Page 47 of Rejected
When he met Aunt March for the first time, he whispered in my ear:
‘Aunts should never have been invented.’
A bubble of laughter escaped me, and Papa sent me to my room without any dinner, but I didn’t mind. I still laugh whenever I remember this phrase. It was a welcome change after all of aunt’s remarks anyway:
‘You are not ladylike, Josephine. Mind your manners, Josephine. You talk too much, Josephine. Your fingers are once again black with ink, Josephine. No one shall want to marry you, Josephine. You forget your place, Josephine.’
After she left, Laurie started calling me ‘Jo’, and that was the first time I loved hearing my name on someone’s lips. He did not speak it with disappointment or disapproval.
With him, I was not ‘Josephine’, but merely ‘Jo’.
‘Jo’ could write and run and laugh and was never told to stop talking. ‘Jo’ could neverdisappoint, because I was only ever ‘Jo’ with him. And he accepted every single part of me.
I could exist as ‘Jo’.
I could breathe as ‘Jo’.
Pretty soon, I was ‘Jo’ to everyone else as well.
Laurie did that for me.
Laurie created a place for me in a world that had rejected me.
And in losing him, I wonder if I have lost that as well.
I wonder if my only place in this world was by his side.
Eternally,
Your sister.
eighteen
Meg and her Sir John arrived at Orchard Hall in the last week of October, without sending word first.
“We shall stay here,” Margaret said, “with your permission.”
“I beg your pardon?” Jo asked, wide-eyed.
“You look so thin,” her sister observed, sailing past her and into the Hall in a flurry of pastel silks. Jo was still dressed in mourning black. “Thinner than I’ve seen you in ages. You were right, John, we took too long.”
“Took too long to what?” Jo asked.
“To come back,” Sir John winced, smiling in that blonde way of his. “How are you, Josephine? You look well.”
“She looks thin!” Meg shouted from the top of the stairs. She was already hurrying towards her old room.
“Always beautiful, dear Josephine,” Sir John said faithfully, and turned to direct his manservant, who kept unloading boxes and trunks from what appeared to be a fleet of carriages. A veritable army of people followed behind him with more trunks and portmanteaux. “I shall have my own man take care of these, I do not wish to trouble you.”
“Trouble me…?” Jo was so confused she felt a tinge of vertigo.
Everything was swirling around her in a frenzy. After all these months of quiet and solitude, the commotion was almost too much to bear, which wasstrange. Nothing had ever been too much for Josephine St. Claire before.
“By the look on your face,” Meg said, sailing back down the stairs—Meg always sailed instead of walking, there had never been a more graceful creature—“dear sister, I can tell that my letter did not reach you before we did.”
“You sent a letter? What did it say?”
“It said,” Meg said in her gentle, matter-of-fact tone, “that our honeymoon has ended. And we are coming straight to Orchard Hall to take up residence here.”
