The Signature of All Things (34 page)

“I’ve never before had my own desk,” Ambrose told her. “It makes me feel uncharacteristically important. It makes me feel like an aide-de-camp
.
”

A single door separated their two studies—and that door was never closed. All day long, Alma and Ambrose walked back and forth into each other’s rooms, looking in on the other’s progress, and showing each other some item or other of interest in a specimen jar, or on a microscope slide. They ate buttered toast together every morning, had gypsy lunches out in the fields, and stayed up late into the night, helping Henry with his correspondence, or looking over old volumes from the White Acre library. On Sundays, Ambrose joined Alma for church with the dull, droning Swedish Lutherans, dutifully reciting prayers alongside her.

They spoke or they were silent—it did not seem to matter much one way or the other—but they were never apart.

During the hours that Alma worked in the moss beds, Ambrose sprawled out on the grass nearby, reading. While Ambrose sketched in the orchid house, Alma pulled up a chair beside him, working on her own correspondence. She had never before spent much time in the orchid house, but since Ambrose’s arrival, it had been transformed into the most stunning location at White Acre. He had spent nearly two weeks cleaning each of the hundreds of glass panes so that sunlight entered in crisp, unfiltered columns. He mopped and waxed the floors until they glittered. What’s more—and rather astonishingly—he spent another week burnishing the leaves of every individual orchid plant with banana peels, until they all shone like tea services polished by a loyal butler.

“What’s next, Ambrose?” Alma teased. “Shall we now comb out the hair of every fern on the property?”

“I do not think the ferns would object,” he said.

In fact, something curious had occurred at White Acre right after Ambrose brought such shine and order to the orchid house: the rest of the estate suddenly seemed drab by comparison. It was as though someone had polished only a single spot on a dingy old mirror, and now, as a result, the rest of the mirror looked truly filthy. One wouldn’t have noticed it before, but now it was obvious. It was as though Ambrose had opened an inlet to something previously invisible, and Alma could finally see a truth she would otherwise have been blind to forever: White Acre, elegant as it was, had incrementally fallen into a state of crumbling neglect over the past quarter century.

With this realization, Alma got it in her mind to bring the rest of the estate up to the same sparkling standard as the orchid house. After all, when was the last time every single pane of glass in any of the other greenhouses had been cleaned? She could not recall. There was mildew and dust everywhere she looked now. The fences all needed whitewashing and repair, weeds grew in the gravel drive, and cobwebs filled the library. Every rug needed a stout banging, and every furnace was in need of overhaul. The palms in the great glasshouse were nearly bursting through the roof, they had not been cut back in so many years. There were desiccated animal bones in the corners of the barns from years of marauding cats, the carriage brass had been allowed to tarnish, and the maids’ uniforms appeared to be decades out of date—because they were.

Alma hired seamstresses to make new uniforms for everyone on the staff, and she even commissioned two new linen frocks for herself. She offered a new suit to Ambrose, but he asked if he could have four new paintbrushes, instead. (Exactly four. She offered five. He did not need five, he said. Four would be luxury enough.) She enlisted a squadron of fresh young help to assist in bringing the place back up to shine. She realized that, as older White Acre workers had died or been dismissed over the years, they had never been replaced. Only a third as many staff worked at the estate now as there had been twenty-five years ago, and that was simply not enough.

Hanneke resisted the new arrivals at first. “I do not have the strength of body or mind anymore to make good workers out of bad ones,” she complained.

“But, Hanneke,” Alma protested. “Look how cleverly Mr. Pike has spruced up the orchid house! Don’t we want everything at the estate to look so fine?”

“We have far too much cleverness in this world already,” Hanneke replied, “and not enough good sense. Your Mr. Pike is only making work for others. Your mother would spin in her grave, to know that people are going about polishing flowers by hand.”

“Not the flowers,” Alma corrected. “The leaves.”

But in time even Hanneke surrendered, and it wasn’t long before Alma saw her delegating the new young staff to haul out the old flour barrels from the cellar, to dry them in the sun—a chore that had not been performed, as far as Alma could remember, since Andrew Jackson had been president.

