The Signature of All Things

that he published papers with such titles as “The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural” was not.
    But Alma could not help but love Wallace all the more for his unorthodox beliefs, and for his passionate, fearless arguments. Her own life was becoming ever more sedate and circumscribed, but she took such pleasure from watching Wallace—the wild, unbridled thinker—cause academic mayhem in so many directions at once. He had none of Darwin’s aristocratic propriety; he spilled over with inspirations and distractions and half-baked notions. Nor did he ever stay on a single idea for long, flitting instead from whim to whim.
    In his most transcendent fascinations, Wallace inevitably reminded Alma of Ambrose, and this made her fonder of him than ever. Like Ambrose, Wallace was a dreamer. He came down strongly on the side of miracles. He argued that nothing was more important than the investigation of that which appeared to defy the rules of nature, for who were we to claim that we understood the rules of nature? Everything was a miracle until we solved it. Wallace wrote that the first man who ever saw a flying fish probably thought he was witnessing a miracle—and the first man who ever described a flying fish was doubtless called a liar. Alma loved him for such playful, stubborn arguments. He would have done well at the White Acre dinner table, she often thought.
    Wallace did not completely neglect his more legitimate scientific explorations, however. In 1876, he published his own masterpiece: The Geographical Distribution of Animals , which was instantly celebrated as the most definitive text on zoogeography yet produced. It was a stunning book. Alma’s young cousin Mimi read most of it to her, for Alma’s sight had grown quite dim by now. Alma enjoyed Wallace’s ideas so much that during certain passages of the book, she sometimes even cheered aloud.
    Mimi would look up from her reading and say, “You do quite enjoy this Alfred Russel Wallace, don’t you, Auntie?”
    “He is a prince of science!” Alma smiled.
    Wallace soon undermined his own rescued reputation, however, with an increased involvement in radical politics—fighting vociferously for land reform, for women’s suffrage, for the rights of the poor and the dispossessed. He simply could not stay above the fray. Friends and admirers in high places tried to secure him stable positions at good institutions, but Wallace had become known as such an extremist that few would risk hiring him. Alma worried about his finances. She sensed he was not wise with his money. In every way, Wallace simply refused to play the part of the goodEnglish gentleman—probably because he was not, in fact, a good English gentleman, but rather a working-class firebrand who never thought before he spoke, and never paused before he published. His passions made for a certain amount of chaos, and controversy stuck to him like a burr, but Alma did not want him ever to back down. She liked to see him needling the world.
    “You tell them, my boy,” Alma would murmur, whenever she heard of his latest scandal. “You tell them!”
    Darwin never publicly spoke an ill word about Wallace, nor Wallace about Darwin, but Alma always wondered what the two men—so brilliant, and yet so opposite in disposition and style—truly thought of each other. Her question was answered in April of 1882, when Charles Darwin died and Alfred Russel Wallace, per Darwin’s written instructions, served as a pallbearer at the great man’s funeral.
    They loved each other, she realized.They loved each other, because they knew each other.
    With that thought, Alma felt deeply lonely, for the first time in dozens of years.
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    D arwin’s death alarmed Alma, who was now eighty-two years old, and increasingly frail. He had been only seventy-three! She had never expected to outlive him. The sense of alarm stayed with her for months after Darwin passed away. It was as though a piece of her own history had died with him, and nobody would ever know it. Not that anyone had known it before, of course, but a link was undoubtedly lost—a link that meant a great deal to her. Soon Alma herself would die, and then there would be only one link left—young Wallace, who was then nearing sixty, and maybe not so young anymore, after all. If things went on as they always had, she would die never having known Wallace, just as she had never known Darwin. It felt unbearably sad to her, quite suddenly, that this might come