The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Seven

The year 1816 would later be remembered as The Year Without a Summer—not only at White Acre, but across much of the world. Volcanic eruptions in Indonesia filled Earth’s atmosphere with ash and darkness, bringing drought to North America and freezing famine to most of Europe and Asia. The corn crop failed in New England, the rice crop withered in China, oat and wheat crops collapsed all across northern Europe. More than a hundred thousand Irish starved to death. Horses and cattle, suffering without grain, were annihilated en masse. There were food riots in France, England, and Switzerland. In Quebec City, it snowed twelve inches in June. In Italy, the snow came down brown and red, terrifying the populace into fears of apocalypse.

In Pennsylvania, for the entirety of June, July, and August of that benighted year, the countryside was enveloped in a deep, frigid, dark fog. Little grew. Thousands of families lost everything. For Henry Whittaker, though, it was not a bad year. The stoves in his greenhouses had managed to keep most of his tropical exotics alive even in the semidarkness, and he’d never made a living off the risks of outdoor farming, anyway. The bulk of his medicinal plants were imported from South America, where the climate was unaffected. What’s more, the weather was making people sick, and sick people bought more pharmaceuticals. Both botanically and financially, then, Henry was mostly unaffected.

No, that year, Henry found his prosperity in real estate speculation and his pleasure in rare books. Farmers were fleeing Pennsylvania in droves, heading west in the hopes of finding brighter sun, healthier soil, and a more hospitable environment. Henry bought up a good deal of the property these destroyed people left behind, thus coming into possession of excellent mills, forests, and pastures along the way. Quite a few Philadelphia families of rank and note fell into ruin that year, brought down by the foul weather’s spiral of economic decline. This was wonderful news for Henry. Whenever another wealthy family collapsed, he was able to purchase, at steep discount, their land, their furniture, their horses, their fine French saddles and Persian textiles, and—most satisfyingly—their libraries.

Over the years, the acquisition of magnificent books had become something of a mania for Henry. It was a peculiar mania, given that the man could scarcely read English, and most assuredly could not read, say, Catullus. But Henry did not want to read these books; he merely wanted to own them, as prizes for his growing library at White Acre. Medical, philosophical, and exquisitely rendered botanical books he longed for most of all. He was aware that these volumes were every bit as dazzling to visitors as the tropical treasures in his greenhouses. He had even launched a custom before dinner parties of choosing (or, rather, having Beatrix choose) one precious book to show to the gathered guests. He especially enjoyed performing this ritual when famous scholars were visiting, in order to see them catch their breath and go light-headed with desire; most men of letters never really expected to hold in their own hands an early-sixteenth-century Erasmus, with the Greek printed on one side and the Latin on the other.

Henry acquired books voluptuously—not volume by volume, but trunkful by trunkful. Obviously, all these books needed sorting, and, just as obviously, Henry was not the man to sort them. This physically and intellectually taxing job had fallen for years to Beatrix, who would steadily weed through the lots, keeping the gems and unloading much of the dross over to the Philadelphia Free Library. But Beatrix, by late autumn of 1816, had fallen behind in the task. Books were coming in faster than she could sort them. The spare rooms of the carriage house now contained many trunks that had yet to be opened, each filled with more volumes. With new windfalls of entire private libraries coming to White Acre by the week (as one fine family after another met financial ruin), the collection was on the brink of becoming an unmanageable bother.

So Beatrix chose Alma to help her sift and catalogue the books. Alma was the clear choice for the job. Prudence was not much help in such matters, as she was useless in Greek, practically useless in Latin, and could never really be made to understand how to divide botanical volumes accurately between pre- and post-1753 editions (which is to say, before and after the advent of Linnaean taxonomy). But Alma, now aged sixteen, proved to be both efficient and enthusiastic at the task of setting the White Acre library into order. She had a sound historical comprehension of what she was handling, and she was a fevered, diligent indexer. She was also physically strong enough to carry about the heavy crates and boxes. Too, the weather was so poor in 1816 that there was little pleasure to be found outdoors, and not much benefit to be gained by working in the garden. Happily, Alma came to consider her library work as a kind of indoor gardening, with all the attendant satisfactions of muscular labor and beautiful unfoldings.

Alma even found that she had a talent for repairing books. Her experience in mounting plant specimens made her well adept at managing the materials in the binding closet—a tiny dark room with a hidden door just off the library, where Beatrix stored all the paper, fabrics, leather, wax, and glues needed to maintain and restore the fragile old editions. After a few months, in fact, Alma was doing so well at all these tasks that Beatrix put her daughter completely in charge of the White Acre library, both the catalogued and uncatalogued collections. Beatrix had grown too stout and too tired to climb up the library ladders anymore, and was tired of the job.

