The Signature of All Things

itself up tightly again—as always—as soon as the sisters were once more alone. It was hopeless to remedy. Sometimes, though, Alma could not help but imagine what life might have been like if Retta had been their sister—the littlest girl, the third girl, indulged and foolish, who could disarm everyone, and whisk them all into a state of warmth and affection. If only Retta had been a Whittaker, Alma thought, instead of a Snow! Maybeeverything would have been different. Maybe Alma and Prudence, under that familial arrangement, might have learned to be confidantes, intimates, friends . . . sisters!
    It was a thought that filled Alma with terrible sadness, but there was nothing to be done for it. Things could only be what they were, as her mother had taught her many times.
    As for things that could not be changed, they must stoically be endured.

Chapter Ten
    N ow it was late July of 1820.
    The United States of America was in economic recession, the first period of decline in its short history, and Henry Whittaker, for once, was not enjoying a glittering year of commerce. It was not that he had fallen upon hard times—not by any means—but he was feeling an unaccustomed sense of pressure. The market in exotic tropical plants was saturated in Philadelphia, and Europeans had grown bored of American botanical exports. Worse, it seemed that every Quaker in town these days was opening his own medical dispensary and manufacturing his own pills, ointments, and unguents. No rival had yet surpassed the popularity of Garrick & Whittaker products, but soon enough they might.
    Henry longed to have his wife’s advice on all this, but Beatrix had not been well all year. She suffered spells of dizziness, and with the summer so hot and uncomfortable, her condition worsened. Her capacity was lagging, and her breath was always short. She never complained, and she tried to keep up with her work, but she was not healthy, and she refused to see a doctor. She did not believe in doctors, pharmacists, or medicines—an irony, given the family trade.
    Henry’s health was not so capital, either. He was sixty years old now. His bouts of the old tropical maladies lasted longer these days. Dinner gatherings had become difficult to plan, as one could never be certainif Henry and Beatrix would be in the proper condition to receive guests. This made Henry angry and bored, and his anger made everything more difficult at White Acre. His temperamental outbursts were increasingly vitriolic. Somebody must pay! That bastard’s son is finished! I will see him destroyed! The maids ducked around corners and hid whenever they saw him coming.
    There was bad news from Europe, too. Henry’s international agent and emissary, Dick Yancey—the tall Yorkshireman who frightened Alma so much as a child—had recently arrived at White Acre with a most disturbing piece of intelligence: a pair of chemists in Paris had recently managed to isolate a substance they were calling “quinine,” found in the bark of the cinchona tree. They were claiming that this compound was the mysterious ingredient in Jesuit’s bark that was so effective at treating malaria. With this knowledge in hand, French chemists might soon be able to manufacture a better product from the bark—a more lightly powdered, more potent, more efficient product. They could easily undermine Henry’s dominance of the fever trade forever.
    Henry was berating himself (and berating Dick Yancey a bit, too) that they had not seen this coming. “We should have discovered this ourselves!” Henry said. But chemistry was not Henry’s field. He was an unrivaled arborist, a ruthless merchant, and a brilliant innovator, but try as he might, he could not stay abreast of every new bit of scientific progress in the world. Knowledge was advancing too quickly for him. Another Frenchman had recently patented a mathematical calculating machine called an arithometer , which could perform long division on its own. A Danish physicist had just announced that a relationship existed between electricity and magnetism, and Henry didn’t even understand what the man was talking about.
    In short, there were too many new inventions these days, and too many new ideas, all so complex and far-flung. One could no longer be an expert in generalities, making a handsome pudding of profit in all sorts of fields. It was enough to make Henry Whittaker feel old.
    But things were not all bad, either. Dick Yancey brought Henry one