The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-five

Four days later Alma awoke at dawn to joyous shouting from the Hiro contingent. She stepped outside her fare to discover the source of the commotion. Her five wild little boys were running up and down the beach, turning flips and somersaults in the early morning light, shouting in enthusiastic Tahitian. When Hiro saw her, he ran up the zigzagged pathway to her door with wild speed.

“Tomorrow morning is here!” he shouted. His eyes were blazing with excitement, such as she had never before seen, even in this quite excitable child.

Baffled, Alma took his arm, trying to slow him down and make sense of him.

“What are you saying, Hiro?” she asked him.

“Tomorrow morning is here!” he shouted again, jumping up and down as he spoke, unable to contain himself.

“Tell me in Tahitian,” she commanded, in Tahitian.

“Teie o tomorrow morning!” he shouted back, which was merely the same nonsense in Tahitian as it was in English: “Tomorrow morning is here.”

Alma looked up and saw a crowd gathering on the beach—everyone from the mission, as well as people from the nearby villages. All were as excited as the little boys. She saw the Reverend Welles running toward the shore with his funny, crooked gait. She saw Sister Manu running, and Sister Etini, and the local fishermen, too.

“Look!” said Hiro, directing Alma’s eyes to the sea. “Tomorrow morning is arrive!”

Alma looked out to the bay and saw—how could she not have noticed immediately?—a fleet of long canoes slicing across the water toward the beach with incredible speed, powered by dozens of dark-skinned rowers. In all her time in Tahiti, she had never lost her wonder at the power and agility of such canoes. When flotillas such as this came rushing across the bay, she always felt as though she were watching the arrival of Jason and the Argonauts, or Odysseus’s fleet. Most of all, she loved the moment when, drawing close to shore, the rowers heaved their muscles in one last push, and the canoes flew out of the sea as though shot forth by great invisible bows, landing on the beach in a dramatic, exuberant arrival.

Alma had questions, but Hiro had already dashed over to greet the canoes, as had the rest of the growing crowd. Alma had never before seen so many people on the beach. Caught up in the excitement, she, too, ran toward the boats. These were exceptionally fine, even majestic, canoes. The grandest must have been sixty feet, and in its bow stood a man of impressive height and build—clearly the leader of this expedition. He was Tahitian, but as she drew nearer, she could see that he was impeccably dressed in the suit of a European man. The villagers gathered around him, chanting songs of welcome, carrying him from the canoe like a king.

The people carried the stranger to the Reverend Welles. Alma pushed through the throng, drawing as near as she could. The man bent down over the Reverend Welles, and the two pressed their noses together in the customary greeting of deepest affection. She heard the Reverend Welles say, in a voice wet with tears, “Welcome back to your home, blessed son of God.”

The stranger pulled back from the embrace. He turned to smile at the crowd, and Alma caught her first direct look at his face. If she had not been propped up by the crush of so many people, she might have fallen over with the force of recognition.

The words tomorrow morning—which Ambrose had written on the backs of all the drawings of The Boy—had not been a code. “Tomorrow morning” was not some sort of dreamy wish for a utopian future, or an anagram, or any manner of occult concealment whatsoever. For once in his life, Ambrose Pike had been perfectly straightforward: Tomorrow Morning was simply a person’s name.

And now, indeed, Tomorrow Morning had arrived.

It enraged her.

That was her initial reaction. She felt—perhaps irrationally—that she had been tricked. Why, in all her months of search and privation, had she never heard mention of him—this regal figure, this adored visitant, this man who brought all of northern Tahiti running and cheering to the shoreline to greet him? How had his name or his existence never been alluded to, not even faintly? Nobody had once used the words tomorrow morning with Alma, unless in literal reference to something that was planned for the next day, and certainly nobody had ever mentioned the island’s universal adoration of some elusive, handsome native who might someday arrive out of nowhere and be worshipped. There had never even been a rumor of such a figure. How could someone of this much consequence simply appear?

While the rest of the crowd moved along toward the mission church in a cheering, chanting mass, Alma stood quietly on the beach, struggling to make sense of all this. New questions replaced old beliefs. Whatever certainties she had felt only last week were now breaking up, like an ice dam at the beginning of spring. The apparition she had come here to seek indeed existed, but he was not a Boy; rather, he appeared to be some sort of king. What business did Ambrose have with an island king? How had they met? Why had Ambrose depicted Tomorrow Morning as a simple fisherman, when clearly he was a man of considerable power?

Alma’s stubborn, relentless, internal-speculation engine began to spin once more. This sensation only angered her further. She was so weary of speculation. She could not bear anymore to invent new theories. All her life, she felt, she had lived in a state of speculation. All she had ever wanted was to know things, yet still and now—even after all these years of tireless questioning—all she did was ponder and wonder and guess.

No more speculation. No more of it. She would now need to know everything. She would insist on knowing.

Alma could hear the church before she reached it. The singing coming from within that humble building was like nothing she had ever heard. It was a roar of jubilation. There was no room inside the church for her; she stood outside with the jostling, chanting crowd, and listened. The hymns that Alma had heard in this church in the past—the voices of the eighteen congregants of the Reverend Welles’s mission—had been thin and reedy tunes compared to what she was hearing now. For the first time, she could understand what Tahitian music was truly meant to be, and why it needed hundreds of voices roaring and bellowing together in order to perform its function: to outsing the ocean. That’s what these people were doing now, in a crashing expression of veneration, both beautiful and dangerous.

At last it quieted, and Alma could hear a man speaking—clearly and powerfully—to the congregation. He spoke in Tahitian, in a disquisition that, at times, was almost a chant. She pushed closer to the door and peered in: it was Tomorrow Morning, tall and splendid, standing at the pulpit, arms raised, calling out to the congregation. Alma’s command of Tahitian was still too basic for her to follow the entire sermon, but she could comprehend that this man was offering up a passionate testament to the living Christ. But that was not all he was doing; he was also cavorting with this gathering of people, the same way Alma had many times watched the boys of the Hiro contingent cavort with the waves. His mettle and nerve were unwavering. He pulled laughter and tears from the congregation, as well as solemnity and riotous joy. She could feel her own emotions being tugged along by the timbre and intensity of his voice, even as his words themselves remained largely incomprehensible.

Tomorrow Morning’s performance went on for well over an hour. He had them singing; he had them praying; he had them prepared, it seemed, to attack at dawn. Alma thought, My mother would have despised this. Beatrix Whittaker had never gone in for evangelical passions; she’d believed that frenzied people were in danger of forgetting their manners and their reason, and then where would we be as a civilization? In any case, Tomorrow Morning’s riproarious soliloquy was unlike anything Alma had ever before heard at the Reverend Welles’s church—or anywhere, for that matter. This was not a Philadelphia minister, dutifully dispensing Lutheran teachings, or Sister Manu and her simple, monosyllabic homilies; this was oration. This was the drums of war. This was Demosthenes defending Ctesiphon. This was Pericles honoring the dead of Athens. This was Cicero rebuking Catiline.

What Tomorrow Morning’s speech most certainly did not bring to Alma’s mind was the humility and gentleness she had come to associate with this modest little mission by the sea. There was nothing humble or gentle about Tomorrow Morning. Indeed, she had never seen such an audacious, self-possessed figure. An adage of Cicero’s came to her in its original, mighty Latin (the only language, she felt, that could stand up to the thundering groundswell of native eloquence she was right now witnessing): “Nemo umquam neque poeta neque orator fuit, qui quemquam meliorem quam se arbitraretur.”

Never did there exist a poet or an orator who thought there was another better than himself.

The day became only more fervid from there.

