The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-two

Alma’s first glimpse of Tahiti, as seen from the deck of the Elliot, had been of abrupt mountain peaks rising hard into cloudless cerulean skies. She had just awoken on this fine, clear morning, and had walked onto the deck to survey her world. She was not expecting what she saw. The sight of Tahiti grabbed the breath from Alma’s chest: not its beauty, but its strangeness. All her life, she’d heard stories of this island, and she’d seen drawings and paintings, too, but still she had no idea the place would be so tall, so extraordinary. These mountains were nothing like the rolling hills of Pennsylvania; these were verdant and wild slopes—shockingly steep, alarmingly jagged, staggeringly high, blindingly green. Indeed, everything about the place was overdressed with green. Even right down to the beaches, it was all excessive and green. Coconut palms gave the impression of growing straight from the water itself.

It unnerved her. Here she was, quite literally in the middle of nowhere—halfway between Australia and Peru—and she could not help but wonder: Why is there an island here at all? Tahiti felt to her like an uncanny interruption of the Pacific’s vast, endless flatness—an eerie and arbitrary cathedral, thrusting up from the center of the sea for no reason at all. She had expected to view it as a kind of paradise, for that was how Tahiti had always been described. She had expected to be overcome by its beauty, to feel as though she had landed in Eden. Hadn’t Bougainville called the island La Nouvelle Cythère, after the island of Aphrodite’s birth? But Alma’s first reaction, to be quite honest, was fear. On this bright morning, in this balmy climate, faced with the sudden appearance of this famous utopia, she was conscious of nothing but a sense of menace. She wondered, What had Ambrose made of this? She did not want to be left alone here.

But where else was she to go?

The old pacer of a ship slid smoothly into the harbor at Papeete, with seabirds of a dozen varieties spinning and wheeling about the masts faster than Alma could count or identify them. Alma and her luggage were dispatched onto the bustling, colorful wharf. Captain Terrence, quite kindly, went to see if he could hire Alma a carriage to take her to the mission settlement at Matavai Bay.

Her legs were shaky, after months at sea, and she was nearly overcome by nerves. She saw people around her of all sorts—sailors and naval officers and men of commerce, and somebody in clogs, who looked as though he might be a Dutch merchant. She saw a pair of Chinese pearl traders, with long queues down their backs. She saw natives and half-natives and who knew what else. She saw a burly Tahitian man wearing a heavy woolen pea jacket, which he had clearly acquired from a British sailor, but he wore no trousers—just a skirt of grass, and a disconcertingly nude chest beneath the jacket. She saw native women dressed in all sorts of ways. Some of the older ones quite brazenly displayed their breasts, while the younger women tended to wear long frocks, with their hair arranged in modest plaits. They were the new converts to Christianity, Alma supposed. She saw a woman wrapped in what appeared to be a tablecloth, wearing men’s European leather shoes several sizes too big for her feet, selling unfamiliar fruits. She saw a fantastically dressed fellow, wearing European trousers as a sort of jacket, with his head all aflutter in a crown of leaves. She thought him a most extraordinary sight, but no one else paid him any notice.

The native people here were bigger than the people Alma was used to. Some of the women were quite as large as Alma herself. The men were even larger. Their skin was burnished copper. Some of the men had long hair and looked frightening; others had short hair and looked civilized.

Alma saw a sad knot of prostitutes rush toward the Elliot’s sailors with immediate, brazen suggestions, just as soon as the men’s feet touched the dock. These women wore their hair down, reaching below their waists in glossy black waves. From the back, they all looked the same. From the front, one could see the differences in age and beauty. Alma watched the negotiations begin. She wondered how much something like that cost. She wondered what the women offered, specifically. She wondered how long these transactions took, and where they occurred. She wondered where the sailors went if they wanted to purchase boys instead of girls. There was no sign of that sort of exchange on the dock. Probably it happened in a more discreet place.

She saw all manner of infants and children—in and out of clothes, in and out of the water, in and out of her way. The children moved like schools of fish, or flocks of birds, with every decision rendered in immediate, collective concurrence: Now we shall jump! Now we shall run! Now we shall beg! Now we shall mock! She saw an old man with a leg inflamed to twice its natural size. His eyes were white from blindness. She saw tiny carriages, pulled by the saddest little ponies imaginable. She saw a group of small brindled dogs tangling with each other in the shade. She saw three French sailors, arm in arm, singing lustily, drunk already on this fine morning. She saw signs for a billiards hall, and, remarkably, a printing shop. The solid land swayed beneath her feet. She was hot in the sun.

A handsome black rooster spotted Alma and marched toward her with an officious strut, as though he were an emissary dispatched to welcome her. He was so dignified that she would not have been surprised had he worn a ceremonial sash across his chest. The rooster stopped directly in front of her, magisterial and watchful. Alma nearly expected him to speak, or demand to see her documents. Not knowing what else to do, she reached down and stroked the courtly bird, as if he were a dog. Astonishingly, he allowed it. She stroked him some more, and he clucked at her in rich satisfaction. Eventually the rooster settled at her feet and fluffed out his feathers in handsome repose. He showed every sign of feeling that their interaction had gone precisely according to plan. Alma felt comforted, somehow, by this simple exchange. The rooster’s quietude and assurance helped put her at ease.

