The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Six

Alma’s youth—or rather, the simplest and most innocent part of it—came to an abrupt end in November of 1809, in the small hours of the night, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.

Alma awoke from a deep sleep to raised voices and the sound of carriage wheels dragging through gravel. In places where the house should have been silent at such an hour (the hallway outside her bedroom door, for instance, and the servants’ quarters upstairs) there was a skittering of footsteps from all directions. She arose in the cold air, lit a candle, found her leather boots, and reached for a shawl. Her instinct was that some sort of trouble had come to White Acre, and that her assistance might be needed. Later in life, she would recall the absurdity of this notion (how could she have honestly believed she could help with anything?), but at that time, in her mind, she was a young lady of nearly ten years, and she still had a certain confidence in her own importance.

When Alma arrived at the top of the wide staircase she saw below her, in the grand entryway to the home, a gathering of men holding lanterns. Her father, wearing a greatcoat over his night clothes, stood at the center of them all, his face tense with irritation. Hanneke de Groot was there as well, her hair in a cap. Alma’s mother was there, too. This must be serious, then; Alma had never seen her mother awake at this hour.

But there was something else, and Alma’s eyes went straight to it—a girl, slightly smaller than Alma, with a white-blond plait of hair down her back, stood between Beatrix and Hanneke. The women had one hand each upon the girl’s slender shoulders. Alma thought the child looked somehow familiar. The daughter of one of the workers, possibly? Alma could not be sure. The girl, whoever she was, had the most beautiful face—though that face seemed shocked and fearful in the lamplight.

What brought disquiet to Alma, however, was not the girl’s fear, but rather the proprietary firmness of Beatrix’s and Hanneke’s grips on the child’s shoulders. As a man approached as though to reach for the girl, the two women closed in tighter, clutching the child harder. The man retreated—and he was wise to, Alma thought, for she had just gotten a glimpse of the expression on her mother’s face: unyielding fierceness. The same expression was on Hanneke’s face. It was that shared expression of fierceness on the faces of the two most important women in Alma’s life that shot her through with unaccountable dread. Something alarming was happening here.

At that point, Beatrix and Hanneke both turned their heads simultaneously, and looked to the top of the staircase, where Alma stood, staring dumbly, holding her candle and her sturdy boots. They turned toward her as though Alma had called out their names, and as though they did not welcome the interruption.

“Go to bed,” they both barked—Beatrix in English, Hanneke in Dutch.

Alma might have protested, but she was helpless against the power of their united force. Their tight, hardened faces frightened her. She had never seen anything quite like it. She was neither needed nor wanted here, it was clear.

Alma took one more anxious look at the beautiful child in the center of the crowded hall of strangers, then fled to her room. For a long hour, she sat on the edge of her bed, listening until her ears ached, hoping somebody would come to her with explanation or comfort. But the voices diminished, there was the sound of horses galloping away, and still nobody came. Finally Alma collapsed asleep on top of the covers, wrapped in her shawl and cradling her boots. In the morning when she awoke, she found that the entire crowd of strangers had cleared off from White Acre.

But the girl was still there.

Her name was Prudence.

Or, rather, it was Polly.

Or, to be specific, her name was Polly-Who-Became-Prudence.

Her story was an ugly one. There was an effort at White Acre to suppress it, but stories like this do not like to be suppressed, and within a few days, Alma would come to learn it. The girl was the daughter of the head vegetable gardener at White Acre, a quiet German man who had revolutionized the design of the melon houses, to lucrative effect. The gardener’s wife was a local Philadelphia woman of low birth but famous beauty, and she was a known harlot. Her husband, the gardener, adored her but could never control her. This, too, was widely known. The woman had cuckolded him relentlessly for years, making little effort to conceal her indiscretions. He had quietly tolerated it—either not noticing, or pretending not to notice—until, quite out of nowhere, he stopped tolerating it.