Now, some people might have questioned whether a respectable and unmarried sixteen-year-old girl really ought to have been left without any supervision in the midst of an uncensored deluge of books, trusted to negotiate her way alone through such a vast flood of unconstrained ideas. Perhaps Beatrix thought she’d already completed her work with Alma, having successfully produced a young woman who appeared pragmatic and decent, and who would surely know how to resist corrupting ideas. Or perhaps Beatrix did not think through what sorts of books Alma might stumble upon when she opened those trunks. Or perhaps Beatrix believed that Alma’s homeliness and awkwardness rendered the girl immune to the dangers of, for heaven’s sake, sensuality. Or perhaps Beatrix (who was nearing fifty years old, and suffering from episodes of dizziness and distraction) was simply getting careless.

One way or another, Alma Whittaker was left alone, and that is how she found the book.

She would never know from whose library it had originated. Alma found the thing in an unmarked trunk, with an otherwise unremarkable collection, mostly medical in nature—some standard Galen, some recent translations of Hippocrates, nothing new or exciting. But in the midst of it all was a thick, sturdy, calfskin-bound volume called Cum Grano Salis, written by an anonymous author. Such a funny title: With a Grain of Salt. At first, Alma thought it was a treatise on cooking, something like the fifteenth-century Venetian reprint of the fourth-century De Re Coquinaria, that the White Acre library already contained. But a swift fanning of its pages revealed that this book was written in English, and contained no illustrations or lists meant for a cook. Alma opened to the first page, and what she read there made her mind jolt wildly.

“It puzzles me,” wrote Anonymous, in his introduction, “that we are all bequeathed at birth with the most marvelous bodily pricks and holes, which the youngest child knows are objects of pure delight, but which we must pretend in the name of civilization are abominations—never to be touched, never to be shared, never to be enjoyed! Yet why should we not explore these gifts of the body, both in ourselves and in our fellows? It is only our minds that prevent us from such enchantments, only our artificial sense of ‘civilization’ that forbids such simple entertainments. My own mind, once locked within a prison of hard civility, has been stroked open for years by the most exquisite of physical pleasures. Indeed, I have found that carnal expression can be pursued as a fine art, if practiced with the same dedication as one might show to music, painting or literature.

“What follows in these pages, respected reader, is an honest accounting of my lifetime of erotic adventure, which some may call foul, but which I have pursued happily—and I believe harmlessly—since my youth. If I were a religious man, trapped within the bondage of shame, I might call this book a confession. But I do not subscribe to sensual shame, and my investigations have shown that many human groupings across the world also do not subscribe to shame in regard to the sensual act. I have come to believe that an absence of such shame may be, indeed, our natural state as a human species—a state that our civilization has sadly warped. For that reason, I do not confess my unusual history, but merely disclose it. I hope and trust that my disclosures will be read as a guide and a diversion, not only for gentlemen but also for venturous and educated ladies.”

Alma closed the book. She knew this voice. She didn’t know the author personally, of course, but she recognized him as a type: an educated man of letters, of the sort who frequently dined at White Acre. This was the type of man who could easily write four hundred pages on the natural philosophy of grasshoppers, but who, in this case, had instead decided to write four hundred pages on his sensual adventures. This sense of recognition and familiarity both confused Alma and enticed her. If such a treatise was written by a respectable gentleman, with a respectable voice, did that make it respectable?

What would Beatrix say? Alma knew immediately. Beatrix would say that this book was illicit and dangerous and abhorrent—a mare’s nest of wrongness. Beatrix would want this book destroyed. What would Prudence have done, if she ever found such a book? Well, Prudence wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Or, if Prudence somehow did end up with this book in her hands, she would dutifully present it to Beatrix to be destroyed, and would likely receive a strict punishment in the process for having even touched the thing in the first place. But Alma was not Prudence.

What, then, would Alma do?

Alma would destroy the book, she decided, and say nothing of it to anyone. In fact, she would destroy it right now. This very afternoon. Without reading another word of it.

She opened the book again, to a random page. Again she encountered that familiar, respectable voice, speaking on the most unbelievable topic.

