The Signature of All Things (23 page)

What could George Hawkes possibly see in Retta Snow? By Alma’s recollection, George had barely ever been able to
look
at Retta Snow without baffled embarrassment. Alma remembered how George had always glanced over to her in confusion whenever Retta spoke, as though seeking help, relief, or interpretation. If anything, these little glances between George and Alma
about
Retta had been one of their sweetest intimacies—or at least Alma had dreamed that they were.

But apparently Alma had dreamed many things.

Some part of her still hoped this was just one of Retta’s strange games, or perhaps a deluded flight of the girl’s imagination. Only a moment earlier, after all, Retta had claimed there were witches living in the carriage house, so anything could be possible. But, no. Alma knew Retta too well.
This was not Retta at play. This was Retta in earnest. This was Retta chattering on about the problem with sleeves and shawls in a February wedding. This was Retta quite seriously worrying over the necklace her mother planned to lend her, which was quite valuable, but not entirely to Retta’s liking:
What if the chain is too long?
What if it becomes tangled in the bodice?

Alma stood suddenly and pulled Retta up from the floor. She could not bear it anymore. She could not sit still and listen to another word of this. Without a further plan of action, she embraced Retta. It was so much easier to embrace her than to look at her. It also made Retta stop talking. She held Retta in such a firm press that she heard the girl’s breath intake sharply, with a surprised squeak. Just when she thought Retta might begin speaking again, Alma commanded, “Hush,” and grasped her friend more securely.

Alma’s arms were extraordinarily strong (she had a blacksmith’s arms, just as her father did) and Retta was so tiny, with the rib cage of a baby rabbit. There were snakes that could kill this way, with an embrace that only grew tighter and tighter until the breath stopped completely. Alma squeezed tighter. Retta made another small squeaking noise. Alma grasped harder still—so hard that she lifted Retta right from the floor.

She remembered the day they all had met: Alma, Prudence, and Retta.
Fiddle, fork, and spoon
. Retta had said, “If we were boys, we would have to fight now.” Well, Retta was no fighter. She would have lost such a battle. She would have lost badly. Alma compressed her arms even tighter around this tiny, useless, precious person. She clenched her eyes shut as hard as she could, but tears bled from the corners nonetheless. She could feel Retta going limp in her grip. It would be so easy to stop her from breathing. Stupid Retta. Cherished Retta, who—even now!—successfully resisted all efforts not to be loved.

Alma dropped her friend to the floor.

Retta landed with a gasp and very nearly bounced.

Alma forced herself to speak. “I congratulate you on your happiness,” she said.

Retta sobbed once, and clutched at her bodice with trembling hands. She smiled, so foolish and trusting. “What a good little Alma you are!” Retta said. “And how much you love me!”

In a queer touch of almost masculine formality, Alma extended her
hand for Retta to shake, managing to choke forth just one more sentence: “You are most deserving.”

“D
id you
know
?” Alma demanded of Prudence not an hour later, finding her sister at her needlework in the drawing room.

Prudence set her work on her lap, folded her hands, and said nothing. Prudence had a habit of never committing to any conversation before she completely understood the circumstances. But Alma waited nonetheless, wanting to force her sister to speak, wanting to catch her at something. At what, though? Prudence’s face had nothing to reveal, and if Alma thought Prudence Whittaker was fool enough to speak first under such hot circumstances, then she did not know Prudence Whittaker.

In the silence that followed, Alma felt her anger turn from blazing indignation to something more tragic and petulant, something spoiled and sad. “Did you know,” Alma was finally forced to ask, “that Retta Snow is to marry George Hawkes?”

Prudence’s expression did not change, but Alma saw a tiny white line appear for just a moment around her sister’s lips, as though the mouth had compressed only the slightest bit. Then the line vanished, quickly as it had arrived. Alma might even have imagined it.

“No,” Prudence replied.

“How could this have happened?” Alma asked. Prudence said nothing, so Alma kept speaking. “Retta tells me they have been betrothed since the week of our mother’s death.”

“I see,” said Prudence, after a long pause.