Through the terrifically effective native telegraph system of Tahiti (fleet-footed boys with loud voices), word spread quickly that Tomorrow Morning had arrived, and the beach at Matavai Bay grew more crowded and exuberant by the hour. Alma wanted to find the Reverend Welles, to ask him many questions, but his tiny form kept disappearing into the mob, and she could only catch fleeting glimpses of him, his white hair flying in the breeze, beaming with happiness. She could not draw near Sister Manu, either, who was so electrified that she lost her giant flowered hat, and who was weeping like a schoolgirl in a crowd of chattering, euphoric women. The Hiro contingent was nowhere to be seen—or, rather, they were everywhere to be seen, but they moved far too quickly for Alma to catch and question them.

The crowd on the beach—as though by unanimous decision—turned into a revel. Space was cleared for wrestling and boxing matches. Young men flung off their shirts, applied coconut oil, and began to tussle. Children galloped across the shoreline in spontaneous footraces. A ring appeared in the sand, and suddenly a cockfight was under way. As the day went on, musicians arrived, carrying everything from native drums and flutes to European horns and fiddles. On another part of the beach, men were industriously digging a fire pit and lining it with stones. They were planning a tremendous roast. Then Alma saw Sister Manu, quite out of nowhere, catch a pig, pin it down, and kill it—much to the consternation of the pig. Alma could not but feel a bit resentful at the sight of this. (How long had she been waiting for a taste of pork? All it took, apparently, was Tomorrow Morning’s arrival, and the deed was done.) With a long knife and a confident hand, Manu cheerfully took the pig apart. She pulled out the viscera, like a woman pulling taffy. She and a few of the stronger women held the pig’s carcass over the open flames of the fire pit to burn off the bristles. Then they wrapped it in leaves and lowered it onto the hot stones. More than a few chickens, helpless in this tidal surge of celebration, followed the pig to its death.

Alma saw pretty Sister Etini rushing by, her arms filled with breadfruit. Alma lunged forward, touched Etini on the shoulder, and said, “Sister Etini—please tell me: who is Tomorrow Morning?”

Etini turned with a wide smile. “He is the Reverend Welles’s son,” she said.

“The Reverend Welles’s son?” Alma repeated. The Reverend Welles had only daughters—and only one living daughter, at that. If Sister Etini’s English were not so nimble and fluent, Alma might have assumed the woman had misspoken.

“His son by taio,” Etini explained. “Tomorrow Morning is his son by adoption. He is my son, too, and Sister Manu’s. He is the son of all in this mission! We are all family by taio.”

“But where does he come from?” Alma asked.

“He comes from here,” Etini said, and she could not disguise her tremendous pride in that fact. “Tomorrow Morning is ours, you see.”

“But where did he arrive from just today?”

“He arrived from Raiatea, where he now lives. He has a mission of his own there. He has found great success in Raiatea, on an island that was once most hostile to the true God. The people he has brought along with him today, they are his converts—some of his converts, that is. To be sure, he has many more.”

To be sure, Alma had many more questions, but Sister Etini was eager to attend to the feast, so Alma thanked her and sent her off. She went over to a guava bush by the river and sat down in its shade, to think. There was a great deal to think about and piece together. Desperate to make sense out of all this astonishing new information, she harkened back to a conversation she’d had months ago with the Reverend Welles. She dimly remembered the Reverend Welles having told her of his three adopted sons—the three most exemplary products of the mission school at Matavai Bay—who now led respected missions on various outer islands. She pushed herself to recall the details of that single, long-ago conversation, but her recollection was frustratingly indistinct. Raiatea may indeed have been one of the islands he had mentioned, Alma felt, but she was certain he had never brought up the name “Tomorrow Morning.” Alma would have taken note of that name, had she ever heard it. Those words would have immediately alerted her attention, brimming as they did with personal associations. No, she had never heard the name spoken before. The Reverend Welles had called him by something else.

Sister Etini rushed past again, arms empty this time, and once more Alma darted forth and detained her. She knew she was being a pest, but could not stop herself.

“Sister Etini,” she asked. “What is Tomorrow Morning’s name?”

Sister Etini looked puzzled. “His name is Tomorrow Morning,” she said simply.

“What does Brother Welles call him, though?”

“Ah!” Sister Etini’s eyes lit up. “Brother Welles calls him by his Tahitian name, which is Tamatoa Mare. But Tomorrow Morning is a nickname he invented for himself, when he was just a little boy! He prefers to be called that. He was always so facile with language, Sister Whittaker—quite the best student Mrs. Welles and I ever had, and you will find that he speaks far better English than do I—and he could hear, even from earliest childhood, that his Tahitian name sounded like those English words. He was always so clever. Now the name suits him, we all agree, for he brings such hope, you understand, to everyone he meets. Like a new day.”

“Like a new day,” Alma repeated.

“Exactly, yes.”

“Sister Etini,” Alma said. “I am sorry, but I have one last question. When was the last time Tamatoa Mare was here at Matavai Bay?”

Sister Etini answered without hesitation. “November of 1850.”

Sister Etini rushed off. Alma sat down in the shade again and watched the mirthful mayhem unfold. She watched it with no joy. She felt an indentation in her heart, as though somebody were pressing a thumbprint through her chest, deep and firm.

Ambrose Pike had died here in November of 1850.

It took Alma some time to come near Tomorrow Morning. That night was a mighty celebration—a feast worthy of a monarch, which was certainly how the man was regarded. Hundreds of Tahitians crowded the beach, eating roasted pigs, fish, and breadfruit, and enjoying arrowroot pudding, yams, and countless coconuts. Bonfires were lit, and the people danced—not the most obscene dances, of course, for which Tahiti was once so infamous, but the least offensive traditional dance, the one they called the hura. Even this would not have been permitted in any other mission settlement on the island, but Alma knew that the Reverend Welles sometimes allowed it. (“I simply cannot see the harm in it,” he had once told Alma, who had begun to think of this oft-repeated phrase as a perfect motto for the Reverend Welles.)

Alma had never seen the dance performed before, and she was as captivated as anyone else. The young female dancers wore their hair ornamented with triple strands of jasmine and gardenia blossoms, and flowers draped over their necks. The music was slow and undulating. Some of the girls had faces marked by the pox, but in the firelight all were equally beautiful. One could get a sense of the women’s limbs and hips in motion, even underneath their long-sleeved, shapeless, missionary-prescribed dresses. It was very much the most provocative dance Alma had ever seen (their hands alone were provocative, she marveled), and she could not begin to imagine what this dance must have looked like to her father back in 1777, when the women performing it wore grass skirts and nothing else. Quite a show it must have been, for a young boy from Richmond attempting to uphold his virtue.

From time to time athletic men jumped into the dance ring to perform comic, buffoonish interruptions to the hura. The point of this, Alma thought at first, was to break the sensual mood with mirth, but they, too, soon began testing the limitations of lewdness in their movements. There was a recurrent joke of the men grasping toward the female dancers, while the girls gracefully darted away without missing a step. Even the youngest children appeared to understand the underlying allusion to desire and rebuke playing itself out in the performance, and they howled with a degree of laughter that made them seem far more sophisticated than their years. Even Sister Manu—that shining example of Christian propriety—leapt into the fray at one point and joined the hura dancers, swaying her bulk with surprising agility. When one of the young male dancers came after her, she allowed herself to be caught, to the roaring delight of the crowd. The dancer then pressed himself against her hip, in a series of motions whose frank ribaldry could be misconstrued by nobody; Sister Manu merely fixed him with a comically inflated flirtatious gaze, and kept dancing.

