The Signature of All Things

was brief, simple, efficient, and respectable. Fewer than a dozen people attended. James Garrick, the pharmacist, was there. He coughed terribly during the entire ceremony. His lungs were ruined, Alma knew, from years of working with the powdered jalap that had made him rich. Dick Yancey was there, his baldpate gleaming in the sun like a weapon. George Hawkes was there, and Alma wished she could have folded herself into his arms. To Alma’s surprise, her waxen erstwhile tutor Arthur Dixon was there, too. She could not imagine how Mr. Dixon had even heard about Beatrix’s death, nor did she realize he had ever been fond of his old employer, but she was touched that he had come, and she told him so. Retta Snow came, too. Retta stood between Alma and Prudence, holding a hand of each, and she remained uncharacteristically silent. In fact, Retta was nearly as stoic as a Whittaker that day, to her credit.
    There were no tears from anyone, nor would Beatrix have wanted any. From birth to death, Beatrix had always taught that one must exude credibility, forbearance, and restraint. It would have been a pity now, after this woman’s lifetime of respectability, for things to have gone mawkish at the last moment. Nor, after the funeral, would there be any gathering at White Acre, to drink lemonade and share in remembrances and comfort. Beatrix would not have wished for any of that. Alma knew that her mother had always admired the instructions that Linnaeus—the father of botanical taxonomy—had issued to his own family about his funeral arrangements: “Entertain nobody, and accept no condolences.”
    The coffin was lowered into the fresh clay grave. The Lutheran minister spoke. Liturgy, litany, the Apostles’ Creed—it went swiftly by. There was no eulogy, for that was not the Lutheran way, but there was a sermon, familiar and grim. Alma tried to listen, but the minister droned on until she felt stupefied, and only bits of the sermon rose to her ears. Sin is innate, she heard. Grace is a mystery of God’s bequeathing. Grace can be neither earned nor squandered, nor added to, nor diminished. Grace is rare. None shall know who has it. We are baptized unto death. We praise you.
    The hot summer sun, setting low, burned cruelly in Alma’s face. Everyone squinted in discomfort. Henry Whittaker was benumbed and bewildered. His only request had been this: once the coffin was in the hole, he’d asked that they cover the lid with straw. He wanted to make sure that, when the first shovelfuls of dirt hit his wife’s casket, the awful sound would be muffled.

Chapter Eleven
    A lma Whittaker, aged twenty, was now the mistress of the White Acre estate.
    She slipped into her mother’s old role as though she had trained a lifetime for it—which, in a sense, she had done.
    The day after Beatrix’s funeral, Alma entered her father’s study and started sifting through piles of accumulated paperwork and letters, resolved to immediately attend to all the tasks that Beatrix had traditionally executed. To her growing distress, Alma realized that a great deal of important work at White Acre—accounting, invoicing, correspondence—had been left untended in the past few months, even the past year, as Beatrix’s health had deteriorated. Alma cursed herself for not having noticed this earlier. Henry’s desk had always been a shamble of vital papers all mixed in with the jumble of uselessness, but Alma had not grasped how serious the disorder had grown until she investigated the study more deeply.
    Here is what she found: stacks of important papers had been spilling off Henry’s desk over the past few months and cumulating on the floor into something like geological strata. Horrifyingly, there were more boxes of unsorted papers hidden in deep closets. In her initial excavations, Alma found bills that had not been paid since the previous May, payrolls that had never been reckoned, and letters—such a thick sludge of letters!—from builders awaiting orders, from business partners with urgent questions,from collectors overseas, from lawyers, from the Patent Office, from botanical gardens across the world, and from various and sundry museum directors. If Alma had known earlier that so much correspondence was being neglected, she would have tended to it months ago. Now it was nearly at the level of crisis. At this very moment, a ship full of Whittaker botanicals was moored in the Philadelphia harbor, collecting steep docking fees, unable to