by Thad Carhart
“I am afraid the French have caused no end of mischief in my lifetime,” she said. “When I was a girl, they were very wicked in North America, but of course my father was very ill by then.” It turns out that she is the daughter of King George III!
I explained that my father had lived among the tribes for many years, rather than in French settlements, and that I had spent time with the Mandan. This lit a spark in her eyes. She asked about Indian ceremonies and wondered if I could give her a sampling of the singing. I hesitated, then explained that it was very different from European music, but she insisted. I told her to imagine thirty or forty braves all drumming and chanting and dancing together, and I cleared away the teacups.
I drummed on the tabletop to begin, then began the Buffalo chant. You know how loud that needs to be: the spirit of the herd is being called! I let loose and whooped and shrieked like a Mandan, pounding all the time on the table. The floor shook and the windows rattled. The color rose to the queen’s cheeks, her eyes lit up, and she even moved her head in time with the drumming. But suddenly the door flew open and Suber, the major-domo, burst in, wondering what was happening.
That put an end to the Buffalo chant, and she gave him a look that would freeze fire. Then she looked tired all of a sudden, and old. When I rose to leave, she said she found my American accent pleasing. So Pomp has met a queen. You did warn me that these aristocrats are all related to one another.
Soon it will be two years since I arrived here. But sometimes it feels as if I am just along for the ride, and the ride might end tomorrow or it might go on for years. Meanwhile, I am always Duke Paul’s unusual young friend, another one of his finds from his explorations in the New World.
I should warn you about the flood of visitors you may one day find at your doorstep. I cannot count the number of times European noblemen who are planning a trip to “the Indian lands” or “the Mississippi River” (it is the one river they have all heard of) have consulted me for my “expertise.” They ask me for letters of introduction to my Indian kinsmen. They think it is like visiting their cousins in Vienna or Paris or Saint Petersburg. They consider Indian chiefs to be “natural aristocrats,” and think they have “royal houses,” just like in Europe. Every now and again I see these people on the receiving end of a Cheyenne war party. Mostly, though, I just look interested and agree with whatever they are saying, and soon enough they move on to something else.
Duke Paul says it is very stylish these days to talk about visiting the American frontier but that the only one who is likely to go is Prince Maximilian of Wied, a nobleman from a small state on the Rhine who has already been to South America. Do not be surprised if one day he knocks on your door. He seems to know something about several of the tribes.
Duke Paul talks about you as if you were the Great White Father himself. Just recently he was telling me how impressed he was by the way you arbitrated the claims of the Potawatomi tribe when Stream of the Rock and Black Quail parlayed with you in his presence. He says you rule supreme an area that exceeds the size of France many times over. I get the feeling, too, that he is a bit jealous of your collection of Indian objects, since he mentions it frequently.
I have heard that someone in England has come up with a way to string carriages together and pull them along iron rails, like the little ore caddies at the blacksmith’s, but big enough to hold people and able to go from city to city. The steam engine would take the place of horses. Duke Paul says it is the way of the future. Long before that day, I will write again to give you my news.
I hope this finds you well, and ask that you remember me kindly to Mrs. Clark, your children, and Mr. Chouteau.
As ever, your affectionate,
Pomp
PART FOUR
WHAT HE HAD LEFT BEHIND
THIRTY-FOUR
SPRING 1828
BAD MERGENTHEIM
Paul and his bride, Princess Sophie von Thurn und Taxis, had been married a year earlier, in the spring of 1827. The euphoria of the celebrations had been contagious, allowing Paul’s entourage to foresee a promising future. The gypsy duke was no more, his family proclaimed, and they were certain Paul finally understood the considerable advantages of joining ranks and helping to administer the lands of Württemberg. His wife was lovely, titled, and rich, but she was also young and unsophisticated. She had imagined starting a family and making an annual round of court visits, an illusion that had been sustained for a time. For his part, Paul saw only a refuge in the form of space for his objects, time to study them properly, and money enough to conduct future expeditions as he wished.
Paul was given Castle Mergentheim as a wedding present, a moated compound at the center of a town that lay a long day’s ride to the northeast of Ludwigsburg. It was a nobleman’s domain that resembled others Baptiste had visited. Baptiste now saw Paul’s determination to make a name for himself in the field of natural history. Everything was secondary to the needs of his book about his travels in North America. It began with the assembling of the crates in the main courtyard soon after they took up residence. Over the course of two weeks wagons had arrived from warehouses in Stuttgart, friends’ houses throughout Baden and Bavaria, even from Silesia, and deposited their contents in the vast space. Baptiste was still astonished at the amount of cargo that had crossed the Atlantic. By mid-July, it was almost possible to cross the wide courtyard without setting foot on the ground.
Princess Sophie could not have had any doubt about what mattered to Paul as she watched the rooms of the castle fill like a private museum that summer. Only one of the five floors was devoted to living quarters, and much of the furniture from her home in Regensburg was banished to storage. Many of the rooms on the second floor were fitted with shelves and long examining tables for dissection.
