The Signature of All Things

collecting kit of glass vials, tiny storage boxes, cotton wool, and writing tablets. She went out in all weather, because delights could be found in all weather. A late-April snowstorm one year brought the odd sound of songbirds and sleighbells mingled together, and this alone was worth leaving the house for. She learned that walking carefully in the mud to save one’s boots or the hems of one’s skirts never rewarded one’s search. She was never scolded for returning home with muddied boots and hems, so long as she came home with good specimens for her private herbarium.
    Soames the pony was Alma’s constant companion on these forays—sometimes carrying her through the forest, sometimes following along behind her like a large, well-mannered dog. In the summer, he wore splendid silk tassels in his ears, to keep out the flies. In the winter, he wore furbeneath his saddle. Soames was the best botanical collecting partner one could ever imagine, and Alma talked to him all day long. He would do absolutely anything for the girl, except move quickly. Only occasionally did he eat the specimens.
    In her ninth summer, completely on her own, Alma learned to tell time by the opening and closing of flowers. At five o’clock in the morning, she noticed, the goatsbeard petals always unfolded. At six o’clock, the daisies and globeflowers opened. When the clock struck seven, the dandelions would bloom. At eight o’clock, it was the scarlet pimpernel’s turn. Nine o’clock: chickweed. Ten o’clock: meadow saffron. By eleven o’clock, the process begins to reverse. At noon, the goatsbeard closed. At one o’clock, the chickweed closed. By three o’clock, the dandelions had folded. If Alma was not back to the house with her hands washed by five o’clock—when the globeflower closed and the evening primrose began to open—she would find herself in trouble.
    What Alma wanted to know most of all was how the world was regulated. What was the master clockwork behind everything? She picked flowers apart, and explored their innermost architecture. She did the same with insects, and with any carcass she ever found. One late September morning, Alma became fascinated by the sudden appearance of a crocus, a flower that she’d previously believed bloomed only in the spring. What a discovery! She could not get a satisfactory answer from anyone about what in heaven’s name these flowers thought they were doing, showing up here at the cold beginning of autumn, leafless and unprotected, just when all else was dying. “They are autumn crocuses,” Beatrix told her. Yes, clearly and obviously they were—but to what end? Why bloom now? Were they stupid flowers? Had they lost track of time? To what important office did this crocus need to attend, that it would suffer to put forth bloom during the first bitter nights of frost? Nobody could elucidate. “That is simply how the variety behaves,” Beatrix said, which Alma found to be an uncharacteristically unsatisfying answer. When Alma pushed further, Beatrix replied, “Not everything has an answer.”
    Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor. When she recovered herself, she drew the mysterious autumn crocus in her writing tablet, and dated her entry, along withher questions and protestations. She was quite diligent in this way. Things must be kept track of—even things one could not comprehend. Beatrix had instructed her that she must always record her findings in drawings as accurate as she could make them, categorized, whenever possible, by the correct taxonomy.
    Alma enjoyed the act of sketching, but her finished drawings often disappointed her. She could not draw faces or animals (even her butterflies looked truculent), though eventually she found that she was not awful at drawing plants. Her first successes were some quite good renderings of umbels—those hollow-stemmed, flat-flowered members of the carrot family. Her umbels were accurate, though she wished they were more than accurate; she wished they were beautiful. She said as much to her mother, who corrected her: “Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”
    Sometimes, in her forays through the woodlands, Alma encountered other children. This always alarmed her. She knew who these intruders were, though she never spoke to them. They were the children of her