The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Alma went on. “But there was an additional provision written into the will. He directed that he would leave his estate to the Abolitionist Society only under the condition that the house at White Acre become a school for Negro children, and that you, Prudence, administer it.”

  Prudence stared at Alma penetratingly, as though looking for evidence of trickery on Alma’s face. Alma had no trouble arranging her countenance into an expression of truth, for indeed this was what the documents said—or, at least, this was what the documents said now.

  “He left a quite long letter of explanation,” Alma went on, “which I can summarize for you here. He said that he felt he’d done little good with his life, although he had prospered handsomely. He felt he’d offered the world nothing of value, in return for his own tremendous good fortune. He felt you would be the best person to see to it that White Acre, in the future, would become a seat of human kindness.”

  “He wrote those words?” Prudence asked, canny as ever. “Those very words, Alma? Our father, Henry Whittaker, referred to ‘a seat of human kindness’?”

  “Those very words,” Alma insisted. “The deeds and instructions have already been drawn up. If you do not accept these provisions—if you do not move back to White Acre along with your family, and take command over running a school there, as our father wished—then all the money and property simply reverts to the two of us, and we shall have to sell it all off or divide it some other way. That being the case, it seems a pity not to honor his wishes.”

  Prudence searched Alma’s face again. “I do not believe you,” she said at last.

  “You need not believe me,” Alma said. “Yet that is how it is. Hanneke will stay on to manage the household and ease you into the role of running White Acre. Father left Hanneke a most generous endowment, but I know she will wish to remain there and to help you. She is an admirer of yours, and she likes to be kept useful. The gardeners and landscapers will stay on, to maintain the property. The library will remain intact, for the betterment of the students. Mr. Dick Yancey will continue to administer our father’s overseas interests, and he will take over the Whittaker share of the pharmaceutical company, with all the profits flowing back into the school, into the salaries of the workers, and to abolitionist causes. Do you understand?”

  Prudence did not reply.

  Alma went on, “Ah, but there is but one more provision. Father has set aside a generous bequest to pay for the expenses of our friend Retta at the Griffon Asylum for the remainder of her days, such that George Hawkes should not suffer the burden of her care.”

  Now Prudence seemed to be losing control of something in her face. Her eyes grew damp, as did her hand, clasped in Alma’s.

  “There is nothing you can say,” Prudence said, “that will ever convince me that our father wished for any of these things.”

  Still, Alma did not back down. “Do not let it surprise you so. You know that he was an unpredictable man. And you will see, Prudence—the papers of ownership and the provisions of transfer are all quite clear and legal.”

  “I well know, Alma, that you yourself have a facility for drawing up clear legal papers.”

  “But you have known me for such a long while, Prudence. Have you ever known me to do anything in life beyond what our father permitted me to do, or instructed me to do? Think of it, Prudence! Have you ever?”

  Prudence looked away. Then her face collapsed upon itself, her reserve fractured at last, and she fell apart into tears. Alma pulled her sister—her extraordinary, brave, little-known sister—into her arms, and the two women stood for a long while, embracing in silence, while Prudence wept.

  At last, Prudence pulled away and wiped her eyes. “And what did he leave you, Alma?” she asked, her voice shaken. “What did that most generous father of ours leave you, amid this unexpected beneficence?”

  “Do not worry yourself with that now, Prudence. I have far more than I will ever need.”

  “But what did he leave you exactly? You must tell me.”

  “A bit of money,” Alma said. “And the carriage house, as well—or, rather, all of my possessions within it.”

  “Are you meant to live forever in a carriage house?” Prudence asked, overwhelmed and confused, and clutching again at Alma’s hand.

  “No, dear one. I shall not live anywhere near White Acre, ever again. It is all in your care now. But my books and my belongings will remain at the carriage house, while I go away for a while. Eventually I shall settle someplace, and then I shall send for all that I need.”

  “But where are you going?”

  Alma could not help but laugh. “Oh, Prudence,” she said. “If I were to tell you, you would only think I was mad!”

