The Signature of All Things (13 page)

Here, Beatrix finally chimed in, admonishing her fourteen-year-old daughter, “I do wonder, Alma, whether it is absolutely necessary for you to put the entire world in possession of your every thought. Why not let your poor guest attempt to answer one question before you assault him with
another? Please, young man, try again. What was it you were attempting to say?”

But now Henry was speaking again. “You didn’t even bring me cuttings, did you?” he asked the overwhelmed fellow—who by this point did not know which Whittaker he should answer first, and therefore made the grave mistake of answering nobody. In the long silence that ensued, everyone stared at him. Still, the young man could not manage to emit a single word.

Disgusted, Henry broke the silence, turning to Alma and saying, “Ah, put it to rest, Alma. I’m not interested in this one. He hasn’t thought things through. And yet look at him! Still he sits there, eating my dinner, drinking my claret, and hoping to get my money!”

So Alma did indeed put it to rest, pursuing no further questions on the subject of ammoniacum gum, or Dioscorides, or the tribal customs of Persia. Instead, she turned brightly to another gentleman at the table—not noticing that this second young fellow had himself turned rather pale—and asked, “So, I see by your marvelous paper that you have found some quite extraordinary fossils! Have you been able yet to compare the bone to modern samples? Do you really think those are hyena teeth? And do you still believe that the cave was flooded? Have you read Mr. Winston’s recent article on primeval flooding?”

Meanwhile, Prudence—without anyone’s noticing—turned coolly to the stricken young Englishman beside her, the one who had just been so firmly shut down, and murmured, “Do go on.”

T
hat night, before bedtime, and after evening accounting and prayers, Beatrix corrected the girls, as per daily custom.

“Alma,” she began, “polite discourse should not be a race to the finish line. You may find it both beneficial and civilized, on rare occasions, to permit your victim to actually finish a thought. Your worth as a hostess consists in displaying the talents of your guests, not crowing about your own.”

Alma began to protest, “But—”

Beatrix cut her off, and continued, “Moreover, it is not necessary to overlaugh at jests, once they have done their duty and caused amusement. I find
lately that you are carrying on with laughter altogether too long. I never met a truly honorable woman who honked like a goose.”

Then Beatrix turned to Prudence.

“As for you, Prudence, while I admire that you do not engage in idle and irritating chatter, it is another thing altogether to retreat from conversation entirely. Visitors will think you are a dunce, which you are not. It would be an unfortunate stamp of discredit upon this family if people believed that only one of my daughters had the capacity to speak. Shyness, as I have told you many times, is simply another species of vanity. Banish it.”

“My apologies, Mother,” Prudence said. “I felt unwell this evening.”

“I believe that you
think
you felt unwell this evening. But I saw you with a book of light verse in your hands just before dinner, idling away quite happily as you read. Anyone who can read a book of light verse just before dinner cannot be that unwell a mere hour later.”

“My apologies, Mother,” Prudence repeated.

“I also wish to speak to you, Prudence, about Mr. Edward Porter’s behavior this evening at the dinner table. You should not have let that man stare at you for quite so long as you did. Engrossment of this sort is demeaning to all. You must learn how to abort this sort of behavior in men by speaking to them with intelligence and firmness about serious topics. Perhaps Mr. Porter might have awoken from his infatuated stupor sooner, had you discussed with him the Russian Campaign, for instance. It is not sufficient to be merely good, Prudence; you must also become clever. As a woman, of course, you will always have a heightened moral awareness over men, but if you do not sharpen your wits in defense of yourself, your morality will serve you little good.”

“I understand, Mother,” Prudence said.

“Nothing is so essential as dignity, girls. Time will reveal who has it, and who has it not.”

L
ife might have been pleasanter for the Whittaker girls if—like the blind and the lame—they had learned how to aid each other, filling in each other’s weaknesses. But instead they limped along side by side in silence, each girl left alone to grope through her own deficiencies and troubles.

