Across the Endless River

by Thad Carhart

  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.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FALL 1824

  After 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?”

  “A duchess might do,” Theresa told him, “even a countess if she were very rich and from an ancient, noble family.”

  Baptiste laughed. “This is the way horse breeders talk.”

  “But that is exactly what it is like! You couldn’t have put it better! The importance given to ancestry, bloodlines, relatives near and distant, and the ability to produce an heir is just another form of animal husbandry.”

  She explained for Baptiste which considerations of lineage would be weighed, and how political and geographical alliances would also be taken into account. Then negotiations could begin between two households about the money, land, and treasure that would seal the union. All such royal marriages were arranged; marrying for sentimental reasons was regarded as a form of madness.

  “I was unusually lucky. My dowry was not very great, but my family was illustrious. My husband was a very decent man who loved me in his way, and he was exceedingly rich and generous. Despite our lack of children, he arranged for a sizeable part of his fortune to be controlled by me in the event of his death. My independence is in the form of gold bullion in the bank vaults of Saint Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna.”

  “I take it Paul doesn’t want to marry who his family tells him to?”

  Theresa rose and put on the dressing gown that hung nearby, then pulled her hair back with combs before turning again to Baptiste. The softness had gone out of her features and when her eyes met his, Baptiste felt dismay; her gaze was on his nakedness, but her thoughts were elsewhere.

  “No, Baptiste, nor does he want to take his own life in hand. But if he wants to maintain the economic and social advantages of his position so that he can be free to do his work, then he must expect to fashion a compromise that will satisfy his family. Either that or he must break with Württemberg altogether and make his own way in society. Sadly, his upbringing has prepared him for nothing practical, and his passion for natural history requires significant amounts of money. He will have to choose, and it will be sooner rather than later.”

  “Paul will have a hard time compromising,” Baptiste said.

  She flushed. “You would think that making an accommodation with the world in order to preserve your independence were the greatest tragedy.” Theresa’s eyes narrowed. “Compromising with power to protect their interests is something women do every day of their lives. Never forget that, Baptiste.”

  As Theresa had foreseen, Paul soon told Baptiste that they would be leaving for his brother’s estates in Silesia. He thought of Maura and wondered where she was. Though they had written again as cousins during the summer, he realized that he had forgotten even to look for a response to his last letter. Was she traveling again?

  The prospect of being separated from Theresa troubled him more. She was his lover, his go-between, his guide to the peculiar world of Ludwigsburg, his one true friend. The night before he left, he told
her he was uneasy about leaving, but her response did not satisfy him.

  “You will return to your country before too long, while my life is here. Whatever time we have had together is a gift that life has offered us both. Let us try not to worry about what lies ahead.”

  So began a nomadic existence as he, Paul, and Schlape traveled around Europe visiting relatives and friends. Baptiste worried that the matter of Paul’s debts would soon catch up with them, that he would quickly run out of money and have to return to Ludwigsburg to confront his cousin. But Paul’s circumstances did not visibly change: he frequently enjoyed the hospitality of others, but he also spent money in a prodigal fashion when the need arose. The coach and four matched horses they used for travel were splendidly cared for; their meals and lodgings were the most comfortable available on the rare occasions when they were not offered the generous hospitality of rich and titled friends; nor did they forego any diversions or entertainments in the towns and cities they visited. As Theresa had told him, money was not really the issue that set Paul at odds with his family.

  In fact, Paul had several sources of income, which made him, by any reasonable standard, a rich man—income from his mother’s lands in Silesia, his portion of his father’s inheritance, investments in English and French shipping consortia that were regularly profitable, even a sizeable gift from his uncle King Friedrich to his favorite nephew, which Paul referred to simply as “the gold bars” and that he did not draw upon. Baptiste also discovered by happenstance that Paul carried a letter of credit from Theresa, which he frequently used for their travel expenses. But for any future large expenditures, like another expedition to America, he would have to marry and settle down, a contradiction that Paul found intolerable.

