The Signature of All Things (33 page)

“Look what he’s done!” Henry said, thrusting a paper at Alma. It was a lovely sketch, minutely detailed, of a vanilla blossom, with arrows pointing to particular bits of the plant’s anatomy. Henry stared at Alma expectantly, while she studied the page, which meant nothing to her.

“I apologize,” Alma said. “I was asleep only a moment ago, so my mind is perhaps not clear . . .”

“Pollination, Alma!” Henry cried, clapping his hands once, and then pointing at Mr. Pike, indicating that he should explain.

“What I believe may have occurred, Miss Whittaker—as I was telling your father—is that your Frenchman may have, indeed, collected the correct
variety of vanilla from Mexico. But perhaps the reason the vines have not fruited is that they have not been successfully pollinated.”

It may have been the middle of the night, and Alma may have been asleep only moments earlier, but still her mind was a fearfully well-trained machine of botanical calculation, which is why she instantly heard the abacus beads in her brain begin clicking toward an understanding.

“What is the pollination mechanism for the vanilla orchid?” she asked.

“I could not say for certain,” Mr. Pike said. “Nobody is certain. It could be an ant, it could be a bee, it could be a moth of some sort. It could even be a hummingbird. But whatever it is, your Frenchman did not transport it to Tahiti along with his plants, and the native insects and birds of French Polynesia do not seem capable of pollinating your vanilla blossoms, which do have a difficult shape. Thus—no fruit. No pods.”

Henry clapped once again. “No profit!” he added.

“So what are we to do?” Alma asked. “Collect every insect and bird in
the Mexican jungle and try to ship them, alive, to the South Pacific, with the hopes of finding your pollinator?”

“I don’t believe you will need to,” Mr. Pike said. “This is why I couldn’t sleep, because I’ve been considering that same question, and I think I’ve come up with an answer. I think you could pollinate it yourself, by hand. Look, I’ve made some drawings here. What makes the vanilla orchid so troublesome to pollinate is the exceptionally long column, you see, which contains both the male and female organs. The rostellum—right here—separates the two, to prevent the plant from pollinating itself. You simply need to lift the rostellum, and then insert a small twig into the pollinia cluster, gather up the pollen on the tip of the twig, and then reinsert the twig into the stamen of a different blossom. You are essentially playing the role of the bee, or the ant, or whoever would be doing this in nature. But you could be far more efficient than any animal, because you could hand-pollinate every single blossom on the vine.”

“Who would do this?” Alma asked.

“Your workers could do it,” Mr. Pike said. “The plant only puts out blooms once a year, and it would take but a week to finish the task.”

“Wouldn’t the workers crush the blossoms?”

“Not if they were carefully trained.”

“But who would have the delicacy for such an operation?”

Mr. Pike smiled. “All you need is little boys with little fingers and little sticks. If anything, they will enjoy the task. I myself would have enjoyed it, as a child. And surely there is an abundance of little boys and little sticks on Tahiti, no?”

“Aha!” Henry said. “So what do you think, Alma?”

“I think it’s brilliant.” She was also thinking that first thing tomorrow, she would need to show Ambrose Pike the White Acre library’s copy of the sixteenth-century Florentine codex, with those early Spanish Franciscan illustrations of vanilla vines. He would much appreciate it. She couldn’t wait to show it to him. She hadn’t even shown him the library yet at all. She had barely shown him anything at White Acre. They had so much more exploring ahead of them!

“It’s merely an idea,” Mr. Pike said. “It probably could have waited until daylight.”

Alma heard a noise and turned. Here was Hanneke de Groot, standing at the door in her nightclothes, looking plump and puffy and irritable.

“Now I’ve woken the entire household,” Mr. Pike said. “My sincerest apologies.”

“
Is er een probleem?
” Hanneke asked Alma.

“There’s no problem, Hanneke,” Alma said. “The gentlemen and I were simply having a discussion.”

“At two o’clock in the morning?” Hanneke demanded. “
Is dit een bordeel?
”

Is this a bordello?

“What is she saying?” Henry asked. Apart from his failing hearing, he had never mastered Dutch—despite having been married to a Dutchwoman for decades, and having worked alongside Dutch speakers for much of his life.

“She wants to know if anyone would like tea or coffee,” Alma said. “Mr. Pike? Father?”

“I will have tea,” Henry said.

