The Signature of All Things

stunning piece of good news during this visit: Sir Joseph Banks was dead.
    That daunting figure, who had once been the handsomest man in Europe, who had been the darling of kings, who had circled the globe, who had slept with heathen queens on open beaches, who had introducedthousands of new botanical species to England, and who had sent young Henry out into the world to become Henry Whittaker —that very man was dead.
    Dead and rotting in a crypt somewhere in Heston.
    Alma, who was sitting in her father’s study copying letters when Dick Yancey arrived and delivered this news, gasped in shock, and said, “May God rest him.”
    “May God curse him,” Henry corrected. “He tried to ruin me, but I beat him.”
    Without a doubt, Henry did seem to have beaten Sir Joseph Banks. At the least, he had matched him. Despite Banks’s wounding humiliations so many years earlier, Henry had prospered beyond all imagination. He had not merely been victorious in the cinchona trade, he maintained business interests in every corner of the world. He had become a name. Nearly all his neighbors owed him money. Senators, ship owners, and merchants of every sort sought his blessing, and longed for his patronage.
    Over the past three decades, Henry had created greenhouses in West Philadelphia that rivaled anything to be seen at Kew. He’d coaxed orchid varieties to bloom at White Acre that Banks had never found success with along the Thames. When Henry first heard that Banks had acquired a four-hundred-pound tortoise for the menagerie at Kew, he promptly ordered a pair of them for White Acre, secured in the Galapagos and personally delivered by the tireless Dick Yancey. Henry had even managed to bring the great water lilies of the Amazon to White Acre—water lilies so big and strong they could support a standing child—while Banks, at the time of his death, had never even seen the great water lilies.
    What’s more, Henry managed to live his life as richly as Banks ever did. He had conjured for himself a far larger and grander estate in America than anything Banks ever inhabited in England. His mansion shone on the hill like a colossal signal fire, casting its impressive light over the entire city of Philadelphia.
    Henry had even dressed like Sir Joseph Banks for many years now. He had never forgotten how dazzling that clothing had appeared to him as a boy, and he had made a point—over the course of his life as a rich man—to both imitate and surpass Banks’s wardrobe. As a result, by 1820, Henry was still wearing a style of clothing that was much out of date. When every otherman in America had long ago turned to simple trousers, Henry still wore silk stockings and breeches, elaborate white wigs with long queues, gleaming silver shoe buckles, deep-cuffed coats, blouses with broad ruffles, and brocaded vests in vivid shades of lavender and emerald.
    Dressed in this lordly yet antique manner, Henry looked positively quaint as he strode about Philadelphia in his colorful Georgian finery. He had been accused of looking like a waxwork exhibit from Peale’s Arcade, but he did not mind. This was precisely how he wanted to look—exactly as Sir Joseph Banks had first appeared to him in the offices of Kew, in 1776, when Henry the thief (thin, hungry, and ambitious) had been summoned before Banks the explorer (handsome, elegant, and sumptuous).
    But now Banks was dead. He was a dead baronet, to be sure, but he was still dead. Whereas Henry Whittaker—the poor-born, well-dressed emperor of American botany—was alive and prosperous. Yes, his leg ached, and his wife was ill, and the French were catching up to him in the malaria business, and the American banks were failing all around him, and he had a closetful of aging wigs, and he had never borne a son—but, by God, Henry Whittaker had defeated Sir Joseph Banks at last.
    He instructed Alma to go down to the wine cellar, to procure him the finest available bottle of rum, for celebratory purposes.
    “Make it two bottles,” he said, in afterthought.
    “Perhaps you ought not drink overly much this evening,” Alma warned, carefully. He had only recently recovered from a fever, and she did not like the look on her father’s face. It was a look of frightful emotional distortion.
    “We shall drink as much as we wish tonight, my old friend,” said Henry to Dick Yancey, as though Alma had not spoken at all.
    “ More than we wish,” said Yancey, giving Alma a warning look that chilled