The Signature of All Things

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 palms 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years of marauding cats, the carriage brass had been allowed to tarnish, and the maids’ uniforms appeared to be decades out of date—because they were.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.
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    I n mid-July of 1848, Alma went to visit Retta at the Griffon Asylum for the