The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Eleven

Alma Whittaker, aged twenty, was now the mistress of the White Acre estate.

She slipped into her mother’s old role as though she had trained a lifetime for it—which, in a sense, she had done.

The day after Beatrix’s funeral, Alma entered her father’s study and started sifting through piles of accumulated paperwork and letters, resolved to immediately attend to all the tasks that Beatrix had traditionally executed. To her growing distress, Alma realized that a great deal of important work at White Acre—accounting, invoicing, correspondence—had been left untended in the past few months, even the past year, as Beatrix’s health had deteriorated. Alma cursed herself for not having noticed this earlier. Henry’s desk had always been a shamble of vital papers all mixed in with the jumble of uselessness, but Alma had not grasped how serious the disorder had grown until she investigated the study more deeply.

Here is what she found: stacks of important papers had been spilling off Henry’s desk over the past few months and cumulating on the floor into something like geological strata. Horrifyingly, there were more boxes of unsorted papers hidden in deep closets. In her initial excavations, Alma found bills that had not been paid since the previous May, payrolls that had never been reckoned, and letters—such a thick sludge of letters!—from builders awaiting orders, from business partners with urgent questions, from collectors overseas, from lawyers, from the Patent Office, from botanical gardens across the world, and from various and sundry museum directors. If Alma had known earlier that so much correspondence was being neglected, she would have tended to it months ago. Now it was nearly at the level of crisis. At this very moment, a ship full of Whittaker botanicals was moored in the Philadelphia harbor, collecting steep docking fees, unable to unload its cargo because the captain had not been recompensed.

What was worse, mixed in with all the urgent work were absurd little details, time-wasters, mounds of absolute twaddle. There was a nearly illegible note from a woman in West Philadelphia, saying that her baby had just swallowed a pin and the mother was afraid the child might die—could somebody at White Acre tell her what to do? The widow of a naturalist who had worked for Henry fifteen years earlier in Antigua was claiming destitution and requesting a pension. There was an outdated note from White Acre’s head landscaper about a gardener who needed to be fired immediately, for having entertained several young women in his room after hours with a party of watermelon and rum.

Was this the sort of thing her mother had always taken care of, in addition to everything else? Swallowed pins? Disconsolate widows? Watermelon and rum?

Alma saw no choice but to clean out this Augean stable, one piece of paper at a time. She cajoled her father to sit beside her and help her to understand what various items might mean, and whether this or that suit of law needed to be taken seriously, or why the price of sarsaparilla had climbed so steeply since last year. Neither of them could completely translate Beatrix’s coded, vaguely Italian, triple-accountancy system, but Alma was the better mathematician, so she puzzled out the ledgers as best she could, while simultaneously creating a simpler method for future use. Alma deputized Prudence to pen page after page of polite correspondence, as Henry—with much loud complaining—dictated the essence of the most vital information.

Did Alma mourn her mother? It was difficult to know. She did not exactly have time for it. She was buried in a swampland of work and frustration, and this sensation was not entirely distinguishable from sorrow itself. She was weary and overwhelmed. There were times when she looked up from her labors to ask her mother a question—looking over to the chair where Beatrix had always sat—and was startled by the nothingness to be found there. It was like looking at a spot on a wall where a clock had hung for years, and seeing only an empty space. She could not train herself not to look; the emptiness surprised her every time.

But Alma was also angry with her mother. As she paged through months’ worth of confusing documents, she wondered why Beatrix—knowing herself to be so ill—had not enlisted somebody to help over a year ago. Why had she put documents into boxes and stored them in closets, rather than seeking assistance? Why had Beatrix never taught anyone else her complicated accounting system, or, if nothing else, told someone where to find filed documentation from previous years?

She remembered her mother’s having warned her, years ago, “Never put away your labors while the sun is high, Alma, with the hopes of finding more hours to work tomorrow—for you shall never have any more extra time tomorrow than you had today, and once you have fallen behindhand in your responsibilities, you will never catch up.”

So why had Beatrix allowed things to fall so behindhand?

Perhaps she had not believed she was dying.

Perhaps her mind had been so addled with pain that she had lost track of the world.

Or perhaps—Alma thought darkly—Beatrix had wanted to punish the living with all this work, long after she was dead.

As for Hanneke de Groot, Alma quickly came to understand that the woman was a saint. Alma had never before realized how much work Hanneke did around the estate. Hanneke recruited, trained, maintained, and reprimanded a staff of dozens. She managed the food cellars and harvested the estate’s vegetables as though leading a cavalry charge through fields and gardens. She commandeered her troops to polish the silver, and stir the gravy, and beat the carpets, and whitewash the walls, and put up the pork, and gravel the driveway, and render the lard, and cook the puddings. With her even temper and firm handle on discipline, Hanneke somehow managed the jealousies, laziness, and stupidity of so very many people, and she was clearly the only reason the estate had carried on at all once Beatrix had fallen ill.

One morning, shortly after her mother’s death, Alma had caught Hanneke disciplining three scullery maids, whom she had backed up against the wall as though she intended to shoot them.

“One good worker could replace all three of you,” Hanneke barked, “and trust me—when I find one good worker, all three of you will be dismissed! In the meanwhile, get back to your tasks, and stop shaming yourselves with such carelessness.”

“I cannot thank you enough for your service,” Alma told Hanneke, once the girls were gone. “I hope to someday be able to assist you more with the management of the household, but for now I will still need you to do everything, as I try to make sense of my father’s business affairs.”

“I have always done everything,” Hanneke replied, uncomplainingly.

“Indeed, it seems you have, Hanneke. It seems you do the work of ten men.”