Then the two of them—bird and woman—waited together silently on the docks, waiting for whatever would happen next.

It was seven miles between Papeete and Matavai Bay. Alma took such pity on the poor pony who had to haul her luggage that she stepped out of the carriage and walked along beside it. It was exquisite to use her legs after so many stagnant months at sea. The road was lovely and shaded overhead by a latticework of palms and breadfruit trees. The landscape felt both familiar and confounding to Alma. Many of the palm varieties she recognized from her father’s greenhouses, but others were mysterious concoctions of pleated leaves and slippery, leathery bark. Having known palms only in greenhouses, Alma had never before heard palm trees. The sound of the wind through their fronds was like rustling silk. Sometimes, in the stronger gusts, their trunks creaked like old doors. They were all so loud and alive. As for the breadfruit trees, they were grander and more elegant than she would ever have imagined. They looked like the elms of home: glossy and magnanimous.

The carriage driver—an old Tahitian man with a disturbingly tattooed back and a well-oiled chest—was perplexed by Alma’s insistence on walking. He seemed to fear this meant he wouldn’t be paid. To reassure him, she tried to pay him halfway to their destination. This brought only more confusion. Captain Terrence had negotiated a price beforehand, but that arrangement now looked to be void. Alma offered payment in American coins, but the man attempted to make change for her from a handful of dirty Spanish piastres and Bolivian pesos. Alma could not figure out how he was possibly calculating this currency exchange, until she realized he was trading in his dull old coins for her shiny new ones.

She was deposited in a fringe of shade under a banana grove in the middle of the mission settlement at Matavai Bay. The carriage driver stacked her luggage into a tidy pyramid; it looked just as it had looked seven months earlier, outside the carriage house at White Acre. Left alone, Alma took in her surroundings. It was a pleasant enough situation here, she thought, though more modest than she had imagined. The mission church was a humble little structure, whitewashed and thatched, surrounded by a small cluster of similarly whitewashed and thatched cottages. There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen people altogether living there.

The community, such as it was, was built along the banks of a small river that let out straight into the sea. The river bisected the beach, which was long and curved, and formed of dense, black, volcanic sand. Because of the color of the sand, the bay here was not the shining turquoise one normally associates with the South Seas; instead it was a stately, heavy, slow-rolling inlet of ink. A reef about three hundred yards out kept the surf fairly calm. Even from this distance, Alma could hear the waves smashing against that distant reef. She took up a handful of the sand—the color of soot—and let it pour through her fingers. It felt like warm velvet, and it left her fingers clean.

“Matavai Bay,” she said aloud.

She could scarcely believe she was here. All the great explorers of the last century had been here. Wallis had been here, and Vancouver, and Bougainville. Captain Bligh had spent six months camped on this very beach. Most impressive of all, to Alma’s mind, was that this was the same beach where Captain Cook had first landed in Tahiti, in 1769. To Alma’s left, in the near distance, was the high promontory where Cook had observed the transit of Venus—that vital movement of a tiny black planetary disc across the face of the sun, which he had traveled across the world to witness. The gentle little river to Alma’s right had once marked the last boundary in history between the Tahitians and the British. Directly after Cook’s landfall, the two peoples had stood on the opposite sides of this stream, regarding each other with wary curiosity for several hours. The Tahitians thought the British had sailed out of the sky, and that their huge, impressive ships were islands—motu—that had broken loose from the stars. The English tried to determine if these Indians would be aggressive or dangerous. The Tahitian women came right to the edge of the river and teased the English sailors on the other side with playful, provocative dances. There seemed to be no danger here, decided Captain Cook, and he let his men loose upon the girls. The sailors exchanged iron nails with the women for sexual favors. The women took the nails and planted them in the ground, hoping to grow more of this precious iron, as one would grow a tree from a sprig.

Alma’s father had not been on that voyage. Henry Whittaker had come to Tahiti eight years later, on Cook’s third expedition, in August of 1777. By that point, the English and the Tahitians were well accustomed to each other—and fond of each other, too. Some of the British sailors even had island wives waiting among the women, and island children, as well. The Tahitians had called Captain Cook “Toote” because they could not pronounce his name. Alma knew all this from her father’s stories—stories she had not thought of in decades. She remembered them all now. Her father had bathed in this very river as a young man. Since that time, the missionaries had started using it, Alma knew, for baptisms.

Now that she was here at last, Alma was not certain what to do next. There was not a soul in sight, with the exception of a child playing alone in the river. He could not have been more than three years old, was absolutely nude, and acted quite unperturbed about having been left unattended in the water. She did not wish to leave her luggage unguarded, so she simply sat down on the pile and waited for someone to come along. She was terribly thirsty. She had been too excited that morning to eat her ship’s breakfast, so she was hungry, too.

After a long spell, a stout Tahitian woman in a long, modest dress and a white bonnet emerged from one of the more distant cottages, carrying a hoe. She stopped when she saw Alma. Alma stood up and straightened her dress. “Bonjour,” she cried out. Tahiti officially belonged to France now; Alma imagined French was her best option.

The woman smiled beautifully. “We speak English here!” she cried back.

Alma wanted to approach, so they would not have to shout at each other, but—foolishly—she still felt bound to her luggage. “I am looking for the Reverend Francis Welles!” she called.

