The Signature of All Things (12 page)

A weaker child might have given up on speaking altogether. A more combative child might have demanded to know why Henry Whittaker was allowed to
talk
like a blasted stevedore—why he could sit at the dinner table and call another man “a prick-fed donkey” straight to his face, without ever
once being corrected by Beatrix—while the rest of the family must
converse
like barristers. But Prudence was neither weak nor combative. Instead, she turned out to be a creature of steadfast and unblinking vigilance, who perfected herself daily as though honing the blade of her soul, taking care never to make the same error twice. After five months at White Acre, Prudence’s speech never again needed refinement. Not even Alma could find an error, though she never stopped looking for one. Other aspects of Prudence’s form—her posture, her manners, her daily toilet—also came into quick calibration.

Prudence took all corrections without complaint. Indeed, she actually sought corrections—particularly from Beatrix! Whenever Prudence neglected to perform a task properly, or indulged in an ungenerous thought, or made an ill-considered remark, she would personally report herself to Beatrix, admit her wrongs, and willingly submit to a lecture. In this manner, Prudence made Beatrix not merely her mother, but also her mother-confessor. Alma, who had been hiding her own faults and lying about her own shortcomings since toddlerhood, found this behavior monstrously incomprehensible.

As a result, Alma regarded Prudence with ever-increasing suspicion. There was a diamond-hard quality about Prudence, which Alma believed masked something wicked and perhaps even evil. The girl struck her as cagey and canny. Prudence had a way of sidling out of rooms, never seeming to turn her back on anyone, never making a noise when a door closed behind her. Also, Prudence was altogether too attentive to other people, never forgetting dates that were important to others, always taking care to wish the maids a happy birthday or a pleasant Sabbath at the appropriate time, and all that sort of business. This diligent pursuit of goodness felt altogether too unremitting to Alma, as did the stoicism.

What Alma did know without question was that it advantaged her little to be held by comparison against such a perfectly lacquered person as Prudence. Henry even called Prudence “Our Little Exquisite,” which made Alma’s old nickname “Plum” feel humble and plain. Everything about Prudence made Alma feel humble and plain.

But there were consolations. In the classroom, at least, Alma always held place of primacy. Prudence could never catch up with her sister there. It was not for lack of effort, either, for the girl was certainly a hard worker. Poor
thing, she labored over her books like a Basque stonemason. Each book for Prudence was like a slab of granite, to be hauled uphill in the sun with panting effort. It was nearly painful to watch, but Prudence insisted on persevering, and never once broke into tears. As a result, she did advance—and impressively, one must admit, considering her background. Mathematics would always be a struggle for her, but she did cudgel into her brains the fundamentals of Latin, and after a time she could speak quite passable French, with a nice accent. As for penmanship, Prudence did not cease practicing until it was every bit as fine as a duchess’s.

But all the discipline in the world is not enough to close a real gap in the realm of scholarship, and Alma had gifts of the mind that extended far beyond what Prudence would ever be able to reach. Alma had a capital memory for words and an innate brilliance for sums. She loved drills, tests, formulas, theorems. For Alma, to read something once was to have ownership of it forever. She could take apart an argument the way a good soldier can dismantle his rifle—half asleep in the dark, and the thing still comes to pieces beautifully. Calculus put her into fits of ecstasies. Grammar was an old friend—perhaps from having grown up speaking so many languages simultaneously. She also loved her microscope, which felt like a magical extension of her own right eye, enabling her to peer straight down the throat of the Creator Himself.

For all these reasons, one might have supposed that the tutor whom Beatrix eventually hired for the girls would have preferred Alma to Prudence, but in fact he did not. In fact, he was careful not to make known any preference between the two children—both of whom he seemed to regard as a flat and equal duty. The tutor was a rather dull young man, British by birth, with a poxy, waxen complexion and an ever-worried countenance. He sighed a great deal. His name was Arthur Dixon, and he was a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh. Beatrix had selected him after a rigorous examination process involving dozens of other candidates, all of whom had been rejected for—among other faults—being too stupid, too talkative, too religious, not religious enough, too radical, too handsome, too fat, or too stuttering.

