The Signature of All Things

said.
    He stared at her blankly.
    Alma realized that, in her haste and agitation, she had just used Latin with this child. She corrected herself. “Bring me ammonium carbonate.”
    Again, the blank look. Alma spun and glanced at everyone else in the room. All she saw were confused faces. Nobody knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t using the right words. She searched her mind. She tried again.
    “Bring me spirit of hartshorn,” she said.
    But, no, that wasn’t the familiar term, either—or would not be for thesepeople. Hartshorn was an archaic usage, something only a scholar would know. She clenched shut her eyes and searched for the most recognizable possible name of what she wanted. What did ordinary people call it?Pliny the Elder had called it hammoniacus sal. Thirteenth-century alchemists used it all the time. But references to Pliny would be of no help in this situation, nor was thirteenth-century alchemy of much service to anyone in this room. Alma cursed her mind as a dustbin of dead languages and useless particulars. She was losing precious time here.
    Finally, she remembered. She opened her eyes and barked out a command that actually worked: “Smelling salts!” she cried. “Go! Find them! Bring them to me!”
    Quickly, the salts were produced. It took nearly less time to find them than it had taken Alma to name them.
    Alma wafted the crystals under her mother’s nose. With a wet, rattling gasp, Beatrix took a breath. The circle of maids and servants emitted various bleats and gasps of shock, and one woman shouted, “Praise God!”
    So Beatrix was not dead, but she remained senseless for the next week. Alma and Prudence took turns sitting with their mother, watching her throughout the days and the long nights. On the first night, Beatrix vomited in her sleep, and Alma cleaned her. She also wiped away the urine and the foul waste.
    Alma had never before seen her mother’s body—not beyond the face, the neck, the hands—but when she bathed the inanimate form on the bed, she could see that her mother’s breasts were misshapen with several hard lumps in each. Tumors. Large ones. One of the tumors had ulcerated through the skin, and was leaking a dark fluid. The sight of this made Alma feel as though she herself might topple over. The word for it came to her mind in Greek: Karkinos . The crab. Cancer. Beatrix must have been diseased for quite a long while. She must have been living in torment for months, if not years. She had never complained. She had merely excused herself from the table, on the days when the suffering became unbearable, and dismissed it as common vertigo.
    Hanneke de Groot barely slept at all that week, but brought compresses and broths at all hours. Hanneke wrapped fresh damp linens around Beatrix’s head, tended to the ulcerated breast, carried in buttered bread for the girls, tried to get liquids past Beatrix’s cracked lips. To her shame, Alma sometimesfelt a sense of restlessness at her mother’s side, but Hanneke patiently attended to all the duties of care. Beatrix and Hanneke had been together their whole lives. They had grown up side by side at the botanical gardens of Amsterdam. They had come together on the ship from Holland. They had both left their families behind to sail to Philadelphia, never again to see parents or siblings. At times, Hanneke wept over her mistress, and prayed in Dutch. Alma did not weep or pray. Nor did Prudence—not that anyone saw.
    Henry stormed in and out of the bedroom at all hours, undone and disquieted. He was of no assistance. It was much easier when he was gone. He would sit with his wife for only a few moments before crying out, “Oh, I cannot bear it!” and leaving in a storm of curses. He grew disheveled, but Alma had little time for him. She was watching her mother wither away beneath the fine Flemish bedlinens. This was no longer the formidable Beatrix van Devender Whittaker; this was a most miserable and insentient object, ripe with stink and sad with decline. After five days, Beatrix was seized with a total suppression of urine. Her abdomen grew swollen, hard, and hot. She could not live long now.
    A doctor arrived, sent by the pharmacist James Garrick, but Alma sent him away. It would do her mother no good to be bled and cupped now. Instead, Alma sent a message back to Mr. Garrick, requesting that he prepare for her a tincture of liquid opium that she could release into her mother’s mouth by small drops every