The Signature of All Things

stone, vast, and well balanced—graced with fine east and west pavilions, a columned portico to the south, and a broad terrace to the north. He also built a grand carriage house, a large forge, and a whimsical gatehouse, as well as several botanical structures—including the first of what would eventually be many freestanding hothouses, an orangery modeled after the famous structure at Kew, and the beginnings of a glasshouse of staggering scope. Along the muddy bank of the Schuylkill—where only fifty years earlier Indians had gathered wild onions—he built his own private barge dock, just like the ones at the fine old estates along the Thames.
    The city of Philadelphia was, for the most part, still living frugally in those days, but Henry designed White Acre as a brazen affront to the very notion of thrift. He wanted the place to pulse with extravagance. He was not afraid to be envied. Indeed, he found it bloody good sport to be envied, and good business, too, for envy drew people near. His home was designed not only to appear grand from a distance—easily seen from the river, sitting lofty and high upon its promontory, coolly overlooking the city on the other side—but also to express richness with every minute detail. Each doorknob would be brass, and all the brass would gleam. The furniture came straight from Seddon’s of London, the walls were hung with Belgian paper, the china plate was Cantonese, the cellar was stocked with Jamaican rum and French claret, the lamps were hand-blown in Venice, and the lilacs around the property had first bloomed in the Ottoman Empire.
    He allowed rumors of his wealth to spread unchecked. As rich as he was, it did not hurt for people to imagine him even richer. When neighbors started whispering that Henry Whittaker’s horses had their hooves shod in silver, he permitted them to continue believing it. In fact, his horses’ hooves were not shod in silver; they were shod in iron, just like everyone else’s horses, and what’s more, Henry had shod them himself (a skill he had learned in Peru—on poor mules, using poor tools). But why should anyone know that, when the rumor was so much more pleasing and formidable?
    Henry understood not only the allure of money, but also the more mysterious allure of power. He knew that his estate must not merely dazzle, but also intimidate. Louis XIV used to take visitors on walks through his pleasure gardens not as an amusing diversion, but as a demonstration of force: every exotic flowering tree and every sparkling fountain and all the priceless Greek statuary were all just a means to communicate a single unambiguous message to the world: You would not be advised to declare war against me! Henry wished White Acre to express that same sentiment.
    Henry also built a large warehouse and factory down by the Philadelphia harbor, for the receiving of medicinal plants from all over the world: ipecac, simarouba, rhubarb, guaiacum bark, china root, and sarsaparilla. He entered into partnership with a stalwart Quaker pharmacist named James Garrick, and the two men immediately began processing pills, powders, ointments, and tonics.
    He started his business with Garrick not one moment too soon. By the summer of 1793, a yellow fever epidemic was battering Philadelphia. Thestreets were choked with corpses, and orphans clung to their dead mothers in the gutters. People died in pairs, in families, in clusters of dozens—heaving out sickening rivers of black sludge from their gullets and bowels on their way to death. Local physicians had decided that the only possible cure was to violently purge their patients even further,through repeated bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, and the best-known purgative in the world was a plant called jalap, which Henry was already importing in bales from Mexico.
    Henry himself suspected that the jalap cure was bogus, and he refused to let anyone in his household take it. He knew that Creole doctors down in the Caribbean—far more familiar with yellow fever than their northern counterparts—treated patients with a less barbarous prescription of restorative liquids and rest. There was no money to be made, however, in restorative liquids and rest, while there was a great deal of money to be made in jalap. This is how it came to pass that, by the end of 1793, one-third of the population of Philadelphia had died of yellow fever, and Henry Whittaker had doubled his wealth.
    Henry took his earnings and built two more