The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Seventeen

The wedding took place on Tuesday, August 29, 1848, in the drawing room at White Acre. Alma wore a brown silk dress made specially for the occasion. Henry Whittaker and Hanneke de Groot stood as witnesses. Henry was cheerful; Hanneke was not. A judge from West Philadelphia, who had done business in the past with Henry, conducted the vows as a favor to the master of the house.

“Let friendship instruct you,” he concluded, after promises had been exchanged. “Let you be anxious of each other’s misfortunes, and encouraging of each other’s joys.”

“Partners in science, trade, and life!” Henry bellowed, quite unexpectedly, and then blew his nose with considerable force.

There were no other friends or family in attendance. George Hawkes had sent a crate of pears as congratulations, but he was ill with fever, he wrote, and could not join them. Also, a large bouquet had arrived the day before, care of the Garrick Pharmacy. As for Ambrose, no one attended as his guest. His friend Daniel Tupper, in Boston, had sent a telegraph that morning reading simply, “WELL DONE PIKE,” but Tupper did not travel down for the wedding. It would have been only half a day from Boston by train, but still—nobody came down to stand for Ambrose.

Alma, looking around her, realized how small a household they had become. This was far too small a gathering. This was simply not enough people. It was barely enough for a legal wedding. How had they become so isolated? She remembered the ball that her parents had held in 1808, exactly forty years earlier: how the verandah and the great lawn had swirled with dancers and musicians, and how she had run among them with her torch. It was impossible to imagine now that White Acre had ever been the site of such a spectacle, such laughter, such wild doings. It had become a constellation of silence since then.

As a wedding gift, Alma gave Ambrose an exceedingly fine antiquarian edition of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, originally published in 1684. Burnet was a theologian who surmised that the planet—before Noah’s flood—had been a smooth sphere of absolute perfection, which had “the beauty of youth and blooming nature, fresh and fruitful, not a wrinkle, scar or fracture in all its body; no rocks nor mountains, no hollow caves, nor gaping channels, but even and uniform all over.” He, Burnet, had called this “The First Earth.” Alma thought her husband would like it, and indeed he did. Notions of perfection, dreams of unsullied exquisiteness—all of this was Ambrose, through and through.

As for Ambrose, he presented Alma with a beautiful square of Italian paper, which he had folded into a tiny, complex sort of envelope, and had covered with seals in four different colors of wax. Every seam was sealed, and every seal was different. It was a pretty object—small enough to sit on the palm of her hand—but it was strange and nearly cabalistic. Alma turned the curious little item over and over.

“How is one meant to open such a gift?” she asked.

“It is not to be opened,” Ambrose said. “I ask you never to open it.”

“What does it contain?”

“A message of love.”

“Really?” said Alma, delighted. “A message of love! I should like to see such a thing!”

“I would prefer that you imagine it.”

“My imagination is not as rich as yours, Ambrose.”

“But for you who loves knowledge so much, Alma, it will do your imagination good to keep something unrevealed. We will come to know each other so well, you and I. Let us leave something unopened.”

She put the gift in her pocket. It sat there all day—a strange, light, mysterious presence.

They dined that evening with Henry and his friend the judge. Henry and the judge drank too much port. Alma took no spirits, nor did Ambrose. Her husband smiled at her whenever she glanced his way—but then he always had done that, even before he was her husband. It felt like any other evening, except that she was now Mrs. Ambrose Pike. The sun went down slowly that night, like an old man taking his time to hobble downstairs.

At last, after dinner, Alma and Ambrose retired to Alma’s bedroom for the first time. Alma sat on the edge of the bed, and Ambrose joined her. He reached for her hand. After a long silence, she said, “If you’ll excuse me . . .”

She wished to put on her new nightdress, but did not want to disrobe in front of him. She took the nightdress into the small water closet off the corner of her bedroom—the one that had been installed, with a bathtub and cold-water taps, in the 1830s. She undressed and put on the gown. She did not know if she should keep her hair up, or let it down. It did not always look nice when she let it down, but it was uncomfortable to sleep in pins and fasteners. She hesitated, then decided to leave it up.

When she reentered the bedroom, she found that Ambrose had also changed into his nightshirt—a simple linen affair, which hung to his shins. He had folded his clothes neatly and set them on a chair. He stood on the far side of the bed from her. Nervousness ran over her like a cavalry charge. Ambrose did not seem nervous. He did not say anything about her nightdress. He beckoned her to the bed, and she climbed in. He came into the bed from the other side, and met her in the middle. Immediately she had the awful thought that this bed was far too small for the both of them. She and Ambrose were both so tall. Where were their legs supposed to go? What about their arms? What if she kicked him in her sleep? What if she put an elbow into his eye, without knowing?

She turned sideways, he turned sideways, and they faced each other.

“Treasure of my soul,” he said. He took one of her hands, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, just above the knuckles, as he had been doing every night for the last month, since their engagement. “You have brought me such peace.”

