The Signature of All Things

florilegiumof her father’s plant collection, and he had set to it without question. He would go wherever he was led.
    He wanted to be an angel of God, but Lord protect him, he was just a lamb.
    Did she honestly try to think of a plan that would be best for him? She told herself later that she did. She would not divorce him; there was no reason to put either of them through such scandal. She would provide him with ample funds—not that he had ever asked for any, but because it was the proper thing to do. She would not send him back to Massachusetts, not only because she detested his mother (just from that one letter, she detested his mother!) but also because the thought of Ambrose sleeping forever on his friend Tupper’s couch brought her anguish. She could not send him back to Mexico, either, that was certain. He had almost died of fever there already.
    Yet she could not keep him in Philadelphia, because his presence brought her too much suffering. Mercy, how he had diminished her! Yet she still loved his face—pale and troubled though he had become. Just to see that face brought forth such a gaping, vulgar need within her that she could scarcely bear it. He would have to go elsewhere—somewhere far away. She could not risk encountering him in the years to come.
    She wrote a letter to Dick Yancey—to her father’s iron-fisted business manager—who was at the moment in Washington, D.C., arranging some business with the nascent botanical gardens there. Alma knew that Yancey would soon be embarking for the South Pacific on a whaling ship. He was going to Tahiti to investigate the Whittaker Company’s struggling vanilla plantation, and to attempt to put into place the artificial-pollination tactic that Ambrose himself had suggested to Alma’s father, on the first night of his visit to White Acre.
    Yancey planned to leave for Tahiti soon, within the fortnight. It was best to sail before the late-autumn storms, and before the harbor froze.
    Alma knew all this. Why should Ambrose not go to Tahiti with Dick Yancey, then? It was a respectable, even ideal, solution. Ambrose could take over management of the vanilla plantation himself. He would excel at it, would he not? Vanillas were orchids, weren’t they? Henry Whittaker would be pleased with the plan; sending Ambrose to Tahiti was exactly what he’dwanted in the first place, before Alma talked him out of it, to her own severe detriment.
    Was this a banishment? Alma attempted not to think so. Tahiti was said to be a paradise, Alma told herself. It was hardly a penal colony. Yes, Ambrose was delicate, but Dick Yancey would see that no harm befell him. The work would be interesting. The climate was fine and healthy there. Who would not envy this opportunity to see the fabled shores of Polynesia? It was an opportunity that any man of botany or commerce would welcome—and it was all paid for, besides.
    She pushed aside the voices within her who protested that, yes, this was most certainly a banishment—and a cruel one. She ignored what she knew all too well—that Ambrose was neither a man of botany nor a man of commerce, but rather a being of unique sensitivities and talents, whose mind was a delicate thing, and who was perhaps not at all suited to a long journey on a whaling vessel, or life on an agricultural plantation in the distant South Seas. Ambrose was more child than man, and he had said to Alma many times that he wanted nothing more in life than a secure home and a gentle companion.
    Well, there are many things in life that we want, she told herself, and we do not always get them.
    Besides, there was nowhere else for him to go.
    Having decided everything, Alma then established her husband at the United States Hotel for two weeks—right across the street from the large bank where her father’s money was stored in great secret vaults—while she waited for Dick Yancey to return from Washington.
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    I t was in the lobby of United States Hotel, a fortnight later, that Alma at last introduced her husband to Dick Yancey—to towering, silent Dick Yancey, with the fearsome eyes and the jaw carved out of rock, who did not ask questions, and who did only as he was ordered. Well, Ambrose did only as he was ordered, too. Stooped and pale, Ambrose asked no questions. He did not even ask how long he would be expected to remain in Polynesia. She would not have known how to answer that question, in any case. It was not a banishment, she continued to tell herself.