  Artocarpus incisa

  PART FOUR

  The Consequence of Missions

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Alma sailed for Tahiti on the thirteenth day of November, 1851.

  The Crystal Palace had just been erected in London for the Great Exhibition. Foucault’s pendulum was newly installed at the Paris Observatory. The first white man had recently glimpsed Yosemite Valley. A submarine telegraph cable was spooling across the Atlantic Ocean. John James Audubon was dead of old age; Richard Owen won the Copley Medal for his work on paleontology; the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania was about to graduate its first class of eight women doctors; and Alma Whittaker—aged fifty-one years—was a paying passenger on a whaling ship headed for the South Seas.

  She sailed without a maid, without a friend, without a guide. Hanneke de Groot had wept on Alma’s neck at the news she was leaving, but had quickly regained her senses and commissioned for Alma a collection of practical garments, including two specially made travel dresses: humble frocks of linen and wool, with reinforced buttons (not much different from what Hanneke had always worn), which Alma could tend without assistance. So attired, Alma rather resembled a servant herself, but she was exceedingly comfortable and could move about with ease. She wondered why she had not dressed this way her entire life. Once the travel dresses were completed, Alma instructed Hanneke to sew secret compartments into the hems of two of the dresses, which Alma used to conceal the gold and silver coins she would need to pay for her travels. These coins constituted a large portion of Alma’s remaining wealth in the world. It was not a fortune by any means, but it was enough—Alma dearly hoped—to sustain a frugal traveler for two or three years.

  “You have been always so kind to me,” Alma said to Hanneke, when the dresses were presented.

  “Well, I shall miss you,” Hanneke replied, “and I shall cry again when you go, but let us admit to it, child—we are both of us too old now to fear the great changes of life.”

  Prudence presented Alma with a commemorative bracelet, braided from strands of Prudence’s own hair (still as pale and beautiful as sugar) together with strands of Hanneke’s hair (gray as polished steel). Prudence knotted the bracelet herself onto Alma’s wrist, and Alma promised never to remove it.

  “I could not think of a more precious gift,” Alma said, and she meant it.

  Immediately upon making her decision to go to Tahiti, Alma had penned a letter to the missionary in Matavai Bay, the Reverend Francis Welles, alerting him that she would be coming for an indefinite period of time. She knew there was a strong chance she would arrive at Papeete before her letter did, but there was nothing to be done for it. She needed to sail before winter set in. She did not want to wait so long that she changed her mind. She could only hope that when she arrived in Tahiti, there would be a place for her to stay.

  It took her three weeks to pack. She knew precisely what to take, as she had been instructing botanical collectors for decades on the subject of safe and useful travel. Thus, she packed arsenical soap, cobbler’s wax, twine, camphor, forceps, cork, insect boxes, a plant press, several waterproof Indian rubber bags, two dozen durable pencils, three bottles of India ink, a tin of watercolor pigments, brushes, pins, nets, lenses, putty, brass wire, small scalpels, washing
flannels, silk thread, a medical kit, and twenty-five reams of paper (blotting, writing, plain brown). She considered bringing a gun, but as she was not an expert shot, she decided that a scalpel would have to do at close range.

  She heard her father’s voice as she prepared, remembering all the times she had taken dictation for him, or had overheard him instructing young botanists. Be wakeful and watchful, she heard Henry say. Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood.

  Alma knew to wear light colors in the tropics in order to stay cool. She knew that soapsuds worked into fabric and dried overnight would waterproof clothing perfectly. She knew to wear flannel next to the skin. She knew that it would be appreciated if she took gifts for both the missionaries (recent newspapers, vegetable seeds, quinine, hand axes, and glass bottles) and the natives (calico, buttons, mirrors, and ribbon). She packed one of her beloved microscopes—the lightest one—though she much feared it would be destroyed on the journey. She packed a gleaming new chronometer and a smallish traveling thermometer.

