The Signature of All Things

van Devender residence.
    She sent for all her old books and notes from the carriage house back at White Acre, and for her herbarium, too. It was like a holiday for her, the week her shipment arrived; she spent days in nostalgic absorption, unpacking it all. She had missed every item and volume of it. She was blushingly amused to discover, buried in the bottoms of the trunks of books, all her old prurient reading material. She decided to keep the lot of it—though she was sure to keep it well hidden. For one thing, she did not know how to dispose of such scandalous texts respectably. For another thing, these books still had the power to stir her. Even at her advanced age, a stubborn tug of brazen desire lingered within her body, and still demanded her attention on certain nights, when, under the coverlet, she would revisit her familiar old quim, remembering once more the taste of Tomorrow Morning, the smell of Ambrose, the urgency of life’s moststubborn and unrelenting urges. She did not even attempt to fight these urges anymore; by now, it was evident they were a part of her.
    Alma earned a respectable salary—her first—at the Hortus, and she shared an assistant and a clerk with the director of mycology and the overseer of ferns (all of whom became dear friends—the first scientific friends she’d ever had). In due course, she made a reputation for herself not only as a brilliant taxonomist but also as a good cousin. It pleased and surprised Alma not a little that she adapted so comfortably to the bustle and tumult of family life, given that she’d always lived such a solitary existence. She delighted in the clever repartee of Dees’s children and grandchildren at the dinner table, and took pride in their many achievements and talents. She was honored when the girls would come to her for advice or consolation about their thrilling or terrible romantic disturbances. She saw bits of Retta in their moments of excitement; bits of Prudence in their moments of reserve; bits of herself in their moments of doubt.
    Over time, Alma came to be regarded by all the van Devenders as a considerable asset both to the Hortus and to the family—which two entities were utterly indistinguishable, in any case. Alma’s uncle gave over to her a small, shady corner of the palm house, and invited her to make a permanent display called the Cave of Mosses. This was both a tricky and a satisfying assignment. Mosses do not like to grow where they are not born, and Alma had difficulty orchestrating the necessary and precise conditions (the correct humidity, the right combination of light and shade, the proper stones, gravel, and logs as substrates) to encourage the moss colonies to flourish in these artificial surroundings. She successfully executed this feat, though, and soon the cave thrived with moss specimens from all over the world. It would be a lifelong project to maintain the exhibit, which required continuous misting (achieved with the help of steam-powered engines), needed to be cooled by insulated walls, and could never be exposed to direct sunlight. Aggressive and fast-growing mosses had to be kept in check, so that rarer, more diminutive species could advance. Alma had read of Japanese monks who maintained their moss gardens by weeding with tiny forceps, and she took up this practice, as well. She could be seen every morning in the Cave of Mosses, removing one tiny invasive strand at a time, by the light of a miner’s lantern, using the tips of her fine steel tweezers. She wanted it perfect. She wanted it to glitter like emerald fire—just as that extraordinary moss cave had glittered for her and Tomorrow Morning, years before, in Tahiti.
    The Cave of Mosses became a popular exhibit at the Hortus, but only for a certain type of person: the type who longed for cool darkness, for silence, for reverie. (The type of person, in other words, who had little interest in showy blossoms, mammoth lily pads, or crowds of loud families.) Alma enjoyed perching in a corner of the cave and observing these sorts of people enter the world she had made. She saw them caress the pelts of moss, and watched their faces relax, their posture loosen. She felt an affinity with them—the quiet ones.
    During those years, Alma also spent a considerable amount of time working over her theory of competitive alteration. Uncle Dees had been urging her to publish the paper since he’d read it upon her arrival in 1854, but Alma had resisted then, and