“He is in the corral today!” the woman called back cheerfully, and went on her way down the road toward Papeete, leaving Alma once more alone with her trunks.

The corral? Did they have cattle here? If so, Alma could neither see nor smell any sign of them. What could the woman have meant?

Over the next hours, a few more Tahitians wandered past Alma and her pile of crates and trunks. All of them were friendly, yet none seemed especially intrigued by her presence, and none talked with her for long. All reiterated the same piece of information: that the Reverend Francis Welles was in the corral for the day. And what time would he be back from the corral? Nobody knew. Before dark, they all dearly hoped.

A few young boys gathered round Alma and played a daring game of tossing pebbles at her luggage, and sometimes at her feet, until a large older woman with a glowering face chased them away, and they dashed off to play in the river. As the day wore on, some men with tiny fishing poles walked past Alma down to the beach and waded into the sea. They stood up to their necks in the gently rolling surf, casting about for fish. Her thirst and hunger had become urgent. Still, she did not dare go wandering and leave her belongings behind.

Dusk comes on fast in the tropics. Alma had already learned this in her months at sea. The shadows grew longer. The children ran out of the river and dashed back inside their cottages. Alma watched the sun lowering swiftly over the steep peaks of the island of Moorea, far across the bay. She began to panic. Where would she sleep tonight? Mosquitoes flitted around her head. She was now invisible to the Tahitians. They went about their business around her, as if she and her luggage were a stone cairn that had stood there on the beach since the dawn of history itself. The evening swallows emerged from the trees to hunt. Light glared off the water in dazzling blazes from the setting sun.

Then Alma saw something in the water, something heading toward the beach. It was a small outrigger canoe, quick and narrow. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted against the reflected sunlight, trying to make out the figures inside. No, it was just one figure, she saw, and that figure was paddling most energetically. The canoe shot up onto the beach with remarkable force—a little arrow of perfect momentum—and out sprang an elf. Or such was Alma’s first thought: Here is an elf! Further scrutiny, however, revealed the elf to be a man, a white man, with a wild corona of snowy hair and a fluttering beard to match. He was tiny and bowlegged and spry, and he hauled the canoe up the beach with surprising strength for one so small.

“Reverend Welles?” she shouted with hope, waving her arms in a gesture that utterly lacked dignity.

The man approached. It was difficult to say what was more remarkable about him—his diminutive stature or his gaunt frame. He was half the size of Alma, with a child’s body, and a quite skeletal body, at that. His cheeks were hollow and his shoulders were sharp and pointed beneath his shirt. His trousers were held around his pinched waist by a doubled-up length of rope. His beard reached far down his chest. He was wearing some sort of strange sandals, also made of rope. He did not wear a hat, and his face was deeply sunburned. His clothes were not entirely in rags, but quite nearly. He looked like a broken parasol. He looked like an elderly, miniature castaway.

“Reverend Welles?” she asked again, hesitant as he drew nearer.

He looked up at her—far up at her—with frank and bright blue eyes. “I am the Reverend Welles,” he said. “At least, I believe that I still am, you see!”

He spoke with a light, clipped, indeterminate British accent.

“Reverend Welles, my name is Alma Whittaker. I hope you received my letter?”

He tilted his head: birdlike, interested, unperturbed. “Your letter?”

It was just as she had feared. She was not expected here. She took a deep breath and tried to think how best to explain herself. “I have come to visit, Reverend Welles, and to perhaps stay for a while—as you can probably see.” She made an apologetic gesture toward her pyramid of luggage. “I have an interest in natural botany and I would like to study your native plants. I know that you are something of a naturalist yourself. I come from Philadelphia, in the United States. I have also come to survey the vanilla plantation my family owns. My father was Henry Whittaker.”

He raised his wispy white eyebrows. “Your father was Henry Whittaker, do you say?” he asked. “Has that good man passed away?”

“I’m afraid he has, Reverend Welles. Just this last year.”

“I regret to hear it. May the Lord take him to His breast. I worked for your father over the years, you see, in my own small way. I sold him many specimens, for which he was kind enough to pay me fairly. I never met your father, you see, but I worked through his emissary, Mr. Yancey. He was always a most generous and upright man, your good father. Many times over the years, the earnings from Mr. Whittaker helped to save this little settlement. We cannot always count on the London Missionary Society to come through for us, can we? But we have always been able to count on Mr. Yancey and Mr. Whittaker, you see. Tell me, do you know Mr. Yancey?”

“I know him well, Reverend Welles. I have known him all my life. He arranged for my travel here.”

“Certainly! Certainly you do. Then you know him to be a good man.”

Alma could not say that she would ever have accused Dick Yancey of being “a good man,” but she nodded nonetheless. Likewise, she had never before heard her father described as generous, upright, or kind. These words would take some getting accustomed to. She remembered a man in Philadelphia who’d once referred to her father as “a biped of prey.” Think how surprised that man would be now, to see how well regarded was the biped’s name here, in the middle of the South Seas! The thought of it made Alma smile.

“I would be most happy to show you the vanilla plantation,” the Reverend Welles continued. “A native man from our mission has taken over management of it, ever since we lost Mr. Pike. Did you know Ambrose Pike?”

Alma’s heart pirouetted inside her chest, but she kept her face neutral. “Yes, I knew him a bit. I worked rather closely with my father, Reverend Welles, and it was the two of us, in fact, who made the decision to dispatch Mr. Pike to Tahiti.”

