The Signature of All Things (47 page)

The more appalled he became, the more Henry turned tyrant to his poor nurses. He wanted his legs rubbed constantly, and—fearing suffocation from his inflamed lungs—demanded that his bedstead be tilted up at a steep angle. He refused all pillows for fear they would drown him in his sleep. He grew more belligerent by the day, even as he declined. “What a beggarly mess you have made of this bed!” he would shout after some pale, frightened girl as she ran from the room. Alma marveled at how he could possibly find the strength to bark like a chained dog, even as he was vanishing away upon the sheets. He was difficult, but there was something admirable in his fight, too, something kingly in his refusal to quietly die.

He weighed nothing. His body had become a loose envelope filled with long, sharp bones, and covered all over with sores. He could take nothing
but beef tea, and not much of it. But for all that, Henry’s voice was the last part of his body to fail him. This was a pity, in a way. Henry’s voice caused the good maids and nurses around him to suffer, for—like a brave English sailor going down with his ship—he took to singing bawdy songs, as though to keep up his courage in the face of doom. Death was trying to pull him down with both hands, but he was singing it away.

“
With a red flag flying, let it pass!
Shove it up the maiden’s ass!
”

“That will be all, Kate, thank you,” Alma would say to the unfortunate young nurse who happened to be on duty, escorting the poor girl to the door, even as Henry sang out, “
Good old Kate in Liverpool! Once she ran a whoring school!
”

Henry had never cared much for civilities, but now he cared for them not a whit. He said whatever he wanted to say—and perhaps, it occurred to Alma, even more than he wanted to say. He was staggeringly indiscreet. He shouted about money, about deals gone sour. He accused and probed, attacked and parried. He even picked fights with the dead. He debated with Sir Joseph Banks, trying again to convince him to grow cinchona in the Himalayas. He ranted to his deceased wife’s long-gone father: “I will show you, you skunk-faced old pig-dog of a Dutchman, what a rich man I intend to become!” He accused his own long-dead father of being a fawning bootlick. He demanded that Beatrix be summoned to take care of him and to bring him cider. Where was his wife? For what purpose did a man have a wife, if not to tend him upon his sickbed?

Then one day he looked Alma straight in the eye and said, “And you think I don’t know what that husband of yours was!”

Alma hesitated a moment too long to send the nurse from the room. She ought to have done it right away, but she waited, instead, uncertain of what her father was trying to say.

“You think I have not met such men as that in my travels? You think I was not once such a man as that myself? You think they took me on the
Resolution
for my able navigating? I was a hairless little boy, Plum—a hairless little shaver from the land, with a fine clean arsehole. There’s no shame in saying it!”

He was addressing her as “Plum.” He had not called her that name in years—in decades. He had not even recognized her at times during the past months. But now, with the use of the beloved old pet name, it was apparent
that he knew precisely who she was—which meant that he also knew precisely what he was saying.

“You may leave now, Betsy,” Alma directed the nurse, but the nurse did not seem in a hurry to leave.

“Ask yourself what they did to me on that ship, Plum! The youngest shaver there, I was! Oh, by God, but they had their fun with me!”

“Thank you, Betsy,” Alma said, moving now to escort the nurse to the door herself. “You may close the door behind you. Thank you. You’ve been most helpful, then. Thank you. Off you go.”

Henry was now singing an awful verse Alma had never heard before: “
They whacked me up and whacked me down, The mate he buggered me round and round!
”

“Father,” Alma said, “you must stop.” She drew near and placed her hands on his chest. “You
must
stop.”

He stopped singing and looked at her with fiery eyes. He grabbed her wrists with his bony hands.

“Ask yourself why he married you, Plum,” Henry said, in a voice as clear and strong as youth itself. “Not for the money, I’ll wager! Not for your clean little arsehole, either. For something else, it must be. It don’t make sense to you, do it? Not to me neither, it don’t make sense.”

Alma pulled her arms from her father’s grip. His breath smelled like rot. Most of him was already dead.

“Cease your talking, Father, and take some beef tea,” she said, tilting the cup to his mouth, and avoiding his gaze. She had a feeling the nurse was listening from behind the door.

