That the rate of change within moss colonies, and the extent of that change, is so dramatic as to suggest perpetual change.
That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.
That moss was almost certainly a different entity (most likely algae) before it was moss.
That moss—as the world continues to transform—may itself eventually become a different entity.
That whatever is true for mosses must be true for all living things.
Alma’s theory felt audacious and dangerous, even to herself. She knew she was in treacherous territory—not only from a religious perspective (though this did not much concern her), but also from a scientific perspective. As she marched toward her conclusion like a mountaineer, Alma knew she was at risk of falling into the trap that had consumed so many grandiose French thinkers over the centuries—namely, the trap of l’esprit de système, where one dreams up some giant and thrilling universal explanation, and then tries to force all facts and reason to bend to that explanation, regardless of whether it makes any sense. But Alma was certain that her theory did make sense. The trick would be to prove it in writing.
A ship was as good a place as anywhere to write—and several ships, one after another, moving ponderously across the empty seas, were better still. Nobody disturbed Alma. Roger the dog lay in the corner of her berth and watched her work, panting and scratching at himself and often looking terribly disappointed in life, but he would have done that wherever in the world he happened to be. At night, he would sometimes jump into her bunk and curl up against the crook of her legs. Sometimes he woke Alma with his little moans.
Sometimes Alma, too, uttered little moans in the night. Just as she had found during her first voyage at sea, she discovered that her dreams were vivid and powerful, and that Ambrose Pike figured prominently in them. But now Tomorrow Morning made frequent appearances in her dreams, as well—sometimes even melding with Ambrose into strange, sensual, chimeric figures: Ambrose’s head on Tomorrow Morning’s body; Tomorrow Morning’s voice emerging from Ambrose’s throat; one man, during sexual congress with Alma, suddenly transforming into the other. But it was not only Ambrose and Tomorrow Morning who blended together in these strange dreams—everything seemed to be merging. In Alma’s most compelling nighttime reveries, the old binding closet at White Acre metamorphosed into a cave of mosses; her carriage house became a tiny but pleasant room at the Griffon Asylum; the sweet-smelling meadows of Philadelphia transformed into fields of warm black sand; Prudence was suddenly dressed in Hanneke’s clothing; Sister Manu tended to the boxwoods in Beatrix Whittaker’s Euclidean garden; Henry Whittaker paddled up the Schuylkill River in a tiny Polynesian outrigger canoe.
Arresting though these images may have been, the dreams somehow did not disturb Alma. Instead, they filled her with the most astonishing sensation of synthesis—as though all the most disparate elements of her biography were at last knitting together. All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming one thing. Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again—that feeling she had experienced only once before, in the weeks leading up to her wedding with Ambrose—of being most spectacularly alive. Not merely alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity—a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.
She would awaken, catch her breath, and immediately begin writing again.
Having established the ten guiding principles of her daring theory, Alma now harnessed her most quivering, electrified energies, and wrote the history of the Moss Wars of White Acre. She wrote the story of the twenty-six years she had spent observing the advance and retreat of competing colonies of moss across one tumble of boulders at the edge of the woods. She focused her attention most specifically upon the genus Dicranum, because it demonstrated the most elaborate range of variation within the moss family. Alma knew of Dicranum species that were short and plain, and others that were dressed in exotic fringe. There were species that were straight-leafed, others that were twisted, others that lived only on rotting logs beside stones, others that claimed the sunniest crests of tall boulders, some that proliferated in puddled water, and one that grew most aggressively near the droppings of white-tailed deer.
Over her decades of study, Alma had noticed that the most similar Dicranum species were the ones that could be found right next to each other. She argued that this was not accidental—that the rigors of competition for sunlight, soil, and water had forced the plants, over the millennia, into evolving minuscule adaptations that would advantage them ever so slightly over their neighbors. This is why three or four variations of Dicranum could simultaneously exist on one boulder: they had each found their own niche in this contained, compressed environment, and were now defending their individual territory with slight adaptations. These adaptations did not have to be extraordinary (the mosses did not need to grow flowers, or fruit, or wings); they simply needed to be different enough to outcompete rivals—and no rival in the world was more threatening than the rival who was brushing right up against you. The most urgent war is always the one fought at home.
Alma reported in exhaustive detail battles whose victories and defeats were measured in inches, and over decades. She recounted how climate alterations over those decades had given advantages to one variety over another, how birds had transformed the destiny of the mosses, and how—when the old oak beside the pasture fence fell and the pattern of shade shifted overnight—the whole universe of the rock field changed with it.
She wrote, “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”
She wrote, “All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”
She wrote, “The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.”
She wrote, “The victor shall win—but only until he no longer wins.”
She wrote, “This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient. The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive.”
