The Signature of All Things (71 page)

But scarcely had Hanneke’s body been discovered, Prudence wrote on, than a boy arrived at White Acre with a message from George Hawkes that Retta—“transformed these many years by madness, beyond all recognition”—had expired in her room at the Griffon Asylum for the Insane.

Prudence wrote, “It is challenging to know what one should regret more
arduously: Retta’s death, or the sad circumstances of her life. I strive to remember the Retta of long ago, so gay and carefree. Scarcely can I see her in my imagination as that girl, before her mind became so dreadfully clouded . . . for that was so long ago, as I have said, when we were all so young.”

Then came the most shocking news. Not two days after Retta’s death, Prudence reported, George Hawkes himself had died. He had just come from Griffon’s, straight from making arrangements for his wife’s funeral, and had collapsed on the street in front of his printing shop. He was sixty-seven years old.

“I apologize that it has taken me more than a week to write you this unhappy missive,” Prudence concluded, “but my mind is beset by so many thoughts and distresses that it has been difficult for me to proceed. It staggers one’s mind. We are all grievously shocked here. Perhaps I have delayed so long in writing this letter because I could not help but think: Every day that I do not tell my poor sister this news, she does not have to bear it. I search my heart for a peppercorn’s worth of comfort to offer you, but find it difficult to come by. I scarcely can find comfort for myself. May the Lord receive and preserve them all. I am at a loss for what else to say, please forgive me. The school continues well. The students thrive. Mr. Dixon and the children send their abiding affection—most sincerely, Prudence.”

Now Alma did sit, and she put down the letter beside her.

Hanneke, Retta, and George—all gone, in one sweep of the hand.

“Poor Prudence,” Alma murmured aloud.

Poor Prudence, indeed, to have lost George Hawkes forever. Of course, Prudence had lost George long ago, but now she had lost him again, and this time forever. Prudence had never stopped loving George, nor he her—or so Hanneke had told Alma. But George had followed poor Retta to her grave, bound forever to the destiny of the tragic little wife he had never loved. All the possibilities of their youth, Alma thought, all run to waste. For the first time, she considered how similarly her fate and her sister’s had unfolded—both of them doomed to love men they could not possess, and both of them resolved to carry on bravely despite it. One did the best one could, of course, and there was dignity to be found in stoicism, but truly there were times when the sadness of this world was scarcely to be endured, and the violence of love, Alma thought, was sometimes the most pitiless violence of all.

Her first instinct was to return home with all haste. But White Acre was no
longer her home, and even to imagine walking into the old mansion without seeing Hanneke de Groot’s face made Alma feel sick and lost. Instead, she went to her office and wrote a letter in reply, searching her own heart for peppercorns of comfort, and finding them scarce. Uncharacteristically, she turned to the Bible, to Psalms. She wrote to her sister, “The Lord is near unto them who are of a broken heart.” She spent the entire day behind her closed door, bent quietly in half by grief. She did not burden her uncle with any of this sad news. He had been so pleased to know that his beloved nursemaid Hanneke de Groot still lived; she could not bear to inform him of this death, or the others. She did not wish to lay any trouble upon his good and cheerful spirit.

O
nly a fortnight later, she would be glad of this decision, when her uncle Dees contracted a fever, took to his bed, and died within the space of a day. It was one of those periodic fevers that swept through Amsterdam in summertime, when the canals grew stale and fetid. One morning, Dees and Alma and Roger shared breakfast together, and by the next breakfast Dees was gone. He was seventy-six. Alma was so ruptured by this loss—on the heels of the others—that she barely knew how to contain herself. She found herself pacing her rooms in the night, pressing one hand against her chest, for fear her ribs would cleave open and her heart would fall to the ground. Alma felt that she had known her uncle for such a short while—not nearly long enough! Why was there never enough time? One day he had been there, and then, the next, called away. All of them had been called away.

