The Signature of All Things

little arsehole, either. For something else, it must be. It don’t make sense to you, do it? Not to me neither, it don’t make sense.”
    Alma pulled her arms from her father’s grip. His breath smelled like rot. Most of him was already dead.
    “Cease your talking, Father, and take some beef tea,” she said, tilting the cup to his mouth, and avoiding his gaze. She had a feeling the nurse was listening from behind the door.
    He sang, “ Oh, we’re running away around the Cape! Some for debt and some for rape! ”
    She tried to pour the broth into his mouth—to stop him singing, as much as anything—but he spat it out and knocked her hand away. The broth rained across the sheets and the cup spun across the floor. He still had strength in him, the old fighter. He grabbed for her wrists again and caught one of them.
    “Don’t be simple, Plum,” he said. “Don’t believe a single thing any cunt or bastard ever tells you in this world. You go find out! ”
    Over the next week, as Henry slid closer toward death, he would say and sing many more things—most of them filthy and all of them unfortunate—butthat one phrase of his struck Alma as so cogent and deliberate that she would always think of it as having been her father’s final words: You go find out.
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    H enry Whittaker died on October 19, 1851. It was like a storm blowing out to sea. He thrashed till the end, fought to the last breath he drew. The calm at the end of it, once he finally left, was staggering. Nobody could believe they had survived him. Hanneke, wiping away a tear of exhaustion as much as sadness, said, “Oh, to those who already dwell in heaven—good luck for what is coming!”
    Alma helped to wash her father’s body. She asked to be alone with his corpse. She did not wish to pray. She did not wish to weep. There was something she needed to find. Lifting the sheet off her father’s naked corpse, she explored the skin around his abdomen, searching with fingers and eyes for something like a scar, like a lump, something odd, small, and out of place. She was looking for the emerald that Henry had sworn to her, decades ago when she was a child, that he had sewn beneath his own flesh. She did not flinch to look for it. She was a naturalist. If it was there, she would find it.
    You must always have one final bribe, Plum.
    It wasn’t there.
    She was astonished. She’d always believed everything her father told her. But then, she thought, perhaps he had offered the emerald up to Death, right near the end. When the songs hadn’t worked and the courage hadn’t worked and all his cunning had failed to negotiate a way out of this final frightful contract, maybe he had said, “Take my best emerald, too!” And maybe Death had taken it, Alma thought—but then took Henry, as well.
    Not even her father could buy his way out of that covenant.
    Henry Whittaker was gone, and his last trick gone with him.
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    S he inherited everything. The will—produced only a day after the funeral, by Henry’s old solicitor—was the simplest imaginable document, not more than a few sentences long. To his “one natural-born daughter,” the will instructed, Henry Whittaker left his entire fortune. All his land, all his business concerns, all his wealth, all his holdings—all of it was to be Alma’s exclusively. There were no provisions made for anyone else. There was nomention of his adopted daughter, Prudence Whittaker Dixon, nor his loyal staff. Hanneke would receive nothing; Dick Yancey would receive nothing.
    Alma Whittaker was now one of the richest women in the New World. She controlled the largest botanical importing concern in America, the affairs of which she had singlehandedly managed over the last five years, and she was half owner of the prosperous Garrick & Whittaker Pharmaceutical Company. She was the sole inhabitant of one of the grandest private homes in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, she held the rights to several lucrative patents, and she owned thousands of acres of productive land. Under her direct command were scores of servants and employees, while numberless people around the world worked for her on a contractual basis. Her greenhouses and glasshouses rivaled any to be found in the finest European botanical gardens.
    It did not feel like a blessing.
    Alma was weary and saddened by the death of her father, of course, but she also felt burdened, rather than honored, by his mammoth bequest. What interest did she have in a vast