The Signature of All Things

hour.
    On the seventh night, Alma was asleep in her own bed when Prudence—who had been sitting with Beatrix—came and woke her with a touch to the shoulder.
    “She’s speaking,” Prudence said.
    Alma shook her head, trying to establish where she was. She blinked at Prudence’s candle. Who was speaking? She had been dreaming of horses’ hooves and winged animals. She shook her head again, placed herself, remembered.
    “What is she saying?” Alma asked.
    “She asked me to leave the room,” Prudence said without emotion. “She asked for you.”
    Alma drew a shawl around her shoulders.
    “You sleep now,” she told Prudence, and took the candle into her mother’s room.
    Beatrix’s eyes were open. One of the eyes was shot red with blood. Thateye did not move. The other eye moved across Alma’s face, hunting, tracking carefully.
    “Mother,” Alma said, and looked around for something to give Beatrix to drink. There was a cup of cold tea on the bedside table, a remnant of Prudence’s recent vigil. Beatrix would not want blasted English tea, not even on her deathbed. Still, it was all there was to drink. Alma held the cup to her mother’s dry lips. Beatrix sipped and then, sure enough, frowned.
    “I’ll bring you coffee,” Alma apologized.
    Beatrix shook her head, only very slightly.
    “What can I bring you?” Alma asked.
    There was no response.
    “Do you want Hanneke?”
    Beatrix did not seem to hear, so Alma repeated the question, this time in Dutch.
    “ Zal ik Hanneke roepen? ”
    Beatrix shut her eyes.
    “ Zal ik Henry roepen? ”
    There was no response.
    Alma took her mother’s hand, which was cold and small. They had never before held hands. She waited. Beatrix did not open her eyes. Alma had nearly dozed off when her mother spoke, and in English.
    “Alma.”
    “Yes, Mother.”
    “Never leave.”
    “I won’t leave you.”
    But Beatrix shook her head. This is not what she had meant. Once more, she closed her eyes. Again, Alma waited, overcome with exhaustion in this dark room ripe with death. It was a long while before Beatrix found the strength to make her full statement.
    “Never leave your father,” she said.
    What could Alma say? What does one promise a woman on her deathbed? Especially if that woman is one’s mother? One promises anything.
    “I will never leave him,” Alma said.
    Beatrix searched Alma’s face again with her one good eye, as though weighing the sincerity of this vow. Evidently satisfied, she closed her eyes once more.
    Alma gave her mother another drop of opium. Beatrix’s breathing wasquite shallow now and her skin was cold. Alma was certain her mother had already spoken her last words, but nearly two hours later, when Alma had fallen asleep in the chair, she heard a gurgling cough, and woke with a start. She thought Beatrix was choking, but she was only trying to speak again. Once again, Alma wet Beatrix’s lips with the hated tea.
    Beatrix said, “My head spins.”
    Alma said, “Let me fetch Hanneke for you.”
    Astonishingly, Beatrix smiled. “No,” she said. “ Het is fijn. ”
    It is pleasant.
    Then Beatrix Whittaker closed her eyes, and—as though by her own decision—she died.
----
    T he next morning, Alma, Prudence, and Hanneke worked together to clean and dress the body, wrap it in the shroud, and prepare it for burial. It was silent, sad work.
    They did not lay out the body in the parlor for viewing, despite local custom. Beatrix would not have wished to be viewed, and Henry did not want to see his wife’s corpse. He could not bear it, he said. Moreover, in weather this hot a swift burial was the wisest and most hygienic course of action. Beatrix’s body had been moldering even before she’d died, and now they all feared a violent putrefaction. Hanneke dispatched one of White Acre’s carpenters to build a quick and simple coffin. The three women tucked sachets of lavender all throughout the winding-sheets in order to retard the smell, and as soon as the coffin was built, Beatrix’s body was loaded into a wagon and taken to the church, to be stored in the cool basement until the funeral. Alma, Prudence, and Hanneke wound black crepe mourning bands around their upper arms. They were to wear these bands for the next six months. The tightness of the material around her arm made Alma feel like a girded tree.
    On the afternoon of the funeral, they walked behind the wagon, following the coffin to the Swedish Lutheran graveyard. The burial