He trailed off, fearing, it appeared, that he had been impolite. She did not wish him to think that he’d been rude to an elderly woman. She did not wish him to think, either, that she was some unhinged old bat with an unseemly fixation. That being the case, what else could she do?
She told him everything.
When she was finished speaking at last, he was silent for a long while, and then asked, “Do you still have the paper?”
“Certainly,” she said.
“May I read it?” he asked.
Slowly, without further conversation, they walked through the back gate of the Hortus, to Alma’s office. She unlocked the door, breathing heavily from the stairs, and invited Mr. Wallace to make himself comfortable at her desk. From under the divan in the corner, she retrieved a small, dusty, leather valise—as worn as though it had circled the world several times, which, indeed, it had—and opened it. Inside was but a single item: a forty-page document, handwritten, and gently swaddled in flannel, like an infant.
Alma carried it over to Wallace, then settled herself comfortably on the divan while he read it. It took him a while. She must have dozed—as she did so often these days, and at the strangest moments—for she was startled awake by his voice sometime later.
“When did you say that you wrote this, Miss Whittaker?” he asked.
She rubbed her eyes. “The date is on the back,” she said. “I added things to it later, ideas and such, and those addenda are filed away in this office somewhere. But that which you hold in your hands is the original, which I wrote in 1854.”
He considered this.
“So Darwin was still the first,” he said at last.
“Oh yes, absolutely,” said Alma. “Mr. Darwin was the first by far, and the most thorough. There has never been any question about that. Please understand, Mr. Wallace, I do not pretend to have a claim . . .”
“But you arrived at this idea before me,” Wallace said. “Darwin beat us both, to be certain, but you arrived at the idea four years before me.”
“Well . . .” Alma hesitated. “That is certainly not what I wish to say.”
“But Miss Whittaker,” he said, and his voice grew bright with excitement and comprehension. “This means there were three of us!”
For a moment, Alma could not breathe.
In an instant, she was transported back to White Acre, to a fine autumn day in 1819—the day she and Prudence first met Retta Snow. They were all so young, and the sky was blue, and love had not yet grievously injured any of them. Retta had said, looking up at Alma with her shiny, living eyes, “So now there are three of us! What luck!”
What was the song that Retta had invented for them?
We are fiddle, fork, and spoon,
We are dancing with the moon,
If you’d like to steal a kiss from us,
You’d better steal one soon!
When Alma did not respond right away, Wallace came over and sat beside her.
“Miss Whittaker,” he said, in a quieter voice. “Do you understand? There were three of us.”
“Yes, Mr. Wallace. It appears that there were.”
“This is a most extraordinary simultaneity.”
“I’ve always thought so,” she said.
He stared at the wall for a while, silent for another long spell.
At last he asked, “Who else knows about this? Who can vouch for you?”
“Only my uncle Dees.”
“And where is your uncle Dees?”
“Dead, you know,” said Alma, and she could not help but laugh. This was how Dees would have wanted her to say it. Oh, how she missed that stout old Dutchman. Oh, how he would have loved this moment.
“But why did you never publish?” Wallace asked.
“Because it was not good enough.”
“Nonsense! It’s all here. The entire theory is all here. It’s certainly more developed than the absurd, feverish letter I wrote to Darwin in ’fifty-eight. We should publish it now.”
“No,” Alma said. “There is no need to publish it. Truly, I do not have a need of that. It is enough, what you just have said—that there were three of us. That is enough for me. You have made an old woman happy.”
“But we could publish,” he pushed on. “I could present it for you . . .”
She put her hand on his. “No,” she said, firmly. “I ask you to trust me. It is not necessary.”
They sat in stillness for a while.
“May I at minimum ask why you felt it was not worth publishing in 1854?” Wallace said, breaking the silence.
“I did not publish because I believed there was something missing from the theory. And I will tell you, Mr. Wallace—I still believe there is something missing from the theory.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“A convincing evolutionary explanation for human altruism and self-sacrifice,” she said.
She wondered if she would have to elaborate. She did not know if she had the energy to dive fully into the giant question again—to tell him all about Prudence and the orphans, and the women who pulled babies from canals, and the men who rushed into fires to rescue strangers, and the starving prisoners who shared their last bites of food with other starving prisoners, and the missionaries who forgave the fornicators, and the nurses who cared for the insane, and the people who loved dogs that no one else could love, and all the rest of it beyond.
But there was no need to get into particulars. He understood immediately.
“I’ve had the same questions, myself, you know,” he said.
“I know that you have,” she said. “I’ve always wondered—did Darwin have such questions?”
“Yes,” Wallace said. Then he paused, reconsidering. “Though I never knew exactly what Darwin concluded on the matter, to be honest. He was so careful, you know, never to make proclamations about anything until he was absolutely certain. Unlike me.”
“Unlike you,” Alma agreed. “But not unlike me.”
“No, not unlike you.”
“Were you fond of Mr. Darwin?” Alma asked. “I’ve always wondered that.”
“Oh, yes,” said Wallace easily. “Quite. He was the best of men. I think he was the greatest man of our time, or, indeed, of most times. To whom can we compare him? There was Aristotle. There was Copernicus. There was Galileo. There was Newton. And there was Darwin.”
“So you never resented him?” Alma asked.
“Heavens no, Miss Whittaker. In science, all merit should be imputed to the first discoverer, and thus the theory of natural selection was always meant to be his. What’s more, he alone had the grandeur for it. I believe he was our generation’s Virgil, taking us on a tour through heaven, hell, and purgatory. He was our divine guide.”
“I’ve always thought so, too.”
“I tell you, Miss Whittaker, I am not at all distressed to learn that you beat me to the theory of natural selection, but I would have been terribly cast down to have learned that you had beat Darwin. I so admire him, you know. I would like to see him keep his throne.”
“His throne is in no danger from me, young man,” said Alma mildly. “No need for alarm.”
Wallace laughed. “I quite enjoy it, Miss Whittaker, that you call me a young man. For a fellow in his seventh decade, that is quite a compliment.”
“From a lady in her ninth decade, sir, it is simply the truth.”
He did indeed seem young to her. It was interesting—the best parts of her life, she felt, had always been spent in the company of old men. There were all those stimulating meals of her childhood, sitting at the table with the endless parade of brilliant aged minds. There were the years at White Acre with her father, discussing botany and trade late into the night. There was her time in Tahiti with the good and decent Reverend Francis Welles. There were the four happy years here in Amsterdam with Uncle Dees before his death. But now she herself was old, and there were no more old men! Now, here she sat with a stooped graybeard—a mere child of sixty—and she was the ancient tortoise in the room.