Alma kept an eye on the Reverend Welles, who appeared simply charmed by all that he saw. Beside him sat Tomorrow Morning, poised with perfect posture, immaculately dressed like a London gentleman. Throughout the evening, people came to sit by his side, to press their noses against his nose, and to bring him salutations. He received everyone with a spirit of both finesse and largesse. Truly, Alma had to admit, she had never seen a more beautiful human being in all her life. Of course, beauty in the physical form was everywhere to be found in Tahiti, and one grew accustomed to it after a while. Men were beautiful here, women yet more beautiful, and children even more beautiful still. What a pale and spindle-armed group of hunchbacks most Europeans seemed by comparison to the extraordinary Tahitians! It had been said a thousand times, by a thousand awestruck foreigners. So, yes, beauty was in no short supply here, and Alma had seen much of it—but Tomorrow Morning was the most beautiful of all.

His skin was dark and burnished, his smile a slow moonrise. When he gazed upon anyone, it was an act of generosity, of luminescence. It was impossible not to stare at him. Notwithstanding his handsome countenance, his size alone commanded attention. He was truly prodigious in stature, an Achilles in the flesh. Most certainly, one would follow such a man into battle. The Reverend Welles had once told Alma that in the old days in the South Seas, when the islanders went to war against each other, the victors would pick through their opponents’ corpses, looking for the tallest and darkest bodies among the dead. Once they had found those slain behemoths, they would carve open their corpses and remove their bones, from which they made fishhooks, chisels, and weapons. The bones of the largest men, it was believed, were charged with tremendous power, and hence the tools and weapons carved from them would endow their holder with invincibility. As for Tomorrow Morning, Alma thought ghoulishly, they could have made an armory’s worth of weaponry out of him—if they could’ve managed to kill him in the first place.

Alma hovered around the outskirts of the firelight, to remain somewhat inconspicuous while she took in the situation. Nobody took notice of her, so consumed were they by their joy. The revelry went on long into the night. The fires burned high and bright, casting shadows so dark and so twisting that one almost feared to trip over them, or to be clutched by them and pulled down into the pô. The dancing grew wilder and the children behaved like spirits possessed. Alma might have assumed that a visit from a prominent Christian missionary would not have produced quite so much roistering and carousing—but then again, she was still new to Tahiti. None of it disturbed the Reverend Welles, who had never looked happier, never more buoyant.

Long after midnight, the Reverend Welles noticed Alma at last.

“Sister Whittaker!” he called out. “Where are my manners? You must meet my son!”

Alma approached the two men, who were sitting so near the fire that they appeared ablaze themselves. It was an awkward meeting, for Alma was standing and the men—as per local custom—remained seated. She was not about to sit. She was not about to press her nose to anyone else’s nose. But Tomorrow Morning reached up with his long arm and offered a polite handshake.

“Sister Whittaker,” said the Reverend Welles, “this is my son, of whom you have heard me speak. And my dear son, this is Sister Whittaker, you see, who visits us from the United States of America. She is a naturalist of some renown.”

“A naturalist!” said Tomorrow Morning in a fine British accent, nodding with interest. “As a child, I had quite a fondness for natural history. My friends thought me mad, to value that which no one else valued—leaves, insects, coral, and the like. But it was a pleasure and education. What a worthy life, to make so deep a study of the world. How fortunate you are in your vocation.”

Alma gazed down at him. To see his face so close at long last—this indelible face, this face that had so troubled and fascinated her for so long, this face that had brought her here from the other side of the globe, this face that had probed so stubbornly at her imagination, this face that had beleaguered her to the point of obsession—was simply staggering. His face had such a powerful effect upon her that it struck her as incredible that he, in turn, was not equally staggered by seeing her: How could she know him so intimately, and he know her not at all?

But why in heaven would he?

Placidly, he returned her gaze. His eyelashes were so long, it was an absurdity. They seemed not only excessive, but almost confrontational—this spectacle of eyelashes, this needlessly luxuriant fringe. She felt irritation rising within her—nobody required eyelashes such as these.

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” she said.

With statesmanlike grace, Tomorrow Morning insisted that, no, the pleasure was entirely his own. Then he released her hand, Alma excused herself, and Tomorrow Morning returned his attention to the Reverend Welles—to his happy, elfin, little white father.

He stayed at Matavai Bay a fortnight.

She rarely took her eyes off him, keen to learn—by observation and proximity—whatever she could. What she learned, and quite quickly, was that Tomorrow Morning was beloved. It was close to exasperating, in fact, how beloved he was. She wondered if it was ever exasperating for him. He was never given a moment to himself, although Alma kept watching for one, hoping for a private word with him. It seemed there would never be a chance for it; there were meals and meetings and gatherings and ceremonies all around him, at all hours. He slept in Sister Manu’s house, which buzzed with constant visitors. Queen ’Aimata Pōmare IV Vahine of Tahiti invited Tomorrow Morning for tea at her palace in Papeete. All wanted to hear—in English or Tahitian, or both—the story of Tomorrow Morning’s extraordinary success as a missionary on Raiatea.

Nobody wanted to hear about it more than Alma, and over the duration of Tomorrow Morning’s sojourn, she managed to piece together the entire story from various onlookers and admirers of the Great Man. Raiatea, she learned, was the cradle of Polynesian mythology, and thus a most unlikely place ever to have embraced Christianity. The island—large and rugged—was the birthplace and residence of Oro, the god of war, whose temples were honored by human sacrifice and littered with human skulls. Raiatea was a serious place (Sister Etini used the word weighty). Mount Temehani, in the center of the island, was considered to be the eternal residence of all the dead of Polynesia. A permanent shroud of fog hung over the tallest pinnacle of this mountain, it was said, for the dead did not like the sunlight. The Raiateans were not a laughing people; they were a firm people—a people of blood and grandeur. They were not the Tahitians. They had resisted the English. They had resisted the French. They had not resisted Tomorrow Morning. He had first arrived there six years earlier in a most spectacular manner: he came alone in a canoe, which he abandoned as he neared the island. He stripped naked and swam to shore, paddling easily over the thunderous breakers, holding his Bible over his head and chanting, “I sing the word of Jehovah, the one true God! I sing the word of Jehovah, the one true God!”

The Raiateans took notice.

Since then Tomorrow Morning had built an evangelizing empire. He had erected a church—just near Raiatea’s pagan mother temple—that might easily have been mistaken for a palace, had it not been a house of worship. It was now the largest structure in Polynesia. It was held up by forty-six columns, hewn from the trunks of breadfruit trees, and sanded smooth with sharkskin.

Tomorrow Morning numbered his converts at some three and a half thousand souls. He had watched the people feed their idols to the fire. He had watched the old temples undergo a rapid transformation, from shrines of violent sacrifice to harmless piles of mossy rocks. He had put the Raiateans in modest European clothing: men in trousers, women in long dresses and bonnets. Young boys stood in line to have their hair cut short and respectable by him. He had supervised the construction of a community of tidy white cottages. He taught spelling and reading to a people who, prior to his arrival, had never seen the alphabet. Four hundred children a day attended school now and learned their catechism. Tomorrow Morning saw to it that the people did not merely ape the words of the Gospel, but understood what they meant. As such, he had already trained seven missionaries of his own, whom he had recently sent forth to even more distant islands; they, too, would swim to shore with the Bible held high, chanting the name of Jehovah. The days of disturbance and fallacy and superstition were over. Infanticide was over. Polygamy was over. Some called Tomorrow Morning a prophet; he was rumored to prefer the word servant.

Alma learned that Tomorrow Morning had taken a wife on Raiatea, Temanava, whose name meant “the welcoming.” He had two young daughters there as well, Frances and Edith, named after the Reverend and Mrs. Welles. He was the most honored man in the Society Islands, Alma learned. She heard it so many times, she was growing weary of hearing it.

“And to think,” said Sister Etini, “that he came from our little school at Matavai Bay!”

