Across the Endless River (41 page)

“But where—” Baptiste began, but Maura interrupted, shaking her head slowly.

“My father has been paid for his services in almost every way imaginable.”

Baptiste nodded and handed the stone back. “Far up the Missouri, there is no money. People barter for everything with beads and pieces of glass and other flashy trinkets.”

“I hope to see that river with you soon.” She smiled at Baptiste's look of surprise. “I have thought of little else since your letter arrived. To leave my parents would be difficult, though I know my father would understand.” She turned away. “But to see you go away forever would be worse.”

“Then come with me,” Baptiste said softly. He saw her shoulders quiver, and he rose and held her. Excitedly, he outlined his plans. Paul and he had booked passage on a ship leaving Bremen in mid-April. It would stop in Bordeaux approximately one week later, depending on the weather, and she could join him then. Maura assured him that Ludovic would have no difficulty in spiriting her into Bordeaux, where her family's contacts were extensive, and she reminded him that the captain of a ship was empowered to marry passengers. Baptiste inclined his head in assent and pulled her into his embrace.

Tears streaked Maura's cheeks, but her eyes were full of delight. “I must make my farewells at home, then I shall meet you in Bordeaux.” She kissed him, and they stood and held each other for a long time, swaying imperceptibly as the rhythm of their breathing became one.

That afternoon they made love with passionate deliberation, as if they had both been holding their breath. Baptiste asked Maura if she was sure, and she whispered back, “I have been waiting for you.” He removed her undergarment and saw that she was wearing his eagle talon around her neck, and he bent and kissed her where it hung between her breasts. As she drew him close, he felt her heart beating rapidly. Baptiste encircled her with his arms and, feeling her body accept his embrace, lifted her onto the bed.

Lying beside her, propped up on his elbow, he caressed each of her breasts in turn as he looked in her eyes. Then he moved his hand slowly down across her belly and, waiting for assent and trust in her regard, continued down between her legs until his touch found warmth. He took the time she needed, and when he entered her, she uttered a little cry of surprise and held him closer, her face balancing on the edge of pain and acceptance and joy. Baptiste savored his role as her teacher, conscious of how he had learned that, in this as in so much else, time was the greatest indulgence.

The next days were filled with an easy rhythm of eating, drinking, talking, and lovemaking. When Maura asked him how he felt about leaving Europe, he said, “I have been standing under a waterfall for five years, and now I am about to step outside the stream.” Baptiste explained again to Maura that life on the frontier was very rough. “The weather is either too hot or too cold,” he told her, “the work is endless, you're alone most of the time, and whites and Indians still tear one another to pieces when things go wrong.”

Maura listened patiently to his account but told him that she was unafraid. “I have seen more perhaps than you imagine in travels with my father. Partisans who trade for guns are no strangers to injury and death, nor to rough living. I know that violence and horror are part of life.”

Maura had devised a plan to import wine to New Orleans. “Selling wine is a business I am good at. My father will supply me from our vineyards in the Gironde. The greatest fur trade in the world is concentrated in the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys. All those thirsty mouths could do with some more wine.” She described the great number of things she would need to set up as a wholesaler, including a suitable warehouse in New Orleans.

“What about delivering guns?” Baptiste was being playful, but Maura took his words seriously.

“That is something,” she said evenly, “I prefer to leave behind.”

He told her that living in New Orleans was not what he had in mind, but she brushed away his concern. “Just time enough to get the business under way. The trade is all up the river anyway, and from what you told me, the steamboat traffic was reliable when you left. It could only have grown in five years.”

Occasionally during those days full of shared purpose and delight, Baptiste walked by himself around the property, taking care to avoid the road. He considered the little farm, surrounded by scrub pines and swampy clearings, and he thought about returning to St. Louis. He smelled the sea nearby, and that seemed an opening from this contained world of roads and villages, cities and châteaux, tended forests and animals in pens. Even at this watery edge of France, he knew, the system of roads and laws and customs all led back to Paris, and in this regard the rest of Europe was far more similar than it was different. Maura, too, seemed to understand that, and to want something else.
Could anyplace be farther from the frontier?
he wondered.

On the night of Maura's departure, they stood on a lightless beach flanked by a marshy inlet as Michel signaled offshore with a hooded lantern. They saw the signal returned, three lights at brief intervals, and they waited until a boat with two men and two pairs of oars materialized from the invisible deep, gliding with a rasp up onto the gravel shore. The dim outline of a larger craft was visible just beyond the mouth of the inlet. Baptiste's concern was written on his face.

“These are my father's men; that is his ship, the
Sans Peur,
the fastest cutter in the Channel. I'll be safe,” she told him.

She asked him for his handkerchief, dabbed at her eyes, then put it back in his pocket. Then she kissed him and let herself be helped into the boat. They shoved off immediately, and the black night swallowed them whole. Only the muffled swish of oars suggested for a few more moments that they had been there at all.

The next morning, Baptiste took his handkerchief from his pocket and something dropped to the floor. Thinking it a stray coin, he bent to retrieve it and found beside the chest of drawers a single perfect sapphire, shimmering in the morning light that filled the room.

F
ORTY-FOUR

M
ARCH 1829

W
hen Baptiste returned to Württemberg, only a month remained before he and Paul would leave for Bremen. Paul threw himself into the preparations, equipping himself with the latest instruments, buying three new rifles, even having several suits of clothes tailored to his own design for life in the wild.