“Your mother did the work of twenty men, Alma—and had to look after your father, too.”

As Hanneke turned to leave, Alma reached for the housekeeper’s arm.

“Hanneke,” she asked, exhausted and frowning, “what does one do for a baby who has just swallowed a pin?”

Without hesitating, or asking why such a question should suddenly arise, Hanneke replied, “Prescribe raw egg white to the child and patience to the mother. Give the mother assurance that the pin will probably slide out the child’s sewer hole in a few days, with no ill effects. If it’s an older child, you can make it jump a rope, to encourage the process along.”

“Does the child ever die from it?” Alma asked.

Hanneke shrugged. “Sometimes. But if you prescribe these steps and speak in a tone of certainty, the mother will not feel so helpless.”

“Thank you,” Alma said.

As for Retta Snow, the girl came over to White Acre several times during the first weeks after Beatrix’s death, but Alma and Prudence—absorbed in catching up with the work of the family business—could find no time for her.

“I can help you!” Retta said, but everyone knew that she could not.

“Then I shall wait for you every day in your study in the carriage house,” Retta finally promised Alma, when she had been turned away too many times in a row. “When you are finished with your labors, you will come and see me. I will talk to you while you study impossible things. I will tell you extraordinary stories, and you will laugh and marvel. For I have news of the most shocking variety!”

Alma could not imagine ever again finding the time to laugh or marvel with Retta, much less to continue her own projects. For quite some time after her mother’s death, she forgot that she had ever had her own work at all. She was a mere quill-driver now, a scrivener, a slave to her father’s desk, and the administrator of a dauntingly large household—wading through a jungle of neglected tasks. For two months, she barely stepped outside her father’s study at all. As best she was able, she refused to let her father leave, either.

“I need your help on all these matters,” Alma pleaded with Henry, “or we shall never catch up again.”

Then, late one October afternoon, right in the middle of all the sorting, calculating, and solving, Henry simply stood up and walked out of his own study, leaving Alma and Prudence with their hands full of papers.

“Where are you going?” Alma asked.

“To get drunk,” he said, in a voice fierce and dark. “And by God, how I dread it.”

“Father—” she protested.

“Finish it yourself,” he commanded.

And so she did.

With Prudence’s help, with Hanneke’s help, but mostly on her own accord, Alma polished that study to a state of trim perfection. She put each one of her father’s affairs in order—solving one onerous problem at a time—until every edict, injunction, mandate, and dictate had been addressed, until every letter was answered, every chit was paid, every investor was assured, every vendor cajoled, and every vendetta settled.

It was the middle of January before she finished, and when she did, she understood the workings of the Whittaker Company from top to bottom. She had been in mourning for five months. She had entirely missed the autumn—seeing it neither arrive nor leave. She stood up from her father’s desk and unwound her black crepe armband. She laid the thing across in the last bin of refuse and discards, to be burned with the rest of it. That was enough.

Alma walked to the binding closet just off the library, locked herself in, and pleasured herself quickly. She had not touched her quim in months, and the unfettering of this welcome old release made her want to weep. She had not wept in months, either. No, that was incorrect: she had not wept in years. She also realized that her twenty-first birthday had come and gone the previous week without notice—not even from Prudence, who could usually be counted upon for a small, thoughtful gift.

Well, what did she expect? She was older now. She was the mistress of the grandest estate in Philadelphia, and the head clerk, it now appeared, of one of the largest botanical importing concerns on the planet. The time for childish things had passed.

After Alma left the binding closet, she stripped down and took a bath—though it was not a Saturday—and went to sleep at five o’clock in the afternoon. She slept for thirteen hours. When she awoke, the house was silent. For the first moment in months, the house needed nothing from her. The silence sounded like music. She dressed slowly and enjoyed her tea and toast. Then she walked across her mother’s old Grecian garden, glassed over now with ice, until she reached the carriage house. It was time for her to return, if only for a few hours, to her own work, which she had left in midsentence the day her mother had fallen down the stairs.

To her surprise, Alma saw a thin tendril of smoke uncurling from the chimney of the carriage house as she approached. When she reached her study, there—as promised—was Retta Snow, curled up on the divan under a thick wool blanket, sound asleep and waiting for her.

“Retta—” Alma touched her friend’s arm. “What in the world are you doing here?”

Retta’s large green eyes flew open. Clearly, in the first moment in which she awoke, the girl had no idea where she was, and she did not seem to recognize Alma. Something awful came over Retta’s face in that instant. She looked feral, even dangerous, and Alma found herself jerking back in fear, as though recoiling from a cornered dog. Then Retta smiled and the effect passed. She was all sweetness again, and she resembled herself once more.

“My loyal friend,” said Retta in a sleepy voice, reaching for Alma’s hand. “Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”

Alma looked about the room and saw a small cache of empty biscuit tins and a puddle of clothing piled carelessly on the floor. “Why are you sleeping in my study, Retta?”

“Because things have grown impossibly dull at my own house. Things are rather dull here, too, of course, but at least there is the chance at times to see a bright face, if one is patient. Did you know that you have mice in your herbarium? Why do you not keep a pussycat in this room, to manage them? Have you ever seen a witch? I confess, I believe there was a witch in the carriage house last week. I could hear her laughing. Do you think we should tell your father? I can’t imagine it’s safe to keep a witch about the place. Or perhaps he would merely think I am mad. Though he seems to think so, anyway. Have you got any more tea? Aren’t these cold mornings unutterably cruel? Do you not long terribly for summer? Where has your black armband gone?”