Alma had decided months ago, even before leaving Philadelphia, that she would tell nobody in Tahiti of her relationship to Ambrose. During the entirety of her journey, she had traveled as “Miss Whittaker,” and had allowed the world to regard her a spinster. In a very real sense, of course, she was a spinster. No sane person would have regarded her marriage to Ambrose as any sort of marriage at all. What’s more, she certainly looked like a spinster—and felt like one. Generally speaking, she did not like to tell lies, but she had come here to fit together the story of Ambrose Pike, and she much doubted that anyone would be candid with her if they knew that Ambrose had been her husband. Assuming that Ambrose had honored her request and told nobody of their marriage, she did not imagine anyone would suspect a link between them, aside from the fact that Mr. Pike had been her father’s employee. As for Alma, she was merely a traveling naturalist, and the daughter of a quite famous botanical importer and pharmaceuticals magnate; it should make every bit of sense to anyone that she might come to Tahiti for her own purposes—to study its mosses, and to look in on the family’s vanilla plantation.

“Well, we sorely miss Mr. Pike,” the Reverend Welles said, with a sweet smile. “Perhaps I miss him most of all. His death was a loss to our small settlement, you see. We wish that all strangers who came here would set such a good example to the natives as did Mr. Pike, who was a friend to the fatherless and fallen, an enemy of rancor and viciousness, and all that sort of thing, you see. He was a kind man, your Mr. Pike. I admired him, you see, because I felt he was able to show the natives—as so many Christians cannot seem to show the natives—what a Christian temperament should truly be. The conduct of so many other visiting Christians, you see, does not always seem calculated to raise the esteem of our religion in the eyes of these simple people. But Mr. Pike was a model of goodness. What’s more, he had a gift for befriending the natives such as I have rarely seen in others. He spoke to everyone in such a plain and generous manner, you see. It is not always done that way, I am afraid, with the men who come to this island from far away. Tahiti can be a dangerous paradise, you see. For those who are accustomed to, let us say, the more rigorous moral landscape of European society, this island and its people can present temptations that are difficult to resist. Visitors take advantage, you see. Even some missionaries, I am sorry to say, sometimes exploit these people, who are a childlike and innocent people, you see, though with the help of the Lord we try to teach them to be more self-preserving. Mr. Pike was not such a type—to take advantage, you see.”

Alma felt bowled over. She found this to be quite the most remarkable speech of introduction she had ever heard (barring, she supposed, the first time she had met Retta Snow). The Reverend Welles had not probed whatsoever into why Alma Whittaker had come all the way from Philadelphia to sit upon a pile of crates and trunks in the middle of his mission, and yet here he was, already discussing Ambrose Pike! She had not expected this. Nor had she expected that her husband, with his valise filled with secret and lewd drawings, would be praised quite so passionately as a moral example.

“Yes, Reverend Welles,” she managed to say.

Astonishingly, the Reverend Welles continued even further on the subject: “What’s more, you see, I came to love Mr. Pike as a most cherished friend. You cannot imagine the comfort of an intelligent companion in a place so lonely as this. Verily I would walk many miles to see his face again or to grasp his hand once more in friendship, if only that were possible—but such a miracle will never exist for as long as I breathe, you see, for Mr. Pike has been called home to paradise, Miss Whittaker, and we are left here alone.”

“Yes, Reverend Welles,” Alma said again. What else could she say?

“You may call me Brother Welles,” he said, “if I may call you Sister Whittaker?”

“Certainly, Brother Welles,” she said.

“You may now join us for evening prayer, Sister Whittaker. We are in a bit of a rush, you see. We will start later than usual this evening, for I have spent the day out in the coral, you see, and I have lost track of time.”

Ah, Alma thought—the coral. Of course! He had been out at sea all day in the coral reefs, not looking after cattle.

“Thank you,” Alma said. She looked again to her luggage, and hesitated. “I wonder where I might place my belongings in the meanwhile, to keep them safe? In my letter, Brother Welles, I had inquired if I might stay at the settlement for some time. I study mosses, you see, and I had hoped to explore the island . . .” She trailed off, unnerved by the man’s candid blue eyes upon her.

“Certainly!” he said. She waited for him to say more, but he did not. How unquestioning he was! He could not have been less discommoded by her presence if they had planned this rendezvous for ten years.

“I have a comfortable amount of money,” Alma said uncomfortably, “which I could offer to the mission in exchange for lodging . . .”

“Certainly!” he chirped again.

“I am not yet decided as to how long I might stay . . . I shall make every effort not to be a bother . . . I do not expect comforts . . .” She trailed off again. She was answering questions that he was not asking. Over time, Alma would learn that the Reverend Welles never asked questions of anyone, but for now she found it extraordinary.

“Certainly!” he said, for the third time. “Now join us in evening prayer, Sister Whittaker.”

“Certainly,” she said, and gave up.

He led her away from her luggage—away from all that she owned and all that was precious to her—and strode toward the church. All she could do was follow.

