And there were so many places in which one could eat! The dining room, the drawing room, the kitchen, the parlor, the study, the sunroom, and the verandahs with their shaded arbors. There were luncheons of tea and gingerbread, chestnuts and peaches. (And such peaches—pink on one side, gold on the other.) In the winter, one could drink soup in the upstairs nursery while watching the river below, which glittered under the barren sky like a polished mirror.
But outdoors, the delights were even more plentiful and ripe with mystery. There were the noble greenhouses, filled with cycads, palms, and ferns, all packed in deep, black, stinking tanner’s bark to keep them warm. There was the loud and frightening water engine, which kept the greenhouses wet. There were the mysterious forcing houses—always faintingly hot—where the delicate imported plants were brought to heal after long sea voyages, and where orchids were bribed into blooming. There were the lemon trees in the orangery, which were wheeled outside every summer like consumptive patients, to enjoy the natural sun. There was the small Grecian temple, hidden at the end of an avenue of oaks, where one could imagine Olympus.
There was the dairy and, hard beside it, the buttery—with its alluring whiff of alchemy, superstition, and witchcraft. The German dairymaids drew hexes in chalk on the buttery’s door, and muttered incantations before entering the building. The cheese would not set, they told Alma, if it was cursed by the devil. When Alma asked her mother about this, she was scolded as a credulous innocent, and given a long lecture in how cheese actually sets—as it turns out, through a perfectly rational chemical transmutation of fresh milk treated with rennet, which is then set to age in wax rinds at controlled temperatures. Lesson completed, Beatrix then wiped the hexes from the buttery’s door, reprimanding the dairymaids as superstitious fools. The next day, Alma noticed, the chalk hexes were drawn back in. One way or another, the cheese continued to set properly.
Then there were the endless sylvan acres of woodland—left purposely uncultivated—filled with rabbits, foxes, and park deer who would eat out of one’s hand. Alma was allowed—nay, encouraged!—by her parents to wander that woodland at will, in order to learn the natural world. She gathered beetles, spiders, and moths. She watched a large striped snake be eaten alive one day by a much larger black snake—a process that took several hours and was a horrible and spectacular display. She watched tiger spiders dig deep tubes into the duff, and robins gather moss and mud from the river’s edge for their nests. She adopted a handsome little caterpillar (handsome by caterpillar standards), and rolled him into a leaf to take home as a friend, though she later accidentally murdered him by sitting on him. That was a severe blow, but one carried on. That is what her mother said: “Stop your weeping and carry on.” Animals die, it was explained. Some animals, like sheep and cows, are born for no other purpose except to die. One could not mourn every death. By the age of eight Alma had already dissected, with Beatrix’s assistance, the head of a lamb.
Alma always went to the woods fitted out in the most sensible dress, armed with her own personal collecting kit of glass vials, tiny storage boxes, cotton wool, and writing tablets. She went out in all weather, because delights could be found in all weather. A late-April snowstorm one year brought the odd sound of songbirds and sleighbells mingled together, and this alone was worth leaving the house for. She learned that walking carefully in the mud to save one’s boots or the hems of one’s skirts never rewarded one’s search. She was never scolded for returning home with muddied boots and hems, so long as she came home with good specimens for her private herbarium.
Soames the pony was Alma’s constant companion on these forays—sometimes carrying her through the forest, sometimes following along behind her like a large, well-mannered dog. In the summer, he wore splendid silk tassels in his ears, to keep out the flies. In the winter, he wore fur beneath his saddle. Soames was the best botanical collecting partner one could ever imagine, and Alma talked to him all day long. He would do absolutely anything for the girl, except move quickly. Only occasionally did he eat the specimens.
In her ninth summer, completely on her own, Alma learned to tell time by the opening and closing of flowers. At five o’clock in the morning, she noticed, the goatsbeard petals always unfolded. At six o’clock, the daisies and globeflowers opened. When the clock struck seven, the dandelions would bloom. At eight o’clock, it was the scarlet pimpernel’s turn. Nine o’clock: chickweed. Ten o’clock: meadow saffron. By eleven o’clock, the process begins to reverse. At noon, the goatsbeard closed. At one o’clock, the chickweed closed. By three o’clock, the dandelions had folded. If Alma was not back to the house with her hands washed by five o’clock—when the globeflower closed and the evening primrose began to open—she would find herself in trouble.
What Alma wanted to know most of all was how the world was regulated. What was the master clockwork behind everything? She picked flowers apart, and explored their innermost architecture. She did the same with insects, and with any carcass she ever found. One late September morning, Alma became fascinated by the sudden appearance of a crocus, a flower that she’d previously believed bloomed only in the spring. What a discovery! She could not get a satisfactory answer from anyone about what in heaven’s name these flowers thought they were doing, showing up here at the cold beginning of autumn, leafless and unprotected, just when all else was dying. “They are autumn crocuses,” Beatrix told her. Yes, clearly and obviously they were—but to what end? Why bloom now? Were they stupid flowers? Had they lost track of time? To what important office did this crocus need to attend, that it would suffer to put forth bloom during the first bitter nights of frost? Nobody could elucidate. “That is simply how the variety behaves,” Beatrix said, which Alma found to be an uncharacteristically unsatisfying answer. When Alma pushed further, Beatrix replied, “Not everything has an answer.”
Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor. When she recovered herself, she drew the mysterious autumn crocus in her writing tablet, and dated her entry, along with her questions and protestations. She was quite diligent in this way. Things must be kept track of—even things one could not comprehend. Beatrix had instructed her that she must always record her findings in drawings as accurate as she could make them, categorized, whenever possible, by the correct taxonomy.
Alma enjoyed the act of sketching, but her finished drawings often disappointed her. She could not draw faces or animals (even her butterflies looked truculent), though eventually she found that she was not awful at drawing plants. Her first successes were some quite good renderings of umbels—those hollow-stemmed, flat-flowered members of the carrot family. Her umbels were accurate, though she wished they were more than accurate; she wished they were beautiful. She said as much to her mother, who corrected her: “Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”
Sometimes, in her forays through the woodlands, Alma encountered other children. This always alarmed her. She knew who these intruders were, though she never spoke to them. They were the children of her parents’ employees. The White Acre estate was like a giant living beast, with half its enormous body needed for servants—the German and Scottish-born gardeners whom her father preferred to hire over the lazier native-born Americans, and the Dutch-born maids upon whom her mother insisted and relied. The household servants lived in the attic, and the outdoor laborers and their families lived in cottages and cabins all across the property. They were quite nice cottages, too—not because Henry cared about his workers’ comfort, but because Henry could not abide the sight of squalor.