She wrote, “Ongoing battle between and among species is inescapable, as is loss, as is biological modification. Evolution is a brutal mathematics, and the long road of time is littered with the fossilized remnants of incalculable failed experiments.”
She wrote, “Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”
Sometimes she had to cross out entire pages of work, when she looked up from her writing only to realize that hours had passed, and she had not stopped scribbling for a moment, but was no longer exactly discussing mosses.
Then she would go for a brisk circumambulation of the ship’s deck—whatever ship it happened to be—with Roger the dog trailing behind her. Her hands would be trembling and her heart racing with emotion. She would clear her head and her lungs, and reconsider her position. Afterward, she would return to her berth, sit down with a fresh sheet of paper, and begin writing all over again.
She repeated this exercise hundreds of times, for close to fourteen months.
* * *
By the time Alma arrived in Rotterdam,
her thesis was nearly complete. She did not consider it entirely complete, for something about it was still missing. The creature in the corner of the dream was still gazing at her, unsatisfied and unsettled. This sense of incompletion chewed at her, and she resolved to keep at the idea until she had conquered it. That said, she did feel that most of her theory was irrefutably accurate. If she was correct in her thinking, then she was holding in her hand a rather revolutionary forty-page scientific document. And if, instead, she was incorrect in her thinking? Well, then she had—at the very least—written the most detailed description of life and death in a Philadelphia moss colony that the scientific world would ever see.
In Rotterdam, she rested for a few days at the only hotel she could find that would accept Roger’s presence. She and Roger had walked the city for much of an afternoon, in an all but futile search for lodging. Along the way, she’d become increasingly irritated by the bilious looks that hotel clerks kept throwing their way. She could not help but think that if Roger were a more handsome dog, or a more charming dog, she would not have encountered so much trouble finding a room. This struck Alma as terribly unjust, for she had come to regard the little orange mongrel as noble in his own fashion. Had he not just crossed the world? How many supercilious hotel clerks could say the same? But she supposed this was the way of life—prejudice and ignominy and their sorry like.
As for the hotel that did accept them, it was a squalid place, run by a rheumy old woman who peered at Roger over the desk and said, “I once had a cat who looked just like him.”
Dear God! Alma thought in horror at the idea of such a sad beast.
“You aren’t a whore, are you?” asked the woman, just to be certain.
This time, Alma uttered her “Dear God!” aloud. She simply could not help herself. Her answer seemed to satisfy the proprietress.
The tarnished mirror in the hotel room revealed to Alma that she did not look much more civilized than Roger. She could not arrive in Amsterdam looking like this. Her wardrobe was a ruin and a havoc. Her hair, which had grown increasingly white, was a ruin and a havoc, as well. There was nothing to be done about the hair, but over the next few days she had several new frocks quickly sewn up. They were nothing fine (she modeled them on Hanneke’s original, practical pattern) but at least they were new, clean, and intact. She purchased new shoes. She sat in a park and wrote long letters to both Prudence and Hanneke, alerting them that she had reached Holland, and that she intended to remain here indefinitely.
She was nearly out of money. She still had a bit of gold sewn into her tattered hems, but not much. She’d kept precious little of her father’s inheritance to begin with, and now—over these last years of travel—the better part of her modest bequest had been spent, one precious coin at a time. She was left with a sum not nearly sufficient to meet the simplest demands of life. Of course, she knew she could always get more money, if true emergency were to arise. She supposed she could walk into any countinghouse at the Rotterdam docks and—using Dick Yancey’s name and her father’s legacy—easily draw a loan against the Whittaker fortune. But she did not wish to do this. She did not feel that the fortune was rightfully hers. It struck her as a matter of utmost personal consequence that she—from this point forth—make her own way in the world.
Letters posted and a fresh wardrobe procured, Alma and Roger left Rotterdam on a steamboat—by far the easiest part of their journey—and headed to the Port of Amsterdam. Upon their arrival, Alma left her luggage at a modest hotel near the docks and hired a coachman (who, for an additional fee of twenty stivers, was finally persuaded to accept Roger as a passenger). The coach took them all the way to the quiet neighborhood of Plantage, straight to the gates of the Hortus Botanicus.
Alma stepped out into the slanting early-evening sun outside the botanical garden’s tall brick walls. Roger was by her side; under her arm was a parcel wrapped in plain brown paper. A young man in a tidy guard’s uniform stood at the gate, and Alma approached, asking in her easy Dutch whether the director was on the premises today. The young man confirmed that the director was indeed on the premises, because the director came to work every day of the year.
Alma smiled. Naturally he does, she thought.
“Would it be possible to have a word with him?” she asked.