Alma did not find a moment to speak with Tomorrow Morning until late one night, ten days after his arrival, when she caught him walking alone the short distance between Sister Etini’s house, where he had just enjoyed dinner, and Sister Manu’s house, where he intended to sleep.

“May I have a word with you?” she asked.

“Certainly, Sister Whittaker,” he agreed, remembering her name with ease. He gave the appearance of being completely unsurprised to see her coming out of the shadows toward him.

“Is there someplace more quiet where we might speak?” she asked. “What I need to discuss with you, I would like to address in privacy.”

He laughed comfortably. “If ever you have managed to experience such a thing as privacy here at Matavai Bay, Sister Whittaker, I salute you. Anything you wish to say to me, you may say here.”

“Very well, then,” she said, although she could not help but glance around to see if anyone might overhear. “Tomorrow Morning,” she began, “you and I are—I believe—more closely affixed to each other’s destinies than one might think. I have been introduced to you as Sister Whittaker, but I need you to understand that for a short period of my life, I was known as Mrs. Pike.”

“I will not make you go any further,” he said gently, putting up a hand. “I know who you are, Alma.”

They looked at each other in silence for what felt like a long time.

“So,” she said, at last.

“Quite,” he replied.

Again, the long silence.

“I know who you are, too,” she finally said.

“Do you?” He did not appear the least bit alarmed. “Who am I, then?”

But now—pushed to answer—she found that she could not easily respond to the question. Needing to say something, though, she said, “You knew my husband well.”

“Indeed, I did. What’s more, I miss him.”

This response shocked Alma, but she preferred this—the shock of his admission—to an argument, or a denial. Anticipating this conversation over the previous days, Alma had thought she might go mad, were Tomorrow Morning to accuse her of nefarious lies, or pretend never to have heard of Ambrose. But he did not seem inclined to resist or repudiate. She looked at him closely, seeking something in his face besides relaxed assuredness, but could see nothing amiss.

“You miss him,” she repeated.

“And I always will, for Ambrose Pike was the best of men.”

“So says everyone,” said Alma, feeling vexed and slightly outplayed.

“For it was true.”

“Did you love him, Tamatoa Mare?” she asked, again searching his face for a break in his equanimity. She wanted to catch him by surprise, as he had caught her. But his face displayed not a whit of unease. He did not even blink at the use of his given name.

He replied, “All who met him, loved him.”

“But did you love him particularly?”

Tomorrow Morning put his hands in his pockets and looked up toward the moon. He was not in a hurry to reply. He looked for all the world like a man waiting leisurely for a train. After a while, he returned his gaze to Alma’s face. They were not far from the same height, she noticed. Her shoulders were not so much narrower than his.

“I suppose you wonder about things,” he said, by means of an answer.

She felt she was losing ground here. She would need to be even more direct.

“Tomorrow Morning,” she said. “May I speak to you with candor?”

“Please do,” he encouraged.

“Allow me to tell you something about myself, for it might help you to speak more freely. Implanted in my very disposition—though I do not always consider it either a virtue or a blessing—is a desire to understand the nature of things. As such, I would like to understand who my husband was. I’ve come all this distance to understand him better, but it has thus far been fruitless. The little that I have been given to understand about Ambrose has brought me only more confusion. Ours was admittedly neither a customary marriage nor a long one, but this does not negate the love and concern that I felt toward my husband. I am not an innocent, Tomorrow Morning. I do not require protection from the truth. Please understand that my aim is neither to assail you nor to make you my enemy. Neither are your secrets in any peril, should you entrust them to my care. I do have reason, however, to suspect that you possess secrets about my late husband. I have seen the drawings that he made of you. Those drawings, as I am certain you can understand, compel me to ask for the truth of your association with Ambrose. Can you honor a widow’s request, and tell me what you know? My feelings do not require sparing.”

Tomorrow Morning nodded. “Do you have the day free tomorrow, to spend with me?” he asked. “Perhaps well into the evening?”

She nodded.

“How able is your body?” he asked.

The question and its incongruity rattled her. He noted her discomfort and clarified, “What I mean to ascertain is, are you capable of hiking a long distance? I would suppose that as a naturalist you are fit and hale, but still, I must ask. I would like to show you something, but I do not wish to overtax you. Can you manage climbing uphill in steep terrain, and that sort of thing?”

“I should think so,” Alma replied, irritated once more. “I have traversed the entirety of this island over the past year. I have seen everything there is to see in Tahiti.”

“Not everything, Alma,” Tomorrow Morning corrected her, with a benevolent smile. “Not all of it.”

Just after dawn the next day, they departed. Tomorrow Morning had procured a canoe for their journey. Not a risky little gambit of a canoe, such as the one the Reverend Welles used when he visited his coral gardens, but a finer one, solid and well made.

“We shall be going to Tahiti-iti,” he explained. “It would take us days to get there overland, but we can reach it in five or six hours by navigating the coastline. You’re comfortable on the water?”

She nodded. She found it difficult to tell whether he was being considerate or condescending. She had packed a bamboo tube of fresh water for herself and some poi for lunch, wrapped in a square of muslin that she could tie to her belt. She was wearing her most tired dress—the one that had already endured the island’s worst abuses. Tomorrow Morning glanced at her bare feet, which, after a year on Tahiti, were as tough and callused as a plantation worker’s. He made no mention of it, but she saw him take notice. His feet were also bare. From the ankles up, though, he was the perfect European gentleman. He wore his customary clean suit and white shirt, though he removed his jacket, folded it neatly, and used it as a seat cushion in the canoe.

There was no point in conversation on the journey to Tahiti-iti—the small, roundish, rugged, and remote peninsula on the opposite side of the island. Tomorrow Morning had to concentrate, and Alma did not wish to turn around every time she needed to speak. Thus, they proceeded in silence.

Traveling around the coastline was difficult going in certain areas, and Alma wished that Tomorrow Morning had brought a paddle for her, too, so she could feel as though she were helping along their progress—though, truthfully, he did not seem to need her. He carved the water with elegant efficiency, threading through the reefs and channels without hesitation, as though he had made this trip already hundreds of times—which, she suspected, he probably had. She was grateful for her wide-brimmed hat, as the sun was strong, and the glare off the water made spots dance across her eyes.

Within five hours, the cliffs of Tahiti-iti were on their right. Alarmingly, it appeared as if Tomorrow Morning was aiming straight for them. Were they to dash themselves against the rocks? Was that to be the morbid aim of this journey? But then Alma saw it—an arched opening in the cliff face, a dark aperture, an entrance to a sea-level cave. Tomorrow Morning synchronized the canoe to the rolling of a strong wave and then—thrillingly, fearlessly—shot them straight through that opening. Alma thought for certain they would be sucked back into the daylight by the receding water, but he paddled fiercely, almost standing up in the canoe, such that they were pitched up on the wet gravel of a rocky beach, deep inside the cave. It was nigh a feat of magic. Not even the Hiro contingent, she thought, would have risked such a maneuver.

“Jump out, please,” he commanded, and although he did not quite bark at her, she gathered that she had to move quickly, before the next wave came in. She leapt out and scurried to the highest level—which, to be honest, did not feel quite high enough. One big wave, she thought, and they would be washed away forever. Tomorrow Morning did not seem concerned. He pulled the canoe up behind him onto the beach.

“May I ask you to help me?” he said politely. He pointed to a ledge above their heads, and she saw that he meant to put the canoe up there, for safekeeping. She helped him lift the canoe, and together they pushed it up onto the ledge, far above the reach of the breaking waves.

She sat down, and he sat beside her, breathing heavily with exertion.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked her at last.

“Yes,” she said.

“Now we must wait. When the tide goes out fully, you will see that there is a kind of narrow route that we can walk on along the cliff, and then we can climb upward, to a plateau. From there, I can take you to the place I wish to show you. If you feel that you can manage it, that is?”

