The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “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

  They 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.

  “I’ve never before had my own desk,” Ambrose told her. “It makes me feel uncharacteristically important. It makes me feel like an aide-de-camp.”

  A single door separated their two studies—and that door was never closed. All day long, Alma and Ambrose walked back and forth into each other’s rooms, looking in on the other’s progress, and showing each other some item or other of interest in a specimen jar, or on a microscope slide. They ate buttered toast together every morning, had gypsy lunches out in the fields, and stayed up late into the night, helping Henry with his correspondence, or looking over old volumes from the White Acre library. On Sundays, Ambrose joined Alma for church with the dull, droning Swedish Lutherans, dutifully reciting prayers alongside her.

  They spoke or they were silent—it did not seem to matter much one way or the other—but they were never apart.

  During the hours that Alma worked in the moss beds, Ambrose sprawled out on the grass nearby, reading. While Ambrose sketched in the orchid house, Alma pulled up a chair beside him, working on her own correspondence. She had never before spent much time in the orchid house, but since Ambrose’s arrival, it had been transformed into the most stunning location at White Acre. He had spent nearly two weeks cleaning each of the hundreds of glass panes so that sunlight entered in crisp, unfiltered columns. He mopped and waxed the floors until they glittered. What’s more—and rather astonishingly—he spent another week burnishing the leaves of every individual orchid plant with banana peels, until they all shone like tea services polished by a loyal butler.

  “What’s next, Ambrose?” Alma teased. “Shall we now comb out the hair of every fern on the property?”

  “I do not think the ferns would object,” he said.

  In fact, something curious had occurred at White Acre right after Ambrose brought such shine and order to the orchid house: the rest of the estate suddenly seemed drab by comparison. It was as though someone had polished only a single spot on a dingy old mirror, and now, as a result, the rest of the mirror looked truly filthy. One wouldn’t have noticed it before, but now it was obvious. It was as though Ambrose had opened an inlet to something previously invisible, and Alma could finally see a truth she would otherwise have been blind to forever: White Acre, elegant as it was, had incrementally fallen into a state of crumbling neglect over the past quarter century.

  With this realization, Alma got it in her mind to bring the rest of the estate up to the same sparkling standard as the orchid house. After all, when was the last time every single pane of glass in any of the other greenhouses had been cleaned? She could not recall. There was mildew and dust everywhere she looked now. The fences all needed whitewashing and repair, weeds grew in the gravel drive, and cobwebs filled the library. Every rug needed a stout banging, and every furnace was in need of overhaul. The pal
ms in the great glasshouse were nearly bursting through the roof, they had not been cut back in so many years. There were desiccated animal bones in the corners of the barns from years of marauding cats, the carriage brass had been allowed to tarnish, and the maids’ uniforms appeared to be decades out of date—because they were.

  Alma hired seamstresses to make new uniforms for everyone on the staff, and she even commissioned two new linen frocks for herself. She offered a new suit to Ambrose, but he asked if he could have four new paintbrushes, instead. (Exactly four. She offered five. He did not need five, he said. Four would be luxury enough.) She enlisted a squadron of fresh young help to assist in bringing the place back up to shine. She realized that, as older White Acre workers had died or been dismissed over the years, they had never been replaced. Only a third as many staff worked at the estate now as there had been twenty-five years ago, and that was simply not enough.

  Hanneke resisted the new arrivals at first. “I do not have the strength of body or mind anymore to make good workers out of bad ones,” she complained.

  “But, Hanneke,” Alma protested. “Look how cleverly Mr. Pike has spruced up the orchid house! Don’t we want everything at the estate to look so fine?”

  “We have far too much cleverness in this world already,” Hanneke replied, “and not enough good sense. Your Mr. Pike is only making work for others. Your mother would spin in her grave, to know that people are going about polishing flowers by hand.”

  “Not the flowers,” Alma corrected. “The leaves.”

  But in time even Hanneke surrendered, and it wasn’t long before Alma saw her delegating the new young staff to haul out the old flour barrels from the cellar, to dry them in the sun—a chore that had not been performed, as far as Alma could remember, since Andrew Jackson had been president.

  “Don’t go too far with the cleaning,” Ambrose cautioned. “A little neglect can be of benefit. Have you ever noticed how the most splendid lilacs, for instance, are the ones that grow up alongside derelict barns and abandoned shacks? Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.”

  “So speaks the man who polishes his orchids with banana peels!” Alma said, laughing.

  “Ah, but those are orchids,” Ambrose said. “That’s different. Orchids are holy relics, Alma, and need to be treated with reverence.”

  “But, Ambrose,” Alma said, “this entire estate was beginning to look like a holy relic . . . after a holy war!”

  They called each other “Alma” and “Ambrose” now.

  May passed. June passed. July arrived.

  Had she ever been this happy?

  She had never been this happy.

  Alma’s existence, before the arrival of Ambrose Pike, had been a good enough one. Yes, her world may have looked small, and her days repetitive, but none of it had been unbearable to her. She had made the best of her fate. Her work with mosses occupied her mind, and she knew that her research was unimpeachable and honest. She had her journals, her herbarium, her microscopes, her botanical disquisitions, her correspondence with botanists and collectors overseas, her duties toward her father. She had her customs, habits, and responsibilities. She had her dignity. True, she was something like a book that had opened to the same page every single day for nearly thirty straight years—but it had not been such a bad page, at that. She had been sanguine. Contented. By all measures, it had been a good life.

  She could never return to that life now.