He sang, “
Oh, we’re running away around the Cape! Some for debt and some for rape!
”

She tried to pour the broth into his mouth—to stop him singing, as much as anything—but he spat it out and knocked her hand away. The broth rained across the sheets and the cup spun across the floor. He still had strength in him, the old fighter. He grabbed for her wrists again and caught one of them.

“Don’t be simple, Plum,” he said. “Don’t believe a single thing any cunt or bastard ever tells you in this world.
You go find out!
”

Over the next week, as Henry slid closer toward death, he would say and sing many more things—most of them filthy and all of them unfortunate—but
that one phrase of his struck Alma as so cogent and deliberate that she would always think of it as having been her father’s final words:
You go find out.

H
enry Whittaker died on October 19, 1851. It was like a storm blowing out to sea. He thrashed till the end, fought to the last breath he drew. The calm at the end of it, once he finally left, was staggering. Nobody could believe they had survived him. Hanneke, wiping away a tear of exhaustion as much as sadness, said, “Oh, to those who already dwell in heaven—good luck for what is coming!”

Alma helped to wash her father’s body. She asked to be alone with his corpse. She did not wish to pray. She did not wish to weep. There was something she needed to find. Lifting the sheet off her father’s naked corpse, she explored the skin around his abdomen, searching with fingers and eyes for something like a scar, like a lump, something odd, small, and out of place. She was looking for the emerald that Henry had sworn to her, decades ago when she was a child, that he had sewn beneath his own flesh. She did not flinch to look for it. She was a naturalist. If it was there, she would find it.

You must always have one final bribe, Plum.

It wasn’t there.

She was astonished. She’d always believed everything her father told her. But then, she thought, perhaps he had offered the emerald up to Death, right near the end. When the songs hadn’t worked and the courage hadn’t worked and all his cunning had failed to negotiate a way out of this final frightful contract, maybe he had said, “Take my best emerald, too!” And maybe Death had taken it, Alma thought—but then took Henry, as well.

Not even her father could buy his way out of that covenant.

Henry Whittaker was gone, and his last trick gone with him.

S
he inherited everything. The will—produced only a day after the funeral, by Henry’s old solicitor—was the simplest imaginable document, not more than a few sentences long. To his “one natural-born daughter,” the will instructed, Henry Whittaker left his entire fortune. All his land, all his business concerns, all his wealth, all his holdings—all of it was to be Alma’s exclusively. There were no provisions made for anyone else. There was no
mention of his adopted daughter, Prudence Whittaker Dixon, nor his loyal staff. Hanneke would receive nothing; Dick Yancey would receive nothing.

Alma Whittaker was now one of the richest women in the New World. She controlled the largest botanical importing concern in America, the affairs of which she had singlehandedly managed over the last five years, and she was half owner of the prosperous Garrick & Whittaker Pharmaceutical Company. She was the sole inhabitant of one of the grandest private homes in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, she held the rights to several lucrative patents, and she owned thousands of acres of productive land. Under her direct command were scores of servants and employees, while numberless people around the world worked for her on a contractual basis. Her greenhouses and glasshouses rivaled any to be found in the finest European botanical gardens.

It did not feel like a blessing.

Alma was weary and saddened by the death of her father, of course, but she also felt burdened, rather than honored, by his mammoth bequest. What interest did she have in a vast botanical importing concern, or a busy pharmaceutical manufacturing operation? What need did she have to own half a dozen mills and mines across Pennsylvania? What use did she have for a thirty-four-room mansion filled with rare treasures and a challenging staff? How many greenhouses did one lady botanist need in order to study mosses? (That answer, at least, was simple: none.) Yet it was all hers.

After the solicitor left, Alma, feeling stunned and self-pitying, went to find Hanneke de Groot. She longed for the comfort of the most familiar person left in the world to her. She found the old housekeeper standing upright inside the large, cold fireplace in the kitchen, poking a broom handle up into the chimney, trying to unloose a swallow’s nest, while unleashing upon herself a coating of soot and grime.

