The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twelve

By 1848, Alma Whittaker was just beginning work on her new book, The Complete Mosses of North America. In the previous twenty-six years, she had published two others—The Complete Mosses of Pennsylvania and The Complete Mosses of the Northeastern United States—both of which were long, exhaustive, and handsomely produced by her old friend George Hawkes.

Alma’s first two books had been warmly received within the botanical community. She had been flatteringly reviewed in a few of the more respectable journals, and was generally acknowledged as a wizard of bryophytic taxonomy. She had mastered the subject not only by studying the mosses of White Acre and its surroundings, but also by purchasing, trading, and cajoling samples from other botanical collectors all over the country and the world. These transactions had been easily enough executed. Alma already knew how to import botanicals, and moss was effortless to transport. All one had to do was dry it, box it up, and put it on a ship, and it would survive its journey without the slightest trouble. It took up little space and weighed virtually nothing, so ships’ captains did not mind having it as extra cargo. It never rotted. Dried moss was so perfectly designed for transport, in fact, that people had already been using it as packing material for centuries. Indeed, early in her explorations, Alma had discovered that her father’s dockside warehouses were already filled with several hundred varieties of mosses from across the planet, all tucked into neglected corners and crates, all ignored and unexamined—until Alma had gotten them under her microscope.

Through such explorations and imports, Alma had been able, over the past twenty-six years, to collect nearly eight thousand species of mosses, which she had preserved in a special herbarium, stored in the driest hayloft of the carriage house. Her body of knowledge in the field of global bryology, then, was almost excruciatingly dense, despite the fact that she herself had never traveled outside Pennsylvania. She kept up correspondence with botanists from Tierra del Fuego to Switzerland, and carefully watched the complex taxonomical debates that raged in the more obscure scientific journals as to whether this or that sprig of Neckera or Pogonatum constituted a new species, or was merely a modified variation of an already documented species. Sometimes she chimed in with her own opinions, with her own meticulously argued papers.

What’s more, she now published under her own full name. She was no longer “A. Whittaker,” but simply “Alma Whittaker.” No initials were appended to the name—no evidence of degrees, no membership in distinguished gentlemanly scientific organizations. Nor was she even a “Mrs.,” with the dignity that such a title affords a lady. By now, quite obviously, everyone knew she was a woman. It mattered little. Moss was not a competitive domain, and that is the reason, perhaps, that she had been allowed to enter the field with so little resistance. That, and her own dogged perseverance.

As Alma came to know the world of moss over the years, she better understood why nobody had properly studied it before: to the innocent eye, there appeared to be so little to study. Mosses were typically defined by what they lacked, not by what they were, and, indeed, they lacked much. Mosses bore no fruit. Mosses had no roots. Mosses could grow no more than a few inches tall, for they contained no internal cellular skeleton with which to support themselves. Mosses could not transport water within their bodies. Mosses did not even engage in sex. (Or at least they did not engage in sex in any obvious manner, unlike lilies or apple blossoms—or any other flower, in fact—with their overt displays of male and female organs.) Mosses kept their propagation a mystery to the naked human eye. For that reason, they were also known by the evocative name Cryptogamae—“hidden marriage.”

In every way mosses could seem plain, dull, modest, even primitive. The simplest weed sprouting from the humblest city sidewalk appeared infinitely more sophisticated by comparison. But here is what few people understood, and what Alma came to learn: Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone; scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil. Under shelves of exposed limestone, moss colonies create dripping, living sponges that hold on tight and drink calciferous water straight from the stone. Over time, this mix of moss and mineral will itself turn into travertine marble. Within that hard, creamy-white marble surface, one will forever see veins of blue, green, and gray—the traces of the antediluvian moss settlements. St. Peter’s Basilica itself was built from the stuff, both created by and stained with the bodies of ancient moss colonies.

Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones. Moss, Alma learned, is the first sign of botanic life to reappear on land that has been burned or otherwise stripped down to barrenness. Moss has the temerity to begin luring the forest back to life. It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.

The only thing mosses need is time, and it was beginning to appear to Alma that the world had plenty of time to offer. Other scholars, she noticed, were starting to suggest the same notion. By the 1830s, Alma had already read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which proposed that the planet was far older than anyone had yet realized—perhaps even millions of years old. She admired the more recent work of John Phillips, who by 1841 had presented a geological timeline even older than Lyell’s estimates. Phillips believed that Earth had been through three epochs of natural history already (the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic), and he had identified fossilized flora and fauna from each period—including fossilized mosses.

