The Signature of All Things (32 page)

“My mother wonders the same thing, Mr. Whittaker. I am afraid I have too many questions about religion to be a good minister.”

“
Religion?
” Henry frowned. “What the deuce does
religion
have to do with being a good minister? It is a profession like any other profession, young man. You fit yourself to the task, and keep your opinions private. That is what all good ministers do—or should!”

Mr. Pike laughed pleasantly. “If only somebody had told me that twenty years ago, sir!”

“There is no excuse for a young man of health and wit in this country not to prosper. Even a minister’s son should be able to find industrious activity somewhere.”

“Many would agree with you,” said Mr. Pike. “Including my late father. Nonetheless, I have been living beneath my station for years.”

“And I have been living
above
my station—forever! I first came here to America when I was a young fellow about your age. I found money lying about everywhere, all over this country. All I had to do was pick it up with the tip of my walking stick. What is your excuse for poverty, then?”

Mr. Pike looked Henry directly in the eye and said, without a trace of malice, “The want of a good walking stick, I suppose.”

Alma swallowed hard and stared down at her plate. George Hawkes did the same. Henry, however, seemed not to hear. There were times when Alma thanked the heavens for her father’s worsening deafness. He had already turned his attention to the butler.

“I tell you, Becker,” Henry said, “if you make me eat mutton one more night this week, I will have someone shot.”

“He doesn’t really have people shot,” Alma reassured Mr. Pike, under her breath.

“I had figured that,” her guest whispered back, “or else I would be dead already.”

For the rest of the meal, George and Alma and Mr. Pike made pleasant conversation—more or less between themselves—while Henry huffed and coughed and complained about various aspects of his dinner, and even nodded off a few times, chin collapsed on his chest. He was, after all, eighty-eight
years old. None of it, happily, appeared to concern Mr. Pike, and as George Hawkes was already used to this sort of behavior, Alma eventually relaxed a bit.

“Please forgive my father,” Alma said to Mr. Pike in a low voice, during one of Henry’s bouts of sleep. “George knows his moods well, but these outbursts can be disquieting to those who do not have experience with our Henry Whittaker.”

“He is quite the bear at the dinner table,” Mr. Pike replied, with a tone more admiring than appalled.

“Indeed he is,” said Alma. “Thankfully, though, like a bear, he sometimes gives us the respite of hibernating!”

This comment even brought a smile to George Hawkes’s lips, but Ambrose was still studying the sleeping figure of Henry, pondering something.

“My own father was so grave, you see,” he said. “I always found his silences frightening. I should think it would be delightful to have a father who speaks and acts with such liberty. One always knows where one stands.”

“One does, at that,” Alma agreed.

“Mr. Pike,” George said, changing the subject, “may I ask where you are living at the moment? The address to which I sent my letter was in Boston, but you mentioned just now that your family resides in Framingham, so I wasn’t certain.”

“At the moment, sir, I am without a home,” said Mr. Pike. “The address you refer to in Boston is the residence of my old friend Daniel Tupper, who has been kind to me since the days of my short career at Harvard. His family owns a small printing concern in Boston—nothing as fine as your operation, but well run and solid. They are mostly known for pamphlets and local bills of advertisement, that sort of thing. When I left Harvard, I worked for the Tupper family for several years as a typesetter, and found that I had a hand for it. That was also where I first learned the art of lithography. I had been told it was difficult, but I never found it to be. It is much the same as drawing, really, except that one draws on stone—though of course you both already know that! Forgive me. I am unaccustomed to speaking about my work.”

“And what took you to Mexico and Guatemala, Mr. Pike?” George continued gently.

“Again, we can credit my friend Tupper with that. I’ve always had a fascination for orchids, and somewhere along the way, Tupper hatched a scheme that I should go to the tropics for a few years and make some drawings and such, and together we would produce a beautiful book on tropical orchids. I’m afraid he thought it would make us both quite rich. We were young, you know, and he was full of confidence about me.