  Baptiste had often wondered why Paul didn’t use his extensive contacts to make a fortune in fur trading. Only gradually did he come to understand that the actual making of money was beneath Paul, something vaguely disreputable and, in any case, unnecessary. Commerce was like a great machine that turned somewhere nearby but unseen, and by Paul’s reckoning, it had nothing to do with his life.

  First they went to Silesia, a weeklong journey during which they passed through a diminishing number of cities and towns and long stretches of forest and untilled plains. At last they entered Carlsruhe, a rustic village of modest buildings. Slowed by a September storm that had turned the roads to mud, they arrived in the late evening.

  “Welcome, welcome!” Paul’s brother bellowed over the wind as they hurried inside. Taller than Paul but not as heavyset, he seemed very pleased at their arrival. “This storm is just beginning,” he told them. “Tomorrow the roads will be impassable. I’m very glad you got through.”

  Duke Eugene’s castle, though comfortable, was much smaller than the palace at Ludwigsburg, and right away Baptiste sensed a more relaxed atmosphere. It felt like a big family house, and no courtiers were apparent. It stood in the center of the town, a ponderous square building of two stories with rounded corners and a towering central cupola, surrounded by a narrow strip of greenery bounded by a circular dirt road. From this ring extended eight roads symmetrically, like the spokes of a wagon wheel, along which houses and shops were arrayed in a haphazard fashion.

  On the third day, after the storm had subsided, Paul took Baptiste for a ride through the ducal forest that surrounded Carlsruhe. It was a vast wooded tract crisscrossed with straight allées in patterns that intersected and then continued on through the trees. At intervals they came upon small lakes and little pavilions and houses with artful names—the Swedish Castle, the Doll’s House, the Vineyard Pavilion—set against the landscape the way one might place a bauble on a tabletop in a Ludwigsburg salon. It was, Baptiste saw, another version of the pattern he was by now familiar with, in slightly modified form. Paths lined with trimmed trees led through the woods to clearings with fountains, sculpture, and small structures, all made to look welcoming and informal. When he and Paul left the confines of the ducal domain, Baptiste saw that the surrounding terrain was wilder and more remote than anything he had yet seen in Europe. Theresa had told him that bears and wolves were to be found in the far hills. For the first time he was in a region where man did not entirely prevail.

  But the still and formal ducal forest, with its cleared understory and eerie quiet, felt like a huge garden—which, indeed, it was. Workers cleared the brush, hauled down wood, and cut the lower branches of trees to achieve the illusion of a wild forest that was pretty to look at. “It makes hunting at a gallop a delight,” Paul told him when he mentioned the lack of down wood. Baptiste recalled that the forest of Royaumont outside of Paris was the same, with few impediments for horses. During their ride, they saw no one else in the forest other than workers. Paul saw nothing unusual in this arrangement. “It is Eugene’s domain. There is only the occasional poacher, and for that we have wardens.”

  A miniature temple on a gentle rise, its columns reflected in a placid pool below, reminded Baptiste of the ordered rows of trees receding from the riverbank on the lower Mississippi to frame one of the Creole plantation houses, and of Monsieur Chouteau’s big house outside St. Louis, whose walled garden had been hacked from the underbrush. This is what Europeans do, he thought, in Ludwigsburg or Silesia or along the Mississippi, when they are in the woods.

  Paul led him to a cleared rise that commanded a fine sweep of the landscape. Beyond the patterned wheel of streets below, the sun played upon ordered fields, open meadows, and measureless forests that stretched to the far hills.

  “Your brother owns all of this, isn’t that so?” Baptiste asked.

  “Yes,” Paul replied.

  “You can’t go anywhere, as far as the eye can see, that doesn’t belong to him, or to another noble.”

  Paul nodded.

  “It is a lot of land for one person to own.”

  “My friend,” he said, “this is not the New World. We hold the land in commonweal for all of society. It has been this way for many centuries.”

