The Signature of All Things

She used old barrels for seats, rather than formal chairs, as she found them easier to get around with her skirts. She had a pair of marvelousGerman microscopes, which she had learned to operate—as George Hawkes had noticed!—with the deft touch of a master embroiderer. Initially the winters in the study had been unpleasant (cold enough that her ink wouldn’t flow), but Alma soon set herself up with a small Franklin stove, and she personally chinked up the cracks in the walls with dried moss, such that eventually her study became as cozy and lovely a refuge as anyone could hope for, all the year round.
    There in the carriage house Alma built up her herbarium, mastered her comprehension of taxonomy, and took on ever more detailed experiments. She read her copy of Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary so many times that the book itself took on the appearance of old, worn foliage. She studied the latest medical papers about the beneficial effects of digitalis on patients suffering from dropsy, and the use of copaibafor the treatment of venereal diseases. She worked on improving her botanical drawings—which were never exactly beautiful, but always beautifully exact. She worked with untiring diligence, her fingers speeding happily across her tablets and her lips moving as though in prayer.
    While the rest of White Acre flowed along in its customary activity and combat, these two locations—the binding closet and the carriage house study—became for Alma twin points of privacy and revelation. One room was for the body; one was for the mind. One room was small and windowless; the other airy and cheerfully lit. One room smelled of old glue; the other of fresh hay. One room brought forth secret thoughts; the other brought forth ideas that could be published and shared. The two rooms existed in separate buildings, divided by lawns and gardens, bisected by a wide gravel drive. Nobody would ever have seen their correlation.
    But both rooms belonged to Alma Whittaker alone, and in both rooms, she came into being.

Chapter Nine
    A lma was sitting at her desk in the carriage house one day in the autumn of 1819, reading the fourth volume of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s natural history of invertebrates, when she saw a figure crossing her mother’s Grecian garden.
    Alma was accustomed to White Acre workers passing by in their duties, and usually there was a partridge or a peacock picking about the grounds as well, but this creature was neither worker nor bird. It was a small, trim, dark-haired girl of about eighteen years, dressed in a most becoming rose-colored walking costume. As she strolled the garden, the girl carelessly swung a green-trimmed, tasseled parasol. It was difficult to be certain, but the girl seemed to be talking to herself. Alma put down Mr. Lamarck and watched. The stranger was not in any hurry, and, indeed, she eventually found a bench to sit upon, and then—more curious still— to lie upon , flat on her back. Alma watched, waiting for the girl to move, but it appeared she had fallen asleep.
    This was all quite strange. There were visitors at White Acre that week (an expert in carnivorous plants from Yale and a tedious scholar who had written a major treatise on greenhouse ventilation), but none of them had brought daughters. This girl was clearly not related to any of the workers around the estate, either. No gardener could afford to purchase his daughter such a fine parasol as that, and no laborer’s daughter would ever walk with such insouciance across Beatrix Whittaker’s prized Grecian garden.
    Intrigued, Alma left her work behind and walked outside. She approached the girl carefully, not wanting to startle her awake, but upon closer examination saw that the girl was not napping at all—just staring up at the sky, her head pillowed in a pile of glossy black curls.
    “Hello,” Alma said, peering down at her.
    “Oh, hello!” replied the girl, entirely unalarmed by Alma’s appearance. “I was just thanking goodness for this bench!”
    The girl popped up into a seated position, smiling brightly, and patted the spot beside her, inviting Alma to sit. Alma obediently sat down, studying her seatmate as she settled in. The girl was certainly a queer-looking thing. She had seemed prettier from a distance. True, she had a lovely figure, a magnificent head of hair, and an appealingly matched set of dimples, but from nearby one could see that her face was a bit flat and round—something like a