The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Fifteen

They became inseparable, Alma and Ambrose. They soon spent nearly every moment together. Alma instructed Hanneke to move Mr. Pike out of the guest wing and into Prudence’s old bedroom, on the second floor of the house, directly across the hall from Alma’s own room. Hanneke protested the incursion of a stranger into the family’s private living quarters (it was not proper, she said, nor safe, and most especially, we do not know him), but Alma overruled her, and the move was made. Alma herself cleared space for Ambrose in the carriage house, in a disused tack room next to her own study. Within a fortnight, his first printing presses had arrived. Soon after that, Alma purchased for him a fine bureau-escritoire, with pigeonholes and stacks of broad, shallow drawers to hold his drawings.

“I’ve never before had my own desk,” Ambrose told her. “It makes me feel uncharacteristically important. It makes me feel like an aide-de-camp.”

A single door separated their two studies—and that door was never closed. All day long, Alma and Ambrose walked back and forth into each other’s rooms, looking in on the other’s progress, and showing each other some item or other of interest in a specimen jar, or on a microscope slide. They ate buttered toast together every morning, had gypsy lunches out in the fields, and stayed up late into the night, helping Henry with his correspondence, or looking over old volumes from the White Acre library. On Sundays, Ambrose joined Alma for church with the dull, droning Swedish Lutherans, dutifully reciting prayers alongside her.

They spoke or they were silent—it did not seem to matter much one way or the other—but they were never apart.

During the hours that Alma worked in the moss beds, Ambrose sprawled out on the grass nearby, reading. While Ambrose sketched in the orchid house, Alma pulled up a chair beside him, working on her own correspondence. She had never before spent much time in the orchid house, but since Ambrose’s arrival, it had been transformed into the most stunning location at White Acre. He had spent nearly two weeks cleaning each of the hundreds of glass panes so that sunlight entered in crisp, unfiltered columns. He mopped and waxed the floors until they glittered. What’s more—and rather astonishingly—he spent another week burnishing the leaves of every individual orchid plant with banana peels, until they all shone like tea services polished by a loyal butler.

“What’s next, Ambrose?” Alma teased. “Shall we now comb out the hair of every fern on the property?”

“I do not think the ferns would object,” he said.

In fact, something curious had occurred at White Acre right after Ambrose brought such shine and order to the orchid house: the rest of the estate suddenly seemed drab by comparison. It was as though someone had polished only a single spot on a dingy old mirror, and now, as a result, the rest of the mirror looked truly filthy. One wouldn’t have noticed it before, but now it was obvious. It was as though Ambrose had opened an inlet to something previously invisible, and Alma could finally see a truth she would otherwise have been blind to forever: White Acre, elegant as it was, had incrementally fallen into a state of crumbling neglect over the past quarter century.

With this realization, Alma got it in her mind to bring the rest of the estate up to the same sparkling standard as the orchid house. After all, when was the last time every single pane of glass in any of the other greenhouses had been cleaned? She could not recall. There was mildew and dust everywhere she looked now. The fences all needed whitewashing and repair, weeds grew in the gravel drive, and cobwebs filled the library. Every rug needed a stout banging, and every furnace was in need of overhaul. The palms in the great glasshouse were nearly bursting through the roof, they had not been cut back in so many years. There were desiccated animal bones in the corners of the barns from years of marauding cats, the carriage brass had been allowed to tarnish, and the maids’ uniforms appeared to be decades out of date—because they were.

Alma hired seamstresses to make new uniforms for everyone on the staff, and she even commissioned two new linen frocks for herself. She offered a new suit to Ambrose, but he asked if he could have four new paintbrushes, instead. (Exactly four. She offered five. He did not need five, he said. Four would be luxury enough.) She enlisted a squadron of fresh young help to assist in bringing the place back up to shine. She realized that, as older White Acre workers had died or been dismissed over the years, they had never been replaced. Only a third as many staff worked at the estate now as there had been twenty-five years ago, and that was simply not enough.

Hanneke resisted the new arrivals at first. “I do not have the strength of body or mind anymore to make good workers out of bad ones,” she complained.

“But, Hanneke,” Alma protested. “Look how cleverly Mr. Pike has spruced up the orchid house! Don’t we want everything at the estate to look so fine?”

“We have far too much cleverness in this world already,” Hanneke replied, “and not enough good sense. Your Mr. Pike is only making work for others. Your mother would spin in her grave, to know that people are going about polishing flowers by hand.”

“Not the flowers,” Alma corrected. “The leaves.”

But in time even Hanneke surrendered, and it wasn’t long before Alma saw her delegating the new young staff to haul out the old flour barrels from the cellar, to dry them in the sun—a chore that had not been performed, as far as Alma could remember, since Andrew Jackson had been president.

“Don’t go too far with the cleaning,” Ambrose cautioned. “A little neglect can be of benefit. Have you ever noticed how the most splendid lilacs, for instance, are the ones that grow up alongside derelict barns and abandoned shacks? Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.”

“So speaks the man who polishes his orchids with banana peels!” Alma said, laughing.

“Ah, but those are orchids,” Ambrose said. “That’s different. Orchids are holy relics, Alma, and need to be treated with reverence.”

“But, Ambrose,” Alma said, “this entire estate was beginning to look like a holy relic . . . after a holy war!”

They called each other “Alma” and “Ambrose” now.

May passed. June passed. July arrived.

Had she ever been this happy?

She had never been this happy.

Alma’s existence, before the arrival of Ambrose Pike, had been a good enough one. Yes, her world may have looked small, and her days repetitive, but none of it had been unbearable to her. She had made the best of her fate. Her work with mosses occupied her mind, and she knew that her research was unimpeachable and honest. She had her journals, her herbarium, her microscopes, her botanical disquisitions, her correspondence with botanists and collectors overseas, her duties toward her father. She had her customs, habits, and responsibilities. She had her dignity. True, she was something like a book that had opened to the same page every single day for nearly thirty straight years—but it had not been such a bad page, at that. She had been sanguine. Contented. By all measures, it had been a good life.

She could never return to that life now.

