Across the Endless River (24 page)

T
WENTY-THREE

A
fter that first night, Baptiste went to Theresa's rooms two or three times a week as spring turned into summer. After their lovemaking she would sometimes kneel by his side as he lay on his back and run her finger lightly across each of his four scars and bend forward and kiss each one, finishing the ritual with a whispered prayer: “Neither knife nor ball shall pierce the flesh of him I hold dear.” Her incantation gave her a feeling she could protect him against the things she could not control. Her husband had died in battle, he reminded himself. Baptiste's scars, though, had only been the result of childhood games and foolish accidents. He tried to tell Theresa this, but she hushed him.

Just below his left eye he had a small triangular indentation from a stubby arrow shot in haste by a fellow member of the Kit Fox Society as they played at war. An inch higher and he would have lost his eye, but the cheekbone had protected him. On his left breast, just below the nipple, he bore a diagonal scar six inches long and one inch wide, an impressive mark of other roughhousing with his Mandan cousins, when the head of a war club, brandished in glee, came loose and struck him to the ground. He had bled spectacularly, his chest and stomach latticed with red, but the wound was superficial and had soon healed. Another puncture wound on the right side of his stomach had been far more serious. He had fallen onto the blunt end of a lance when his horse shied at a rattlesnake. The fever had lasted for over a week. When Baptiste recovered, the shaman told him that he had left to visit the Great Spirit and had only reluctantly returned when they called to him through the big pipe.

The last scar caused him pain. He had jumped into the river from a high bank, responding to the cries of his father, whose overloaded canoe had upended. As strong a paddle as he was in a canoe, his father had never learned to swim; though he was only thirty feet from the bank, his terror was real. Baptiste leaped and hit a submerged rock, which peeled off a flap of skin on his right hip as cleanly as if it were a strip of hide flensed after the hunt. Once he got his father and his load of pelts safely to shore, he had looked in awe at the flesh hanging from the bone and had come near to fainting. But the shaman bound up the skin and muscle with a poultice and changed the herbs frequently. The wound had taken a long time to heal, and still, five years later, he felt a deep ache in his hip when the weather was damp. It sometimes frightened Baptiste to look at the mottled patch of skin with its thick, ragged edge. He realized that these must seem like savage wounds to one not used to life on the frontier.

Theresa was contemptuous of the cult of war, which she derisively called “men and their endless games.” Her husband's death surely played a part in her attitude. She was dismissive about the practice of dueling over points of honor. The dramatic scars on the faces of fashionable young men she referred to as “self-inflicted.” He wondered what she would make of the life he had known as a boy among the Mandan if she could see it for herself. If these marks from boyhood pranks made such a strong impression on her, what would she think of the ones borne by his kinsmen and friends when they became full members of the tribe?

One night, shortly before midsummer, he felt Theresa's soft and pliant shoulder against his in the warm air, and he closed his eyes. He dreamed that night of the Mandan initiation. Once again he heard the chants and felt the throb of the drums in his bones, once again he watched as the young men cried out for strength. He saw Jumping Fox hanging overhead, twirling vividly in the firelight, and this time he sprang up to help him. He grabbed for his legs, and heard a piercing scream. Instead of holding the body spinning above him, his arms grasped something cold and brittle that seemed to disintegrate in his hands. Then a crash resounded below him and there was another scream, and he was awake. He was standing on the bed, and he heard Theresa urgently say, “Don't move. There is glass all over. Let me light a candle.”

When the light flared up, he saw what he had done. In his right hand he grasped one of the branches of the Venetian chandelier that hung above the bed; on the floor at the foot of the bed lay the shattered pieces of another. She lit two oil lamps on the dresser. There came a knock at the outer door and Marie-Claire's worried voice: “Madame, is there some trouble? Madame?” Theresa put on her dressing gown, went out, and reassured Marie-Claire in low tones.

Baptiste's body shone with sweat in the faint light. “Let me move some of these sharp pieces from the bedclothes.” Theresa picked up several jagged shards of blue glass and placed them on a bedside tray. “Now you can get down safely.” He crossed to the opposite side of the bed and jumped to the floor.

“You're bleeding,” Theresa said.

Rivulets of blood traced a scarlet net from his hands to his elbows. She sat him in a chair, gently uncoiled his fingers from the curved piece of Murano glass, and sat on a footstool with a basin of water and a small towel and washed his cuts. He was still captivated by the reality of his dream. Now, with just the two of them enclosed within the lamp's gentle nimbus, the world seemed diminished, and he felt a stab of loneliness as he considered how far behind he had left his other world. He sat wordless before her and watched her movements with a distant interest.

“What did you dream of?” Theresa asked gently.

“I saw a friend very clearly.”

“Ah,” she said as she wrapped strips of linen around his palm. “Was your friend in danger?”

“No. Not exactly. He just seemed . . . he seemed to need me.”

She tied off the last strip and touched his forearm with her fingertips. “Come, let me give you some cognac.” Her eyes were sad as she rose.

The brandy spread a warm flush from his gut to his head and then slowly to his limbs. The pulsing in his hands eased, and the stinging of the cuts. Theresa stoked the fire's embers and added a log, and together they sat before it in facing chairs and watched the flames take life. Then he told her about the initiation ceremony.

“I didn't grab for Jumping Fox when I watched in the lodge. He became a Mandan brave that day, like all the others.”

“And you?”

“To the Mandan, I was part of the white man's world. I took another path, and it has brought me here. But I sometimes think that there is no more place for me in this world than there was among the Mandan.”

