The Signature of All Things

slight mystery. Henry was not handsome. He was certainly not refined. In all truth, there was something of the village blacksmith about his ruddy face, his large hands, and his rough manners. To most eyes, he appeared neither solid nor credible. Henry Whittaker was an impulsive, loud, and bellicose man, whohad enemies all over the world. He had also become, in the past years, a bit of a drinker. What respectable young woman would willingly choose such a character for a husband?
    “The man has no principles,” Jacob van Devender objected to his daughter.
    “Oh, Father, you are most grievously mistaken,” Beatrix corrected him dryly. “Mr. Whittaker has many principles. Just not the best variety of them.”
    True, Henry was rich, and thus some observers speculated that perhaps Beatrix appreciated his wealth more than she let on. Also, Henry aimed to take his new bride to America, and perhaps—the local wags gossiped—she had some shameful secret reason to leave Holland forever.
    The truth, however, was simpler: Beatrix van Devender married Henry Whittaker because she liked what she saw in him. She liked his strength, his cunning, his ascendency, his promise. He was rough, yes, but she was no dainty blossom herself. She respected his bluntness, as he respected hers. She understood what he wanted of her, and felt certain that she could work with him—and perhaps even manage him a bit. Thus, Henry and Beatrix quickly and straightforwardly formed their alliance. The only accurate word for their union was a Dutch word, a business word: partenrederij— a partnership based on honest trade and plain dealing, where tomorrow’s profits are a result of today’s promises, and where the cooperation of both parties equally contributes to prosperity.
    Her parents disowned her. Or it may be more precise to say that Beatrix disowned them. They were a rigid family, the whole lot of them. They disagreed over her alliance, and disagreements among van Devenders tended to be eternal. After choosing Henry and leaving for the United States, Beatrix never again communicated with Amsterdam. Her last glimpse of her family was of her young brother, Dees, ten years old, weeping at her departure, pulling at her skirts, crying, “They are taking her away from me! They are taking her away from me!” She uncurled her brother’s fingers from her hem, told him to never again shame himself with public tears, and walked away.
    Beatrix brought with her to America her personal maidservant—an immensely competent young washbasin of a woman named Hanneke de Groot. She also procured from her father’s library a 1665 edition of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia , and a most valuable compendium of LeonhartFuchs’s botanical illustrations. She sewed dozens of pockets into her traveling dress, and filled each pocket with the Hortus’s rarest tulip bulbs, all swaddled protectively in moss. She brought along, as well, several dozen blank accounting ledgers.
    She was already planning her library, her garden, and—it would appear—her fortune.
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    B eatrix and Henry Whittaker arrived in Philadelphia in early 1793. The city, unprotected by walls or other fortifications, consisted at that time of a busy port, a few blocks of commercial and political interests, a conglomerate of farming homesteads, and some fine new estates. It was a place of expansive, generative possibility—a veritable alluvial bed of potential growth. The First Bank of the United States had opened there just the year before. The entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was at war with its forests—and its denizens, armed with axes, oxen, and ambition, were winning. Henry bought 350 acres of sloping pastures and unmolested woodland along the west bank of the Schuylkill River, with the intention to add more land as soon as he could acquire it.
    Henry had originally planned to be rich by the age of forty, but he had driven his horses so hard, as the expression went, that he had arrived at his destination early. He was only thirty-two years old, and already had money banked up in pounds, florins, guineas, and even Russian kopecks. He aimed to become even wealthier still. But for now, upon his arrival in Philadelphia, it was time to put on a display.
    Henry Whittaker named his property White Acre, a play on his own name, and immediately set to work building a Palladian mansion of lordly dimensions, far more beautiful than any private structure the city had yet seen. The house would be