“I wished to discover,” the author wrote, “at what age a woman loses her ability to receive sensual pleasure. My friend the brothel owner, who had assisted me in the past in so many experiments, told me of a certain courtesan who had enjoyed her occupation actively from the age of fourteen until the age of sixty-four, and who now, at the age of seventy, lived in a city not far from my own. I wrote to the woman in question, and she responded with a letter of charming candor and warmth. In the space of a month, I had come to visit her, where she allowed me to examine her genitalia, which were not easily distinguished from the genitalia of a much younger woman. She demonstrated that she was still most capable of pleasure, indeed. Using her fingers and a light coating of nut oil upon her hood of passion, she stroked herself toward a crisis of rapture—”

Alma shut the book. This book must not be kept. She would burn it in the kitchen fire. Not this afternoon, when someone would see her, but later tonight.

She opened it up again, once more at random.

“I have come to believe,” the calm narrator continued, “that there are some people who benefit both in body and mind by regular beatings to the naked posterior. Many times, I have seen this practice lift the spirits of both men and women, and I suspect it may be the most salubrious treatment we have at our disposal for melancholia and other diseases of the mind. For two years, I kept company with the most delightful maid, a milliner’s girl, whose innocent and even angelic orbs became firm and strong with repeated flagellation, and whose sorrows were routinely erased by the taste of the whip. As I have described earlier in these pages, I once kept in my offices an elaborate couch, made for me by a fine London upholsterer, specially fitted with winches and ropes. This maid liked nothing more than to be tied securely upon that couch, where she would hold my member in her mouth, sucking me as a child enjoys a stick of sugar, whilst a companion—”

Alma shut the book again. Anyone with a mind even remotely above the vulgar would stop reading this thing immediately. But what about the cankerworm of curiosity that lived within Alma’s belly? What about its desire to feed daily upon the novel, the extraordinary, the true?

Alma opened the book again, and read for another hour, overcome by stimulus, doubt, and havoc. Her conscience tugged at her skirt hems, pleading with her to stop, but she could not make herself stop. What she discovered in these pages made her feel vexed, frothy, and breathless. When she thought she might actually faint from the tangled stalks of imagination that were now waving throughout her head, she slammed shut the book at last, and locked it back into the innocuous trunk from which it had come.

Hurriedly, she left the carriage house, smoothing her apron with her damp hands. Outside it was cool and overcast, as it had been all year, with an unsatisfying mizzle of fog. The air was so thick one nearly could have dissected it with a scalpel. There were important tasks to be completed this day. Alma had promised Hanneke de Groot that she would help supervise the lowering of cider caskets into the basement for winter. Somebody had littered papers beneath the lilacs along the South Wood fence; that would need to be tidied. The shrubbery behind her mother’s Grecian garden had been invaded by ivy, and a boy should be dispatched to clear it. She would attend to these responsibilities immediately, with her customary efficiency.

Pricks and holes.

All she could think about were pricks and holes.

Evening arrived. The dining room was lit and china laid. Guests were expected presently. Alma was freshly dressed for dinner, bundled in an expensive gown of jaconet muslin. She should have been waiting in the drawing room for the guests, but instead she excused herself for a moment to the library. She locked herself in the binding closet, behind the hidden door, just off the library entrance. It was the nearest door with a solid lock on it. She did not have the book with her. She did not need the book; the images it conjured had been following her about the estate all afternoon, feral and stubborn and searching.

She was full of thoughts, and these thoughts were making wild demands upon her body. Her quim hurt. It felt deprived. This hurt had been accumulating all afternoon. If anything, the painful sense of deprivation between her legs felt like a kind of witchcraft, a devilish haunting. Her quim wanted rubbing in the fiercest way. Her skirts were a hindrance. She was itching and dying in this gown. She lifted her skirts. Sitting there on the small stool in the tiny, dark, locked binding closet, with its smells of glue and leather, she opened her legs and began petting herself, poking at herself, moving her fingers in and around herself, frantically exploring her spongy petals, trying to find the devil who hid in there, eager to erase that devil with her hand.

She found it. She rubbed at it, harder and harder. She felt an unraveling. The hurt in her quim turned to something else—an up-fire, a vortex of pleasure, a chimney-effect of heat. She followed the pleasure where it led. She had no weight, no name, no thoughts, no history. Then came a burst of phosphorescence, as though a firework had discharged behind her eyes, and it was over. She felt quiet and warm. For the first conscious moment of her life, her mind was free from wonder, free from worry, free from work or puzzlement. Then, from the middle of that marvelous furred stillness, a thought took shape, took hold, took over:

I shall have to do this again.

Not a half hour later, Alma was standing in the atrium of White Acre, flustered and embarrassed, receiving dinner guests. That night, the visitors included serious young George Hawkes, a Philadelphia publisher of fine botanical prints, books, periodicals, and journals, and a distinguished older gentleman by the name of James K. Peck, who taught at the College of New Jersey up in Princeton, and who had just published a book about the physiology of Negroes. Arthur Dixon, the girls’ pale tutor, dined with the family as usual, although he rarely added much to the conversation, and tended to spend dinner hours looking worriedly at his fingernails.