The chapel was not more than twenty feet long. Inside, it was lined with simple benches, and its walls were whitewashed and clean. Four whale-oil lanterns kept the place dimly lit. Alma counted eighteen worshippers, all of them native Tahitians. Eleven women and seven men. To the degree possible (she did not wish to be rude), Alma examined the faces of all the men. None of them was The Boy from Ambrose’s drawings. The men were dressed in simple European-style trousers and shirts and the women wore those long, loose frocks that Alma had been seeing everywhere since she’d ar-rived. Most of the women wore bonnets, but one—Alma recognized her as the hard-faced lady who had shooed away the young boys—wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, decorated with an elaborate array of fresh flowers.

What followed was the most unusual religious service Alma had ever witnessed, and by far the shortest. First, they sang a hymn in the Tahitian language, though no one had a hymnal. The music was odd to Alma’s ears—dissonant and sharp, with voices layered upon voices in patterns she could not follow, accompanied by naught but a single drum, played by a boy of about fourteen. The drum’s rhythm did not seem to match the song—not in any way that Alma could identify. The women’s voices rose up in piercing cries above the chants of the men. She could find no melody hidden within this strange music. She kept listening for a familiar word (Jesus, Christ, God, Lord, Jehovah) but nothing was recognizable. She felt self-conscious sitting in silence while the women around her sang so loudly. She could add nothing to this event.

After the singing ended, Alma expected the Reverend Welles to deliver a sermon, but he remained sitting with his head bowed in prayer. He did not even look up as the large Tahitian woman with the flowers on her hat stood and approached the simple pulpit. The woman read briefly, in English, from the book of Matthew. Alma marveled that this woman could read, and in English, as well. Though Alma had never been the prayerful sort, there was comfort in the familiar words. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the reviled and persecuted. Blessed, blessed, blessed. So many blessings, so generously expressed.

Then the woman closed the Bible and—still speaking in English—gave a quick, loud, and strange sermon.

“We are born!” she shouted. “We crawl! We walk! We swim! We work! We give children! We grow old! We walk with a stick! But only in God there is peace!”

“Peace!” said the congregation.

“If we fly to heaven, God is there! If we sail the sea, God is there! If we walk the land, God is there!”

“There!” said the congregation.

The woman stretched out her arms and opened and closed her hands in quick succession, many times in a row. Then she opened and closed her mouth rapidly. She made antics like a puppet on strings. Some of the congregation giggled. The woman did not seem to mind the laughter. Then she stopped moving about and shouted, “Look at us! We are cleverly made! We are full of hinges!”

“Hinges!” said the congregation.

“But the hinges will rust! We will die! Only God remains!”

“Remains!” said the congregation.

“The king of bodies has no body! But he brings us peace!”

“Peace!” said the congregation.

“Amen!” said the woman in the flower-covered hat, and returned to her seat.

“Amen!” said the congregation.

Then the Reverend Welles moved to the altar and offered communion. Alma stood in line with the rest of them. The Reverend was so tiny, she had to bend nearly double at the waist to receive his offering. There was no wine, but the juice of a coconut served the purpose of Christ’s blood. As for the body of Christ, it was a small rolled ball of something sticky and sweet that Alma could not identify. She welcomed it; she was famished.

The Reverend Welles offered an impressively short prayer: “Give us the will, oh Christ, to endure every affliction that is our portion. Amen.”

“Amen,” said the congregation.

This concluded the service. It could not have lasted fifteen minutes. Yet it was just enough time that—when Alma walked back outside—she found that the sky had grown completely dark, and every last one of her belongings was gone.

“Taken where?” Alma demanded. “And by whom?”

“Hmm,” said the Reverend Welles, scratching his head and looking at the spot where Alma’s luggage had rested only so very recently. “Now, that is not easily answered. Probably the young boys took it all, you see. It is usually the young boys, for this sort of thing. But most certainly it has been taken.”

This confirmation was not helpful.

“Brother Welles!” she said, frantic with alarm. “I asked you if we should safeguard it! I need those items most urgently! We could have put it all in a house somewhere, safe behind a locked door, perhaps! Why did you not suggest it?”

He nodded in earnest agreement, but without any trace of consternation. “We could have put your luggage in a house, yes. But, you see, everything would have been taken regardless. They would take it now, you see, or they would take it later.”

Alma thought of her microscope, of her reams of paper, her ink, her pencils and medicines and collection vials. What of her clothing? Dear God, what of Ambrose’s valise, filled with all those dangerous, unspeakable drawings? She thought she would weep.

“But I brought gifts for the natives, Brother Welles. They did not have to steal from me. I would have given them things. I brought them scissors and ribbons!”

He gave a bright smile. “Well, it appears your gifts have been received, you see!”

“But there are items that I will need to have returned to me—items of unspeakable value and tenderness.”

He was not entirely unsympathetic. She had to grant him that. He nodded kindly, and took notice, at least somewhat, of her distress. “That must make you sorrowful, Sister Whittaker. But please be assured—none of it has been eternally stolen. It has simply been taken, perhaps only temporarily. Some of it may be returned, if you are patient. If there is anything of particular value to you, I can ask for it specifically. Sometimes if I ask in the proper manner, items reappear.”

She thought over all that she had packed. What did she most desperately need? She could not ask for the valise filled with Ambrose’s sodomite drawings, though it was torture to have lost it, for it was her most important belonging.

“My microscope,” she said, faintly.

