The High Missouri (17 page)

The words brought Dylan crashing back into the world of the mundane. Yes, this was why Caro kept her silence.

In fact, Dylan didn’t feel a whit tired. His spirit was animated, tingling, pulsing with aliveness. He wrapped up in his blankets, propped against a tree, and watched the stars. He had never felt so excited to be alive.

Soon he saw from the Big Dipper that dawn was coming, that the darkness would begin to pale faintly now along the eastern horizon. In half an hour first light would rise into the world, and then would emerge a miracle, the majesty of the sun. He felt he had to watch it, to let the sun’s beams flood into him, to drink them in like a rare liquor and let them warm him from within. He decided to get high, to find some pinnacle, some magical place to stand and be flooded with light.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said to Bleu.

“Don’t let your arse get cold.” Bleu snorted out a half chuckle.

Vulgar assumption. Dylan felt no inclination to tell Bleu, or anyone of ordinary consciousness, what he would do. I understand, Caro. “I’ll take a while,” he added.

He found an outcropping of stone that jutted from the top of a hill. It felt like an altar. As the sky lightened, he could see to the east the great, rolling, rocky plain that two or three months ago struck him as so desolate. Now he saw that it was beautiful. It was painted this late autumn in every shade of brown—sere grasses that were dun, amber, and ginger, jutting rocks that were mahogany and sienna, bushes and willows that were cinnamon and gold. The few leaves left on the cottonwoods below him on the plain sprinkled the washes the color of lemon rind.

He turned and looked away from the sun, toward the high mountains rising from the night mists into the morning light. Here the aspens splotched the hillside with color of fluttering canaries, and bushes ran riot in magenta. These wild colors were unified there by the pure, white, glistening snow that lay like grace on the land and all the rocks. Far, far to the west, on the highest ridges and summits, the snow caught the first rays of the rising sun, and turned a molten rose-gold.

He sat very still and watched and felt. Light emanated from the sky, or generated from within the shining streams, or rose from the earth itself; he could not have said which. It felt like benediction.

He watched, and for once in his life did not form his experience into words. He let it remain, as it was, inside him and outside him, elemental as earth, fire, water, air. It felt like food of the spirit, ambrosial nourishment, life-giving sustenance, even breath itself. He felt it come into his eyes and so into his brain and heart and lungs and so into his blood, and by his blood be carried to every particle of his being, even his skin, his fingernails, his hair, and back to the liquid surface of his eyes. It permeated him, it suffused his being. It was like hearing ethereal music, the music of spheres, yet the music was utterly soundless.

Stirred by some powerful impulse, he slid forward onto his knees, face to the sun. He bowed his head, touched it to the naked rock of the altar. Suddenly, vibrantly, he felt the reverberation of the energy of the earth within his head, within all his bones. It was the dance of the planet itself—the intricate motions of the air, the subtle undulations of water, the green force that squeezed through grass and flowers and made them surge toward the sun, that sucked up through the great roots of trees and through the thick trunks and out into the delicate leaves, which danced in the fluxing air. He felt this force rise through him vigorously, ringingly, resoundingly, and his entire body pirouetted to it. To the outward eye he was still. Yet dervishlike, he whirled on the single place where he knelt, not worshiping the divine energies, but becoming them.

He felt the paradox: while he knelt utterly still, he danced.

Chapter Fifteen

When he came back to camp, Dylan saw Caro for the first time.

She was simply tending the fire. She turned and looked at him and saw. And took an extra moment to see. He knew what she saw—that he had been up all night, racked by the pain of existence, transported by the vision of nobility, that he was haggard and exhausted yet uplifted by the very air he breathed.

She broke into a radiant smile. Amazing how the world could be transformed—you could be transformed—by what was in your mind.

He handed her the book. For both of them it was a moment of reverence. “Thank you. Thank you beyond thanks.”

They looked each other in the eyes, hesitated, smiled foolishly.