“You’re all kind, but I will take my leave,” Mr. Pike said. “I will return to my rooms now, and I promise not to disturb anyone again. Moreover, I’ve just realized that tomorrow is the Sabbath. Perhaps you will all be rising early, for church?”

“Not I!” Henry said.

“You will find in this household, Mr. Pike,” Alma said, “that some of us keep the Sabbath, some of us do not keep it, and some of us keep it only halfway.”

“I understand,” he replied. “In Guatemala, I often lost track of the days, and I fear I missed many Sabbaths.”

“Do they honor the Sabbath in Guatemala, Mr. Pike?”

“Only through the acts of drinking, brawling, and cockfighting, I’m afraid.”

“Then off to Guatemala we go!” Henry cried.

Alma had not seen her father in such high spirits in years.

Ambrose Pike laughed. “You may go to Guatemala, Mr. Whittaker. I daresay they would appreciate you there. But I myself am finished with jungles. For tonight, I should simply return to my rooms. When I have the opportunity to sleep in a proper bed, I would be fool to waste it. I bid you both a good night, I thank you again for your hospitality, and I apologize most sincerely to your housekeeper.”

After Mr. Pike left the room, Alma and her father sat in silence for a
while. Henry stared at Ambrose’s sketch of the vanilla orchid. Alma could almost hear him thinking; she knew her father all too well. She waited for him to say it—what she knew was coming—while at the same time trying to figure out how she was going to combat it.

Meanwhile, Hanneke returned with a tray, which held tea for Alma and Henry, and coffee for herself. She set it down with a grumbling sigh, then plopped herself in an armchair across from Henry. The housekeeper poured her own cup first, and put her gouty old ankle up on a finely embroidered French footstool. She left Henry and Alma to serve themselves. Protocol at White Acre had grown relaxed over the years. Perhaps too relaxed.

“We should send him to Tahiti,” Henry said at last, after a good five minutes of silence. “We will put him in charge of the vanilla plantation.”

So there it was. Exactly what Alma had seen coming.

“An interesting idea,” she said.

But she could not let her father dispatch Mr. Pike to the South Seas. She knew this with as much certainty as she had ever known anything in her life. For one thing, she sensed that the artist himself would not welcome the assignment. He had said as much himself—that he was finished with jungles. He did not wish to travel any longer. He was weary and homesick. And yet he had no home. The man needed a home. He needed to rest. He needed a place to work, to make the paintings and prints he was born to make, and to hear himself living.

What’s more, though—Alma needed Mr. Pike. She felt overcome with a wild necessity to keep this person at White Acre forever. What a thing to decide, after knowing him less than a day! But she felt ten years younger today than she had felt the day before. This had been the most illuminating Saturday Alma had spent in decades—or perhaps even since childhood—and Ambrose Pike was the source of the illumination.

This situation reminded her of when she was young, and she had found a fox kitten in the woods, orphaned and tiny. She had brought it home and begged her parents to allow her to keep it. This was back in the halcyon days before Prudence had arrived, back when Alma had been given the run of the whole universe. Henry had been tempted, but Beatrix had put a stop to the plan.
Wild creatures belong in wild places.
The kit was taken from Alma’s hands, not to be seen again.

Well, she would not lose
this
fox. And Beatrix was not here anymore to prevent it.

“I think it would be a mistake, Father,” Alma said. “It would be a waste of Mr. Pike to send him to Polynesia. Anyone can manage a vanilla plantation. You just heard the man explain it himself. It’s simple. He’s even made the instruction drawings already. Send the sketches to Dick Yancey, and have him enlist someone to implement the pollination program. I think you could find better use for Mr. Pike right here at White Acre.”

“Doing what, exactly?” Henry asked.

“You have not yet seen his work, Father. George Hawkes thinks Ambrose Pike to be the best lithographer of our age.”

“And what need do I have for a lithographer?”

“Maybe it’s time to publish a book of White Acre’s botanical treasures. You have specimens in these greenhouses that the civilized world has never seen. They should be documented.”

“Why would I do such an expensive thing, Alma?”

“Let me tell you something that I’ve heard recently,” Alma said, by means of an answer. “Kew is planning to publish a catalog of fine prints and illustrations of its
most rare plants. Had you heard that?”

“For what purpose?” Henry asked.

