Alma searched herself to determine if this was true.
But of course it was true.
Her father had left her everything—the entirety of his fortune, at the exclusion of everyone else in the world. He had never allowed her to leave White Acre, not only because he had needed her, she suddenly realized, but also because he had loved her. Alma remembered him gathering her onto his lap when she was a small child, and telling her fanciful stories. She remembered her father’s saying, “To my mind, the homely one is worth ten of the pretty one.” She remembered the night of the ball at White Acre, in 1808, when the Italian astronomer had arranged the guests into a tableau vivant of the heavens, and had conducted them into a splendid dance. Her father—the sun, the center of it all—had called out across the universe, “Give the girl a place!” and had encouraged Alma to run. For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that it must have been he, Henry, who had thrust the torch into her hands that night, entrusting her with fire, releasing her as a Promethean comet across the lawn, and across the wide open world. Nobody else would have had the authority to entrust a child with fire. Nobody else would have bestowed upon Alma the right to have a place.
Tomorrow Morning went on. “My father has always regarded me as a sort of prophet, you know.”
“Is that how you regard yourself?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I know what I am. For one thing, I am a rauti. I am a haranguer, as my grandfather was before me. I come to the people and chant out encouragement. My people have suffered a great deal, and I push them to be strong again—but in the name of Jehovah, because the new god is more powerful than our old gods. If that were not true, Alma, all my people would still be alive. This is how I minister: with power. I believe that on these islands the news of the Creator and of Jesus Christ must be communicated not through gentleness and persuasion, but through power. That is why I have found success where others have failed.”
He was quite casual, revealing this to Alma. He almost shrugged it off as an easy thing.
“But there is something more,” he said. “In the old ways of thinking, there were known to be intermediary beings—messengers, as it were, between gods and men.”
“Like priests?” Alma asked.
“Like the Reverend Welles, you mean?” Tomorrow Morning smiled, looking again at the mouth of the cave. “No. My father is a good man, but he is not the sort of being to which I refer here. He is not a divine messenger. I am thinking of something other than a priest. I suppose you could say . . . what is the word? An emissary. In the old ways of thinking, we believed that each god had his own emissary. In emergencies, the Tahitian people would pray to these emissaries for deliverance. ‘Come to the world,’ they would pray. ‘Come to the light, and help us, for there is war and hunger and fear, and we suffer.’ The emissaries were neither of this world nor the next, but they moved between the two.”
“Is that how you regard yourself?” Alma asked again.
“No,” he said. “That is how I regarded Ambrose Pike.”
He turned to her immediately after he said this, and his face—for just a moment—was stricken with pain. Her heart clutched, and she had to catch herself, to hold her composure.
“You saw him the same way, too?” he asked, searching her face for an answer.
“Yes,” she said. At last they had come to it. At last they had come to Ambrose.
Tomorrow Morning nodded, and looked relieved. “He could hear my thoughts, you know,” he said.
“Yes,” Alma said. “That was something he could do.”
“He wanted me to listen to his thoughts,” Tomorrow Morning said, “but I do not have that capacity.”
“Yes,” said Alma. “I understand. Nor do I.”
“He could see evil—the way that it gathers in clusters. That was how he explained evil to me, as a clustering of sinister color. He could see doom. He could see good, as well. Billows of goodness, surrounding certain people.”
“I know,” said Alma.
“He heard the voices of the dead. Alma, he heard my brother.”
“Yes.”
“He told me that one night he could hear starlight—but it was only for that one night. It saddened him that he could never hear it again. He thought that if he and I attempted together to hear it, if we put our minds together, we could receive a message.”
“Yes.”
“He was lonely on earth, Alma, for nobody was similar to him. He could find no home.”
Alma again felt the clutch in her heart—a clenching of shame and guilt and regret. She balled up her hands into fists and pressed them into her eyes. She willed herself not to cry. When she put down her fists and opened her eyes, Tomorrow Morning was watching her as though waiting for a signal, as though waiting to see if he should stop speaking. But all she wanted was for him to continue speaking.
“What did he wish for, with you?” Alma asked.
“He wanted a companion,” Tomorrow Morning said. “He wanted a twin. He wanted us to be the same. He was mistaken about me, you understand. He thought I was better than I am.”
“He was mistaken about me, too,” Alma said.
“So you see how it is.”
“What did you wish for, with him?”
“I wanted to couple with him, Alma,” Tomorrow Morning said grimly, but without a flinch.
“As did I,” she said.
“So we are the same, then,” said Tomorrow Morning, though the thought did not appear to bring him comfort. It did not bring her comfort, either.
“Did you couple with him?” she asked.
Tomorrow Morning sighed. “I allowed him to believe that I was also an innocent. I think he saw me as The First Man, as a new kind of Adam, and I allowed him to believe that of me. I allowed him to draw those pictures of me—no, I encouraged him to draw those pictures of me—for I am vain. I told him to draw me as he would draw an orchid, in blameless nakedness. For what is the difference, in the eyes of God, between a naked man and a flower? This is what I told him. That is how I brought him near.”
“But did you couple with him?” she repeated, steeling herself for a more direct answer.
“Alma,” he said. “You have given me to understand what sort of a person you are. You have explained that you are compelled by a desire for comprehension. Now let me give you to understand what sort of a person I am: I am a conqueror. I do not boast to say it. It is merely my nature. Perhaps you have never before met a conqueror, so it is difficult for you to understand.”
“My father was a conqueror,” she said. “I understand more than you might imagine.”
Tomorrow Morning nodded, conceding the point. “Henry Whittaker. By all accounts, yes. You may be correct. Perhaps, then, you can understand me. The nature of a conqueror, as you surely know, is to acquire whatever he wishes to acquire.”
For a long while after that, they did not speak. Alma had another question, but she could scarcely bear to ask it. But if she did not ask it now, she never would know, and then the question would chew holes through her for the rest of her life. She girded her courage again and asked, “How did Ambrose die, Tomorrow Morning?” When he did not reply at once, she added, “I was informed by the Reverend Welles that he died of infection.”
“He did die of infection, I suppose—by the end of it. That is what a doctor would have told you.”
“But how did he truly die?”