In mid-July of 1848, Alma went to visit Retta at the Griffon Asylum for the first time since her friend had been interned there. Alma had not kept her word to visit Retta every month, as she had promised George Hawkes she would, but White Acre had been so busy and pleasant since Ambrose’s arrival that she had put Retta out of her mind. By July, though, Alma’s conscience was beginning to scratch at her, and thus she made arrangements to take her carriage up to Trenton for the day. She wrote a note to George Hawkes, asking if he would like to join her, but he demurred. He gave no explanation as to why, although Alma knew he simply could not bear to see Retta in her current state. Ambrose, however, offered to keep Alma company for the day.

“But you have so much work to do here,” Alma said. “Nor is it likely to be a pleasurable visit.”

“The work can wait. I would like to meet your friend. I have a curiosity, I must confess, about diseases of the imagination. I would be interested to see the asylum.”

After an uneventful ride to Trenton, and a short conversation with the supervising doctor, Alma and Ambrose were escorted to Retta’s room. They found her in a small private chamber with a neat bedstead, a table and chair, a strip of carpet, and an empty space on the wall where a mirror had once hung, before it had to be removed—the nurse explained—because it was upsetting the patient.

“We tried to put her in with another lady for a spell,” the nurse said, “but she wouldn’t have it. Became violent. Fits of disquiet and terror. There is reason to fear for anyone left in a room with her. Better off on her own.”

“What do you do for her do when she suffers such fits?” Alma asked.

“Ice baths,” said the nurse. “And we block her eyes and ears. It seems to calm her.”

It was not an unpleasant room. It had a view of the back gardens, and the light was plentiful, but still, Alma thought, her friend must be lonely. Retta was dressed neatly and her hair was clean and braided, but she looked apparitional. Pale as ashes. She was still a pretty thing, but mostly, by now, she was just a thing. She did not appear either pleased or alarmed to see Alma, nor did she show any interest in Ambrose. Alma went and sat beside her friend, and held her hand. Retta allowed it without protest. A few of her fingers, Alma noticed, were bandaged at the tips.

“What has happened there?” Alma asked the nurse.

“She bites herself at night,” the nurse explained. “We can’t get her to quit off doing it.”

Alma had brought her friend a small bag of lemon candies and a paper funnel full of violets, but Retta merely looked at the gifts as though she was not certain which to eat and which to admire. Even the recent edition of Joy’s Lady’s Book that Alma had purchased along the way was met with indifference. Alma suspected that the flowers, the sweets, and the magazine would ultimately go home with the nurse.

“We have come to visit you,” Alma said to Retta, rather lamely.

“Then why are you not here?” Retta asked, in a voice blunted by laudanum.

“We are here, darling. We are right here before you.”

Retta looked at Alma blankly for a while, then turned to look out the window again.

“I had meant to bring her a prism,” Alma said to Ambrose, “but I’ve gone and forgotten it. She always loved prisms.”

“You should sing her a song,” Ambrose suggested quietly.

“I am not a singer,” Alma said.

“I do not think she would object.”

But Alma couldn’t even think of a song. Instead she leaned over to Retta’s ear and whispered, “Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”

Retta failed to respond.

Alma turned to Ambrose, and asked, almost in a panic, “Do you know a song?”

“I know many, Alma. But I don’t know her song.”

In the carriage ride home, Alma and Ambrose were thoughtful and quiet. At last, Ambrose asked, “Was she always this way?”

“Stupefied? Never. She was always a bit mad, but she was such a delight as a girl. She had wild humor and no small amount of charm. All who knew her loved her. She even brought gaiety and laughter to me and to my sister—and, as I’ve told you, Prudence and I were never ones for shared gaiety. But her disturbances increased over the years. And now, as you see . . .”

“Yes. As I see. Poor creature. I have such sympathy for the mad. Whenever I am around them, I feel it straight to my soul. I think anyone who claims never to have felt insane is lying.”

Alma pondered this. “I honestly do not believe I have ever felt insane,” she said. “I wonder if I’m telling a falsehood when I say that to you. I don’t think so.”

Ambrose smiled. “Of course not. I should have made an exception for you, Alma. You are not like the rest of us. You have a mind of such solidity and substance. Your emotions are durable as a strongbox. This is why people feel so reassured around you.”

“Do they?” Alma asked, genuinely surprised to hear it.

“Indeed, they do.”

“That’s a curious thought. I’ve never heard it expressed,” Alma looked out the window of the carriage, and contemplated further. Then she remembered something. “Or perhaps I have heard it expressed. You know, Retta herself used to say that I possessed a rather reassuring chin.”

“The entirety of your being is reassuring, Alma. Even your voice is reassuring. For those of us who sometimes feel as though we are blowing about our lives like chaff on a miller’s floor, your presence is a most appreciated consolation.”

Alma did not know how to respond to this surprising statement, so she tried to dismiss it. “Come now, Ambrose,” she said. “You are such a steady-minded man—surely you have never felt insane?”

He thought for a moment, selecting his words carefully: “One cannot help but feel how closely one lies to the same condition as your friend Retta Snow.”

“No, Ambrose, surely not!”

When he did not immediately reply, she felt herself grow anxious.

“Ambrose,” she said more gently. “Surely not, yes?”

Again, he was careful, and took a long time to answer. “I refer to the sense of dislocation from this world—coupled with a feeling of alignment to some other world.”

“To what other world?” Alma asked.

His hesitation to reply made her feel as though she had overreached, so she attempted a more casual tone. “I apologize, Ambrose. I have a dreadful habit of not resting on questions until I have found a satisfactory answer. It’s my nature, I’m afraid. I hope you will not think me rude.”

“You are not rude,” Ambrose said. “I enjoy your curiosity. It’s merely that I’m uncertain how to offer you a satisfactory answer. One does not wish to lose the fondness of people one admires by revealing too much of oneself.”

So Alma released the topic, hoping, perhaps, that the subject of madness would never be mentioned again. As though to neutralize the moment, she brought out a book from her purse and attempted to read. The carriage was too jolting for comfortable reading, and her mind was much distracted by what she had just heard, but she pretended to be absorbed in her book regardless.