“For the purpose of boasting, Father,” Alma said. “I heard it from one of the young lithographers who works for George Hawkes down on Arch Street. The British have offered this boy a small fortune, to lure him over to Kew. He is fairly gifted, though he’s no Ambrose Pike. He is considering to accept the invitation. He says the book is intended to be the most beautiful botanical collection ever printed. Queen Victoria herself is investing in it. Five-color lithographs, and the best watercolorists in Europe to finish them off. It will be a large volume, too. Nearly two feet tall, the boy says, and thick as a Bible. Every botanical collector will want a copy of it. It is meant to announce the renaissance of Kew.”

“The renaissance of Kew,” Henry scoffed. “Kew will never be what it was, now that Banks is gone.”

“I hear differently, Father. Since they’ve built the Palm House, everyone claims the place is becoming magnificent again.”

Was this shameless of her? Even sinful? To stir up Henry’s old rivalry with Kew Gardens? But it was true, what she said. It was all true. So let Henry brew up some antagonism, she decided. It did not feel wrong to evoke this force. Things had become too torpid and slow at White Acre over these last years. A bit of competition would harm no one. She was merely
raising up the blood in Henry Whittaker’s old bones—and in herself, too. Let this family have a pulse again!

“No one has yet heard of Ambrose Pike, Father,” she pushed on. “But once George Hawkes publishes his orchid collection, everyone will know the name. Once Kew publishes
its
book, every other prominent botanical garden and greenhouse will want to commission a florilegium, as well—and they’ll all want Mr. Pike to make the prints. Let us not wait, only to lose him to a rival garden. Let us keep him here, and offer him shelter and patronage. Invest in him, Father. You’ve seen how clever he is, how useful. Give him the opportunity. Let us produce a folio of White Acre’s collection that surpasses anything the world of botanical publishing has ever seen.”

Henry said nothing. Now she could hear
his
abacus clicking. She waited. It was taking him a long time to think. Too long. Meanwhile, Hanneke was slurping at her coffee with what appeared to be deliberate insouciance. The noise seemed to be distracting Henry. Alma wanted to knock the cup out of the old woman’s hands.

Raising her voice, Alma made one last effort. “It should not be difficult, Father, to persuade Mr. Pike to stay here. The man is in need of a home, but he lives on precious little, and it would require nearly nothing to support him. His worldly belongings fill a valise that would fit on your lap. As you have witnessed tonight, he is agreeable company. I think you may even enjoy having him about. But whatever you do, Father, I lay the most urgent stress upon you
not
to send this man to Tahiti. Any fool can grow a vanilla vine. Get another Frenchman for that job, or a hire a missionary gone bored. Any blockhead’s brother can manage a plantation, but no one can make botanical illustrations in the manner of Ambrose Pike. Do not let the chance slip for you to keep him here with us. I seldom give you such strong counsel, Father, but I must plead with you tonight in the plainest terms—do not lose this one. You shall regret it.”

There was another long silence. Another slurp from Hanneke.

“He will need a studio,” Henry said at last. “Printing presses, that sort of thing.”

“He can share the carriage house with me,” Alma said. “I have plenty of room for him.”

So it was decided.

Henry limped off to bed. Alma and Hanneke were left staring at each other. Hanneke said nothing, but Alma did not like the expression on her face.

“
Wat?
” Alma finally demanded.

“
Wat voor spelletje speel je?
” Hanneke asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alma said. “I am not playing a game.”

The old housekeeper shrugged. “As you insist,” she said, in deliberately accentuated English. “You are the mistress of this house.”

Then Hanneke stood up, quaffed back the last of her coffee, and returned to her rooms in the basement—leaving a mess behind in the drawing room for someone else to clean up.

Chapter Fifteen

T
hey became inseparable, Alma and Ambrose. They soon spent nearly every moment together. Alma instructed Hanneke to move Mr. Pike out of the guest wing and into Prudence’s old bedroom, on the second floor of the house, directly across the hall from Alma’s own room. Hanneke protested the incursion of a stranger into the family’s private living quarters (it was not proper, she said, nor safe, and most especially,
we do not know him
), but Alma overruled her, and the move was made. Alma herself cleared space for Ambrose in the carriage house, in a disused tack room next to her own study. Within a fortnight, his first printing presses had arrived. Soon after that, Alma purchased for him a fine bureau-escritoire, with pigeonholes and stacks of broad, shallow drawers to hold his drawings.