The Signature of All Things (20 page)

As for things that could not be changed, they must stoically be endured.

Chapter Ten

N
ow it was late July of 1820.

The United States of America was in economic recession, the first period of decline in its short history, and Henry Whittaker, for once, was not enjoying a glittering year of commerce. It was not that he had fallen upon hard times—not by any means—but he was feeling an unaccustomed sense of pressure. The market in exotic tropical plants was saturated in Philadelphia, and Europeans had grown bored of American botanical exports. Worse, it seemed that every Quaker in town these days was opening his own medical dispensary and manufacturing his own pills, ointments, and unguents. No rival had yet surpassed the popularity of Garrick & Whittaker products, but soon enough they might.

Henry longed to have his wife’s advice on all this, but Beatrix had not been well all year. She suffered spells of dizziness, and with the summer so hot and uncomfortable, her condition worsened. Her capacity was lagging, and her breath was always short. She never complained, and she tried to keep up with her work, but she was not healthy, and she refused to see a doctor. She did not believe in doctors, pharmacists, or medicines—an irony, given the family trade.

Henry’s health was not so capital, either. He was sixty years old now. His bouts of the old tropical maladies lasted longer these days. Dinner gatherings had become difficult to plan, as one could never be certain
if Henry and Beatrix would be in the proper condition to receive guests. This made Henry angry and bored, and his anger made everything more difficult at White Acre. His temperamental outbursts were increasingly vitriolic.
Somebody must pay! That bastard’s son is finished! I will see him destroyed!
The maids ducked around corners and hid whenever they saw him coming.

There was bad news from Europe, too. Henry’s international agent and emissary, Dick Yancey—the tall Yorkshireman who frightened Alma so much as a child—had recently arrived at White Acre with a most disturbing piece of intelligence: a pair of chemists in Paris had recently managed to isolate a substance they were calling “quinine,” found in the bark of the cinchona tree. They were claiming that this compound was the mysterious ingredient in Jesuit’s bark that was so effective at treating malaria. With this knowledge in hand, French chemists might soon be able to manufacture a better product from the bark—a more lightly powdered, more potent, more efficient product. They could easily undermine Henry’s dominance of the fever trade forever.

Henry was berating himself (and berating Dick Yancey a bit, too) that they had not seen this coming. “We should have discovered this ourselves!” Henry said. But chemistry was not Henry’s field. He was an unrivaled arborist, a ruthless merchant, and a brilliant innovator, but try as he might, he could not stay abreast of every new bit of scientific progress in the world. Knowledge was advancing too quickly for him. Another Frenchman had recently patented a mathematical calculating machine called an
arithometer
, which could perform long division on its own. A Danish physicist had just announced that a relationship existed between electricity and magnetism, and Henry didn’t even understand what the man was talking about.

In short, there were too many new inventions these days, and too many new ideas, all so complex and far-flung. One could no longer be an expert in generalities, making a handsome pudding of profit in all sorts of fields. It was enough to make Henry Whittaker feel old.

But things were not all bad, either. Dick Yancey brought Henry one stunning piece of good news during this visit: Sir Joseph Banks was dead.

That daunting figure, who had once been the handsomest man in Europe, who had been the darling of kings, who had circled the globe, who had slept with heathen queens on open beaches, who had introduced
thousands of new botanical species to England, and who had sent young Henry out into the world to become
Henry Whittaker
—that very man was dead.

Dead and rotting in a crypt somewhere in Heston.

Alma, who was sitting in her father’s study copying letters when Dick Yancey arrived and delivered this news, gasped in shock, and said, “May God rest him.”

“May God curse him,” Henry corrected. “He tried to ruin me, but I beat him.”

Without a doubt, Henry did seem to have beaten Sir Joseph Banks. At the least, he had matched him. Despite Banks’s wounding humiliations so many years earlier, Henry had prospered beyond all imagination. He had not merely been victorious in the cinchona trade, he maintained business interests in every corner of the world. He had become a name. Nearly all his neighbors owed him money. Senators, ship owners, and merchants of every sort sought his blessing, and longed for his patronage.