“Ambrose,” she replied, amazed by his name, amazed by his face.

“It is in our sleep that we most closely glimpse the power of spirit,” he said. “Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered.”

“Thank you,” she said, senselessly. She could not think of what else to say, in response to such an unexpected speech. Was this some sort of wooing? Was this how they proceeded with things, up in Boston? She worried that her breath did not smell sweet. His breath smelled sweet. She wished that he would extinguish the lamp. Immediately, as though hearing her thoughts, he reached over and extinguished the lamp. The dark was better, more comfortable. She wanted to swim toward him. She felt him take up her hand again and press it to his lips.

“Good night, my wife,” he said.

He did not let go of her hand. Within a matter of moments—she could tell it by his breathing—he was asleep.

Of everything Alma had imagined, hoped for, or feared as to what might transpire on her wedding night, this course of events had never occurred to her.

Ambrose dozed on, steady and peaceful beside her, his hand clasped lightly and trustingly around hers, while Alma, eyes wide in the dark, lay still in the spreading silence. Bewilderment overcame her like something oily and dank. She sought possible explanations for this strange occurrence, paging through her mind for one interpretation after another, as one would do in science, with any experiment gone wildly wrong.

Perhaps he would awaken, and they would recommence—or rather commence—with their marital pleasures? Perhaps he had not liked her nightdress? Perhaps she had appeared too modest? Or too eager? Was it the dead girl that he wanted? Was he thinking of his lost love from Framingham, all those years ago? Or perhaps he had been overcome by a fit of nerves? Was he unequal to love’s duties? But none of these explanations made sense, particularly not the last one. Alma knew enough of such matters to understand that the inability to conduct intercourse brought men the severest imaginable shame—but Ambrose did not seem ashamed at all. Nor had he even attempted intercourse. On the contrary, he slept as easefully as a man could possibly sleep. He slept like a rich burgher in a fine hotel. He slept like a king after a long day of boar hunting and jousting. He slept like a princely Mohammedan, sated by a dozen comely concubines. He slept like a child under a tree.

Alma did not sleep. The night was hot, and she was uncomfortable lying on her side for so long, afraid to move, afraid to withdraw her hand from his. The pins and fasteners in her hair pressed into her scalp. Her shoulder was growing numb below her. After a long while, she finally released herself from his clasp and turned over onto her back, but it was useless: rest would not find her this night. She lay there in stiffness and alarm, her eyes wide open, her armpits damp, her mind searching without success for a comforting conclusion to this most surprising and unfavorable turn of affairs.

At dawn, every bird on earth, merrily oblivious to her dread, began to sing. With the first rays of sunlight, Alma allowed herself to throw forward a spark of hope that her husband would awaken in the dawn and embrace her now. Perhaps they would begin it in the daylight—all the expected intimacies of matrimony.

Ambrose did awaken, but he did not embrace her. He woke in a lively instant, fresh and contented. “What dreams!” he said, and reached his arms above him in a languorous stretch. “I have not had such dreams in years. What an honor it is, to share the electricity of your being. Thank you, Alma! What a day we shall have! Did you have such dreams, too?”

Alma had dreamed nothing, of course. Alma had passed the night boxed up within a waking horror. Nonetheless, she nodded. She did not know what else to do.

“You must promise me,” Ambrose said, “that when we die—whichever of us shall die first—that we will send vibrations to each other across the divide of mortality.”

Again, senselessly, she nodded. It was easier than trying to speak.

Stale and silent, Alma watched her husband rise and splash his face in the basin. He took his clothing from the chair and politely excused himself to the water closet, returning fully dressed and saturated with good cheer. What lurked behind that warm smile? Alma could see nothing behind it but more warmth. He looked to her exactly as he had looked the first day she had glimpsed him—like a lovely, bright, and enthusiastic man of twenty years.

She was a fool.

“I shall leave you to your privacy,” he said. “And I shall be waiting for you at the breakfast table. What a day we shall have!”

Alma’s entire body ached. In a terrible cloud of stiffness and despair, she moved out of bed slowly, like a cripple, and dressed herself. She looked in the mirror. She should not have looked. She had aged a decade in one night.

Henry was at the breakfast table when Alma finally descended. He and Ambrose were engaged in a light tinsel of conversation. Hanneke brought Alma a fresh pot of tea and threw her a sharp look—the sort of look that all women get on the morning after their wedding—but Alma avoided her eyes. She tried to keep her face from appearing moony or grim, but her imagination was fatigued and she knew that her eyes were red. She felt overgrown by mildew. The men did not seem to notice. Henry was telling a story Alma had heard a dozen times already—of the night he had shared a bed in a filthy Peruvian tavern with a pompous little Frenchman, who had the thickest imaginable French accent, but who tirelessly insisted he was not French.

