The Signature of All Things

instant, fresh and contented. “What dreams!” he said, and reached his arms above him in a languorous stretch. “I have not had such dreams in years. What an honor it is, to share the electricity of your being. Thank you, Alma! What a day we shall have! Did you have such dreams, too?”
    Alma had dreamed nothing, of course. Alma had passed the night boxed up within a waking horror. Nonetheless, she nodded. She did not know what else to do.
    “You must promise me,” Ambrose said, “that when we die—whichever of us shall die first—that we will send vibrations to each other across the divide of mortality.”
    Again, senselessly, she nodded. It was easier than trying to speak.
    Stale and silent, Alma watched her husband rise and splash his face in the basin. He took his clothing from the chair and politely excused himself to the water closet, returning fully dressed and saturated with good cheer. What lurked behind that warm smile? Alma could see nothing behind it but more warmth. He looked to her exactly as he had looked the first day she had glimpsed him—like a lovely, bright, and enthusiastic man of twenty years.
    She was a fool.
    “I shall leave you to your privacy,” he said. “And I shall be waiting for you at the breakfast table. What a day we shall have!”
    Alma’s entire body ached. In a terrible cloud of stiffness and despair, she moved out of bed slowly, like a cripple, and dressed herself. She looked in the mirror. She should not have looked. She had aged a decade in one night.
    Henry was at the breakfast table when Alma finally descended. He and Ambrose were engaged in a light tinsel of conversation. Hanneke brought Alma a fresh pot of tea and threw her a sharp look—the sort of look that all women get on the morning after their wedding—but Alma avoided her eyes. She tried to keep her face from appearing moony or grim, but her imagination was fatigued and she knew that her eyes were red. She felt overgrown by mildew. The men did not seem to notice. Henry was telling a story Alma had heard a dozen times already—of the night he had shared a bed in a filthy Peruvian tavern with a pompous little Frenchman, who had the thickest imaginable French accent, but who tirelessly insisted he was not French.
    Henry said, “The dunderhead kept saying to me, ‘ Hi emm en Heenglishman! ’ and I kept telling him, ‘You are not an Englishman, you idiot, you are a Frenchman! Just listen to your cussed accent!’ But no, the bloody dunderhead kept saying it: ‘ Hi emm en Heenglishman! ’ Finally I said to him, ‘Tell me, then—how is it possible that you are an Englishman?’ And he crowed, ‘ Hi emm en Heenglishman because Hi ’ave en Heenglish wife! ’”
    Ambrose laughed and laughed. Alma stared at him as if he were a specimen.
    “By that logic,” Henry concluded, “I am a bloody Dutchman!”
    “And I am a Whittaker!” Ambrose added, still laughing.
    “More tea?” Hanneke asked Alma, again with that same penetrating look.
    Alma clamped shut her mouth, which she realized had been hanging a bit too far open. “I have had enough, Hanneke, thank you.”
    “The men will be carting in the last of the hay today,” Henry said. “See to it, Alma, that it is done properly.”
    “Yes, Father.”
    Henry turned to Ambrose again. “She is good value, that wife of yours,especially when there is work to be done. A regular Farmer John in skirts, she is.”
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    T he second night was the same as the first—and the third night, and the fourth and fifth. All the nights to follow, all the same. Ambrose and Alma would undress in privacy, come to the bed and face each other. He would kiss her hand and praise her goodness, and extinguish the lamp. Ambrose would then fall into the sleep of an enchanted figure in a fairy tale, while Alma lay in silent torment beside him. The only thing that changed over time was that Alma finally managed to receive a few fitful hours of sleep a night, merely because her body would collapse with exhaustion. But her sleep was interrupted by clawing dreams and awful spells of restless, roaming, wakeful thought.
    By day, Alma and Ambrose were companions as ever in study and contemplation. He had never seemed more fond of her. She woodenly went about her own work, and helped him with his. He always wanted to be near her—as near to her as possible. He did not seem aware of her discomfort. She tried not to reveal it. She kept hoping for a change. More weeks passed. October