Over the past three decades, Henry had created greenhouses in West Philadelphia that rivaled anything to be seen at Kew. He’d coaxed orchid varieties to bloom at White Acre that Banks had never found success with along the Thames. When Henry first heard that Banks had acquired a four-hundred-pound tortoise for the menagerie at Kew, he promptly ordered a
pair
of them for White Acre, secured in the Galapagos and personally delivered by the tireless Dick Yancey. Henry had even managed to bring the great water lilies of the Amazon to White Acre—water lilies so big and strong they could support a standing child—while Banks, at the time of his death, had never even
seen
the great water lilies.

What’s more, Henry managed to live his life as richly as Banks ever did. He had conjured for himself a far larger and grander estate in America than anything Banks ever inhabited in England. His mansion shone on the hill like a colossal signal fire, casting its impressive light over the entire city of Philadelphia.

Henry had even dressed like Sir Joseph Banks for many years now. He had never forgotten how dazzling that clothing had appeared to him as a boy, and he had made a point—over the course of his life as a rich man—to both imitate and surpass Banks’s wardrobe. As a result, by 1820, Henry was still wearing a style of clothing that was much out of date. When every other
man in America had long ago turned to simple trousers, Henry still wore silk stockings and breeches, elaborate white wigs with long queues, gleaming silver shoe buckles, deep-cuffed coats, blouses with broad ruffles, and brocaded vests in vivid shades of lavender and emerald.

Dressed in this lordly yet antique manner, Henry looked positively quaint as he strode about Philadelphia in his colorful Georgian finery. He had been accused of looking like a waxwork exhibit from Peale’s Arcade, but he did not mind. This was precisely how he wanted to look—exactly as Sir Joseph Banks had first appeared to
him
in the offices of Kew, in 1776, when Henry the thief (thin, hungry, and ambitious) had been summoned before Banks the explorer (handsome, elegant, and sumptuous).

But now Banks was dead. He was a dead baronet, to be sure, but he was still dead. Whereas Henry Whittaker—the poor-born, well-dressed emperor of American botany—was alive and prosperous. Yes, his leg ached, and his wife was ill, and the French were catching up to him in the malaria business, and the American banks were failing all around him, and he had a closetful of aging wigs, and he had never borne a son—but, by God, Henry Whittaker had defeated Sir Joseph Banks at last.

He instructed Alma to go down to the wine cellar, to procure him the finest available bottle of rum, for celebratory purposes.

“Make it two bottles,” he said, in afterthought.

“Perhaps you ought not drink overly much this evening,” Alma warned, carefully. He had only recently recovered from a fever, and she did not like the look on her father’s face. It was a look of frightful emotional distortion.

“We shall drink as much as we wish tonight, my old friend,” said Henry to Dick Yancey, as though Alma had not spoken at all.

“
More
than we wish,” said Yancey, giving Alma a warning look that chilled her. Lord, she did not like this man, though her father much admired him. Dick Yancey, Alma’s father had told her once in a tone of real pride, was a useful fellow to have around in the settling of arguments, as he settled them not with words, but with knives. The two men had met on the docks of Sulawesi in 1788, when Henry had watched Yancey beat a pair of British naval officers into politeness without speaking a single word. Henry had immediately hired him as his agent and enforcer, and the two men had been plundering the world together ever since.

Alma had always been terrified of Dick Yancey. Everybody was. Even
Henry called Dick “a trained crocodile,” and had once said, “It’s difficult to say which is more dangerous—a trained crocodile or a wild one. One way or another, I would not leave my hand resting in his mouth for long, God bless him.”

Even as a child, Alma innately comprehended that there were two types of silent men in the world: one type was meek and deferential; the other type was Dick Yancey. His eyes were a pair of slowly circling sharks, and as he stared at Alma now, those eyes were clearly saying: “Bring the rum.”