Alma sat down and pressed her friend’s hand to her lips. It was good to hear utter nonsense again, after all the seriousness of the last months. “I never know which one of your questions to answer first, Retta.”

“Start in the middle,” Retta suggested, “and then work in both directions.”

“What did the witch look like?” Alma asked.

“Ha! Now you are the one asking too many questions!” Retta leapt up from the divan and shook herself awake. “Are we working today?”

Alma smiled. “Yes, I believe we are working today—at last.”

“And what are we studying, my dear best Alma?”

“We are studying Utricularia clandestina, my dear best Retta.”

“A plant?”

“Most certainly.”

“Oh, it sounds beautiful!”

“Do be assured that it isn’t,” Alma said. “But it is interesting. And what is Retta studying today?” Alma picked up the ladies’ magazine lying on the floor by the divan and thumbed through its incomprehensible pages.

“I am studying the sorts of gowns in which a fashionable girl should wed,” Retta said lightly.

“And are you choosing such a gown?” Alma replied, just as lightly.

“Most absolutely!”

“And what will you do with such a gown, my little bird?”

“Oh, I had a plan to wear it on my wedding day.”

“An ingenious plan!” Alma said, and turned toward her laboratory bench to see if she could begin putting together her notes from five months earlier.

“But the sleeves are quite short in all these drawings, you see,” Retta prattled on, “and I fear I shall be cold. I could wear a shawl, suggests my little maid, but then nobody would be able to enjoy the necklace Mother said I could wear. Also, I wish for a spray of roses, though they are out of season and some say it is inelegant to carry a spray of flowers, in any case.”

Alma turned around to face her friend once more. “Retta,” she said, this time in a more serious tone. “You aren’t truly getting married, are you?”

“I do hope so!” Retta laughed. “I have been told that the only way one should get married is truly!”

“And whom do you intend to marry?”

“Mr. George Hawkes,” said Retta. “That funny, serious man. It makes me so glad, Alma, that my husband-to-be is somebody you adore so much, which means that we can all be friends. He does admire you so, and you admire him, which must mean he is a good man. It is your affection for George, really, that makes me trust him. He asked for my hand shortly after your mother’s death, but I didn’t want to speak of it sooner, as you were suffering so much, you poor dear. I had no idea he was even fond of me, but Mother tells me that everyone is fond of me, bless their hearts, because they cannot help themselves.”

Alma sat down on the floor. She had no other choice but to sit down.

Retta ran over to her friend, and sat down beside her. “Look at you! You are overcome on my behalf! You care about me so!” Retta put her arm around Alma’s waist, just as she had done on the day they met, and embraced her closely. “I must confess that I am still a bit overcome myself. What would such a clever man want with such a silly bit of lint like me? My father was most surprised! He said, ‘Loretta Marie Snow, I always figured you to be the sort of girl who would marry a handsome, stupid fellow who wore tall boots and hunted foxes for pleasure!’ But look at me—instead I shall marry a scholar. Imagine if it eventually makes me clever, Alma, to be married to a man with such a premium mind. Though I must say that George is not nearly as patient as you are, about answering my questions. He says that the subject of botanical publishing is far too complex to explain, and it is true that I still cannot tell the difference between a lithograph and an engraving. Is that what it’s called—a lithograph? So I may end up as stupid as ever! Nonetheless, we shall live right across the river, which will be most fun! Father has promised to build us a charming new house, right next to George’s print shop. You must come see me every day! And we shall all three of us go to see plays at Old Drury together!”

Alma, still sitting on the floor, had no capacity for speech. She was only grateful that Retta’s head was tucked against her chest as she chattered away, so the girl could not see her face.

George Hawkes was to marry Retta Snow?

But George was supposed to be Alma’s husband. She had seen it in her mind so vividly for nearly five years now. She had conjured fantasies of him—his body!—when she was in the binding closet. But she had cherished more chaste thoughts of him, as well. She had imagined them working together, in close study. She always pictured herself leaving White Acre, when it came time to marry George. Together, they would live in a small room over his print shop, with its warm smells of ink and paper. She had envisaged them traveling to Boston together, or perhaps even beyond—as far away as the Alps, climbing over boulders to hunt for pasqueflowers and rock-jasmine. He would say to her, “What do you make of this specimen?” and she would say, “It is fine and rare.”

He had always been so kind to her. He had once pressed her hand between his hands. They had looked through the same microscope eyepiece so many times—one after the other, then back again—trading on and off with the marvel of it.

What could George Hawkes possibly see in Retta Snow? By Alma’s recollection, George had barely ever been able to look at Retta Snow without baffled embarrassment. Alma remembered how George had always glanced over to her in confusion whenever Retta spoke, as though seeking help, relief, or interpretation. If anything, these little glances between George and Alma about Retta had been one of their sweetest intimacies—or at least Alma had dreamed that they were.

But apparently Alma had dreamed many things.

Some part of her still hoped this was just one of Retta’s strange games, or perhaps a deluded flight of the girl’s imagination. Only a moment earlier, after all, Retta had claimed there were witches living in the carriage house, so anything could be possible. But, no. Alma knew Retta too well. This was not Retta at play. This was Retta in earnest. This was Retta chattering on about the problem with sleeves and shawls in a February wedding. This was Retta quite seriously worrying over the necklace her mother planned to lend her, which was quite valuable, but not entirely to Retta’s liking: What if the chain is too long? What if it becomes tangled in the bodice?