  Baptiste said nothing, but he thought of the endless stretches of land along the Missouri and its tributaries: the Kansas, the Platte, the Knife, and all the other rivers and streams he knew so well. Under the vast sky stretched rolling prairies, wooded river valleys, desolate badlands, mountains and hills rich with game. The different tribes often fought brutally over hunting rights, but not one Oto or Sioux or Pawnee or Mandan would ever consider that he or his tribe owned the land that sustained them all. It would be ridiculous, like owning the air itself. It was a lunatic notion that only the white man was capable of.

  From the deck of a boat on the Rhine in October, Baptiste watched the plume of steam emerging from a very tall smokestack near the river’s bank. A regular metallic clanging sounded from within the adjacent building, and a jet of pure heat shot from the stack’s top, then turned to billowing smoke dancing above a gap distorted by the heat. He had seen other chimneys, even the exhaust pipes on the steamships at Le Havre, but this concentration of energy was greater than anything he had ever known. Paul told him, “It is one of the new iron foundries. But it scares the animals and makes the country folk uneasy. Can you blame them?”

  Baptiste laughed at Paul’s pronouncement. His eyes shone with wonder. “This just keeps pumping it out, as if all the sulfur springs and smoke holes on the upper Missouri had been harnessed and made to pull the same wagon.”

  Paul pointed to a line of cliffs off the starboard bow and indicated two castles built on adjacent pinnacles high above the river.

  “The nearer one”—he pointed to a mass of fortified towers crowning one of the heights—“is still owned by a collateral branch of my mother’s family. In the fourteenth century, holding the higher ground was everything.”

  “In some places in America, it still is,” Baptiste said. “These castles are like the fortified stockades the army is building as more traders move upriver.”

  Paul said, “From a distance, the white cliffs on the Missouri above Fort Atkinson, with their
peaks and crags like battlements, reminded me of these very fortresses.”

  But Baptiste saw only an unremarkable expanse of an unimpressive river, its shoreline punctuated by drab villages and its surface peppered with boat traffic. “I guess I’d have to see the place you’re thinking of,” he offered doubtfully.

  Often they passed through cities, and Baptiste still wondered at the numbers of people to be found in the streets. In Berlin, they arrived in the midst of a general celebration—a festival honoring the city’s founders, Paul told him—and he hung out the window of the coach as it progressed slowly, jostled by the crowd. In Amsterdam, they were on foot during one of the biggest market days of the year, and the press of people slowed their walking to a crawl. The commotion on all sides was exciting, but the inability to move as he wished, hemmed in by the crowd, was deeply unsettling. At last they reached a main canal, where small boats ferried people across the harbor from a crowded pier. Every inch of space was alive with human activity and resonating with the cries of merchants and market-goers.

  As they waited for the next ferry, Paul swept his arm wide to take in the scene. “They’re all headed for America one day,” he said. Baptiste laughed at Paul’s joke, but he saw that Paul was serious. “If you lived here, wouldn’t you go?” Paul persisted.

  “I suppose I would,” Baptiste admitted, “but then, I know something about what’s there.”

  “They’ve heard that America is empty,” Paul told him, “and that there is opportunity for every man. What else matters if you are faced with this?”

  Of all the seaports they visited, his favorite was Venice. The canals lined with houses and palaces delighted him. An Austrian cousin of Paul’s let them use his palazzo on the Grand Canal, and from its windows Baptiste watched the boat traffic for hours on end. He thought the gondolas were a precarious and awkward means of water travel, and that the standing rower’s way of propelling a boat was inefficient. But as he watched the gondoliers ply passengers and cargo along the main waterway, he came to appreciate how well adapted their craft were for these sheltered waters and how skilled they were at controlling them with a single long oar. This was not the Missouri, with its turbulent currents and unpredictable weather. Once he saw a large, narrow boat with six standing oarsmen come down the canal at a great pace. Their strokes were as rhythmic and fluid as those of Indian braves in the large war canoes he had sometimes seen on the Missouri, and they moved with the same speed, grace, and purpose.