“So we pooled our resources, such as they were, and Tupper put me on a boat. He instructed me to go off and make a great noise of myself in the world. Sadly for him, I am not much of a noisemaker. Even more sadly for him, my few years in the jungle turned into eighteen, as I have already explained to Miss Whittaker. Through thrift and perseverance I was able to keep myself alive there for nearly two decades, and I am proud to say I never took money from Tupper or anybody, after his initial investment. Nonetheless, I think poor Tupper feels his faith in me was quite misguided. When I finally came home last year, he was kind enough to let me use his family’s printing press to make some of the lithographs you’ve already seen, but—quite forgivably—he long ago lost his desire to produce a book with me. I move too slowly for him. He has a family now, and cannot dally about with such expensive projects. He has been a heroically good friend to me, all the same. He lets me sleep on the couch in his home, and, since returning to America, I have been helping once more in the print shop.”

“And your plans now?” Alma said.

Mr. Pike raised his hands, as though in supplication before heaven. “It has been so long since I made plans, you see.”

“But what would you
like
to do?” Alma asked.

“Nobody has ever asked me that question before.”

“Yet I ask you, Mr. Pike. And I wish for you to give me an honest answer.”

He turned his light brown eyes upon her. He did look awfully weary. “Then I shall tell you, Miss Whittaker,” he said. “I would like never to travel again. I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.”

George and Alma exchanged glances. As though sensing that he was being left behind, Henry woke up with a start, and pulled the attention back to himself.

“Alma!” he said. “That letter from Dick Yancey last week. You read it?”

“I did read it, Father,” she replied, briskly changing tone.

“What do you make of it?”

“I think it unfortunate news.”

“Obviously it is. It has put me in a ghastly temper. But what do your friends here make of it?” Henry asked, waving his glass at his guests.

“I do not believe they know of the situation,” Alma said.

“Then tell them the situation, daughter. I need opinions.”

This was most odd. Henry did not generally seek opinions. But he urged her again with a wave of the wineglass, and so she began to speak, addressing herself to George and Mr. Pike both.

“Well, it’s about vanilla,” she said. “Fifteen years or so ago, my father was convinced by a Frenchman to invest in a vanilla plantation in Tahiti. Now we learn the plantation has failed. And the Frenchman has vanished.”

“Along with my investment,” Henry added.

“Along with my father’s investment,” Alma confirmed.

“A considerable investment,” Henry clarified.

“A
most
considerable investment,” Alma agreed. She knew this well, for she had arranged the transfers of payment herself.

“It should have worked,” Henry said. “The climate is perfect for it. And the vines grew! Dick Yancey saw them himself. They grew to sixty-five feet tall. The blasted Frenchman said that vanilla would grow happily there, and he was right about it. The vines produced blossoms as big as your fist. Exactly as he said they would. What was it the little Frenchman told me, Alma? ‘Growing vanilla in Tahiti will be easier than farting in your sleep.’”

Alma blanched, glancing at her guests. George politely folded his napkin in his lap, but Mr. Pike smiled in frank amusement.

“So what went wrong, sir?” he asked. “If I may pry?”

Henry glared at him. “The vines did not bear fruit. The blossoms bloomed and withered, and never produced a single blasted pod.”

“May I ask where the original vanilla plants came from?”

“Mexico,” Henry growled, staring Mr. Pike down in a spirit of full challenge. “So you be the one to tell me, young man—what went wrong?”

Alma was slowly beginning to glean something here. Why did she ever underestimate her father? Was there anything the old man missed? Even in his foul temper, even in his semideafness, even in his
sleep
, he had somehow garnered exactly who was sitting at his table: an orchid expert who had just
spent nearly two decades of study in and around Mexico. And vanilla, Alma now remembered, was a member of the orchid family. Their visitor was being put to the test.

“
Vanilla planifolia
,” Mr. Pike said.

“Exactly,” Henry confirmed, and set down his wineglass on the table. “That is what we planted in Tahiti. Go on.”

“I saw it all over Mexico, sir. Mostly around Oaxaca. Your man in Polynesia, your Frenchman, he was correct—it is a vigorous climber, and it would happily take to the climate of the South Pacific, I suspect.”