Alma stood suddenly and pulled Retta up from the floor. She could not bear it anymore. She could not sit still and listen to another word of this. Without a further plan of action, she embraced Retta. It was so much easier to embrace her than to look at her. It also made Retta stop talking. She held Retta in such a firm press that she heard the girl’s breath intake sharply, with a surprised squeak. Just when she thought Retta might begin speaking again, Alma commanded, “Hush,” and grasped her friend more securely.

Alma’s arms were extraordinarily strong (she had a blacksmith’s arms, just as her father did) and Retta was so tiny, with the rib cage of a baby rabbit. There were snakes that could kill this way, with an embrace that only grew tighter and tighter until the breath stopped completely. Alma squeezed tighter. Retta made another small squeaking noise. Alma grasped harder still—so hard that she lifted Retta right from the floor.

She remembered the day they all had met: Alma, Prudence, and Retta. Fiddle, fork, and spoon. Retta had said, “If we were boys, we would have to fight now.” Well, Retta was no fighter. She would have lost such a battle. She would have lost badly. Alma compressed her arms even tighter around this tiny, useless, precious person. She clenched her eyes shut as hard as she could, but tears bled from the corners nonetheless. She could feel Retta going limp in her grip. It would be so easy to stop her from breathing. Stupid Retta. Cherished Retta, who—even now!—successfully resisted all efforts not to be loved.

Alma dropped her friend to the floor.

Retta landed with a gasp and very nearly bounced.

Alma forced herself to speak. “I congratulate you on your happiness,” she said.

Retta sobbed once, and clutched at her bodice with trembling hands. She smiled, so foolish and trusting. “What a good little Alma you are!” Retta said. “And how much you love me!”

In a queer touch of almost masculine formality, Alma extended her hand for Retta to shake, managing to choke forth just one more sentence: “You are most deserving.”

“Did you know?” Alma demanded of Prudence not an hour later, finding her sister at her needlework in the drawing room.

Prudence set her work on her lap, folded her hands, and said nothing. Prudence had a habit of never committing to any conversation before she completely understood the circumstances. But Alma waited nonetheless, wanting to force her sister to speak, wanting to catch her at something. At what, though? Prudence’s face had nothing to reveal, and if Alma thought Prudence Whittaker was fool enough to speak first under such hot circumstances, then she did not know Prudence Whittaker.

In the silence that followed, Alma felt her anger turn from blazing indignation to something more tragic and petulant, something spoiled and sad. “Did you know,” Alma was finally forced to ask, “that Retta Snow is to marry George Hawkes?”

Prudence’s expression did not change, but Alma saw a tiny white line appear for just a moment around her sister’s lips, as though the mouth had compressed only the slightest bit. Then the line vanished, quickly as it had arrived. Alma might even have imagined it.

“No,” Prudence replied.

“How could this have happened?” Alma asked. Prudence said nothing, so Alma kept speaking. “Retta tells me they have been betrothed since the week of our mother’s death.”

“I see,” said Prudence, after a long pause.

“Did Retta ever know that I . . .” Here Alma hesitated and nearly started weeping. “Did Retta ever know that I had feelings for him?”

“How could I possibly answer that?” Prudence replied.

“Did she learn it from you?” Alma’s voice was insistent and ragged. “Had you ever told her? You were the only one who could have told her that I loved George.”

Now the white line around her sister’s lips reappeared, for a slightly longer time. There was no mistaking it. This was anger.

“I would hope, Alma,” said Prudence, “that you would better know my character after so many years. Would anybody who came to me for gossip ever go home satisfied?”

“Did Retta ever come to you for gossip?”

“It matters little whether she did or did not, Alma. Have you ever known me to disclose someone’s secrets?”

“Stop answering me in riddles!” Alma shouted. Then she lowered her voice: “Did you or did you not ever tell Retta Snow that I loved George Hawkes?”

Alma saw a shadow pass across the door, waver, and then vanish. All she caught was the glimpse of an apron. Somebody—a maid—was about to enter the drawing room, but had evidently changed her mind and ducked out instead. Why was there never any privacy in this house? Prudence had seen the shadow, too, and she did not like it. She stood up now and stepped forward to face Alma directly—indeed, almost threateningly. The sisters could not regard one another eye-to-eye, for their heights were so different, but Prudence somehow managed to stare down Alma, nonetheless, even from one foot below her.

“No,” Prudence said. “I have told nothing to anyone, and never shall. What’s more, your insinuations insult me, and are unfair to both Retta Snow and Mr. Hawkes, whose business—I should dearly hope—is their own. Worst of all, your inquiry degrades you. I am sorry for your disappointment, but we owe our friends our joy and best wishes at their good fortune.”

Alma started to speak again, but Prudence cut her off. “You’d best regain mastery of yourself before you continue speaking, Alma,” she warned, “or you shall regret whatever it is you are about to reveal.”

Well, that was beyond debate. Alma already did regret what she had revealed. She wished that she had never begun this conversation. But it was too late for that. The next best thing would have been to end it right now. This would have been a marvelous opportunity for Alma to stop her mouth. Horribly, though, she could not control herself.

“I only wanted to know if Retta had betrayed me,” Alma blurted forth.

“Did you?” Prudence asked evenly. “So is it your supposition that your friend and mine, Miss Retta Snow—the most guileless creature I have ever encountered—willfully stole George Hawkes from you? To what purpose, Alma? For her own sporting satisfaction? And while you are on this line of questioning, do you also believe that I betrayed you? Do you believe that I told Retta your secret, in order to make a mockery of you? Do you believe that I encouraged Retta to pursue Mr. Hawkes, as some sort of wicked game? Do you believe I have some wish to see you punished?”