For the first year of Arthur Dixon’s tenure, Beatrix often sat in the classroom, too, working at her mending in the corner, watching to ensure that Arthur did not make factual errors, or treat the girls in any sort of
unbefitting manner. Eventually she was satisfied: young Dixon was a perfectly boring wizard of academics, who did not appear to be in possession of a single callow or jocular bone. He could be utterly trusted, then, to teach the Whittaker girls, four days a week, a rotating coursework of natural philosophy, Latin, French, Greek, chemistry, astronomy, mineralogy, botany, and history. Alma was also given special extra work in optics, algebra, and spherical geometry, from which Prudence—in a rare gesture of mercy on Beatrix’s part—was spared.

On Fridays, there was a departure from this schedule, when a drawing master, a dancing master, and a music master paid visits, to round out the girls’ educational curriculum. Mornings, the girls were expected to work alongside their mother in her own private Grecian garden—a triumph of functional mathematics that Beatrix was attempting to arrange, with pathways and topiary, according to strict Euclidean principles of symmetry (all balls and cones and complex triangles, clipped and rigid and exact). The girls were also required to devote several hours a week to improving their needlework skills. During the evenings, Alma and Prudence were called upon to sit at the formal dining table and engage intelligently with dinner guests from all over the world. If there were no guests at White Acre, Alma and Prudence passed their evenings in the drawing room, staying up late into the night, assisting their father and mother with official White Acre correspondence. Sundays were for church. Bedtime brought a long round of nightly prayers.

Apart from that, their time was their own.

B
ut it was not such a trying schedule, really—not for Alma. She was an energetic and engaging young lady, who needed little rest. She enjoyed the work of the mind, enjoyed the labor of gardening, and enjoyed the conversations at the dinner gatherings. She was always happy to spend time helping her father with his correspondence late at night (as this was sometimes her only chance to engage intimately with the man anymore). Somehow she even managed to find hours for herself, and in those hours she created inventive little botanical projects. She toyed with cuttings of willow trees, pondering how it was that they sometimes cast out roots from their buds, and sometimes from their leaves. She dissected and memorized, preserved
and categorized, every plant in reach. She built a beautiful
hortus siccus—
a splendid little dried herbarium.

Alma loved botany, more by the day. It was not so much the beauty of plants that compelled her as their magical orderliness. Alma was a girl possessed by a soaring enthusiasm for systems, sequence, pigeonholing, and indexes; botany provided ample opportunity to indulge in all these pleasures. She appreciated how, once you had put a plant into the correct taxonomical order, it stayed in order. There were serious mathematical rules inherent in the symmetry of plants, too, and Alma found serenity and reverence in these rules. In every species, for instance, there is a fixed ratio between the teeth of the calyx and the divisions of the corolla, and that ratio never changes. One could set one’s clock to it. It was an abiding, comforting, unfaltering law.

If anything, Alma wished she had even more time to devote to the study of plants. She had bizarre fantasies. She wished that she lived in an army barracks of natural sciences, where she would be woken at dawn by a bugle call and marched off in formation with other young naturalists, in uniforms, to labor all day in woods, streams, and laboratories. She wished that she lived in a botanical monastery or a botanical convent of sorts, surrounded by other devoted taxonomists, where no one interfered with one another’s studies, yet all shared their most exciting findings with each other. Even a botanical prison would be nice! (It did not occur to Alma that such places of intellectual asylum and walled isolation did exist in the world, to a point, and that they were called “universities.” But little girls in 1810 did not dream of universities. Not even Beatrix Whittaker’s little girls.)