On that Tuesday night in November of 1809, the gardener had awoken his wife from a peaceful sleep beside him, dragged her outside by her hair, and cut her neck from ear to ear. Immediately after, he hanged himself from a nearby elm. The commotion had raised the other workers of White Acre, who came running out of their houses to investigate. Left behind in the wake of all this sudden death was the little girl named Polly.

Polly was the same age as Alma, but daintier and startlingly beautiful. She looked like a perfect figurine carved out of fine French soap, into which someone had inlaid a pair of glittering peacock-blue eyes. But it was the tiny pink pillow of her mouth that made this girl more than simply pretty; it made her an unsettling little voluptuary, a Bathsheba wrought in miniature.

When Polly had been brought to White Acre manor that tragic night, surrounded by constables and big working men—all of them with their hands upon her—Beatrix and Hanneke had immediately foreseen nothing but danger for the child. Some of the men were suggesting the girl be taken to an almshouse, but others were already proclaiming that they would happily assume responsibility for this orphan themselves. Half the men in that room had copulated with that girl’s mother at some point or another—as Beatrix and Hanneke well knew—and the women did not like to imagine what might be in store for this pretty thing, for this spawn of the whore.

The two women, acting as one, clutched Polly away from the mob, and kept her away from the mob. This was not a considered decision. Nor was it a gesture of charity, draped in a warm mantle of maternal kindness. No, this was an act of intuition, sprung from a deep and unspoken feminine knowledge of how the world functions. One does not leave so small and beautiful a female creature alone with ten heated men in the middle of the night.

But once Beatrix and Hanneke had safeguarded Polly—once the men had cleared off—what was to be done with her? Then they did make a considered decision. Or rather, Beatrix made the decision, as she alone had the authority to decide. She made, in fact, a rather shocking decision. She decided to keep Polly forever, to adopt her immediately as a Whittaker.

Alma later learned that her father protested the idea (Henry was not happy about having been awoken in the middle of the night, much less about acquiring a sudden daughter), but Beatrix cut short his complaint with a single hard look, and Henry had the good sense not to protest twice. So be it. Their family was too small, anyway, and Beatrix had never been able to enlarge it. Hadn’t two more babies been born after Alma? Hadn’t those babies never drawn a breath? And weren’t those dead infants now buried in the Lutheran churchyard, doing nobody any good? Beatrix had always wanted another child, and now, by dint of providence, a child had arrived. With the addition of Polly to the household, the Whittaker brood could be efficiently doubled overnight. It all made tidy sense. Beatrix’s decision was swift and unhesitating. Without another word of protest, Henry conceded. Also, he had no choice.

Anyway, the girl was a pretty thing, and she did not seem to be a complete simpleton. Indeed, once things quieted down, Polly demonstrated an actual decorum—an almost aristocratic composure—that was all the more notable in a child who had just witnessed both of her parents’ deaths.

Beatrix saw distinct promise in Polly, as well as no other possible respectable future for the child. In the proper home, Beatrix believed, and with the right moral influence, this girl could be shunted toward a different path of life than the pleasure-seeking gaiety and wickedness for which her mother had paid the ultimate price. The first task was to clean her up. The poor wretch had blood all over her shoes and hands. The second task was to change her name. Polly was a name suitable only to a pet bird or a street girl for hire. From this point forward, the child would be called Prudence—a name that would serve as a signpost, Beatrix hoped and expected, of more righteous direction.

So all was resolved—and resolved within an hour. Which is how it came to pass that Alma Whittaker awoke the next morning to the flabbergasting information that she now had a sister, and that her sister’s name was Prudence.

Prudence’s arrival changed everything at White Acre. Later in life, when Alma was a woman of science, she would better understand how the introduction of any new element into a controlled environment will alter that environment in manifold and unpredictable ways, but as a child, all she sensed was a hostile invasion and a premonition of doom. Alma did not embrace her interloper with a warm heart. Then again, why should she have? Who among us has ever warmheartedly embraced an interloper?