This notion of an unthinkably ancient world did not shock Alma, though it did shock a good many other people, as it directly contradicted the Bible’s teachings. But Alma had her own peculiar theories about time, which were only bolstered by the fossil records in primordial ocean shale to which Lyell and Phillips had referred in their studies. Alma had come to believe, in fact, that there were several different sorts of time that operated simultaneously throughout the cosmos; as a diligent taxonomist, she had even gone so far as to differentiate and name them. Firstly, Alma had determined, there was such a thing as Human Time, which was a narrative of limited, mortal memory, based upon the flawed recollections of recorded history. Human Time was a short and horizontal mechanism. It stretched out straight and narrow, from the fairly recent past to the barely imaginable future. The most striking characteristic of Human Time, however, was that it moved with such amazing quickness. It was a snap of the finger across the universe. Most unfortunately for Alma, her mortal days—like everyone else’s mortal days—fell within the purview of Human Time. Thus, she would not be here long, as she was most painfully aware. She was a mere blink of existence, as was everyone else.

At the other end of the spectrum, Alma postulated, there was Divine Time—an incomprehensible eternity in which galaxies grew, and where God dwelled. She knew nothing about Divine Time. Nobody did. In fact, she became easily irritated at people who claimed to have any comprehension whatsoever of Divine Time. She had no interest in studying Divine Time, because she believed there was no way for a human mind to comprehend it. It was time outside of time. So she left it alone. Nonetheless, she sensed that it existed, and she suspected that it hovered in some kind of massive, infinite stasis.

Closer to home, returning to earth, Alma also believed in something she called Geological Time—about which Charles Lyell and John Phillips had recently written so convincingly. Natural history fell into this category. Geological Time moved at a pace that felt nearly eternal, nearly divine. It moved at the pace of stone and mountains. Geological Time was in no hurry, and had been ticking along, some scholars were now suggesting, far longer than anyone had yet surmised.

But somewhere between Geological Time and Human Time, Alma posited, there was something else—Moss Time. By comparison to Geological Time, Moss Time was blindingly fast, for mosses could make progress in a thousand years that a stone could not dream of accomplishing in a million. But relative to Human Time, Moss Time was achingly slow. To the unschooled human eye, moss did not even seem to move at all. But moss did move, and with extraordinary results. Nothing seemed to happen, but then, a decade or so later, all would be changed. It was merely that moss moved so slowly that most of humanity could not track it.

Alma could track it, though. She was tracking it. Long before 1848, she had already trained herself to observe her world, as much as possible, through the protracted clockwork of Moss Time. Alma had drilled tiny painted flags into the stones at the edges of her limestone outcropping to mark the progress of each individual moss colony, and she had now been watching this prolonged drama for twenty-six years. Which varieties of mosses would advance across the boulder, and which varieties would retreat? How long would it take? She observed these great, inaudible, slow-moving dominions of green as they expanded and contracted. She measured their progress in fingernail lengths and by half decades.

As Alma studied Moss Time, she tried not to worry about her own mortal life. She herself was trapped within the limits of Human Time, but there was nothing to be done for it. She would simply have to make the best of the short, mayfly-like existence she had been granted. She was already forty-eight years old. Forty-eight years was nothing to a moss colony, but it was a considerable accretion of years for a woman. Her cycles of menstruation had recently finished. Her hair was turning white. If she was fortunate, she thought, she might be permitted another twenty or thirty years in which to live and to study—forty more years at the most. That was the best she could wish for, and she wished for it every day. She had so much to learn, and not enough time in which to learn it.

If the mosses had known how soon Alma Whittaker would be gone, she often thought, they might pity her.

Meanwhile, life at White Acre carried on as ever. The Whittakers’ botanical business had not expanded for years, but neither had it contracted; it had stabilized, one could say, into a steady machine of profitable returns. The greenhouses were still the best in America, and there were, just now, more than six thousand different varieties of plants on the property. There was a craze at the moment in America for ferns and palms (“pteridomania,” the cheeky journalists called it) and Henry was reaping the benefit of that fad, growing and selling all manner of exotic fronds. There was much money to be made, too, on the mills and farms that Henry owned, and a good bit of his land had been profitably sold to the railroad companies in the past few years. He was interested in the burgeoning rubber trade, and had recently used his contacts in Brazil and Bolivia to begin investing in that uncertain new business.

