Epilogue One
Two years later, Justin came back from the war for good.
By then, Jo and Laurie had settled into what Meg called ‘the chaos of married life’ most comfortably. Meg, her John and their nearly two-year-old twins were living in London, and Amy had finally married her French suitor—the reason for that cryptic billet about betrayal that had started it all.
Jo and Laurie were busy managing both Orchard Hall and the Lowry estate, which was a source of constant guilt for Jo, but did not appear to bother Laurie in the least. He was constantly so radiant with happiness, it almost hurt to look directly at him. He’d been this way for two years, and did not show signs of stopping anytime soon.
Absurd boy.
On this particular evening in late December, they were sitting at their favorite spot in Orchard Hall’s smaller library, Laurie dictating business letters with his secretary, and Jo at her own desk, working on the second volume of Dear Beth the publisher had practically begged her for.
It had been raining softly for the better part of the day, an icy rain that almost kept turning to snow. The fire was burning in the corner, the Christmas wreaths were alight with white candles, and Jo and Laurie kept on working in companionable silence. In Jo’s stomach, the baby was sleeping, waiting. Getting ready.
“I need your opinion about this sentence I just wrote,”
she told Laurie.
“Am I interrupting you?”
“Never, love,”
he replied immediately, lifting his head from his papers. A curl had fallen down his forehead, and he looked like a boy. Tired. Happy. That perpetually hungry look was long gone from his face—except when they went upstairs to their bedroom. Then it returned with a vengeance.
“Let’s hear the sentence.”
She read it out loud to him. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, as if he were enjoying the finest beverage he’d tasted in his life.
“Perfection,”
he murmured when she finished.
“It is not,”
Jo insisted.
“It needs something in order to be—”
She was interrupted by a servant, discreetly entering the room.
“Lord Vidal is here, m’lady,” he said.
Laurie jumped to his feet, at once tense.
“We are not at home for his lordship,”
he said sharply.
“Send him away.”
Jo came up behind him, covering his hand with hers. His fingers were clenched whitely in a fist.
“This is his house, Teddy,”
she said quietly into her husband’s ear.
“And he has been away at war for the better part of two years. Show him in,”
she said more loudly to the servant.
“I shall murder him,”
Laurie grit his teeth.
“He left you here all alone. He let you manage his affairs, his responsibility! I could kill him for treating you thus.”
“So you shall,”
Jo replied, in consoling tones.
“Only let me ascertain whether he is in one piece first, and then you can do any kind of violence you prefer to him.”
Teddy tried to smile but he couldn’t. His expression had turned darker than she had ever seen it.
“What is it?”
she asked.
“Your eyes grow lifeless when you are sad,”
he replied.
“Always have, since you were a little girl. I have always been able to see it—I have always hated it with a passion.”
“How unnerving,”
Jo murmured, sliding her body closer to his. Laurie lifted an eloquent eyebrow in question.
“To be so seen.”
Her husband leaned down and kissed her on the lips.
“Nothing unnerving about it, love,”
he said.
“I have always seen you. Since the very first moment. Now show that degenerate brother of yours in, and let me decide on sight whether he shall be allowed to live or not.”
Right that moment, Justin walked in, and Laurie immediately ran and fell on his neck, enveloping him in a bone-crushing embrace, as if Justin were the prodigal son returned from the death. So much for all his threats.
“You look disgustingly happy, sister,”
Justin said, his voice coming muffled from inside Teddy’s almost violent embrace, with a smirk that still held a shadow of his old self. Other than that, he was a completely different man. He was a man who had come home from the war, Jo realized all over again. He was a man who could very well have never come home at all, as so many others didn’t.
She ran and fell on top of the both of them, hugging them as fiercely as they hugged her.
“That’s it,”
Jo murmured wetly against her brother’s neck.
“I’m not letting you go back to the front.”
“The war is over, m’dear, don’t you know,”
Justin said with that strange, grown-up, manly voice of his.
“Stop calling me ‘your dear’ in that odious manner,”
Jo said. Suddenly, it wasn’t so hard to let go of him.
“I see war has not improved your manners.”
“The opposite rather,”
Justin was smiling as if he considered himself slightly superior to everyone in the world. It made her furious.
It took Laurie and him the better part of an hour to stop smiling to each other like the pair of idiots they were. Finally, they were settled in the powder blue salon, where they were served tea, even though it was well past midnight.
Justin told them his news.
Jo could tell that most if not all of what he was recounting were lies. But she nodded along, wondering what horrific truths her brother was shielding them from. He wasn’t known for being considerate of the feelings of others, especially where she was concerned; thus, she surmised, the lies he told were not out of solicitude. They were out of necessity.
And she was in no mood to discover the horrors they concealed.
“So, here I am, back to civilized society,”
her brother concluded.
“Hide the women.”
Laurie laughed so hard he nearly fell out of his chair.
“’Tis no laughing matter, Teddy, old boy,”
Justin said, looking much more terrified than he had during his fake recounting of the war.
“I am already pursued by conniving females. And the mothers… A nightmare. My imbecilic friends and I are actually considering making a wager in order to keep each other safe. We are at the start of the season, after all.”
“What imbecilic friends?”
Jo asked with sudden alarm.
Justin waved a disinterested hand in the air.
“Ashton, Ingram, and that pirate, Darlington,”
he said. Jo’s heart sank. Ingram was that Adonis of a marquis, and Ashton was a duke and also, she suspected, a murderer at heart.
“You know, the worst scoundrels and rakes society has to offer.”
He glanced at his pocket-watch.
