The Signature of All Things

to learn how to take more care with their own lives.

Chapter Fourteen
    L ater that month, Alma received a note from George Hawkes, asking that she please come to Arch Street, in order to visit his printing shop and see something quite extraordinary.
    “I shall not spoil the incredibility of it by telling you more at this point,” he wrote, “but I believe you would enjoy viewing this in person, and at your leisure.”
    Well, Alma had no leisure. Neither did George, though—which is why this note was most unprecedented. In the past, George had contacted Alma only for publishing matters, or emergencies regarding Retta. But there had been no emergencies with Retta since they had placed her at Griffon’s, and Alma and George were not working on a book together at the moment. What, then, could be so urgent?
    Intrigued, she took a carriage to Arch Street.
    She found George in a back room, hulking over a long table covered with the most dazzling multiplication of shapes and colors. As Alma approached, she could see that this was an enormous collection of paintings of orchids, stacked in tall piles. Not only paintings, but lithographs, drawings, and etchings.
    “This is the most beautiful work I have ever seen,” George said, by means of a greeting. “It’s just come in yesterday, from Boston. It’s such an odd story. Look at this mastery!”
    George thrust into Alma’s hand a lithograph of a spotted Catasetum .The orchid had been rendered so magnificently that it seemed to grow off the page. Its lips were spotted red against yellow, and appeared moist, like living flesh. Its leaves were lush and thick, and its bulbous roots looked as though one could shake actual soil off them. Before Alma could thoroughly take in the beauty, George handed her another stunning print—a Peristeria barkeri , with its tumbling golden blossoms so fresh they nearly trembled. Whoever had tinted this lithograph had been a master of texture as well as color; the petals resembled unshorn velvet, and touches of albumen on their tips gave each blossom a hint of dew.
    Then George handed her another print, and Alma could not help but gasp. Whatever this orchid was, Alma had never seen it before. Its tiny pink lobes looked like something a fairy would don for a fancy dress ball. She had never seen such complexity, such delicacy. Alma knew lithographs, and knew them well. She had been born only four years after the technique was invented, and she had collected for the library at White Acre some of the finest lithography the world had yet produced. She believed she well understood the technical limitations of the medium, yet these prints proved her wrong. George Hawkes knew lithography, too. Nobody in Philadelphia had mastered it better than he. Yet his hand shook as he reached to give Alma another sheet, another orchid. He wanted her to see all of this, and he wanted her to see it all at once. Alma was desperate to keep looking, but she needed to better understand the situation first.
    “Wait, George, let us pause for a moment. You must tell me—who made these?” Alma asked. She knew all the best botanical illustrators, but she did not know this artist. Not even Walter Hood Fitch could create work like this. If she had ever before seen the likes of it, she most certainly would have remembered.
    “The most extraordinary fellow, it seems,” George said. “His name is Ambrose Pike.”
    Alma had never heard the name.
    “Who publishes his work?” she asked.
    “Nobody!”
    “Who has commissioned this work, then?”
    “It is not clear that anyone has commissioned it,” George said. “Mr. Pike made the lithographs himself, in a friend’s print shop in Boston. He found the orchids, executed the sketches, made the prints, and even did the tintwork on his own. He sent all this work to me without a good deal more explanation than that. It arrived yesterday in the most innocuous box you have ever seen. I nearly toppled over when I opened it, as you can imagine. Mr. Pike has been in Guatemala and Mexico for these past eighteen years, he says, and only recently returned home to Massachusetts. The orchids he has documented here are the result of his time in the jungle. Nobody knows of him. We must bring him to Philadelphia, Alma. Perhaps you could invite him to White Acre? His letter was most humble. He has put the entirety of his life toward this endeavor. He wonders if I might publish it for him.”
    “You will publish, won’t you?” Alma