The Glory Cloak: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton - Softcover

Patricia O'Brien is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Glory Cloak and co-author of I Know Just What You Mean, a New York Times bestseller. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Chapter One

He was so little, the colored boy wedged in Abba's oven. I couldn't believe my eyes. He sat with his knees to his chin, shaking like a blob of jelly, and after a horrified moment I shrieked and slammed the door shut.

Louisa flew into the kitchen, swooped me up and clapped her hand over my mouth. She smelled of cinnamon apple tea. "You naughty girl," she hissed. "You were told to stay out of the kitchen. Why do you pay so little heed? We could go to jail if he were found."

I bawled in mortification. I adored Cousin Louisa. She was the nicest of the Alcott sisters, even though at eighteen she was ten years older than I and almost a grown-up. She put on wonderful plays and I didn't want her to be angry with me. She paused in the act of giving me a good shake, and I could see she was trying mightily to control her temper.

"It's all right, Susan, don't cry," she finally said. "He has to stay in there until dark and we don't want to be making a fuss over his presence. Don't be afraid."

"He won't be cooked, will he?"

"No, no, you silly little goose. He will be taken somewhere safe."

I was getting more interested now, and dying for another peek. "Why does he have to go?"

Louisa's chin, already square and formidable, grew even more so as she replied. "Because he is escaping slavery, which is an abomination. You hear me, Susan? Say it."

"Slavery is an abdom -- " I faltered. I could see the Brown girls watching from the doorway, and hoped their father would not come storming in the room, for he was a glowering man with fierce eyes and dark hair that stood straight up in front: his hair is as much afraid of him as I am, I thought.

"It is evil."

I nodded, clutching Louisa's hand.

She softened and smiled at me with a hint of forgiveness, so I dared to ask more.

"Can he play with me before he leaves?"

"He won't have time to play."

"But I want to be his friend," I said, thinking of those sad, fearful eyes.

Louisa leaned over and kissed the tip of my nose. "I will be your friend, Susan," she said. "I promise...if you obey me."

"Oh, yes," I breathed, delighted. "Always."

And so, on a fine spring day in 1850, it began -- a pledge of friendship that took us through thirty-eight years, warming my life even through pain; now she is gone and I sit here alone at my desk, wondering how to make sense of it all. Out the window, at the end of the short gravel walk from my shop to Main Street, the postman is stuffing yet more tributes in the mailbox, for I have promised to help dear Anna, now the only sister left, answer the overflow. After doing his best to tie the lid shut with a strand of rope, he catches a glimpse of me and mournfully tips his hat. All of Concord is mourning Louisa. Not just Concord; the entire country. Especially the children.

And I am left to face my own life -- my loves and jealousies -- lived so often in counterpoint to an adored friend who lived mainly in her head and on paper.

I want Louisa to be remembered for her good character and sturdy heart, beyond her success and fame -- and certainly beyond her father's trumpeting praise of her as "Duty's faithful child." But I also must trace the path that led us through the tantalizing possibilities she brought to life. What hopes she floated out onto the water! Her sailing ships were fragile vessels of paper filled with life and passion that I cheered on, time after time, wanting back something they could not always give.

I loved Louisa, perhaps more than anyone in my life. As a child, she thrilled me -- she was tall and thin, with gray eyes both fierce and funny, and moved sometimes awkwardly and other times with swift, sure grace. Her clothes always had an indifferent, patched-together look that I, kept harnessed by my proper parents in proper clothes, envied. She was so free and buoyant, she was once able to convince me that if I flapped my arms industriously enough, I would be able to fly. "Can you?" I asked, mouth falling open. "Of course," she said solemnly. "But I'm too busy writing my play to show you right now."

As I grew and changed, I saw her more for the complicated dreamer, the woman of many moods, she truly was. Through everything, my love never wavered.

And yet I betrayed her. Even though our friendship survived, nothing changes that fact.

"Susan, we have endured," she whispered from her deathbed. Was it but a week ago? How can that be, when her voice still echoes in my head?

"Oh Louy, we have. But at times it was a terrible journey," I replied, clinging to her hand.

"Our own Pilgrim's Progress."

I managed to smile, remembering how she would outfit her sisters and me with hats and sticks and lead us from the City of Destruction in the dark cellar to the Celestial City, which was just the dusty attic stocked with fruit and candy rewards. But Lou would dramatize the hazards along our way so vividly, my childish heart would thump with fear.

"I was most afraid of the lions and the hobgoblins," I whispered.