“Surely someone else can do that for you, Hanneke,” Alma said in Dutch, by means of greeting. “Let me find a girl.”

Hanneke backed out of the fireplace, huffing and filthy. “Do you think I haven’t asked them to?” she demanded. “But do you think there is another Christian soul in this household who would stick their neck up a fireplace chimney except me?”

Alma brought Hanneke a damp cloth to wipe clean her face, and the two women sat down at the table.

“The solicitor has left already?” Hanneke asked.

“Gone just these five minutes ago,” Alma said.

“That was swift.”

“It was a simple business.”

Hanneke frowned. “So he left it all to you, then, did he?”

“Indeed,” said Alma.

“Nothing to Prudence?”

“Nothing,” said Alma, noticing that Hanneke had not asked after her own interests.

“Curse him, then,” Hanneke said, after a moment’s silence.

Alma winced. “Be kind, Hanneke. My father is not a day in his grave.”

“Curse him, I say,” the housekeeper repeated. “Curse him as a stubborn sinner, to disregard his other daughter.”

“She would not have accepted anything from him anyway, Hanneke.”

“You do not know that to be true, Alma! She is part of this family, or should be. Your much-lamented mother wanted her to be part of this family. I expect you will look after Prudence yourself, then?”

This took Alma aback. “In what manner? My sister scarcely wishes to see me, and she turns away all gifts. I cannot offer her so much as a teacake without her claiming it to be more than she needs. You cannot honestly believe she would allow me to share our father’s wealth with her?”

“She is a proud girl, that one,” Hanneke said, with more admiration than concern.

Alma wished to change the subject. “What will White Acre be like now, Hanneke, without my father? I do not look forward to running the estate without his presence. It feels as though a great, living heart has been ripped out of this home.”

“I will not permit you to disregard your sister,” Hanneke said, as though Alma had not spoken at all. “It is one thing for Henry to be sinful, stupid, and selfish in his grave, but another thing altogether for you to behave the same way in life.”

Alma bristled. “I come to you today for warmth and counsel, Hanneke, yet you insult me.” She stood up, as if to leave the kitchen.

“Oh, sit down, child. I insult nobody. I only mean to tell you that you owe your sister a significant debt, and you should see to it that debt is paid.”

“I owe my sister no debt.”

Hanneke threw up her arms, still blackened with soot. “Do you see
nothing
, Alma?”

“If you refer, Hanneke, to the lack of warmth between Prudence and myself, I urge you not to lay the blame for it exclusively upon my shoulders. The fault has been every bit as much hers as mine. We have never been at ease in each other’s society, the two of us, and she has warded me off, all these many years.”

“I do not speak of sisterly warmth. Many sisters have no warmth with each other. I speak of sacrifice. I know everything that occurs in this house, child. Do you imagine you are the only one who ever came to me in tears? Do you imagine you are the only one who ever knocked on Hanneke’s door when sorrow overwhelmed? I know all the secrets.”

Bewildered, Alma tried to imagine her aloof sister Prudence ever falling into the housekeeper’s arms in tears. No, it could not be pictured. Prudence had never had Alma’s closeness with Hanneke. Prudence had not known Hanneke from infancy, and Prudence did not even speak Dutch. How could intimacy exist at all?

Still, Alma had to ask it: “What secrets?”

“Why do you not ask Prudence yourself?” Hanneke replied.

Now the housekeeper was being intentionally coy, Alma felt, and she could not endure it. “I cannot command you to tell me anything, Hanneke,” Alma said, switching over to English. She was too irritated now to speak in the old, familiar Dutch. “Your secrets belong to you, if you choose to keep them. But I do command you to cease toying with me. If you have information about this family that you believe I should know, then I wish you would reveal it. But if your sport is merely to sit here and mock my ignorance—my ignorance of
what,
I cannot possibly know—then I regret coming to speak to you today at all. I face important decisions about everyone in this household, and I deeply grieve my father’s passing. I carry much responsibility now. I do not have the time or the fortitude to play guessing games with you.”

Hanneke looked at Alma carefully, squinting a bit. At the end of Alma’s speech she nodded, as though she approved the tone and tenor of Alma’s words.