So Henry Whittaker was still very much alive—perhaps miraculously so. His health, at the age of eighty-eight, had not much declined, which was rather impressive, considering how strenuously he had always lived and how vigorously he had always complained. His eyes gave him trouble, but with a magnifying lens and a good lamp, he could keep track of his paperwork. With a sturdy cane and a dry afternoon, he could still walk his property, dressed—as ever—like an eighteenth-century lord of the manor.

Dick Yancey—the trained crocodile—continued to manage the Whittaker Company’s international interests ably, importing new and lucrative medicinal plants like simarouba, chondrodendron, and many others. James Garrick, Henry’s old Quaker business partner, was now deceased, but James’s son John had taken over the pharmacy, and Garrick & Whittaker medicinal brands still sold briskly across Philadelphia and beyond. Henry’s dominance of the international quinine trade had been dealt a blow by French competition, but he was doing well closer to home. He had recently launched a new product, Garrick & Whittaker’s Vigorous Pills—a concoction of Jesuit’s bark, gum myrrh, sassafras oil, and distilled water, which professed to cure every human malady from tertian fevers and blistering rashes to feminine malaise. The product was a tremendous success. The pills were inexpensive to manufacture and brought in a steady profit, particularly in the summertime, when illness and fever broke out across the city, and every family, rich or poor, lived in fear of pestilence. Mothers would try the pills for anything afflicting their children.

The city had risen up around White Acre. Neighborhoods bustled now where once there had been only quiet farms. There were omnibuses, canals, railroad lines, paved highways, turnpikes, and steam packets. The population of the United States had doubled since the Whittakers had arrived in 1792, and its flag now boasted thirty stars. Trains running in every direction spit hot ash and cinders. Ministers and moralists feared that the vibrations and jostling of such fast travel would throw weak-minded women into sexual frenzies. Poets wrote odes to nature, even as nature vanished before their eyes. There were a dozen millionaires in Philadelphia, where once there had been only Henry Whittaker. All this was new. But there was still cholera and yellow fever and diphtheria and pneumonia and death. All that was old. Thus, the pharmaceutical business remained strong.

After Beatrix’s death, Henry had not married again, nor shown any interest in marriage. He had no need for a wife; he had Alma. Alma was good to Henry, and sometimes, once a year or so, he even praised her for it. By now, she had learned how to best organize her own existence around her father’s whims and demands. For the most part she enjoyed his company (she could never help her fondness for him) although she was keenly aware that every hour she spent in her father’s presence was an hour lost for the study of mosses. She gave Henry her afternoons and evenings, but kept the mornings for her own work. He was ever more slow to rise as he got older, so this schedule functioned well. He sometimes wished for dinner guests, but far less frequently now. They might have company four times a year these days, instead of four times a week.

Henry remained capricious and difficult. Alma might find herself woken during the night by the apparently ageless Hanneke de Groot, telling her, “Your father wants you, child.” At which point Alma would rise, wrap herself in a warm robe, and go to her father’s study—where she would find Henry sleepless and irritated, shuffling through a lake of papers, demanding a dram of gin and a friendly round of backgammon at three o’clock in the morning. Alma would oblige him without complaint, knowing that Henry would only be more tired the next day, and thus afford her more hours for her own work.

“Have I ever told you about Ceylon?” he would ask, and she would let him talk himself to sleep. Sometimes she would fall asleep, too, to the sound of his old stories. Dawn would break on the old man and his white-haired daughter, both collapsed across their chairs, an unfinished game of backgammon between them. Alma would rise and tidy up the room. She would call for Hanneke and the butler to take her father back to his bed. Then she would bolt down her breakfast and walk either to her study in the carriage house or to her outpost of moss boulders, where she could turn her attention once more to her own labors.

This is how things had been for more than two and a half decades now. This is how she thought things would always be. It was a quiet but not unhappy life for Alma Whittaker.

Not unhappy in the least.

Others, however, had not been so fortunate.

Alma’s old friend George Hawkes, for instance, had not found happiness in his marriage to Retta Snow. Nor was Retta in the least bit happy. Knowing this did not bring Alma any consolation or joy. Another woman might have rejoiced at this information, as a sort of dark revenge to her own broken heart, but Alma was not the sort of character who took satisfaction from somebody else’s suffering. What’s more, however much the marriage had once hurt her, Alma no longer loved George Hawkes. That fire had dimmed years ago. To have continued loving him under the reality of the circumstances would have been immeasurably foolish, and she had already played the fool too far. However, Alma did pity George. He was a good soul, and he had always been a good friend to her, but never had a man chosen a wife more poorly.