“Don’t go too far with the cleaning,” Ambrose cautioned. “A little neglect can be of benefit. Have you ever noticed how the most splendid lilacs, for instance, are the ones that grow up alongside derelict barns and abandoned shacks? Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.”

“So speaks the man who polishes his orchids with banana peels!” Alma said, laughing.

“Ah, but those are
orchids
,” Ambrose said. “That’s different. Orchids are holy relics, Alma, and need to be treated with reverence.”

“But, Ambrose,” Alma said, “this entire estate was beginning to look like a holy relic . . . after a holy war!”

They called each other “Alma” and “Ambrose” now.

May passed. June passed. July arrived.

Had she ever been this happy?

She had never been this happy.

Alma’s existence, before the arrival of Ambrose Pike, had been a good enough one. Yes, her world may have looked small, and her days repetitive, but none of it had been unbearable to her. She had made the best of her fate. Her work with mosses occupied her mind, and she knew that her research was unimpeachable and honest. She had her journals, her herbarium, her microscopes, her botanical disquisitions, her correspondence with botanists and collectors overseas, her duties toward her father. She had her customs, habits, and responsibilities. She had her dignity. True, she was something like a book that had opened to the same page every single day for nearly thirty straight years—but it had not been such a bad page, at that. She had been sanguine. Contented. By all measures, it had been a good life.

She could never return to that life now.

I
n mid-July of 1848, Alma went to visit Retta at the Griffon Asylum for the first time since her friend had been interned there. Alma had not kept her word to visit Retta every month, as she had promised George Hawkes she would, but White Acre had been so busy and pleasant since Ambrose’s arrival that she had put Retta out of her mind. By July, though, Alma’s conscience was beginning to scratch at her, and thus she made arrangements to take her carriage up to Trenton for the day. She wrote a note to George Hawkes, asking if he would like to join her, but he demurred. He gave no explanation as to why, although Alma knew he simply could not bear to see Retta in her current state. Ambrose, however, offered to keep Alma company for the day.

“But you have so much work to do here,” Alma said. “Nor is it likely to be a pleasurable visit.”

“The work can wait. I would like to meet your friend. I have a curiosity, I must confess, about diseases of the imagination. I would be interested to see the asylum.”

After an uneventful ride to Trenton, and a short conversation with the supervising doctor, Alma and Ambrose were escorted to Retta’s room. They
found her in a small private chamber with a neat bedstead, a table and chair, a strip of carpet, and an empty space on the wall where a mirror had once hung, before it had to be removed—the nurse explained—because it was upsetting the patient.

“We tried to put her in with another lady for a spell,” the nurse said, “but she wouldn’t have it. Became violent. Fits of disquiet and terror. There is reason to fear for anyone left in a room with her. Better off on her own.”

“What do you do for her do when she suffers such fits?” Alma asked.

“Ice baths,” said the nurse. “And we block her eyes and ears. It seems to calm her.”

It was not an unpleasant room. It had a view of the back gardens, and the light was plentiful, but still, Alma thought, her friend must be lonely. Retta was dressed neatly and her hair was clean and braided, but she looked apparitional. Pale as ashes. She was still a pretty thing, but mostly, by now, she was just a
thing
. She did not appear either pleased or alarmed to see Alma, nor did she show any interest in Ambrose. Alma went and sat beside her friend, and held her hand. Retta allowed it without protest. A few of her fingers, Alma noticed, were bandaged at the tips.

“What has happened there?” Alma asked the nurse.

“She bites herself at night,” the nurse explained. “We can’t get her to quit off doing it.”

Alma had brought her friend a small bag of lemon candies and a paper funnel full of violets, but Retta merely looked at the gifts as though she was not certain which to eat and which to admire. Even the recent edition of
Joy’s Lady’s Book
that Alma had purchased along the way was met with indifference. Alma suspected that the flowers, the sweets, and the magazine would ultimately go home with the nurse.

“We have come to visit you,” Alma said to Retta, rather lamely.

“Then why are you not here?” Retta asked, in a voice blunted by laudanum.