Half of Amsterdam, it seemed, gathered for the funeral of Dr. Dees van Devender. His four sons and two eldest grandsons carried the casket from the house on Plantage Parklaan to the church around the corner. A bundle of daughters-in-law and grandchildren clutched each other and wept; they pulled Alma into their midst, and she drew comfort from this press of family. Dees had been much adored. All were bereft. What’s more, the family pastor revealed that Dr. van Devender had been a quiet paragon of charitable works for all his life; there were many in this crowd of mourners whose lives he had aided or even saved over the years.

The irony of this revelation—in light of Alma and Dees’s interminable midnight debates—made Alma want to cry and laugh at the same time. His lifetime of anonymous generosity certainly placed him high on Maimonides’s ladder, she thought, but he might have mentioned it to me at
some point! How could he have sat there, year after year, dismissing the scientific relevance of altruism, while at the same time secretly dedicating himself to it quite tirelessly? It made Alma marvel at him. It made her miss him. It made her want to question him and tease him—but he was gone.

After the funeral, Dees’s eldest son, Elbert, who would now be taking over directorship of the Hortus, had the good grace to approach Alma and pledge to her that her place, both within the family and at the Hortus, was absolutely assured.

“You need never worry for the future,” he said. “We all wish for you to stay.”

“Thank you, Elbert,” she managed to say, and the two cousins embraced.

“It comforts me to know that you loved him, as did we all,” Elbert said.

But no one had loved Dees more than Roger the dog. From the first moment of Dees’s illness, the little orange mutt had refused to move from his master’s bed; he would not leave after the corpse had been removed, either. He planted himself in the cold sheets and would not budge. He refused to take food—not even the
wentelteefjes
Alma had prepared for him herself, and which she had tearfully tried to feed him by hand. He turned his head to the wall and closed his eyes. She touched his head, spoke to him in Tahitian, and reminded him of his noble lineage, but he did not respond in the least. Within a matter of days, Roger was gone, too.

W
ere it not for the black cloud of death that swept across Alma’s landscape in that summer of 1858, she almost certainly would have heard about the proceedings of the Linnean Society of London on July 1 of that year. She generally made a point of reading notes from all the more important scientific gatherings across Europe and America. But her mind was—forgivably—much distracted that summer. Journals piled on her desk unread, as she grieved. Looking after her Cave of Mosses absorbed whatever scant energy she could muster. Much else went unattended.

And thus she’d missed it.

In fact, she would hear nothing of it until one morning in late December of the following year, when she opened her copy of The
Times
and read a review of a new book, by Mr. Charles Darwin, entitled
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
.

Chapter Thirty

O
f course Alma knew of Charles Darwin; everyone did. In 1839, he’d published a quite popular travel book about his journey to the Galápagos Islands. The book—a charming account—had made him rather famous at the time. Darwin had a light hand on the page, and he’d managed to convey his delight with the natural world in a comfortable and friendly tone that had welcomed readers of all backgrounds. Alma remembered admiring that talent of Darwin’s, for she herself could never come close to writing such entertaining, democratic prose.

Reflecting back on it now, what Alma remembered most clearly from
The Voyage of the Beagle
was a description of penguins swimming at night through phosphorescent waters, leaving, Darwin wrote, a “fiery wake” in the darkness.
A fiery wake!
Alma had appreciated that description, and it had stayed with her these last twenty years. She’d even recalled the phrase during her voyage to Tahiti, that marvelous night on the
Elliot
, when she had witnessed such phosphorescence herself. But she did not remember much else about the book, and Darwin had not distinguished himself to any extraordinary extent since. He had retired from travel to a life of more scholarly pursuits—some fine and careful work on barnacles, if Alma recalled correctly. She had certainly never considered him the major naturalist of his generation.

But now, upon reading the review of this new and startling book, Alma
discovered that Charles Darwin—that soft-spoken barnacle aficionado, that gentle penguin lover—had been hiding his cards. As it turned out, he had something quite momentous to offer the world.