“I can manage it,” she said.

“Good. For now, we will rest for a spell.” He lay back against the cushion of his jacket, stretched out his legs, and relaxed. When the waves rolled in, they nearly reached his feet—but not quite. He must know exactly how the tides operated within this cave, she could see. It was quite extraordinary. Looking at Tomorrow Morning stretched out beside her, she had a sudden poignant memory of the way Ambrose used to sprawl so comfortably across any surface—across grass, across a couch, across the floor of the drawing room at White Acre.

She gave Tomorrow Morning about ten minutes to rest, but then could contain herself no longer.

“How did you meet him?” she asked.

The cave was not the quietest place to speak, what with the water rushing back and forth up over the stones, and all the variations of damp echoes. But there was something about the thrumming rush of sound, too, that made this place feel like the safest spot in the world for Alma to demand things, and to have secrets revealed. Who could hear them? Who would ever see them? Nobody but the spirits. Their words would be dragged from this cave by the tide and pulled out to sea, broken up in the churning waves, eaten by fish.

Tomorrow Morning replied without sitting up. “I returned to Tahiti to visit the Reverend Welles in August of 1850, and Ambrose was here—just as you are now here.”

“What did you think of him?”

“I thought he was an angel,” he said without hesitation, without even opening his eyes.

He was answering her questions almost too quickly, she thought. She did not want glib answers; she wanted the complete story. She did not want only the conclusions; she wanted the in-between. She wanted to see Tomorrow Morning and Ambrose as they met. She wanted to observe their exchanges. She wanted to know what they had been thinking, what they had been feeling. Most certainly, she wanted to know what they had done. She waited, but he was not more forthcoming. After they had been in silence for a long while, Alma touched Tomorrow Morning’s arm. He opened his eyes.

“Please,” she said. “Continue.”

He sat up, and turned to face her. “Did the Reverend Welles ever tell you how I came to the mission?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“I was only seven years old,” he said. “Perhaps eight. My father died first, then my mother died, then my two brothers died. One of my father’s surviving wives took responsibility for me, but then she died. There was another mother, too—another of my father’s wives—but subsequently she died. All the children of my father’s other wives died, in short order. There were grandmothers, too, but they also died.” He paused, considering something, and then continued, correcting himself: “No, I am mistaking the order of the deaths, Alma, please excuse me. It was the grandmothers who died first, as the weakest members of the family. So, yes, first it was my grandmothers who died, and then my father, and then so forth, as I have said. I, too, was sick for a spell, but I did not die—as you can see. But these are common stories in Tahiti. Surely you have heard them before?”

Alma was not sure what to say, so she said nothing. While she knew of the ruinous death toll across Polynesia over the past fifty years, nobody had told her any stories of their personal losses.

“You’ve seen the scars on Sister Manu’s forehead?” he asked. “Has anyone explained to you their origin?”

She shook her head. She did not know what any of this had to do with Ambrose.

“Those are grief scars,” he said. “When the women here in Tahiti mourn, they cut their heads with sharks’ teeth. It is gruesome, I know, to a European mind, but it is a means for a woman to both convey and unloose her sorrow. Sister Manu has more scars than most because she lost the entirety of her family, including several children. This is perhaps why she and I have always been so fond of each other.”

Alma was struck by his use of the quiet word fond as a means of expressing the allegiance between a woman who had lost all her children and a boy who had lost all his mothers. It did not seem a forceful enough word.

Then Alma thought of Sister Manu’s other physical anomaly. “What about her fingers?” she asked, holding up her own hands. “The missing tips?”

“That is another legacy of loss. Sometimes people here will cut off their fingertips as an expression of grief. This became easier to do when the Europeans brought us iron and steel.” He smiled ruefully. Alma did not smile in return; it was too awful. He continued. “Now, as for my grandfather, whom I have not yet mentioned, he was a rauti. Do you know about the rauti? The Reverend Welles has tried over the years to enlist my help in translating this word, but it’s difficult. My good father uses the word ‘haranguer,’ but that does not convey the dignity of the position. ‘Historian’ comes close, but it is not quite accurate, either. The task of the rauti is to run alongside men as they charge into battle, and to keep up their courage by reminding them of who they are. The rauti sings out the bloodlines and the lineage of each man, reminding the warriors of the glory of their family history. He ensures that they do not forget the heroism of their forefathers. The rauti knows the lineage of every man on this island, all the way back to the gods, and he chants out their courage for them. One could say it is a kind of sermon, but a violent one.”

“What were the verses like?” Alma asked, reconciling herself to this long, incongruous story. He had brought her here for a reason, she supposed, and he must be telling her this for a reason.

Tomorrow Morning turned his face toward the cave entrance, and thought for a moment. “In English? It does not have the same power, but it would be something along the lines of, ‘Give forth all your vigilance until their will is severed! Hang upon them like lightning! You are Arava, the son of Hoani, the grandson of Paruto, who was born of Pariti, who sprang from Tapunui, who claimed the head of the mighty Anapa, the father of eels—you are that man! Break over them like the sea!’” Tomorrow Morning thundered out these words, and they reverberated across the stones, drowning out the waves. He turned back to Alma—who had gooseflesh up her arms now, and who could not imagine the impact this must have had in Tahitian, if it stirred her so greatly in English—and said in his conversational voice, “Women fought, too, at times.”

“Thank you,” she said, though she could not have identified why she said it. “What became of your grandfather?”

“He died with the rest of them. After my family died, I was a child alone. In Tahiti, this is not so grave a fate for a child as it might be, I suppose, in London or Philadelphia. Children here are given independence from a young age, and anyone who can climb a tree or cast a line can feed himself. Nobody here will freeze to death in the night. I was similar to the young boys you see on the beach at Matavai Bay, who are also without family, although perhaps I was not as happy as they seem to be, for I did not have a little gang of fellows. The problem for me was not starvation of the body, but starvation of the spirit, do you see?”

“Yes,” said Alma.

“So I found my way to Matavai Bay, where there was a settlement of people. For several weeks, I watched the mission. I saw that, as humbly as they lived, they still had better things than elsewhere on the island. They had knives sharp enough to kill a pig in one stroke, and axes that could fell a tree with ease. To my eyes, their cottages were luxurious. I saw the Reverend Welles, who was so white that he looked to me like a ghost, though not a malevolent ghost. He spoke the language of ghosts, yes, but he spoke some of my language, too. I watched his baptisms, which were entertaining to everyone. Sister Etini was operating the school already, along with Mrs. Welles, and I saw the children going in and out. I lay outside the windows and listened to the lessons. I was not uneducated, completely. I could name one hundred and fifty kinds of fish, you see, and I could draw a map of the stars in the sand, but I was not educated in the European manner. Some of these children had small slates, for their lessons. I tried to construct myself a slate, out of a dark flake of lava stone that I polished smooth with sand. I dyed my chalkboard blacker still, using the sap of the mountain plantain, and then I scribbled lines on it with white coral. It was nearly a successful invention—although, unfortunately it did not erase!” He smiled at the memory. “You had quite a library as a child, I understand? And Ambrose told me that you spoke several languages, from the earliest age?”

Alma nodded. So Ambrose had spoken of her! She felt a tremor of pleasure at this revelation (he had not forgotten her!) but there was disturbance in it, as well: what else did Tomorrow Morning know about her? Far more, clearly, than she knew about him.