“We have an appointment at White’s tomorrow.”
“And what wager will that be, pray tell?”
Laurie asked.
“Never to marry,”
Justin replied simply, looking immensely satisfied with himself.
Laurie let out a whistle.
“That is a wager that’s begging to be lost,”
he chuckled softly, his eyes drifting to Jo.
“Not everyone is as fortunate as you,”
Justin told him, “my deluded friend.”
Jo did not know if she had just been complimented, insulted or both. Probably both. Was it possible to hate this version of her brother more than the one he had been before the war.
“For once, you might be right,”
Jo told her brother, “a rare occasion.”
He sneered at her.
“Better you lot should stay away from the marriage mart.”
“Indeed,”
Justin agreed.
“Women everywhere should be safe from those idiots, I think.”
“And you,”
Jo added, never missing an opportunity to count her brother among idiots.
“Oh, I hardly think so.”
Laurie was still laughing. Enjoying yourself, are you? Jo told him with her eyes. Laurie winked at her. Hugely.
“Women everywhere would be safe from you idiots betting on not getting married. But I bet it is the idiots that will definitely not be safe from them.”
“Care for a wager?”
Justin immediately said.
Jo could not hide her disgust any longer. Her brother appeared to have learned nothing from his exile at the Peninsula. He had come back more of a sarcastic wastrel than ever, ready to wager and, naturally, gamble as well, his future away.
She shot him a murderous look, as Laurie dissolved into laughter.
“Time for bed,”
she said in a voice so severe she hoped would not be her voice once she became a mother. Then again, maybe it should be.
As she walked with her brother to his room, he took her aside in the gallery.
“I came straight here after arriving in England,”
Justin said, “not because I missed your ridiculous husband, but because I meant to talk with you,”
he said to Jo.
“Whatever for?”
“For all the burdens you have been shouldering,”
Justin said bluntly.
“Including this house. My estate. All of it. We left you alone, all of us, Amy, Meg, and me, and you did everything. Just as you have always done. Did you think we haven’t all seen it, just because we were too selfish to make you stop?”
For once, Jo was speechless in the presence of her brother.
“You s-saw?”
she asked, feeling lost.
What is the man talking about? Did the war do severe injury to his non-existent brain?
“I saw,”
Justin repeated.
“We all did. How you have always been taking care of everyone but no one has taken care of you. How you took time to make Laurie talk and smile when he was a little boy whom nobody wanted. How you dove in after Amy in the ice, not caring if you drowned. How you stayed with Beth all these nights we feared she could die, and it was too great a burden for everyone else, even Mama. Yet you shouldered it. You stayed. She did not die alone. I was not here, but I learned of everything you did, Jo. And then, you went to London for Meg’s season when you did not want to. You stayed behind when Amy went gallivanting through Europe on the travels you had fantasized about your whole life. You stayed behind to look after Father while I was drinking my nights away in town. You kept house for me, you ran in the middle of a duel for me, nearly getting yourself killed—”
Justin stopped, appearing to be overcome by emotion.
No, that was absurd. Justin did not feel anything. He had purposefully abandoned the very idea when he was thirteen. Jo looked closely at his face.
He was overcome by emotion—but it wasn’t one of kindness. It was one of immense disgust. At himself.
“Justin,”
she said quickly, taking a hold of his arm. It was thinner than her husband’s, thinner than Justin’s had ever been. She was reminded once again how close she had come to losing him at the front.
“Do not think these ugly things, I beg of you. All I did, I did because I love my family, I love each and every one of you.”
“You told me of you and Theodore,”
he went on, as if he had not heard her, “and I did nothing. Nothing. I saw the poor man dying in Vienna and I did not even tell him I knew. I could not face him anymore, nor could I be a burden for him to watch over me in my exile, so I enlisted. At least that way he could come back to England. But I could not help him or you. I did not know how. But you did. You have always helped everyone, shouldered everyone’s burdens. Mine more than anyone else’s. Who has helped you?”
He lifted his eyes to her face, and she wanted to run away and hide from the naked pain she saw there.
Who will save him from this? She thought frantically. He is drowning in self-reproach and self-loathing. He is being swallowed alive in front of my eyes, and I cannot do a thing to stop it.
She licked her suddenly dry lips.
“I helped me,”
she replied.
“I found in me the strength I needed to keep going when I was alone. And then Meg came. Then Laurie. Then you.”
He nodded quietly, his jaw working.
“What can I do?”
he asked, his voice a low rumble.
“To make up for my transgressions against you?”
“There are no transgressions against me, do not be ridiculous, Justin. I am not a deity.”
“Aren’t you?”
The arrogant smirk was back, but it did not fool her now. Those eyes of his were still dripping sorrow.
“There is one thing you can do,”
Jo said, beginning to walk towards his room again.
“Promise me you will change. That you won’t do anything like that duel that nearly cost a man’s life, ever again.”
He laughed, as if the idea of such a promise was absurd.
“I can definitely promise you that I will not stop being depraved, because honestly, as this point, I don’t think I can. But I do promise you that there will be no more duels,”
he said eventually.
“You do?”
She searched his face for signs of lying.
“No more duels,”
he repeated.
“I will never duel another man as long as I live. I do not make this promise lightly, I make is as your brother and a gentleman.”
“Good,”
Jo replied, “I hope that for once in your life, you are in earnest.”
“I am,”
Justin took her hand and kissed the back of it lightly. “I won’t.”
Jo watched him walk into his room. What rot, she thought. She did think he was in earnest, but she did not trust him for a second.
Justin had never been able to keep a promise in his life.