He nodded again. “That may be difficult, you see. A microscope would be an item of considerable novelty around here. Nobody will have ever seen one. I don’t believe I have ever seen one myself! Still, I shall start asking immediately. We can only hope, you see! As for tonight, we must find you lodging. Down the beach about a quarter of a mile is the small cottage we helped build for Mr. Pike, when he came to stay. It has been left much as it was when he passed away, may God rest him. I had thought that one of the natives might claim the place as his own home, but it seems nobody will go inside. It is tainted by death, you see—to their minds, I mean. These are a superstitious people, you see. But it is a pleasing cottage with comfortable furniture, and if you are not a superstitious person, you should be at ease there. You are not a superstitious person, are you, Sister Whittaker? You do not strike me as such. Shall we go look at it?”

Alma felt like crumpling to the ground. “Brother Welles,” she said, struggling to keep her voice from breaking. “Please forgive me. I have come a long way. I am far from all that is familiar to me. I am much shocked to have lost my belongings, which I managed to safeguard for fifteen thousand miles of travel, only to have it vanish just a moment ago! I have not had a bite to eat, with the exception of your kind communion, since my dinner on the whaling ship yesterday afternoon. All is new, and all is strange. I am much burdened and much distracted. I ask you to forgive me . . .” Alma stopped talking. She had lost track of the purpose of this speech. She did not know what she was asking forgiveness for.

He clapped his hands. “To eat! Certainly, you must eat! My apologies, Sister Whittaker! You see, I do not eat myself—or quite rarely. I forget that others must do so! My wife would lace me up and give me the evils, if she knew of my poor manners!”

Without another word, and without any supplemental explanation as to the subject of his wife, the Reverend Welles ran off and knocked on the door of the cottage closest to the church. The large Tahitian woman—the same one who had delivered the sermon earlier that evening—answered the door. They exchanged a few words. The woman glanced at Alma, and nodded. The Reverend Welles rushed back to Alma with his springy, bow-legged step.

Alma wondered, could that be the Reverend’s wife?

“Then it is done!” he said. “Sister Manu will provide for you. We eat simply here, but yes, at minimum you should eat! She will bring something to your cottage. I also asked her to bring you an ahu taoto—a sleeping shawl, which is all we use around here at night. I shall bring you a lamp, too. Now let us find our way. I cannot think of another thing you will possibly need.”

Alma could think of many things she needed, but the promise of food and sleep was enough to sustain her for the time being. She walked behind the Reverend Welles down the black sand beach. He walked at an impressive speed for one with such short, crooked legs. Even with her long strides, Alma had to rush to keep up with him. He swung a lantern beside him, but did not light it, for the moon had risen and was bright in the sky. Alma was startled by large, dark shapes scurrying across the sand in their path. She thought they were rats, but on closer look discovered they were crabs. They unsettled her. They were quite sizable, with one large pincer claw each, which they dragged beside them as they scuttled along, clicking awfully. They came too close to her feet. She might have preferred rats, she thought. She was grateful to be wearing shoes. The Reverend Welles had somehow lost his sandals between the church service and now, but he was unconcerned with the crabs. He prattled along as he walked.

“I am intrigued to see how you will find Tahiti, Sister Whittaker, from a botanical point of view, you see,” he said. “Many are disappointed by it. It is a lush climate, you see, but we are a small island, so you will find that there is more abundance here than variety. Sir Joseph Banks most certainly found Tahiti lacking—botanically, I mean. He felt the people were far more interesting than the plants. Perhaps he had a point! We have only two varieties of orchids—Mr. Pike was so sorry to hear of that, though he avidly searched for more of them—and once you learn the palms, which you will do in a snap, there is not much more to discover. There is a tree called apage, you see, which will remind you of a gum tree, and it rises to forty feet—but not very magnificent for a woman raised in the deep forests of Pennsylvania, I wager! Ha-ha-ha!”

Alma did not have the energy to tell the Reverend Welles that she had not been raised in a deep forest.

He went on: “There is a lovely sort of laurel called tamanu—useful, good. Your furniture is made of it. Impervious to insects, you see. Then a sort of a magnolia, called the hutu, which I sent to your good father in 1838. Hibiscus and mimosa are to be found everywhere by the seashore. You will like the mape chestnut—perhaps you saw it by the river? I find it the most beautiful tree on the island. The women make their clothing from the bark of a sort of paper-mulberry tree—they call it tapa—but now many of them prefer the cotton and calico that the sailors bring.”

“I brought calico,” Alma murmured sadly. “For the women.”

“Oh, they will appreciate that!” the Reverend Welles said breezily, as though he had already forgotten that Alma’s belongings had been stolen. “Did you bring paper? Books?”

“I did,” Alma said, feeling more mournful by the moment.

“Well, it is difficult here with paper, you will see. The wind, the sand, the salt, the rain, the insects—never was there a climate less conducive to books! I have watched all my papers vanish before my eyes, you see!”

As have I, just now, Alma nearly said. She did not think she had ever been this hungry in her life, or this tired.