After a long while, Ambrose said, “I have not yet told you why I left Harvard, those many years ago.”

She put the book away and turned to him.

“I suffered an episode, Alma,” he said.

“Of madness?” Alma asked. She spoke in her customary direct way, although her stomach fell in fear at how he might reply.

“It may have been. I’m not certain what one would call it. My mother thought it was madness. My friends thought it was madness. The doctors believed it to be madness. I myself felt it was something else.”

“Such as?” she asked, again in her normal voice, although her trepidation was mounting by the moment.

“Possession by spirits, perhaps? A gathering of magic? An erasure of material boundaries? Inspiration, winged with fire?” He did not smile. He was quite serious.

This confession gave Alma such severe pause that she could not reply. There was no place in her thinking for the erasure of material boundaries. Nothing brought more goodness and assurance to Alma Whittaker’s life than the heartening certainty of material boundaries.

Ambrose regarded her carefully before continuing. He looked at her as though she were a thermometer or a compass—as though he were trying to gauge her, as though he were choosing a direction in which to turn based entirely on the nature of her response. She endeavored to keep alarm from her face. He must have been satisfied with what he saw, for he went on.

“When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?”

Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma’s mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme.

The old cobbler had believed in something he called “the signature of all things”—namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love. This is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water. Polygonum, with its spattering of blood-red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh. And so on, ad infinitum. Beatrix Whittaker had always been scornful of this theory (“Most leaves are shaped like livers—are we meant to eat them all?”), and Alma had inherited her mother’s skepticism.

But now was not the time to speak of skepticism, for again Ambrose was reading Alma’s face. He was searching her expression most desperately, it seemed, for permission to proceed. Again, Alma kept her countenance impassive, although she felt much disturbed. Again, he proceeded.

“I know that the science of today takes issue with Boehme’s ideas,” he said. “I understand the objections. Jacob Boehme worked in the opposite direction of proper scientific methodology. He lacked the rigor of orderly thinking. His writings were filled with shattered, splintered, mirror-fragments of insight. He was irrational. He was credulous. He saw only what he wished to see. He overlooked anything that contradicted his certainties. He started with his beliefs, then sought to make the facts fit around them. Nobody could rightly call that science.”

Beatrix Whittaker could not have said it better herself, Alma thought—but again, she merely nodded.

“And yet . . .” Ambrose trailed off.

Alma gave her friend time to collect his thoughts. He was quiet for such a long while that she thought perhaps he had decided to end there. But after a long silence, he continued: “And yet Boehme said that God had pressed Himself into the world, and had left marks there for us to discover.”

The parallel was unmistakable, Alma thought, and she could not help but point it out. “Like a printmaker,” she said.

At these words, Ambrose spun to look at her, his face flooded with relief and gratitude. “Yes!” he said. “Precisely that. You understand me. You can see what that idea would have meant to me, as a young man. Boehme said that this divine imprimatur is a kind of holy magic, and that this magic is the only theology we will ever need. He believed that we could learn to read God’s prints, but that we must first swing ourselves into the fire.”

“Swing ourselves into the fire,” Alma repeated, keeping her voice neutral.

“Yes. By renouncing the material world. By renouncing the church, with its stone walls and liturgies. By renouncing ambition. By renouncing study. By renouncing the desires of the body. By renouncing possessiveness and selfishness. By renouncing even speech! Only then could one see what God had seen, at the moment of creation. Only then could one read the messages the Lord had left behind for us. So you see, Alma, I could not become a minister after hearing of this. Nor a student. Nor a son. Nor—it seemed—a living man.”

“What did you become, instead?” Alma asked.

“I tried to become the fire. I ceased all activities of normal existence. I stopped speaking. I even stopped eating. I believed that I could survive on sunlight and rain alone. For quite a long while—though it seems impossible to imagine—I tell you that I did survive on sunlight and rain alone. It did not surprise me. I had faith. I had always been the most devout of my mother’s children, you see. Where my brothers possessed logic and reason, I had always felt the Creator’s love more innately. As a child, I used to fall so deeply into prayer that my mother would shake me in church and punish me for sleeping during services, but I had not been sleeping. I had been . . . corresponding. Now, after reading Jacob Boehme, I wanted to meet the divine even more intimately. That is why I gave up everything in the world, including sustenance.”

“What happened?” Alma asked, once more dreading the answer.

“I met the divine,” he said, eyes bright. “Or, I believed I did. I had the most magnificent thoughts. I could read the language hidden inside trees. I saw angels living inside orchids. I saw a new religion, spoken in a new botanical language. I heard its hymns. I cannot remember the music now, but it was exquisite. Also, there was a full fortnight when I could hear people’s thoughts. I wished they could hear mine, but they did not appear to. I was kept joyous by exalted feeling, by rapture. I felt that I could never be injured again, never touched. I was no harm to anyone, but I did lose my desire for this world. I was . . . unparticled. Oh, but there was more. Such knowledge came into me! For instance, I renamed all the colors! And I saw new colors, hidden colors. Did you know that there is a color called swissen, which is a sort of clear turquoise? Only moths can see it. It is the color of God’s purest anger. You would not think God’s anger would be pale and blue, but it is.”

“I did not know that,” Alma admitted, carefully.

“Well, I saw it,” Ambrose said. “I saw halos of swissen, surrounding certain trees, and certain people. In other places, I saw crowns of benevolent light where there should have been no light at all. This was light that did not have a name, but it had a sound. Everywhere I saw it—or, rather, everywhere I heard it—I followed. Soon after that, however, I nearly died. My friend Daniel Tupper found me in a bank of snow. Sometimes I think that if winter had not come, I might have been able to continue.”

“Without food, Ambrose?” Alma asked. “Surely not . . .”

“Sometimes I think so. I do not claim it to be rational, but I think so. I wished to become a plant. Sometimes I think that—just for a very short while, driven by faith—I became a plant. How else could I have endured two months with nothing but rain and sunlight? I recalled Isaiah: ‘All flesh is grass . . . surely the people is grass.’”

For the first time in years, Alma remembered how, as a child, she had also longed to be a plant. Of course, she had been a mere child, wishing for more patience and affection from her father. But even so—she had never actually believed that she was a plant.