At first, Alma did not remotely understand why this girl was here. What she would find out eventually about Prudence’s history (mined from the dairymaids, and in German, no less!) elucidated much—but on the first day after Prudence’s arrival, nobody explained anything. Even Hanneke de Groot, who usually had more information on mysteries than anyone, would say only, “It is God’s design, child, and for the best.” When Alma pushed the housekeeper for further information, Hanneke whispered sharply, “Find your mercy and ask me no more questions!”

The girls were formally introduced to each other at the breakfast table. No mention was made of the encounter the night before. Alma could not stop staring at Prudence, and Prudence could not stop staring at her plate. Beatrix spoke to the children as though nothing were amiss. She explained that someone named Mrs. Spanner would be coming in from the city later that afternoon, to cut new dresses for Prudence out of more suitable material than her current clothing. There would be a new pony coming, too, and Prudence would need to be taught to ride—the sooner the better. Also, there would thenceforth be a tutor at White Acre. Beatrix had decided that it would tax her energies too extremely to teach two girls at the same time, and since Prudence had received no formal education thus far in life, a young tutor might be a useful addition to the household. The nursery would now be turned into a dedicated schoolroom. Alma would be expected, needless to say, to help teach her sister in penmanship, sums, and figures. Alma was quite far ahead in the training of the mind, of course, but if Prudence toiled sincerely—and if her sister helped—she should be able to excel. A child’s intellect, Beatrix said, is an object of impressive elasticity, and Prudence was still young enough to catch up. The human mind, if dutifully trained, should be able to perform anything we ask of it. It is all just a matter of working hard.

While Beatrix spoke, Alma stared. How could anything be as pretty and disturbing as Prudence’s face? If beauty were truly accuracy’s distraction, as her mother had always said, what did that make Prudence? Quite possibly the least accurate and most distracting object in the known world! Alma’s sense of disquiet multiplied by the moment. She was beginning to realize something dreadful about herself, something that she had never before been given reason to contemplate: she herself was not a pretty thing. It was only by awful comparison that she suddenly came to perceive this. Where Prudence was dainty, Alma was large. Where Prudence had hair spun from golden-white silk, Alma’s hair was the color and texture of rust—and it grew, most unflatteringly, in every direction except downward. Prudence’s nose was a little blossom; Alma’s was a growing yam. On it went, from head to toe: a most miserable accounting.

After breakfast was completed, Beatrix said, “Now come, girls, and embrace each other as sisters.” Alma did embrace Prudence, obediently, but without warmth. Side by side, the contrast was even more notable. More than anything, it felt to Alma, the two of them resembled a perfect little robin’s egg and a big homely pinecone, suddenly and inexplicably sharing the same nest.

The realization of all this made Alma want to weep, or fight. She could feel her face settling into a dark sulk. Her mother must have seen it, for she said, “Prudence, please excuse us while I speak to your sister for a moment.” Beatrix took Alma by the upper arm, pinching her so firmly that it burned, and escorted her into the hall. Alma felt tears coming, but forced her tears to halt, and then to halt again, and then to halt once more.

Beatrix looked down at her one natural-born child, and spoke in a voice of cool granite: “I do not intend ever again to see such a face upon my daughter as the face I have just seen. Do you understand me?”

Alma managed to say only one wavering word (“But—”) before she was cut off.

“No outbreak of jealousy or malice has ever been welcomed in God’s eyes,” Beatrix continued, “nor shall such an outbreak ever be welcomed in the eyes of your family. If you have sentiments within you that are unpleasant or uncharitable, let them fall stillborn to the ground. Become the master of yourself, Alma Whittaker. Am I understood?”

This time, Alma only thought the word (“But—”); however, she must have thought it too loudly, because somehow her mother heard it. Now Beatrix had been pushed entirely too far.

“I am sorry on your own account, Alma Whittaker, that you are so selfish in your regard for others,” Beatrix said, her face clenched now with true anger. As for her final two words, she spat them out like two sharp chips of ice:

“Improve yourself.”