The staid botanical publisher had been at first merely baffled by his flighty and mercurial bride, but as time passed he had grown more openly irritated. George and Retta had occasionally dined at White Acre during the first years of their marriage, but Alma soon noticed that George would darken and grow tense whenever Retta spoke, as though he dreaded in advance whatever she was about to say. Eventually he stopped speaking at the dinner table altogether—almost in the hope, it seemed, that his wife would stop speaking, too. If that had been his wish, it hadn’t worked. Retta, for her part, became increasingly nervous around her quiet husband, which made her speak only more frantically, which, in turn, only made her husband more determinedly silent.

After a few years of this, Retta had developed a most peculiar habit, which Alma found painful to watch. Retta would flutter her fingers helplessly in front of her mouth as she spoke, as though trying to catch the words as they came out of her—as though trying to stop the words, or even thrust them back in. Sometimes Retta was actually able to abort a sentence in the middle of some crazed thought or another, and then she would press her fingers against her lips to prevent more speech from spilling out. But this triumph was even more difficult to witness, for that last, strange, unfinished sentence would hang uncomfortably in the air, while Retta, stricken, stared at her soundless husband, her eyes wild with apology.

After enough of these upsetting performances, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkes stopped coming to dinner at all. Alma saw them only in their own home, when she came down to Arch Street to discuss publishing details with George.

Wifehood, as it turned out, did not suit Mrs. Retta Snow Hawkes. She simply was not crafted for it. Indeed, adulthood itself did not suit her. There were too many restrictions involved in the custom, and far too much seriousness expected. Retta was no longer a silly girl who could go driving about the city so freely in her small two-wheeled chaise. She was now the wife and helpmeet of one of Philadelphia’s most respected publishers, and expected to comport herself as such. It was no longer dignified for Retta to be seen at the theater alone. Well, it never had been dignified, but in the past nobody had forbidden it. George forbade it. He did not enjoy the theater. George also required his wife to attend church services—several times a week, in fact—where Retta squirmed, childlike, in tedium. She could not dress so gaily after her marriage, either, nor break into song at the slightest whim. Or, rather, she could break into song, and sometimes did, but it did not look correct, and only infuriated her husband.

As for motherhood, Retta had not been able to manage that responsibility either. Within a year of marriage there had been a pregnancy in the Hawkes household, but that pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. The next year, there had been another unsuccessful pregnancy, and the year after that, another. After losing her fifth child, Retta had taken to her room in a most violent mania of despair. Neighbors could hear her sobbing, it was reported, from several houses away. Poor George Hawkes had no idea what to do with this desperate woman, and he was quite unable to work for several days in a row on account of his wife’s derangement. He had finally sent a message up to White Acre, begging for Alma to please come down to Arch Street and sit with her old friend, who was beyond all consolation.

But by the time Alma had arrived, Retta was already sleeping, with a thumb in her mouth and her beautiful hair splayed across the pillow like bare black branches against a pale winter sky. George explained that the pharmacy had sent over a bit of laudanum, and this had seemed to work.

“Pray, George, try not to make a habit of that,” Alma had warned. “Retta has an unusually sensitive constitution, and too much laudanum may do her harm. I know she can be a bit nonsensical at times, and even tragic. But my understanding of Retta is that she requires only patience and love in order to find her own way back to happiness. Perhaps if you give her more time . . .”

“I apologize for having disturbed you,” George said.

“Not at all,” Alma said. “I am always at your disposal, and Retta’s, too.”

Alma wanted to say more—but what? She felt she may have spoken too freely already, or perhaps even criticized him as a husband. Poor man. He was exhausted.

“Friendship is here, George,” she said, and laid her hand on his arm. “Use it. You may call upon me at any time.”

Well, he did. He called upon Alma in 1826, when Retta cut off all her hair. He called upon Alma in 1835, when Retta vanished for three days, and was ultimately found in Fishtown, sleeping amid a pile of street children. He called upon her in 1842, when Retta came after a servant with a pair of sewing scissors, claiming that the woman was a ghost. The servant had not suffered serious injury, but now nobody would take Retta her breakfast. He called upon her in 1846, when Retta had started writing long, incomprehensible letters, composed more of tears than ink.

