Thank you for your letter, and I can’t tell you how much I relished the parcel collected from your travels—little Cissie Bhaer shall have quite the Parisian air to her when I take her into town! I’m glad to hear that Teddy is behaving himself among the fine lords and ladies of Europe, and that Bess continues to improve at her mud pies (now don’t frown, dear, for it don’t become you, and you know I never will learn to refer respectfully to your sculptures, however artistic they may be). Come safely home from Rome, dearie, and come as quickly as you can, for I long with all my heart to present to all three of you this completely captivating, newest and littlest—although very far from the quietest, as her ma’s poor head can attest—of little women.

Ever your topsy-turvy sister,

Jo.

Nearly a century and a quarter later, and more than three thousand miles away, Fee Atwater sat in the kitchen of a tall, narrow house in Islington on a rainy Sunday in early spring and ate brunch with two of her daughters while awaiting the arrival of her third. Fee was American-born and raised, and although she had lived in London, and most happily so, for the majority of her adult life, there still remained parts of America that would be with her until the day she died. One of these was the habit of Sunday brunch, for Fee and her family a cheerfully haphazard occasion centering around the table of the friendly, untidy kitchen, abundant with well-thumbed cookery books, photographs in frames, and random bunches of flowers stuck into jam jars and milk bottles, during which family members and friends would come and go, helping themselves as they passed to bagels and cream cheese, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, and lately—since Fee had recently succumbed to the charms of Ottolenghi on Upper Street—a variety of ready-made salads and side dishes to round out the feast. These last caused her husband, when he was at home, to examine the prices on the containers and complain that she was driving them all into bankruptcy, in response to which Fee would point out that she made sufficient money of her own as a family therapist to indulge her family in treats once a week, and that, by the way, she did not notice him exactly turning in horror from those same extravagant side dishes when they were offered to him.

Fee and David Atwater were a happy couple. David Atwater owned a small publishing company specializing in travel books, which took him away from England often, and sometimes for several weeks at a time. Fee was independent by nature, the product of a long line of strong-minded Yankee women from Massachusetts, and both agreed that the space his travels put between them did their marriage good. Whatever the cause, their marriage was a strong one. They respected each other and made each other laugh, fought sometimes but always made up, and after nearly thirty years of marriage, still reached, almost unconsciously, for each other’s hand when they walked down the street.