The silence was almost entire save for the fire's gentle hissing, and they sat together for a long time before Theresa spoke. “Suppose I tell you a dream I sometimes have.” Baptiste inclined his head, and she went on. “I am flying, looking down on a carriage in which I am traveling. My body is in the carriage, but the
real
me, my essence, is flying high above. It is taking me to my parents' house in Silesia on a trip I must have made a dozen times in the years before I was first married. It was a road I knew well, a comfortable voyage, a homecoming. Yet as I fly above, I imagine the coach turning off the road that leads home and taking another one, a turning at a crossroads. Sometimes the carriage turns left, sometimes right, but it always turns off the usual path. I don't know where it is going, and that seems to be the important part. My destination is unknown, new, mysterious. As the coach turns, my being is filled with anticipation at the adventure ahead. I wake up excited, hopeful, and full of happiness at having set off for somewhere unfamiliar.” She looked at him full of enthusiasm and asked, “Can you imagine how the unknown can actually give us hope?”

Baptiste was puzzled, and he shook his head.

“In many ways that dream is curious,” she told him, “and yet it comforts me when I consider the turns my life has taken. I was sixteen when I married and moved to Russia. I had visited my grandmother in France every year, and I'd been to Vienna once or twice, but otherwise I knew only Württemberg. Saint Petersburg seemed familiar, but when we spent time on my husband's estates in the country, I quickly realized how completely different Russia was from anything I had ever known.”

She gazed into the fire.

“The people were very nice. They had to be, of course, but some were genuinely welcoming. Still, I was an outsider—they called me
‘la
petite française'—
and I knew that if I stayed for a thousand years, I would never truly be one of them.”

She had felt different and alone, she told him, and it had made her unbearably sad. She had longed for everything she had known as a girl. But soon she had decided to make the best of it, and learn about her husband's country, rather than thinking constantly of her own.

“What made you change?” Baptiste asked.

“I realized there was no going back. That is always the lot of women, but men often have a choice. Your own mother chose to stay with your father rather than return to her tribe. That was the only way forward for her in the world.”

Baptiste nodded, sensing the truth of her words as he considered the direction his mother's life had taken.

“You, too, can choose how to use your time in this strange place. You could return to America, of course, and I expect that someday you will.”

“Someday.” He repeated the word without inflection.

“While you are here, though, absorb everything that is new to you. Me, Paul, Ludwigsburg, Europe—all of it! Someday it will help you fashion your life. Live in the present, but take in all you can for what lies ahead.”

“It is hard for me to imagine the future,” Baptiste said.

Theresa took his uninjured hand in her own. “There is not much in this world I am sure of, but that is one thing I know. It is like the manhood ritual you described, Baptiste, except that you are not surrounded by friends and cousins who are going through the same ordeal. There is only one you, and you must make it up as you go along, here in the present. My friend, that is one of the most difficult tasks we face.”

Later, he would remember “my friend”—she had called him
“mon
ami.”
Of all the guileless things a woman could say in the quietness of intimacy, this was surely the most satisfying.

T
WENTY-FOUR

F
ALL 1824

A
fter one of Paul's trips to Stuttgart to see to the details of his collection, he worried aloud about the need to find a permanent home for his treasures. Baptiste had often heard this before. “How can I study what I've collected if the pieces can't be suitably housed?” Paul complained, but Baptiste didn't understand the problem. “Paul needs to find a very rich wife,” Theresa told him.

It was an evening in late August when Baptiste and Theresa lay in bed, talking in unhurried tones as they traced arabesques with their fingertips on each other's arms. Baptiste had come to savor their lovemaking, learning the luxury of taking his time. Nor was there any concern about Theresa's becoming pregnant; she had told him that, after two miscarriages in Russia, she was no longer able to conceive. The prospect of Paul's and Baptiste's departure arose. “Paul seems finally to be serious about leaving Ludwigsburg,” Theresa said.

“We were supposed to have left for Silesia by now,” Baptiste replied, “but Paul always has just one more detail that needs to be taken care of.”

Theresa rolled onto her side and traced her fingers lightly across Baptiste's chest. “But this time there are things that will hasten his departure.”

“What things?”

“Money. The court chamberlain has received several demands for payment from Paul's creditors in America. Apparently, it is quite an extensive list, starting in St. Louis and continuing down the”—she paused, letting Baptiste provide the word—“yes, the
Mississippi
River to New Orleans. When Wilhelm returns in two weeks, he'll be furious to discover that his gypsy cousin has engaged the kingdom's finances to cover the debts incurred on his expedition. If I know Paul, it is only the beginning of the bills that will come due.”

“How is leaving going to help?” he asked.

Theresa shrugged. “It won't. But Wilhelm has a fearsome temper, so it is best if Paul is far away when the wave breaks.”

“What will Paul live on now?” Baptiste asked her. “I am part of what he likes to call his ‘household.' I'm just another bill to pay, isn't that so?”

Theresa put her arm around Baptiste's shoulder. “No, no,
mon ami.
You misunderstand. What it costs for you to be attached to Paul's household is not significant, because it is not really about money. It is about a choice in life. Either Paul settles down and acts the part of a royal duke of Württemberg as Wilhelm understands it or his access to the royal funds will always be severely limited. Money is just the weapon. Do you see? If Paul wants to retain his independence, as I know he does, he would do well to marry and start a family.”

“How does he find the right kind of wife?”

“The halls are filled with candidates, if he would choose to notice them. The trick will be finding one rich enough to meet his needs and tolerant enough to indulge his travels. Young women in our world generally think very little about science and exploration. Being married to a man whose life is ruled by them is hardly the dream of most princesses.”

“Does he have to marry a princess?”