George did not know how to manage these scenes and muddles. It was all a dreadful distraction to his business and to his mind. He was publishing more than fifty books a year now, along with an array of scientific journals and a new, expensive, subscription-only Octavo of Exotic Flora (to be released quarterly, and illustrated with impressively large hand-tinted lithographs of the finest quality). All these endeavors required his absolute attention. He had no time for a collapsing wife.

Alma had no time for it either, but still she came. Sometimes—during particularly bad episodes—she would even spend the night with Retta, sleeping in the Hawkeses’ own conjugal bed, with her arms around her trembling friend, while George slept on a pallet in the print shop next door. She got the impression that he usually slept there nowadays, anyway.

“Will you still love me and will you still be kind to me,” Retta would ask Alma in the middle of the night, “if I become the very devil himself?”

“I will always love you,” Alma reassured the only friend she had ever had. “And you could never be the devil, Retta. You simply must rest, and not trouble yourself or the others anymore . . .”

In the mornings after such episodes, the three of them would breakfast together in the Hawkeses’ dining room. This was never comfortable. George was no light conversationalist under the best of circumstances, and Retta—depending on how much laudanum she had been given the night before—would be either frenzied or stupefied. Intervals of lucidity became ever more rare. Sometimes Retta chewed on a rag, and would not let it be taken from her. Alma would search for some topic of conversation that would suit all three of them, but no such topic existed. No such topic had ever existed. She could speak with Retta about nonsense, or she could speak with George about botany, but she could never puzzle out a way to speak to them both.

Then, in April of 1848, George Hawkes called upon Alma again. She was working at her desk—attacking with zeal the puzzle of a poorly preserved Dicranum consorbrinum recently sent to her by an amateur collector in Minnesota—when a thin young boy arrived on horseback, carrying an urgent message: Miss Whittaker’s immediate presence was please requested at the Hawkes home on Arch Street. There had been an accident.

“What sort of accident?” Alma asked, rising from her work in alarm.

“A fire!” the boy said. It was difficult for him to restrain his glee. Boys always loved fires.

“Dear heavens! Has anyone been injured?”

“No, ma’am,” said the boy, visibly disappointed.

Retta, Alma soon learned, had set a fire in her bedroom. For some reason, she had decided that she needed to burn her bedclothes and curtains. Mercifully, the weather was damp, and the fabrics had only smoldered, not ignited. A good deal more smoke than flame had been produced, but the damage to the bedroom was considerable nonetheless. The damage to the morale of the household was even more severe. Two more maids had resigned. No one could be expected to live in this home. No one could bear this demented mistress.

When Alma arrived, George was pale and overwhelmed. Retta had been sedated, and lay heavily asleep across a couch. The house smelled of a brush fire after rain.

“Alma!” George said, rushing to her. He took her hand in his. He had done that only once before, more than three decades earlier. It was different this time. Alma felt ashamed of even remembering the last time. His eyes were wide with panic. “She cannot stay here any longer.”

“She is your wife, George.”

“I know what she is! I know what she is. But she cannot stay here, Alma. She is not safe, and nobody is safe around her. She could have killed us all, and ignited the print shop, as well. You must find a place for her to stay.”

“A hospital?” Alma asked. But Retta had been to the hospital so many times, where, it always seemed, nobody could do much for her. She always returned home from the hospital even more agitated than when she had been admitted.

“No, Alma. She needs a permanent place. A different sort of home. You know of what I speak! I cannot have her here for another night. She must live elsewhere. You must forgive me for this. You know more than anyone, and yet not even you know fully what she has become. I have not slept a night in this past week. Nobody in this household sleeps, for fear of what she will do. She requires two people with her at all times, to ensure that she does not harm herself or another. Do not force me to say more! I know that you understand what I am asking. You must attend to this for me.”

Without questioning for a moment why it must be she who must attend to this, Alma attended to it. With a few well-placed letters, she was quickly able to secure admission for her friend at the Griffon Asylum in Trenton, New Jersey. The building had just been erected the year prior, and Dr. Victor Griffon—a respected Philadelphia figure who had once been a guest at White Acre—had designed the property himself, for optimum serenity to the disturbed mind. He was the foremost American advocate of moral care for the mentally disturbed, and his methods, it was said, were quite humane. His patients were never chained to the walls, for instance, as Retta had once been chained at the Philadelphia hospital. The asylum was said to be a serene and beautiful place, with fine gardens and, naturally, high walls. It was not unpleasant, people said. Nor was it inexpensive, as Alma had learned when she paid, in advance, for the first year of Retta’s stay. She had no wish to trouble George with the bill, and Retta’s own parents had long ago passed away, leaving only debts behind them.