“We are here, darling. We are right here before you.”

Retta looked at Alma blankly for a while, then turned to look out the window again.

“I had meant to bring her a prism,” Alma said to Ambrose, “but I’ve gone and forgotten it. She always loved prisms.”

“You should sing her a song,” Ambrose suggested quietly.

“I am not a singer,” Alma said.

“I do not think she would object.”

But Alma couldn’t even think of a song. Instead she leaned over to Retta’s ear and whispered, “Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”

Retta failed to respond.

Alma turned to Ambrose, and asked, almost in a panic, “Do you know a song?”

“I know many, Alma. But I don’t know
her
song.”

I
n the carriage ride home, Alma and Ambrose were thoughtful and quiet. At last, Ambrose asked, “Was she always this way?”

“Stupefied? Never. She was always a bit mad, but she was such a delight as a girl. She had wild humor and no small amount of charm. All who knew her loved her. She even brought gaiety and laughter to me and to my sister—and, as I’ve told you, Prudence and I were never ones for shared gaiety. But her disturbances increased over the years. And now, as you see . . .”

“Yes. As I see. Poor creature. I have such sympathy for the mad. Whenever I am around them, I feel it straight to my soul. I think anyone who claims never to have felt insane is lying.”

Alma pondered this. “I honestly do not believe I have ever felt insane,” she said. “I wonder if I’m telling a falsehood when I say that to you. I don’t think so.”

Ambrose smiled. “Of course not. I should have made an exception for you, Alma. You are not like the rest of us. You have a mind of such solidity and substance. Your emotions are durable as a strongbox. This is why people feel so reassured around you.”

“Do they?” Alma asked, genuinely surprised to hear it.

“Indeed, they do.”

“That’s a curious thought. I’ve never heard it expressed,” Alma looked out the window of the carriage, and contemplated further. Then she remembered something. “Or perhaps I have heard it expressed. You know, Retta herself used to say that I possessed a rather reassuring chin.”

“The entirety of your being is reassuring, Alma. Even your voice is reassuring. For those of us who sometimes feel as though we are blowing about
our lives like chaff on a miller’s floor, your presence is a most appreciated consolation.”

Alma did not know how to respond to this surprising statement, so she tried to dismiss it. “Come now, Ambrose,” she said. “You are such a steady-minded man—surely you have never felt insane?”

He thought for a moment, selecting his words carefully: “One cannot help but feel how closely one lies to the same condition as your friend Retta Snow.”

“No, Ambrose, surely not!”

When he did not immediately reply, she felt herself grow anxious.

“Ambrose,” she said more gently. “Surely not, yes?”

Again, he was careful, and took a long time to answer. “I refer to the sense of dislocation from this world—coupled with a feeling of alignment to some other world.”

“To what other world?” Alma asked.

His hesitation to reply made her feel as though she had overreached, so she attempted a more casual tone. “I apologize, Ambrose. I have a dreadful habit of not resting on questions until I have found a satisfactory answer. It’s my nature, I’m afraid. I hope you will not think me rude.”

“You are not rude,” Ambrose said. “I enjoy your curiosity. It’s merely that I’m uncertain how to offer you a satisfactory answer. One does not wish to lose the fondness of people one admires by revealing too much of oneself.”

So Alma released the topic, hoping, perhaps, that the subject of madness would never be mentioned again. As though to neutralize the moment, she brought out a book from her purse and attempted to read. The carriage was too jolting for comfortable reading, and her mind was much distracted by what she had just heard, but she pretended to be absorbed in her book regardless.

After a long while, Ambrose said, “I have not yet told you why I left Harvard, those many years ago.”

She put the book away and turned to him.

“I suffered an episode, Alma,” he said.

“Of madness?” Alma asked. She spoke in her customary direct way, although her stomach fell in fear at how he might reply.

“It may have been. I’m not certain what one would call it. My mother
thought it was madness. My friends thought it was madness. The doctors believed it to be madness. I myself felt it was something else.”

“Such as?” she asked, again in her normal voice, although her trepidation was mounting by the moment.