The Signature of All Things

encountered the names of Bronson Alcott or Ralph Waldo Emerson. For solace and fellowship, he looked to medieval writers, not contemporary ones.
    Moreover, he actively sought the God of the Bible, as well as the spirits of nature. When he attended the Swedish Lutheran church every Sunday with Alma, he knelt and prayed in humble accord. He sat upright in the unyielding oak pew, and took in the sermons without discomfort. When he was not in prayer, he worked in silence over his printing presses, or industriously made portraits of orchids, or helped Alma with her mosses, or played long games of backgammon with Henry. Truly, Ambrose had no idea what was occurring in the rest of the world. If anything, he was trying to escape the world—which meant that he had arrived at his curious bundle of ideas all by himself. He did not know that half of America and most of Europe were attempting to read each other’s minds. He merely wanted to read Alma’s mind, and to have her read his.
    She could not refuse him.
    So when this young man asked her to take him someplace quiet and secret, she took him into the binding closet. She could think of nowhere else to go. She did not want to wake anyone by marching through the house to a more distant location. She did not wish to be caught in a bedroom with him. What’s more, she knew of no quieter or more private place than this. She told herself that these were the reasons she took him there. They may even have been true.
    He had not known that the door was there. Nobody knew it was there—so cleverly were its seams hidden behind the elaborate old plastermolding of the wall. Since Beatrix’s death, Alma was the only person who ever entered the binding closet. Perhaps Hanneke knew of its existence, but the old housekeeper seldom came to this wing of the house, to the far distant library. Henry probably knew of it—he had designed it, after all—but he, too, seldom frequented the library anymore. He had probably forgotten the place years earlier.
    Alma did not bring a lamp with them. She was all too familiar with the tiny room’s contours. There was a stool, where she had sat when she came to be so shamefully and pleasurably alone, and there was a small work table on which Ambrose could now sit, directly facing her. She showed him where to sit. Once she shut and locked the door, they were in absolute darkness together, in this tiny, hidden, stifling place. He did not seem alarmed by darkness, or the cramped quarters. For this was what he had requested.
    “May I take your hands?” he asked.
    She reached out cautiously across the darkness until her fingertips touched his arms. Together, they found each other’s hands. His hands were slender and light. Hers felt heavy and damp. Ambrose laid his hands across his knees, palms facing upward, and she allowed her palms to settle atop his. She did not expect what she encountered in that first touch: the fierce, staggering onrush of love. It went through her like a sob.
    But what had she expected? Why should it have felt anything less than elevated, exaggerated, exalted? Alma had never before been touched by a man. Or, rather, just twice—once, in the spring of 1818, when George Hawkes had pressed Alma’s hand between both of his and had called her a brilliant microscopist; and once again by George, more recently, when he was in distress about Retta—but in both cases that had been only one of her hands, coming in contact nearly accidentally with a man’s flesh. Never had she been touched with anything that might fairly be called intimacy. Numberless times over the decades, she had sat on this very stool with her legs open and her skirts up about her waist, with this very door locked behind her, leaning back against the embrace of this very wall behind her, sating her hunger as best she could with the grappling of her own fingers. If there were molecules in this room that differed from the other molecules of White Acre—or indeed, from the other molecules of the world—then these molecules were permeated by dozens and hundreds and thousands of impressions of Alma’s carnal exertions. Yet now she was here in this closet,in the same familiar darkness, surrounded by those molecules, alone with a man ten years her junior.
    But what was she to do about this sob of love?
    “Listen for my question,” Ambrose said, holding Alma’s hands lightly. “And then ask me your own. There will be no further need to speak. We shall know when we