It was a sad business for Alma, making these arrangements, but everyone agreed it was for the best. Retta would have her own room at Griffon, such that she could not harm another patient, and she would also have a nurse with her at all hours. Knowing this brought Alma comfort. Moreover, the therapies at the asylum were modern and scientific. Retta’s madness would be treated with hydropathy, with a centrifugal spinning board, and with kind moral guidance. She would have no access to either fire or scissors. Alma had been assured of this last fact by Dr. Griffon himself, who had already diagnosed Retta with something he called “exhaustion of the nervous fountain.”

So Alma made all the arrangements. George was required only to sign the certificate of insanity and accompany his wife, along with Alma, to Trenton. The three of them went by private carriage, because Retta could not be trusted on a train. They brought a strap with them, in case she needed restraining, but Retta bore herself along lightly, humming little songs.

When they arrived at the asylum, George walked briskly ahead across the great lawn toward the front entrance, with Alma and Retta following just behind him, arm in arm, as though they were enjoying a stroll.

“Such a pretty house this is!” Retta said, admiring the elegant brick building.

“I agree,” Alma said, with a surge of relief. “I am happy that you like it, Retta, for this is where you will live now.” It was not clear how much Retta understood about what was happening, but she did not seem agitated.

“These are lovely gardens,” Retta went on.

“I agree,” said Alma.

“I cannot bear to see flowers cut down, though.”

“But, Retta, you are so silly to say such a thing! Nobody loves a bouquet of freshly cut flowers more than you!”

“I am being punished for the most unspeakable offenses,” Retta replied, quite calmly.

“You are not being punished, little bird.”

“I am terrified of God, more than all.”

“God has no complaint with you, Retta.”

“I am plagued by the most mysterious pains in my chest. It feels sometimes as if my heart will be crushed. Not at the moment, you see, but it comes on so quickly.”

“You will meet friends here who can help you.”

“When I was a young girl,” Retta said in this same relaxed tone, “I used to go on compromising walks with men. Did you know that about me, Alma?”

“Hush, Retta.”

“There is no need to hush me. George knows. I’ve told him many times. I permitted those men to handle me however they liked, and I even allowed myself to take money from them—though you know I never needed the money.”

“Hush, Retta. You are not speaking sensibly.”

“Did you ever wish to go on compromising walks with men? When you were young, I mean?”

“Retta, please . . .”

“The ladies in the buttery at White Acre used to do it, too. They showed me how to do things to men, and taught me how much money to take for my services. I bought myself gloves and ribbons with the money. I once even bought a ribbon for you!”

Alma slowed her pace, hoping George could not hear them speaking. But she knew he had already heard everything. “Retta, you are so weary, you must save your voice . . .”

“But did you never, Alma? Did you never wish to commit compromising acts? Did you never feel a wicked hunger, inside the body?” Retta clutched her arm and gazed up at her friend quite piteously, searching Alma’s face. Then she slumped again, resigned. “No, of course you didn’t. For you are good. You and Prudence are both good. Whereas I am the very devil himself.”

Now Alma felt that her own heart would break. She looked at the wide, hunched shoulders of George Hawkes as he walked ahead of them. She felt overcome with shame. Had she never wished to commit compromising acts with men? Oh, if Retta only knew! If anyone knew! Alma was a forty-eight-year-old spinster with a dried-up womb, and yet she still found her way to the binding closet several times a month. Many times a month, even! What’s more, all the illicit texts of her youth—Cum Grano Salis, and the rest of them—still pulsed in her memory. Sometimes she took those books out of their hidden trunk, in the hayloft of the carriage house, and read them again. What did Alma not know of wicked hungers?

Alma felt that it would be immoral of her to say nothing of reassurance or allegiance to this broken little creature. How could Alma let Retta believe she was the only wicked girl in the world? But George Hawkes was right there, walking only a few feet in front of them, and surely he could hear all. So Alma did not console, nor did she offer commiseration. All she said was this: “Once you settle into your new home here, my dear little Retta, you will be able to walk in these gardens every day. Then you will be at peace.”

