“Reverend Welles?” she asked again, hesitant as he drew nearer.
He looked up at her—far up at her—with frank and bright blue eyes. “I am the Reverend Welles,” he said. “At least, I believe that I still am, you see!”
He spoke with a light, clipped, indeterminate British accent.
“Reverend Welles, my name is Alma Whittaker. I hope you received my letter?”
He tilted his head: birdlike, interested, unperturbed. “Your letter?”
It was just as she had feared. She was not expected here. She took a deep breath and tried to think how best to explain herself. “I have come to visit, Reverend Welles, and to perhaps stay for a while—as you can probably see.” She made an apologetic gesture toward her pyramid of luggage. “I have an interest in natural botany and I would like to study your native plants. I know that you are something of a naturalist yourself. I come from Philadelphia, in the United States. I have also come to survey the vanilla plantation my family owns. My father was Henry Whittaker.”
He raised his wispy white eyebrows. “Your father was Henry Whittaker, do you say?” he asked. “Has that good man passed away?”
“I’m afraid he has, Reverend Welles. Just this last year.”
“I regret to hear it. May the Lord take him to His breast. I worked for your father over the years, you see, in my own small way. I sold him many specimens, for which he was kind enough to pay me fairly. I never met your father, you see, but I worked through his emissary, Mr. Yancey. He was always a most generous and upright man, your good father. Many times over the years, the earnings from Mr. Whittaker helped to save this little settlement. We cannot always count on the London Missionary Society to come through for us, can we? But we have always been able to count on Mr. Yancey and Mr. Whittaker, you see. Tell me, do you know Mr. Yancey?”
“I know him well, Reverend Welles. I have known him all my life. He arranged for my travel here.”
“Certainly! Certainly you do. Then you know him to be a good man.”
Alma could not say that she would ever have accused Dick Yancey of being “a good man,” but she nodded nonetheless. Likewise, she had never before heard her father described as generous, upright, or kind. These words would take some getting accustomed to. She remembered a man in Philadelphia who’d once referred to her father as “a biped of prey.” Think how surprised that man would be now, to see how well regarded was the biped’s name here, in the middle of the South Seas! The thought of it made Alma smile.
“I would be most happy to show you the vanilla plantation,” the Reverend Welles continued. “A native man from our mission has taken over management of it, ever since we lost Mr. Pike. Did you know Ambrose Pike?”
Alma’s heart pirouetted inside her chest, but she kept her face neutral. “Yes, I knew him a bit. I worked rather closely with my father, Reverend Welles, and it was the two of us, in fact, who made the decision to dispatch Mr. Pike to Tahiti.”
Alma had decided months ago, even before leaving Philadelphia, that she would tell nobody in Tahiti of her relationship to Ambrose. During the entirety of her journey, she had traveled as “Miss Whittaker,” and had allowed the world to regard her a spinster. In a very real sense, of course, she was a spinster. No sane person would have regarded her marriage to Ambrose as any sort of marriage at all. What’s more, she certainly looked like a spinster—and felt like one. Generally speaking, she did not like to tell lies, but she had come here to fit together the story of Ambrose Pike, and she much doubted that anyone would be candid with her if they knew that Ambrose had been her husband. Assuming that Ambrose had honored her request and told nobody of their marriage, she did not imagine anyone would suspect a link between them, aside from the fact that Mr. Pike had been her father’s employee. As for Alma, she was merely a traveling naturalist, and the daughter of a quite famous botanical importer and pharmaceuticals magnate; it should make every bit of sense to anyone that she might come to Tahiti for her own purposes—to study its mosses, and to look in on the family’s vanilla plantation.
“Well, we sorely miss Mr. Pike,” the Reverend Welles said, with a sweet smile. “Perhaps I miss him most of all. His death was a loss to our small settlement, you see. We wish that all strangers who came here would set such a good example to the natives as did Mr. Pike, who was a friend to the fatherless and fallen, an enemy of rancor and viciousness, and all that sort of thing, you see. He was a kind man, your Mr. Pike. I admired him, you see, because I felt he was able to show the natives—as so many Christians cannot seem to show the natives—what a Christian temperament should truly be. The conduct of so many other visiting Christians, you see, does not always seem calculated to raise the esteem of our religion in the eyes of these simple people. But Mr. Pike was a model of goodness. What’s more, he had a gift for befriending the natives such as I have rarely seen in others. He spoke to everyone in such a plain and generous manner, you see. It is not always done that way, I am afraid, with the men who come to this island from far away. Tahiti can be a dangerous paradise, you see. For those who are accustomed to, let us say, the more rigorous moral landscape of European society, this island and its people can present temptations that are difficult to resist. Visitors take advantage, you see. Even some missionaries, I am sorry to say, sometimes exploit these people, who are a childlike and innocent people, you see, though with the help of the Lord we try to teach them to be more self-preserving. Mr. Pike was not such a type—to take advantage, you see.”
Alma felt bowled over. She found this to be quite the most remarkable speech of introduction she had ever heard (barring, she supposed, the first time she had met Retta Snow). The Reverend Welles had not probed whatsoever into why Alma Whittaker had come all the way from Philadelphia to sit upon a pile of crates and trunks in the middle of his mission, and yet here he was, already discussing Ambrose Pike! She had not expected this. Nor had she expected that her husband, with his valise filled with secret and lewd drawings, would be praised quite so passionately as a moral example.
“Yes, Reverend Welles,” she managed to say.
Astonishingly, the Reverend Welles continued even further on the subject: “What’s more, you see, I came to love Mr. Pike as a most cherished friend. You cannot imagine the comfort of an intelligent companion in a place so lonely as this. Verily I would walk many miles to see his face again or to grasp his hand once more in friendship, if only that were possible—but such a miracle will never exist for as long as I breathe, you see, for Mr. Pike has been called home to paradise, Miss Whittaker, and we are left here alone.”
“Yes, Reverend Welles,” Alma said again. What else could she say?
“You may call me Brother Welles,” he said, “if I may call you Sister Whittaker?”
“Certainly, Brother Welles,” she said.
“You may now join us for evening prayer, Sister Whittaker. We are in a bit of a rush, you see. We will start later than usual this evening, for I have spent the day out in the coral, you see, and I have lost track of time.”
Ah, Alma thought—the coral. Of course! He had been out at sea all day in the coral reefs, not looking after cattle.
“Thank you,” Alma said. She looked again to her luggage, and hesitated. “I wonder where I might place my belongings in the meanwhile, to keep them safe? In my letter, Brother Welles, I had inquired if I might stay at the settlement for some time. I study mosses, you see, and I had hoped to explore the island . . .” She trailed off, unnerved by the man’s candid blue eyes upon her.