The Signature of All Things

Yet even she did not know how long it would last.
    “Mr. Yancey will take care of you from here,” she said to Ambrose. “Your comforts will be attended to, as much as possible.”
    She felt as though she were leaving a baby in the care of a trained crocodile. At that moment, she loved Ambrose every bit as much as she ever had loved him—which was entirely . Already, she felt a wide-open absence at the thought of him sailing to the other side of the world. Then again, she had felt nothing but wide-open absence since her wedding night. She wanted to embrace him, but she had always wanted to embrace him, and she could not do that. He would not permit it. She wanted to cling to him, to beg him to stay, to beg him to love her. None of it was permitted. There was no use in it.
    They shook hands, as they had done in her mother’s Grecian garden on the day they had met. The same small worn leather valise sat beside Ambrose’s feet, filled with all his belongings. He wore the same brown corduroy suit. He had taken nothing with him from White Acre.
    The last thing she said to him was, “I pray of you, Ambrose, do me the service of not speaking to anyone you may meet about our marriage. Nobody need know what has transpired between us. You will travel not as the son-in-law of Henry Whittaker, but as his employee. Anything further than that would only lead to questions, and I do not long for the world’s questions.”
    He agreed by nodding. He said nothing more. He looked sick and exhausted.
    Alma did not need to ask Dick Yancey to keep secret her history with Mr. Pike. Dick Yancey did nothing but keep secrets; that was why the Whittakers had kept him around for such a very long time.
    Dick Yancey was useful that way.

Chapter Eighteen
    A lma heard nothing whatsoever from Ambrose over the next three years; in fact, she scarcely even heard anything about him. In the early summer of 1849, Dick Yancey sent word that they had safely arrived in Tahiti after an uneventful sail. (Alma knew that this did not mean it had been an easy sail; to Dick Yancey, any journey that did not end in shipwreck or capture by pirates was uneventful.) Yancey reported that Mr. Pike had been left at Matavai Bay, in the care of a botanizing missionary named the Reverend Francis Welles, and that Mr. Pike had been introduced to the duties of the vanilla plantation. Soon after, Dick Yancey had left Tahiti to attend to Whittaker business in Hong Kong. After that, no more news arrived.
    This was a time of much despair for Alma. Despair is a tedious business and quickly becomes repetitive, which is how it came to pass that each day for Alma became a replica of the day that had preceded it: sad, lonely, and indistinct. The first winter was the worst. The months seemed colder and darker than any winter Alma had known, and she felt invisible birds of prey hovering over her whenever she walked between the carriage house and the mansion. The bare trees stared at her starkly, begging to be warmed or clothed. The Schuylkill froze so fast and thick that men made bonfires on its surface at night and roasted oxen on spits. Whenever Alma stepped outside, the wind hit her, captured her, and wrapped around her like a stiff and frozen cloak.
    She stopped sleeping in her bedroom. She quite nearly stopped sleeping at all. She had been more or less living in the carriage house since her confrontation with Ambrose; she could not imagine ever sleeping in her matrimonial chamber again. She ceased taking meals with the household, and ate the same fare at dinner as she had taken at breakfast: broth and bread, milk and molasses. She felt listless, tragic, and slightly murderous. She was irritable and prickly with exactly those people who were kindest to her—Hanneke de Groot, for instance—and she left off all care and concern for the likes of her sister Prudence, or her poor old friend Retta. She avoided her father. She barely kept up with the official work of White Acre. She complained to Henry that he had treated her unfairly—that he had always treated her as a servant.
    “I never claimed fairness!” he shouted, and banished her back to the carriage house until she could become master of herself again.
    She felt as though the world mocked her, and thus the world was difficult to face.
    Alma had always been of sturdy constitution and had never known the desolations of a sickbed, but during that first winter after Ambrose left, she found it difficult to rise at all in