Henry said, “The dunderhead kept saying to me, ‘Hi emm en Heenglishman!’ and I kept telling him, ‘You are not an Englishman, you idiot, you are a Frenchman! Just listen to your cussed accent!’ But no, the bloody dunderhead kept saying it: ‘Hi emm en Heenglishman!’ Finally I said to him, ‘Tell me, then—how is it possible that you are an Englishman?’ And he crowed, ‘Hi emm en Heenglishman because Hi ’ave en Heenglish wife!’”

Ambrose laughed and laughed. Alma stared at him as if he were a specimen.

“By that logic,” Henry concluded, “I am a bloody Dutchman!”

“And I am a Whittaker!” Ambrose added, still laughing.

“More tea?” Hanneke asked Alma, again with that same penetrating look.

Alma clamped shut her mouth, which she realized had been hanging a bit too far open. “I have had enough, Hanneke, thank you.”

“The men will be carting in the last of the hay today,” Henry said. “See to it, Alma, that it is done properly.”

“Yes, Father.”

Henry turned to Ambrose again. “She is good value, that wife of yours, especially when there is work to be done. A regular Farmer John in skirts, she is.”

The second night was the same as the first—and the third night, and the fourth and fifth. All the nights to follow, all the same. Ambrose and Alma would undress in privacy, come to the bed and face each other. He would kiss her hand and praise her goodness, and extinguish the lamp. Ambrose would then fall into the sleep of an enchanted figure in a fairy tale, while Alma lay in silent torment beside him. The only thing that changed over time was that Alma finally managed to receive a few fitful hours of sleep a night, merely because her body would collapse with exhaustion. But her sleep was interrupted by clawing dreams and awful spells of restless, roaming, wakeful thought.

By day, Alma and Ambrose were companions as ever in study and contemplation. He had never seemed more fond of her. She woodenly went about her own work, and helped him with his. He always wanted to be near her—as near to her as possible. He did not seem aware of her discomfort. She tried not to reveal it. She kept hoping for a change. More weeks passed. October arrived. The nights turned cool. There was no change.

Ambrose appeared so at ease with the terms of their marriage that Alma—for the first time in her life—feared herself to be going mad. Here she wanted to ravish him to a pulp, but he was happy to merely kiss the one square inch of skin below the middle knuckle of her left hand. Had she been misinformed as to the nature of conjugality? Was it a trick? She was enough of a Whittaker to seethe at the thought of having been played as a fool. But then she would look at Ambrose’s face, which was the furthest imaginable thing from the face of a scoundrel, and her rage, once more, would render down back into unhappy bewilderment.

By early October, Philadelphia was enjoying the last days of Indian summer. The mornings were crowning glories of cool air and blue skies, and the afternoons balmy and lazy. Ambrose behaved as though he was more inspired than ever, springing out of bed every morning as though shot forth by a cannon. He had managed to get a rare Aerides odorata to bloom in the orchid house. Henry had imported the plant years ago from the foothills of the Himalayas, but it had never put forth a single bud until Ambrose took the orchid out of its pot on the ground and hung it high from the rafters, in a bright spot of sun, in a basket made of bark and dampened moss. Now the thing had ignited into sudden flower. Henry was elated. Ambrose was elated. Ambrose was making drawings of it from every angle. It would be the pride of the White Acre florilegium.

“If you love anything enough, it will eventually show you its secrets,” Ambrose told Alma.

She might have begged to differ, had her opinion been asked. She could not possibly have loved Ambrose more, but no secrets were forthcoming from him. She found herself unpleasantly jealous of his victory with the Aerides odorata. She envied the plant itself, and the care he had shown it. She could not focus on her own work, yet here he was thriving in his. She began to resent his presence in the carriage house. Why was he always interrupting her? His printing presses were loud, and smelled of hot ink. Alma could no longer bear it. She felt as though she were rotting. Her temper grew short. She was walking through the White Acre vegetable gardens one day when she came upon a young worker, sitting on his shovel, lazily picking at a splinter in his thumb. She had seen this one before—this little splinter-picker. He was far more often to be found sitting on his shovel than working with it.

“Your name is Robert, isn’t it?” she asked, approaching him with a warm smile.

“I’m Robert,” he confirmed, looking up at her with mild unconcern.

“What is your task this afternoon, Robert?”

“To turn over this rotty old pea patch, ma’am.”

“And do you plan to get at it one of these days, Robert?” she probed, her voice dangerously low.

“Well, I’ve got this splinter here, see . . .”

Alma leaned over him, casting his whole tiny body in shadow. She picked him up by his collar, a full foot off the ground, and—shaking him like a sack of feed—she bellowed, “Get back at your work, you useless little lobcock, before I take off your balls with that shovel of yours!”

