The Signature of All Things (29 page)

“I regret that you do not share in my beliefs, Father,” Prudence said.

“I don’t give a farrier’s fart about your beliefs. But I swear to you, if my warehouses come to any harm—”

“You are a man of influence,” Prudence interrupted. “Your voice could benefit this cause, and your money could do much good for this sinful world. I appeal to the witness within your own bosom—”

“Oh, bugger the witness in my bosom! You only stand to make things more wretched for every hardworking tradesman in this city!”

“Then what would you have me do, Father?”

“I would have you stop your mouth, girl, and attend to your family.”

“All who suffer are my family.”

“Curse the moon and spare me your sermons—
they are not
. The people in this room are your family.”

“No more than any other,” said Prudence.

That stopped Henry. Indeed, it took the breath out of him. Even Alma felt walloped by it. The comment made her eyes sting unexpectedly, as though she had just been clouted hard across the bridge of her nose.

“You do not regard us as your family?” Henry asked, once he had regained his composure. “Very well, then. I dismiss you from this family.”

“Oh, Father, you mustn’t—” Alma protested, in real horror.

But Prudence cut her sister off, launching into a response that was so lucid and calm, one might have thought it had been rehearsed for years. Perhaps it had been.

“As you wish,” Prudence said. “But know that you are dismissing from your household a daughter who has always been loyal to you, and who has the right to seek tenderness and sympathy from the one man she ever had the memory of calling Father. Not only is this cruel, but I believe it will
bring anguish upon your conscience. I shall pray for you, Henry Whittaker. And when I pray, I shall ask the Lord in heaven whatever happened to my father’s ethics—or did he never have any?”

Henry leapt to his feet and pounded both fists on his desk in rage.

“You little idiot!” he roared.
“I never had any!”

T
hat had been ten years earlier, and Henry had not seen his daughter Prudence since, nor had Prudence made any attempt to see Henry. Alma herself had seen her sister only a handful of times, stopping by the Dixon home in sporadic demonstrations of artificial nonchalance and forced goodwill. She pretended she was passing through the neighborhood anyway, to drop in with small gifts for her nieces and nephews, or to deliver a basket of treats around the Christmas holidays. Alma knew that her sister would only pass along these gifts and treats to a more needy family, but she made the gestures nonetheless. At the beginning of the family rift, Alma had even attempted to offer money to her sister, but Prudence, not surprisingly, had refused it.

These visits had never been warm or comfortable, and Alma was always relieved when they were over. Alma felt shamed whenever she saw Prudence. As irritating as she found her sister’s rigidity and morality, Alma could not help but feel that her father had behaved poorly in his final encounter with Prudence—or, rather, that Henry and Alma herself had
both
behaved poorly. The incident had cast them in no lovely light: Prudence had stood firmly (though sanctimoniously) on the side of the Good and the Righteous, while Henry had merely defended his commercial property and disowned his adopted daughter. And as for Alma? Well, Alma had come down on the side of Henry Whittaker—or at least it would appear that she had—by not having spoken up more vehemently in her sister’s defense, and by staying on at White Acre after Prudence walked out.

But her father needed her! Henry Whittaker might not be a generous man, and he might not be a kind man, but he was an important man, and he needed her. He could not live without her. Nobody else could manage his affairs, and his affairs were vast and significant. This is what she told herself.

What’s more, abolitionism was not a cause dear to Alma’s heart. She believed slavery to be abhorrent, naturally enough, but she was occupied
with so many other concerns that the question did not consume her conscience on a daily basis. Alma was living in Moss Time, after all, and she simply could not focus upon her work—and take care of her father—while also calibrating herself to the shifting vagaries of everyday human political drama. Slavery was a grotesque injustice, yes, and should be abolished. But there were so
many
injustices: poverty was another, and tyranny, and theft, and murder. One could not set one’s hand to eliminating every known injustice while at the same time writing definitive books on American mosses and managing the complex affairs of a global family enterprise.