Ambrose went on. “After my friends found me in the snowbank, they took me to a hospital for the insane.”

“Similar to where we just were?” Alma asked.

He smiled with infinite sadness. “Oh, no, Alma. Not at all similar to where we just were.”

“Oh, Ambrose, I am so sorry,” she said, and now she felt thoroughly sickened. She had seen more typical hospitals for the insane in Philadelphia, when she and George used to commit Retta to such houses of despair for short periods of time. She could not imagine her gentle friend Ambrose in such a place of squalor and sorrow and suffering.

“One need not be sorry,” Ambrose said. “It has passed. Fortunately for my mind, I have forgotten most of what occurred there. But the experience of the hospital left me, forever after, more frightened than I had been in the past. Too frightened to ever again experience full trust. When I was released, Daniel Tupper and his family took me into their care. They were kind to me. They gave me shelter, and offered work for me to do in their print shop. I hoped that perhaps I might be able to reach the angels once again, but through a more material manner this time. A safer manner, I suppose you could say. I had lost my courage to swing myself into the fire once more. So I taught myself the art of printmaking—in imitation of the Lord, really, though I know it sounds sinful and prideful to confess that. I wanted to press my own perceptions into the world, though I have still never made work as fine as what I wish it to be. But it brings me occupation. And I contemplated orchids. There was comfort in orchids.”

Alma hesitated, then asked, not without discomfort, “Were you ever able to reach the angels again?”

“No.” Ambrose smiled. “I’m afraid not. But the work brought its own pleasures—or its own distractions. Thanks to Tupper’s mother, I began eating again. But I was a changed person. I avoided all the trees and all people whom I had seen tinted by God’s angry swissen during my episode. I longed for the hymns of the new religion I had witnessed, but I could not remember the words. Soon after that, I went off to the jungle. My family thought it was a mistake—that I would encounter madness there again, and that the solitude would harm my constitution.”

“Did it?”

“Perhaps. It is difficult to say. As I told you when first we met, I suffered fevers there. The fevers diminished my strength, but I also welcomed them. There were moments during fever when I believed I could nearly see God’s imprimatur again, but only nearly. I could see that edicts and stipulations were written into the leaves and vines. I could see that the tree branches around me were bent into a disturbance of messages. There were signatures everywhere, lines of confluence everywhere, but I could not read them. I heard strains of the old familiar music, but I could not capture it. Nothing was revealed to me. When I was ill I sometimes saw glimpses of the angels hidden inside the orchids again—but only the edges of their raiment. The light had to be pure, and everything quite silent, even for that to occur. Yet it was not enough. It was not what I had seen before. Once one has seen angels, Alma, one is not satisfied with the edges of their raiment. After eighteen years, I knew that I would never again witness what I had seen once—not even in the deepest solitude of the jungle, not even in a state of deluded fever—and so I came home. But I suppose I will always long for something else.”

“What do you long for, precisely?” Alma asked.

“Purity,” he said, “and communion.”

Alma, overcome with sadness—and also overcome by a jarring fear that something beautiful was being taken away from her—took all this in. She did not know how to bring Ambrose comfort, though he did not seem to be asking for it. Was he a madman? He did not seem a madman. In a way, she told herself, she should feel honored he had entrusted her with such secrets. But such alarming secrets! What was one to make of them? She had never seen angels, or witnessed the hidden color of God’s true anger, or swung into the fire. She was not even entirely certain what that meant—to “swing into the fire.” How would one do it? Why would one do it?

“What plans do you have now?” she asked. Even as she spoke these words, she cursed her plodding and corporeal mind, which could think only in terms of mundane strategies: A man has just spoken of angels, and you ask him his plans.

But Ambrose smiled. “I wish for a restful life, though I am not convinced I have earned it. I am grateful that you have provided me with a place to live. I enjoy White Acre enormously. It is a sort of heaven for me—or as close as one can reach to heaven, I suppose, while still living. I am sated by the world, and wish for peace. I am fond of your father, who does not seem to condemn me, and who permits me to stay. I am grateful to have work to produce, which brings me occupation and satisfaction. I am most grateful for your companionship. I have felt lonely, I must confess, since 1828—since my friends first brought me out of the snowbank and back into the world. After what I have seen, and because of what I can no longer see, I am always somewhat lonely. But I find that I am less lonely in your company than I am at other times.”

Alma nearly felt she would cry when she heard this. She considered how to respond. Ambrose had always given so freely of his confidences, and yet she had never shared her own. He was brave with his admissions. Although his admissions frightened her, she should return his bravery in kind.

“You bring me respite from my loneliness, as well,” Alma said. This was difficult for her to confess. She could not bear to look at him as she said it, but at least her voice did not waver.

“I would not have known that, dear Alma,” Ambrose said kindly. “You always appear so stalwart.”

“None of us is stalwart,” Alma replied.

They returned to White Acre, back to their normal and pleasant routine, but Alma remained distracted by what she had been told. Sometimes when Ambrose was busy working—drawing an orchid or preparing a stone for lithographic printing—she would watch him, looking for signs of a sickly or sinister mind. But she could see no evidence of it. If he was suffering from, or longing for, spectral illusions or uncanny hallucinations, he did not reveal this, either. There appeared no evidence of a distempered reason.

Whenever Ambrose glanced up and caught her looking at him, he would merely smile. He was so guileless, so gentle and unsuspecting. He did not seem wary of being watched. He did not appear anxious to hide anything. He did not seem to regret what he had shared with Alma. If anything, his deportment toward her was only warmer. He was only more appreciative, more encouraging, and more helpful than before. His good temperament was ever so fixed. He was patient with Henry, with Hanneke, with everyone. At times he appeared fatigued, but that was to be expected, for he worked hard. He worked as hard as Alma did. Naturally he would be fatigued at times. But otherwise he was much the same as before: her dear, unguarded friend. Nor was he seized by excessive religiosity, not so far as Alma could tell. Aside from his dutiful appearances with Alma at church every Sunday, she never even saw him in prayer. In every way, he appeared a good man at peace.