She tossed him back to the ground. He landed hard. He scrambled out from under her shadow like a rabbit, and began digging furiously, haphazardly, fearfully. Alma walked away, shaking loose the muscles of her arms, and immediately recommenced her thoughts of her husband. Was it possible that Ambrose simply didn’t know? Could anyone be such an innocent as to have entered matrimony unaware of its duties, or oblivious to the sexual mechanisms between man and wife? She remembered a book she had read years ago, back when she had begun collecting those licentious texts in the loft of the carriage house. She had not thought of this book for at least two decades. It had been rather tedious, compared to the others, but it came back to her mind now. It bore the title The Fruits of Marriage: A Gentleman’s Guide to Sexual Continence; A Manual for Married Couples, by Dr. Horscht.

This Dr. Horscht had written the book, he claimed, after counseling a modest young Christian couple who did not possess any knowledge—either theoretical or practical—of the sexual relation, and who had baffled themselves and each other with such peculiar feelings and sensations upon entering the conjugal bed that they felt they were under a spell. Finally, a few weeks after their wedding, the poor young groom had quizzed a friend, who had given him the shocking information that the newlywed husband needed to place his organ directly inside his bride’s “watering hole” for the proper relations to occur. This thought had brought such fear and shame upon the poor young fellow that he ran to Dr. Horscht with questions as to whether this outlandish-sounding act could possibly be either performable or virtuous. Dr. Horscht, in pity for the baffled young soul, had written his guidebook on the engine of sexuality, to assist other newly married men.

Alma had scorned the book when she’d read it years earlier. To be a young fellow and to hold such complete ignorance of the genito-urinary function seemed beyond absurd to her. Surely such people could not exist?

Yet now she wondered.

Did she need to show him?

That Saturday afternoon, Ambrose retired to their bedroom early and excused himself to bathe before dinner. She followed him to the room. She sat on the bed, and listened to the water running into the large porcelain tub on the other side of the door. She heard him humming. He was happy. She, on the other hand, was inflamed with misery and doubt. He must be undressing now. She heard muted splashes as he entered the bath, and then a sigh of pleasure. Then silence.

She stood up and undressed, too. She removed everything—drawers and chemise, even the pins from her hair. If she’d had anything more to take off, she would have done so. Her nude form was not beautiful, and she knew it, but it was all she had. She went and leaned against the door of the water closet, listening with her ear pressed against it. She did not have to do this. There were alternatives. She could learn to endure things as they were. She could patiently submit to her suffering, to this strange and impossible marriage-that-was-not-a-marriage. She could learn how to conquer everything that Ambrose brought forth within her—her appetite for him, her disappointment in him, her sense of tormenting absence whenever she was near him. If she could learn how to defeat her own desire, then she could keep her husband—such as he was.

No. No, she could not learn that.

She turned the knob, pushed against the door, and entered as silently as she could. His head turned toward her, and his eyes grew wide with alarm. She said nothing, and he said nothing. She looked away from his eyes and allowed herself to examine his entire body, just submerged under the cool bath water. There he was, in all his naked loveliness. His skin was milky white—so much whiter in his chest and legs than on his arms. There was only a trace of hair on his torso. He could not have been more perfectly beautiful.

Had she worried that he might not have genitalia at all? Had she imagined that this might have been the problem? Well, this was not the problem. He had genitalia—perfectly adequate, and even impressive, genitalia. She allowed herself to observe with care this lovely appendage of his—this pale, waving sea creature, which floated between his legs in its thatch of wet and private fur. Ambrose did not move. Nor did his penis stir at all. It did not like being looked at. She realized this immediately. Alma had spent enough time in the woods gazing upon shy animals to know when a creature did not want to be seen, and this creature between Ambrose’s legs did not wish to be seen. Still, she gazed at it because she could not look away. Ambrose allowed her to do this—not so much because he was permissive, but because he was paralyzed.

At last, she looked up to his face, desperate to find some opening, some conduit, into him. He appeared frozen in fear. Why fear? She dropped to the floor beside the bathtub. It almost looked as though she were kneeling before him in supplication. No—she was kneeling before him in supplication. His right hand, with its long and tapered fingers, was resting on the edge of the tub, clutching at the porcelain rim. She loosened this hand, one finger at a time. He allowed her to loosen it. She took his hand and brought it toward her mouth. She put three of his fingers in her mouth. She could not help herself. She needed something of him inside her. She wanted to bite down on him, just enough to keep his fingers from slipping out of her mouth. She did not wish to frighten him, but she did not wish to let him go, either. Instead of biting down, she began to suck. She was perfectly concentrated in her yearning. Her lips made a noise—a rude sort of wet noise.

At that, Ambrose came alive. He gasped, and yanked his fingers from her mouth. He sat up quickly, making a loud splash, and covered his genitals with both his hands. He looked as though he were going to die of terror.

“Please—” she said.

They stared at each other, like a woman and a bedchamber intruder—but she was the intruder, and he was the terrified quarry. He stared at her as though she were a stranger who had put a knife to his throat, as though she intended to use him for the most evil pleasures, then sever his head, carve out his bowels, and eat his heart with a long, sharpened fork.