Was that not true?

And why must Prudence go so far out of her way to make everyone around her look so paltry-hearted and piggish, in comparison to her own mighty sacrifices?

“Thank you for your kindness,” Prudence would always say, whenever Alma came calling with a gift or a basket, but she always stopped short of expressing true affection or gratitude. Prudence was nothing if not polite, but she was not warm. Alma would return home to the luxuries of White Acre after these visits to Prudence’s impoverished home feeling undone and overly examined—as though she had stood before a strict jurist and had been found lacking. So perhaps it should not be surprising that over the years Alma visited Prudence less and less frequently, and that the two sisters were pulled further apart than ever.

But now, in the carriage returning home from Trenton, George Hawkes had given Alma information that the Dixons might be in some kind of trouble over Arthur Dixon’s inflammatory pamphlet. As Alma stood near her boulder field in that spring of 1848, taking notes on the progress of her mosses, she wondered if she should perhaps call upon Prudence again. If her brother-in-law’s position at the university was indeed threatened, this was serious. But what could Alma say? What could she do? What help could she offer Prudence, that would not be refused out of pride and a willful show of humility?

Moreover, had the Dixons not put themselves in this pickle? Wasn’t all this just the natural consequence of living in such extremity and radicalism? What business did Arthur and Prudence have as parents, putting the lives of their six children in jeopardy? Their cause was a dangerous one. Abolitionists were often dragged through the streets and beaten—even in
free northern cities! The North did not love slavery, but it did love peace and stability, and abolitionists disturbed that peace. The Colored Orphans’ Asylum, where Prudence volunteered her services as a teacher, had been several times already attacked by mobs. And what about the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy—murdered in Illinois, and his abolitionist-friendly printing presses destroyed and thrown in the river? That could easily happen here in Philadelphia. Prudence and her husband should be more careful.

Alma turned her attention back to her mossy boulders. She had work to do. She had fallen behind in the last week, committing poor Retta to Dr. Griffon’s asylum, and she did not intend to fall even further behind now as a result of her sister’s foolhardiness. She had measurements to record, and she needed to attend to them.

Three separate colonies of
Dicranum
grew on one of the largest rocks. Alma had been observing these colonies for twenty-six years, and lately it had become incontrovertibly evident that one of these
Dicranum
varietals was advancing, while the other two had retreated. Alma sat near the boulder, comparing more than two decades of notes and drawings. She could make no sense of it.

Dicranum
was Alma’s obsession-within-an-obsession—the innermost heart of her fascination with mosses. The world was blanketed with hundreds upon hundreds of species of
Dicranum
, and each variety was minutely different. Alma knew more about
Dicranum
than anybody in the world, yet still this genus bothered her and kept her awake at night. Alma—who had puzzled over mechanisms and origins her entire life—had been consumed for years with fervent questions about this complicated genus. How had
Dicranum
come to be? Why was it so markedly diverse? Why had nature bestowed such pains in making each variety so minutely different from the others? Why were some varietals of
Dicranum
so much hardier than their nearby kin? Had there always been such a vast mix of
Dicranum
, or had they transmuted somehow—metamorphosed from one into another—while sharing a common ancestor?

There had been a good deal of talk within the scientific community lately about species transmutation. Alma had been following the debate most eagerly. It was not an entirely new discussion. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had originated the subject forty years prior, in France, when he’d argued that every species on earth had transformed since its original creation
because of an “interior sentiment” within the organism, which longed to perfect itself. More recently, Alma had read
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, by an anonymous British author who also argued that species were capable of progression, of change. The author did not put forth a convincing mechanism as to
how
a species could change—but he did argue for the existence of transmutation.