On the carriage ride home from Trenton, Alma and George were mostly silent.

“She will be well taken care of,” Alma said at last. “Dr. Griffon assured me of it himself.”

“We are each of us born into trouble,” George said, by means of reply. “It is a sad fate to come into this world at all.”

“That may be true,” Alma replied carefully, surprised at the vehemence of his words. “Yet we must find the patience and resignation to endure our challenges as they arise to meet us.”

“Yes. So we are taught,” George said. “Do you know, Alma, there were times when I wished Retta would find relief in death, rather than suffer this continued torment, or bring such torment to myself and to others?”

She could not imagine what to say in response. He stared at her, his face twisted by darkness and agony. After a few moments, she stumbled forth with this statement: “Where there is life, George, there is still hope. Death is so terribly final. It will come soon enough to us all. I would hesitate to wish it hastened upon anyone.”

George shut his eyes and did not answer. This did not seem to have been a reassuring response.

“I will make a practice of coming to Trenton to visit Retta once a month,” Alma said, in a lighter tone. “If you wish, you may join me. I will take her copies of Joy’s Lady’s Book. She will like that.”

For the next two hours, George did not speak. For a while, it appeared that he was falling in and out of sleep. As they neared Philadelphia, though, he opened his eyes. He looked as unhappy as anyone Alma had ever seen. Alma, her heart going out to the man, elected to change the subject. A few weeks earlier, George had lent Alma a new book, just published out of London, on the subject of salamanders. Perhaps a mention of this would lift his spirits. So she thanked him now for the loan, and spoke of the book in some detail as the carriage moved slowly toward the city, concluding at last, “In general, I found it to be a volume of considerable thought and accurate analysis, though it was abominably written and terribly arranged—so I do have to ask you, George, do these people in England not have editors?”

George looked up from his feet and said, quite abruptly, “Your sister’s husband has made some trouble for himself of late.”

Clearly, he had not heard a word she’d spoken. Furthermore, the change of subject surprised Alma. George was not a gossip, and it struck her as odd that he would refer to Prudence’s husband at all. Perhaps, she supposed, he was so distraught by the day’s events that he was not quite himself. She did not wish to make him feel uncomfortable, however, so she took up the conversation, as though she and George always discussed such matters.

“What has he done?” she asked.

“Arthur Dixon has published a reckless pamphlet,” George explained wearily, “to which he was foolish enough to append his own name, expressing his opinion that the government of the United States of America is a beastly bit of moral fraudulence on account of its ongoing affiliation with human slavery.”

There was nothing shocking in this news. Prudence and Arthur Dixon had been committed abolitionists for many years. They were well known across Philadelphia for antislavery views that leaned toward the radical. Prudence, in her spare hours, taught reading to free blacks at a local Quaker school. She also cared for children at the Colored Orphans’ Asylum, and often spoke at meetings of women’s abolition societies. Arthur Dixon produced pamphlets frequently—even incessantly—and had served on the editorial board of the Liberator. To be frank about it, many people in Philadelphia had grown rather weary of the Dixons, with their pamphlets and articles and speeches. (“For a man who fancies himself an agitator,” Henry always said of his son-in-law, “Arthur Dixon is an awful bore.”)

“But what of it?” Alma asked George Hawkes. “We all know that my sister and her husband are active in such causes.”

“Professor Dixon has gone further this time, Alma. He not only wishes for slavery to be abolished immediately, but he is also of the opinion we should neither pay taxes nor respect American law until that unlikely event occurs. He encourages us to take to the streets with flaming torches and the like, demanding the instant liberation of all black men.”

“Arthur Dixon?” Alma could not help herself from saying the full name of her dull old tutor. “Flaming torches? That doesn’t sound like him.”

“You may read it yourself and see. Everyone has been speaking of it. They say he is fortunate to still hold his position at the university. Your sister, it seems, has spoken in agreement with him.”

Alma contemplated this news. “That is a bit alarming,” she agreed at last.

“We are each of us born to trouble,” George repeated, rubbing his hand over his face in exhaustion.

“Yet we must find the patience and resignation—” Alma began again lamely, but George cut her off.

“Your poor sister,” he said. “And with young children in her house, besides. Please let me know, Alma, if there is anything I can ever do to help your family. You have always been so kind to us.”