The Signature of All Things

more children during the conflict. The war ended. The president was assassinated. The union held. The transcontinental railroad was completed. Alma thought perhaps that was what would keep the United States sewn together now—the rough, steel stitches of the mighty railroad. These days America seemed, from Alma’s safe distance, to be a place of uncontrollable, ferocious growth. She was happy not to be there. America was a lifetime ago; she did not think she would recognize the place anymore, nor would it recognize her. She liked her life as a Dutchwoman, as a scholar, as a van Devender. She read every scientific journal, and published in many of them. She had lively discussions with her colleagues, over coffee and pastry. Every summer, the Hortus granted her a month’s leave to go gathering mosses across the Continent. She came to know the Alps quite well, and came to love them, as she tramped across their majesty with her cane and her collecting kit. She came to know the fern-damp woods of Germany, too.
    She had grown into a most contented old lady.
    The 1870s arrived. In peaceful Amsterdam, Alma entered the eighth decade of her life, but remained committed to her work. She found it difficult to hike anymore, but she tended to her Cave of Mosses, and gave occasional lectures at the Hortus on the subject of bryology. Her eyes began to fail, and she worried that she would no longer be able to identify mosses. In anticipation of this sad inevitability, she practiced working with her mosses in the dark, to learn to identify them by touch. She became quite adept at it. (She did not need to see mosses forever, but she would always want to know them.) Fortunately, she had excellent help with her work now. Her favorite young cousin, Margaret—fondly nicknamed Mimi—revealed an innate fascination with mosses, and soon became Alma’s protégée. When the girl finished her studies, she came to work with Alma at the Hortus; with Mimi’sassistance, Alma was able to complete her comprehensive, two-volume The Mosses of Northern Europe , which was well received. The volumes were prettily illustrated, though the artist was no Ambrose Pike.
    But nobody was Ambrose Pike. Nobody ever would be.
    Alma watched as Charles Darwin became ever more the great man of science. She did not begrudge his success; he deserved the praise, and carried himself with dignity. He kept at his work on evolution, which she was pleased to see, with his typical blend of excellence and discretion. In 1871, he published the exhaustive The Descent of Man —in which he finally applied his principles of natural selection to humans. He was wise to have waited this long, Alma thought. By this point, the book’s final determination ( Yes, we are apes ) was almost a foregone conclusion. In the dozen years since Origin had first appeared, the world had been anticipating and debating “The Monkey Question.” Sides had been drawn, papers had been written, and endless rebuttals and arguments had been brought forth. It was almost as though Darwin had waited for the world to adapt to the unsettling notion that God might not have created mankind from dust, before delivering his calm, well-ordered, carefully argued verdict on the matter. Alma, once more, read the book as closely as anyone, and much admired it.
    Still, though, she did not see a solution to the Prudence Problem.
    She never told anyone about her own evolutionary theory—and about her own small, tenuous connection to Darwin. She still was far more interested in her shadow brother, Alfred Russel Wallace. She had watched his career carefully over the years too, taking vicarious pride in his successes, and feeling distress at his failures. At first, it had seemed that Wallace would be forever Darwin’s footnote—or even footman, insomuch as he spent a good part of the 1860s writing papers defending natural selection, and, by extension, Darwin. But then Wallace took an odd turn. In the middle of that decade, he discovered spiritualism, hypnotism, and mesmerism, and began exploring what more respectable people called “the occult.” Alma could nearly hear Charles Darwin groaning at this development from across the Channel—for the two men’s names were forever to be linked, and Wallace had taken off on a very disreputable and unscientific flight of fancy indeed. The fact that Wallace attended séances and palm readings, and swore that he had spoken to the dead, was perhaps pardonable, but the fact