“I wish I had a Tahitian’s memory,” the Reverend Welles went on. “Then one would have no need for papers! What we keep in libraries, they keep in their minds. I feel such a half-wit, in comparison. The youngest fisherman here knows the names of two hundred stars! What the old ones here know, you could not imagine. I used to keep documents, but it was too discouraging to watch them be eaten away, even as I laid down the words. The ripening climate here produces fruit and flower in abundance, you see, but also mold and rot. It is not a land for scholars! But what is history to us, I ask? So brief is our stay in the world! Why make such a bother to record our flickering lives? If the mosquitoes trouble you too severely in the evenings, you may ask Sister Manu to show you how to burn dried pig dung by your door; it keeps them down a bit. You will find Sister Manu most useful. I used to preach the sermons here, but she enjoys it more than I do, and the natives prefer her sermons to mine, so now she is the preacher. She has no family, and so she tends to the pigs. She feeds them by hand, you see, to encourage them to stay near the settlement. She is wealthy, in her way. She can trade a single piglet for a month of fish and other treasures. The Tahitians value roasted piglet. They used to believe that the smell of flesh draws near the gods and spirits. Of course, some of them still believe that, despite being Christians, ha-ha-ha! In any case, Sister Manu is good to know. She has a fine singing voice. To a European ear, the music of Tahiti wants in every quality that would render it pleasurable, but you may learn to tolerate it with time.”

So Sister Manu was not the Reverend Welles’s wife, Alma thought. Who was his wife, then? Where was his wife?

He kept talking, tirelessly: “If you see lights out on the bay at night, do not be alarmed. It is only the men, gone fishing with lanterns. It is most picturesque. The flying fish are drawn to the light, and they land in the canoes. Some of the boys are able to catch them by hand. I tell you—whatever natural variety is lacking on the land in Tahiti, it is more than made up for by the abundance of wonders at sea! If you like, I will show you the coral gardens tomorrow, out by the reefs. There, you shall witness the Lord’s inventiveness most impressively evidenced. Here we are, then—Mr. Pike’s house! Now it shall be your house! Or, I should say, your fare! In Tahitian, we call a house a fare. It is not too soon to begin learning a few words, you see.”

Alma repeated the word in her head: fah-ray. She committed it to memory. She was exhausted, but even so, Alma Whittaker would have to be far more exhausted than this not to prick up her ears at a new and unfamiliar language. In the dim glow of moonlight, just up a slight slope from the beach, she could see the tiny fare hidden under a fretwork of palms. It was not much bigger than the smallest garden shed at White Acre, but it was pleasant enough to look at. If anything, it resembled an English seaside cottage, but much shrunken in scale. A crazy zigzagged path of crushed seashells led from the beach to the door.

“It is a queer path, I know, but the Tahitians made it,” said the Reverend Welles with a laugh. “They see nothing advantageous in making a straight path, for even the shortest distances! You will grow accustomed to such marvels as this! But it is good to be a bit off the beach. You are four yards above highest tide, you see.”

Four yards. It did not seem like much.

Alma and the Reverend Welles approached the cottage up the crooked path. Alma could see that the purpose of a door was answered by a simple screen of plaited palm fronds, which he pushed open easily. Clearly, there was no lock here—nor had there ever been one. Once inside, he lit the lamp. They stood together in the one small open room, beneath a simple thatched roof. Alma could just barely stand up without hitting her head on the lowest rafter. A lizard skittered across the wall. The floor was dried grass that rustled under Alma’s feet. There was a small rough wooden bench with no cushion, but at least it had a back and arms. There was a table with three chairs—one of which was broken and tipped over. It looked like a child’s table, in a poor nursery. Curtainless, glassless windows opened on all sides. The final bit of furniture was a small bed—barely bigger than the bench—with a thin pallet slung on top. The pallet appeared to be made from an old canvas sail, stuffed with something or other. The whole room, such as it was, seemed much more suitable to somebody of the Reverend Welles’s size than her own.

“Mr. Pike lived as the natives live,” he said, “which is to say—he lived in one room only. But if you want partitions, I suppose we could make partitions for you.”

Alma could not imagine where one would put a partition in this tiny place. How do you divide nothing into parts?

“You may wish at some point to move back to Papeete, Sister Whittaker. Most do. There is more civilization to be found there in the capital, I suppose. More vice, as well, and more evil. But there you could find a Chinaman to do your laundry, and that sort of thing. There are all manner of Portuguese and Russians there—all those sorts who fall off whaling boats and never leave. Not that Portuguese and Russians constitute a civilization, but it is more variety of mankind than you will find in our small settlement out here, you see!”

Alma nodded, but she knew she would not be leaving Matavai Bay. This had been Ambrose’s banishment; now it would be hers.

“You will find a spot to cook in the back, by the garden,” the Reverend Welles went on. “Do not expect much of your garden, although Mr. Pike tried nobly to cultivate it. Everyone tries, but once the pigs and goats have finished their forays, there are not many pumpkins left for us! We can get you a goat, if you would like fresh milk. You can ask Sister Manu.”

As though summoned by the sound of her name, Sister Manu appeared at the doorway. She must have been right on their heels. There was almost not enough room for her to enter, with Alma and the Reverend Welles already in the cottage. Alma wasn’t sure Sister Manu would even fit through the door, with that wide, flower-covered hat on her head. Somehow, though, they all squeezed in. Sister Manu opened a bundle of cloth and began to lay food out on the tiny table, using banana leaves as plates. It took all of Alma’s reserve not to dive into the meal immediately. Sister Manu handed Alma a length of bamboo with a stopper of cork.

“Water for you to drink!” Sister Manu said.

“Thank you,” said Alma. “You are kind.”

