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Amy and Laurie honeymoon in Concord. They do things the wrong way ‘round, which seems just right to Amy — after all, they reached their understanding on a carriage ride and said their vows over a vast sea. And there isn’t anywhere else Amy wants to be yet, except the places where Beth still seems to be just around the corner or ready to knock on the door. Amy wants to see Mr. Laurence in his purple slippers. She wants to wrap a time-worn knit shawl around her shoulders for as long as it still smells like her sister.
But home doesn’t mean nothing changed, as much as Amy may want it to. The luggage they take down from the carriage doesn’t go to Orchard House, but instead travels across the way so it can be unloaded at the Laurence estate. It’s a home Amy has visited many times, with struck hands and winter-pink cheeks, but never with such finality in the closing of the door. She never expected to go up the stairs and into a bedroom of her own, where she will step out of her slippers and unlace her corset. Where she will wash her face and lovingly arrange all her things: the gowns she bought in Paris, the box of paints she is still leery to touch, Beth’s stupid little doll, and Jo’s special little book.
The first time she takes a bath, she feels like a thief who will be caught out at any moment. Surely she shouldn’t be allowed to be naked in the Laurence house. But it’s her house now. She’s a Laurence, too; not just a March.
Amy and Laurie each have their own rooms, connected in the middle by a passthrough lined with cupboards and drawers for all and sundry. It’s a luxury she didn’t have at crowded Orchard House, with Beth in the bed opposite and one or the other of them always in each other’s business. Though now there are empty rooms enough at home. Her other home.
Amy and Laurie have their own rooms, but they hardly keep to them. The first night, she tiptoes into his bed and puts her head on his bony shoulder. “I hate this big house,” she grumbles, homesick and heartsore.
His voice is light, with a laugh in it. “I thought you wanted a big house.”
“Well, now that I have it,” she says, cranky, “I don’t want it.”
“We could move into your old attic, but I think Grandfather would be very lonely.”
The silence of the house seems to want for the sound of a piano. She sometimes sees Mr. Laurence with his head slightly tilted, ear attuned to nothing. Her heart has been effectively appealed to. “I suppose we’ll just have to have lots of parties, then.”
“Or lots of children,” Laurie says, and Amy smirks. So goes the rest of the night. They’d gotten married on the boat out of impatience for it and she’s impatient still.
In the morning she gets up to splash her face and peer outside at the dark little house across the field. She looks back at the bed, where Laurie sleeps in a soft sea of blankets and pillows, his long limbs all awkward angles and face turned away. Light comes in through the gap in the curtains and spills across his cheek. Briefly, Amy’s fingers itch. They want a pencil and an empty stretch of paper to take down this private thing, this quiet little morning.
But when it came down to great or nothing, Amy chose nothing. And that’s just how it will be.
“You never gave me my portrait,” Laurie says.
Amy is teaching Daisy and Demi how to paint — or, more accurately, she’s allowing them to become rainbow-streaked disasters as their little hands find each and every color on offer. She looks up with a cocked eyebrow. “I believe you’ll find I did.” The scene certainly lingers in her memory, though it’s no longer such a painful one.
“No, you gave me a drawing. Far be it from me to correct my lovely wife —”
She dabs a streak of orange onto his cheek. He smiles.
“— but when I commissioned a portrait, I thought I’d be getting a true Amy March original. I expected you to unpack the oils. What am I supposed to put above the fireplace now? How will my descendants be able to remember how fine and handsome I was?”
“You’ll have to rely on your reputation.”
With a dismissive pshaw, he says, “Then I’m out of hope, for my reputation’s no good. Proposing to two sisters in as many years doesn’t make one the subject of much positive conversation.”
Amy snorts. “It’s one way to live on.”
“Come now.” Laurie leans forward, handsome and grinning even with paint on his face. “It would make a wonderful wedding present.”
She never had much power to resist him.
One portrait rapidly becomes two, and then three. She gives him his studied fireplace topper to start with, though it doesn’t seem much like Laurie in the end. He’ll never look right sitting stiffly without a smile on his face, even though it’s dashing enough for Mr. Laurence to want to hang it right away. Laurie is better off sprawling, never mind the location — or with a thousand other expressions, mischief to delight.
She puts an easel on a tarp in his bedroom even though she has to cover her work lest she scandalize the servants. She paints him at the piano composing silly little songs for their niece and nephew. She paints him in the garden with their grand house on one side and her little family home on the other. She paints him how she remembers him at the seaside, in the attic, in Paris. They’re paintings for no one to see, so Amy does not reserve a single color. She paints his eyes at their greenest, renders him in crimson and aubergine. Concord explodes behind him in every season: winter’s cool blue and spring’s soft pink; summer yellow and autumn red.
But it’s the last one. Amy promises that every portrait is the last one and vigorously scrubs the paint from underneath her nails.
“I just think it’ll be so nice for John’s birthday, and I’ll pay you back somehow, Amy, I swear,” Meg says, so earnestly that Amy sets up another canvas. This time it’s her sister in blush and butter yellow, two small children clutching her skirt.
“Oh, I don’t know, who’s interested in a picture of your old mother?” Marmee says, so Amy sets out to prove her wrong.
“Suppose the old one’s gathered too much dust,” Mr. Laurence says, gesturing to his likeness above the fireplace. “And I can’t say I wasn’t envious of the one you did for my grandson.”
“He does have a rather interesting face,” Jo says of the professor, with such pointed obliviousness of her own heart that Amy plans to make sure she won’t be able to deny it.
And then, “Oh, leave me alone,” Jo says, swatting at Amy’s teasing brush, so Amy paints her, too. With her loose strawberry hair, Jo looks to Amy like an icon in a church, one of the thousand painted saints she saw in Italy. Not that Amy would ever dare tell her as much.
Beth isn’t there to defer or demure, so Amy can paint her as much as she likes.
“I think,” Laurie says, “that we might run out of walls soon. Perhaps we can start charging admission? The Museum of Amy March has a nice ring to it, I’ll admit.”
“Oh, stop it,” Amy says, tracing the outline of his cheek more from memory than sight. “It’s a big house. And this is the last one.”