George Hawkes, the botanical publisher, had been a guest at White Acre many times before, and Alma was fond of him. He was shy but kind, and terribly intelligent, with the posture of a great, awkward, shuffling bear. His clothes were too big, his hat sat wrong on his head, and he never seemed to know precisely where to stand. To coax George Hawkes into speech was a challenge, but once he began speaking, he was a pleasant treasure. He knew more about botanical lithography than anyone else in Philadelphia, and his publications were exquisite. He spoke lovingly of plants and artists and the craft of bookbinding, and Alma enjoyed his company enormously.

As for the other guest, Professor Peck, he was a new addition to the dinner table, and Alma disliked him straight away. He had every mark of a bore, and a determined bore at that. Immediately upon his arrival, he occupied twenty minutes in the atrium of White Acre, relaying in Homeric detail the trials of his coach ride from Princeton to Philadelphia. Once he had exhausted that fascinating topic, he shared his surprise that Alma, Prudence, and Beatrix would be joining the gentlemen at the dinner table, insofar as the conversation would surely be over their heads.

“Oh, no,” Henry corrected his guest. “I think you’ll soon enough find that my wife and daughters are passably capable of conversation.”

“Are they?” the gentleman asked, plainly unconvinced. “In what topics?”

“Well,” Henry said, rubbing at his chin as he considered his family, “Beatrix here knows everything, Prudence has artistic and musical knowledge, and Alma—the big tall one—is a right beast for botany.”

“Botany,” Professor Peck repeated, with practiced condescension. “A most improving recreation for girls. The only scientific work that is suited to the female sex, I have always surmised, on account of its absence of cruelty, or mathematical rigor. My own daughter does fine drawings of wildflowers.”

“How engrossing for her,” Beatrix murmured.

“Yes, quite,” said Professor Peck, and turned to Alma. “A lady’s fingers are more pliant, you see. Softer than a man’s. Better suited than a man’s hands, some say, for the more delicate operations of plant collection.”

Alma, who was not one to blush, blushed to her very bones. Why was this man talking about her fingers, about pliancy, about delicacy, about softness? Now everybody looked at Alma’s hands, which, only a short while earlier, had been buried straight up inside her quim. It was dreadful. From the corner of her eye, she saw her old friend George Hawkes smile at her in nervous sympathy. George blushed all the time. He blushed whenever anyone looked at him, and whenever he was forced to speak. Perhaps he was commiserating with her discomfort. With George’s eyes upon her, Alma felt herself blushing redder still. For the first time in her life, she could not find speech, and she wished that nobody would look at her at all. She would have done anything to escape dinner that night.

Fortunately for Alma, Professor Peck did not seem particularly interested in anyone but himself, and once dinner was served, he commenced on a long and detailed disquisition, as though he had mistaken White Acre for a lecture hall, and his hosts for students.

“There are those,” he began, after an elaborate folding of his napkin, “who have recently submitted that Negroidism is merely a disease of the skin, which could perhaps, using the correct chemical combinations, be washed off, as it were, thus transforming the Negro into a healthy white man. This is incorrect. As my research has proven, a Negro is not a diseased white man, but a species of his own, as I shall demonstrate . . .”

Alma found it challenging to pay attention. Her thoughts were on Cum Grano Salis and the binding closet. Now, this day did not mark the first occasion upon which Alma had heard of genitalia, or even of human sexual function. Unlike other girls—who were told by their families that Indians brought babies, or that impregnation occurred through the insertion of seeds into small cuts in the side of a woman’s body—Alma knew the rudiments of human anatomy, both male and female. There were far too many medical treatises and scientific books around White Acre for her to have remained wholly ignorant on this topic, and the entire language of botany, with which Alma was so intimately familiar, was highly sexualized. (Linnaeus himself had referred to pollination as “marriage,” had called flower petals “noble bed curtains,” and had once daringly described a flower that contained nine stamens and one pistil as “nine men in the same bride’s chamber, with one woman.”)

What’s more, Beatrix would not have her daughters be raised as self-endangering innocents, particularly given Prudence’s natural mother’s unfortunate history, so it was Beatrix herself who—with much stuttering and suffering, and a good deal of fanning about the neck—had imparted to Alma and Prudence the essential proceedings of human propagation. This conversation nobody had enjoyed, and everyone had worked together to end it as swiftly as possible—but the information had been transmitted. Beatrix had even once warned Alma that certain parts of the body were never to be touched except in the interest of cleanliness, and that one must never linger at the privy, for instance, due to the dangers of solitary unchaste passions. Alma had paid no mind to the warning at the time because it made no sense: Who would ever want to linger at the privy?