They all stared at each other for quite a while after this: Alma exhaustedly, Sister Manu guardedly, the Reverend Welles cheerfully.

Finally, the Reverend Welles bowed his head and said, “We thank you, Lord Jesus and God our Father, for the safe delivery of your servant Sister Whittaker. We ask that you hold her in your special favor. Amen.”

Then he and Sister Manu left at last, and Alma plunged into the food with both hands, swallowing it in such quick gulps that she did not pause even for a moment to determine what, exactly, it was.

She awoke in the middle of the night to the taste of warm iron in her mouth. She smelled blood and fur. There was an animal in her room. A mammal. She identified this fact before she even remembered where she was. Her heart beat rapidly as she sought more information. She was not on the ship. She was not in Philadelphia. She was in Tahiti—there, she had oriented herself! She was in Tahiti in the cottage where Ambrose had stayed and where he had died. What was the word for her cottage? Fare. She was in her fare, and there was an animal in it with her.

She heard a whining noise, high and eerie. She sat up in the tiny, uncomfortable bed and looked around. Enough moonlight shone through the window that she could see it now—the dog who stood in the middle of her room. It was a small dog, maybe twenty pounds. Its ears were back and it was baring its teeth at her. Their eyes fastened on each other. The dog’s whine turned to a growl. Alma did not want to fight a dog. Not even a small dog. This thought came to her simply, even calmly. Next to the bed was the short length of bamboo that Sister Manu had given her, filled with fresh water. It was the only thing in reach that might serve as a weapon. She tried to determine whether she could reach for the bamboo without alarming the dog further. No, she most certainly did not want to have a fight with a dog, but if she must fight, she wanted it to be a fair match. She stretched her arm slowly down toward the floor, not taking her eyes off the creature. The dog barked and came nearer. She pulled back her arm. She tried again. The dog barked again, this time with increased anger. There would be no chance for her to find a weapon.

So be it. She was too tired to be afraid.

“What is your complaint with me?” she asked the dog, in a weary tone.

At the sound of her voice, the dog unleashed a great torrent of complaints, barking with such force that his whole body seemed to lift from the floor with every syllable. She stared at him dispassionately. It was the dead of night. She had no lock on her door. She had no pillow for her head. She had lost all her belongings and was sleeping in her filthy traveling dress, with its hems full of hidden coins—all the money she had left to her, now that her belongings had been stolen. She had nothing but a short length of bamboo with which to defend herself, and she could not even reach that. Her house was surrounded by crabs and infested with lizards. And now this: an angry Tahitian dog in her room. She was so exhausted, she nearly felt bored.

“Go away,” she told him.

The dog barked louder. She gave up. She turned her back to him, rolled over, and attempted, once more, to find a comfortable arrangement on the thin pallet. He barked and barked. His indignation had no limits. Attack me, then, she thought. She fell asleep to the sound of his outrage.

A few hours later Alma woke again. The light had changed. It was near dawn. Now there was a boy sitting cross-legged in the center of her floor, staring at her. She blinked, and suspected magic: What sorcerer had come and turned a little dog into a little child? The boy had long hair and a solemn face. He looked to be approximately eight years old. He wore no shirt, but Alma was relieved to see that he possessed trousers—although one leg was ripped to a short length, as though he had pulled himself out of a trap and left the remainder of his clothing behind.

The boy jumped to his feet, as if he had been waiting for her to awaken. He approached the bed. She drew back in alarm, but then saw that he was holding something, and, what’s more, offering it to her. The object gleamed in the dim morning light, balanced on his palm. It was something slender and brass. He placed it on the edge of her bed. It was the eyepiece to her microscope.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. At the sound of her voice, the boy ran away. The flimsy object that called itself a door swung closed behind him without a sound.

Alma could not fall asleep again after that, but she did not immediately rise, either. She was every bit as weary now as she had been the night before. Who would come to her room next? What sort of a place was this? She must find a means to block the door somehow—but with what? She could move the little table in front of the door at night, but that could easily be shuffled aside. And with windows that were nothing but holes cut in the walls, what good would it do to block the door at all? She fingered the brass eyepiece in her hand with confusion and longing. Where was the rest of her beloved microscope? Who was that child? She should have chased him, to see where he was hiding everything else she owned.

She closed her eyes and listened to the unfamiliar sounds around her. She felt almost as though she could hear the dawn breaking. Most certainly, she could hear the waves just outside her door breaking. The surf sounded disquietingly close. She would prefer to be a bit farther away from the sea. Everything felt too close, too dangerous. A bird, perched on the roof directly over her head, uttered a strange cry. Its call sounded something like: “Think! Think! Think!”

As though she ever did anything else!

Alma rose at last, resigned to wakefulness. She wondered where to find a privy, or a spot that might serve as a privy. Last night she had squatted behind the fare, but she hoped for a better arrangement nearby. She stepped out the front door and nearly tripped over something. She looked down and saw—sitting right on her doorstep, if one could call it a doorstep—Ambrose’s valise, waiting politely for her, unopened and tightly buckled as ever. She knelt down, undid the buckles, and threw it open, then quickly dug through the contents: all the pictures were still there.

Up and down the beach, as far as she could see in the dim morning light, there was not a sign of anyone—neither woman nor man, neither boy nor dog.

“Think!” shrieked the bird over her head. “Think!”