Dylan stammered out, “I went up there”—he pointed—“to watch the sun rise. It was…” He shrugged helplessly. “…grand.”

He squatted by the fire. This morning even the pemmican would taste like manna. “God, I’m starved,” he said. Then foolishly, “I haven’t slept at all.”

They rode close together and talked all day. Troyes didn’t like their incessant jabber, as he called it, but they didn’t care. Like Bleu, he rode ahead and to the sides, scouting. And they were alone to show each other their souls.

Caro told him how she had been introduced to the works of Lord Byron. She’d spent the last three years in England, going to school. She liked learning but disliked school. It was fussily proper old ladies of all ages, concerned about carriage, manners, deportment, and decorum. Among the first of the accomplishments young ladies were to attain was music, which she’d adored. Her favorite instrument was the pianoforte. Though she’d not become accomplished at the instrument—that required years—she’d loved it, and the new pieces being written for it. The clavichord and harpsichord expressed only daintiness and prettiness, she said, while the pianoforte sang the soul. Some day Dylan must hear this new music in Montreal.

“I also learned to paint,” she said. “That is my own window on the ultimate.” She thought a long moment. He sensed that she was committing herself to self-revelation, struggling beyond her fear of sounding foolish, daring a new intimacy. “I do my best work in pencil,” she said. “When I sketch heads.” She gave him a special smile. “I would like to draw your head.” She mused for a moment. “For me drawing is a way of looking beyond time at the infinite. I see past what’s ephemeral to the essence of a person.” She paused. “I hope I can show you.”

On with her life’s story: The best of her learning came not through the school curriculum, but through a friendship. Her favorite teacher lent her a copy of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, a wonderfully romantic tale of the trials of soul of a young man. She looked at Dylan sidelong and added, “A young man not unlike you.” That book opened up the inner world for Caro, the world of feelings neglected and even scorned by society. Then she read Goethe’s
Faust
, which was monumental, God and the devil struggling for the soul of one man—she would tell him the whole story one day, Caro said. And then, from her dearest friend,
Childe Harold
came into her hands.

She considered her words. “It was as though the sky burst open,” she said, “rent by lightning and shattered by a clap of thunder. Beyond the sky were revealed, on a cosmic scale, my own feelings, my own sense of being outcast, alone, and madly in love with a world equally cruel and beautiful.”

After her cataclysmic experience of reading
Childe Harold
, “an experience of being awake all night, like you,” she wanted more than anything in the world to meet the poet who set down human life so truly in rhymes.

Her best friend at school, Elaine, who preferred to be called Hélène, knew a lot about Byron. So did the other girls—the man’s life was a delicious scandal. They told tales of how the poet, despite being born an aristocrat, was unconventional and cared nothing for society and its manners. He traveled to Italy and to Greece. He did as he pleased, and according to gossip, had many lovers.

To Caro it simply meant what she hoped—that the young lord lived with the glory that sang in his verses. He sought experience, life itself, scorching and searing as that might be. He held back from nothing, made himself vulnerable to existence in every way, lived like Icarus, flying boldly and dangerously near the sun. Of course he would have many lovers. Byron was gobbling life whole, in both its glory and its monstrosity.

The best part of the gossip was about the life he carried on with Lady Caroline Lamb. Here was a woman Caro admired by reputation and longed to know more about. Though Caroline Lamb was married to another man, she and Byron immediately recognized themselves as kindred spirits. In a gesture from their very souls, they began a love affair openly, as such affairs should be conducted, drinking both the ambrosia of soaring emotions and the castigation of society. Though report had it that they later fell out, Caroline Lamb was transforming the experience marvelously—she was writing a novel about her years with Byron.