“Did Retta ever know that I . . .” Here Alma hesitated and nearly started weeping. “Did Retta ever know that I had feelings for him?”

“How could I possibly answer that?” Prudence replied.

“Did she learn it from
you
?” Alma’s voice was insistent and ragged. “Had you ever told her? You were the only one who could have told her that I loved George.”

Now the white line around her sister’s lips reappeared, for a slightly longer time. There was no mistaking it. This was anger.

“I would hope, Alma,” said Prudence, “that you would better know my character after so many years. Would anybody who came to me for gossip ever go home satisfied?”

“Did Retta ever come to you for gossip?”

“It matters little whether she did or did not, Alma. Have you ever known me to disclose someone’s secrets?”

“
Stop answering me in riddles!
” Alma shouted. Then she lowered her voice: “Did you or did you not ever tell Retta Snow that I loved George Hawkes?”

Alma saw a shadow pass across the door, waver, and then vanish. All she caught was the glimpse of an apron. Somebody—a maid—was about to enter the drawing room, but had evidently changed her mind and ducked out instead. Why was there never any privacy in this house?
Prudence had seen the shadow, too, and she did not like it. She stood up now and stepped forward to face Alma directly—indeed, almost threateningly. The sisters could not regard one another eye-to-eye, for their heights were so different, but Prudence somehow managed to stare down Alma, nonetheless, even from one foot below her.

“No,” Prudence said. “I have told nothing to anyone, and never shall. What’s more, your insinuations insult me, and are unfair to both Retta Snow and Mr. Hawkes, whose business—I should dearly hope—is their own. Worst of all, your inquiry degrades you. I am sorry for your disappointment, but we owe our friends our joy and best wishes at their good fortune.”

Alma started to speak again, but Prudence cut her off. “You’d best regain mastery of yourself before you continue speaking, Alma,” she warned, “or you shall regret whatever it is you are about to reveal.”

Well, that was beyond debate. Alma already
did
regret what she had revealed. She wished that she had never begun this conversation. But it was too late for that. The next best thing would have been to end it right now. This would have been a marvelous opportunity for Alma to stop her mouth. Horribly, though, she could not control herself.

“I only wanted to know if Retta had betrayed me,” Alma blurted forth.

“Did you?” Prudence asked evenly. “So is it your supposition that your friend and mine, Miss Retta Snow—the most guileless creature I have ever encountered—willfully stole George Hawkes from you? To what purpose, Alma? For her own sporting satisfaction? And while you are on this line of questioning, do you also believe that I betrayed you? Do you believe that I told Retta your secret, in order to make a mockery of you? Do you believe that I encouraged Retta to pursue Mr. Hawkes, as some sort of wicked game? Do you believe I have some wish to see you punished?”

Sweet mercy, but Prudence could be relentless. Had she been a man, she would have made a formidable lawyer. Alma had never felt so dreadful or appeared so petty. She sat down on the nearest chair and stared at the floor. But Prudence followed Alma to the chair, stood over her, and kept speaking. “In the meanwhile, Alma, I have news of my own to report, which I shall tell you now, for it pertains to a similar concern. I had intended to wait until our family was out of mourning to address this subject, but I see that you have decided that our family is out of mourning already.”

Here, Prudence touched Alma’s upper right arm—bare of its black crepe band—and Alma nearly flinched.

“I, too, am to wed,” Prudence announced, without a trace of triumph or delight. “Mr. Arthur Dixon has asked for my hand, and I have accepted.”

Alma’s head, for just one moment, emptied: Who in the name of God was Arthur Dixon? Mercifully, she did not speak this question aloud, for in the very next instant, of course, she remembered who he was, and felt absurd for having ever wondered. Arthur Dixon: their tutor. That unhappy and stooped man, who had somehow drummed French into Prudence’s head, and who had joylessly helped Alma to master her Greek. That sad creature of damp sighs and sorrowful coughs. That little tedium of a figure, whose face Alma had not thought about since quite literally the last time she had seen it, which had been—when? Four years ago? When he’d finally left White Acre to become Professor of Ancient Languages at the University of Pennsylvania? No, Alma realized with a start, this was incorrect. She had seen Arthur Dixon only recently, at her mother’s funeral. She had even spoken to him. He had offered up his kind condolences, and she had wondered what he was doing there.