Alma’s imagination, on the other hand, had been raked up and kindled by their discussion during the journey home from Trenton. She could not put any of it into sense, and she longed for a cogent answer to this puzzle: Was Ambrose Pike mad? And if Ambrose Pike was not mad, then what was he? She had trouble swallowing marvels and miracles, but she had equal trouble regarding her dear friend as a bedlamite. So what had he seen, during his episode? She herself had never met the divine, nor had she ever longed to meet it. She had lived her life committed to a comprehension of the real, the material. Once, while having a tooth pulled under the influence of ether, Alma had seen dancing stars inside her mind—but this, she had known even at the time, was the normal effect of the drug upon one’s wits, and it did not cause her to ascend into the gearworks of heaven. But Ambrose had not been under the influence of ether or any other substance during his visions. His madness had been . . . clearheaded madness.

In the weeks following her conversation with Ambrose, Alma often woke in the night and crept down to the library to read the volumes of Jacob Boehme. She had not studied the old German cobbler since her youth, and she tried now to approach the texts with respect and an open mind. She knew that Milton had read Boehme, and that Newton had admired him. If such luminaries had found wisdom in these words—and if someone as extraordinary as Ambrose had been so stirred by them—then why not Alma?

But she found nothing in the texts that aroused her to a state of mystery or wonder. To Alma, Boehme’s writings were full of extinct principles, both opaque and occultist. He was of the old mind, the medieval mind, distracted by alchemy and bezoars. He believed that precious stones and metals were imbued with power and divine virtue. He saw the cross of God hidden in a slice of cabbage. Everything in the world, he believed, was an embodied revelation of eternal potency and divine love. Each piece of nature was a verbum fiat—a spoken word of God, a created utterance, a marvel made flesh. He believed that roses did not symbolize love, but in fact were love: love made literal. He was both apocalyptic and utopian. This world must soon end, he said, and humanity must reach an Edenic state, where all men would become male virgins, and life would be joy and play. Yet God’s wisdom, he insisted, was female.

Boehme wrote, “The wisdom of God is an eternal virgin—not a wife, but rather chastity and purity without flaw, who stands as an image of God. . . . She is the wisdom of miracles without number. In her, the Holy Spirit beholds the image of the angels. . . . Although she give the body to all the fruits, she is not the corporeality of the fruits, but rather the gracefulness and beauty within them.”

None of this made sense to Alma. A good deal of it irritated her. It certainly did not make her long to stop eating, or studying, or speaking, or to give up the pleasures of the body and live upon sunlight and rain. On the contrary, Boehme’s writing made her long for her microscope, for her mosses, for the comforts of the palpable and the concrete. Why was the material world not sufficient for people such as Jacob Boehme? Was it not wonderful enough, what one could see and touch and know to be real?

“True life stands in the fire,” Boehme wrote, “and then one mystery takes hold of the other.”

Alma had been taken hold of, to be sure, but her mind did not ignite. Nor, however, did it settle. Her reading of Boehme led her to other works in the White Acre library—other dusty treatises on the intersection of botany and divinity. She felt both skeptical and provoked. She paged through all the old theologians and the quaint, extinct thaumaturges. She examined Albertus Magnus. She dutifully studied what monks had written four hundred years earlier about mandrakes and unicorn horns. The science was all so flawed. There were holes in their logic so gaping that one could feel gusts of wind blowing through the arguments. They had believed such outlandish notions in the past—that bats were birds, that storks hibernated under water, that gnats sprang from the dew, that geese hatched from barnacles, and that barnacles grew on trees. As a purely historical matter it was interesting enough—but why honor it? she wondered. Why would Ambrose have been seduced by medieval scholarship? It was a fascinating trail, yes, but it was a trail of errors.

In the middle of one hot night at the end of July, Alma was in the library with a lamp before her and her spectacles upon the tip of her nose, looking at a seventeenth-century copy of the Arboretum sacrum—whose author, like Boehme, had tried to read sacred messages into all the plants mentioned in the Bible—when Ambrose entered the room. She was startled when she saw him, but he seemed undisturbed. If anything, he appeared concerned about her. He sat beside her at the long table in the center of the great room. He was wearing his daytime clothes. Either he had changed out of his nightclothes, out of deference to Alma, or he had never gone to bed that evening at all.

“You cannot pass so many nights in a row without sleep, my dear Alma,” he said.

“I am using the quiet hours to conduct research,” she replied. “I hope I have not disturbed you.”

He looked at the titles of the great old books lying open before them. “But you are not reading about mosses,” he said quietly. “What is your interest in all this?”

She found it difficult to lie to Ambrose. In general, she was not adept at untruths, and he, in particular, was not a person she wished to deceive. “I cannot make sense of your story,” she confessed. “I am looking for answers in these books.”

He nodded, but said nothing in reply.

“I started with Boehme,” Alma went on, “whom I find simply incomprehensible, and now I’ve moved on to . . . all the others.”

“I’ve troubled you by what I’ve told you about myself. I was afraid that might occur. I ought to have said nothing.”

“No, Ambrose. We are the dearest of friends. You may always confide in me. You may even trouble me at times. I was honored by your confidences. But in my desire to better understand you, I am afraid I am falling quite out of my depth.”

“And what do these books tell you about me?”

“Nothing,” Alma replied. She could not help but laugh, and Ambrose laughed with her. She was quite exhausted. He looked weary as well.

“Then why do you not ask me yourself?”

“Because I do not wish to gall you.”

“You could never gall me.”

“But it needles me, Ambrose—the errors in these books. I wonder why the errors do not needle you. Boehme makes such leaps, such contradictions, such confusions of thought. It is as though he wishes to vault directly into heaven upon the strength of his logic, but his logic is deeply impaired.” She reached across the table for a book and flung it open. “In this chapter here, for instance, he is trying to find keys to God’s secrets hidden inside the plants of the Bible—but what are we to make of it, when his information is simply incorrect? He spends a full chapter interpreting ‘the lilies of the field’ as mentioned in the book of Matthew, dissecting every letter of the word ‘lilies,’ looking for revelation within the syllables . . . but Ambrose, ‘the lilies of the field’ itself is a mistranslation. It would not have been lilies that Christ discussed in his Sermon on the Mount. There are only two varieties of lily native to Palestine, and both are exceedingly rare. They would not have flowered in such abundance as to have ever filled a meadow. They would not have been familiar enough to the common man. Christ, tailoring his lesson to the widest possible audience, would more likely have referred to a ubiquitous flower, in order that his listeners would comprehend his metaphor. For that reason, it is exceedingly probable that Christ was talking about the anemones of the field—probably Anemone coronaria—though we cannot be certain . . .”

