The Signature of All Things

ofunbefitting manner. Eventually she was satisfied: young Dixon was a perfectly boring wizard of academics, who did not appear to be in possession of a single callow or jocular bone. He could be utterly trusted, then, to teach the Whittaker girls, four days a week, a rotating coursework of natural philosophy, Latin, French, Greek, chemistry, astronomy, mineralogy, botany, and history. Alma was also given special extra work in optics, algebra, and spherical geometry, from which Prudence—in a rare gesture of mercy on Beatrix’s part—was spared.
    On Fridays, there was a departure from this schedule, when a drawing master, a dancing master, and a music master paid visits, to round out the girls’ educational curriculum. Mornings, the girls were expected to work alongside their mother in her own private Grecian garden—a triumph of functional mathematics that Beatrix was attempting to arrange, with pathways and topiary, according to strict Euclidean principles of symmetry (all balls and cones and complex triangles, clipped and rigid and exact). The girls were also required to devote several hours a week to improving their needlework skills. During the evenings, Alma and Prudence were called upon to sit at the formal dining table and engage intelligently with dinner guests from all over the world. If there were no guests at White Acre, Alma and Prudence passed their evenings in the drawing room, staying up late into the night, assisting their father and mother with official White Acre correspondence. Sundays were for church. Bedtime brought a long round of nightly prayers.
    Apart from that, their time was their own.
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    B ut it was not such a trying schedule, really—not for Alma. She was an energetic and engaging young lady, who needed little rest. She enjoyed the work of the mind, enjoyed the labor of gardening, and enjoyed the conversations at the dinner gatherings. She was always happy to spend time helping her father with his correspondence late at night (as this was sometimes her only chance to engage intimately with the man anymore). Somehow she even managed to find hours for herself, and in those hours she created inventive little botanical projects. She toyed with cuttings of willow trees, pondering how it was that they sometimes cast out roots from their buds, and sometimes from their leaves. She dissected and memorized, preservedand categorized, every plant in reach. She built a beautiful hortus siccus— a splendid little dried herbarium.
    Alma loved botany, more by the day. It was not so much the beauty of plants that compelled her as their magical orderliness. Alma was a girl possessed by a soaring enthusiasm for systems, sequence, pigeonholing, and indexes; botany provided ample opportunity to indulge in all these pleasures. She appreciated how, once you had put a plant into the correct taxonomical order, it stayed in order. There were serious mathematical rules inherent in the symmetry of plants, too, and Alma found serenity and reverence in these rules. In every species, for instance, there is a fixed ratio between the teeth of the calyx and the divisions of the corolla, and that ratio never changes. One could set one’s clock to it. It was an abiding, comforting, unfaltering law.
    If anything, Alma wished she had even more time to devote to the study of plants. She had bizarre fantasies. She wished that she lived in an army barracks of natural sciences, where she would be woken at dawn by a bugle call and marched off in formation with other young naturalists, in uniforms, to labor all day in woods, streams, and laboratories. She wished that she lived in a botanical monastery or a botanical convent of sorts, surrounded by other devoted taxonomists, where no one interfered with one another’s studies, yet all shared their most exciting findings with each other. Even a botanical prison would be nice! (It did not occur to Alma that such places of intellectual asylum and walled isolation did exist in the world, to a point, and that they were called “universities.” But little girls in 1810 did not dream of universities. Not even Beatrix Whittaker’s little girls.)
    So Alma did not mind working hard. But she actively disliked Fridays. Art classes, dancing classes, music classes—all these exertions irritated her, and pulled her from her true interests. She was not graceful. She could not entirely tell one famous painting from another, nor did she ever learn to draw faces without making her