But with her discovery of Cum Grano Salis, Alma had suddenly been made aware that the most unimaginable sensual events were transpiring all over the world. Men and women were doing simply astonishing things with each other, and they were doing them not only for procreation but for recreation—as were men and men, and women and women, and children and servants, and farmers and travelers, and sailors and seamstresses, and sometimes even husbands and wives! One could even do the most astonishing things to oneself, as Alma had just learned in the binding closet. With or without a light coating of nut oil.

Did other people do this? Not only the gymnastic acts of penetration, but this private rubbing? Anonymous wrote that many people did it—even ladies of gentle birth, by his account and experience. What about Prudence? Did she do this thing? Had she ever experienced the spongy petals, the vortex of up-fire, the bursting of phosphorescence? This was impossible to imagine; Prudence did not even perspire. It was difficult enough to read Prudence’s facial expressions, much less surmise at what was hiding beneath her clothes, or buried in her mind.

What about Arthur Dixon, their tutor? Was anything lurking in his mind besides academic tedium? Was anything buried in his body, beyond his twitches and his perpetual dry cough? She stared at Arthur, seeking some sign of sensual life, but his figure, his face, revealed nothing. She could not imagine him in a shudder of ecstasy such as the one she had just experienced in the binding closet. She could scarcely imagine him reclining, and could certainly not imagine him unclothed. He gave every indication of being a man who had been born sitting up, wearing a tight-fitting waistcoat and wool breeches, holding a dense book, and sighing unhappily. If he had urges, where and when did he release them?

Alma felt a cool hand on her arm. It was her mother’s.

“What is your opinion, Alma, of Professor Peck’s treatise?”

Beatrix knew Alma had not been listening. How did she know that? What else did she know? Alma gathered herself quickly, cast her mind back over the beginning of the dinner, tried to retrieve the few ideas she’d actually heard. Uncharacteristically, she came up with nothing. She cleared her throat and said, “I would prefer to read the entirety of Professor Peck’s book before rendering any judgment.”

Beatrix cast her daughter a sharp look: surprised, critical, and unimpressed.

Professor Peck, however, took Alma’s comment as an invitation to speak more—in fact, to recite a good majority of the first chapter of his book, from memory, for the benefit of the ladies at the table. Henry Whittaker would not normally have permitted such an act of perfect tedium in his dining room, but Alma could see by his face that her father was weary and depleted, most likely on the brink of another one of his attacks. Impending illness was the only thing that ever quieted her father like this. If Alma knew Henry, and she did know him, he would be in bed all day tomorrow, and probably for the entirety of the week to come. For the time being, though, Henry endured Professor Peck’s droning recitation by pouring himself one liberal dose of claret after another, and by closing his eyes for long periods.

Meanwhile, Alma studied George Hawkes, the botanical publisher. Did he do this thing? Did he ever rub himself to a crisis of pleasure? Anonymous wrote that men practiced onanism even more frequently than women. A young man of health and vigor could reportedly coax himself to ejaculation several times a day. Nobody would describe George Hawkes as being exactly full of vigor, but he was a young man with a large, heavy, perspiring body—a body that did seem to be full of something. Had George done this act recently, perhaps even on this day? What was George Hawkes’s member doing right now? Resting in languor? Or tending toward desire?

Suddenly, the most astonishing imaginable event occurred.

Prudence Whittaker spoke.

“Pardon me, sir,” Prudence said, directing her words and her placid gaze precisely at Professor Peck, “if I understand you correctly, it seems you have identified the different textures of human hair as evidence that Negroes, Indians, Orientals, and the white man are all members of different species. But I cannot help but wonder at your supposition. On this very estate, sir, we raise several varieties of sheep. Perhaps you noticed them as you came up the drive earlier this evening? Some of our sheep have silken hair, some have coarse hair, and some have dense woolen curls. Surely, sir, you would not doubt that—despite their differences in coats—they are all sheep. And if you’ll excuse me, I believe that all these varieties of sheep can also be interbred successfully with one another. Is it not the same with man? Could one not, then, make the argument that Negroes, Indians, Orientals, and the white man are also all one species?”

