Without a trace of rebuke, Henry replied, “Oh, so you’re interested in Our Little Exquisite, then? Prudence, come in here! You are requested to be seen!”
Prudence slipped through the entryway and stood beside Alma, whose feet were now sinking into the floor, as into a thick and terrible swamp.
“There we are!” said the guest, looking over Prudence as though pricing her out. “Oh, she is splendid, isn’t she? I had wondered. I had suspected everyone might have been exaggerating.”
Henry waved his hand dismissively. “Ah, you all make too much of Prudence,” he said. “To my mind, the homely one is worth ten of the pretty one.”
So, you see, it is quite possible that both girls suffered equally.
Chapter Seven
The year 1816 would later be remembered as The Year Without a Summer—not only at White Acre, but across much of the world. Volcanic eruptions in Indonesia filled Earth’s atmosphere with ash and darkness, bringing drought to North America and freezing famine to most of Europe and Asia. The corn crop failed in New England, the rice crop withered in China, oat and wheat crops collapsed all across northern Europe. More than a hundred thousand Irish starved to death. Horses and cattle, suffering without grain, were annihilated en masse. There were food riots in France, England, and Switzerland. In Quebec City, it snowed twelve inches in June. In Italy, the snow came down brown and red, terrifying the populace into fears of apocalypse.
In Pennsylvania, for the entirety of June, July, and August of that benighted year, the countryside was enveloped in a deep, frigid, dark fog. Little grew. Thousands of families lost everything. For Henry Whittaker, though, it was not a bad year. The stoves in his greenhouses had managed to keep most of his tropical exotics alive even in the semidarkness, and he’d never made a living off the risks of outdoor farming, anyway. The bulk of his medicinal plants were imported from South America, where the climate was unaffected. What’s more, the weather was making people sick, and sick people bought more pharmaceuticals. Both botanically and financially, then, Henry was mostly unaffected.
No, that year, Henry found his prosperity in real estate speculation and his pleasure in rare books. Farmers were fleeing Pennsylvania in droves, heading west in the hopes of finding brighter sun, healthier soil, and a more hospitable environment. Henry bought up a good deal of the property these destroyed people left behind, thus coming into possession of excellent mills, forests, and pastures along the way. Quite a few Philadelphia families of rank and note fell into ruin that year, brought down by the foul weather’s spiral of economic decline. This was wonderful news for Henry. Whenever another wealthy family collapsed, he was able to purchase, at steep discount, their land, their furniture, their horses, their fine French saddles and Persian textiles, and—most satisfyingly—their libraries.
Over the years, the acquisition of magnificent books had become something of a mania for Henry. It was a peculiar mania, given that the man could scarcely read English, and most assuredly could not read, say, Catullus. But Henry did not want to read these books; he merely wanted to own them, as prizes for his growing library at White Acre. Medical, philosophical, and exquisitely rendered botanical books he longed for most of all. He was aware that these volumes were every bit as dazzling to visitors as the tropical treasures in his greenhouses. He had even launched a custom before dinner parties of choosing (or, rather, having Beatrix choose) one precious book to show to the gathered guests. He especially enjoyed performing this ritual when famous scholars were visiting, in order to see them catch their breath and go light-headed with desire; most men of letters never really expected to hold in their own hands an early-sixteenth-century Erasmus, with the Greek printed on one side and the Latin on the other.
Henry acquired books voluptuously—not volume by volume, but trunkful by trunkful. Obviously, all these books needed sorting, and, just as obviously, Henry was not the man to sort them. This physically and intellectually taxing job had fallen for years to Beatrix, who would steadily weed through the lots, keeping the gems and unloading much of the dross over to the Philadelphia Free Library. But Beatrix, by late autumn of 1816, had fallen behind in the task. Books were coming in faster than she could sort them. The spare rooms of the carriage house now contained many trunks that had yet to be opened, each filled with more volumes. With new windfalls of entire private libraries coming to White Acre by the week (as one fine family after another met financial ruin), the collection was on the brink of becoming an unmanageable bother.
So Beatrix chose Alma to help her sift and catalogue the books. Alma was the clear choice for the job. Prudence was not much help in such matters, as she was useless in Greek, practically useless in Latin, and could never really be made to understand how to divide botanical volumes accurately between pre- and post-1753 editions (which is to say, before and after the advent of Linnaean taxonomy). But Alma, now aged sixteen, proved to be both efficient and enthusiastic at the task of setting the White Acre library into order. She had a sound historical comprehension of what she was handling, and she was a fevered, diligent indexer. She was also physically strong enough to carry about the heavy crates and boxes. Too, the weather was so poor in 1816 that there was little pleasure to be found outdoors, and not much benefit to be gained by working in the garden. Happily, Alma came to consider her library work as a kind of indoor gardening, with all the attendant satisfactions of muscular labor and beautiful unfoldings.
Alma even found that she had a talent for repairing books. Her experience in mounting plant specimens made her well adept at managing the materials in the binding closet—a tiny dark room with a hidden door just off the library, where Beatrix stored all the paper, fabrics, leather, wax, and glues needed to maintain and restore the fragile old editions. After a few months, in fact, Alma was doing so well at all these tasks that Beatrix put her daughter completely in charge of the White Acre library, both the catalogued and uncatalogued collections. Beatrix had grown too stout and too tired to climb up the library ladders anymore, and was tired of the job.
Now, some people might have questioned whether a respectable and unmarried sixteen-year-old girl really ought to have been left without any supervision in the midst of an uncensored deluge of books, trusted to negotiate her way alone through such a vast flood of unconstrained ideas. Perhaps Beatrix thought she’d already completed her work with Alma, having successfully produced a young woman who appeared pragmatic and decent, and who would surely know how to resist corrupting ideas. Or perhaps Beatrix did not think through what sorts of books Alma might stumble upon when she opened those trunks. Or perhaps Beatrix believed that Alma’s homeliness and awkwardness rendered the girl immune to the dangers of, for heaven’s sake, sensuality. Or perhaps Beatrix (who was nearing fifty years old, and suffering from episodes of dizziness and distraction) was simply getting careless.
One way or another, Alma Whittaker was left alone, and that is how she found the book.
She would never know from whose library it had originated. Alma found the thing in an unmarked trunk, with an otherwise unremarkable collection, mostly medical in nature—some standard Galen, some recent translations of Hippocrates, nothing new or exciting. But in the midst of it all was a thick, sturdy, calfskin-bound volume called Cum Grano Salis, written by an anonymous author. Such a funny title: With a Grain of Salt. At first, Alma thought it was a treatise on cooking, something like the fifteenth-century Venetian reprint of the fourth-century De Re Coquinaria, that the White Acre library already contained. But a swift fanning of its pages revealed that this book was written in English, and contained no illustrations or lists meant for a cook. Alma opened to the first page, and what she read there made her mind jolt wildly.