When the boxes were opened, the contents were sorted by type. Animal specimens were all arrayed along the shelves in a system of Paul’s devising. Plants and mineral samples were grouped together on the ground floor in a series of dark rooms that smelled of dirt and mold. In a spacious hall that had once been a ceremonial gathering space for the Knights of the Teutonic Order, Paul stored all the things he had acquired from the Indian tribes.
In the fall following the wedding, Paul and Baptiste had set to work editing Paul’s material for publication, combining journals and field notes into a chronological narrative of his journey. As Paul’s notes referred to a particular specimen or group of objects, Baptiste searched the storerooms for the pieces on the list. In America, labels had been attached to each object, listing the date it had been collected, the place, and a rough description. Much of Baptiste’s time was spent correcting Paul’s sometimes vague notions of what tribes he had been in contact with.
Although they worked for nine or ten hours each day, six days a week, the process was painfully slow, and Baptiste despaired of finishing. In six months he had examined less than a quarter of the specimens. Moreover, as the full extent of Paul’s obsession with his work became apparent to Paul’s wife, she associated Baptiste with his absence from her side, as if Baptiste were the cause rather than the symptom.
Occasionally Baptiste spoke of his desire to go home, but Paul dismissed it. “Yes, yes, of course you shall leave. We will embark together on my next expedition to North America. That has always been my plan.” Baptiste held his tongue, willing to see how matters developed. He wanted to finish the project, but he was becoming restless.
Baptiste and Maura exchanged letters regularly, and he sometimes saw her when Paul visited Paris. She was still fascinated by the prospect of going to America, though they had made no specific plans. She understood intuitively that, despite hard work and danger, the New World promised that some essential part of her life would remain in her own hands in a way it never could in Europe. Baptiste’s work with Paul had taken far longer than either of them had imagined, but this arrangement seemed to suit her. Perhaps fixing a date for his departure would force her to make a decision about which she still had
doubts.
Baptiste carefully arranged the two birds side by side on the examining table and pulled the wings of each fully wide before pinning them to the wooden block. Their feathers still glistened with the water he had used to rinse off the preserving alcohol and he saw that, unlike many of the specimens Paul had collected, this pair was in excellent condition. The darker of the two, blackish brown with a gray metallic sheen to the feather tips, Baptiste knew was the male; the female’s coloring was a lighter brown, less showy and more uniform. A small note in Paul’s handwriting had been attached to the specimen jar: “Collected 11 August 1823 below Council Bluffs. Fringilla pecoris?” Baptiste turned to the copy of Alexander Wilson’s study of birds that lay open on the table, checked the Linnaean reference, and satisfied himself that the description corresponded to the specimens before him. He took up his pen and added his comments to the dated entry in Paul’s field notes: “Americans call this the cowbird. The Mandan sometimes call him Little Friend of the Buffalo. This is because large flocks follow the herds and these birds eat insects from the backs of the animals.”
He turned to the shelves that held the other specimens he intended to catalog before Paul arrived. A russet owl, a green parrot, and a wild turkey floated in large glass containers, their feathers transformed from their formerly brilliant plumage to a flat gray. The owl was sadly decomposed, its head detached from its body, its tissues and bones disintegrating in the preserving alcohol. He generally recognized the birds from his life along the river, and Wilson’s book resolved any minor questions he had.
Baptiste knew the appearance and behavior of animals best; their anatomy and bone structure were aspects he had only begun to understand in Paul’s laboratory. “This is the summer coat of a rabbit that turns white in the winter,” Baptiste would say, or “The feathers of this owl go through a red phase in the male before returning to gray-brown after the mating season.” “You do not know how much you know,” Paul told him, eagerly recording Baptiste’s comments as they worked their way through the collection. Paul often prodded him to look for a feature that would set one of his specimens apart as a new species or subspecies. Baptiste had come to understand that this was the accomplishment Paul craved.
Before moving on to the owl, Baptiste dipped his hands in a basin of water, wiped them on a towel, and walked around to the bank of windows that lay behind his examining table. He could see across the wide main courtyard of the castle. Schloss Mergentheim had been Paul’s official residence since his marriage. An extensive lawn dotted with trees spread away to Baptiste’s right; to his left stood the main gate to the enclosure, a huge triumphal sally port set in the five-story structure, through which a cobbled road led across an exterior moat to the green calm within. The continuous wall of buildings given over to official functions—a school, a riding academy, administrative offices, a convent, officers’ quarters for the garrison—enclosed about three acres of open ground in an irregular oblong that had first been laid out and fortified in the Middle Ages. Within that enclosure, and forming part of the exterior wall, lay the confines of the castle proper.
By crossing the room, Baptiste could look down on the castle’s much smaller inner courtyard, an expanse of paving stones surrounded by three-story whitewashed buildings capped by a steep-pitched roof of black tiles. One side of the inner court was dominated by the fanciful curved facade of the castle’s tall Baroque chapel, its yellow stucco, carved gray stone, and twin steeples the only relief from the precision of black and white forms that closed the circle.