“It has been a dream of mine to someday see a library,” he said. “I would also like to see stained glass windows. In any case, one day the Reverend Welles spied me and approached me. He was kind. I am certain you need not stretch your imagination to understand how kind he was, Alma, for you have met the man. He gave me a task. He needed to convey a message, he said, to a missionary in Papeete. He asked me if I could take the message to his friend. Naturally, I agreed. I asked him, ‘What is the message?’ He simply handed me a slate with lines written upon it, and said, in Tahitian, ‘This is the message.’ I was dubious, but I took off running. In several hours, I had found the other missionary at his church by the docks. This man did not speak Tahitian at all. I did not understand how it would be possible for me to convey to him the message, when I did not even know what the message was, and we could not communicate! But I handed him the slate. He looked at it, and went into his church. When he came out, he handed me a small stack of writing paper. This was the first time I had ever encountered paper, Alma, and I thought it was the finest and whitest tapa cloth I had ever seen—though I did not understand what sort of clothing anyone could make out of such small pieces. I supposed it could be sewn together into some kind of garment.

“I hurried back to Matavai Bay, running the entire seven miles, and handed the paper to the Reverend Welles, who was delighted, for—he told me—this had been his message: he had wished to borrow some writing paper. I was a Tahitian child, Alma, which meant that I knew of magic and miracles—but I did not understand the magic of this trick. Somehow, it appeared to me, the Reverend Welles had convinced the slate to tell something to the other missionary. He must have commanded the slate to speak on his behalf, and thus, his wish had been granted! Oh, I wanted to know this magic! I whispered a commandment to my poor imitation of a slate, and I scribbled some lines on it with coral. My commandment was, ‘Bring back my brother from the dead.’ It puzzles me now why I did not ask for my mother, but I must have missed my brother more at that time. Perhaps because he was protective. I had always admired my brother, who was far more courageous than I was. You will not be surprised, Alma, to learn that my attempt at magic did not work. However, when the Reverend Welles saw what I was doing, he sat to speak with me, and that was the beginning of my new education.”

“What did he teach you?” Alma asked.

“The mercy of Christ, firstly. Secondly, English. Lastly, reading.” After a long pause, he spoke again. “I was a good student. I understand that you were also a good student?”

“Yes, always,” said Alma.

“The ways of the mind were easy for me, as I believe they were easy for you?”

“Yes,” said Alma. What else had Ambrose told him?

“The Reverend Welles became my father, and since then I have always been my father’s favorite. He loves me more, I daresay, than he loves his own daughter and his own wife. He certainly loves me more than he loves his other adopted sons. I understand from what Ambrose told me that you were your father’s favorite, as well—that Henry loved you even more, perhaps, than he loved his own wife?”

Alma started. It was a shocking statement. She felt wholly unable to reply. What loyalty did she feel toward her mother and toward Prudence across all the years and miles—and even across the divide of death—that she could not bring herself to answer this question honestly?

“But one knows when one is the favorite of our father, Alma, don’t we?” Tomorrow Morning asked, probing more gently. “It transfers to us a unique power, does it not? If the person of most consequence in the world has chosen to prefer us over all others, then we become accustomed to having what we wish for. Wasn’t that the case with you, as well? How can we not feel that we are strong—people like you and me?”

Alma searched herself to determine if this was true.

But of course it was true.

Her father had left her everything—the entirety of his fortune, at the exclusion of everyone else in the world. He had never allowed her to leave White Acre, not only because he had needed her, she suddenly realized, but also because he had loved her. Alma remembered him gathering her onto his lap when she was a small child, and telling her fanciful stories. She remembered her father’s saying, “To my mind, the homely one is worth ten of the pretty one.” She remembered the night of the ball at White Acre, in 1808, when the Italian astronomer had arranged the guests into a tableau vivant of the heavens, and had conducted them into a splendid dance. Her father—the sun, the center of it all—had called out across the universe, “Give the girl a place!” and had encouraged Alma to run. For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that it must have been he, Henry, who had thrust the torch into her hands that night, entrusting her with fire, releasing her as a Promethean comet across the lawn, and across the wide open world. Nobody else would have had the authority to entrust a child with fire. Nobody else would have bestowed upon Alma the right to have a place.

Tomorrow Morning went on. “My father has always regarded me as a sort of prophet, you know.”

“Is that how you regard yourself?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I know what I am. For one thing, I am a rauti. I am a haranguer, as my grandfather was before me. I come to the people and chant out encouragement. My people have suffered a great deal, and I push them to be strong again—but in the name of Jehovah, because the new god is more powerful than our old gods. If that were not true, Alma, all my people would still be alive. This is how I minister: with power. I believe that on these islands the news of the Creator and of Jesus Christ must be communicated not through gentleness and persuasion, but through power. That is why I have found success where others have failed.”

He was quite casual, revealing this to Alma. He almost shrugged it off as an easy thing.

“But there is something more,” he said. “In the old ways of thinking, there were known to be intermediary beings—messengers, as it were, between gods and men.”

“Like priests?” Alma asked.

“Like the Reverend Welles, you mean?” Tomorrow Morning smiled, looking again at the mouth of the cave. “No. My father is a good man, but he is not the sort of being to which I refer here. He is not a divine messenger. I am thinking of something other than a priest. I suppose you could say . . . what is the word? An emissary. In the old ways of thinking, we believed that each god had his own emissary. In emergencies, the Tahitian people would pray to these emissaries for deliverance. ‘Come to the world,’ they would pray. ‘Come to the light, and help us, for there is war and hunger and fear, and we suffer.’ The emissaries were neither of this world nor the next, but they moved between the two.”

“Is that how you regard yourself?” Alma asked again.

“No,” he said. “That is how I regarded Ambrose Pike.”

He turned to her immediately after he said this, and his face—for just a moment—was stricken with pain. Her heart clutched, and she had to catch herself, to hold her composure.

“You saw him the same way, too?” he asked, searching her face for an answer.

“Yes,” she said. At last they had come to it. At last they had come to Ambrose.

Tomorrow Morning nodded, and looked relieved. “He could hear my thoughts, you know,” he said.

“Yes,” Alma said. “That was something he could do.”

“He wanted me to listen to his thoughts,” Tomorrow Morning said, “but I do not have that capacity.”

“Yes,” said Alma. “I understand. Nor do I.”

“He could see evil—the way that it gathers in clusters. That was how he explained evil to me, as a clustering of sinister color. He could see doom. He could see good, as well. Billows of goodness, surrounding certain people.”

“I know,” said Alma.

“He heard the voices of the dead. Alma, he heard my brother.”

“Yes.”

“He told me that one night he could hear starlight—but it was only for that one night. It saddened him that he could never hear it again. He thought that if he and I attempted together to hear it, if we put our minds together, we could receive a message.”

“Yes.”

“He was lonely on earth, Alma, for nobody was similar to him. He could find no home.”

Alma again felt the clutch in her heart—a clenching of shame and guilt and regret. She balled up her hands into fists and pressed them into her eyes. She willed herself not to cry. When she put down her fists and opened her eyes, Tomorrow Morning was watching her as though waiting for a signal, as though waiting to see if he should stop speaking. But all she wanted was for him to continue speaking.

“What did he wish for, with you?” Alma asked.

“He wanted a companion,” Tomorrow Morning said. “He wanted a twin. He wanted us to be the same. He was mistaken about me, you understand. He thought I was better than I am.”

“He was mistaken about me, too,” Alma said.

“So you see how it is.”

“What did you wish for, with him?”

“I wanted to couple with him, Alma,” Tomorrow Morning said grimly, but without a flinch.

“As did I,” she said.

“So we are the same, then,” said Tomorrow Morning, though the thought did not appear to bring him comfort. It did not bring her comfort, either.

“Did you couple with him?” she asked.

Tomorrow Morning sighed. “I allowed him to believe that I was also an innocent. I think he saw me as The First Man, as a new kind of Adam, and I allowed him to believe that of me. I allowed him to draw those pictures of me—no, I encouraged him to draw those pictures of me—for I am vain. I told him to draw me as he would draw an orchid, in blameless nakedness. For what is the difference, in the eyes of God, between a naked man and a flower? This is what I told him. That is how I brought him near.”