Such views were most controversial. To put forth the notion that any entity could alter itself was to question God’s very dominion. The Christian position was that the Lord had created all the world’s species in one day, and that none of His creations had changed since the dawn of time. But it seemed increasingly clear to Alma that things
had
changed. Alma herself had studied samples of fossilized moss that did not quite match the mosses of the current day. And this was only nature on the tiniest scale! What was one to make of the tremendous fossil bones of the lizardlike creatures that Richard Owen had recently named “dinosaurs”? That these gargantuan animals had once walked the earth, and now—quite obviously—they did not, was beyond dispute. The dinosaurs had been replaced by something else, or they had shifted into something else, or they had simply been erased. How did one account for such mass extinctions and transformations?

As the great Linnaeus himself had written:
Natura non facit saltum.

Nature does not make leaps.

But Alma thought that nature
did
make leaps. Perhaps only tiny leaps—skips, hops, and lurches—but leaps nonetheless. Nature certainly made alterations. One could see it in the breeding of dogs and sheep, and one could see it in the shifting arrangements of power and dominion between various moss colonies on these common limestone boulders at White Acre’s forest edge. Alma had ideas, but she could not quite tack and baste them together. She felt certain that some varieties of
Dicranum
must have grown forth out of other, older varieties of
Dicranum
. She felt certain that one entity could have issued from another entity, or rendered another colony extinct. She could not grasp
how
it occurred, but she was convinced
that
it occurred.

She felt the familiar old constriction in her chest—that combination of desire and urgency. Only two more hours of daylight remained in which to work outdoors before she had to return to her father’s evening demands. She needed more hours—many more hours—if she was ever to study these
questions as they deserved to be studied. She would never have enough hours. She had already lost so much time this week. Every soul in the world seemed to believe that Alma’s hours belonged to him. How was she ever meant to devote herself to proper scientific exploration?

Observing the sun as it lowered, Alma decided that she would not visit Prudence. She simply did not have the time for it. She did not want to read Arthur’s latest seditious pamphlet on abolition, either. What could Alma do to help the Dixons? Her sister did not want to hear Alma’s opinions, nor did she wish to accept Alma’s assistance. Alma felt sorry for Prudence, but a visit would only be awkward, as such encounters were always awkward.

Back to her boulders Alma turned. She took out her tape and measured the colonies again. Hastily, she recorded the data in her notebook.

Only two more hours.

She had so much work to do.

Arthur and Prudence Dixon would have to learn how to take more care with their own lives.

Chapter Fourteen

L
ater that month, Alma received a note from George Hawkes, asking that she please come to Arch Street, in order to visit his printing shop and see something quite extraordinary.

“I shall not spoil the incredibility of it by telling you more at this point,” he wrote, “but I believe you would enjoy viewing this in person, and at your leisure.”

Well, Alma had no leisure. Neither did George, though—which is why this note was most unprecedented. In the past, George had contacted Alma only for publishing matters, or emergencies regarding Retta. But there had been no emergencies with Retta since they had placed her at Griffon’s, and Alma and George were not working on a book together at the moment. What, then, could be so urgent?

Intrigued, she took a carriage to Arch Street.

She found George in a back room, hulking over a long table covered with the most dazzling multiplication of shapes and colors. As Alma approached, she could see that this was an enormous collection of paintings of orchids, stacked in tall piles. Not only paintings, but lithographs, drawings, and etchings.

“This is the most beautiful work I have ever seen,” George said, by means of a greeting. “It’s just come in yesterday, from Boston. It’s such an odd story. Look at this mastery!”

George thrust into Alma’s hand a lithograph of a spotted
Catasetum
.
The orchid had been rendered so magnificently that it seemed to grow off the page. Its lips were spotted red against yellow, and appeared moist, like living flesh. Its leaves were lush and thick, and its bulbous roots looked as though one could shake actual soil off them. Before Alma could thoroughly take in the beauty, George handed her another stunning print—a
Peristeria barkeri
, with its tumbling golden blossoms so fresh they nearly trembled. Whoever had tinted this lithograph had been a master of texture as well as color; the petals resembled unshorn velvet, and touches of albumen on their tips gave each blossom a hint of dew.