The Signature of All Things

In November 1809, Alma’s parents adopt a young orphan. The girl, Polly, is the daughter of a woman whose husband murdered her for infidelity before hanging himself. Beatrix renames the girl Prudence and decides to give her a respectable future. Alma does not welcome Prudence, whose beauty makes Alma realize she is not pretty, and Beatrix admonishes Alma to improve herself. Beatrix also improves Prudence by providing her with education by a tutor named Arthur Dixon.

Although she is not as lovely or as well-mannered as Prudence, Alma takes consolation in her superior intelligence. Alma is an “energetic and engaging young lady” (79) who enjoys learning and creating botanical projects. Where Prudence might be more artistic or grateful, Alma enjoys interrogating guests at the dinner table. Thus, their identities are established: Prudence is known as the beautiful one, and Alma is the clever one, which is a more valuable attribute in Henry’s eyes. The girls treat each other with politeness but never become friends, and instead they “[limp] along side by side in silence, each girl left alone to grope through her own deficiencies and troubles” (84).

Henry continues to expand his property by acquiring real estate and adding to his library. Alma has a talent for organizing and indexing books, so that task falls to her. She learns how to repair books in the binding closet, a small room off the library. To her, the work is a kind of “indoor gardening, with all the attendant satisfactions of muscular labor and beautiful unfoldings” (89).

One day when she is 16, Alma finds a book at the bottom of a trunk in which the anonymous author recounts his erotic adventures and insists that shame is a construct of civilization and that bodies are meant to be enjoyed. As she reads about his varied sexual acts, Alma experiences arousal, which leaves her feeling “vexed, frothy, and breathless” (92). Just before dinner, she locks herself in the binding closet, and with her fingers, stimulates herself to climax.

Their many and varied dinner guests that day include George Hawkes, a botanical publisher of whom Alma is fond. During dinner, Alma is distracted by watching the guests and wondering about their erotic desires and experiences. She is profoundly shocked when Prudence challenges a visiting professor on his assessment that Africans are a different species of human than white Europeans. After dinner, prompted by Prudence, George asks Alma about a botanical paper she has written, and he offers to publish it. Alma confesses to Prudence that she is in love with George.

George Hawkes publishes several of Alma’s papers under the name A. Whittaker. She does not wish to be relegated to the field of polite botany because she is a woman; she wants to join the field of botany proper. During this time frame, Prudence withdraws “back into her cool, distant, mysterious ways, treating everyone and everything with the same indifferent, indecipherable politeness as ever” (107). The girls turn 18, but neither of them has marriage prospects, for while Alma is strong and intelligent but not desirable to men, Prudence, by contrast, is so lovely that men fear to approach her.

Alma continues to harbor a secret love for George Hawkes. She cherishes the memory of when they were once looking through her microscope at a sample and George pressed her hand and called her a brilliant microscopist. In private, Alma continues her visits to the binding closet and hides the more salacious books she discovers when her father buys other people’s libraries. While the morality books warn that such self-pleasure is harmful, Alma finds that it clears her mind. She sets up a study in the carriage house where she keeps her books, her tools and supplies, and her herbarium. These two places—the binding closet and the carriage house—are for Alma “twin points of privacy and revelation” (114).

In the autumn of 1819, Alma sees a stranger walking through her mother’s Grecian garden. The girl turns out to be their neighbor, Retta Snow, and she completely disarms and charms Alma with her bright chatter and instant affection for both Alma and Prudence. “Now there are three of us!” Retta exclaims (118), and she becomes a fixture at White Acre. Retta is full of nonsense and lacking in parental influence, but she endears herself to the family and lounges in the carriage house while Beatrix works. Retta’s sense of play counters Alma’s dedicated, studious nature. Even Prudence laughs in Retta’s presence, and when they walk home together after lunch at Retta’s house, Alma confesses her affection for George Hawkes once more. Alma wishes she could be closer to Prudence but knows that “for things that could not be changed, they must be stoically endured” (128).

In 1820, Henry’s fortunes are not in danger, but the world is changing. French chemists have isolated quinine, which they can sell as a medicine to compete with Jesuit’s bark. Sir Joseph Banks is dead. Beatrix falls down the main staircase at White Acre, and Alma tends to her during a long week of agony and sees cancerous tumors on her mother’s breasts. On her deathbed, Beatrix asks Alma never to leave Henry. Her funeral is sober and brief.

Alma is now the mistress of White Acre, taking her mother’s place, and Hanneke gives Alma advice. After she puts the household accounts and her father’s business correspondence in order, Alma returns to her study in the carriage house and finds Retta looking at wedding dresses. Retta announces that she is to marry George Hawkes. When Alma seeks Prudence out to complain that George Hawkes has been stolen from her, she is shocked to learn that Prudence plans to marry their old tutor, Arthur Dixon.

Alma devotes herself to taking care of her father and learning the many nuances of his business affairs. Hanneke tells Alma that someday there will be someone for her to love, but Alma doesn’t believe it, asking, “Who will ever put a ring on these fishwife’s hands of mine? Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head?” (157). Hanneke tells Alma to grind her suffering under the heel of her boot, and so Alma does. After she revisits an early article she published on mosses, Alma takes her magnifying glass and goes outside. Upon examining a cluster of limestone boulders, she is astonished by what she sees: a miniature forest of majestic detail, a “stupefying kingdom” (161). Alma decides to devote her life to the study of mosses.