“Might I ask who you are, and what your business is?” asked the young man, aiming condemnatory looks at both her and Roger. She did not object to his questions, but she certainly objected to his tone.
“My name is Alma Whittaker, and my business is the study of mosses and the transmutation of species,” she said.
“And why should the director want to see you?” the guard asked.
She drew herself up to her most formidable height and, like a rauti, launched into an imposing recitation of her bloodline. “My father was Henry Whittaker, whom some in your country once called ‘The Prince of Peru.’ My paternal grandfather was the Apple Magus to His Majesty King George III of England. My maternal grandfather was Jacob van Devender, a master of ornamental aloes, and the director of these gardens for thirty-some years—a position that he inherited from his father, who, in turn, had inherited it from his father, and so forth, all the way back to the original founding of this institution in 1638. Your current director is, I believe, a man named Dr. Dees van Devender. He is my uncle. His older sister was named Beatrix van Devender. She was my mother, and a virtuoso of Euclidean botany. My mother was born, if I am not mistaken, just around the corner from where we are now standing, in a private home outside the walls of the Hortus—where all van Devenders since the middle of the seventeenth century have been born.”
The guard gaped at her.
She concluded, “If this is too much information for you to retain, young man, you may simply tell my uncle Dees that his niece from America would very much like to meet him.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Dees van Devender stared at Alma from across a cluttered table in his office.
Alma allowed him to stare. Her uncle had not spoken to her since she had been ushered into his chambers a few minutes earlier, nor had he invited her to have a chair. He was not being impolite; he was simply Dutch, and therefore cautious. He was taking her in. Roger sat at Alma’s side, looking like a crooked little hyena. Uncle Dees took in the dog, as well. Generally speaking, Roger did not like to be looked at. Normally, when strangers stared at Roger, he would turn his back on them, hang his head, and sigh in misery. But suddenly Roger did the strangest thing. He left Alma’s side, walked under the table, and lay down with his chin upon Dr. van Devender’s feet. Alma had never seen the likes of it. She was about to comment upon it, but her uncle—completely unconcerned about the cur on his shoes—spoke first.
“Je lijkt niet op je moeder,” he said.
You do not look like your mother.
“I know,” Alma replied in Dutch.
He went on: “You look precisely like that father of yours.”
Alma nodded. She could tell by his tone that this was not a point in her favor, her resemblance to Henry Whittaker. Then again, it never had been.
He stared some more. She stared back. She was as riveted by his face as he was by hers. If Alma did not look like Beatrix Whittaker, then this man most certainly did. It was a most marked similarity—her mother’s face all over again, but elderly, male, bearded, and, at the moment, suspicious. (Well, to be honest, the suspicion only heightened his resemblance to Beatrix.)
“Whatever became of my sister?” he asked. “We heard of the rise of your father—everyone in European botany did—but we never heard from Beatrix again.”
Nor did she hear from you, Alma thought, but she did not say it. She did not really blame anyone in Amsterdam for never having attempted to communicate with Beatrix since—when was it?—1792. She knew how the van Devenders were: stubborn. It would never have worked. Her mother would never have yielded.
“My mother lived a prosperous life,” Alma replied. “She was content. She made a
most remarkable classical garden, much admired throughout Philadelphia. She worked alongside my father in the botanicals trade, straight up to her death.”
“Which was when?” he asked, in a tone that would have befitted an officer of the police.
“In August of 1820,” she replied.
Hearing the date caused a grimace to cross her uncle’s face. “So long ago,” he said. “Too young.”
“She had a sudden death,” Alma lied. “She did not suffer.”
He looked at her for a while longer, then took a leisurely sip of coffee and helped himself to a bite of wentelteefje from the small plate before him. Clearly, she had interrupted an evening snack. She would have given almost anything for a taste of that wentelteefje. It looked and smelled wonderful. When was the last time she’d had cinnamon toast? Probably the last time Hanneke had made it for her. The aroma made her weak with nostalgia. But Uncle Dees did not offer her any coffee, and he certainly did not offer her a share of his beautiful, golden, buttery wentelteefjes.
“Would you like me to tell you anything about your sister?” Alma asked at length. “I believe your memories of her would be a child’s memories. I could tell you stories, if you like.”
He did not respond. She tried to imagine him as Hanneke had always depicted him—as a sweet-natured ten-year-old boy, weeping at his older sister’s elopement to America. Hanneke had told Alma many times of how Dees had clung to Beatrix’s skirts, until he’d had to be pried off. She’d also described how Beatrix had scolded her little brother to never again let the world see his tears. Alma found it difficult to picture. He looked dreadfully old now, and dreadfully grave.
She said, “I grew up with Dutch tulips all around me—descendants of the bulbs that my mother took with her to Philadelphia from right here at the Hortus.”
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