To their credit, and to the credit of the mother who kept them polite, the
girls were never unpleasant to each other. Unkind words were never once exchanged. They respectfully shared an umbrella with each other, arm in arm, whenever they walked in the rain. They stepped aside for each other at doorways, each willing to let the other pass first. They offered each other the last tart, or the best seat, nearest to the warmth of the stove. They gave each other modest and thoughtful gifts at Christmas Eve. One year, Alma bought Prudence—who liked to draw flowers (beautifully, though not
accurately
)—a lovely book on botanical illustration called
Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master: A New Treatise on Flower Painting.
That same year, Prudence made for Alma an exquisite satin pincushion, rendered in Alma’s favorite color, aubergine. So they did try to be thoughtful.

“Thank you for the pincushion,” Alma wrote to Prudence, in a short note of considered politeness. “I shall be certain to use it whenever I find myself in need of a pin.”

Year after year, the Whittaker girls conducted themselves toward each other with the most exacting correctness, although perhaps from different motives. For Prudence, exacting correctness was an expression of her natural state. For Alma, exacting correctness was a crowning effort—a constant and almost physical subduing of all her meaner instincts, stamped into submission by sheer moral discipline and fear of her mother’s disapproval. Thus, manners were held, and all appeared peaceful at White Acre. But in truth, there was a mighty seawall between Alma and Prudence, and it did not ever budge. What’s more, nobody helped them to budge it.

One winter’s day, when the girls were about fifteen years old, an old friend of Henry’s from the Calcutta Botanical Gardens came to visit White Acre after many years away. Standing in the entryway, still shaking the snow off his cloak, the guest shouted, “Henry Whittaker, you weasel! Show me that famous daughter of yours I’ve been hearing so much about!”

The girls were just nearby, transcribing botanical notes in the drawing room. They could hear every word.

Henry, in his great crashing voice, said, “Alma! Come instantly! You are requested to be seen!”

Alma rushed into the atrium, bright with expectation. The stranger looked at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. He said, “No, you bloody fool—that’s not what I meant! I want to see the pretty one!”

Without a trace of rebuke, Henry replied, “Oh, so you’re interested in
Our Little Exquisite, then? Prudence, come in here! You are requested to be seen!”

Prudence slipped through the entryway and stood beside Alma, whose feet were now sinking into the floor, as into a thick and terrible swamp.

“There we are!” said the guest, looking over Prudence as though pricing her out. “Oh, she
is
splendid, isn’t she? I had wondered. I had suspected everyone might have been exaggerating.”

Henry waved his hand dismissively. “Ah, you all make too much of Prudence,” he said. “To my mind, the homely one is worth ten of the pretty one.”

So, you see, it is quite possible that both girls suffered equally.

Chapter Seven

T
he year 1816 would later be remembered as The Year Without a Summer—not only at White Acre, but across much of the world. Volcanic eruptions in Indonesia filled Earth’s atmosphere with ash and darkness, bringing drought to North America and freezing famine to most of Europe and Asia. The corn crop failed in New England, the rice crop withered in China, oat and wheat crops collapsed all across northern Europe. More than a hundred thousand Irish starved to death. Horses and cattle, suffering without grain, were annihilated en masse. There were food riots in France, England, and Switzerland. In Quebec City, it snowed twelve inches in June. In Italy, the snow came down brown and red, terrifying the populace into fears of apocalypse.

In Pennsylvania, for the entirety of June, July, and August of that benighted year, the countryside was enveloped in a deep, frigid, dark fog. Little grew. Thousands of families lost everything. For Henry Whittaker, though, it was not a bad year. The stoves in his greenhouses had managed to keep most of his tropical exotics alive even in the semidarkness, and he’d never made a living off the risks of outdoor farming, anyway. The bulk of his medicinal plants were imported from South America, where the climate was unaffected. What’s more, the weather was making people sick, and sick people bought more pharmaceuticals. Both botanically and financially, then, Henry was mostly unaffected.