"You were brave, Susan. We had no choice, you know." She tried to smile, then coughed and pulled the quilt to her chin.

What did she mean, I wonder? Now I open the top drawer of my desk and stare at the letter waiting there that must be answered. The request for information from the earnest Ednah Dow Cheney, now clearly determined to become Louisa's biographer. It is time to pick up the pen and take a stab at being Duty's faithful child, at least this once.

March 1888

Dear Mrs. Cheney,

I pray you will bear me no grudge for not addressing earlier the topic of your letter, but I needed to allow my own grieving to ease before replying. I understand the importance of your questions, but I do wonder if I offer anything that will be of value to you for your biography of Louisa.

In the time we served together as nurses in Washington during the war, there were indeed people who played a larger role in her life than most suspect. Yet that is often true, would you not agree? Especially for someone as celebrated as Louisa.

You ask about us. In truth, our friendship was not a conventional one with a predictable trajectory. It produced a shared lifetime marked by loss and missed opportunities as well as by joy. Do forgive me, but our small story is not one that fits comfortably into the image the world has of the author of Little Women.

I hesitate, then scratch out all but the first two sentences. Mrs. Cheney is too eager to know what happened at Union Hospital. Are there words adequate to convey that experience? I know why soldiers do not want to talk about their wartime adventures, for my own nightmares of pain and death haunted my dreams for years. War leaves memories one can neither face nor forget.

But that is not what pricks her curiosity. Industrious, conscientious writer that she is, her letter asks the question directly. Did Louisa ever find a man she loved? If so, who was he? And what happened? She looks for clues to Louisa's sadness, and she knocks at the right door, but I do not want to let her in. It is a burden I would be tempted to share, but only with one person, and that one person is certainly not Mrs. Cheney. Yet she persists, telling me I owe the story to history. If it isn't told now, she says, Louisa will become folklore, forever blended with her greatest creation, Jo March.

I lay down my pen. It is easier now to go back to staring out the window at the mailbox. Too easy. I am only putting off the inevitable, for although I can avoid Mrs. Cheney, I can no longer avoid my own questions. The memories will shake loose and choose their own course; there is nothing now I can do to stop them. Oh, how painful it is to face what I must ask of myself -- did I lose or find myself through Louisa? Did she consume me or set me free?

So I will start. At the cemetery.

I don my cloak and trudge up Main Street, past Monument Square, up Bedford Street and into the graveyard, wondering what self-punishment I am inflicting to make this journey yet again. My step slowing, I turn onto the narrow, winding path that takes me up the ridge, the cold, hard ground unyielding beneath my boots. A meandering rise, up past the Thoreaus and the Hawthornes, remembering, hearing; stopping at the Alcott plot. The two fresh coffins of Bronson and his daughter are still above the ground. They will remain here for now, for the earth is still too frozen to put them to final rest.

If I concentrate, I hear whispering back and forth. Even the faint echo of Bronson calling across the path to Nathaniel, still trying to break through the man's dark reticence as he was wont to do in life. Their homes were not much farther apart than their graves, and now they lie as neighbors for eternity.

I look to the right, to the next plot. I can hear Henry Thoreau's monotone as he discoursed on the wonders of communing with bullfrogs and Louisa's enthralled responses as she tried to tame this rude, clumsy man whom even Harvard could not civilize. He was certainly a sagacious observer of worms and plants and weather, but she saw more than that, and yearned for him to notice her. When I was a child, perhaps nine or ten, I saw only a cold, remote boor who chewed with his mouth open. I would sit spooning my soup when he came to dinner, watching him talk and slurp, and wonder why Louisa was all moony-eyed as she leaned forward to catch every word he spoke. I took to imitating his slurps, following each of his with one of mine, playing my own sly game. May started to copy me one night and I giggled, then choked, with disastrous consequences. Bronson's disapproval was daunting, but it was Louisa's hurt glance that truly chastened me.

We would laugh about that, now. If we could.

It takes a few moments to traverse the narrow path upward and reach the Emersons, Concord's royal family. Here the first crocuses are emerging, which is fitting, for this is the grandest spot on the hill. In life, Mr. Emerson housed his friends and dug into his pockets to give them money, and none was helped more by him than the philosophizing, work-scorning Bronson. And none more mortified by that kindness than Louisa.

