The Signature of All Things

neither confessed nor pleaded, nor hung his head in shame, and if Sir Joseph Banks thought Henry Whittaker was fool enough to speak first under such hot circumstances, then he did not know Henry Whittaker.
    Therefore, after a long silence, Banks commanded, “Tell me, then—why should I not see you hang at Tyburn?”
    So that’s it, Henry thought. I’m snapped.
    Nonetheless, the boy grappled for a plan. He needed to find a tactic, and he needed to find it in one quick and slender moment. He had not spent his life being beaten senseless by his older brothers to have learned nothing about fighting. When a bigger and stronger opponent has landed the first blow, you have but one chance to swing back before you will be pummeled into clay, and you’d best come back with something unexpected.
    “Because I’m a useful little fingerstink,” Henry said.
    Banks, who enjoyed unusual incidents, barked with surprised laughter. “I confess that I don’t see the use of you, young man. All you have done for me is to rob me of my hard-won treasure.”
    It wasn’t a question, but Henry answered it nonetheless.
    “I might’ve trimmed a bit,” he said.
    “You don’t deny this?”
    “All the braying in the world won’t change it, do it?”
    Again, Banks laughed. He may have thought the boy was putting on a show of false courage, but Henry’s courage was real. As was his fear. As was his lack of penitence. For the whole of his life, Henry would always find penitence weak.
    Banks changed tack. “I must say, young man, that you are a crowning distress to your father.”
    “And him to me, sir,” Henry fired back.
    Once more, the surprised bark of laughter from Banks. “Is he, then? What harm has that good man ever done to you?”
    “Made me poor, sir,” Henry said. Then, suddenly realizing everything, Henry added, “It were him, weren’t it? Who peached me over to you?”
    “Indeed it was. He’s an honorable soul, your father.”
    Henry shrugged. “Not to me, eh?”
    Banks took this in and nodded, generously conceding the point. Then he asked, “To whom have you been selling my plants?”
    Henry ticked off the names on his fingers: “Mancini, Flood, Willink, LeFavour, Miles, Sather, Evashevski, Feuerle, Lord Lessig, Lord Garner—”
    Banks cut him off with a wave. He stared at the boy with open astonishment. Oddly, if the list had been more modest, Banks might have been angrier. But these were the most esteemed botanical names of the day. A few of them Banks called friends. How had the boy found them? Some of these men hadn’t been to England in years. The child must be exporting . What kind of campaign had this creature been running under his nose?
    “How do you even know how to handle plants?” Banks asked.
    “I always knowed plants, sir, for my whole life. It’s like I knowed it all beforehand.”
    “And these men, do they pay you?”
    “Or they don’t get their plants, do they?” Henry said.
    “You must be earning well. Indeed, you must have accumulated quite a pile of money in the past years.”
    Henry was too cunning to answer this.
    “What have you done with the money you’ve earned, young man?” Banks pushed on. “I can’t say you’ve invested it in your wardrobe. Without a doubt, your earnings belong to Kew. So where is it all?”
    “Gone, sir.”
    “Gone where?”
    “Dice, sir. I have a weakness of the gambling, see.”
    That may or may not have been true, Banks thought. But the boy certainly had as much nerve as any two-footed beast he had ever encountered. Banks was intrigued. He was a man, after all, who kept a heathen for a pet, and who—to be honest—enjoyed the reputation of being half heathen himself. His station in life required that he at least purport to admire gentility, but secretly he preferred a bit of wildness. And what a little wild cockerel was Henry Whittaker! Banks was growing less inclined by the moment to hand over this curious item of humanity to the constables.
    Henry, who saw everything, saw something happening in Banks’s face—a softening of countenance, a blooming curiosity, a sliver of a chance for hislife to be saved. Intoxicated with a compulsion for self-preservation, the boy vaulted into that sliver of hope, one last time.
    “Don’t put me to hang, sir,” Henry said. “You’ll regret it that you did.”
    “What do you propose I do with you, instead?”
    “Put me to use.”
    “Why should I?” asked Banks.
    “Because I’m better than