papa and Laurie… and now, months later, nothing was left apart from Orchard Hall.
Of course, she wouldn’t be able to stay here forever. It now belonged to her brother, with his title. And when he took ownership of it, she would be confined to a few rooms, and would become the spinster sister, or aunt, or… someone everybody forgot about.
I am being too glum again, she thought.I can do anything I like; I am not destitute, after all. The possibilities are endless. The only thing dragging me to the abyss are my own morose thoughts. I must stop this train of thought. I must find the light.
Her writing was the light; she would keep following it, however small a light in the darkness, wherever it might lead her, and it would have to be enough.
That evening, she settled comfortably in her favorite chair and lit a fire even though it was not strictly necessary. She took her tea up in her room, and wrote into the early morning by the light of the flames. When it burned too low, she still kept writing, even though her eyes stung with darkness and smoke, and when it snuffed out, she lit a candle, and then another one, hardly noticing that she had done so afterwards.
She kept on writing.
As she wrote, she cried with a freedom she had not felt yet. The tears just dripped down her face, unstoppable, and onto the paper. She let them mix with the ink, and kept writing. She did not notice when the tears stopped; or when they started again. She kept writing, and as she wrote, she was no longer alone in a cold house that used to be her home. As she wrote, a little light sprung from the pages and grew and grew until the entire room positively burst with it.
She followed the light.
She wrote.
…