No, that year, Henry found his prosperity in real estate speculation and
his pleasure in rare books. Farmers were fleeing Pennsylvania in droves, heading west in the hopes of finding brighter sun, healthier soil, and a more hospitable environment. Henry bought up a good deal of the property these destroyed people left behind, thus coming into possession of excellent mills, forests, and pastures along the way. Quite a few Philadelphia families of rank and note fell into ruin that year, brought down by the foul weather’s spiral of economic decline. This was wonderful news for Henry. Whenever another wealthy family collapsed, he was able to purchase, at steep discount, their land, their furniture, their horses, their fine French saddles and Persian textiles, and—most satisfyingly—their libraries.

Over the years, the acquisition of magnificent books had become something of a mania for Henry. It was a peculiar mania, given that the man could scarcely read English, and most assuredly could not read, say, Catullus. But Henry did not want to read these books; he merely wanted to own them, as prizes for his growing library at White Acre. Medical, philosophical, and exquisitely rendered botanical books he longed for most of all. He was aware that these volumes were every bit as dazzling to visitors as the tropical treasures in his greenhouses. He had even launched a custom before dinner parties of choosing (or, rather, having Beatrix choose) one precious book to show to the gathered guests. He especially enjoyed performing this ritual when famous scholars were visiting, in order to see them catch their breath and go light-headed with desire; most men of letters never really expected to hold in their own hands an early-sixteenth-century Erasmus, with the Greek printed on one side and the Latin on the other.

Henry acquired books voluptuously—not volume by volume, but trunkful by trunkful. Obviously, all these books needed sorting, and, just as obviously, Henry was not the man to sort them. This physically and intellectually taxing job had fallen for years to Beatrix, who would steadily weed through the lots, keeping the gems and unloading much of the dross over to the Philadelphia Free Library. But Beatrix, by late autumn of 1816, had fallen behind in the task. Books were coming in faster than she could sort them. The spare rooms of the carriage house now contained many trunks that had yet to be opened, each filled with more volumes. With new windfalls of entire private libraries coming to White Acre by the week (as one fine family after another met financial ruin), the collection was on the brink of becoming an unmanageable bother.

So Beatrix chose Alma to help her sift and catalogue the books. Alma was the clear choice for the job. Prudence was not much help in such matters, as she was useless in Greek, practically useless in Latin, and could never really be made to understand how to divide botanical volumes accurately between pre- and post-1753 editions (which is to say, before and after the advent of Linnaean taxonomy). But Alma, now aged sixteen, proved to be both efficient and enthusiastic at the task of setting the White Acre library into order. She had a sound historical comprehension of what she was handling, and she was a fevered, diligent indexer. She was also physically strong enough to carry about the heavy crates and boxes. Too, the weather was so poor in 1816 that there was little pleasure to be found outdoors, and not much benefit to be gained by working in the garden. Happily, Alma came to consider her library work as a kind of indoor gardening, with all the attendant satisfactions of muscular labor and beautiful unfoldings.

Alma even found that she had a talent for repairing books. Her experience in mounting plant specimens made her well adept at managing the materials in the binding closet—a tiny dark room with a hidden door just off the library, where Beatrix stored all the paper, fabrics, leather, wax, and glues needed to maintain and restore the fragile old editions. After a few months, in fact, Alma was doing so well at all these tasks that Beatrix put her daughter completely in charge of the White Acre library, both the catalogued and uncatalogued collections. Beatrix had grown too stout and too tired to climb up the library ladders anymore, and was tired of the job.

Now, some people might have questioned whether a respectable and unmarried sixteen-year-old girl really ought to have been left without any supervision in the midst of an uncensored deluge of books, trusted to negotiate her way alone through such a vast flood of unconstrained ideas. Perhaps Beatrix thought she’d already completed her work with Alma, having successfully produced a young woman who appeared pragmatic and decent, and who would surely know how to resist corrupting ideas. Or perhaps Beatrix did not think through what sorts of books Alma might stumble upon when she opened those trunks. Or perhaps Beatrix believed that Alma’s homeliness and awkwardness rendered the girl immune to the dangers of, for heaven’s sake,
sensuality
. Or perhaps Beatrix (who was nearing fifty years old, and suffering from episodes of dizziness and distraction) was simply getting careless.