But Prudence also needed improvement, and a good deal of it, too!

To begin with, she was quite far behind Alma in matters of schooling. To be fair, though, what child would not have been behind Alma? By the age of nine, Alma could comfortably read Caesar’s Commentaries in its original, and Cornelius Nepos. She could already defend Theophrastus over Pliny. (One was the true scholar of natural science, she would argue, while the other was a mere copyist.) Her Greek, which she loved and recognized as a sort of delirious form of mathematics, was growing stronger by the day.

Prudence, by contrast, knew her letters and her numbers. She had a sweet and musical voice, but her speech itself—the very blazing emblem of her unfortunate background—needed much correction. During the beginning of Prudence’s stay at White Acre, Beatrix picked at bits of the girl’s language constantly, as though with the sharpened tip of a knitting needle, digging away at usage that sounded common or base. Alma was encouraged to make corrections, as well. Beatrix instructed Prudence that she must never say “back and forth,” when “backwards and forwards” was so much more refined. The word fancy in any context sounded crude, as did the word folks. When one wrote a letter at White Acre, it went in the post, not the mail. A person did not fall sick; a person fell ill. One would not be leaving for church soon; one would be leaving for church directly. One was not partly there; one was nearly there. One did not stove along; one hurried along. And one did not talk in this family; one conversed.

A weaker child might have given up on speaking altogether. A more combative child might have demanded to know why Henry Whittaker was allowed to talk like a blasted stevedore—why he could sit at the dinner table and call another man “a prick-fed donkey” straight to his face, without ever once being corrected by Beatrix—while the rest of the family must converse like barristers. But Prudence was neither weak nor combative. Instead, she turned out to be a creature of steadfast and unblinking vigilance, who perfected herself daily as though honing the blade of her soul, taking care never to make the same error twice. After five months at White Acre, Prudence’s speech never again needed refinement. Not even Alma could find an error, though she never stopped looking for one. Other aspects of Prudence’s form—her posture, her manners, her daily toilet—also came into quick calibration.

Prudence took all corrections without complaint. Indeed, she actually sought corrections—particularly from Beatrix! Whenever Prudence neglected to perform a task properly, or indulged in an ungenerous thought, or made an ill-considered remark, she would personally report herself to Beatrix, admit her wrongs, and willingly submit to a lecture. In this manner, Prudence made Beatrix not merely her mother, but also her mother-confessor. Alma, who had been hiding her own faults and lying about her own shortcomings since toddlerhood, found this behavior monstrously incomprehensible.

As a result, Alma regarded Prudence with ever-increasing suspicion. There was a diamond-hard quality about Prudence, which Alma believed masked something wicked and perhaps even evil. The girl struck her as cagey and canny. Prudence had a way of sidling out of rooms, never seeming to turn her back on anyone, never making a noise when a door closed behind her. Also, Prudence was altogether too attentive to other people, never forgetting dates that were important to others, always taking care to wish the maids a happy birthday or a pleasant Sabbath at the appropriate time, and all that sort of business. This diligent pursuit of goodness felt altogether too unremitting to Alma, as did the stoicism.

What Alma did know without question was that it advantaged her little to be held by comparison against such a perfectly lacquered person as Prudence. Henry even called Prudence “Our Little Exquisite,” which made Alma’s old nickname “Plum” feel humble and plain. Everything about Prudence made Alma feel humble and plain.

But there were consolations. In the classroom, at least, Alma always held place of primacy. Prudence could never catch up with her sister there. It was not for lack of effort, either, for the girl was certainly a hard worker. Poor thing, she labored over her books like a Basque stonemason. Each book for Prudence was like a slab of granite, to be hauled uphill in the sun with panting effort. It was nearly painful to watch, but Prudence insisted on persevering, and never once broke into tears. As a result, she did advance—and impressively, one must admit, considering her background. Mathematics would always be a struggle for her, but she did cudgel into her brains the fundamentals of Latin, and after a time she could speak quite passable French, with a nice accent. As for penmanship, Prudence did not cease practicing until it was every bit as fine as a duchess’s.

