The Signature of All Things

you. I have found in life that when I speak of biology, they compare me to Newton. But when I speak of the spirit world, they call me a weak-minded, babyish idiot.”
    “Do not listen to them,” Alma said, and patted his hand protectively. “I have never liked it when they insult you.”
    He was quiet for a while, and then: “May I ask you something, Miss Whittaker?”
    She nodded.
    “May I ask how it is that you know so much about me? I do not wish you to think I am offended—on the contrary, I am flattered—but I simply cannot make sense of it. Your field is bryology, you see, and mine is not. Nor are you a spiritualist or a mesmerist. Yet you have such familiarity with all my writing across every possible field, and you also know my critics. You even know who my wife’s father is. Why could that be? I cannot put it together . . .”
    He trailed off, fearing, it appeared, that he had been impolite. She did not wish him to think that he’d been rude to an elderly woman. She did not wish him to think, either, that she was some unhinged old bat with an unseemly fixation. That being the case, what else could she do?
    She told him everything.
----
    W hen she was finished speaking at last, he was silent for a long while, and then asked, “Do you still have the paper?”
    “Certainly,” she said.
    “May I read it?” he asked.
    Slowly, without further conversation, they walked through the back gate of the Hortus, to Alma’s office. She unlocked the door, breathing heavily from the stairs, and invited Mr. Wallace to make himself comfortable at her desk. From under the divan in the corner, she retrieved a small, dusty, leather valise—as worn as though it had circled the world several times, which, indeed, it had—and opened it. Inside was but a single item: a forty-page document, handwritten, and gently swaddled in flannel, like an infant.
    Alma carried it over to Wallace, then settled herself comfortably on the divan while he read it. It took him a while. She must have dozed—as she did so often these days, and at the strangest moments—for she was startled awake by his voice sometime later.
    “When did you say that you wrote this, Miss Whittaker?” he asked.
    She rubbed her eyes. “The date is on the back,” she said. “I added things to it later, ideas and such, and those addenda are filed away in this office somewhere. But that which you hold in your hands is the original, which I wrote in 1854.”
    He considered this.
    “So Darwin was still the first,” he said at last.
    “Oh yes, absolutely,” said Alma. “Mr. Darwin was the first by far, and the most thorough. There has never been any question about that. Please understand, Mr. Wallace, I do not pretend to have a claim . . .”
    “But you arrived at this idea before me,” Wallace said. “Darwin beat us both, to be certain, but you arrived at the idea four years before me.”
    “Well . . .” Alma hesitated. “That is certainly not what I wish to say.”
    “But Miss Whittaker,” he said, and his voice grew bright with excitement and comprehension. “This means there were three of us!”
    For a moment, Alma could not breathe.
    In an instant, she was transported back to White Acre, to a fine autumn day in 1819—the day she and Prudence first met Retta Snow. They were all so young, and the sky was blue, and love had not yet grievously injured any of them. Retta had said, looking up at Alma with her shiny, living eyes, “So now there are three of us! What luck!”
    What was the song that Retta had invented for them?
We are fiddle, fork, and spoon,
We are dancing with the moon,
If you’d like to steal a kiss from us,
You’d better steal one soon!
    When Alma did not respond right away, Wallace came over and sat beside her.
    “Miss Whittaker,” he said, in a quieter voice. “Do you understand? There were three of us.”
    “Yes, Mr. Wallace. It appears that there were.”
    “This is a most extraordinary simultaneity.”
    “I’ve always thought so,” she said.
    He stared at the wall for a while, silent for another long spell.
    At last he asked, “Who else knows about this? Who can vouch for you?”
    “Only my uncle Dees.”
    “And where is your uncle Dees?”
    “Dead, you know,” said Alma, and she could not help but laugh. This was how Dees would have wanted her to say it. Oh, how she missed that stout old Dutchman. Oh, how he would have loved this moment.
    “But why did you never publish?” Wallace