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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE - The Curtains Are Hung

  CHAPTER TWO - Mother—or Femme Fatale

  CHAPTER THREE - The Mortal Ravine

  CHAPTER FOUR - Knitting Lessons and a Wake

  CHAPTER FIVE - A Woodland Encounter

  CHAPTER SIX - The Strange Encounter Explained

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Confrontation in the Forest

  CHAPTER EIGHT - A Game of Croquet

  CHAPTER NINE - An Old Friend Appears

  CHAPTER TEN - The Bell Foundry

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - A Rough-and-Tumble Picnic

  CHAPTER TWELVE - A Cold Kitchen

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Lady Macbeth Comes for Dinner

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Potatoes Are Requested

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Ravine, or a Long Way to the Bottom

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - The Son Returned Home

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Jonah Discovered

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Young Love Revealed and Destroyed

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - A Father Grieves

  CHAPTER TWENTY - The Post Arrives

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - The Business Concluded

  Teaser chapter

  About the Author

  Praise for the

  LOUISA MAY ALCOTT MYSTERY SERIES

  Louisa and the Missing Heiress

  “This thrilling mystery reads like one of Alcott’s own ‘blood-and-thunder’ tales. The colorful characters and long-held secrets will keep you guessing until the final page.”

  —Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott

  “An adventure fit for Louisa May Alcott. A fine tribute to a legendary heroine.”

  —Laura Joh Rowland, author of the Adventures of Charlotte Brontë series

  “Your favorite author takes on a life of her own, and proves to be a smart, courageous sleuth.”

  —Victoria Thompson, author of the Gaslight Mystery series

  “Charming and clever amateur sleuth Louisa May Alcott springs to life.”

  —Karen Harper, national bestselling author of The Queen’s Governess

  “It was perhaps inevitable that Louisa May Alcott, the pseudonymous author of so many blood-and-thunder tales, would, herself, take up sleuthing. This tale of dark secrets, mysterious men, and heiresses in distress will please any reader who has longed to pursue Jo March’s ‘sensation stories,’ those lucrative tales that allowed Beth to go to the seashore, but of which the good Professor Bhaer so stoutly disapproved. As Jo herself might say, a thumping good read.”

  —Joanne Dobson, author of Death Without Tenure

  “Maclean has a wonderful grasp of the history, language, and style of nineteenth-century Boston . . . enough plot twists to keep me entertained until the satisfying conclusion.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “This novel reveals that my great-great-aunt had a secret career that none of us knew about. It’s great fun and a page-turner, and it uses the morals and mores of the time and place to delightful effect.”

  —John Pratt, heir to the Alcott Estate

  “A great debut that’s appropriate for all ages.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “Great fun. . . . Maclean has done a wonderful job of capturing Alcott’s voice and style. . . . I suspect the real Alcott would have liked it and wished she had written it herself.”

  —Woman Writers Magazine

  Louisa and the Country Bachelor

  “Anna Maclean has created an entertaining period piece around Louisa May Alcott and her adventures as an amateur sleuth before she becomes a well-known author. . . . Those readers who enjoy mysteries set in the past, like the Irene Adler series, will want to add this series to the list of their must-reads.”

  —Roundtable Reviews

  Louisa and the Crystal Gazer

  “In Louisa and the Crystal Gazer, Louisa continues to grow as a character.... This self-growth and self-awareness help keep the book from becoming simply another historical cozy. . . . By relying on her own personal strengths and those of family and friends, Louisa has the ability to find the criminal regardless of the circumstances.”

  —Reviewing the Evidence

  Other Louisa May Alcott Mysteries

  Louisa and the Missing Heiress

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  Published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin

  Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Signet edition.

  First Obsidian Printing, October 2011

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54756-4

  Copyright © Jeanne Mackin, 2005

  Excerpt from Louisa and the Crystal Gazer copyright © Jeanne Mackin, 2004

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  FOR

  CLARA IRENE CAMPFIELD,

  FAVORITE AUNT

  AND FELLOW MYSTERY LOVER

  Dunreath Place

  Roxbury, Massachusetts

  March 1887

  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 co
ming 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 Wortham and being almost run over by carriages and threatened at knifepoint 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 two “blood and thunder” romance stories under a pen name and a collection of stories for children, Flower 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 Sylvia 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.

  When Sylvia arrived today she was carrying 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 volume 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 considerable quantity 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, bringing me back to the present. “I think I remember her there, in that summer of ‘fifty-five. 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 hair looked unnaturally colored. I passed the photograph to Sylvia and a moment later the maid arrived with a tea tray. “Four lumps?” I asked Sylvia, picking up the sugar tongs.

  “One. I’m trying to be slim. But you are too thin, Louisa,” she said sternly. “You must eat more.” She stirred her tea and eyed the little cakes 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. Our laughter turned from bright to sad when we also thought of the iniquitous crimes of that strange summer, the sense of loss and waste that accompanies memories of premature death. 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.” Sylvia shivered.

  “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 an abbreviated entry, which meant, of course, there was much I did not say. I had written of the ease of the journey and the kindness with which my cousin and uncle greeted me, and of country pleasures and friendly neighbors.

  Friendly neighbors, indeed. Except for the occasional murderer.

  Louisa May Alcott

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Curtains Are Hung

  “IS IT STRAIGHT, Louisa?” asked Sylvia Shattuck, holding a framed watercolor of Kilburn Mountain against the blue sprigged wallpaper of my new parlor. She stood precariously on a footstool, stretching to place the picture over her head against the wall, and displayed to advantage the graceful arm movements and balance achieved during her private lessons with an Italian dancing instructor.

  “A little higher on the left corner,” I said, considering. “There. Now it’s perfect.”

  We had just swept and dusted the parlor and equipped it largely with leftovers from my cousin Eliza Wells’s amply stocked attic. The two blue brocade settees were of that style known as “worn”; the lace curtains were gently moth-eaten; the thick braided rug had sentimental burn holes from the hearth.

  To make up for any deficiencies of decor, Sylvia and I had added jars of wildflowers to the mantel and a special “Abba’s corner,” consisting of a comfortable chair close to the hearth, a footstool, and a table and lamp, so she could sew and knit in comfort in the evenings.

  And because this cottage, given to us rent-free by Abba’s brother-in-law, Benjamin Willis, was soon to hold my beloved family, it did come close to being perfect.

  In June of that year I had received a letter from Cousin Eliza and Uncle Benjamin, inviting me to come spend time with them. Yes, he was the unfortunate owner of the already mentioned potato cellar, but I must not rush the st
ory. Pacing is important.

  Abba, my mother, 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. We Alcotts, at that time before our removal to Walpole, lived in a little run-down house on Beacon Hill, though even the rent for that modest residence was becoming difficult to meet. It had been a winter of hard work and frugal vegetable broths.

  That day the invitation from Uncle arrived, 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 them for years, I believe,” I said. “What can this be about?” I sat on a stool near the stove to warm myself and tore open the envelope. “I have no idea,” said Abba, stirring the pot and looking, to use a phrase, like the cat that swallowed the canary.

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

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

  “She 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.”