Alma relented. What other choice did she have? She stood and walked slowly from the water closet, gently pulling the door closed behind her. She dressed again. She walked downstairs. Her heart was so broken that she did not know how it was possible she could still be alive.

She found Hanneke de Groot sweeping the corners of the dining room. With a clenched voice, she requested that the housekeeper please make up the guest bedroom in the east wing for Mr. Pike, who would be sleeping there from now on, until other arrangements could be made.

“Waarom?” Hanneke asked.

But Alma could not tell her why. She was tempted to fall into Hanneke’s arms and weep, but resisted it.

“Is there any harm in an old woman’s question?” Hanneke asked.

“You will please inform Mr. Pike yourself of this new arrangement,” Alma said, and walked away. “I find myself unable to tell him.”

Alma slept on her divan in the carriage house that night, and did not take dinner. She thought of Hippocrates, who believed that the ventricles of the heart were not pumps for blood, but for air. He believed the heart was an extension of the lungs—a sort of great, muscular bellows, which fed the furnace of the body. Tonight, Alma felt as if it were true. She could feel a huge gushing and sucking of wind inside her chest. It felt as though her heart was gasping for air. As for her lungs, they seemed full of blood. She was drowning with every breath. She could not shake this sense of drowning. She felt mad. She felt like crazed little Retta Snow, who also used to sleep on this couch, when the world became too frightening.

In the morning, Ambrose came to find her. He was pale and his face was contorted with pain. He sat beside her, and reached for her hands. She pulled them away. He stared at her for a long while without speaking.

“If you are trying to communicate something to me silently, Ambrose,” she said at last, in a voice tight with anger, “I will be unable to hear it. I ask that you speak to me directly. Do me that courtesy, please.”

“Forgive me,” he said.

“You must tell me what I am to forgive you for.”

He struggled. “This marriage . . .” he began, and then lost his words.

She laughed a hollow laugh. “What is a marriage, Ambrose, when it is cheated of the honest pleasures any husband and wife could rightly expect?”

He nodded. He looked hopeless.

“You have misled me,” she said.

“Yet I believed we understood each other.”

“Did you? What did you believe was understood? Tell me in words: What did you think our marriage would be?”

He searched for an answer. “An exchange,” he finally said.

“Of what, exactly?”

“Of love. Of ideas and comfort.”

“As did I, Ambrose. But I thought there might be other exchanges as well. If you wished to live like a Shaker, why did you not run off and join them?”

He looked at her, baffled. He had no idea what a Shaker was. Lord, there was so much this boy did not know!

“Let us not dispute each other, Alma, or stand in conflict,” he begged.

“Is it the dead girl whom you long for? Is that the problem?”

Again, the baffled expression.

“The dead girl, Ambrose,” she repeated. “The one your mother told me of. The one who died in Framingham years ago. The one you loved.”

He could not have been more perplexed. “You spoke to my mother?”

“She wrote me a letter. She told me of the girl—of your true love.”

“My mother wrote you a letter? About Julia?” Ambrose’s face was swimming in bewilderment. “But I never loved Julia, Alma. She was a dear child and the friend of my youth, but I never loved her. My mother may have wished me to love her, for she was the daughter of an upstanding family, but Julia was nothing more than my innocent neighbor. We drew flowers together. She had a small genius for it. She was dead at the age of fourteen. I have scarcely thought of her these many years. Why on earth are we speaking of Julia?”

“Why can you not love me?” Alma asked, hating the desperation in her voice.

“I could not love you more,” Ambrose said, with desperation to match her own.

“I am ugly, Ambrose. I have never been unaware of that fact. Also, I am old. Yet I am in possession of several things that you wanted—comforts, companionship. You could have had all those things without humiliating me through marriage. I had already given you those things, and would have given them to you forever. I was content to love you like a sister, perhaps even like a mother. But you were the one who wished to wed. You were the one who introduced to me the idea of matrimony. You were the one who said that you wanted to sleep next to me every night. You were the one who allowed me to long for things that I long ago overcame desiring.”

She had to stop speaking. Her voice was rising and cracking. This was shame upon shame.

“I have no need of wealth,” Ambrose said, his eyes wet with sorrow. “You know this of me.”

“Yet you are reaping its benefits.”

“You do not understand me, Alma.”

“I do not understand you at all, Mr. Pike. Edify me.”

“I asked you,” he said. “I asked you if you wanted a marriage of the soul—a mariage blanc.” When she did not immediately answer, he said, “It means a chaste marriage, without exchange of flesh.”

“I know what a mariage blanc is, Ambrose,” she snapped. “I was speaking French before you were born. What I fail to understand is why you would imagine that I wanted one.”

“Because I asked you. I asked if you would accept this of me, and you agreed.”

“When?” Alma felt that she would tear his hair straight out of his scalp if he did not speak more directly, more truthfully.

