The Signature of All Things

him herself, and which she had tearfully tried to feed him by hand. He turned his head to the wall and closed his eyes. She touched his head, spoke to him in Tahitian, and reminded him of his noble lineage, but he did not respond in the least. Within a matter of days, Roger was gone, too.
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    W ere it not for the black cloud of death that swept across Alma’s landscape in that summer of 1858, she almost certainly would have heard about the proceedings of the Linnean Society of London on July 1 of that year. She generally made a point of reading notes from all the more important scientific gatherings across Europe and America. But her mind was—forgivably—much distracted that summer. Journals piled on her desk unread, as she grieved. Looking after her Cave of Mosses absorbed whatever scant energy she could muster. Much else went unattended.
    And thus she’d missed it.
    In fact, she would hear nothing of it until one morning in late December of the following year, when she opened her copy of The Times and read a review of a new book, by Mr. Charles Darwin, entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life .

Chapter Thirty
    O f course Alma knew of Charles Darwin; everyone did. In 1839, he’d published a quite popular travel book about his journey to the Galápagos Islands. The book—a charming account—had made him rather famous at the time. Darwin had a light hand on the page, and he’d managed to convey his delight with the natural world in a comfortable and friendly tone that had welcomed readers of all backgrounds. Alma remembered admiring that talent of Darwin’s, for she herself could never come close to writing such entertaining, democratic prose.
    Reflecting back on it now, what Alma remembered most clearly from The Voyage of the Beagle was a description of penguins swimming at night through phosphorescent waters, leaving, Darwin wrote, a “fiery wake” in the darkness. A fiery wake! Alma had appreciated that description, and it had stayed with her these last twenty years. She’d even recalled the phrase during her voyage to Tahiti, that marvelous night on the Elliot , when she had witnessed such phosphorescence herself. But she did not remember much else about the book, and Darwin had not distinguished himself to any extraordinary extent since. He had retired from travel to a life of more scholarly pursuits—some fine and careful work on barnacles, if Alma recalled correctly. She had certainly never considered him the major naturalist of his generation.
    But now, upon reading the review of this new and startling book, Almadiscovered that Charles Darwin—that soft-spoken barnacle aficionado, that gentle penguin lover—had been hiding his cards. As it turned out, he had something quite momentous to offer the world.
    Alma put down the newspaper and rested her head in her hands.
    A fiery wake, indeed.
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    I t took her nearly a week to get a copy of the actual book from England, and Alma waded through those days as though in a trance. She felt she would not be able to produce an adequate reaction to this turn of events until she could read—word for word—what Darwin himself had to say, rather than what was already being said about him.
    On January 5—her sixtieth birthday—the book arrived. Alma retired to her office with enough food and drink to sustain her for as long as necessary, and locked herself inside. Then she opened On the Origin of Species to the first page, began to read Darwin’s lovely prose, and from there fell downward into a deep cavern that resounded from every side with her own ideas.
    He had not stolen her theory, needless to say. Not for a moment did that absurd thought even cross her mind—for Charles Darwin had never heard of Alma Whittaker, nor should he have. But like two explorers seeking the same treasure trove from two different directions, she and Darwin had both stumbled on the identical chest of riches. What she had deduced from mosses, he had deduced from finches. What she had observed in the boulder fields of White Acre, he’d seen repeated in the Galápagos Archipelago. Her boulder field was naught but an archipelago itself, writ in miniature. An island is an island, after all—whether it is three feet or three miles across—and all the most dramatic events in the natural world occur on the wild, competitive, tiny battlefields of islands.
    It was a beautiful book. She