“But did you couple with him?” she repeated, steeling herself for a more direct answer.

“Alma,” he said. “You have given me to understand what sort of a person you are. You have explained that you are compelled by a desire for comprehension. Now let me give you to understand what sort of a person I am: I am a conqueror. I do not boast to say it. It is merely my nature. Perhaps you have never before met a conqueror, so it is difficult for you to understand.”

“My father was a conqueror,” she said. “I understand more than you might imagine.”

Tomorrow Morning nodded, conceding the point. “Henry Whittaker. By all accounts, yes. You may be correct. Perhaps, then, you can understand me. The nature of a conqueror, as you surely know, is to acquire whatever he wishes to acquire.”

For a long while after that, they did not speak. Alma had another question, but she could scarcely bear to ask it. But if she did not ask it now, she never would know, and then the question would chew holes through her for the rest of her life. She girded her courage again and asked, “How did Ambrose die, Tomorrow Morning?” When he did not reply at once, she added, “I was informed by the Reverend Welles that he died of infection.”

“He did die of infection, I suppose—by the end of it. That is what a doctor would have told you.”

“But how did he truly die?”

“It is not pleasant to speak of,” said Tomorrow Morning. “He died of grief.”

“What do you mean—of grief? But how?” Alma pushed on. “You must tell me. I did not come here for a pleasant exchange, and I assure you that I am capable of withstanding whatever I hear. Tell me—what was the mechanism?”

Tomorrow Morning sighed. “Ambrose cut himself, quite severely, some days prior to his death. You will remember my telling you how the women here—when they have lost a loved one—will take a shark’s tooth to their own heads? But they are Tahitians, Alma, and it is a Tahitian custom. The women here know how to do this dreadful thing safely. They know precisely how deeply to cut themselves, such that they can bleed out their sorrows without causing dire harm. Afterward, they tend to the wound immediately. Ambrose, alas, was not practiced in this art of self-wounding. He was much distressed. The world had disappointed him. I had disappointed him. Worst of all, I believe, he had disappointed himself. He did not stay his own hand. When we found him in his fare, he was beyond saving.”

Alma shut her eyes and saw her love, her Ambrose—his good and beautiful head—drenched in the blood of his self-mortification. She had disappointed Ambrose, as well. All he had wanted was purity, and all she had wanted was pleasure. She had banished him to this lonely place, and he had died here, horribly.

She felt Tomorrow Morning touch her arm, and she opened her eyes.

“Do not suffer,” he said calmly. “You could not have stopped this thing from occurring. You did not lead him to his death. If anybody led him to his death, it was I.”

Still, she was unable to speak. But then another awful question rose, and she had no choice but to ask it: “Did he cut off his fingertips, too? In the manner of Sister Manu?”

“Not all of them,” Tomorrow Morning said, with commendable delicacy.

Alma shut her eyes again. Those artist’s hands! She remembered—though she did not wish to remember it—the night she had put his fingers in her mouth, trying to take him into her. Ambrose had flinched in fear, had recoiled. He had been so fragile. How had he managed to commit this awful violence upon himself? She thought she would be sick.

“This is my burden to carry, Alma,” Tomorrow Morning said. “I have strength enough for this burden. Allow me to carry it.”

When she found her voice again, she said, “Ambrose took his own life. Yet the Reverend Welles gave him a proper Christian burial.”

It was not a question, but a statement of amazement.

“Ambrose was an exemplary Christian,” Tomorrow Morning said. “As for my father, may God preserve him, he is a man of unusual mercy and generosity.”

Alma, slowly piecing together more of the story, asked, “Does your father know who I am?”

“We should assume that he does,” said Tomorrow Morning. “My good father knows everything that happens on this island.”

“Yet he has been so kind to me. He has never pried, never inquired . . .”

“This should not surprise you, Alma. My father is kindness incarnate.”

Another long pause. Then: “But does that mean he knows about you, Tomorrow Morning? Does he know what transpired between you and my late husband?”

“Again, we may reasonably assume so.”

“Yet he remains so admiring—”

Alma could not finish her thought, and Tomorrow Morning did not bother replying. Alma sat in astonished silence for a long while after this. Clearly, the Reverend Francis Welles’s tremendous capacity for compassion and forgiveness was not something to which one could apply logic, or even words.

Eventually, though, yet another terrible question rose in her mind. This question made her feel bilious and somewhat crazed, but—once more—she needed to know.

“Did you force yourself upon Ambrose?” she asked. “Did you bring injury to him?”

Tomorrow Morning did not take offense at this implicit accusation, but he did suddenly look older. “Oh, Alma,” he said sadly. “It appears that you do not quite understand what a conqueror is. It is not necessary for me to force things—once I am decided, the others have no choice. Can you not see this? Did I force the Reverend Welles to adopt me as his son, and to love me more than he loves even his own flesh-and-blood family? Did I force the island of Raiatea to embrace Jehovah? You are an intelligent woman, Alma. Try to comprehend this.”

Alma pressed her fists against her eyes again. She would not allow herself to weep, but now she knew a dreadful truth: Ambrose had permitted Tomorrow Morning to touch him, whereas he had only recoiled from her in abhorrence. It was possible this information made her feel worse than anything else she had yet learned today. It shamed her that she could concern herself with such a petty and selfish matter after hearing such horrors, but she could not help herself.

“What is it?” Tomorrow Morning asked, seeing her stricken face.

“I longed to couple with him, too,” she confessed at last. “But he would not have me.”

Tomorrow Morning looked at her with infinite tenderness. “So this is where we are different, you and I,” he said. “For you relented.”

Now the tide was low at last, and Tomorrow Morning said, “Let us go quickly, while we have our opportunity. If we are to do this at all, we must move now.”

They left the canoe behind on its unreachable ledge, and exited the cave. There was, as Tomorrow Morning had promised, a narrow route along the bottom of the cliff, upon which they could safely walk. They walked for a few hundred feet and then began to ascend. From the canoe, the cliff had seemed sheer, vertical, and unscalable, but now, as she followed Tomorrow Morning, putting her feet and hands just where he put his, she could see that there was, indeed, a pathway upward. It was almost as if stairs had been cut, with footholds and handholds placed precisely where they would be needed. She did not look down at the waves below, but trusted—as she had learned to trust the Hiro contingent—in her guide’s competence and her own sure-footedness.

About fifty feet up, they came to a ridge. From there, they entered a thick belt of jungle, scrambling up a steep slope of damp roots and vines. After her weeks with the Hiro contingent, Alma was in fine hiking trim, with the heart of a Highland pony, but this was a truly treacherous climb. Wet leaves under her feet made for dangerous slips, and even barefoot it was difficult to find purchase. She was tiring. She could see no sign of a path. She didn’t know how Tomorrow Morning could possibly tell where he was going.

“Be careful,” he said over his shoulder. “C’est glissant.”

He must be weary, too, she realized, for he did not even seem to recognize that he just had spoken to her in French. She hadn’t known that he spoke French at all. What else did he have in that mind of his? She marveled at it. He had done well for an orphan boy.

The steepness leveled out a bit, and now they were walking alongside a stream. Soon she could hear a dim rumbling in the distance. For a while, the noise was just a rumor, but then they came around a bend and she could see it—a waterfall about seventy feet tall, a ribbon of white foam that emptied noisily into a churning pool. The force of the falling water created gusts of wind, and the mist gave form to this wind, like ghosts made visible. Alma wanted to pause here, but the waterfall was not Tomorrow Morning’s destination. He leaned in to her to make himself heard, pointed toward the sky, and shouted, “Now we go up again.”