“In your book-repair closet that night, after I found you in the library. When we sat in silence together. I asked you, silently, ‘Will you accept this of me?’ and you said, ‘yes.’ I heard you say yes. I felt you say it! Do not deny it, Alma—you heard my question across the divide, and you answered me in the affirmative! Is that not true?”

He was staring at her with panicked eyes. Now she was struck dumb.

“And you asked me a question, too,” Ambrose went on. “You asked me silently if this is what I wanted of you. I said yes, Alma! I believe I even said it aloud! I could not have answered more clearly! You heard me say it!”

She cast her mind back to that night in the binding closet, to her silent detonation of sexual pleasure, to the sensation of his question running through her, and of her question running through him. What had she heard? She had heard him ask, clear as a ringing church bell, “Will you accept this of me?” Of course she had said yes. She thought he had meant, “Will you accept sensual pleasures such as this from me?” When she had asked in reply, “Is this what you want of me?” she had meant, “Do you want these sensual pleasures with me?”

Dear Lord in heaven, they had misunderstood each other’s questions! They had supernaturally misunderstood each other’s questions. It had been the one and only categorical miracle of Alma Whittaker’s life, and she had misunderstood it. This was the worst jest she had ever heard.

“I was only asking you,” she said wearily, “if you wanted me. Which is to say—if you wanted me fully, in the way that lovers typically want each other. I thought you were asking me the same.”

“But I would never ask for anyone’s corporeal body in the manner of which you speak,” Ambrose said.

“Why ever not?”

“Because I do not believe in it.”

Alma could not comprehend what she was hearing. She was unable to speak for a long while. Then she asked, “Is it your opinion that the conjugal act—even between a man and his wife—is something vile and depraved? Surely you know, Ambrose, what other people share with each other, in the privacy of marriage? Do you think me debased, for wanting my husband to be a husband? Surely you have heard tales of such enjoyments between men and women?”

“I am not like other men, Alma. Can that honestly surprise you to learn, at this late date?”

“What do you imagine you are, then, if not like other men?”

“It is not what I imagine I am, Alma—it is what I wish to be. Or rather, what I once was, and wish to be again.”

“Which is what, Ambrose?”

“An angel of God,” Ambrose said, in a voice of unspeakable sadness. “I had hoped we could be angels of God together. Such a thing would not be possible unless we were freed of the flesh, bound in celestial grace.”

“Oh, for the godforsaken mercy of the twice-buggered mother of Christ!” Alma cursed. She wanted to pick him up and shake him, as she’d shaken Robert the garden boy the other day. She wanted to argue scripture with him. The women of Sodom, she wanted to tell him, had been punished by Jehovah for having sexual communion with angels—but at least they had gotten their chance! Just her luck, to have been sent an angel so beautiful, yet so uncomplying.

“Come, Ambrose!” she said. “Awaken yourself! We do not live in the celestial realm—not you, and most certainly not I. How can you be so dim? Put your eyes upon me, child! Your real eyes—your mortal eyes. Do I look like an angel to you, Ambrose Pike?”

“Yes,” he said, with sad simplicity.

The rage passed out of Alma, and was replaced by leaden, bottomless sorrow.

“Then you have been much mistaken,” Alma said, “and now we find ourselves in a deuce of a mess.”

He could not stay on at White Acre.

This became evident after only a week had passed—a week during which Ambrose slept in the guest chambers in the east wing, and Alma slept on the divan in the carriage house, both of them enduring the grins and titters of the young maids. To be wed only a few weeks and already sleeping not only in different rooms, but in different buildings . . . well, this was far too glorious a scandal for the busybodies about the estate to resist.

Hanneke tried to keep the staff silent, but the rumors dipped and flew like bats at twilight. They said that Alma was too old and ugly for Ambrose to endure, regardless of the fortune that came tucked inside her dried-up cunny. They said that Ambrose had been caught stealing. They said that Ambrose liked the pretty young girls, and that he had been found with his hand on the arse of a dairymaid. They said whatever they wanted to say; Hanneke could not dismiss everyone. Alma overheard some of it herself, and what she did not overhear, she could easily imagine. The looks they gave her were despicable enough.

Her father called her into his study on a Monday afternoon in late October.

“What is this, then?” he said. “Bored of your new toy already?”

“Do not ridicule me, Father—I swear to you, I cannot bear it.”

“Then make an explanation to me.”

“It is too shameful to explain.”

“I cannot imagine that to be true. Do you fancy that I have not heard the bulk of rumors already? Nothing you could tell me would be more shameful than what people are already saying.”

“There is much that I cannot tell you, Father.”

“Has he been untrue to you? Already?”

“You know him, Father. He would not do that.”

“None of us much know him, Alma. So what is it? Stolen from you—from me? Is he rutting you half to death? Beating you with a leather strop? No, somehow I cannot see any of that. Put a name to it, girl. What is his crime?”