And yet she lived to please her demanding father, even as he lived on the money of others and on her reputation. How should I think of the man? Indeed, Bronson was without band or rivet. But his vague mysticism was frequently contradicted by a furrowed brow and glaring eyes when someone challenged his will. Especially his daughter. Will I ever understand the power he exerted over Louisa? Oh, she would roll her eyes about him, but when he clutched her hand on his deathbed and pleaded, "I am going up, come with me," it took only two days for her to obey. If she had not, I believe he would be scolding her from beyond the grave for not dying on his timetable.

I am too harsh. What is the use of nurturing anger? Wasn't that what Louisa and I had to give up to remain friends? I stand before their graves tasting the sour energy of indignation, but it withers in the face of the memory of this dear family, these dear people, my dear Louisa, all gone. Only Anna remains.

We were third cousins, connected primarily by the abolitionist politics of Bronson and my father. My parents and I lived in New York and visited the Alcotts at least twice a year through my childhood, our visits never lasting more than a fortnight. How I looked forward to them! As an only child, that energetic household of four girls enthralled me. My father and Bronson would huddle with like-minded men in the parlor, arguing over how best to fight the Fugitive Slave Act. The men would shout and argue, but the only visitor who scared me was John Brown. Even my father seemed a bit nonplussed by his fire.

On one of those evenings, I think when I was nine, my thoughts turned back to the little boy I had found hiding in the oven.

"What happened to him?" I asked Louisa before drifting off to sleep.

"He's safe in a new home," she assured me. "Just like the colored man Papa was talking about tonight."

"The one called Shadrack?"

Louisa nodded. "That should teach the government not to try to ensnare a Massachusetts man. They'll not find him now." There was both pride and a touch of nervousness in her voice, for anyone aiding a fugitive was subject to a thousand-dollar fine and six months in jail. I shivered in my bed, wondering what jail was like.

Through those days, my sweet, scattered mother would try to help Abba Alcott make cakes and pies, but she would often wander away from half-worked dough to pick flowers for her hair, singing all the while. My mother -- unlike Louisa's -- never really finished anything. Even her kisses were but promises, coming close to my cheek and then floating away like feathers in the wind.

My cousins were my favorite playmates. Especially Louisa. She was so wonderfully daring, so full of fun. I followed her everywhere, trying to imitate her free and easy stride, her hearty laugh -- everything. No boy could be her friend until she had beaten him in a race. And no girl, unless she liked climbing trees and leaping over fences. Louisa taught me that rules for proper behavior were sometimes absurd and there was joy in breaking them. Around Louisa, I felt less fearful of adult disapproval. Sometimes she would go dark and gloomy, remorseful for some giddy adventure frowned upon by her father, and I would be bereft. But she always brightened again. Once when I was ten she marched me out to her favorite tree, pointed to an alarmingly high branch, and announced it was time for me to learn to hang by my knees. "I can't do that," I said, aghast.

"You wait, you'll be immensely proud of yourself when you succeed," she declared, proceeding to climb the tree and move out onto the branch. She swung herself backward, swaying lazily in the breeze. "Come on, Susan," she commanded.

I climbed, twisting my foot on a gnarled protruding root, beseeching her sympathy for my youth, my timidity, my awkwardness. Anything to keep from following her out onto that branch. And yet something made me go on. Didn't I want to be just like Louisa?

"Oh, stop complaining," she said calmly, swinging to and fro.

I inched outward, trying to tuck my skirts tight beneath my locked knees. With a deep breath, I swung backward.

"See? You're doing it."

"I can't. I'll fall on my head."

"Pretend you're a little monkey. You are, actually."

"I am not. And if Mama sees me, she'll scold me because my britches are showing." I gasped out the words. It was hard to talk, hanging upside down.

"It's worth it. Feel the breeze. Pretend you're hanging by your tail."

My knees were aching. I couldn't hold on much longer. How could she be so serene?

"Can you do handsprings?" she suddenly asked.

"No," I managed.

"I'll teach you. Let's go." She swung upward, grabbing the tree limb with both hands. I did the same, clutching a small branch for balance, wobbling to a sitting position. I climbed slowly down the tree, still dizzy with my own audacity.

Louisa jumped to the ground and brushed off her skirt. "Good job," she said, as I scrambled down behind her. She started to laugh. "I'll tell you a little secret, Susan. You're the only one who's taken my challenge."

"I am?"

"Don't look stricken. Aren't you proud of yourself?"

"Well, I'm willing to take chances," I said quickly.

"I like that. I'd say you are quite daring."

And that was that. I was full of pride and more determined than ever to keep proving to Louisa that her scrawny, undersized ...