Alma turned her attention back to her mossy boulders. She had work to do. She had fallen behind in the last week, committing poor Retta to Dr. Griffon’s asylum, and she did not intend to fall even further behind now as a result of her sister’s foolhardiness. She had measurements to record, and she needed to attend to them.
Three separate colonies of Dicranum grew on one of the largest rocks. Alma had been observing these colonies for twenty-six years, and lately it had become incontrovertibly evident that one of these Dicranum varietals was advancing, while the other two had retreated. Alma sat near the boulder, comparing more than two decades of notes and drawings. She could make no sense of it.
Dicranum was Alma’s obsession-within-an-obsession—the innermost heart of her fascination with mosses. The world was blanketed with hundreds upon hundreds of species of Dicranum, and each variety was minutely different. Alma knew more about Dicranum than anybody in the world, yet still this genus bothered her and kept her awake at night. Alma—who had puzzled over mechanisms and origins her entire life—had been consumed for years with fervent questions about this complicated genus. How had Dicranum come to be? Why was it so markedly diverse? Why had nature bestowed such pains in making each variety so minutely different from the others? Why were some varietals of Dicranum so much hardier than their nearby kin? Had there always been such a vast mix of Dicranum, or had they transmuted somehow—metamorphosed from one into another—while sharing a common ancestor?
There had been a good deal of talk within the scientific community lately about species transmutation. Alma had been following the debate most eagerly. It was not an entirely new discussion. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had originated the subject forty years prior, in France, when he’d argued that every species on earth had transformed since its original creation because of an “interior sentiment” within the organism, which longed to perfect itself. More recently, Alma had read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, by an anonymous British author who also argued that species were capable of progression, of change. The author did not put forth a convincing mechanism as to how a species could change—but he did argue for the existence of transmutation.
Such views were most controversial. To put forth the notion that any entity could alter itself was to question God’s very dominion. The Christian position was that the Lord had created all the world’s species in one day, and that none of His creations had changed since the dawn of time. But it seemed increasingly clear to Alma that things had changed. Alma herself had studied samples of fossilized moss that did not quite match the mosses of the current day. And this was only nature on the tiniest scale! What was one to make of the tremendous fossil bones of the lizardlike creatures that Richard Owen had recently named “dinosaurs”? That these gargantuan animals had once walked the earth, and now—quite obviously—they did not, was beyond dispute. The dinosaurs had been replaced by something else, or they had shifted into something else, or they had simply been erased. How did one account for such mass extinctions and transformations?
As the great Linnaeus himself had written: Natura non facit saltum.
Nature does not make leaps.
But Alma thought that nature did make leaps. Perhaps only tiny leaps—skips, hops, and lurches—but leaps nonetheless. Nature certainly made alterations. One could see it in the breeding of dogs and sheep, and one could see it in the shifting arrangements of power and dominion between various moss colonies on these common limestone boulders at White Acre’s forest edge. Alma had ideas, but she could not quite tack and baste them together. She felt certain that some varieties of Dicranum must have grown forth out of other, older varieties of Dicranum. She felt certain that one entity could have issued from another entity, or rendered another colony extinct. She could not grasp how it occurred, but she was convinced that it occurred.
She felt the familiar old constriction in her chest—that combination of desire and urgency. Only two more hours of daylight remained in which to work outdoors before she had to return to her father’s evening demands. She needed more hours—many more hours—if she was ever to study these questions as they deserved to be studied. She would never have enough hours. She had already lost so much time this week. Every soul in the world seemed to believe that Alma’s hours belonged to him. How was she ever meant to devote herself to proper scientific exploration?
Observing the sun as it lowered, Alma decided that she would not visit Prudence. She simply did not have the time for it. She did not want to read Arthur’s latest seditious pamphlet on abolition, either. What could Alma do to help the Dixons? Her sister did not want to hear Alma’s opinions, nor did she wish to accept Alma’s assistance. Alma felt sorry for Prudence, but a visit would only be awkward, as such encounters were always awkward.
Back to her boulders Alma turned. She took out her tape and measured the colonies again. Hastily, she recorded the data in her notebook.
Only two more hours.
She had so much work to do.
Arthur and Prudence Dixon would have to learn how to take more care with their own lives.
Chapter Fourteen
Later that month, Alma received a note from George Hawkes, asking that she please come to Arch Street, in order to visit his printing shop and see something quite extraordinary.
“I shall not spoil the incredibility of it by telling you more at this point,” he wrote, “but I believe you would enjoy viewing this in person, and at your leisure.”
Well, Alma had no leisure. Neither did George, though—which is why this note was most unprecedented. In the past, George had contacted Alma only for publishing matters, or emergencies regarding Retta. But there had been no emergencies with Retta since they had placed her at Griffon’s, and Alma and George were not working on a book together at the moment. What, then, could be so urgent?
Intrigued, she took a carriage to Arch Street.
She found George in a back room, hulking over a long table covered with the most dazzling multiplication of shapes and colors. As Alma approached, she could see that this was an enormous collection of paintings of orchids, stacked in tall piles. Not only paintings, but lithographs, drawings, and etchings.
“This is the most beautiful work I have ever seen,” George said, by means of a greeting. “It’s just come in yesterday, from Boston. It’s such an odd story. Look at this mastery!”
George thrust into Alma’s hand a lithograph of a spotted Catasetum. The orchid had been rendered so magnificently that it seemed to grow off the page. Its lips were spotted red against yellow, and appeared moist, like living flesh. Its leaves were lush and thick, and its bulbous roots looked as though one could shake actual soil off them. Before Alma could thoroughly take in the beauty, George handed her another stunning print—a Peristeria barkeri, with its tumbling golden blossoms so fresh they nearly trembled. Whoever had tinted this lithograph had been a master of texture as well as color; the petals resembled unshorn velvet, and touches of albumen on their tips gave each blossom a hint of dew.