The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert Page B

further, Beatrix replied, “Not everything has an answer.”
    Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor. When she recovered herself, she drew the mysterious autumn crocus in her writing tablet, and dated her entry, along withher questions and protestations. She was quite diligent in this way. Things must be kept track of—even things one could not comprehend. Beatrix had instructed her that she must always record her findings in drawings as accurate as she could make them, categorized, whenever possible, by the correct taxonomy.
    Alma enjoyed the act of sketching, but her finished drawings often disappointed her. She could not draw faces or animals (even her butterflies looked truculent), though eventually she found that she was not awful at drawing plants. Her first successes were some quite good renderings of umbels—those hollow-stemmed, flat-flowered members of the carrot family. Her umbels were accurate, though she wished they were more than accurate; she wished they were beautiful. She said as much to her mother, who corrected her: “Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”
    Sometimes, in her forays through the woodlands, Alma encountered other children. This always alarmed her. She knew who these intruders were, though she never spoke to them. They were the children of her parents’ employees. The White Acre estate was like a giant living beast, with half its enormous body needed for servants—the German and Scottish-born gardeners whom her father preferred to hire over the lazier native-born Americans, and the Dutch-born maids upon whom her mother insisted and relied. The household servants lived in the attic, and the outdoor laborers and their families lived in cottages and cabins all across the property. They were quite nice cottages, too—not because Henry cared about his workers’ comfort, but because Henry could not abide the sight of squalor.
    Whenever Alma encountered the workers’ children in the woods, she was struck by fear and horror. She had a method for surviving these encounters, though: she would pretend they were not occurring at all. She rode both past and above the children on her stalwart pony (who moved, as always, at the slow and unconcerned pace of cold molasses). Alma held her breath as she passed the children, looking neither to her left nor to her right, until she had cleared the intruders safely. If she did not look at them, she did not have to believe in them.
    The workers’ children never interfered with Alma. It was likely they had been warned to leave her alone. Everyone feared Henry Whittaker, so the daughter was automatically to be feared, too. Sometimes, though, Alma spiedon the children from a safe distance. Their games were rough and incomprehensible. They dressed differently than Alma did. None of these children carried botanical collecting kits slung over their shoulders, and none of them rode ponies with gaily colored silk ear tassels. They shoved and shouted at each other, using coarse language. Alma was more afraid of these children than anything else in the world. She often had nightmares about them.
    But here is what one did for nightmares: one went to find Hanneke de Groot, down in the basement of the house. This could be helpful and soothing. Hanneke de Groot, head housekeeper, held authority over the entire cosmos of the White Acre estate, and her authority vested her with a most calming gravitas. Hanneke slept in her own quarters, next to the underground kitchen, down where the fires never went out. She existed within a warm bath of cellar air, perfumed by the salted hams that hung from every beam. Hanneke lived in a cage—or so it appeared to Alma—for her personal rooms had bars over the windows and doors, as it was Hanneke alone who controlled access to the household’s silver and plate, and who