  All of this, she loaded into trunks and wooden boxes (cushioned lovingly with dried moss) which she then stacked into a small pyramid just outside the carriage house. Alma felt a quiver of panic when she saw her life’s essentials reduced to such a minimal pile. How could she survive with so little? What would she do without her library? Without her herbarium? How would it feel to wait sometimes six months for news of family, or of science? What if the ship should sink, and all these essentials be lost? She felt a sudden sympathy for all the intrepid young men the Whittakers had sent out on collecting expeditions in the past—for the fear and uncertainty they must have felt, even as they purported to be confident. Some of those young men had never been heard from again.

  In her preparations and packing, Alma made certain to give herself every appearance of a botaniste voyageuse, but the truth was, she was not going to Tahiti to search for plants. Her actual motive could be found in one item, buried at the bottom of one of the larger boxes: Ambrose’s leather valise, buckled securely, and filled with the drawings of the nude Tahitian boy. She intended to look for that boy (whom she had come to refer to in her mind as The Boy) and she was certain that she could find him. She intended to search for The Boy across the entire island of Tahiti if necessary, searching for him almost botanically, as though he were a rare orchid specimen. She would recognize him as soon as she saw him, she plainly knew. She would know that face till the end of her days. Ambrose had been a brilliant artist, after all, and the features were so vividly depicted. It was as if Ambrose had left her a map, and now she was following it.

  She did not know what she would do with The Boy once she had found him. But she would find him.

  * * *

  Alma took the train to Boston, spent three nights in an inexpensive harbor hotel (redolent of gin, tobacco, and the sweat of former guests) and then embarked from there. Her ship was the Elliot—a 120-foot whaler, broad and sturdy as an old mare—heading to the Marquesas Islands for the dozenth time since she had been built. The captain had agreed, for a handsome fee, to sail 850 miles out of his way and deliver Alma to Tahiti.

  The captain was a Mr. Terrence, out of Nantucket. He was a sailor much admired by Dick Yancey, who had secured Alma her place on his vessel. Mr. Terrence was as hard as a captain should be, Yancey promised, and he enforced better discipline in his men than most. Terrence was known more for being daring than careful (he was famous for raising his canvases in a storm, rather than subtracting them, in the hopes of gaining speed from the gales), but he was a religious man and a sober one, who strove for a high moral tone at sea. Dick Yancey trusted him and had sailed with him many times. Dick Yancey, who was always in a hurry, preferred captains who sailed fast and fearlessly, and Terrence was just such a type.

  Alma had never before been on a ship. Or, rather, she had been on many ships, when she used to go with her father down to the docks of Philadelphia to inspect arriving cargo, but she had never sailed on a ship before. When the Elliot pulled out of its slip, she stood on the deck with her heart drumming as though to burst from her chest. She watched as the last of the dock’s piles were ahead of her, and then—with breathtaking swiftness—were suddenly behind her. Then they were flying across the great Boston harbor, with smaller fishing boats bobbing in their wake. By the close of the afternoon, Alma was on the open ocean for the first time in her life.

  “I will pay you every service in my power to make you comfortable on this voyage,” Captain Terrence had sworn to Alma when first she boarded. She appreciated his solicitousness, but it soon became clear there was not much that would be comfortable about this journey. Her berth, right next to the captain’s stateroom, was small and dark, and reeked of sewage. The drinking water smelled of a pond. The ship was carrying a cargo of mules to New Orleans, and the animals were unrelenting in their complaints. The food was both unpleasant and binding (turnips and salt biscuits for breakfast; dried beef and onions for dinner) and the weather was, at best, an uncertain affair. For the first three weeks of the journey she did not once see the sun. Immediately, the Elliot encountered gales that broke crockery and knocked sailors about at a most remarkable rate. She sometimes had to tie herself to the captain’s table in order to eat her dried beef and onions in safety. She ate it gallantly, though, and without complaint.