For Baptiste, too, this was a time of anticipation, but for different reasons. The prospect of his life with Maura was the focus of all his thoughts. He felt a jubilant shiver of delight when he considered how much he had changed from the young man who had stepped off the boat in Le Havre, curious, naïve, and alone.

He confided in Paul, who widened his eyes slightly when he heard Maura's name but listened to Baptiste's plans with composure. “She is a delightful young woman,” Paul said. “If Jean-François Hennesy has given his approval, I will certainly do nothing to stand in your way.”

Baptiste thought about the five years he had spent in Europe, and of how France still puzzled him. It was a land of a few haves and of many have-nots, impressively organized and often strangely beautiful for what it had built: cities, churches, roads, bridges, dams.

People talked about how much worse things had been under the
ancien
régime
before the Revolution, but Baptiste felt that the privileged few in Paul's world still owned and ran everything of consequence. Change was in the air, he reminded himself; the Bourbons would surely fall. But someone else would replace them and the arrangement of power and privilege would renew its hold over this un-wild continent. He wanted to be where these considerations did not prevail, where his own skills and efforts and ties along the broad reaches of the Missouri would determine his future. Beyond sentiment and the ghosts of memory, he longed for the place where his destiny would take its shape.

Baptiste and Paul arrived in Bordeaux aboard the brig
Thuringia
eight days after they had left Bremen. There had been some difficulty in leaving the estuary due to contrary winds, but once they passed into the North Sea, they made good time. Now they were docking in the evening light.

Paul was wild with joy at having left his castle of problems. Since setting off from Württemberg, he had showed a boyish, frenetic energy. Paul wanted Baptiste to join a dinner party he had organized at the hotel where he was staying until they set sail the next day, but Baptiste declined. He wanted to be alone and hoped that Maura would appear. If she was there, she might have learned of the ship's arrival from the harbormaster, he reasoned, and would come to the dock or send word; they had agreed she would find her way to the ship. Baptiste was not surprised when she did not appear, given the late hour, though his mind began to imagine obstacles that would keep her from him.
What if her mother has died? Or could not reconcile herself to
Maura's leaving? What if the
Sans Peur
ran into foul weather in the
Channel? What if . . .

That night, he hardly slept. He thought of her flashing eyes and the set of her jaw, of the intimacies they had shared at the house outside of Honfleur, and he knew that she would not waver in her resolve to join him. The urgent softness of her tongue on his chest came to him then most vividly, and the caress of her hand on his neck, and the way she arched her back at the moment of completion—these and a dozen other sensations washed across him and teased him with longing.

He was up early, and he sat in the bow where he had a view of the docks. He watched the reflection of the gradually lightening sky play on the river's current. An hour after he had come on deck, a movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention and caused him to look up. He saw a woman's figure at the far end of the dock, small in the distance but distinct. Her walk was unmistakable: rapid and purposeful.

Everything that mattered was clear in that instant of recognition. They would be Baptiste and Maura, Maura and Baptiste: here on this dock, on the ship, when they set foot on land again in New Orleans, when they made their way up the river together.

Only when he stood did Baptiste realize that he was breathing heavily, that his heart was pounding. His hand moved to his pocket and found there the piece of etched stone, as if it could shelter him with its wings. He looked up to the sun rising above the city's buildings, brightening the estuary on its way to the sea, and thought of home.

A
UTHOR 'S
N
OTE

Reliable documents show that Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau and Duke Paul met on the Missouri River in
1823
, and that Baptiste accompanied Paul upon his return to Europe in early
1824
. The record is also clear that together they went back to St. Louis and the Missouri River in
1829
. Beyond these two dates, bracketing their time in Europe, very little is known about the five years they shared in Paul's world of privilege. Because he was a lesser member of an important royal family, we have accounts of many of Paul's activities: his phenomenal collection, his continuing fascination with natural history, his arranged marriage and negotiated separation after the couple's son was born.

Baptiste's five years in Europe remain a mystery. His facility with languages alone commands respect: he conversed readily in several unrelated Indian languages, a capacity we tend to underrate since it was not unique on the frontier. Add to that his use of English, French, Spanish, and German and his circumstances suggest someone with an uncommon ability to flourish at those shifting points where peoples and customs meet, overlap, and sometimes collide. To return to the frontier after five years in Europe was a clear choice, one that proceeded from a direct knowledge of several extremely different ways of life. In Baptiste's case, these included the Mandan tribal villages with their warrior ethos, the river-borne
voyageur
culture of trappers and the fur trade, the strange bubble world of a small court in postNapoleonic Europe, and the free-form network of European scientists and collectors who gathered facts and artifacts and often shared them avidly.

Baptiste/Pompy was singularly well equipped to fashion an “in-between” path—what the French call an
“entre-deux”—
from among the many he knew early in life. In this he showed a capacity to invent himself that came to be regarded in the nineteenth century as a strikingly American trait. If he captures our imagination—and he has mine—surely it is because he showed himself equal to the extraordinary possibilities that came his way. How and why he did so, we can only guess. I have imagined the other principal characters—Theresa, Maura, Prince Franz, Professor Picard—as composites of those who would have been in Paul's social ambit. While Paul did in fact have an uncle who lived in Paris (inconveniently enough, also named Paul), I have invented the particulars of Prince Franz, who should not be confused with his real counterpart.