The Signature of All Things

wrote, “and then one mystery takes hold of the other.”
    Alma had been taken hold of, to be sure, but her mind did not ignite. Nor, however, did it settle. Her reading of Boehme led her to other works in the White Acre library—other dusty treatises on the intersection of botany and divinity. She felt both skeptical and provoked. She paged through all the old theologians and the quaint, extinct thaumaturges. She examinedAlbertus Magnus. She dutifully studied what monks had written four hundred years earlier about mandrakes and unicorn horns. The science was all so flawed. There were holes in their logic so gaping that one could feel gusts of wind blowing through the arguments. They had believed such outlandish notions in the past—that bats were birds, that storks hibernated under water, that gnats sprang from the dew, that geese hatched from barnacles, and that barnacles grew on trees. As a purely historical matter it was interesting enough—but why honor it? she wondered. Why would Ambrose have been seduced by medieval scholarship? It was a fascinating trail, yes, but it was a trail of errors.
    In the middle of one hot night at the end of July, Alma was in the library with a lamp before her and her spectacles upon the tip of her nose, looking at a seventeenth-century copy of the Arboretum sacrum —whose author, like Boehme, had tried to read sacred messages into all the plants mentioned in the Bible—when Ambrose entered the room. She was startled when she saw him, but he seemed undisturbed. If anything, he appeared concerned about her. He sat beside her at the long table in the center of the great room. He was wearing his daytime clothes. Either he had changed out of his nightclothes, out of deference to Alma, or he had never gone to bed that evening at all.
    “You cannot pass so many nights in a row without sleep, my dear Alma,” he said.
    “I am using the quiet hours to conduct research,” she replied. “I hope I have not disturbed you.”
    He looked at the titles of the great old books lying open before them. “But you are not reading about mosses,” he said quietly. “What is your interest in all this?”
    She found it difficult to lie to Ambrose. In general, she was not adept at untruths, and he, in particular, was not a person she wished to deceive. “I cannot make sense of your story,” she confessed. “I am looking for answers in these books.”
    He nodded, but said nothing in reply.
    “I started with Boehme,” Alma went on, “whom I find simply incomprehensible, and now I’ve moved on to . . . all the others.”
    “I’ve troubled you by what I’ve told you about myself. I was afraid that might occur. I ought to have said nothing.”
    “No, Ambrose. We are the dearest of friends. You may always confide in me. You may even trouble me at times. I was honored by your confidences. But in my desire to better understand you, I am afraid I am falling quite out of my depth.”
    “And what do these books tell you about me?”
    “Nothing,” Alma replied. She could not help but laugh, and Ambrose laughed with her. She was quite exhausted. He looked weary as well.
    “Then why do you not ask me yourself?”
    “Because I do not wish to gall you.”
    “You could never gall me.”
    “But it needles me, Ambrose—the errors in these books. I wonder why the errors do not needle you. Boehme makes such leaps, such contradictions, such confusions of thought. It is as though he wishes to vault directly into heaven upon the strength of his logic, but his logic is deeply impaired.” She reached across the table for a book and flung it open. “In this chapter here, for instance, he is trying to find keys to God’s secrets hidden inside the plants of the Bible—but what are we to make of it, when his information is simply incorrect? He spends a full chapter interpreting ‘the lilies of the field’ as mentioned in the book of Matthew, dissecting every letter of the word ‘lilies,’ looking for revelation within the syllables . . . but Ambrose, ‘the lilies of the field’ itself is a mistranslation. It would not have been lilies that Christ discussed in his Sermon on the Mount. There are only two varieties of lily native to Palestine, and both are exceedingly rare. They would not have flowered in such abundance as to have ever filled a meadow. They would not have been familiar enough to the common man. Christ, tailoring his lesson to the widest possible audience, would more likely