The Signature of All Things

center of the solar system, “Give the girl a place! ”
    Pontesilli shrugged. “You are a comet!” he called down to Alma, while still making a pretense of conducting the universe with one waving arm.
    “What does a comet do, sir?”
    “You fly about in all directions!” the Italian commanded.
    And so she did. She propelled herself into the midst of the planets, ducking and swiveling through everyone’s orbits, scuttling and twirling, the ribbon unfurling from her hair. Whenever she neared her father, he would cry, “Not so close to me, Plum, or you will burn to cinders!” and he would pushher away from his fiery, combustible self, impelling her to run in another direction.
    Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos—the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.
    Nobody stopped her.
    She was a comet.
    She did not know that she was not flying.

Chapter Six
    A lma’s youth—or rather, the simplest and most innocent part of it—came to an abrupt end in November of 1809, in the small hours of the night, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.
    Alma awoke from a deep sleep to raised voices and the sound of carriage wheels dragging through gravel. In places where the house should have been silent at such an hour (the hallway outside her bedroom door, for instance, and the servants’ quarters upstairs) there was a skittering of footsteps from all directions. She arose in the cold air, lit a candle, found her leather boots, and reached for a shawl. Her instinct was that some sort of trouble had come to White Acre, and that her assistance might be needed. Later in life, she would recall the absurdity of this notion (how could she have honestly believed she could help with anything?), but at that time, in her mind, she was a young lady of nearly ten years, and she still had a certain confidence in her own importance.
    When Alma arrived at the top of the wide staircase she saw below her, in the grand entryway to the home, a gathering of men holding lanterns. Her father, wearing a greatcoat over his night clothes, stood at the center of them all, his face tense with irritation. Hanneke de Groot was there as well, her hair in a cap. Alma’s mother was there, too. This must be serious, then; Alma had never seen her mother awake at this hour.
    But there was something else, and Alma’s eyes went straight to it—a girl, slightly smaller than Alma, with a white-blond plait of hair down her back,stood between Beatrix and Hanneke. The women had one hand each upon the girl’s slender shoulders. Alma thought the child looked somehow familiar. The daughter of one of the workers, possibly? Alma could not be sure. The girl, whoever she was, had the most beautiful face—though that face seemed shocked and fearful in the lamplight.
    What brought disquiet to Alma, however, was not the girl’s fear, but rather the proprietary firmness of Beatrix’s and Hanneke’s grips on the child’s shoulders. As a man approached as though to reach for the girl, the two women closed in tighter, clutching the child harder. The man retreated—and he was wise to, Alma thought, for she had just gotten a glimpse of the expression on her mother’s face: unyielding fierceness. The same expression was on Hanneke’s face. It was that shared expression of fierceness on the faces of the two most important women in Alma’s life that shot her through with unaccountable dread. Something alarming was happening here.
    At that point, Beatrix and Hanneke both turned their heads simultaneously, and looked to the top of the staircase, where Alma stood, staring dumbly, holding her candle and her sturdy boots. They turned toward her as though Alma had called out their names, and as though they did not welcome the interruption.
    “Go to bed ,” they both barked—Beatrix in English, Hanneke in Dutch.
    Alma might have protested, but she was helpless against the power of their united force. Their tight, hardened faces frightened her. She had never seen anything quite like it. She was neither needed nor wanted here, it was clear.
    Alma took one more anxious look at the beautiful child in the center of the crowded hall of strangers, then fled to her room. For a long hour, she sat on the edge of her bed,