All eyes turned to Prudence. Alma felt as though she had been jolted awake by a dousing of icy water. Henry’s eyes opened. He set down his glass and sat straight up, his attention fully piqued. It would have taken a subtle eye to see it, but Beatrix sat up a bit straighter in her chair, too, as though putting herself on alert. Arthur Dixon, the tutor, widened his eyes at Prudence in alarm, and then immediately looked about anxiously, as though he might be blamed for this outburst. There was much to marvel at here, indeed. This was the longest speech Prudence had ever given at the dinner table—or indeed anywhere.

Unfortunately, Alma had not been following the discussion up to this point, so she wasn’t entirely certain if Prudence’s statement was accurate or relevant, but, by God, the girl had spoken! Everyone was startled, it seemed, except Prudence herself, who gazed upon Professor Peck with her customary cool beauty, unperturbed, blue eyes wide and clear, awaiting a response. It was as though she had been challenging eminent Princetonians every day of her life.

“We cannot compare humans to sheep, young lady,” Professor Peck corrected. “Simply because two creatures can breed . . . well, if your father will excuse my mentioning this topic in front of the ladies?” Henry, quite attentive now, gave a sovereign wave of approval. “Simply because two creatures can breed, does not mean they are members of the same species. Horses can breed with donkeys, as you may know. Also, canaries with finches, roosters with partridge, and the he-goat with the ewe. This does not make them biologically equivalent. Moreover, it is well known that Negroes attract different types of head lice and intestinal worms than whites, thus incontrovertibly proving species differentiation.”

Prudence nodded her head politely at the guest. “My error, sir,” she said. “Pray, continue.”

Alma remained speechless and baffled. Why all this talk of breeding? Tonight of all nights?

“While differentiation between races is visibly obvious even to a child,” Professor Peck continued, “the superiority of the white man should be clear to anyone with the faintest education in human history and origin. As Teutons and Christians, we honor virtue, vigorous health, thrift and morality. We govern our passions. Therefore, we lead. The other races, backward moving from civilization, could never have invented such advances as currency, the alphabet, and manufacturing. But none are so helpless as the Negro. The Negro shows an overexpression of emotional senses, which accounts for his infamous absence of self-control. We see this demonstrated in his facial structure. There is altogether too much eye, lip, nose, and ear—which is to say that the Negro cannot help but become overstimulated by his senses. Thus, he is capable of the warmest affection, but also the darkest violence. What is more, the Negro cannot blush, and is therefore not capable of shame.”

At the mere mention of blushing and shame, Alma blushed in shame. She was entirely out of control of her own senses this night. George Hawkes smiled at her again, once more with warm sympathy, causing her to blush only deeper. Beatrix shot Alma a glance of such withering derision that Alma feared for a moment she was about to be slapped. Alma almost wished she would be slapped, if only to clear her head.

Prudence—astonishingly—spoke up again.

“I wonder,” she posed, in a voice calm and tempered, “whether the wisest Negro is superior in intelligence to the most foolish white man? I ask, Professor Peck, only because last year our tutor, Mr. Dixon, told us of a carnival he’d once attended, where he encountered a former slave named Mr. Fuller, of Maryland, who was famous for his quickness of reckoning. According to Mr. Dixon, if you were to tell this Negro at precisely what date and time you had been born, he could instantly calculate how many seconds you had been alive, sir, even accounting for leap years. It was evidently a most impressive display.”

Arthur Dixon looked as though he might faint.

The professor, now openly irritated, replied, “Young lady, I have seen carnival mules that can be taught to count.”

“As have I,” Prudence replied, again in that same pale, unruffled tone. “But I have never yet encountered a carnival mule, sir, that could be taught to calculate leap years.”

Professor Peck started a bit at this bold comment, but then nodded curtly and carried on. “Very well, then. To answer your question, there are idiot individuals, and even savant individuals, to be found within every species. Such is not the norm, however, in either direction. I have been collecting and measuring the skulls of white men and Negroes for years, and my research thus far concludes without question that the white man’s skull, when filled with water, holds on average four more ounces than the skull of the Negro—thus proving greater intellectual capacity.”

“I wonder,” Prudence said mildly, “what might have happened if you’d attempted to pour knowledge into the skull of a living Negro, rather than water into the skull of a dead one?”

The table fell into rigid silence. George Hawkes had not yet spoken this evening and clearly he was not about to begin now. Arthur Dixon was doing an excellent imitation of a corpse. Professor Peck’s face had taken on a distinctly purplish hue. Prudence, who, as ever, looked porcelain and unimpeachable, waited for a response. Henry stared at his adopted daughter with the beginnings of astonishment, yet for some reason elected not to speak—perhaps feeling too sickly to engage directly, or perhaps simply curious to see where this most unexpected conversation would lead next. Alma, likewise, contributed nothing. Frankly, Alma had nothing to add. Never had she found herself with so little to say, and never had Prudence been so loquacious. So the duty fell to Beatrix to put words back upon the dinner table, and she did so with her typical stalwart sense of Dutch responsibility.