  * * *

  In mid-July of 1848, Alma went to visit Retta at the Griffon Asylum for the first time since her friend had been interned there. Alma had not kept her word to visit Retta every month, as she had promised George Hawkes she would, but White Acre had been so busy and pleasant since Ambrose’s arrival that she had put Retta out of her mind. By July, though, Alma’s conscience was beginning to scratch at her, and thus she made arrangements to take her carriage up to Trenton for the day. She wrote a note to George Hawkes, asking if he would like to join her, but he demurred. He gave no explanation as to why, although Alma knew he simply could not bear to see Retta in her current state. Ambrose, however, offered to keep Alma company for the day.

  “But you have so much work to do here,” Alma said. “Nor is it likely to be a pleasurable visit.”

  “The work can wait. I would like to meet your friend. I have a curiosity, I must confess, about diseases of the imagination. I would be interested to see the asylum.”

  After an uneventful ride to Trenton, and a short conversation with the supervising doctor, Alma and Ambrose were escorted to Retta’s room. They found her in a small private chamber with a neat bedstead, a table and chair, a strip of carpet, and an empty space on the wall where a mirror had once hung, before it had to be removed—the nurse explained—because it was upsetting the patient.

  “We tried to put her in with another lady for a spell,” the nurse said, “but she wouldn’t have it. Became violent. Fits of disquiet and terror. There is reason to fear for anyone left in a room with her. Better off on her own.”

  “What do you do for her do when she suffers such fits?” Alma asked.

  “Ice baths,” said the nurse. “And we block her eyes and ears. It seems to calm her.”

  It was not an unpleasant room. It had a view of the back gardens, and the light was plentiful, but still, Alma thought, her friend must be lonely. Retta was dressed neatly and her hair was clean and braided, but she looked apparitional. Pale as ashes. She was still a pretty thing, but mostly, by now, she was just a thing. She did not appear either pleased or alarmed to see Alma, nor did she show any interest in Ambrose. Alma went and sat beside her friend, and held her hand. Retta allowed it without protest. A few of her fingers, Alma noticed, were bandaged at the tips.

  “What has happened there?” Alma asked the nurse.

  “She bites herself at night,” the nurse explained. “We can’t get her to quit off doing it.”

  Alma had brought her friend a small bag of lemon candies and a paper funnel full of violets, but Retta merely looked at the gifts as though she was not certain which to eat and which to admire. Even the recent edition of Joy’s Lady’s Book that Alma had purchased along the way was met with indifference. Alma suspected that the flowers, the sweets, and the magazine would ultimately go home with the nurse.

  “We have come to visit you,” Alma said to Retta, rather lamely.

  “Then why are you not here?” Retta asked, in a voice blunted by laudanum.

  “We are here, darling. We are right here before you.”

  Retta looked at Alma blankly for a while, then turned to look out the window again.

  “I had meant to bring her a prism,” Alma said to Ambrose, “but I’ve gone and forgotten it. She always loved prisms.”

  “You should sing her a song,” Ambrose suggested quietly.

  “I am not a singer,” Alma said.

  “I do not think she would object.”

  But Alma couldn’t even think of a song. Instead she leaned over to Retta’s ear and whispered, “Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”

  Retta failed to respond.

  Alma turned to Ambrose, and asked, almost in a panic, “Do you know a song?”

  “I know many, Alma. But I don’t know her song.”

  * * *

  In the carriage ride home, Alma and Ambrose were thoughtful and quiet. At last, Ambrose asked, “Was she always this way?”

  “Stupefied? Never. She was always a bit mad, but she was such a delight as a girl. She had wild humor and no small amount of charm. All who knew her loved her. She even brought gaiety and laughter to me and to my sister—and, as I’ve told you, Prudence and I were never ones for shared gaiety. But her disturbances increased over the years. And now, as you see . . .”

  “Yes. As I see. Poor creature. I have such sympathy for the mad. Whenever I am around them, I feel it straight to my soul. I think anyone who claims never to have felt insane is lying.”
<
br />   Alma pondered this. “I honestly do not believe I have ever felt insane,” she said. “I wonder if I’m telling a falsehood when I say that to you. I don’t think so.”

  Ambrose smiled. “Of course not. I should have made an exception for you, Alma. You are not like the rest of us. You have a mind of such solidity and substance. Your emotions are durable as a strongbox. This is why people feel so reassured around you.”

  “Do they?” Alma asked, genuinely surprised to hear it.

  “Indeed, they do.”

  “That’s a curious thought. I’ve never heard it expressed,” Alma looked out the window of the carriage, and contemplated further. Then she remembered something. “Or perhaps I have heard it expressed. You know, Retta herself used to say that I possessed a rather reassuring chin.”

  “The entirety of your being is reassuring, Alma. Even your voice is reassuring. For those of us who sometimes feel as though we are blowing about our lives like chaff on a miller’s floor, your presence is a most appreciated consolation.”

  Alma did not know how to respond to this surprising statement, so she tried to dismiss it. “Come now, Ambrose,” she said. “You are such a steady-minded man—surely you have never felt insane?”

  He thought for a moment, selecting his words carefully: “One cannot help but feel how closely one lies to the same condition as your friend Retta Snow.”

  “No, Ambrose, surely not!”

  When he did not immediately reply, she felt herself grow anxious.

  “Ambrose,” she said more gently. “Surely not, yes?”

  Again, he was careful, and took a long time to answer. “I refer to the sense of dislocation from this world—coupled with a feeling of alignment to some other world.”

  “To what other world?” Alma asked.

  His hesitation to reply made her feel as though she had overreached, so she attempted a more casual tone. “I apologize, Ambrose. I have a dreadful habit of not resting on questions until I have found a satisfactory answer. It’s my nature, I’m afraid. I hope you will not think me rude.”