But all the discipline in the world is not enough to close a real gap in the realm of scholarship, and Alma had gifts of the mind that extended far beyond what Prudence would ever be able to reach. Alma had a capital memory for words and an innate brilliance for sums. She loved drills, tests, formulas, theorems. For Alma, to read something once was to have ownership of it forever. She could take apart an argument the way a good soldier can dismantle his rifle—half asleep in the dark, and the thing still comes to pieces beautifully. Calculus put her into fits of ecstasies. Grammar was an old friend—perhaps from having grown up speaking so many languages simultaneously. She also loved her microscope, which felt like a magical extension of her own right eye, enabling her to peer straight down the throat of the Creator Himself.

For all these reasons, one might have supposed that the tutor whom Beatrix eventually hired for the girls would have preferred Alma to Prudence, but in fact he did not. In fact, he was careful not to make known any preference between the two children—both of whom he seemed to regard as a flat and equal duty. The tutor was a rather dull young man, British by birth, with a poxy, waxen complexion and an ever-worried countenance. He sighed a great deal. His name was Arthur Dixon, and he was a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh. Beatrix had selected him after a rigorous examination process involving dozens of other candidates, all of whom had been rejected for—among other faults—being too stupid, too talkative, too religious, not religious enough, too radical, too handsome, too fat, or too stuttering.

For the first year of Arthur Dixon’s tenure, Beatrix often sat in the classroom, too, working at her mending in the corner, watching to ensure that Arthur did not make factual errors, or treat the girls in any sort of unbefitting manner. Eventually she was satisfied: young Dixon was a perfectly boring wizard of academics, who did not appear to be in possession of a single callow or jocular bone. He could be utterly trusted, then, to teach the Whittaker girls, four days a week, a rotating coursework of natural philosophy, Latin, French, Greek, chemistry, astronomy, mineralogy, botany, and history. Alma was also given special extra work in optics, algebra, and spherical geometry, from which Prudence—in a rare gesture of mercy on Beatrix’s part—was spared.

On Fridays, there was a departure from this schedule, when a drawing master, a dancing master, and a music master paid visits, to round out the girls’ educational curriculum. Mornings, the girls were expected to work alongside their mother in her own private Grecian garden—a triumph of functional mathematics that Beatrix was attempting to arrange, with pathways and topiary, according to strict Euclidean principles of symmetry (all balls and cones and complex triangles, clipped and rigid and exact). The girls were also required to devote several hours a week to improving their needlework skills. During the evenings, Alma and Prudence were called upon to sit at the formal dining table and engage intelligently with dinner guests from all over the world. If there were no guests at White Acre, Alma and Prudence passed their evenings in the drawing room, staying up late into the night, assisting their father and mother with official White Acre correspondence. Sundays were for church. Bedtime brought a long round of nightly prayers.

Apart from that, their time was their own.

But it was not such a trying schedule, really—not for Alma. She was an energetic and engaging young lady, who needed little rest. She enjoyed the work of the mind, enjoyed the labor of gardening, and enjoyed the conversations at the dinner gatherings. She was always happy to spend time helping her father with his correspondence late at night (as this was sometimes her only chance to engage intimately with the man anymore). Somehow she even managed to find hours for herself, and in those hours she created inventive little botanical projects. She toyed with cuttings of willow trees, pondering how it was that they sometimes cast out roots from their buds, and sometimes from their leaves. She dissected and memorized, preserved and categorized, every plant in reach. She built a beautiful hortus siccus—a splendid little dried herbarium.

Alma loved botany, more by the day. It was not so much the beauty of plants that compelled her as their magical orderliness. Alma was a girl possessed by a soaring enthusiasm for systems, sequence, pigeonholing, and indexes; botany provided ample opportunity to indulge in all these pleasures. She appreciated how, once you had put a plant into the correct taxonomical order, it stayed in order. There were serious mathematical rules inherent in the symmetry of plants, too, and Alma found serenity and reverence in these rules. In every species, for instance, there is a fixed ratio between the teeth of the calyx and the divisions of the corolla, and that ratio never changes. One could set one’s clock to it. It was an abiding, comforting, unfaltering law.

