The Signature of All Things

interesting version of a tail in reply.
    Alma had to admit: Roger likely would rescue Uncle Dees if he were drowning in a canal, or trapped in a fire, or starving in a prison, or pinned beneath a collapsed building—and Dees would certainly do the same for him. The love between Uncle Dees and Roger was every bit as enduring as it had been immediate. They were never to be seen apart, man and dog, not since the moment of their introduction. Very quickly after their arrival in Amsterdamfour years earlier, Roger had given Alma to understand that he was no longer her dog—that, in fact, he had never been her dog, nor had he ever been Ambrose’s dog, but that he had been Dees’s dog all along, by force of pure and plain destiny. The fact that Roger was born in distant Tahiti, whereas Dees van Devender resided in Holland, had been the result, Roger appeared to believe, of an unfortunate clerical error, now thankfully rectified.
    As for Alma’s role in Roger’s life, she had merely been a courier, responsible for transporting the anxious little orange fellow halfway around the world, in order to unite dog and man in the eternal and devoted love that was their rightful due.
    Eternal and devoted love.
    Why?
    Roger was another one Alma couldn’t figure out.
    Roger and Prudence, both.
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    T he summer of 1858 arrived, and with it a sudden season of death. The sorrows began on the last day of June, when Alma received a letter from her sister, delivering an awful compendium of sad news.
    “I have three deaths to report,” Prudence warned in the first line. “Perhaps, sister, you had best sit down before you read on.”
    Alma did not sit down. She stood in the doorway of the van Devender residence on Plantage Parklaan, reading this lamentable communication from distant Philadelphia, while her hands shook in distress.
    Firstly, Prudence reported, Hanneke de Groot was dead at the age of eighty-seven. The old housekeeper had passed in her rooms in the basement of White Acre, safe behind the bars of her private vault. She appeared to have died in her sleep, and without suffering.
    “We cannot conceive of how we shall carry on here without her,” Prudence wrote. “I need not remind you of her goodness and value. She was as a mother to me, as I know she was to you.”
    But scarcely had Hanneke’s body been discovered, Prudence wrote on, than a boy arrived at White Acre with a message from George Hawkes that Retta—“transformed these many years by madness, beyond all recognition”—had expired in her room at the Griffon Asylum for the Insane.
    Prudence wrote, “It is challenging to know what one should regret morearduously: Retta’s death, or the sad circumstances of her life. I strive to remember the Retta of long ago, so gay and carefree. Scarcely can I see her in my imagination as that girl, before her mind became so dreadfully clouded . . . for that was so long ago, as I have said, when we were all so young.”
    Then came the most shocking news. Not two days after Retta’s death, Prudence reported, George Hawkes himself had died. He had just come from Griffon’s, straight from making arrangements for his wife’s funeral, and had collapsed on the street in front of his printing shop. He was sixty-seven years old.
    “I apologize that it has taken me more than a week to write you this unhappy missive,” Prudence concluded, “but my mind is beset by so many thoughts and distresses that it has been difficult for me to proceed. It staggers one’s mind. We are all grievously shocked here. Perhaps I have delayed so long in writing this letter because I could not help but think: Every day that I do not tell my poor sister this news, she does not have to bear it. I search my heart for a peppercorn’s worth of comfort to offer you, but find it difficult to come by. I scarcely can find comfort for myself. May the Lord receive and preserve them all. I am at a loss for what else to say, please forgive me. The school continues well. The students thrive. Mr. Dixon and the children send their abiding affection—most sincerely, Prudence.”
    Now Alma did sit, and she put down the letter beside her.
    Hanneke, Retta, and George—all gone, in one sweep of the hand.
    “Poor Prudence,” Alma murmured aloud.
    Poor Prudence, indeed, to have lost George Hawkes forever. Of course, Prudence had lost George long ago, but now she had lost him again, and this time forever. Prudence had never stopped loving George, nor he