Sweet mercy, but Prudence could be relentless. Had she been a man, she would have made a formidable lawyer. Alma had never felt so dreadful or appeared so petty. She sat down on the nearest chair and stared at the floor. But Prudence followed Alma to the chair, stood over her, and kept speaking. “In the meanwhile, Alma, I have news of my own to report, which I shall tell you now, for it pertains to a similar concern. I had intended to wait until our family was out of mourning to address this subject, but I see that you have decided that our family is out of mourning already.”

Here, Prudence touched Alma’s upper right arm—bare of its black crepe band—and Alma nearly flinched.

“I, too, am to wed,” Prudence announced, without a trace of triumph or delight. “Mr. Arthur Dixon has asked for my hand, and I have accepted.”

Alma’s head, for just one moment, emptied: Who in the name of God was Arthur Dixon? Mercifully, she did not speak this question aloud, for in the very next instant, of course, she remembered who he was, and felt absurd for having ever wondered. Arthur Dixon: their tutor. That unhappy and stooped man, who had somehow drummed French into Prudence’s head, and who had joylessly helped Alma to master her Greek. That sad creature of damp sighs and sorrowful coughs. That little tedium of a figure, whose face Alma had not thought about since quite literally the last time she had seen it, which had been—when? Four years ago? When he’d finally left White Acre to become Professor of Ancient Languages at the University of Pennsylvania? No, Alma realized with a start, this was incorrect. She had seen Arthur Dixon only recently, at her mother’s funeral. She had even spoken to him. He had offered up his kind condolences, and she had wondered what he was doing there.

Well, now she knew. He was there to court his former student, apparently, who also happened to be the most beautiful young woman in Philadelphia, and, it must be said, potentially one of the richest.

“When did this engagement occur?” Alma asked.

“Just before our mother died.”

“How?”

“In the customary fashion,” Prudence replied coolly.

“Did all this occur at the same time?” Alma demanded. The idea sickened her. “Did you become engaged to Mr. Dixon at the same time as Retta Snow became engaged to George Hawkes?”

“I have no knowledge of other people’s affairs,” Prudence said. But then she softened just a trace, and conceded, “But it would appear so—or, close to so. My engagement seems to have occurred a few days earlier. Though it matters not at all.”

“Does Father know?”

“He will know soon enough. Arthur was waiting until our mourning had passed, to make his suit.”

“But what on earth is Arthur Dixon going to say to Father, Prudence? The man is terrified of Father. I cannot conceive of it. How will Arthur manage to get through the conversation, without fainting dead away? And what will you do for the rest of your life—married to a scholar?”

Prudence drew herself up taller and smoothed her skirts. “I wonder if you realize, Alma, that the more traditional response to the announcement of an engagement is to wish the bride-to-be many years of health and happiness—particularly if the bride-to-be is your sister.”

“Oh, Prudence, I apologize—” Alma began, ashamed of herself for the dozenth time that day.

“Think nothing of it,” Prudence said, and turned toward the door. “I had not expected anything different.”

In all of our lives, there are days that we wish we could see expunged from the record of our very existence. Perhaps we long for that erasure because a particular day brought us such splintering sorrow that we can scarcely bear to think of it ever again. Or we might wish to blot out an episode forever because we behaved so poorly on that day—we were mortifyingly selfish, or foolish to an extraordinary degree. Or perhaps we injured another person and wish to disremember our guilt. Tragically, there are some days in a lifetime when all three of those things happen at once—when we are heartbroken and foolish and unforgivably injurious to others, all at the same time. For Alma, that day was January 10, 1821. She would have done anything in her power to strike that entire day from the chronicle of her life.

She could never forgive herself that her initial response to the happy news from both her dear friend and her poor sister had been a mean show of jealousy, thoughtlessness, and (in the case of Retta, at least) physical violence. What had Beatrix always taught them? Nothing is so essential as dignity, girls, and time will reveal who has it. As far as Alma was concerned, on January 10, 1821, she had revealed herself as a young woman devoid of dignity.

This would trouble her for many years to come. Alma tormented herself by imagining—again and again—all the different ways she might have behaved on that day, had she been in better control of her passions. In Alma’s revised conversations with Retta, she embraced her friend with perfect tenderness at the mere mention of George Hawkes’s name, and said in a steady voice, “How lucky a man he is to have won you!” In her revised conversations with Prudence, she never accused her sister of having betrayed her to Retta, and certainly never accused Retta of having stolen George Hawkes, and, when Prudence announced her own engagement to Arthur Dixon, Alma smiled warmly, took her sister’s hand in fondness, and said, “I cannot imagine a more suitable gentleman for you!”

Unfortunately, though, one does not get second chances at such blundered episodes.

To be fair, by January 11, 1821—merely one day later!—Alma was a much better person. She pulled herself back into order as quickly as she could. She firmly committed herself to a spirit of graciousness about both engagements. She willed herself to play the role of a composed young woman who was genuinely pleased about other people’s happiness. And when the two weddings arrived in the following month, separated from each other by only one week, she managed to be a pleasant and cheerful guest at both events. She was helpful to the brides and polite to their grooms. Nobody saw a fissure in her.

That said, Alma suffered.

She had lost George Hawkes. She had been left behind by her sister and by her only friend. Both Prudence and Retta, directly after their weddings, moved across the river into the center of Philadelphia. Fiddle, fork, and spoon were now finished. The only one who would remain at White Acre was Alma (who had long ago decided that she was fork).