If anything, Alma wished she had even more time to devote to the study of plants. She had bizarre fantasies. She wished that she lived in an army barracks of natural sciences, where she would be woken at dawn by a bugle call and marched off in formation with other young naturalists, in uniforms, to labor all day in woods, streams, and laboratories. She wished that she lived in a botanical monastery or a botanical convent of sorts, surrounded by other devoted taxonomists, where no one interfered with one another’s studies, yet all shared their most exciting findings with each other. Even a botanical prison would be nice! (It did not occur to Alma that such places of intellectual asylum and walled isolation did exist in the world, to a point, and that they were called “universities.” But little girls in 1810 did not dream of universities. Not even Beatrix Whittaker’s little girls.)

So Alma did not mind working hard. But she actively disliked Fridays. Art classes, dancing classes, music classes—all these exertions irritated her, and pulled her from her true interests. She was not graceful. She could not entirely tell one famous painting from another, nor did she ever learn to draw faces without making her subjects look either fear-stricken or deceased. Music was not a gift, either, and around the time Alma turned eleven, her father officially requested that she stop torturing the pianoforte. In all these pursuits, Prudence excelled. Prudence could also sew beautifully, and operate a tea service with masterful delicacy, and had many other small and galling talents besides. On Fridays, Alma was likely to have the blackest and most envious thoughts about her sister. These were the times when she honestly thought, for instance, that she would happily trade in one of her extra languages (any of them, except Greek!) for the simple ability to fold an envelope just once as prettily as Prudence could do it.

Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—Alma took real satisfaction in the realms where she excelled over her sister, and the one place where her superiority was most notable was at the Whittakers’ famous dining room table, particularly when the room was thick with challenging ideas. As Alma grew older, her conversation became bolder, more certain, more reaching. But Prudence never developed such confidence at the table. She tended to sit mute but lovely, a sort of useless adornment to each gathering, merely filling a chair between guests, contributing nothing but her beauty. In a way, this made Prudence useful. One could seat Prudence next to anyone, and she would not complain. Many a night, the poor girl was deliberately placed beside the most tedious and deaf old professors—perfect mausoleums of men—who picked at their teeth with their forks, or fell asleep over their meals, lightly snoring while debates raged alongside them. Prudence never objected, nor asked for more sparkling dinner companions. It did not seem to make a difference who sat near Prudence, really: her posture and carefully arranged countenance never altered.

Meanwhile, Alma lunged into engagement with every possible topic—from soil management, to the molecules of gases, to the physiology of tears. One night, for instance, a guest came to White Acre who had just returned from Persia, where he had discovered, right outside the ancient city of Esfahan, samples of a plant that he believed produced ammoniacum gum—an ancient and lucrative medicinal ingredient, whose source had thus far been a mystery to the Western world, as its trade was controlled by bandits. The young man had been working for the British Crown, but had grown disillusioned with his superiors and wanted to speak to Henry Whittaker about funding a continued research project. Henry and Alma—working and thinking as one, as they often did at the dining room table—came at the man with questions from both sides, like two sheepdogs cornering a ram.

“What is the climate in that area of Persia?” Henry asked.

“And the altitude?” Alma added.

“Well, sir, the plant grows on the open plains,” the visitor replied. “And the gum is so abundant within it, I tell you, that it squeezes out great volumes—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Henry interrupted. “Or so you keep saying, and we must have your word on that, I suppose, for I notice you’ve brought me nothing but the merest thimbleful of gum as evidence. Tell me, though, how much do you have to pay the officials in Persia? In tributes, I mean, for the privilege of wandering around their country, collecting up gum samples at will?”