“I would be fascinated, Professor Peck,” Beatrix said, “to see the research you mentioned earlier, about the varietal difference in head lice and intestinal parasites, between the Negro and the white man. Perhaps you have the documentation with you? I would enjoy looking it over. Biology at the parasitic level is most compelling to me.”

“I do not carry the documentation with me, madam,” the professor said, pulling himself back slowly toward dignity. “Nor do I need it. Documentation in this case is not necessary. The differentiation in head lice and intestinal parasites between Negroes and the white man is a well-known fact.”

It was almost not to be believed, but Prudence spoke again.

“What a pity,” she murmured, cool as marble. “Forgive us, sir, but in this household we are never permitted to rest upon the assumption that any fact is well known enough to evade the necessity of accurate documentation.”

Henry—sick and weary as he was—exploded into laughter.

“And that, sir,” he boomed at the professor, “is a well-known fact!”

Beatrix, as though none of this was occurring, turned her attention to the butler and said, “It seems we are now ready for the pudding.”

Their guests were meant to have stayed the night at White Acre, but Professor Peck, flummoxed and irritated, elected instead to take his carriage back to the city, announcing that he would prefer to stay in a downtown hotel and start his arduous journey back to Princeton the next day at dawn. Nobody was sorry to see him go. George Hawkes requested if he might share the carriage back to the center of Philadelphia with Professor Peck, and the scholar gruffly agreed. But before George departed, he asked if he might have a brief moment alone with Alma and Prudence. He had scarcely spoken a word this evening, but now he wanted to say something—and he wanted, apparently, to say it to both girls. So the three of them—Alma, Prudence, and George—all stepped into the drawing room together, while the others milled about in the atrium, gathering up cloaks and parcels.

George directed his comments to Alma, after receiving an almost imperceptible nod from Prudence.

“Miss Whittaker,” he said, “your sister tells me that you have written, merely to satisfy your own curiosity, a most interesting paper on the Monotropa plant. If you’re not too weary, I wonder if you might share with me your central findings?”

Alma was puzzled. This was an odd request, and at such an odd time of day. “Surely you are too weary to speak of my botanical hobbies at this late hour?” she offered.

“Not at all, Miss Whittaker,” George said. “I would welcome it. If anything, it would relax me.”

At these words, Alma found herself relaxing, too. At last, a simple theme! At last, botany!

“Well, Mr. Hawkes,” she said, “as you surely know, Monotropa hypopitys grows only in the shade, and is a sickly white color—almost ghostly in tone. Previous naturalists had always assumed that Monotropa lacks pigment because of the absence of sunlight in its environment, but this theory makes little sense to me, as some of our most vivid shades of green can also be found in the shade, in such plants as ferns and mosses. My investigations further show that Monotropa is just as likely to tilt away from the sun as toward it, leading me to wonder if it does not gain nourishment from the sun’s rays at all, but rather from some other source. I have come to believe Monotropa gains its nutrition from the plants in which it grows. In other words, I believe it to be a parasite.”

“Which brings us back to an earlier topic of this evening,” George said, with a small smile.

Goodness, George Hawkes was making a jest! Alma had not known George was capable of jesting, but upon realizing his joke, she laughed with delight. Prudence did not laugh, but merely sat watching the two of them, pretty and remote as a picture.

“Yes, quite!” Alma said, gaining more momentum. “But unlike Professor Peck and his head lice, I can offer up documentation. I’ve noticed under the microscope that the stem of Monotropa is destitute of those cuticular pores through which air and water are generally admitted in other plants, nor does it seem to have a mechanism to draw moisture from the soil. I believe Monotropa takes nourishment and moisture from its foster parent. I believe its corpselike absence of color derives from the fact that it dines upon food that has already been digested, as it were, by the host.”

“A most extraordinary speculation,” said George Hawkes.

“Well, it is mere speculation at this point. Perhaps someday chemistry will be able to prove what my microscope, for now, only suggests.”

“If you wouldn’t mind sharing the paper with me this week,” said George, “I would like to consider publishing it.”

