In truth, Beatrix had never done Prudence or Alma any favors regarding their suitability for marriage. There were those in Philadelphia who whispered that the Whittakers had rendered their girls completely unmarriageable, what with all that education and isolation from the better families. Neither girl had friends. They had only ever dined with grown men of science and trade, so their minds were distinctly unformed. They had not the slightest training in how to speak properly to a young suitor. Alma was the type of girl who, when a visiting young fellow admired the water lilies in one of White Acre’s beautiful ponds, would say, “No, sir, you are incorrect. These are not water lilies. These are lotuses. Water lilies float on the surface of water, you see, while lotuses rise just above it. Once you learn the difference, you’ll never make the mistake again.”
Alma had grown tall as a man by now, with broad shoulders. She looked as though she could swing an ax. (In point of fact, she could swing an ax, and often had to, in her botanical fieldwork.) This need not have necessarily precluded her from marriage. Some men liked a larger woman, who promised a stronger disposition, and Alma, it could be argued, had a handsome profile—at least from her left side. She certainly had a fine, friendly nature. Yet she was missing some invisible, essential ingredient, and so, despite all the frank eroticism that lay hidden within her body, her presence in a room did not kindle ideas of ardor in any man.
It did not help that Alma herself believed she was unlovely. She believed this only because she had been told it so many times, and in so many different ways. Most recently, the news of her homeliness had come straight from her father, who—after drinking quite a bit too much rum one evening—had said to her, quite out of nowhere, “Think nothing of it, my girl!”
“Think nothing of what, Father?” Alma asked, looking up from the letter she had been writing for him.
“Don’t dismay of it, Alma. It’s not everything to have a pleasing face. Plenty of women are loved who are not beauties. Think of your mother. She’s never been pretty a day of her life, yet she found a husband, didn’t she? Think of Mrs. Cavendesh, down near the bridge! The woman looks a fright, yet her husband finds her adequate enough to have made seven children out of her. So there will be somebody for you, Plum, and I think he will be a fortunate man to have you.”
To think that all this was offered by way of consolation!
As for Prudence, she was a widely acknowledged beauty—arguably the greatest beauty in Philadelphia—but the entire city agreed that she was cold and unwinnable. Prudence excited envy in women, but it was not clear that she excited passion in men. Prudence had a way of making men feel that they ought not to bother at all, and so, wisely, they didn’t. They stared, for one could not help staring at Prudence Whittaker, but they did not approach.
One might have expected the Whittaker girls to attract fortune hunters. True, there were many young men who coveted the family’s money, but the prospect of being Henry Whittaker’s son-in-law seemed more like a threat than a windfall, and nobody really believed that Henry would ever part with his fortune, anyway. One way or another, not even dreams of riches brought suitors near White Acre.
Of course, there were always men around the estate—but they came seeking Henry, not his daughters. At any hour of the day, one could find men standing in the atrium of White Acre, hoping for an audience with Henry Whittaker. These were men of all sorts: desperate men, dreaming men, angry men, liars. These were men who arrived at the estate carrying display cases, inventions, drawings, schemes, or lawsuits. They came offering shares of stock, or pleas for loans, or the prototype of a new vacuum pump, or the certainty of a cure for jaundice, if only Henry would invest in their research. But they did not come to White Acre for the pleasures of courtship.
George Hawkes, however, was different. He never sought anything material from Henry, but came up to White Acre merely to converse with him and to enjoy the spoils of the greenhouses. Henry enjoyed George’s company, for George published the latest scientific findings in his journals, and knew all that was transpiring in the botanical world. George most certainly did not comport himself as a suitor—he was neither flirtatious nor playful—but he was aware of the Whittaker girls, and kind to them. He was always solicitous to Prudence. As for Alma, he engaged with her as though she were a respected botanical colleague. Alma appreciated George’s kind regard, but she wished for more. Academic discourse, she felt, is not how a young man speaks to the girl he loves. This was most unfortunate, for Alma indeed loved George Hawkes with all her heart.
He was an odd choice to love. Nobody would ever have accused George of being a handsome man, but in Alma’s eyes, he was exemplary. She felt somehow that they made a nice pair, perhaps even an obvious pair. There was no question that George was overly large, pale, awkward, and clumsy—but so was Alma. He always made a hash of dressing, but Alma was not fashionable, either. George’s waistcoats were always too tight and his trousers too loose, but if Alma had been a man, this is probably how she would have dressed, as well, for she’d always encountered a similar sort of trouble puzzling out how to arrange her clothing. George had entirely too much forehead and not quite enough chin, but he possessed a thick, damp shock of dark hair, which Alma dearly wanted to touch.
Alma did not know how to play the coquette. She had not the first idea of how to woo George, other than to write him paper after paper on ever more obscure botanical subjects. There had only ever been one moment between George and Alma that might reasonably have been interpreted as tender. In April of 1818, Alma had presented George Hawkes with a beautiful view in her microscope of Carchesium polypinum (perfectly lit and living, happily dancing in a tiny pool of pond water, with its spinning cups, waving cilia, and fringed, flowering branches). George had grasped her left hand, pressed it spontaneously between his two large, damp palms, and said, “My stars, Miss Whittaker! What a brilliant microscopist you’ve become!”
That touch, that pressing of the hand, that praise, had set Alma’s heart beating nineteen strokes to the dozen. It had also sent her running to the binding closet, to slake herself once more with her own hands.
Oh, yes—to the binding closet again!
The binding closet had become, ever since the autumn of 1816, a place that Alma visited every day—indeed, sometimes several times a day, with pauses only during her menses. One might have wondered when she found time for such activity, with all her studies and responsibilities, but simply put, there was no question of not doing it. Alma’s body—tall and mannish, flinty and freckled, large of bone, thick of knuckle, square of hip, and hard of chest—had become, over the years, a most unlikely organ of sexual desire, and she was constantly overcongested with need.
She had now read Cum Grano Salis so many times that it was emblazoned in her memory, and she had moved on to other daring reading material. Whenever her father bought up other people’s libraries, Alma paid most careful attention while sorting through the books, always on the lookout for something dangerous, something with a trick cover, something illicit hidden among the more innocuous volumes. This is how she had found Sappho and Diderot, and also some quite unsettling translations of Japanese pleasure manuals. She had found a French book of twelve sexual adventures, divided by month, called L’Année galante, that told of perverse concubines and lecherous priests, of fallen ballet girls and seduced governesses. (Oh, those long-suffering seduced governesses! Reduced and ruined by the score, they were! They showed up in so many naughty books! Why would anyone be a governess, Alma wondered, if it only led to rape and enslavement?) Alma even read the manual of a secret “Ladies’ Whipping Club” in London, as well as numberless tales of Roman orgies and obscene Hindu religious initiations. All of these books, she separated out from the others, and hid in trunks in the old hayloft of the carriage house.