Chapter Ten
Now it was late July of 1820.
The United States of America was in economic recession, the first period of decline in its short history, and Henry Whittaker, for once, was not enjoying a glittering year of commerce. It was not that he had fallen upon hard times—not by any means—but he was feeling an unaccustomed sense of pressure. The market in exotic tropical plants was saturated in Philadelphia, and Europeans had grown bored of American botanical exports. Worse, it seemed that every Quaker in town these days was opening his own medical dispensary and manufacturing his own pills, ointments, and unguents. No rival had yet surpassed the popularity of Garrick & Whittaker products, but soon enough they might.
Henry longed to have his wife’s advice on all this, but Beatrix had not been well all year. She suffered spells of dizziness, and with the summer so hot and uncomfortable, her condition worsened. Her capacity was lagging, and her breath was always short. She never complained, and she tried to keep up with her work, but she was not healthy, and she refused to see a doctor. She did not believe in doctors, pharmacists, or medicines—an irony, given the family trade.
Henry’s health was not so capital, either. He was sixty years old now. His bouts of the old tropical maladies lasted longer these days. Dinner gatherings had become difficult to plan, as one could never be certain if Henry and Beatrix would be in the proper condition to receive guests. This made Henry angry and bored, and his anger made everything more difficult at White Acre. His temperamental outbursts were increasingly vitriolic. Somebody must pay! That bastard’s son is finished! I will see him destroyed! The maids ducked around corners and hid whenever they saw him coming.
There was bad news from Europe, too. Henry’s international agent and emissary, Dick Yancey—the tall Yorkshireman who frightened Alma so much as a child—had recently arrived at White Acre with a most disturbing piece of intelligence: a pair of chemists in Paris had recently managed to isolate a substance they were calling “quinine,” found in the bark of the cinchona tree. They were claiming that this compound was the mysterious ingredient in Jesuit’s bark that was so effective at treating malaria. With this knowledge in hand, French chemists might soon be able to manufacture a better product from the bark—a more lightly powdered, more potent, more efficient product. They could easily undermine Henry’s dominance of the fever trade forever.
Henry was berating himself (and berating Dick Yancey a bit, too) that they had not seen this coming. “We should have discovered this ourselves!” Henry said. But chemistry was not Henry’s field. He was an unrivaled arborist, a ruthless merchant, and a brilliant innovator, but try as he might, he could not stay abreast of every new bit of scientific progress in the world. Knowledge was advancing too quickly for him. Another Frenchman had recently patented a mathematical calculating machine called an arithometer, which could perform long division on its own. A Danish physicist had just announced that a relationship existed between electricity and magnetism, and Henry didn’t even understand what the man was talking about.
In short, there were too many new inventions these days, and too many new ideas, all so complex and far-flung. One could no longer be an expert in generalities, making a handsome pudding of profit in all sorts of fields. It was enough to make Henry Whittaker feel old.
But things were not all bad, either. Dick Yancey brought Henry one stunning piece of good news during this visit: Sir Joseph Banks was dead.
That daunting figure, who had once been the handsomest man in Europe, who had been the darling of kings, who had circled the globe, who had slept with heathen queens on open beaches, who had introduced thousands of new botanical species to England, and who had sent young Henry out into the world to become Henry Whittaker—that very man was dead.
Dead and rotting in a crypt somewhere in Heston.
Alma, who was sitting in her father’s study copying letters when Dick Yancey arrived and delivered this news, gasped in shock, and said, “May God rest him.”
“May God curse him,” Henry corrected. “He tried to ruin me, but I beat him.”
Without a doubt, Henry did seem to have beaten Sir Joseph Banks. At the least, he had matched him. Despite Banks’s wounding humiliations so many years earlier, Henry had prospered beyond all imagination. He had not merely been victorious in the cinchona trade, he maintained business interests in every corner of the world. He had become a name. Nearly all his neighbors owed him money. Senators, ship owners, and merchants of every sort sought his blessing, and longed for his patronage.
Over the past three decades, Henry had created greenhouses in West Philadelphia that rivaled anything to be seen at Kew. He’d coaxed orchid varieties to bloom at White Acre that Banks had never found success with along the Thames. When Henry first heard that Banks had acquired a four-hundred-pound tortoise for the menagerie at Kew, he promptly ordered a pair of them for White Acre, secured in the Galapagos and personally delivered by the tireless Dick Yancey. Henry had even managed to bring the great water lilies of the Amazon to White Acre—water lilies so big and strong they could support a standing child—while Banks, at the time of his death, had never even seen the great water lilies.
What’s more, Henry managed to live his life as richly as Banks ever did. He had conjured for himself a far larger and grander estate in America than anything Banks ever inhabited in England. His mansion shone on the hill like a colossal signal fire, casting its impressive light over the entire city of Philadelphia.
Henry had even dressed like Sir Joseph Banks for many years now. He had never forgotten how dazzling that clothing had appeared to him as a boy, and he had made a point—over the course of his life as a rich man—to both imitate and surpass Banks’s wardrobe. As a result, by 1820, Henry was still wearing a style of clothing that was much out of date. When every other man in America had long ago turned to simple trousers, Henry still wore silk stockings and breeches, elaborate white wigs with long queues, gleaming silver shoe buckles, deep-cuffed coats, blouses with broad ruffles, and brocaded vests in vivid shades of lavender and emerald.
Dressed in this lordly yet antique manner, Henry looked positively quaint as he strode about Philadelphia in his colorful Georgian finery. He had been accused of looking like a waxwork exhibit from Peale’s Arcade, but he did not mind. This was precisely how he wanted to look—exactly as Sir Joseph Banks had first appeared to him in the offices of Kew, in 1776, when Henry the thief (thin, hungry, and ambitious) had been summoned before Banks the explorer (handsome, elegant, and sumptuous).
But now Banks was dead. He was a dead baronet, to be sure, but he was still dead. Whereas Henry Whittaker—the poor-born, well-dressed emperor of American botany—was alive and prosperous. Yes, his leg ached, and his wife was ill, and the French were catching up to him in the malaria business, and the American banks were failing all around him, and he had a closetful of aging wigs, and he had never borne a son—but, by God, Henry Whittaker had defeated Sir Joseph Banks at last.
He instructed Alma to go down to the wine cellar, to procure him the finest available bottle of rum, for celebratory purposes.
“Make it two bottles,” he said, in afterthought.
“Perhaps you ought not drink overly much this evening,” Alma warned, carefully. He had only recently recovered from a fever, and she did not like the look on her father’s face. It was a look of frightful emotional distortion.
“We shall drink as much as we wish tonight, my old friend,” said Henry to Dick Yancey, as though Alma had not spoken at all.