Alma put down the newspaper and rested her head in her hands.

A fiery wake, indeed.

I
t took her nearly a week to get a copy of the actual book from England, and Alma waded through those days as though in a trance. She felt she would not be able to produce an adequate reaction to this turn of events until she could read—word for word—what Darwin himself had to say, rather than what was already being said about him.

On January 5—her sixtieth birthday—the book arrived. Alma retired to her office with enough food and drink to sustain her for as long as necessary, and locked herself inside. Then she opened
On the Origin of Species
to the first page, began to read Darwin’s lovely prose, and from there fell downward into a deep cavern that resounded from every side with her own ideas.

He had not stolen her theory, needless to say. Not for a moment did that absurd thought even cross her mind—for Charles Darwin had never heard of Alma Whittaker, nor should he have. But like two explorers seeking the same treasure trove from two different directions, she and Darwin had both stumbled on the identical chest of riches. What she had deduced from mosses, he had deduced from finches. What she had observed in the boulder fields of White Acre, he’d seen repeated in the Galápagos Archipelago. Her boulder field was naught but an archipelago itself, writ in miniature. An island is an island, after all—whether it is three feet or three miles across—and all the most dramatic events in the natural world occur on the wild, competitive, tiny battlefields of islands.

It was a beautiful book. She wavered, as she read it, between heartbreak and vindication, between regret and admiration.

Darwin wrote, “More individuals are born than can possibly survive. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die.”

He wrote, “In short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere, in every part of the organic world.”

She felt an upswell of complicated emotion so overwhelming, so dense, that she thought she might faint. It hit her like a blast from a furnace: she had been correct.

She had been correct!

Thoughts of Uncle Dees swarmed her mind, even as she continued reading. Her thoughts of him were constant and contradictory: If only he had lived to see this! Thank God he had not lived to see this!
How simultaneously proud and angry he would have been! She would never have heard the end of it: “See, I
told
you to publish!” Yet he would have celebrated this great, endorsing confirmation of his niece’s work, as well. She did not know how to digest this circumstance without him. She longed for him terribly. She would have gladly suffered his scolding for some of his comfort. Inevitably, too, she wished her father had lived to see this. She wished her mother had lived to see this. Ambrose, too. She wished she had published it herself. She did not know what to think.

Why had she not published?

The question stung her—yet as she read Darwin’s masterpiece (and it was, quite obviously, a masterpiece) she knew that this theory belonged to him, and that it needed to belong to him. Even if she’d said it first, she could never have said it better. It was even possible that nobody would have listened to her had she published this theory—not because she was a woman or because she was obscure (although these factors would not have helped), but merely because she would not have known how to persuade the world as eloquently as Darwin. Her science was perfect, but her writing was not. Alma’s thesis was forty pages long, and
On the Origin of Species
was more than five hundred, but she knew without question that Darwin’s was by far the more readable work. Darwin’s book was artful. It was intimate. It was playful. It read like a novel.

He called his theory “natural selection.” It was a brilliantly concise term, simpler and better than Alma’s bulkier “theory of competitive alteration.” As he patiently built his case for natural selection, Darwin was never strident or defensive. He gave the impression of being the reader’s kindly neighbor. He wrote of the same dark and violent world that Alma perceived—a world of endless killing and dying—but his language contained not a trace of violence. Alma would never have dared to write with such a gentle hand; she would not have known how. Her prose was a hammer; Darwin’s was a
psalm. He came bearing not a sword but a candle. Everywhere in his pages, moreover, he suggested a spirit of divinity—without ever evoking the Creator! He summoned a sense of miracle through rhapsodies on the power of time itself. He wrote, “What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!” He marveled at all the “beautiful ramifications” of change. He offered up the lovely observation that the wonders of adaptation made every creature on the planet—even the humblest beetle—seem precious, astonishing, and “ennobled.”