So Alma went down to the cellar and obediently brought up the rum—two full bottles of it, one for each man. Then she went out to her carriage house, to disappear into her work and escape the drunkenness in store. Long after midnight, she fell asleep on her divan, uncomfortable as it was, rather than return to the house. She awoke at dawn and walked across the Grecian garden to take her breakfast in the big house. As she approached the house, though, she could hear that her father and Dick Yancey were still awake. They were singing sailors’ songs at top volume. Henry may not have been to sea in three decades, but he still knew all the songs.

Alma stopped at the entrance, leaned against the door, and listened. Her father’s voice, echoing through the mansion in the gray morning light, sounded miserable and lurid and exhausted. It sounded like a haunting from a distant ocean.

N
ot two weeks later, on the morning of August 10, 1820, Beatrix Whittaker fell down the great staircase at White Acre.

She had woken early that morning, and must have been feeling well enough that she thought she could do some work in the gardens. She had put on her old leather gardening slippers, gathered her hair into her stiff Dutch cap, and headed down the stairs to go to work. But the steps of the staircase had been waxed the day before, and the soles of Beatrix’s leather slippers were too slick. She toppled forward.

Alma was in her study in the carriage house already, hard at work editing a paper for
Botanica
Americana
on the carnivorous vestibules of the bladderwort, when she saw Hanneke de Groot running across the Grecian garden toward her. Alma’s first thought was how comic it was to see the old housekeeper running—skirts flapping and arms pumping, her face red and
strained. It was like watching a giant barrel of ale, dressed in a gown, bounce and roll across the yard. She nearly laughed aloud. In the very next moment, however, Alma sobered. Hanneke was obviously alarmed, and this was not a woman who was generally subject to alarm. Something dreadful must have occurred.

Alma thought:
My father is dead
.

She put her hand to her heart.
Please, no. Please, not my father.

Now Hanneke was at her door, wide-eyed and wild, panting for breath. The housekeeper choked, swallowed, and blurted it out: “
Je moeder is dood
.”

Your mother is dead.

T
he servants had carried Beatrix back to her bedroom and laid her across the bed. Alma was almost afraid to enter; she had rarely been allowed in her mother’s bedroom. She could see that her mother’s face had turned gray. There was a contusion rising on her forehead, and her lips were split and bloodied. The skin was cold. Servants surrounded the bed. One of the maids was holding a mirror under Beatrix’s nose, looking for any signs of breath.

“Where is my father?” Alma asked.

“Still sleeping,” said a maid.

“Don’t wake him,” Alma commanded. “Hanneke, loosen her stays.”

Beatrix had always worn her clothing tight across the bodice—respectably, firmly, suffocatingly tight. They turned the body to its side, and Hanneke released the lacing. Still, Beatrix did not breathe.

Alma turned to one of the younger servants—a boy who looked as though he could run quickly.

“Bring me
sal volatile
,” she said.

He stared at her blankly.

Alma realized that, in her haste and agitation, she had just used Latin with this child. She corrected herself. “Bring me ammonium carbonate.”

Again, the blank look. Alma spun and glanced at everyone else in the room. All she saw were confused faces. Nobody knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t using the right words. She searched her mind. She tried again.

“Bring me spirit of hartshorn,” she said.

But, no, that wasn’t the familiar term, either—or would not be for these
people. Hartshorn was an archaic usage, something only a scholar would know. She clenched shut her eyes and searched for the most recognizable possible name of what she wanted. What did ordinary people call it?
Pliny the Elder had called it
hammoniacus sal.
Thirteenth-century alchemists used it all the time. But references to Pliny would be of no help in this situation, nor was thirteenth-century alchemy of much service to anyone in this room. Alma cursed her mind as a dustbin of dead languages and useless particulars. She was losing precious time here.

Finally, she remembered. She opened her eyes and barked out a command that actually worked: “Smelling salts!” she cried. “Go! Find them! Bring them to me!”

Quickly, the salts were produced. It took nearly less time to find them than it had taken Alma to
name
them.

Alma wafted the crystals under her mother’s nose. With a wet, rattling gasp, Beatrix took a breath. The circle of maids and servants emitted various bleats and gasps of shock, and one woman shouted, “Praise God!”