Wonderful—that a woman would write a novel. That was the new way, the way of the liberated, the way Caro lived for. That was why she had taken Caroline’s name as her own. Her name was now Caroline Corsair, she said—Corsair after the hero of Byron’s poem of that name. Her father hated it, she said with a smile. Now he avoided calling her by any name at all, using the full “Caroline” only in formal situations to avoid embarrassment, and the familiar “Caro” never. She wouldn’t answer to the name he and her mother had chosen. That was her baby name, she said, an appellation the world gave her before she started to forge her own soul.

At the Easter holiday in England, Caro hatched a daring plan to live as she dreamed of living. “That was when I learned that some are not willing…” She hesitated, evidently uncertain how to finish the sentence.

Caro broached her plan to Hélène. Well, she thought Byron was charming and singular, a wonderful emblem, even something of a cause, but…

“She didn’t see.” Something to raise an eyebrow, something to twitter about, maybe even to inspire an impudent or scandalous deed, like letting a boy go too far. Caro shrugged. “I looked at her as she spoke, her eyes full of mischief, and I knew that’s all she saw. Nothing truly to inspire, nothing to make
the
difference, nothing to use to live a great life.”

Caro looked off toward the western horizon for a long moment. She took a deep breath or two and plunged on.

“I wanted more—I wanted everything. I wanted to meet Byron.” She looked at Dylan with defiant pride.

Hélène and she planned things boldly. Hélène forged a letter over her mother’s signature informing school authorities that Caro was invited to the family estate for the holidays. Then Hélène’s brother, Lord Peter, took Caro up to London to seek out the poet. Caro knew Lord Peter well. He had been her escort on several occasions. “He was fair-skinned and fair-haired and rather beautiful,” Caro said. “I was a little enamored of him.”

Dylan was surprised that Caro would praise a man as fair. What could be more beautiful, he thought, than the dark rose of her own complexion, or her own auburn hair?

She turned her large eyes toward him, and they seemed to see all of him.

“I gave myself to him,” she said.

Dylan felt her inspect him for censure. He let her see none. In this new world, there could be none. “We put up in a hotel in Mayfair, not a truly respectable one. I gave myself to him freely, willingly. It was no seduction.

“It was the second day before I found out. Byron had exiled himself to the Continent. A couple of years before, apparently. English society had been far too narrow for him, of course.

“Lord Peter had known all along. Provincial schoolgirls like Hélène and I, we were ignorant, but Lord Peter was worldly.” Caro’s eyes sparked with anger. “When I called him a deceiver, he laughed at me. Laughed. Then he teased me about being his ‘dusky maiden,’ and I understood.” She hesitated. “The
bastard
thought because I am dark-skinned, I am merely to be used. Bloody English and their wogs.” She looked hard at Dylan. “He was the
last
man in my life who will treat me that way.” She thought a moment and smiled. “Even he regrets it. I made him take me home to his family, and denounced him in front of his mother and sister.

“So I gave up on meeting Lord Byron, but I did not give up on living a life writ in large, bold strokes.”

Dylan had no idea what to say. He murmured, “I admire you.”

She beamed at him. “May I draw you over the noon hour?”

They always took their time at nooning. They let the horses rest. Bleu built a fire and cooked a big dinner. Troyes napped. This time Caro drew busts of Dylan, her easel propped high in the cool wind, the pages fluttering occasionally. She posed him just as she wanted him, chin tucked down, eyes peering out from deep beneath his brows. He held the pose carefully and listened to the rest of her story in silence.

She had come back from England last winter, a cold crossing of the North Atlantic, her time in finishing school at an end. She had no means to stay in England, and she wanted to travel in North America. She wanted to see the interior, the men of her own people, whom she’d never known. She wanted to draw them. When she’d mastered that… Well, she didn’t know what she wanted to do next.

Of course, in her father’s eyes she came back to marry the man he’d chosen for her, one of the partners of the Nor’West Company. She’d refused that marriage with a laugh—had declined even to hear the fellow’s proposal, or to get to know him. The world could not choose her soul mates for her. Venturing forth, she would find her own.

