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edify you on some points of matrimonial conduct.
daguerreotype
“Yes?” Prudence said. “I find myself without experience,” Alma completed the statement. Prudence gazed on, in unperturbed silence. Help me, woman! Alma wanted to cry out. If
How to present myself, I mean, in regards to the art of pleasing . . .” “There should be no art to it,” Prudence replied, “unless one is a woman for hire.”
“You need only be willing,” Prudence said. “A healthy man presented with a willing and acquiescent
wife will need no particular coaxing.”
. What Alma desperately wanted to know was how she could possibly present herself to Ambrose in the form of an orchid, like her sister, and not a mossy boulder, like herself.
she had not only asked a weary forty-eight-year-old mother—with a sick child in the house!—for advice on the art of copulation, but she had asked the daughter of a whore for advice on the art of copulation. How could Alma have forgotten Prudence’s shameful origins?
cursory
innocuous
She remembered the ball that her parents had held in 1808, exactly forty years earlier: how the verandah and the great lawn had swirled with dancers and musicians, and how she had run among them with her torch.
cabalistic.
lobcock,
licentious
Had she imagined that this might have been the problem? Well, this was not the problem. He had genitalia—perfectly adequate, and even impressive, genitalia. She allowed herself to observe with care this lovely appendage of his—this pale, waving sea creature, which floated between his legs in its thatch of wet and private fur.
Ambrose did not move. Nor did his penis stir at all. It did not like being looked at. She realized this immediately. Alma had spent enough time in the woods gazing upon shy animals to know when a creature did not want to be seen, and this creature between Ambrose’s legs did not wish to be seen.
conduit,
supplication.
She put three of his fingers in her mouth. She could not help herself. She needed something of him inside her.
Her heart was so broken that she did not know how it was possible she could still be alive.
She thought of Hippocrates, who believed that the ventricles of the heart were not pumps for blood, but for air.
Shaker,
Edify
debased,
“Oh, for the godforsaken mercy of the twice-buggered mother of Christ!” Alma cursed. She wanted to pick him up and shake him, as she’d shaken Robert the garden boy the other day.
The women of Sodom, she wanted to tell him, had been punished by Jehovah for having sexual communion with angels—but at least they had gotten their chance! Just her luck, to have been sent an angel so beautiful, yet so uncomplying.
How can you be so dim? Put your eyes upon me, child! Your real eyes—your mortal eyes. Do I look like an angel to you, Ambrose Pike?”
deuce
“Do what you damned well like, Alma! This decision is yours. Mr. Pike is not mine to dispose of. You brought this thing into our household, you get rid of it—if that is what you wish. Be swift about it, too. It is always better to cut than to tear.
He wanted to be an angel of God, but Lord protect him, he was just a lamb.
diminished
She felt as though she were leaving a baby in the care of a trained crocodile.
but during that first winter after Ambrose left, she found it difficult to rise at all in the mornings. She lost her nerve for study. She could not imagine why she had ever been interested in mosses—or in anything. All her old enthusiasms were grown over with weeds.
contagion
She unfolded its many pleats and smoothed it out. In the center of the page was one word, written in his elegant, unmistakable hand: ALMA. Useless.
ensorcelled
cataclysm
He was just a bit of nonsense, I tell you. He ought to have been harmless nonsense, but you fell prey. Well, we all fall prey to nonsense at times, child, and sometimes we are fool enough to even love it.”
mellifluous
She wanted to put her head in Hanneke’s lap and be scolded forever.
cowed
Divine Time, Geological Time, Human Time, Moss Time. It occurred to her that she had spent most of her life wishing she could live within the slow, microscopic realm of Moss Time. That had been an odd enough desire, but then she’d met Ambrose Pike, whose yearnings were even more extreme than hers: he had wanted to live within the eternal emptiness of Divine Time—which is to say, he had wanted to live outside of time altogether. He had wanted her to live there with him. One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed. She tried
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It knocked a wedge of something out of her—a wedge of something terribly important—and that wedge was sent spinning into the air, never to be found again.
cauterizes
Her father grew sicker. Her responsibilities grew larger. The world became smaller.
This was a famous tactic of his: silence as a weapon.
“Burn it,” he said.
All she knew was that Ambrose’s precious valise was in her possession now—and so was a dilemma.
Alma was the sort of person who was born to investigate things regardless of the consequences, even if it meant breaking a lock.
Polynesian
