On Fridays, there was a departure from this schedule, when a drawing master, a dancing master, and a music master paid visits, to round out the girls’ educational curriculum. Mornings, the girls were expected to work alongside their mother in her own private Grecian garden—a triumph of functional mathematics that Beatrix was attempting to arrange, with pathways and topiary, according to strict Euclidean principles of symmetry (all balls and cones and complex triangles, clipped and rigid and exact). The girls were also required to devote several hours a week to improving their needlework skills. During the evenings, Alma and Prudence were called upon to sit at the formal dining table and engage intelligently with dinner guests from all over the world. If there were no guests at White Acre, Alma and Prudence passed their evenings in the drawing room, staying up late into the night, assisting their father and mother with official White Acre correspondence. Sundays were for church. Bedtime brought a long round of nightly prayers.
Apart from that, their time was their own.
But it was not such a trying schedule, really—not for Alma. She was an energetic and engaging young lady, who needed little rest. She enjoyed the work of the mind, enjoyed the labor of gardening, and enjoyed the conversations at the dinner gatherings. She was always happy to spend time helping her father with his correspondence late at night (as this was sometimes her only chance to engage intimately with the man anymore). Somehow she even managed to find hours for herself, and in those hours she created inventive little botanical projects. She toyed with cuttings of willow trees, pondering how it was that they sometimes cast out roots from their buds, and sometimes from their leaves. She dissected and memorized, preserved and categorized, every plant in reach. She built a beautiful hortus siccus—a splendid little dried herbarium.
Alma loved botany, more by the day. It was not so much the beauty of plants that compelled her as their magical orderliness. Alma was a girl possessed by a soaring enthusiasm for systems, sequence, pigeonholing, and indexes; botany provided ample opportunity to indulge in all these pleasures. She appreciated how, once you had put a plant into the correct taxonomical order, it stayed in order. There were serious mathematical rules inherent in the symmetry of plants, too, and Alma found serenity and reverence in these rules. In every species, for instance, there is a fixed ratio between the teeth of the calyx and the divisions of the corolla, and that ratio never changes. One could set one’s clock to it. It was an abiding, comforting, unfaltering law.
If anything, Alma wished she had even more time to devote to the study of plants. She had bizarre fantasies. She wished that she lived in an army barracks of natural sciences, where she would be woken at dawn by a bugle call and marched off in formation with other young naturalists, in uniforms, to labor all day in woods, streams, and laboratories. She wished that she lived in a botanical monastery or a botanical convent of sorts, surrounded by other devoted taxonomists, where no one interfered with one another’s studies, yet all shared their most exciting findings with each other. Even a botanical prison would be nice! (It did not occur to Alma that such places of intellectual asylum and walled isolation did exist in the world, to a point, and that they were called “universities.” But little girls in 1810 did not dream of universities. Not even Beatrix Whittaker’s little girls.)
So Alma did not mind working hard. But she actively disliked Fridays. Art classes, dancing classes, music classes—all these exertions irritated her, and pulled her from her true interests. She was not graceful. She could not entirely tell one famous painting from another, nor did she ever learn to draw faces without making her subjects look either fear-stricken or deceased. Music was not a gift, either, and around the time Alma turned eleven, her father officially requested that she stop torturing the pianoforte. In all these pursuits, Prudence excelled. Prudence could also sew beautifully, and operate a tea service with masterful delicacy, and had many other small and galling talents besides. On Fridays, Alma was likely to have the blackest and most envious thoughts about her sister. These were the times when she honestly thought, for instance, that she would happily trade in one of her extra languages (any of them, except Greek!) for the simple ability to fold an envelope just once as prettily as Prudence could do it.
Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—Alma took real satisfaction in the realms where she excelled over her sister, and the one place where her superiority was most notable was at the Whittakers’ famous dining room table, particularly when the room was thick with challenging ideas. As Alma grew older, her conversation became bolder, more certain, more reaching. But Prudence never developed such confidence at the table. She tended to sit mute but lovely, a sort of useless adornment to each gathering, merely filling a chair between guests, contributing nothing but her beauty. In a way, this made Prudence useful. One could seat Prudence next to anyone, and she would not complain. Many a night, the poor girl was deliberately placed beside the most tedious and deaf old professors—perfect mausoleums of men—who picked at their teeth with their forks, or fell asleep over their meals, lightly snoring while debates raged alongside them. Prudence never objected, nor asked for more sparkling dinner companions. It did not seem to make a difference who sat near Prudence, really: her posture and carefully arranged countenance never altered.
Meanwhile, Alma lunged into engagement with every possible topic—from soil management, to the molecules of gases, to the physiology of tears. One night, for instance, a guest came to White Acre who had just returned from Persia, where he had discovered, right outside the ancient city of Esfahan, samples of a plant that he believed produced ammoniacum gum—an ancient and lucrative medicinal ingredient, whose source had thus far been a mystery to the Western world, as its trade was controlled by bandits. The young man had been working for the British Crown, but had grown disillusioned with his superiors and wanted to speak to Henry Whittaker about funding a continued research project. Henry and Alma—working and thinking as one, as they often did at the dining room table—came at the man with questions from both sides, like two sheepdogs cornering a ram.
“What is the climate in that area of Persia?” Henry asked.
“And the altitude?” Alma added.
“Well, sir, the plant grows on the open plains,” the visitor replied. “And the gum is so abundant within it, I tell you, that it squeezes out great volumes—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Henry interrupted. “Or so you keep saying, and we must have your word on that, I suppose, for I notice you’ve brought me nothing but the merest thimbleful of gum as evidence. Tell me, though, how much do you have to pay the officials in Persia? In tributes, I mean, for the privilege of wandering around their country, collecting up gum samples at will?”
“Well, they do demand some tribute, sir, but it seems a small price to pay—”
“The Whittaker Company never pays tribute,” Henry said. “I dislike the sound of this. Why have you even let anyone over there know what you’re doing?”
“Well, sir, one can hardly play the smuggler!”
“Really?” Henry raised an eyebrow. “Can’t one?”
“But could the plant be cultivated elsewhere?” Alma leapt in. “You see, sir, it would do us little good to send you to Esfahan every year on expensive collecting expeditions.”
“I have not yet had the chance to explore—”
“Could it be cultivated in Kattywar?” Henry asked. “Do you have associates in Kattywar?”
“Well, I don’t know, sir, I merely—”