Her eyes told Dylan what he wanted to hear. When she made her choice, it would be for a young man willing to live bravely, daringly, a man open to the fullness of life itself. He wondered if the words beneath her words were, “perhaps a man like Dylan Davies.”

Caro finished the sketch after supper, in the last light of day, after the sun had gone behind the mountain, and they sat, artist and subject, in the lilac shadow of twilight. This time they adopted a silence and held it, a matter of respect for her work. He found himself pulled into something. With a light touch or with a word she would change the angle of his head, the attitude of an eyebrow, even the aspect of his thought. It made him feel different, an unfamiliar Dylan Davies, perhaps a new Dylan Davies, one growing in the strong light of Lord Byron’s vision. He felt uncomfortable yet excited.

At last she took the drawing off the easel and brought it forward to him, smiling, pleased, holding it proudly yet carefully, as one bears a chalice.

Dylan was flabbergasted. He had no idea what to say.

It was stylized in a way he would have described as feminine, the lines graceful and arcing, lines more fluid and lilting than powerful. Likewise his appearance was made more artful than it was, the arc of his neck seen as slender and graceful, the curls of his hair arranged attractively, his eyelashes long, his mouth given a hint of cupid pucker—his whole face idealized.

But this was not what rendered him speechless. It was the violence of the red welts of scar tissue, the marks of the beast upon him. The brooding power of the expression on his face, the glow of… Authority? Command? Confidence, certainly, and something more. The eyes, looking boldly out from under dark brows, had an air of assurance, of dynamism, of passion, and, yes, of domination. As he looked, stunned, the words swam beneath the surface of his mind, words to name truly the spirit that infused the drawing, words that were shapes in the waters of his consciousness, as yet indistinct.

He was taking too long to respond—he could feel Caro’s nervousness rising—but he felt struck dumb. The words rose through the dark waters of his mind.

Darkness. Yes. He felt a wash of relief, and then of alarm. She had drawn his darkness. She had seen him not as angel, but devil. No, he told himself, neither angel nor devil but…

A tide of feelings gushed through him, sweeping the pieces of his old personality away.

That was what he had seen in Byron, he thought, a new kind of man, not an angel, which meant a castrato the way the Church taught it, not a devil with cleft hoofs and a forked tail, but some new creature empowered with the forces of light
and
dark, some new intermingling, some new union, some alloy of… fire in the soul, strength, vitality, male vigor. It was emerging within him, like a great wave from the depth of the sea, and to be himself, he must sail on its crest.

Dylan looked into Care’s eyes. “I think,” he said in unsparing honesty, “you have seen me so deeply as to show me my true self.”

She took the drawing, signed her name to it, and wrote in a large, handsome script across the top,
Dylan Davies
. “It’s yours,” she said, and handed it to him. He accepted it.

Mesmerized, under the sway of newly acknowledged forces, Dylan took her arm. He led her away, he knew not where. He felt as though some superior power—God or Satan, he thought teasingly, or simply his new self?—guided him, lifted his feet, moved his hands, directed his eyes. He led her beyond a little ridge, away from camp, where two ordinary mortals sat, talked, cooked, ate, existed but did not live—give no thought to camp, laddo. He looked from the drawing in his left hand to Caro in his right. He saw high expectation in her face.

On the far side of the ridge, on a spot of mere dirt, he helped her sit. Then he helped her lie back. Without a word, under the sway, he began to unbutton her dress. Her face grew somber and her eyes large. There, under God’s sky, within sight of the whole world, within hearing of the bloody camp, he slowly unbuttoned her dress entirely, gently slipped all her clothes off, and eased her on top of them. Still fully dressed, he rose over her, came between her legs, kissed and caressed her everywhere he’d ever imagined kissing and caressing a woman, and at last came into her and loved her gladly.

A question lanced at him. Here he was, lying beside Caro, his new lover, both of them naked, spent with love, growing chill in the dark and chuckling at even that, and a question was pricking at him and wouldn’t go away.