Alma trailed off. She sounded didactic, ridiculous.

Ambrose laughed again. “What a poet you would have made, dear Alma! I would enjoy to see your translation of the Holy Scripture: ‘Consider the lilies of the field; they neither toil nor spin—though most probably they were not lilies, in any case, but rather Anemone coronaria, though we cannot be certain, but regardless, we can all agree that they neither toil nor spin.’ What a hymn that would make, to fill the rafters of any church! One would love to hear a congregation sing it. But tell me, Alma, while we are on the subject, what do you make of the willows of Babylon, upon which the Israelites hung their harps and wept?”

“Now you are baiting me,” said Alma, her pride both stung and stirred. “But I suspect, given the region, that they were probably poplars.”

“And Adam and Eve’s apple?” he probed.

She felt like a fool, but she could not stop herself. “It was either an apricot or a quince,” she said. “More likely an apricot, because quince is not so sweet as to have attracted a young woman’s desire. One way or another, it could not have been an apple. There were no apples in the Holy Land, Ambrose, and the tree in Eden is often described as having been shady and inviting, with silvery leaves, which could describe most varietals of apricot . . . so when Jacob Boehme speaks of apples and God and Eden . . .”

Now Ambrose was laughing so hard that he had to wipe his eyes. “My dear Miss Whittaker,” he said, with utmost tenderness. “What a marvel is your mind. This sort of dangerous reasoning, by the way, is precisely what God feared would happen, if a woman were allowed to eat from the tree of knowledge. You are a cautionary example to all womankind! You must cease at once all this intelligence and immediately take up the mandolin, or mending, or some other useless activity!”

“You think me absurd,” she said.

“No, Alma, I do not. I think you remarkable. I am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving. I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand—through rational thought—that which cannot be understood at all. There is no exact principle to be found here. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground—unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way.”

“I do have a dreadful love for understanding,” Alma admitted.

“Indeed you do love it, though it is not dreadful,” Ambrose replied. “It is the natural result of having been born with a mind so exquisitely calibrated. But for me, to experience life through mere reason is to feel about in the dark for God’s face while wearing heavy gloves. It is not enough only to study and depict and describe. One must sometimes . . . leap.”

“Yet I simply do not comprehend the Lord toward whom you are leaping,” Alma said.

“Why must you, though?”

“Because I would wish to better know you.”

“Then question me directly, Alma. Do not look for me within these books. I sit here before you, and I shall tell you anything you like about myself.”

Alma shut the dense volume before her. She might have shut it a touch too firmly, for it closed with a thud. She turned her chair to face Ambrose, folded her hands in her lap and said, “I do not understand your interpretation of nature, and this, in turn, fills me with a sense of alarm about the condition of your mind. I do not understand how you can overlook the points of contradiction and the sheer foolishness in these discredited old theories. You presume that our Lord is a benevolent botanist, hiding clues for our betterment within every variety of plant, yet I see no consistent evidence for that. There are just as many plants in our world that poison us as heal us. Why does your botanist deity give us the fetterbush and the privet, for instance, to kill off our horses and cows? Where is the hidden revelation there?”

“But why should our Lord not be a botanist?” Ambrose asked. “What occupation would you prefer your deity to have?”

Alma considered the question seriously. “Perhaps a mathematician,” she decided. “Scratching and erasing at things, you know. Adding and subtracting. Multiplying and dividing. Toying with theories and new calculations. Discarding earlier mistakes. It appears a more sensible idea to me.”

“But the mathematicians I have met, Alma, are not particularly compassionate souls, nor do they nourish life.”

“Precisely,” said Alma. “This would go a long way toward explaining the suffering of mankind and the random nature of our fates—as God adds and subtracts us, divides and erases us.”

“What a grim view! I wish you did not consider our lives so bleakly. On the whole of things, Alma, I still see more wonder in the world than suffering.”

“I know you do,” said Alma, “and that is why I worry for you. You are an idealist, which means that you are destined to be disappointed, and perhaps even wounded. You seek a gospel of benevolence and miracle, which leaves no room for the sorrows of existence. You are like William Paley, arguing that the perfection of every design in the universe is proof of God’s love for us. Do you recall Paley’s claim that the mechanism of the human wrist—so exquisitely suited to gathering food and creating works of artistic beauty—is the very imprint of the Lord’s affection toward man? But the human wrist is also perfectly suited to swinging a murderous ax at one’s neighbor. What proof of love, therein? Moreover, you make me feel like a horrid little marplot, because I sit here making such dull arguments and because I cannot live in the same shining city upon the hill that you inhabit.”

They sat quietly for a spell, then Ambrose asked, “Are we arguing, Alma?”

Alma considered the question. “Perhaps.”

“But why must we quarrel?”

“Forgive me, Ambrose. I am weary.”

“You are weary because you have been sitting in this library every night, asking questions of men who have been dead for hundreds of years.”

“I have spent most of my life conversing with such men, Ambrose. Older ones, as well.”

“Yet because they do not answer questions to your liking, you now assail me. How can I offer you satisfactory answers, Alma, if far superior minds than my own have already disappointed you?”

Alma put her head in her hands. She felt strained.

Ambrose continued, but now in a more tender voice. “Only imagine what we could learn, Alma, if we could unshackle ourselves from argument.”

She looked up at him again. “I cannot unshackle myself from argument, Ambrose. Recall that I am Henry Whittaker’s daughter. I was born into argument. Argument was my first nursemaid. Argument is my lifelong bedfellow. What’s more, I believe in argument and I even love it. Argument is our most steadfast pathway toward truth, for it is the only proven arbalest against superstitious thinking, or lackadaisical axioms.”