“He cannot stay here any longer, and I cannot tell you why.”

“Do you take me for a specimen of man who would faint at the truth? I am old, Alma, but not yet entombed. And don’t think I will not guess it, either, if I go at the question long enough. Are you frigid? Is that the trouble? Or does he hang limp?”

She did not reply.

“Ah,” he said. “Something like that, then. So there has been no settlement of the marital duties?”

Again, she did not reply.

Henry clapped his hands. “Well, what of it? You enjoy each other’s companionship, regardless. That’s more than most people are allotted in their marriages. You are too old to bear children, anyway, and many marriages are not happy in the bedchamber. Most of them, really. Poorly matched pairings are thick as flies in this world. Your marriage may have soured faster than others, but you will bear up and endure it, Alma, like the rest of us do—or did. Haven’t you been raised to bear up and endure things? You will not have your life felled by one setback. Make the best of it. Think of him as a brother, if he does not tickle you under the coverlets to your satisfaction. He would make a good enough brother. He is pleasant company to us all.”

“I am not in need of a brother. I am telling you, Father, he cannot stay here. You must make him leave.”

“And I am telling you, daughter, that not three months ago we two stood in this very room and I listened to you insist that you must marry this man—a man about whom I knew nothing, and about whom you knew only a penny’s worth more. Now you wish me to chase him away? What am I to be, your bull terrier? I confess, I do not approve of it, no, I do not. There is no dignity in it. Is it the gossip you don’t like? Face it down like a Whittaker. Go and be seen by those who mock you. Knock somebody’s head about, if you don’t like the way they look at you. They’ll learn. They’ll find something else to gossip about soon enough. But to cast this young man out forever, for the crime of—what? Not entertaining you? Take up with one of the gardeners, if you must have a young buck in your bed. There are men you can pay for such diversions, same as men pay for women. People desirous of money will do anything, and you have ample money. Use your dowry to establish a harem of young men for your pleasure, if you wish it.”

“Father, please—” she begged.

“But meanwhile, what do you propose I do with our Mr. Pike?” he went on. “Drag him behind a carriage through the streets of Philadelphia, painted with tar? Sink him in the Schuylkill, tied to a barrel full of rocks? Put a blindfold on him, and shoot him against a wall?”

She could only stand there in shame and sorrow, unable to speak. What had she thought her father would say? Well—foolish as it seemed now—she had thought Henry might defend her. She thought Henry would be outraged on her behalf. She had half expected him to stomp around the house in one of his famous old theatrical rants, arms waving like a player in a farce: How could you do this to my daughter? That sort of thing. Something to match the pitch and depth of her own loss and fury. But why would she think that? Whom had she ever seen Henry Whittaker defend? And if he was defending anyone in this case, it appeared he was defending Ambrose.

Instead of coming to her rescue, her father was belittling her. What’s more, Alma now remembered the conversation she and Henry had had about her marriage to Ambrose, not three months earlier. Henry had warned her—or at least, he’d raised the question—about whether “this sort of man” could bring her satisfaction in matrimony. What had he known then, that he hadn’t expressed? What did he know now?

“Why did you not stop me marrying him?” Alma asked at last. “You suspected something. Why did you not speak?”

Henry shrugged. “It was not my domain three months ago to make up your mind for you. Nor is it now. If something is to be done with the young man, you must do it yourself.”

The thought of this staggered Alma: Henry had been making up Alma’s mind for her forever, since she was the smallest mite of a girl—or that was how she had always perceived things.

She could not stop herself from asking, “But what do you think I should do with him?”

“Do what you damned well like, Alma! This decision is yours. Mr. Pike is not mine to dispose of. You brought this thing into our household, you get rid of it—if that is what you wish. Be swift about it, too. It is always better to cut than to tear. One way or another, I want this matter resolved. A certain amount of common sense has exited this family in the last few months, and I would like to see it restored. We have too much work on hand for this sort of foolery.”

In years to come, Alma would try to convince herself that she and Ambrose had made the decision together—about where he was to go next in his life—but nothing could have been further from the truth. Ambrose Pike was not a man who made decisions for himself. He was an untethered balloon, fabulously susceptible to the influence of those more powerful than he—and everyone was more powerful than he. Always, he had done just as he was told. His mother had told him to go to Harvard, and so he had gone to Harvard. His friends had pulled him out of a snowbank and sent him to a ward for the mentally insane, and he had obediently allowed himself to be locked away. Daniel Tupper up in Boston had told him to go to the jungles of Mexico and paint orchids, and he had gone to the jungle and painted orchids. George Hawkes had invited him to Philadelphia, and he had come to Philadelphia. Alma had established him at White Acre and instructed him to make a grand florilegium of her father’s plant collection, and he had set to it without question. He would go wherever he was led.

He wanted to be an angel of God, but Lord protect him, he was just a lamb.