Alma took some solace in the fact that nobody, aside from Prudence, knew about her past love for George Hawkes. There was nothing she could do to obliterate the passionate confessions she had so carelessly shared with Prudence over the years (and heavens, how she regretted them!), but at least Prudence was a sealed tomb, from whom no secrets would ever leak. George himself did not appear to realize that Alma had ever cared for him, nor that she might ever have suspected him of caring for her. He treated Alma no differently after his marriage than he had treated her before it. He had been friendly and professional in the past, and he was friendly and professional now. This was both consoling to Alma and also horribly disheartening. It was consoling because there would be no lingering discomfiture between them, no public sign of humiliation. It was disheartening because apparently there had never been anything at all between them—apart from whatever Alma had allowed herself to dream.

It was all terribly shameful, when one looked back on it. Sadly, one could not often help looking back on it.

Moreover, it now appeared that Alma would be staying at White Acre forever. Her father needed her. This was more abundantly clear every day. Henry had let Prudence go without a fight (indeed, he had blessed his adopted daughter with a quite generous dowry, and he had not been unkind toward Arthur Dixon, despite the fact that the man was a bore and a Presbyterian), but Henry would never let Alma go. Prudence had no value to Henry, but Alma was essential to him, especially now that Beatrix was gone.

Thus, Alma entirely replaced her mother. She was forced to assume the role, because nobody else could manage Henry. Alma wrote her father’s letters, settled his accounts, listened to his grievances, minded his rum consumption, offered commentary on his plans, and soothed his indignations. Called into his study at all hours of day and night, Alma never knew exactly what her father might need from her, or how long the task would take. She might find him sitting at his desk, scratching away at a pile of gold coins with a sewing needle, trying to determine if the gold was counterfeit, and wanting Alma’s opinion. He might simply be bored, wishing for Alma to bring him a cup of tea, or to play cribbage with him, or to remind him of the lyrics of an old song. On days when his body ached, or if he’d just had a tooth drawn or a blistering plaster applied to his chest, he summoned Alma to his study merely to tell her how much pain he was in. Or, for no reason at all, he might simply wish to inventory his complaints. (“Why must lamb taste like ram in this household?” he might demand. Or, “Why must the maids constantly move the carpets about, such that a man never knows where to put his footing? How many spills do they want me to suffer?”)

On busier, healthier days, Henry might have genuine work for Alma. He might need Alma to write a threatening letter to a borrower who had fallen into arrears. (“Tell him that he must commence paying me back within the fortnight, or I will see to it that his children spend the remainder of their lives in a workhouse,” Henry would dictate, while Alma would write, “Dear Sir: With greatest respect, I ask that you bestir yourself to attend this debt . . .”) Or Henry might have received a collection of dried botanical specimens from overseas, which he would need Alma to reconstitute in water and diagram for him swiftly, before they all rotted away. Or he might need her to write a letter to some underling in Tasmania working himself halfway to death at the far reaches of the planet in order to gather exotic plants on behalf of the Whittaker Company.

“Tell that lazy noodle,” Henry would say, tossing a writing tablet across the desk at his daughter, “that it does me no good when he informs me that such-and-such a specimen was found on the banks of some creek whose name he has probably invented himself, for all I know, because I cannot find it marked on any map in existence. Tell him that I need useful details. Tell him I don’t care a row of pins for news of his failing health. My health is failing, too, but do I trouble him to listen to my sorrows? Tell him that I will warrant ten dollars per hundred of every specimen, but that I need him to be exact and I need the specimens to be identifiable. Tell him that he must stop pasting his dried samples to paper, for it destroys them, which he should bloody well know by now. Tell him that he must use two thermometers in every Wardian case—one tied to the glass itself and one embedded in the soil. Tell him that, before he ships off any further specimens, he must convince the sailors on board the ship that they must move the cases off the decks at night if frost is expected, because I will not pay him a wooden tooth for another shipment of black mold in a box, purporting to be a plant. And tell him that, no, I will not advance his salary again. Tell him that he is fortunate to still have his employment at all, given the fact he is doing his level best to bankrupt me. Tell him I will pay him again when he has earned it.” (“Dear Sir,” Alma would begin writing, “We here at the Whittaker Company offer our most sincere gratitude for all your recent labors, and our apologies for any discomforts you may have suffered . . .”)

Nobody else could do this work. It had to be Alma. It was all just as Beatrix had instructed on her deathbed: Alma could not leave her father.

Had Beatrix suspected that Alma would never marry? Probably, Alma realized. Who would have her? Who would take this giant female creature, who stood above six feet tall, who was overly stuffed with learning, and who had hair in the color and shape of a rooster’s comb? George Hawkes had been the best candidate—the only candidate, really—and now he was gone. Alma knew it would be hopeless ever to find a suitable husband, and she said as much one day to Hanneke de Groot, as the two women clipped boxwoods together in Beatrix’s old Grecian garden.

“It will never be my turn, Hanneke,” Alma said, out of the blue. She said it not pitifully, but with simple candor. There was something about speaking in Dutch (and Alma spoke only Dutch with Hanneke) that always elicited simple candor.

“Give the situation time,” Hanneke said, knowing precisely what Alma was talking about. “A husband may still come looking for you.”

“Loyal Hanneke,” Alma said fondly, “let us be honest with ourselves. Who will ever put a ring on these fishwife’s hands of mine? Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head?”

“I will kiss it,” said Hanneke, and pulled Alma down for a kiss on the brow. “There now, it is done. Stop complaining. You always behave as though you know everything, but you do not know all things. Your mother had this same fault. I have seen more of life than you have seen, by a long measure, and I tell you that you are not too old to marry—and you may still raise a family yet. There’s no hurry for it, either. Look at Mrs. Kingston, on Locust Street. Fifty years old, she must be, and she just presented her husband with twins! A regular Abraham’s wife, she is. Somebody should study her womb.”