Well, now she knew. He was there to court his former student, apparently, who also happened to be the most beautiful young woman in Philadelphia, and, it must be said, potentially one of the richest.

“When did this engagement occur?” Alma asked.

“Just before our mother died.”

“
How?
”

“In the customary fashion,” Prudence replied coolly.

“Did all this occur
at the same time
?” Alma demanded. The idea sickened her. “Did you become engaged to Mr. Dixon at the same time as Retta Snow became engaged to George Hawkes?”

“I have no knowledge of other people’s affairs,” Prudence said. But then she softened just a trace, and conceded, “But it would appear so—or, close to so. My engagement seems to have occurred a few days earlier. Though it matters not at all.”

“Does Father know?”

“He will know soon enough. Arthur was waiting until our mourning had passed, to make his suit.”

“But what on earth is Arthur Dixon going to say to Father, Prudence? The man is terrified of Father. I cannot conceive of it. How will Arthur manage to get through the conversation, without fainting dead away? And what will you do for the rest of your life—married to a
scholar
?”

Prudence drew herself up taller and smoothed her skirts. “I wonder if you realize, Alma, that the more traditional response to the announcement of an engagement is to wish the bride-to-be many years of health and happiness—particularly if the bride-to-be is your sister.”

“Oh, Prudence, I apologize—” Alma began, ashamed of herself for the dozenth time that day.

“Think nothing of it,” Prudence said, and turned toward the door. “I had not expected anything different.”

I
n all of our lives, there are days that we wish we could see expunged from the record of our very existence. Perhaps we long for that erasure because a particular day brought us such splintering sorrow that we can scarcely bear to think of it ever again. Or we might wish to blot out an episode forever because we behaved so poorly on that day—we were mortifyingly selfish, or foolish to an extraordinary degree. Or perhaps we injured another person and wish to disremember our guilt. Tragically, there are some days in a lifetime when all three of those things happen at once—when we are heartbroken and foolish and unforgivably injurious to others, all at the same time. For Alma, that day was January 10, 1821. She would have done anything in her power to strike that entire day from the chronicle of her life.

She could never forgive herself that her initial response to the happy news from both her dear friend and her poor sister had been a mean show of jealousy, thoughtlessness, and (in the case of Retta, at least) physical violence. What had Beatrix always taught them?
Nothing is so essential as dignity, girls, and time will reveal who has it.
As far as Alma was concerned, on January 10, 1821, she had revealed herself as a young woman devoid of dignity.

This would trouble her for many years to come. Alma tormented herself by imagining—again and again—all the different ways she might have behaved on that day, had she been in better control of her passions. In Alma’s revised conversations with Retta, she embraced her friend with perfect tenderness at the mere mention of George Hawkes’s name, and said in a steady voice, “How lucky a man he is to have won you!” In her revised conversations with Prudence, she never accused her sister of having betrayed her to Retta, and certainly never accused Retta of having stolen George Hawkes, and, when Prudence announced her own engagement to Arthur Dixon, Alma smiled warmly, took her sister’s hand in fondness, and said, “I cannot imagine a more suitable gentleman for you!”

Unfortunately, though, one does not get second chances at such blundered episodes.

To be fair, by January 11, 1821—merely one day later!—Alma was a much better person. She pulled herself back into order as quickly as she could. She firmly committed herself to a spirit of graciousness about both engagements. She willed herself to play the role of a composed young woman who was genuinely pleased about other people’s happiness. And when the two weddings arrived in the following month, separated from each other by only one week, she managed to be a pleasant and cheerful guest at both events. She was helpful to the brides and polite to their grooms. Nobody saw a fissure in her.

That said, Alma suffered.

She had lost George Hawkes. She had been left behind by her sister and by her only friend. Both Prudence and Retta, directly after their weddings, moved across the river into the center of Philadelphia. Fiddle, fork, and spoon were now finished. The only one who would remain at White Acre was Alma (who had long ago decided that she was
fork
).