Alma reported in exhaustive detail battles whose victories and defeats were measured in inches, and over decades. She recounted how climate alterations over those decades had given advantages to one variety over another, how birds had transformed the destiny of the mosses, and how—when the old oak beside the pasture fence fell and the pattern of shade shifted overnight—the whole universe of the rock field changed with it.
She wrote, “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”
She wrote, “All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”
She wrote, “The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.”
She wrote, “The victor shall win—but only until he no longer wins.”
She wrote, “This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient. The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive.”
She wrote, “Ongoing battle between and among species is inescapable, as is loss, as is biological modification. Evolution is a brutal mathematics, and the long road of time is littered with the fossilized remnants of incalculable failed experiments.”
She wrote, “Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”
Sometimes she had to cross out entire pages of work, when she looked up from her writing only to realize that hours had passed, and she had not stopped scribbling for a moment, but was no longer exactly discussing mosses.
Then she would go for a brisk circumambulation of the ship’s deck—whatever ship it happened to be—with Roger the dog trailing behind her. Her hands would be trembling and her heart racing with emotion. She would clear her head and her lungs, and reconsider her position. Afterward, she would return to her berth, sit down with a fresh sheet of paper, and begin writing all over again.
She repeated this exercise hundreds of times, for close to fourteen months.
By the time Alma arrived in Rotterdam, her thesis was nearly complete. She did not consider it entirely complete, for something about it was still missing. The creature in the corner of the dream was still gazing at her, unsatisfied and unsettled. This sense of incompletion chewed at her, and she resolved to keep at the idea until she had conquered it. That said, she did feel that most of her theory was irrefutably accurate. If she was correct in her thinking, then she was holding in her hand a rather revolutionary forty-page scientific document. And if, instead, she was incorrect in her thinking? Well, then she had—at the very least—written the most detailed description of life and death in a Philadelphia moss colony that the scientific world would ever see.
In Rotterdam, she rested for a few days at the only hotel she could find that would accept Roger’s presence. She and Roger had walked the city for much of an afternoon, in an all but futile search for lodging. Along the way, she’d become increasingly irritated by the bilious looks that hotel clerks kept throwing their way. She could not help but think that if Roger were a more handsome dog, or a more charming dog, she would not have encountered so much trouble finding a room. This struck Alma as terribly unjust, for she had come to regard the little orange mongrel as noble in his own fashion. Had he not just crossed the world? How many supercilious hotel clerks could say the same? But she supposed this was the way of life—prejudice and ignominy and their sorry like.
As for the hotel that did accept them, it was a squalid place, run by a rheumy old woman who peered at Roger over the desk and said, “I once had a cat who looked just like him.”
Dear God! Alma thought in horror at the idea of such a sad beast.
“You aren’t a whore, are you?” asked the woman, just to be certain.
This time, Alma uttered her “Dear God!” aloud. She simply could not help herself. Her answer seemed to satisfy the proprietress.
The tarnished mirror in the hotel room revealed to Alma that she did not look much more civilized than Roger. She could not arrive in Amsterdam looking like this. Her wardrobe was a ruin and a havoc. Her hair, which had grown increasingly white, was a ruin and a havoc, as well. There was nothing to be done about the hair, but over the next few days she had several new frocks quickly sewn up. They were nothing fine (she modeled them on Hanneke’s original, practical pattern) but at least they were new, clean, and intact. She purchased new shoes. She sat in a park and wrote long letters to both Prudence and Hanneke, alerting them that she had reached Holland, and that she intended to remain here indefinitely.
She was nearly out of money. She still had a bit of gold sewn into her tattered hems, but not much. She’d kept precious little of her father’s inheritance to begin with, and now—over these last years of travel—the better part of her modest bequest had been spent, one precious coin at a time. She was left with a sum not nearly sufficient to meet the simplest demands of life. Of course, she knew she could always get more money, if true emergency were to arise. She supposed she could walk into any countinghouse at the Rotterdam docks and—using Dick Yancey’s name and her father’s legacy—easily draw a loan against the Whittaker fortune. But she did not wish to do this. She did not feel that the fortune was rightfully hers. It struck her as a matter of utmost personal consequence that she—from this point forth—make her own way in the world.
Letters posted and a fresh wardrobe procured, Alma and Roger left Rotterdam on a steamboat—by far the easiest part of their journey—and headed to the Port of Amsterdam. Upon their arrival, Alma left her luggage at a modest hotel near the docks and hired a coachman (who, for an additional fee of twenty stivers, was finally persuaded to accept Roger as a passenger). The coach took them all the way to the quiet neighborhood of Plantage, straight to the gates of the Hortus Botanicus.
Alma stepped out into the slanting early-evening sun outside the botanical garden’s tall brick walls. Roger was by her side; under her arm was a parcel wrapped in plain brown paper. A young man in a tidy guard’s uniform stood at the gate, and Alma approached, asking in her easy Dutch whether the director was on the premises today. The young man confirmed that the director was indeed on the premises, because the director came to work every day of the year.
Alma smiled. Naturally he does, she thought.
“Would it be possible to have a word with him?” she asked.
“Might I ask who you are, and what your business is?” asked the young man, aiming condemnatory looks at both her and Roger. She did not object to his questions, but she certainly objected to his tone.
“My name is Alma Whittaker, and my business is the study of mosses and the transmutation of species,” she said.
“And why should the director want to see you?” the guard asked.
She drew herself up to her most formidable height and, like a rauti, launched into an imposing recitation of her bloodline. “My father was Henry Whittaker, whom some in your country once called ‘The Prince of Peru.’ My paternal grandfather was the Apple Magus to His Majesty King George III of England. My maternal grandfather was Jacob van Devender, a master of ornamental aloes, and the director of these gardens for thirty-some years—a position that he inherited from his father, who, in turn, had inherited it from his father, and so forth, all the way back to the original founding of this institution in 1638. Your current director is, I believe, a man named Dr. Dees van Devender. He is my uncle. His older sister was named Beatrix van Devender. She was my mother, and a virtuoso of Euclidean botany. My mother was born, if I am not mistaken, just around the corner from where we are now standing, in a private home outside the walls of the Hortus—where all van Devenders since the middle of the seventeenth century have been born.”