“I confess, Hanneke, that I do not believe Mrs. Kingston is quite fifty years old. Nor do I believe she wishes us to study her womb.”

“I am merely saying that you do not know the future, child, quite as much as you believe you do. And there is something more I need to tell you, besides.” Hanneke stopped working now, and her voice became serious. “Everyone has disappointments, child.”

Alma loved the sound of the word child in Dutch. Kindje. This was the nickname that Hanneke had always called Alma when she was young and afraid and would climb into the housekeeper’s bed in the middle of the night. Kindje. It sounded like warmth itself.

“I am aware that everyone has disappointments, Hanneke.”

“I’m not certain you are. You are still young, so you think only of your own self. You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish. Now I am wiser. It’s a pity we cannot put an old head on young shoulders, or you could be wise, too. But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.”

“What are we to do, then, with our suffering?” Alma asked.

This was not a question Alma would ever have posed to a minister, or a philosopher, or a poet, but she was curious—desperate, even—to hear an answer from Hanneke de Groot.

“Well, child, you may do whatever you like with your suffering,” Hanneke said mildly. “It belongs to you. But I shall tell you what I do with mine. I grasp it by the small hairs, I cast it to the ground, and I grind it under the heel of my boot. I suggest you learn to do the same.”

And so Alma did. She learned how to grind her disappointments under the heel of her boot. She had sturdy boots in her possession, too, and thus she was well outfitted for the task. She made an effort to turn her sorrows into a gritty powder that could be kicked into the ditch. She did this every day, sometimes even several times a day, and that is how she proceeded.

The months passed. Alma helped her father, she helped Hanneke, she worked in the greenhouses, and sometimes she arranged formal dinners at White Acre for Henry’s diversion. Rarely did she see her old friend Retta. It was rarer still to see Prudence, but it did occur sometimes. From habit alone, Alma attended church services on Sundays, although she often, rather disgracefully, followed up her visits to church with visits to the binding closet, in order to evacuate her mind by touching her body. It was no longer joyful, the habit in the binding closet, but it made her feel somewhat unleashed.

She kept herself occupied, but she was not occupied enough. Within a year, she sensed an encroaching lethargy that frightened her severely. She longed for some sort of employment or enterprise that would provide vent for her considerable intellectual energies. At first, her father’s commercial matters were helpful in this regard, as the work filled her days with daunting piles of responsibilities, but soon enough Alma’s efficiency became her enemy. She carried out her tasks for the Whittaker Company too well and too quickly. Soon, having learned everything she needed to know about botanical importing and exporting, she was able to complete Henry’s work for him in the matter of four or five hours a day. This was simply not enough hours. This left far too many remaining hours free, and free hours were dangerous. Free hours created too much opportunity for examining the disappointments she was meant to be grinding under her boot heel.

It was also around this time—the year after everyone married—that Alma came to a significant and even shocking realization: contrary to her childhood belief, she discovered that White Acre was not, in fact, a very large place. Quite the opposite, actually: it was a tiny place. Yes, the estate had grown to more than a thousand acres, with a mile of riverfront, with a sizable patch of virgin forest, with an immense house, with a spectacular library, with a vast network of stables, gardens, glasshouses, ponds, and creeks—but if this constituted the boundaries of one’s entire world (as it did now for Alma), then it was not large at all. Any place that one could not leave was not large—particularly if one was a naturalist!

The problem was that Alma had already spent her life studying the nature of White Acre, and she knew the place too well. She knew every tree and rock and bird and lady’s slipper. She knew every spider, every beetle, every ant. There was nothing new here for her to explore. Yes, she could have studied the novel tropical plants that arrived at her father’s impressive greenhouses every week—but that is not discovery! Somebody else had already discovered those plants! And the task of a naturalist, as Alma understood it, was to discover. But there would be no such chance for Alma, for she had reached the limits of her botanical borders already. This realization frightened her and made her unable to sleep at night, which, in turn, frightened her more. She feared the restlessness that was creeping upon her. She could almost hear her mind pacing within her skull, caged and bothered, and she felt the weight of all the years she had yet to live, bearing down upon her with heavy menace.

A born taxonomist with nothing new to classify, Alma kept her uneasiness at bay by setting other things into order. She tidied and alphabetized her father’s papers. She smartened up the library, discarding books of lesser value. She arranged the collection jars on her own shelves by height, and she created ever more refined systems of superfluous filing, which is how it came to pass that—early one morning in June of 1822—Alma Whittaker sat alone in her carriage house, poring over all the research articles she had ever written for George Hawkes. She was trying to decide whether to organize these old issues of Botanica Americana by subject or by chronology. It was an unnecessary task, but it would fill an hour.

At the bottom of this pile, though, Alma found her earliest article—the one she had written when she was only sixteen years old, about Monotropa hypopitys. She read it again. The writing was juvenile, but the science was sound, and her explanation of this shade-loving plant as a clever, bloodless parasite still felt valid. When she looked closely at her old illustrations of Monotropa, though, she almost had to laugh at their rudimentary crudeness. Her diagrams looked as though they had been sketched by a child, which, essentially, they had been. Not that she had become a glittering artist over the past years, but these early pictures were quite rough indeed. George had been kind to publish them at all. Her Monotropa was meant to be depicted growing out of a bed of moss, but in Alma’s depiction, the plant looked to be growing out of a lumpy old mattress. Nobody would have been able to identify those dismal clumps at the bottom of the drawing as moss at all. She ought to have shown much more detail. As a good naturalist, she ought to have made an illustration that depicted quite precisely in which variety of moss Monotropa hypopitys grew.

