The Signature of All Things

Alma finds that Prudence has remained “a thoroughly impossible woman to comprehend” (184). Prudence has six children, but her marriage does not seem happy. Although she had an enormous dowry from Henry, Prudence gave it all away to abolitionist causes. She dresses in drab clothes, has no jewels or finery, and keeps her household on a very simple diet. Prudence lives next to freed Black people and welcomes them into her home, which makes her a target for racist neighbors. When Henry is threatened by association, he shouts at Prudence and then disowns her when she refuses to abandon her ethical principles, and Alma doesn’t dare to interfere with her father’s decisions. She follows with interest the controversy over whether species can change. By observing her mosses, she can guess that different varieties have changed over time, but she isn’t certain how or why that is so. She feels consumed and fulfilled by her work.

George summons Alma to his printing shop to show her a marvelous series of prints he received from an unknown artist. They are pictures of orchids by a man named Ambrose Pike. Alma is astonished by the work and writes a letter inviting Ambrose to visit White Acre while George publishes his book of prints.

Ambrose arrives in May 1848 with nothing but a leather valise. He admires Beatrix’s Grecian garden and asks Alma about her work with mosses. She shows him the colonies on her boulders, confiding that she has found greatness in the miniature world. Ambrose agrees, saying, “There is so much more potency to be found in detail than in generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it” (203). He has spent 18 years in Guatemala and Mexico, studying orchids. Alma feels comfortable and at ease in the presence of Ambrose; he is like no one she has ever met.

George Hawkes joins them for dinner. Ambrose is unperturbed by Henry’s belligerence or judgment when he shares that he worked for a time with a friend who was a printer but has no plans for his life. Henry complains of a vanilla plantation in Tahiti where the vines are not blossoming, and Ambrose suggests he may have accidentally purchased a variety that does not bear fruit. That night Alma hears noise in the library and finds Henry and Ambrose talking. Ambrose suggests the vanilla vines have not been properly pollinated. Henry wants to send Ambrose to Tahiti at once, but Alma feels “overcome with a wild necessity to keep this person at White Acre forever” (218), and to that end, Alma suggests that Ambrose can help them publish a book of White Acre’s botanical treasures. Hanneke does not approve but says little about this decision.

Alma and Ambrose become inseparable. They work side by side in Alma’s carriage house and share meals, and Alma feels illuminated by his presence. She takes Ambrose to visit Retta in the asylum and learns that Ambrose suffered an episode of what he calls madness. Alma is dismayed; “There was no place in her thinking for the erasure of material boundaries. Nothing brought more goodness and assurance to Alma Whittaker’s life than the heartening certainty of material boundaries” (229). Ambrose was inspired by reading a book called The Signature of All Things, written by a 16th-century cobbler and German philosopher, Jacob Boehme, who suggested that God had concealed clues for the improvement of humanity inside the design of every living thing on earth. According to Boehme, all of creation was a divine code. Alma is skeptical of this belief and upset when Ambrose tells her that, during his episode, he could hear thoughts, understand the language of trees, and see new colors. His friends found him in a snowbank and sent him to an asylum. He went to the jungle and suffered fevers there where these sensations returned in part, but never quite as strongly as before.

After this confession, Alma worries about Ambrose’s health. She reads Boehme again, but his conjectures confuse and irritate her. She expresses her frustration to Ambrose, who reminds her, “I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand” (239). Alma says she wishes to know him better, and Ambrose suggests they should be still enough to hear one another’s thoughts. She takes him to the binding closet, and they hold hands in the quiet dark. Alma is so electrified by the intimacy that she experiences an orgasm. But then she senses a question from Ambrose and realizes that they can indeed communicate thoughts to each other without the need for words.

When they leave the binding closet, Ambrose asks Alma to marry him, telling her he would like to sleep beside her every night and listen to her thoughts forever. Alma recognizes the fundamental differences in their personalities—his faith is in the divine realm, hers in the material—but she is in love and eagerly accepts his proposal. Henry doesn’t endorse the marriage but tells Alma she ought to learn about the marriage bed. Ambrose and Alma have a picture taken together, and the image makes her sad, for it shows her to be “heavy-jawed, rueful” and him “like a starved, mad-eyed prisoner” (253). Yet for Alma, who is kindled with love, everything appears miraculous. She is full of energy, life, and confidence, while Ambrose in contrast is calm, serene, attentive, and kind. He kisses the knuckles of her hand and calls her his “other, better soul” (256).

Alma visits Prudence and asks her awkwardly for advice on marital intimacies, for she fears humiliation. For all her experience in the binding closet, Alma is still a virgin. She wants to present herself as an orchid to Ambrose, not a mossy boulder. Prudence is too scrupulous to speak on such subjects, and Alma leaves feeling no closer to her sister. Ambrose’s mother, Constance Pike, writes Alma a letter of congratulation and says she is happy Ambrose found someone. Prudence sends a beautiful nightgown as a gift.

