“Thank you,” Alma said.
As for Retta Snow, the girl came over to White Acre several times during the first weeks after Beatrix’s death, but Alma and Prudence—absorbed in catching up with the work of the family business—could find no time for her.
“I can help you!” Retta said, but everyone knew that she could not.
“Then I shall wait for you every day in your study in the carriage house,” Retta finally promised Alma, when she had been turned away too many times in a row. “When you are finished with your labors, you will come and see me. I will talk to you while you study impossible things. I will tell you extraordinary stories, and you will laugh and marvel. For I have news of the most shocking variety!”
Alma could not imagine ever again finding the time to laugh or marvel with Retta, much less to continue her own projects. For quite some time after her mother’s death, she forgot that she had ever had her own work at all. She was a mere quill-driver now, a scrivener, a slave to her father’s desk, and the administrator of a dauntingly large household—wading through a jungle of neglected tasks. For two months, she barely stepped outside her father’s study at all. As best she was able, she refused to let her father leave, either.
“I need your help on all these matters,” Alma pleaded with Henry, “or we shall never catch up again.”
Then, late one October afternoon, right in the middle of all the sorting, calculating, and solving, Henry simply stood up and walked out of his own study, leaving Alma and Prudence with their hands full of papers.
“Where are you going?” Alma asked.
“To get drunk,” he said, in a voice fierce and dark. “And by God, how I dread it.”
“Father—” she protested.
“Finish it yourself,” he commanded.
And so she did.
With Prudence’s help, with Hanneke’s help, but mostly on her own accord, Alma polished that study to a state of trim perfection. She put each one of her father’s affairs in order—solving one onerous problem at a time—until every edict, injunction, mandate, and dictate had been addressed, until every letter was answered, every chit was paid, every investor was assured, every vendor cajoled, and every vendetta settled.
It was the middle of January before she finished, and when she did, she understood the workings of the Whittaker Company from top to bottom. She had been in mourning for five months. She had entirely missed the autumn—seeing it neither arrive nor leave. She stood up from her father’s desk and unwound her black crepe armband. She laid the thing across in the last bin of refuse and discards, to be burned with the rest of it. That was enough.
Alma walked to the binding closet just off the library, locked herself in, and pleasured herself quickly. She had not touched her quim in months, and the unfettering of this welcome old release made her want to weep. She had not wept in months, either. No, that was incorrect: she had not wept in years. She also realized that her twenty-first birthday had come and gone the previous week without notice—not even from Prudence, who could usually be counted upon for a small, thoughtful gift.
Well, what did she expect? She was older now. She was the mistress of the grandest estate in Philadelphia, and the head clerk, it now appeared, of one of the largest botanical importing concerns on the planet. The time for childish things had passed.
After Alma left the binding closet, she stripped down and took a bath—though it was not a Saturday—and went to sleep at five o’clock in the afternoon. She slept for thirteen hours. When she awoke, the house was silent. For the first moment in months, the house needed nothing from her. The silence sounded like music. She dressed slowly and enjoyed her tea and toast. Then she walked across her mother’s old Grecian garden, glassed over now with ice, until she reached the carriage house. It was time for her to return, if only for a few hours, to her own work, which she had left in midsentence the day her mother had fallen down the stairs.
To her surprise, Alma saw a thin tendril of smoke uncurling from the chimney of the carriage house as she approached. When she reached her study, there—as promised—was Retta Snow, curled up on the divan under a thick wool blanket, sound asleep and waiting for her.
“Retta—” Alma touched her friend’s arm. “What in the world are you doing here?”
Retta’s large green eyes flew open. Clearly, in the first moment in which she awoke, the girl had no idea where she was, and she did not seem to recognize Alma. Something awful came over Retta’s face in that instant. She looked feral, even dangerous, and Alma found herself jerking back in fear, as though recoiling from a cornered dog. Then Retta smiled and the effect passed. She was all sweetness again, and she resembled herself once more.
“My loyal friend,” said Retta in a sleepy voice, reaching for Alma’s hand. “Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”
Alma looked about the room and saw a small cache of empty biscuit tins and a puddle of clothing piled carelessly on the floor. “Why are you sleeping in my study, Retta?”
“Because things have grown impossibly dull at my own house. Things are rather dull here, too, of course, but at least there is the chance at times to see a bright face, if one is patient. Did you know that you have mice in your herbarium? Why do you not keep a pussycat in this room, to manage them? Have you ever seen a witch? I confess, I believe there was a witch in the carriage house last week. I could hear her laughing. Do you think we should tell your father? I can’t imagine it’s safe to keep a witch about the place. Or perhaps he would merely think I am mad. Though he seems to think so, anyway. Have you got any more tea? Aren’t these cold mornings unutterably cruel? Do you not long terribly for summer? Where has your black armband gone?”
Alma sat down and pressed her friend’s hand to her lips. It was good to hear utter nonsense again, after all the seriousness of the last months. “I never know which one of your questions to answer first, Retta.”
“Start in the middle,” Retta suggested, “and then work in both directions.”
“What did the witch look like?” Alma asked.
“Ha! Now you are the one asking too many questions!” Retta leapt up from the divan and shook herself awake. “Are we working today?”
Alma smiled. “Yes, I believe we are working today—at last.”
“And what are we studying, my dear best Alma?”
“We are studying Utricularia clandestina, my dear best Retta.”
“A plant?”
“Most certainly.”
“Oh, it sounds beautiful!”
“Do be assured that it isn’t,” Alma said. “But it is interesting. And what is Retta studying today?” Alma picked up the ladies’ magazine lying on the floor by the divan and thumbed through its incomprehensible pages.
“I am studying the sorts of gowns in which a fashionable girl should wed,” Retta said lightly.
“And are you choosing such a gown?” Alma replied, just as lightly.
“Most absolutely!”
“And what will you do with such a gown, my little bird?”
“Oh, I had a plan to wear it on my wedding day.”
“An ingenious plan!” Alma said, and turned toward her laboratory bench to see if she could begin putting together her notes from five months earlier.
“But the sleeves are quite short in all these drawings, you see,” Retta prattled on, “and I fear I shall be cold. I could wear a shawl, suggests my little maid, but then nobody would be able to enjoy the necklace Mother said I could wear. Also, I wish for a spray of roses, though they are out of season and some say it is inelegant to carry a spray of flowers, in any case.”
Alma turned around to face her friend once more. “Retta,” she said, this time in a more serious tone. “You aren’t truly getting married, are you?”