The Signature of All Things

regard Ambrose as merely a dear companion, if it would have kept him at White Acre forever. To share buttered toast with him every morning, to observe his ever-illuminated face as he spoke of orchids, to witness the mastery of his printmaking, to watch him throw himself down upon her divan to listen to theories of species transmutation and extinction—truly, all that would have been plenty. She would never have presumed to wish for more. Ambrose as friend—as brother—more than sufficed.
    Even after the events of the binding closet, Alma would not have askedfor more. Whatever had transpired between them in the dark, she was easily prepared to regard as a unique moment, perhaps even a mutual hallucination. She could have talked herself into believing that she had imagined the current of communication that had moved between them across the silence, and imagined the riotous effect that his hands against hers had wrought throughout her entire body. Given enough time, she might have even learned to forget that it ever occurred. Even after that encounter, she would not have allowed herself to love him so desperately, so thoroughly, so helplessly—not without his permission.
    But now they were to be married, and that permission had been granted. There was no chance anymore for Alma to restrain her love—and no reason to. She allowed herself to plummet directly into it. She felt inflamed by amazement, rampant with inspiration, enthralled. Where she had once seen light in Ambrose’s face, she now saw celestial light. Where his limbs had before looked only pleasing, they now looked like Roman statuary. His voice was an evensong. His slightest glance bruised her heart with fearful joy.
    Cast loose for the first time in her life into the realm of love, imbued with impossible energy, Alma barely recognized herself. Her capacities seemed limitless. She barely had need for sleep. She felt she could row a boat up a mountainside. She moved through the world as though in a corona of fire. She was zoetic . It was not merely Ambrose whom she regarded with such vivid purity and thrill—but everything and everybody. All was suddenly miraculous. She saw lines of convergence and grace everywhere she looked. Even the smallest matters became revelatory. She was doused by a sudden surfeit of the most astonishing self-confidence. Quite out of the blue, she found herself solving botanical problems that had vexed her for years. She wrote furiously paced letters to distinguished men of botany (men whose reputations had always cowed her), laying challenge to their conclusions as she had never before permitted herself to do.
    “You have presented your Zygodon with sixteen cilia and no outer peristome!” she scolded.
    Or, “Why are you so certain this is a Polytrichum colony?”
    Or, “I do not agree with Professor Marshall’s conclusion. It can be discouraging, I know, to achieve consensus in the field of cryptogamia, but I caution you against your haste in declaring a new species before you havethoroughly studied the accumulated evidence. These days, one may see as many names for a given specimen as there are bryologists studying it; that does not mean the specimen is either new or rare. I have four such specimens in my own herbarium.”
    She had never before possessed the courage for such remonstrance, but love had emboldened her, and her mind felt like an immaculate engine. A week before the wedding, Alma woke in the night with an electrified start, abruptly realizing that there was a link between algae and mosses. She had been looking at mosses and algae for decades, but she had never before seen the truth of it: the two were cousins. She had no trace of a doubt about it. In essence, she apprehended, mosses did not merely resemble algae that had crawled up on dry land; mosses were algae that had crawled up on dry land. How mosses had made this elaborate transformation from aquatic to terrestrial, Alma did not know. But these two species shared an entwined history. They must do. The algae had decided something, long before Alma or anyone else was watching them, and in that point of decision, had moved up into the dry air and transformed. She did not know the mechanism behind this transformation, but she knew that it had occurred.
    Realizing all this, Alma wished to run across the hall and leap into bed with Ambrose—with he who had ignited such wildness within her body and mind. She wished to tell him everything, to show him