Alma was so enchanted by this unexpected invitation (and so addled by the queer events of the day, and so stirred to be speaking directly to a grown man about whom she had just been nursing sensual thoughts) that she never stopped to consider the strangest element of this entire exchange—namely, the role of her sister Prudence. Why was Prudence even present for this conversation? Why had Prudence given George Hawkes the nod to begin speaking in the first place? And when—at what earlier unknown moment—had Prudence ever had the chance to speak with George Hawkes about Alma’s private botanical research projects? When had Prudence even noticed Alma’s private botanical research projects?

On any other evening, these questions might have inhabited Alma’s mind and tugged at her curiosity, but on this evening she dismissed them. On this evening—at the close of what had been the strangest and most distracted day of her life—Alma’s mind was spinning and dipping with so many other thoughts that she missed all this. Bemused, tired, and a bit dizzy, she bade good night to George Hawkes, and then sat alone in the drawing room with her sister, waiting for Beatrix to come and contend with them.

With the thought of Beatrix, Alma’s euphoria diminished. Beatrix’s nightly accounting of her daughters’ shortcomings was never to be relished, but tonight Alma dreaded the lecture more than usual. Alma’s behavior that day (the discovery of the book, the arousing thoughts, the solitary passion in the binding closet) made her feel as though she visibly emanated guilt. She feared Beatrix would somehow sense it. Moreover, the dinner-table conversation had been catastrophic tonight: Alma had appeared blatantly stupid, while Prudence, unprecedentedly, had been something close to rude. Beatrix would not be pleased with either of them.

Alma and Prudence waited in the drawing room for their mother, quiet as nuns. The two girls were always quiet when they were alone together. Never had they found comfortable conversation. Never had they prattled. Never would they. Prudence sat with her hands folded quietly, while Alma fidgeted with the hem of a handkerchief. Alma glanced at Prudence, seeking something she could not name. Fellowship, maybe. Warmth. Some kind of affinity. Perhaps a reference to any of the evening’s proceedings. But Prudence—glittering as hard as ever—invited no intimacy. Despite this fact, Alma decided to attempt it.

“Those ideas of yours which you expressed tonight, Prudence?” Alma asked. “Where did you come by them?”

“From Mr. Dixon, largely. The condition and plight of the African race is a preferred topic of our good tutor.”

“Is it? I have never heard him make mention of any such thing.”

“Nonetheless, he has strong feelings on the subject,” Prudence said, without any change of expression.

“Is he an abolitionist, then?”

“He is.”

“Heavens,” Alma said, marveling at the idea of Arthur Dixon with strong feelings on anything. “Mother and Father had best not hear of that!”

“Mother knows,” Prudence replied.

“Does she? And what about Father?”

Prudence did not reply. Alma had more questions—a good many more of them—but Prudence did not seem eager for discussion. Again, the room fell silent. Then suddenly Alma leapt into that silence, allowing a wild and uncontrolled question to burst from her lips.

“Prudence,” she asked, “what do you think of Mr. George Hawkes?”

“I think him to be a decent gentleman.”

“And I think I am most desperately in love with him!” Alma exclaimed, shocking even herself with this absurd, unanticipated admission.

Before Prudence could respond—indeed, if she ever would have responded at all—Beatrix entered the drawing room and looked at her two daughters sitting on the divan. For a long while, Beatrix said nothing. She held her daughters in a stern, unyielding gaze, studying first one girl, then the other. This was more terrifying to Alma than any lecture, for the silence contained infinite, omniscient, horrifying possibilities. Beatrix could be aware of anything, could know of everything. Alma picked at a corner of her handkerchief, tearing it to threads. Prudence’s countenance and posture did not alter.

“I am weary this evening,” Beatrix said, finally breaking the awful hush. She looked at Alma and said, “I do not have the will tonight, Alma, to speak of your shortcomings. It will only further injure my temper. Let it only be said that if I ever see such gape-mouthed distraction from you at the dinner table again, I will ask you to take your meals elsewhere.”

“But, Mother—” Alma began.

“Do not explain yourself, daughter. It is weak.”

Beatrix turned as though to exit the room, but then turned back and leveled her gaze at Prudence, as though she were only just remembering something.

“Prudence,” she said. “Fine performance tonight.”

This was entirely out of the ordinary. Beatrix never gave praise. But was there anything about this day that was not out of the ordinary? Alma, amazed, turned to Prudence, again looking for something. Recognition? Commiseration? A shared sense of astonishment? But Prudence revealed nothing and did not return Alma’s gaze, so Alma gave up. She stood from the divan and headed toward the stairs, and bed. At the foot of the stairs, though, she turned to Prudence and surprised herself once more.

“Good night, sister,” Alma said. She had never once used that term before.

“And to you,” was Prudence’s only reply.