On further consideration, though, Alma realized that she herself did not know in which variety of moss Monotropa hypopitys grew. On still further consideration, she realized that she was not entirely certain she could distinguish between different varieties of moss at all. How many were there, anyway? A few? A dozen? Several hundred? Shockingly, she did not know.

Then again, where would she have learned it? Who had ever written about moss? Or even about Bryophyta in general? There was no single authoritative book on the subject that she knew of. Nobody had made a career out of it. Who would have wanted to? Mosses were not orchids, not cedars of Lebanon. They were not big or beautiful or showy. Nor was moss something medicinal and lucrative, upon which a man like Henry Whittaker could make a fortune. (Although Alma did remember her father telling her that he had packed his precious cinchona seeds in dried moss, to preserve them during transport to Java.) Perhaps Gronovius had written something about mosses? Maybe. But the old Dutchman’s work was nearly seventy years old by now—very much out of date and terribly incomplete. What was clear was that nobody paid much attention to the stuff. Alma had even chinked up the drafty old walls of her carriage house with wads of moss, as though it were common cotton batting.

She had overlooked it.

Alma stood up quickly, wrapped herself in a shawl, tucked a large magnifying glass into her pocket, and ran outside. It was a fresh morning, cool and somewhat overcast. The light was perfect. She did not have to go far. At a high spot along the riverbank, she knew there to be a large outcropping of damp limestone boulders, shaded by a screen of nearby trees. There, she remembered, she would find mosses, for that’s where she had harvested the insulation for her study.

She had remembered correctly. Just at that border of rock and wood, Alma came to the first boulder in the outcropping. The stone was larger than a sleeping ox. As she had suspected and hoped, it was blanketed in moss. Alma knelt in the tall grass and brought her face as near as she could to the stone. And there, rising no more than an inch above the surface of the boulder, she saw a great and tiny forest. Nothing moved within this mossy world. She peered at it so closely that she could smell it—dank and rich and old. Gently, Alma pressed her hand into this tight little timberland. It compacted itself under her palm and then sprang back to form without complaint. There was something stirring about its response to her. The moss felt warm and spongy, several degrees warmer than the air around it, and far more damp than she had expected. It appeared to have its own weather.

Alma put the magnifying lens to her eye and looked again. Now the miniature forest below her gaze sprang into majestic detail. She felt her breath catch. This was a stupefying kingdom. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. She rode her eye above the surprising landscape, following its paths in every direction. Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle, and here was a miniature ocean in a depression in the center of the boulder, where all the water pooled.

Just across this ocean—which was half the size of Alma’s shawl—she found another continent of moss altogether. On this new continent, everything was different. This corner of the boulder must receive more sunlight than the other, she surmised. Or slightly less rain? In any case, this was a new climate entirely. Here, the moss grew in mountain ranges the length of Alma’s arms, in elegant, pine tree–shaped clusters of darker, more somber green. On another quadrant of the same boulder still, she found patches of infinitesimally small deserts, inhabited by some kind of sturdy, dry, flaking moss that had the appearance of cactus. Elsewhere, she found deep, diminutive fjords—so deep that, incredibly, even now in the month of June—the mosses within were still chilled by lingering traces of winter ice. But she also found warm estuaries, miniature cathedrals, and limestone caves the size of her thumb.

Then Alma lifted her face and saw what was before her—dozens more such boulders, more than she could count, each one similarly carpeted, each one subtly different. She felt herself growing breathless. This was the entire world. This was bigger than a world. This was the firmament of the universe, as seen through one of William Herschel’s mighty telescopes. This was planetary and vast. These were ancient, unexplored galaxies, rolling forth in front of her—and it was all right here! She could still see her house from here. She could see the familiar old boats on the Schuylkill River. She could hear the distant voices of her father’s orchardmen working in the peach grove. If Hanneke had rung the bell for mealtime at that very instant, she would have heard it.

Alma’s world and the moss world had been knitted together this whole time, lying on top of each other, crawling over each other. But one of these worlds was loud and large and fast, where the other was quiet and tiny and slow—and only one of these worlds seemed immeasurable.

Alma sank her fingers into the shallow green fur and felt a surge of joyful anticipation. This could belong to her! No botanist before her had ever committed himself uniquely to the study of this undervalued phylum, but Alma could do it. She had the time for it, as well as the patience. She had the competence. She most certainly had the microscopes for it. She even had the publisher for it—because whatever else had occurred between them (or had not occurred between them), George Hawkes would always be happy to publish the findings of A. Whittaker, whatever she might turn up.

Recognizing all this, Alma’s existence at once felt bigger and much, much smaller—but a pleasant sort of smaller. The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature. Best of all, Alma realized, she would never learn everything about mosses—for she could tell already that there was simply too much of the stuff in the world; they were everywhere, and they were profoundly varied. She would probably die of old age before she understood even half of what was occurring in this one single boulder field. Well, huzzah to that! It meant that Alma had work stretched ahead of her for the rest of her life. She need not be idle. She need not be unhappy. Perhaps she need not even be lonely.

She had a task.

She would learn mosses.

If Alma had been a Roman Catholic, she might have crossed herself in gratitude to God at this discovery—for the encounter did have the weightless, wonderful sensation of religious conversion. But Alma was not a woman of excessive religious passion. Even so, her heart rose in hope. Even so, the words she now spoke aloud sounded every bit like prayer:

“Praise be the labors that lie before me,” she said. “Let us begin.”