Hand over hand, they climbed beside the waterfall. Soon Alma’s dress was soaked through. She reached for sturdy clumps of mountain plantain and bamboo stalks to steady herself, and prayed they would not come unrooted. Near the top of the waterfall was a comfortable hummock of smooth stone and tall grasses, as well as a tumble of boulders. Alma determined that this must be the plateau of which he had spoken—their destination—though she could not at first determine what was so special about this place. But then Tomorrow Morning stepped behind the largest boulder, and she followed him. There, quite suddenly, was the entrance to a small cave—as tidily cut into the cliff as a room in a house, with walls eight feet up on every side. The cave was cool and silent, and smelled of minerals and soil. And it was covered—thoroughly carpeted—with the most luxuriant mantle of mosses Alma Whittaker had ever seen.

The cave was not merely mossy; it throbbed with moss. It was not merely green; it was frantically green. It was so bright in its verdure that the color nearly spoke, as though—smashing through the world of sight—it wanted to migrate into the world of sound. The moss was a thick, living pelt, transforming every rock surface into a mythical, sleeping beast. Improbably, the deepest corners of the cave glittered the brightest; they were absolutely studded, Alma realized with a gasp, with the jewellike filigree of Schistotega pennata.

Goblin’s gold, dragon’s gold, elfin gold—Schistotega pennata was that rarest of cave mosses, that false gem that gleams like a cat’s eye from within the permanent twilight of geologic shade, that unearthly sparkling plant that needs but the briefest sliver of light each day to sparkle like glory forever, that brilliant trickster whose shining facets have fooled so many travelers over the centuries into believing that they have stumbled upon hidden treasure. But to Alma, this was treasure, more stunning than actual riches, for it bedecked the entire cave in the uncanny, glistering, emerald light that she had only ever before seen in miniature, in glimpses of moss seen through a microscope . . . yet now she was standing fully within it.

Her first reaction upon entering this miraculous place was to shut her eyes against the beauty. It was unendurable. She felt as though this were something she should not be allowed to see without permission, without some sort of religious dispensation. She felt undeserving. With her eyes closed, she relaxed and allowed herself to believe that she had dreamed this vision. When she dared open them again, however, it was all still there. The cave was so beautiful that it made her bones ache with longing. She had never before coveted anything as much as she coveted this glimmering spectacle of mosses. She wanted to be swallowed by it. Already—although she was standing right there—she began to miss this place. She knew she would miss it for the rest of her days.

“Ambrose always thought you would like it here,” Tomorrow Morning said.

Only then did she begin to sob. She sobbed so hard that she did not make a sound—she could not make a sound—and her face twisted into a mask of tragedy. Something in the center of her broke apart, splintering her heart and lungs. She fell forward into Tomorrow Morning, the way a soldier, shot, falls into the arms of his comrade. He held her up. She shook like a rattling skeleton. Her sobbing did not subside. She clung to him with such force that it would have broken the ribs of a lesser man. She wanted to press straight through him and come out the other side—or, better still, be blotted out by him, absorbed into his guts, erased, negated.

In her paroxysm of grief, she did not at first sense it, but at length she perceived that he, too, was weeping—not great gusting sobs, but slow tears. She was holding him up as much as he was holding her. And so they stood together in the tabernacle of mosses and wept out his name.

Ambrose, they lamented. Ambrose.

He was never coming back.

In the end they dropped to the ground, like trees hacked down. Their clothing was soaked and their teeth chattered with cold and fatigue. Without discussion or discomfort, they removed their wet clothes. It had to be done, or they would die of the chill. Now they were not only exhausted and sodden, they were laid bare. They lay down on the moss and regarded each other. It was not an assessment. It was not a seduction. Tomorrow Morning’s form was beautiful—but this was evident, unsurprising, beyond argument, and unimportant. Alma Whittaker’s form was not beautiful—but this, too, was evident, unsurprising, beyond argument, and unimportant.

She reached for his hand. She put his fingers in her mouth, like a child. He allowed it. He did not recoil from her. Then she reached for his penis, which had been—like the penis of every Tahitian boy—circumcised during youth with the tooth of a shark. She needed to touch him more intimately; he was the one person who had ever touched Ambrose. She did not ask permission of Tomorrow Morning for this touch; permission issued from the man, unspoken. All was understood. She moved down his large, warm body, and took his member into her mouth.

This act was the one thing in her life she had ever really wanted to do. She had given up so much, and she had never complained—but could she not, at least once, have this? She did not need to be married. She did not need to be beautiful, or desired by men. She did not need to be surrounded by friends and frivolity. She did not need an estate, a library, a fortune. There was so much that she did not need. She did not even need to have the unexplored terrain of her ancient virginity excavated at long last, at the wearisome age of fifty-three—though she knew Tomorrow Morning would oblige her, had she wished.

But—if only for one moment of her life—she did need this.

Tomorrow Morning did not hesitate, nor did he rush her along. He allowed her to investigate him, and to fit whatever she could fit of him inside her mouth. He allowed her to suck on him as though drawing breath through him—as though she were underwater and he was her only link to air. Her knees in the moss, her face in his secret nest, she felt him grow heavier in her mouth, and warmer, and even more permissive.

It was just as she had always imagined it would be. No, it was more than she had ever imagined it would be. Then he poured himself into her mouth, and she received it like a dedicatory offering, like an almsgiving.

She was grateful.

After that, they did not weep anymore.

They spent the night together, in that high grotto of mosses. It was far too dangerous now, in the darkness, to return to Matavai Bay. While Tomorrow Morning did not object to canoeing at night (indeed, he claimed to prefer it, as the air was cooler), he did not think it safe for them to climb down the waterfall and the cliff face with no light. Knowing the island as he did, he must have realized all along that they would have to spend the night. She did not mind his assumption.

Bedding down in the outdoors did not promise a comfortable night’s sleep, but they made the best of the situation. They built a small fire pit with billiard-sized rocks. They gathered up dry hibiscus, which Tomorrow Morning was able to coax into flame in a matter of minutes. Alma collected breadfruit, which she wrapped in banana leaves and baked until it crumbled open. They made bedding from mountain plantain stalks, which they beat with stones into a soft, clothlike material. They slept together under this crude plantain bedding, pressed against each other for warmth. It was damp, but not insufferable. They denned down like brother foxes. In the morning, Alma awoke to find that the sap of the plantain stalks had left dark blue stains on her skin—although it didn’t show up, she noticed, on Tomorrow Morning’s skin. His skin had absorbed the stain, while hers, paler, displayed it openly.

It seemed wise not to speak of the previous evening’s events. They remained silent on the subject not out of shame, but out of something that more closely resembled regard. Also, they were exhausted. They dressed, ate the remaining breadfruit, descended the waterfall, picked their way down the cliffs, reentered the cave, found the canoe high and dry, and reversed their journey back to Matavai Bay.

Six hours later, as the familiar black beach of the mission settlement came into view, Alma turned to face Tomorrow Morning, and put her hand on his knee. He paused his paddling.

“Forgive me,” she said. “May I trouble you with one final question?”

There was one last thing she needed to know, and—as she was not certain they would ever see each other again—she had to ask him now. He nodded his head respectfully, inviting her to continue.

“For nearly a year now, Ambrose’s valise—filled with his drawings of you—has been sitting in my fare on the beach. Anybody could have taken it. Anybody could have distributed those pictures of you all over the island. Yet not one person on this island has so much as touched the thing. Why is that?”

“Oh, that is simple to answer,” Tomorrow Morning said easily. “It is because they are all terrified of me.”

Then Tomorrow Morning took up the paddle once again, and pulled them back toward the beach. It was almost time for evening services. They were welcomed home with warmth and joy. He gave a beautiful sermon.

Not a single person dared to ask where they had been.