The Signature of All Things

Java with a hundred servants, but the climate there had sickened him over the years, bestowing upon him tropical diseases that would periodically throw his health into havoc for the rest of his life. He needed a more temperate home. He would cut off his arm before he ever again lived in England. The Continent did not appeal: France was filled with irritating people; Spain was corrupt and unstable; Russia, impossible; Italy, absurd; Germany, rigid; Portugal, in decline. Holland, though favorably disposed toward him, was dull.
    The United States of America, he decided, was a possibility. Henry had never been there, but he had heard promising things. He had heard especially promising things about Philadelphia—the lively capital of that young nation. It was said to be a city with a good-enough shipping port, central to the eastern coast of the country, filled with pragmatic Quakers, pharmacists, and hardworking farmers. It was rumored to be a place without haughty aristocrats (unlike Boston), and without pleasure-fearing puritans (unlike Connecticut), and without troublesome self-minted feudal princes (unlike Virginia). The city had been founded on the sound principles of religious tolerance, a free press, and good landscaping, by William Penn—a man who grew tree saplings in bathtubs, and who had imagined his metropolis as a great nursery of both plants and ideas. Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone—except, of course, the Jews. Hearing all this, Henry suspected Philadelphia to be a vast landscape of unrealized profits, and he aimed to turn the place to his advantage.
    Before he settled anywhere, however, he wanted to be fitted up with a wife, and—because he was not a fool—he wanted a Dutch wife. He wanted a clever and decent woman with the least possible frivolousness, and Holland was the place to find her. Henry had indulged himself at times with prostitutes over the years, and had even kept a young Javanese girl on his estate in Pengalengan, but now it was time to take on a proper wife, and he recalled the advice of a sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before, “To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”
    So he sailed back to Holland to pick one. He chose quickly and calculatingly, plucking a wife from a respectable old family, the van Devenders, who had been custodians of the Hortus botanical gardens in Amsterdam for many generations. The Hortus was one of the foremost research gardens in Europe—one of the oldest links in history between botany, scholarship, and trade—and the van Devenders had always managed it with honor. They were not aristocrats by any means, and certainly not rich, but Henry did not need a rich woman. The van Devenders were, however, a premier European family of learning and science—and that he did admire.
    Unfortunately, the admiration was not mutual. Jacob van Devender, the current patriarch of the family and of the Hortus (and a masterful hand at growing ornamental aloes), knew of Henry Whittaker and did not like what he had heard. He knew that this young man had a history of thieving, and also that he had betrayed his own country for profit. This was not the sort of conduct of which Jacob van Devender approved. Jacob was Dutch, yes, and he liked his money, but he was not a banker, not a speculator. He did not measure people’s worth by their piles of gold.
    However, Jacob van Devender had an excellent prospect of a daughter—or so Henry thought. Her name was Beatrix, and she was neither plain nor pretty, which seemed just about right for a wife. She was stout and bosomless, a perfect little barrel of a woman, and she was already rolling toward spinsterhood when Henry met her. To most suitors’ tastes, Beatrix van Devender would have appeared dauntingly overeducated. She was conversant in five living languages and two dead ones, with an expertise in botany equal to any man’s. Decidedly, this woman was not a coquette. She was no ornament of the drawing room. She dressed in the full spectrum of colors that one associates with common house sparrows. She nursed a hard suspicion of passion, exaggeration, and beauty, putting her confidence only in that which was solid and credible, and always trusting acquired wisdom over impulsive instinct. Henry perceived her as a living slab of ballast, which was precisely what he desired.
    As for what Beatrix saw in Henry? Here, we encounter a