Alma and Ambrose are married in August 1848 at White Acre. She gives him a copy of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, and he gives her a folded piece of paper, which he says contains a message of love that she must nonetheless never open or read. That night, Ambrose comes to bed in his nightshirt, calls her the treasure of his soul, and kisses her hand. He says their minds will speak across the distance, and then he falls asleep. Alma is bewildered and lies awake the entire night. Subsequent nights pass with no intimacy, and Alma feels humiliated and betrayed. She desires Ambrose physically and cannot understand why he does not desire her. She wonders if Ambrose simply doesn’t know about conjugal relations, so one night when he is in the bath, she takes off her clothes and enters the bathroom. She kneels beside the bathtub and puts his fingers in her mouth, feeling that “she needed something of him inside her” (275). Ambrose is appalled and leaps away. Alma, heartbroken, dresses and goes downstairs to ask Hanneke to move Ambrose into a guest bedroom.

The next morning, they talk in the carriage house. Ambrose wants a chaste marriage: an exchange of love, ideas, and comfort. He wishes to be an angel of God and hopes they can be “angels of God together…freed of the flesh, bound in celestial grace” (279). Alma thinks back to the binding closet and realizes that even in that silently intimate moment, they misunderstood each other’s intentions.

In her disappointment, Alma cannot bear for Ambrose to stay at White Acre, and she sends him with Dick Yancy to the vanilla plantation in Tahiti.

Alma feels bruised and lost after Ambrose leaves. Seeking to understand Ambrose’s mind, she opens the folded paper he gave her at their wedding, but it contains only her name. After Alma mopes for a year and a half, Hanneke, who thinks that the relationship with Ambrose was nothing but nonsense, gives Alma the stern admonition to behave like a Whittaker.

Alma returns to her mosses and reads about species mutation, including the suggestion by Lamarck that biological mutations result from disuse or overuse of a body part, like the giraffe’s long neck. Alma is not convinced by Lamarck’s theory, for otherwise men who shave would produce sons without beards, or women who curled their hair would have curly-haired daughters. She agrees that things change but questions how and why. The word “scientist” is coined. When Alma visits Retta, her old friend no longer recognizes her, and Prudence is still wrapped up in her life of drudgery and abolition. Three years after her marriage, Alma receives a letter from Reverence Francis Welles of Matavai Bay, Tahiti, who informs her that Ambrose died of infection and was given a Christian burial. Alma feels that her world is shrinking.

Dick Yancey visits White Acre and gives Alma the leather valise that belonged to Ambrose with the muttered instructions to burn it. Instead, Alma opens the valise and finds a sheaf of papers covered with nude sketches of a young, handsome Tahitian man. She is stunned. “The sole possible conclusion to be reached regarding the valise’s contents was this,” Alma thinks. “Ambrose Pike—paragon of purity, the angel of Framingham—was a sodomite” (303). (Now considered an obsolete and highly derogatory term, the word “sodomite” was the standard 19th-century term for a man who had sexual relations with other men.) In the lower corner of each page is written the phrase “tomorrow morning” (303), and Alma wonders who the boy was, who else knew this about Ambrose, and what “tomorrow morning” might mean.

Henry is ailing and in his last days becomes vulgar, telling Alma how the sailors on his voyages used him for sex. He instructs Alma not to believe anything anyone tells her but instead to go and find out for herself. Henry dies in October 1851 “like a storm blowing out to sea” (311). Alma inherits everything, but it feels like a burden.

Hanneke tells Alma that she owes Prudence a debt. Prudence loved George Hawkes, and George Hawkes loved Prudence and proposed to her, but Prudence turned him down and married Arthur Dixon instead in the hopes that George would turn to Alma. Instead, he turned to Retta Snow. Prudence did not love Arthur, and George did not love Retta, but Prudence refused to betray Alma by marrying the man she knew Alma loved. Hanneke says Prudence is the most admirable of women, but Alma has never given her credit for her good qualities. Alma, shamed and shaken, flees to the carriage house and takes stock of herself. She is 51 and alone, and she realizes that although “she thought she knew much…she knew nothing” (320).

The next day, Alma visits her solicitor. Then she visits Prudence. She tells her sister that Henry left the estate of White Acre to the Philadelphia Abolitionist Society with the request that Prudence turn the house into a school for Black children. There is a pension for Hanneke and money to care for Retta in the asylum. Alma has moved her belongings into the carriage house and will send for them. Alma embraces her sister while Prudence weeps.