“Then why are the blasted plants not fruiting?” Henry demanded.

“I could not say for certain,” Mr. Pike said, “having never laid eyes on the plants in question.”

“Then you are nothing but a useless little orchid-sketcher, aren’t you?” Henry snapped.

“Father—”

“However, sir,” Mr. Pike went on, unconcerned with the insult, “I could posit a theory. When your Frenchman was originally procuring his vanilla plants in Mexico, he may have accidentally purchased a varietal of
Vanilla planifolia
that the natives call
oreja de burro—
donkey’s ear—which never bears fruit at all.”

“He was an idiot then,” Henry said.

“Not necessarily, Mr. Whittaker. It would take a mother’s eye to see the distinction between the fruiting and nonfruiting versions of the
planifolia
. It is a common mistake. The natives themselves often confuse the two varieties. Few men of botany can even tell the difference.”

“Can
you
tell the difference?” Henry demanded.

Mr. Pike hesitated. It was evident he did not wish to disparage a man he had never met.

“I asked you a question, boy. Can you tell the difference between the two varieties of
planifolia
? Or can you not?”

“Generally, sir? Yes. I can tell the difference.”

“Then the Frenchman was an idiot,” Henry concluded. “And I was a bigger idiot to have invested in him, for now I have wasted thirty-five acres of fine lowland in Tahiti, growing an infertile variety of vanilla vines for the past fifteen years. Alma, write a letter to Dick Yancey tonight, and tell him to yank up the entire lot of vines and feed it to the pigs. Tell him to replace
it with yams. Tell Yancey, too, that if he ever finds that little shit of a Frenchman, he can feed
him
to the pigs!”

Henry stood up and limped out of the room, too angry to finish his meal. George and Mr. Pike stared in silent wonder at the retreating figure—so quaint in his wig and old velvet breeches, yet so fierce.

As for Alma, she felt a strong surge of victory. The Frenchman had lost, and Henry Whittaker had lost, and the vanilla plantation in Tahiti was most certainly lost. But Ambrose Pike, she believed, had won something tonight, during his first appearance at the White Acre dinner table.

It was a small victory, perhaps, but it might count toward something in the end.

T
hat night, Alma awoke to a strange noise.

She had been lost in dreamless sleep and then, as suddenly as though she’d been slapped, she was awake. She peered into the darkness. Was there somebody in her room? Was it Hanneke?
No. Nobody was there. She rested back into her pillow. The night was cool and serene. What had broken her slumber? Voices? She was reminded for the first time in years of the night that Prudence had been brought to White Acre as a child, surrounded by men and covered with blood. Poor Prudence. Alma really should go visit her. She must make more of an effort with her sister. But there was simply no time. There was silence all around her. Alma began to settle back into sleep.

She heard the sound again. Once more, Alma’s eyes snapped open. What
was
it? Indeed, it seemed to be voices. But who would be awake at this hour?

She rose and wrapped her shawl around her, and expertly lit her lamp. She walked to the top of the stairs and looked over the banister. A light was on in the drawing room; she could see it glowing from under the door. She could hear her father’s laughter. Who was he with? Was he talking to himself? Why had nobody woken her, if Henry needed something?

She came down the stairs and found her father sitting next to Ambrose Pike on the divan. They were looking over some drawings. Her father was wearing a long white nightdress and an old-fashioned sleeping cap, and he was flushed with drink. Mr. Pike was still in his brown corduroy suit, with his hair even more disarranged than earlier in the day.

“We’ve awoken you,” Mr. Pike said, looking up. “My apologies.”

“Can I assist you with something?” Alma asked.

“Alma!” Henry cried. “Your boy here has come up with a piece of brilliance! Show it to her, son!”

Henry wasn’t drunk, Alma realized; he was simply ebullient.

“I had trouble sleeping, Miss Whittaker,” Mr. Pike said, “because I was thinking about the vanilla plants in Tahiti. It occurred to me that there might be another possibility as to why the vines have not fruited. I should have waited until morning so as to not disturb anyone, but I did not want to lose the idea. So I rose and came down, looking for paper. I fear I woke your father in the process.”