“But if the end result is only to drown in words, and never to hear . . .” Ambrose trailed off.

“To hear what?”

“Each other, perhaps. Not each other’s words, but each other’s thoughts. Each other’s spirit. If you ask me what I believe, I shall tell you this: the whole sphere of air that surrounds us, Alma, is alive with invisible attractions—electric, magnetic, fiery and thoughtful. There is a universal sympathy all around us. There is a hidden means of knowing. I am certain of this, for I have witnessed it myself. When I swung myself into the fire as a young man, I saw that the storehouses of the human mind are rarely ever fully opened. When we open them, nothing remains unrevealed. When we cease all argument and debate—both internal and external—our true questions can be heard and answered. That is the powerful mover. That is the book of nature, written neither in Greek nor in Latin. That is the gathering of magic, and it is a gathering that, I have always believed and wished, can be shared.”

“You speak in riddles,” Alma said.

“And you speak too much,” Ambrose replied.

She could find no reply to this. Not without speaking more. Offended, confused, she felt her eyes sting with tears.

“Take me someplace where we can be silent together, Alma,” Ambrose said, leaning in to her. “I trust you so thoroughly, and I believe that you trust me. I do not wish to quarrel with you any longer. I wish to speak to you without words. Allow me to try to show you what I mean.”

This was a most startling request.

“We can be silent together right here, Ambrose.”

He looked around the vast, elegant library. “No,” he said. “We cannot. It is too large and too loud in here, with all these dead old men arguing around us. Take me somewhere hidden and quiet, and let us listen to each other. I know it sounds mad, but it is not mad. I know this one thing to be true—that all we need for communion is our consent. I have come to believe that I cannot reach communion on my own because I am too weak. Since I have met you, Alma, I feel stronger. Do not make me regret what I have told you already of myself. I ask so little of you, Alma, but I must beg of you this request, for I have no other way to explain myself, and if I cannot show you what I believe to be true, then you will always think me deranged or idiotic.”

She protested, “No, Ambrose, I could never think such things of you—”

“But you do already,” he interrupted, with desperate urgency. “Or you will eventually. Then you will come to pity me, or detest me, and I shall lose the companion whom I hold most dear in the world, and this would bring me tribulation and sorrow. Before that sad event occurs—if it has not already occurred—permit me to try to show you what I mean, when I say that nature, in her limitlessness, has no concern for the boundaries of our mortal imaginations. Allow me to try to show you that we can speak to each other without words and without argument. I believe that enough love and affection passes between us, my dearest friend, that we can achieve this. I have always hoped to find somebody with whom I can communicate silently. Since meeting you, I have hoped it even more—for we share, it seems, such a natural and sympathetic understanding of each other, which extends far beyond the crass or the common affections . . . do we not? Do you not also feel as though you are more powerful when I am near?”

This could not be denied. Nor, however, out of dignity, could it be admitted.

“What is it that you wish from me?” Alma asked.

“I wish for you to listen to my mind and my spirit. And I wish to listen to yours.”

“You are speaking of mind reading, Ambrose. This is a parlor game.”

“You may call it whatever you wish. But I believe that without the impediment of language, all will be revealed.”

“But I do not believe in such a thing,” Alma said.

“Yet you are a woman of science, Alma—so why not try? There is nothing to be lost, and perhaps much to be learned. But for this to succeed, we shall need deepest stillness. We shall need freedom from interference. Please, Alma, I will ask this of you only once. Take me to the most quiet and secret place that you know, and let us attempt communion. Let me show you what I cannot tell you.”

What choice did she have?

She took him to the binding closet.

Now, this was not the first that Alma had heard of mind reading. If anything, it was a bit of a local fashion. Sometimes it felt to Alma that every other lady in Philadelphia was a divine medium these days. There were “spirit ambassadors” everywhere one looked, ready to be hired by the hour. Sometimes their experiments leaked into the more respectable medical and scientific journals, which appalled Alma. She had recently seen an article on the subject of pathetism—the idea that chance could be induced by suggestion—which seemed to her like mere carnival games. Some people called these explorations science, but Alma, irritated, diagnosed them as entertainment—and a rather dangerous variety of entertainment, at that.

In a way, Ambrose reminded her of all these spiritualists—yearning and susceptible—yet at the same time, he was not like them in the least. For one thing, he had never heard of them. He lived in far too much isolation to have noticed the mystical manias of the moment. He did not subscribe to the phrenology journals, with their discussions of the thirty-seven different faculties, propensities, and sentiments represented by the bumps and valleys of the human skull. Nor did he visit mediums. He did not read The Dial. He had never mentioned to Alma the names of Bronson Alcott or Ralph Waldo Emerson—because he had never encountered the names of Bronson Alcott or Ralph Waldo Emerson. For solace and fellowship, he looked to medieval writers, not contemporary ones.

Moreover, he actively sought the God of the Bible, as well as the spirits of nature. When he attended the Swedish Lutheran church every Sunday with Alma, he knelt and prayed in humble accord. He sat upright in the unyielding oak pew, and took in the sermons without discomfort. When he was not in prayer, he worked in silence over his printing presses, or industriously made portraits of orchids, or helped Alma with her mosses, or played long games of backgammon with Henry. Truly, Ambrose had no idea what was occurring in the rest of the world. If anything, he was trying to escape the world—which meant that he had arrived at his curious bundle of ideas all by himself. He did not know that half of America and most of Europe were attempting to read each other’s minds. He merely wanted to read Alma’s mind, and to have her read his.

She could not refuse him.

So when this young man asked her to take him someplace quiet and secret, she took him into the binding closet. She could think of nowhere else to go. She did not want to wake anyone by marching through the house to a more distant location. She did not wish to be caught in a bedroom with him. What’s more, she knew of no quieter or more private place than this. She told herself that these were the reasons she took him there. They may even have been true.