He walked back to the shelves, picked up the jar that held the dismembered owl, and carried it to the examining table. As he unpinned the two cowbirds and wiped the wooden block clean, he spoke to the owl in regretful tones.
“You, little one, are in a sorry state. Somebody dealt you a rough blow on your long trip from the Missouri to Mergentheim.”
“You’ve come to Otus asio. Excellent progress!” Paul’s voice resonated from behind him. Baptiste nodded as he removed the owl’s head from the jar. “I was hoping to join you earlier,” Paul continued, “but instead I’ve come to take you away to celebrate.”
Baptiste turned around. “What is the occasion?”
“I have some momentous news,” Paul said, and rose up on the balls of his feet. His tone was ebullient, and a smile spread across his features. “I am going to be a father!”
“Let me be the first to congratulate you,” Baptiste said. He wiped his hands clean and grasped Paul’s hand in both of his. “May your sons follow the buffalo, vanquish their enemies, and prosper for generations to come.” Then he added, “Of course, your wife may be carrying a daughter.”
Paul’s features clouded. “Say a prayer that it be a son! Once I produce an heir, my duty is accomplished.” Then he said, “I have other news that is equally important in its way. Herr Thomm has replied. If I give him the completed text and illustrations by the end of August, he can prepare one hundred copies by November. We can look forward to two births this autumn!”
At the end of the afternoon, Baptiste left the festivities that Paul had organized in one of the summer pavilions in the hills surrounding Mergentheim. Outdoors, light and stillness prevailed, and he breathed deeply. The weather was unseasonably warm for April. He left word with Paul’s coachman that he was returning by foot, then set off through the forest.
Quickly the sound of his footsteps through the new growth of bracken came to the fore and transformed the party noises into a faint and distant tinkling that fast receded. Baptiste considered how different he felt when he walked in the woods here. The European countryside did not draw him in as the forests at home did. It did not awaken the place where his spirit bird lived and watched the world through his eyes. Every part of the land he had seen had been changed by man and every place had its owner. Nothing was untouched. Baptiste recalled the one time in Europe he had felt something akin to what he had left behind.
He and Paul had been visiting Naples a few months before Paul’s wedding. One of their hosts, a passionate disciple of von Humboldt’s theories of geology, took them up the slopes of Mount Vesuvius on a clear February morning. Baptiste had seen prints and drawings of volcanoes in Captain Clark’s study in St. Louis, but the experience of walking on the lightly trembling slopes of a mountain had touched something deep and unexpected in him, as if the earth beneath their feet were alive. Fumaroles of steam rose on all sides, whipped across the slopes by a piercing cold wind, and the odor of sulfur was heavy when the smoke blew their way.
They passed several large steam vents and crossed flows of cooled lava. The black trails were rivers turned to stone. Finally they came to a small crater on the side of the mountain that, their host told them, had been the site of eruptions less than six months before. It looked like the spent furnace of an unseen giant, a heap of ash and lava built up in powdery layers of gray, black, and brown. Paul was disappointed that no lava flow could be observed, though he did praise the view of Capri, the bay, and Naples.
Baptiste vividly remembered the sense of delight that he had felt on that February morning in the thin, freezing air. No one can claim to own this! he had shouted inwardly. As they made their slow descent, the sere and savage landscape reminded him of what he had been missing. Today he felt that same sense of loss, and it troubled him deeply.
THIRTY-FIVE
MAY 17, 1828
BAD MERGENTHEIM
Dear Maura,
I am relieved to be able to address you in a letter by your given name at last, though I have enjoyed being your cousin these many months. Now that you and your family are in Geneva, I can be sure that your friends will place this directly into your hands.
I did not understand that your father’s expulsion from France when he was last in Sicily applied to you and your mother as well. I thought that the two of you would be allowed to return to the Gironde, but your latest letter tells me otherwise, and I worry for you. It must be very hard to have left everything and not know whe
n you can return.
Paul has had word from friends in Stuttgart and elsewhere that the French king is fast losing support, and that he has grown ever more defensive with those he sees as enemies. He says that until he is gone, though, you cannot return to France. Will Geneva be your home now? Or Ireland? I would be sorry to see you go. Geneva is close by and Ireland is very far away. I want to know when we will see each other. Your memory is vivid in my mind, and I had looked forward with the greatest anticipation to seeing you this summer. If there is a way for our paths to cross, please let me know.
Increasingly I think of returning home. These years have taught me many things, and I have absorbed them like a good student. Each day has been a new adventure, where all that was required of me was to pay attention and take in as much as possible. But there comes a time when one wants to stop learning and start doing. Captain Clark often said that the staff officers and personal secretaries who accompanied important visitors in St. Louis “live their lives looking through someone else’s eyes, or trying to.” It was not a compliment. I have begun to be one of them.
My time here has helped me to think about my life in St. Louis differently. You know how attached I am to my guardian, and that I have always trusted his judgment, and yet consider this: Captain Clark has been a slave owner all his adult life. He even took a slave along as part of the Corps of Discovery, a Negro by the name of York, then kept him in St. Louis as his servant. So, you see, I will not be returning to some perfect place; far from it.