“Well, they do demand some tribute, sir, but it seems a small price to pay—”

“The Whittaker Company never pays tribute,” Henry said. “I dislike the sound of this. Why have you even let anyone over there know what you’re doing?”

“Well, sir, one can hardly play the smuggler!”

“Really?” Henry raised an eyebrow. “Can’t one?”

“But could the plant be cultivated elsewhere?” Alma leapt in. “You see, sir, it would do us little good to send you to Esfahan every year on expensive collecting expeditions.”

“I have not yet had the chance to explore—”

“Could it be cultivated in Kattywar?” Henry asked. “Do you have associates in Kattywar?”

“Well, I don’t know, sir, I merely—”

“Or could it be cultivated in the American South?” Alma put in. “How much water does it require?”

“I’m not interested in any venture that might involve cultivation in the American South, Alma, as you well know,” Henry said.

“But, Father, people are saying that the Missouri Territory—”

“Honestly, Alma, can you foresee this pale little English mite thriving in the Missouri Territory?”

The pale little English mite in question blinked, and seemed to have lost his capacity for speech. But Alma pushed on, asking the guest with mounting eagerness, “Do you think the plant you’re discussing might be the same one that Dioscorides mentions, sir, in Materia medica? That would be a thrill, wouldn’t it? We have a splendid early volume of Dioscorides in our library. If you’d like, I could show it to you after dinner!”

Here, Beatrix finally chimed in, admonishing her fourteen-year-old daughter, “I do wonder, Alma, whether it is absolutely necessary for you to put the entire world in possession of your every thought. Why not let your poor guest attempt to answer one question before you assault him with another? Please, young man, try again. What was it you were attempting to say?”

But now Henry was speaking again. “You didn’t even bring me cuttings, did you?” he asked the overwhelmed fellow—who by this point did not know which Whittaker he should answer first, and therefore made the grave mistake of answering nobody. In the long silence that ensued, everyone stared at him. Still, the young man could not manage to emit a single word.

Disgusted, Henry broke the silence, turning to Alma and saying, “Ah, put it to rest, Alma. I’m not interested in this one. He hasn’t thought things through. And yet look at him! Still he sits there, eating my dinner, drinking my claret, and hoping to get my money!”

So Alma did indeed put it to rest, pursuing no further questions on the subject of ammoniacum gum, or Dioscorides, or the tribal customs of Persia. Instead, she turned brightly to another gentleman at the table—not noticing that this second young fellow had himself turned rather pale—and asked, “So, I see by your marvelous paper that you have found some quite extraordinary fossils! Have you been able yet to compare the bone to modern samples? Do you really think those are hyena teeth? And do you still believe that the cave was flooded? Have you read Mr. Winston’s recent article on primeval flooding?”

Meanwhile, Prudence—without anyone’s noticing—turned coolly to the stricken young Englishman beside her, the one who had just been so firmly shut down, and murmured, “Do go on.”

That night, before bedtime, and after evening accounting and prayers, Beatrix corrected the girls, as per daily custom.

“Alma,” she began, “polite discourse should not be a race to the finish line. You may find it both beneficial and civilized, on rare occasions, to permit your victim to actually finish a thought. Your worth as a hostess consists in displaying the talents of your guests, not crowing about your own.”

Alma began to protest, “But—”

Beatrix cut her off, and continued, “Moreover, it is not necessary to overlaugh at jests, once they have done their duty and caused amusement. I find lately that you are carrying on with laughter altogether too long. I never met a truly honorable woman who honked like a goose.”

Then Beatrix turned to Prudence.

“As for you, Prudence, while I admire that you do not engage in idle and irritating chatter, it is another thing altogether to retreat from conversation entirely. Visitors will think you are a dunce, which you are not. It would be an unfortunate stamp of discredit upon this family if people believed that only one of my daughters had the capacity to speak. Shyness, as I have told you many times, is simply another species of vanity. Banish it.”

“My apologies, Mother,” Prudence said. “I felt unwell this evening.”

