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

do hope we’ll be friends.”
    Not too friendly, I thought. I had so much writing I wished to accomplish, and overly friendly neighbors can be such a distraction.
    â€œWe are going to have a lovely summer,” I told my family. “All calmness and quiet.”

CHAPTER TWO
    Mother—or Femme Fatale
    IN THE MORNING, I rose before everyone else and dressed quietly in a castoff pair of Father’s old trousers, a sweater such as the kind worn by fishermen, and a boy’s cap with my hair tucked up in it.
    I slipped out the kitchen door and made my way through our back garden, which grew only weeds and stones because the house had been uninhabited for the past year. I opened the creaking gate and followed a path I remembered from my childhood visits.
    The milk cart made its slow, horse-clopping way down High Street, at my back, but little else moved except the fluttering, chirping birds. Walpole was only half-awake, and the air was fresh and clean, my step buoyant.
    The ravine was just minutes away from our cottage. Mist rose up from the ground as if the earth itself were breathing, and a pretty babbling brook dashed down the ravine, whose sides were fringed with pines and carpeted with delicate ferns and moss. I loved this place, and decided instantly that my story of ideal womanhood, about strong Kate and handsome Mr. Windsor, would have a ravine in it.
    I took a deep breath, executed some knee bends, and stretched my arms overhead in preparation.
    This was what my Boston circle did not know about me: I was as fast on foot as any long-legged boy, and I had the stamina of an athlete. In Concord, as a child, I won all the footraces and never needed to take a leading start, as the other girls were given. “What a shame she’s a girl,” Emerson had commented once to Father, after seeing me run. Father, characteristically preoccupied with thoughts of a lecture he was to give, had answered, “She is? Ah, yes. Though I protest, dear Waldo, that it is never a shame to have daughters, though I admit they are somewhat expensive to clothe. Lace and embroidery, you know.” And then, with the occasional flash of preternatural brilliance that often startled his hearers, he had said, “At least she will never wear a uniform and march behind a military band.” That was years before we realized that the North and South problem would lead to war.
    In the Walpole ravine I ran till my legs ached, till my lungs burned, till the sun was higher in the sky by an hour or more.
    And then, panting, I sat on the ground and stared up at the beautiful blue sky. Abba had been right: Time in the country was just what I needed. Peace and quiet.
    When I returned to our cottage, Cousin Eliza, the generous woman who had helped outfit the house loaned us by her father, Benjamin, was in the kitchen, unpacking a basket.
    She screamed when she saw me, and reached for the broom.
    â€œEliza,” I said hurriedly, taking off my cap and shaking out my hair, “it’s me, Louisa.”
    â€œOh.” She gasped, hand over her heart. “I thought you were one of those Irish scoundrels come to rob the silver. Why are you dressed like that?”
    It seemed pointless to address her first remark and point out that an Alcott household never contained silver. “My exercise clothing,” I explained. “I’ll change and be right down to help.”
    Ten minutes later, now dressed in my workday brown linen dress with ink-stained cuffs, I was helping her set the table for breakfast.
    Eliza was a woman who had all the virtues except beauty, or so I had heard townsfolk gossip, though I found her large eyes and warm smile to more than overcome for a weak chin and a figure much challenged by the strains of procreation; she was also much pitied by those townsfolk because she had a difficult household of four rambunctious children and a hard-luck husband, Frank, whose ventures for profit almost always failed,