Did she honestly try to think of a plan that would be best for him? She told herself later that she did. She would not divorce him; there was no reason to put either of them through such scandal. She would provide him with ample funds—not that he had ever asked for any, but because it was the proper thing to do. She would not send him back to Massachusetts, not only because she detested his mother (just from that one letter, she detested his mother!) but also because the thought of Ambrose sleeping forever on his friend Tupper’s couch brought her anguish. She could not send him back to Mexico, either, that was certain. He had almost died of fever there already.

Yet she could not keep him in Philadelphia, because his presence brought her too much suffering. Mercy, how he had diminished her! Yet she still loved his face—pale and troubled though he had become. Just to see that face brought forth such a gaping, vulgar need within her that she could scarcely bear it. He would have to go elsewhere—somewhere far away. She could not risk encountering him in the years to come.

She wrote a letter to Dick Yancey—to her father’s iron-fisted business manager—who was at the moment in Washington, D.C., arranging some business with the nascent botanical gardens there. Alma knew that Yancey would soon be embarking for the South Pacific on a whaling ship. He was going to Tahiti to investigate the Whittaker Company’s struggling vanilla plantation, and to attempt to put into place the artificial-pollination tactic that Ambrose himself had suggested to Alma’s father, on the first night of his visit to White Acre.

Yancey planned to leave for Tahiti soon, within the fortnight. It was best to sail before the late-autumn storms, and before the harbor froze.

Alma knew all this. Why should Ambrose not go to Tahiti with Dick Yancey, then? It was a respectable, even ideal, solution. Ambrose could take over management of the vanilla plantation himself. He would excel at it, would he not? Vanillas were orchids, weren’t they? Henry Whittaker would be pleased with the plan; sending Ambrose to Tahiti was exactly what he’d wanted in the first place, before Alma talked him out of it, to her own severe detriment.

Was this a banishment? Alma attempted not to think so. Tahiti was said to be a paradise, Alma told herself. It was hardly a penal colony. Yes, Ambrose was delicate, but Dick Yancey would see that no harm befell him. The work would be interesting. The climate was fine and healthy there. Who would not envy this opportunity to see the fabled shores of Polynesia? It was an opportunity that any man of botany or commerce would welcome—and it was all paid for, besides.

She pushed aside the voices within her who protested that, yes, this was most certainly a banishment—and a cruel one. She ignored what she knew all too well—that Ambrose was neither a man of botany nor a man of commerce, but rather a being of unique sensitivities and talents, whose mind was a delicate thing, and who was perhaps not at all suited to a long journey on a whaling vessel, or life on an agricultural plantation in the distant South Seas. Ambrose was more child than man, and he had said to Alma many times that he wanted nothing more in life than a secure home and a gentle companion.

Well, there are many things in life that we want, she told herself, and we do not always get them.

Besides, there was nowhere else for him to go.

Having decided everything, Alma then established her husband at the United States Hotel for two weeks—right across the street from the large bank where her father’s money was stored in great secret vaults—while she waited for Dick Yancey to return from Washington.

It was in the lobby of United States Hotel, a fortnight later, that Alma at last introduced her husband to Dick Yancey—to towering, silent Dick Yancey, with the fearsome eyes and the jaw carved out of rock, who did not ask questions, and who did only as he was ordered. Well, Ambrose did only as he was ordered, too. Stooped and pale, Ambrose asked no questions. He did not even ask how long he would be expected to remain in Polynesia. She would not have known how to answer that question, in any case. It was not a banishment, she continued to tell herself. Yet even she did not know how long it would last.

“Mr. Yancey will take care of you from here,” she said to Ambrose. “Your comforts will be attended to, as much as possible.”

She felt as though she were leaving a baby in the care of a trained crocodile. At that moment, she loved Ambrose every bit as much as she ever had loved him—which was entirely. Already, she felt a wide-open absence at the thought of him sailing to the other side of the world. Then again, she had felt nothing but wide-open absence since her wedding night. She wanted to embrace him, but she had always wanted to embrace him, and she could not do that. He would not permit it. She wanted to cling to him, to beg him to stay, to beg him to love her. None of it was permitted. There was no use in it.

They shook hands, as they had done in her mother’s Grecian garden on the day they had met. The same small worn leather valise sat beside Ambrose’s feet, filled with all his belongings. He wore the same brown corduroy suit. He had taken nothing with him from White Acre.

The last thing she said to him was, “I pray of you, Ambrose, do me the service of not speaking to anyone you may meet about our marriage. Nobody need know what has transpired between us. You will travel not as the son-in-law of Henry Whittaker, but as his employee. Anything further than that would only lead to questions, and I do not long for the world’s questions.”

He agreed by nodding. He said nothing more. He looked sick and exhausted.

Alma did not need to ask Dick Yancey to keep secret her history with Mr. Pike. Dick Yancey did nothing but keep secrets; that was why the Whittakers had kept him around for such a very long time.

Dick Yancey was useful that way.