“I believe that you think you felt unwell this evening. But I saw you with a book of light verse in your hands just before dinner, idling away quite happily as you read. Anyone who can read a book of light verse just before dinner cannot be that unwell a mere hour later.”

“My apologies, Mother,” Prudence repeated.

“I also wish to speak to you, Prudence, about Mr. Edward Porter’s behavior this evening at the dinner table. You should not have let that man stare at you for quite so long as you did. Engrossment of this sort is demeaning to all. You must learn how to abort this sort of behavior in men by speaking to them with intelligence and firmness about serious topics. Perhaps Mr. Porter might have awoken from his infatuated stupor sooner, had you discussed with him the Russian Campaign, for instance. It is not sufficient to be merely good, Prudence; you must also become clever. As a woman, of course, you will always have a heightened moral awareness over men, but if you do not sharpen your wits in defense of yourself, your morality will serve you little good.”

“I understand, Mother,” Prudence said.

“Nothing is so essential as dignity, girls. Time will reveal who has it, and who has it not.”

Life might have been pleasanter for the Whittaker girls if—like the blind and the lame—they had learned how to aid each other, filling in each other’s weaknesses. But instead they limped along side by side in silence, each girl left alone to grope through her own deficiencies and troubles.

To their credit, and to the credit of the mother who kept them polite, the girls were never unpleasant to each other. Unkind words were never once exchanged. They respectfully shared an umbrella with each other, arm in arm, whenever they walked in the rain. They stepped aside for each other at doorways, each willing to let the other pass first. They offered each other the last tart, or the best seat, nearest to the warmth of the stove. They gave each other modest and thoughtful gifts at Christmas Eve. One year, Alma bought Prudence—who liked to draw flowers (beautifully, though not accurately)—a lovely book on botanical illustration called Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master: A New Treatise on Flower Painting. That same year, Prudence made for Alma an exquisite satin pincushion, rendered in Alma’s favorite color, aubergine. So they did try to be thoughtful.

“Thank you for the pincushion,” Alma wrote to Prudence, in a short note of considered politeness. “I shall be certain to use it whenever I find myself in need of a pin.”

Year after year, the Whittaker girls conducted themselves toward each other with the most exacting correctness, although perhaps from different motives. For Prudence, exacting correctness was an expression of her natural state. For Alma, exacting correctness was a crowning effort—a constant and almost physical subduing of all her meaner instincts, stamped into submission by sheer moral discipline and fear of her mother’s disapproval. Thus, manners were held, and all appeared peaceful at White Acre. But in truth, there was a mighty seawall between Alma and Prudence, and it did not ever budge. What’s more, nobody helped them to budge it.

One winter’s day, when the girls were about fifteen years old, an old friend of Henry’s from the Calcutta Botanical Gardens came to visit White Acre after many years away. Standing in the entryway, still shaking the snow off his cloak, the guest shouted, “Henry Whittaker, you weasel! Show me that famous daughter of yours I’ve been hearing so much about!”

The girls were just nearby, transcribing botanical notes in the drawing room. They could hear every word.

Henry, in his great crashing voice, said, “Alma! Come instantly! You are requested to be seen!”

Alma rushed into the atrium, bright with expectation. The stranger looked at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. He said, “No, you bloody fool—that’s not what I meant! I want to see the pretty one!”

Without a trace of rebuke, Henry replied, “Oh, so you’re interested in Our Little Exquisite, then? Prudence, come in here! You are requested to be seen!”

Prudence slipped through the entryway and stood beside Alma, whose feet were now sinking into the floor, as into a thick and terrible swamp.

“There we are!” said the guest, looking over Prudence as though pricing her out. “Oh, she is splendid, isn’t she? I had wondered. I had suspected everyone might have been exaggerating.”

Henry waved his hand dismissively. “Ah, you all make too much of Prudence,” he said. “To my mind, the homely one is worth ten of the pretty one.”

So, you see, it is quite possible that both girls suffered equally.