So Alma did not mind working hard. But she actively disliked Fridays. Art classes, dancing classes, music classes—all these exertions irritated her, and pulled her from her true interests. She was not graceful. She could not entirely tell one famous painting from another, nor did she ever learn to draw faces without making her subjects look either fear-stricken or deceased. Music was not a gift, either, and around the time Alma turned eleven, her father officially requested that she stop torturing the pianoforte. In all these pursuits, Prudence excelled. Prudence could also sew beautifully, and operate a tea service with masterful delicacy, and had many other small and galling talents besides. On Fridays, Alma was likely to have the blackest and most envious thoughts about her sister. These were the times
when she honestly thought, for instance, that she would happily trade in one of her extra languages (any of them, except Greek!) for the simple ability to fold an envelope
just once
as prettily as Prudence could do it.

Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—Alma took real satisfaction in the realms where she excelled over her sister, and the one place where her superiority was most notable was at the Whittakers’ famous dining room table, particularly when the room was thick with challenging ideas. As Alma grew older, her conversation became bolder, more certain, more reaching. But Prudence never developed such confidence at the table. She tended to sit mute but lovely, a sort of useless adornment to each gathering, merely filling a chair between guests, contributing nothing but her beauty. In a way, this made Prudence useful. One could seat Prudence next to anyone, and she would not complain. Many a night, the poor girl was deliberately placed beside the most tedious and deaf old professors—perfect mausoleums of men—who picked at their teeth with their forks, or fell asleep over their meals, lightly snoring while debates raged alongside them. Prudence never objected, nor asked for more sparkling dinner companions. It did not seem to make a difference who sat near Prudence, really: her posture and carefully arranged countenance never altered.

Meanwhile, Alma lunged into engagement with every possible topic—from soil management, to the molecules of gases, to the physiology of tears. One night, for instance, a guest came to White Acre who had just returned from Persia, where he had discovered, right outside the ancient city of Esfahan, samples of a plant that he believed produced ammoniacum gum—an ancient and lucrative medicinal ingredient, whose source had thus far been a mystery to the Western world, as its trade was controlled by bandits. The young man had been working for the British Crown, but had grown disillusioned with his superiors and wanted to speak to Henry Whittaker about funding a continued research project. Henry and Alma—working and thinking as one, as they often did at the dining room table—came at the man with questions from both sides, like two sheepdogs cornering a ram.

“What is the climate in that area of Persia?” Henry asked.

“And the altitude?” Alma added.

“Well, sir, the plant grows on the open plains,” the visitor replied. “And the gum is so abundant within it, I tell you, that it squeezes out great volumes—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Henry interrupted. “Or so you keep saying, and we must have your word on that, I suppose, for I notice you’ve brought me nothing but the merest thimbleful of gum as evidence. Tell me, though, how much do you have to pay the officials in Persia? In tributes, I mean, for the privilege of wandering around their country, collecting up gum samples at will?”

“Well, they do demand some tribute, sir, but it seems a small price to pay—”

“The Whittaker Company never pays tribute,” Henry said. “I dislike the sound of this. Why have you even let anyone over there know what you’re doing?”

“Well, sir, one can hardly play the smuggler!”

“Really?” Henry raised an eyebrow. “Can’t one?”

“But could the plant be cultivated elsewhere?” Alma leapt in. “You see, sir, it would do us little good to send you to Esfahan every year on expensive collecting expeditions.”

“I have not yet had the chance to explore—”

“Could it be cultivated in Kattywar?” Henry asked. “Do you have associates in Kattywar?”

“Well, I don’t know, sir, I merely—”

“Or could it be cultivated in the American South?” Alma put in. “How much water does it require?”

“I’m not interested in any venture that might involve cultivation in the American South, Alma, as you well know,” Henry said.

“But, Father, people are saying that the Missouri Territory—”

“Honestly, Alma, can you foresee this pale little English mite thriving in the Missouri Territory?”

The pale little English mite in question blinked, and seemed to have lost his capacity for speech. But Alma pushed on, asking the guest with mounting eagerness, “Do you think the plant you’re discussing might be the same one that Dioscorides mentions, sir, in
Materia medica
?
That would be a thrill, wouldn’t it? We have a splendid early volume of Dioscorides in our library. If you’d like, I could show it to you after dinner!”