Arthur Dixon looked as though he might faint.
The professor, now openly irritated, replied, “Young lady, I have seen carnival mules that can be taught to count.”
“As have I,” Prudence replied, again in that same pale, unruffled tone. “But I have never yet encountered a carnival mule, sir, that could be taught to calculate leap years.”
Professor Peck started a bit at this bold comment, but then nodded curtly and carried on. “Very well, then. To answer your question, there are idiot individuals, and even savant individuals, to be found within every species. Such is not the norm, however, in either direction. I have been collecting and measuring the skulls of white men and Negroes for years, and my research thus far concludes without question that the white man’s skull, when filled with water, holds on average four more ounces than the skull of the Negro—thus proving greater intellectual capacity.”
“I wonder,” Prudence said mildly, “what might have happened if you’d attempted to pour knowledge into the skull of a living Negro, rather than water into the skull of a dead one?”
The table fell into rigid silence. George Hawkes had not yet spoken this evening and clearly he was not about to begin now. Arthur Dixon was doing an excellent imitation of a corpse. Professor Peck’s face had taken on a distinctly purplish hue. Prudence, who, as ever, looked porcelain and unimpeachable, waited for a response. Henry stared at his adopted daughter with the beginnings of astonishment, yet for some reason elected not to speak—perhaps feeling too sickly to engage directly, or perhaps simply curious to see where this most unexpected conversation would lead next. Alma, likewise, contributed nothing. Frankly, Alma had nothing to add. Never had she found herself with so little to say, and never had Prudence been so loquacious. So the duty fell to Beatrix to put words back upon the dinner table, and she did so with her typical stalwart sense of Dutch responsibility.
“I would be fascinated, Professor Peck,” Beatrix said, “to see the research you mentioned earlier, about the varietal difference in head lice and intestinal parasites, between the Negro and the white man. Perhaps you have the documentation with you? I would enjoy looking it over. Biology at the parasitic level is most compelling to me.”
“I do not carry the documentation with me, madam,” the professor said, pulling himself back slowly toward dignity. “Nor do I need it. Documentation in this case is not necessary. The differentiation in head lice and intestinal parasites between Negroes and the white man is a well-known fact.”
It was almost not to be believed, but Prudence spoke again.
“What a pity,” she murmured, cool as marble. “Forgive us, sir, but in this household we are never permitted to rest upon the assumption that any fact is well known enough to evade the necessity of accurate documentation.”
Henry—sick and weary as he was—exploded into laughter.
“And that, sir,” he boomed at the professor, “is a well-known fact!”
Beatrix, as though none of this was occurring, turned her attention to the butler and said, “It seems we are now ready for the pudding.”
Their guests were meant to have stayed the night at White Acre, but Professor Peck, flummoxed and irritated, elected instead to take his carriage back to the city, announcing that he would prefer to stay in a downtown hotel and start his arduous journey back to Princeton the next day at dawn. Nobody was sorry to see him go. George Hawkes requested if he might share the carriage back to the center of Philadelphia with Professor Peck, and the scholar gruffly agreed. But before George departed, he asked if he might have a brief moment alone with Alma and Prudence. He had scarcely spoken a word this evening, but now he wanted to say something—and he wanted, apparently, to say it to both girls. So the three of them—Alma, Prudence, and George—all stepped into the drawing room together, while the others milled about in the atrium, gathering up cloaks and parcels.
George directed his comments to Alma, after receiving an almost imperceptible nod from Prudence.
“Miss Whittaker,” he said, “your sister tells me that you have written, merely to satisfy your own curiosity, a most interesting paper on the Monotropa plant. If you’re not too weary, I wonder if you might share with me your central findings?”
Alma was puzzled. This was an odd request, and at such an odd time of day. “Surely you are too weary to speak of my botanical hobbies at this late hour?” she offered.
“Not at all, Miss Whittaker,” George said. “I would welcome it. If anything, it would relax me.”
At these words, Alma found herself relaxing, too. At last, a simple theme! At last, botany!
“Well, Mr. Hawkes,” she said, “as you surely know, Monotropa hypopitys grows only in the shade, and is a sickly white color—almost ghostly in tone. Previous naturalists had always assumed that Monotropa lacks pigment because of the absence of sunlight in its environment, but this theory makes little sense to me, as some of our most vivid shades of green can also be found in the shade, in such plants as ferns and mosses. My investigations further show that Monotropa is just as likely to tilt away from the sun as toward it, leading me to wonder if it does not gain nourishment from the sun’s rays at all, but rather from some other source. I have come to believe Monotropa gains its nutrition from the plants in which it grows. In other words, I believe it to be a parasite.”
“Which brings us back to an earlier topic of this evening,” George said, with a small smile.
Goodness, George Hawkes was making a jest! Alma had not known George was capable of jesting, but upon realizing his joke, she laughed with delight. Prudence did not laugh, but merely sat watching the two of them, pretty and remote as a picture.
“Yes, quite!” Alma said, gaining more momentum. “But unlike Professor Peck and his head lice, I can offer up documentation. I’ve noticed under the microscope that the stem of Monotropa is destitute of those cuticular pores through which air and water are generally admitted in other plants, nor does it seem to have a mechanism to draw moisture from the soil. I believe Monotropa takes nourishment and moisture from its foster parent. I believe its corpselike absence of color derives from the fact that it dines upon food that has already been digested, as it were, by the host.”
“A most extraordinary speculation,” said George Hawkes.
“Well, it is mere speculation at this point. Perhaps someday chemistry will be able to prove what my microscope, for now, only suggests.”
“If you wouldn’t mind sharing the paper with me this week,” said George, “I would like to consider publishing it.”
Alma was so enchanted by this unexpected invitation (and so addled by the queer events of the day, and so stirred to be speaking directly to a grown man about whom she had just been nursing sensual thoughts) that she never stopped to consider the strangest element of this entire exchange—namely, the role of her sister Prudence. Why was Prudence even present for this conversation? Why had Prudence given George Hawkes the nod to begin speaking in the first place? And when—at what earlier unknown moment—had Prudence ever had the chance to speak with George Hawkes about Alma’s private botanical research projects? When had Prudence even noticed Alma’s private botanical research projects?