He had not known that the door was there. Nobody knew it was there—so cleverly were its seams hidden behind the elaborate old plaster molding of the wall. Since Beatrix’s death, Alma was the only person who ever entered the binding closet. Perhaps Hanneke knew of its existence, but the old housekeeper seldom came to this wing of the house, to the far distant library. Henry probably knew of it—he had designed it, after all—but he, too, seldom frequented the library anymore. He had probably forgotten the place years earlier.

Alma did not bring a lamp with them. She was all too familiar with the tiny room’s contours. There was a stool, where she had sat when she came to be so shamefully and pleasurably alone, and there was a small work table on which Ambrose could now sit, directly facing her. She showed him where to sit. Once she shut and locked the door, they were in absolute darkness together, in this tiny, hidden, stifling place. He did not seem alarmed by darkness, or the cramped quarters. For this was what he had requested.

“May I take your hands?” he asked.

She reached out cautiously across the darkness until her fingertips touched his arms. Together, they found each other’s hands. His hands were slender and light. Hers felt heavy and damp. Ambrose laid his hands across his knees, palms facing upward, and she allowed her palms to settle atop his. She did not expect what she encountered in that first touch: the fierce, staggering onrush of love. It went through her like a sob.

But what had she expected? Why should it have felt anything less than elevated, exaggerated, exalted? Alma had never before been touched by a man. Or, rather, just twice—once, in the spring of 1818, when George Hawkes had pressed Alma’s hand between both of his and had called her a brilliant microscopist; and once again by George, more recently, when he was in distress about Retta—but in both cases that had been only one of her hands, coming in contact nearly accidentally with a man’s flesh. Never had she been touched with anything that might fairly be called intimacy. Numberless times over the decades, she had sat on this very stool with her legs open and her skirts up about her waist, with this very door locked behind her, leaning back against the embrace of this very wall behind her, sating her hunger as best she could with the grappling of her own fingers. If there were molecules in this room that differed from the other molecules of White Acre—or indeed, from the other molecules of the world—then these molecules were permeated by dozens and hundreds and thousands of impressions of Alma’s carnal exertions. Yet now she was here in this closet, in the same familiar darkness, surrounded by those molecules, alone with a man ten years her junior.

But what was she to do about this sob of love?

“Listen for my question,” Ambrose said, holding Alma’s hands lightly. “And then ask me your own. There will be no further need to speak. We shall know when we have heard each other.”

Ambrose closed his grip gently around her hands. The sensation that this provoked up her arms was beautiful.

How could she extend this?

She considered pretending that she was reading his mind, if only to draw out the experience. She considered whether there might be a way to repeat this event in the future. But what if they were ever discovered in here? What if Hanneke found them alone in a closet? What would people say? What would people think of Ambrose, whose intentions, as ever, had seemed so unmingled with anything foul? He would appear a rake. He would be banished. She would be shamed.

No, Alma understood, they would never do this again after tonight. This was to be the one moment in her life when a man’s hands would be clasped around hers.

She closed her eyes and leaned back a bit, putting her full weight against the wall. He did not let go of her. Her knees nearly brushed against his knees. A good deal of time passed. Ten minutes? A half hour? She drank in the pleasure of his touch. She wished to never forget this.

The pleasant sensation that had begun in her palms and traveled up her arms now advanced into her torso, and eventually pooled between her legs. What had she supposed might happen? Her body had been tuned to this room, trained to this room—and now this new stimulus had arrived. For a while, she contended against the sensation. She was grateful that her face could not be seen, for a most contorted and flushed countenance would have been revealed, had there been a trace of light. Though she had forced this moment, she still could not quite believe this moment: There was a man sitting across from her, right here in the dark of the binding closet, inside the deepest penetralia of her world.

Alma attempted to keep her breath even. She resisted what she was feeling, yet her resistance only increased the sensation of pleasure growing between her legs. There is a Dutch word, uitwaaien, “to walk against the wind for pleasure.” That is what this felt like. Without moving her body at all, Alma leaned against the rising wind with all her power, but the wind only pushed back, with equal force, and so did her pleasure increase.

More time passed. Another ten minutes? Another half hour? Ambrose did not move. Alma did not move, either. His hands did not so much as tremble or pulse. Yet Alma felt consumed by him. She felt him everywhere within her and around her. She felt him counting the hairs at the base of her neck, and examining the clusters of nerves at the bottom of her spine.

“Imagination is gentle,” Jacob Boehme had written, “and it resembles water. But desire is rough and dry as a hunger.”

Yet Alma felt both. She felt both the water and the hunger. She felt both the imagination and the desire. Then, with a sort of horror and a fair amount of mad joy, she knew that she was about to reach her old familiar vortex of pleasure. Sensation was rising quickly through her quim, and there was no question of stopping it. Without Ambrose touching her (aside from her hands), without her touching herself, without either of them moving so much as an inch, without her skirts lifted above her waist or her hands at work within her own body, without even a change of breath—Alma tumbled into climax. For a moment, she saw a flash of white, like sheet lightning across a starless summer sky. The world turned milky behind her closed eyes. She felt blinded, rapturous—and then, immediately, shamed.

Dreadfully shamed.

What had she done? What had he felt? What had he heard? Dear God, what had he smelled? But before she could react or pull away, she felt something else. Though Ambrose still did not move or stir or react, she suddenly felt as though he were brushing against the soles of her feet with a persistent stroke. As the moments passed, she perceived that this stroking sensation was, in fact, a question—an utterance coming into being, right out of the floor. She felt the question enter through the bottoms of her feet and rise through the bones of her legs. Then she felt the question creep up into her womb, swimming through the wet path of her quim. It was nearly a spoken voice that was gliding up into her, nearly an articulation. Ambrose was asking something of her, but he was asking it from inside her. She heard it now. Then there it was, his question, perfectly formed:

Will you accept this of me?

She pulsed silently with her reply: YES.

Then she felt something else. The question that Ambrose had placed within her body was twisting into something else. It was now turning into her question. She had not known that she had a question for Ambrose, but now she did have one—most urgently. She let her question rise through her torso and out through her arms. Then she placed her question upon his awaiting palms:

Is this what you want of me?

She heard him draw in his breath sharply. He clutched her hands so tightly that he nearly hurt her. Then he shattered the silence with one spoken word:

“Yes.”