  There was not another woman on board, nor an educated man. The sailors played cards long into the night, laughing and shouting and keeping her awake. Sometimes the men danced on the deck like spirits possessed, until Captain Terrence threatened to break their fiddles if they did not stop. They were all rough sorts, aboard the Elliot. One of the sailors caught a hawk off the coast of North Carolina, cut its wings, and watched it hop across the deck, for sport. Alma found this barbaric, but she said nothing. The next day, the sailors, bored and distracted, staged a wedding between two mules, decorating the animals in festive paper collars for the event. There was a fine ruckus of hooting and yelling. The captain let it happen; he saw no harm in it (perhaps, Alma thought, because it was a Christian wedding). Alma had never before in her life seen the likes of such behavior.

  There was nobody for Alma to speak to of serious matters, so she decided to stop speaking of serious matters. She resolved to be of good cheer and to make simple conversation with everyone. She vowed to make no enemies. As they would all be at sea together for the next five to seven months, this looked to be a sensible strategy. She even allowed herself to laugh at jests, so long as the men were not too coarse. She did not worry about coming to harm; Captain Terrence would not permit familiarity, and the men displayed no licentiousness toward Alma. (This did not surprise her. If men had not been interested in Alma at nineteen years, surely none would take notice of her at fifty-one.)

  Her closest companion was the small monkey that Captain Terrence kept as a pet. His name was Little Nick, and he would sit with Alma for hours, picking over her gently, always looking for new and odd things. He had a most intelligent and curious disposition. More than anything, the monkey was fascinated by the woven-hair bracelet that Alma wore around her wrist. He could never get over his perplexion that there was not a similar bracelet on her other wrist—although every morning he checked to see if a bracelet had grown there during the night. Then he would sigh and give Alma a resigned look, as though to say, “Why can you not just once be symmetrical?” Over time, Alma learned to share her snuff with Little Nick. He would daintily place a crumb of it in one of his nostrils, sneeze cleansingly, and then fall asleep in her lap. She did not know what she would have done without his company.r />
  They rounded the tip of Florida and stopped in New Orleans to deliver the mules. Nobody mourned to see the mules go. In New Orleans, Alma saw the most extraordinary fog over Lake Pontchartrain. She saw bales of cotton and casks of cane sugar piled on the wharfs, awaiting shipment. She saw steamboats lined up in rows, as far as the eye could see, waiting to paddle up the Mississippi. She found good use for her French in New Orleans, though the accent was confusing. She admired the little houses with their gardens of seashells and clipped shrubbery, and she was dazzled by the women with their elaborate fashions. She wished she had more time for exploration, but was all too soon ordered back on board.

  Southward they sailed along the coast of Mexico. An outbreak of fever swept the ship. Scarcely anyone escaped it. There was a doctor on board, but he was more than useless, and so Alma soon found herself dispensing treatments from her own precious cache of purgatives and emetics. She did not think of herself as much of a nurse, but she was a fairly capable pharmacist, and her assistance won her a small group of admirers.

  Soon Alma herself fell ill, and was forced to keep to her berth. Her fevers gave her distant dreams and vivid fears. She could not keep her hands away from her quim, and woke in paroxysms of both pain and pleasure. She dreamed constantly of Ambrose. She had been making a heroic effort not to think of him, but the fever weakened the fortress of her mind, and his memory forced itself in—but distorted horribly. In her dreams, she saw him in the bathtub—just as she had seen him, nude, that one afternoon—but now his penis grew beautiful and erect, and he grinned at her lecherously while bidding her to suck him until she choked for breath. In other dreams, she watched Ambrose drown in the bathtub, and she woke in a panic, feeling certain she had murdered him. She heard his voice one night whispering, “So now you are the child and I am the mother,” and she woke with a scream, arms flailing. But nobody was there. His voice had been in German. Why would it be in German? What did it mean? She lay awake the rest of the night, struggling to comprehend the word mother—Mutter, in German—a word that, in alchemy, also meant “crucible.” She could make no sense of the dream, but it felt most heavily like a curse.