Across the Endless River (13 page)

Suddenly a hand brusquely swept up the child and snatched the coin from his fingers in one fluid movement. A young woman stood before him in the same rags as the others, her features scrawny and drawn where they could be made out beneath the grime. The child stopped bawling.

“Merci, Monsieur,”
she said, then asked if he had another, so that they might eat a bit of meat that night.

The stench that emanated from this creature was sickening. She gave him a semblance of a smile, and Baptiste saw that she had few teeth, and those were badly discolored. Her breath smelled of wine. He took another coin from his pocket, handed it to her, and walked on quickly.

The exchange had not gone unnoticed. Others materialized along his path and begged for coins. He hurried along, escaping their entreaties by darting down an alleyway. Leaning against a building for a moment, he found that he was breathing heavily. Across the street, a tavern's sign—a jug of wine and a cluster of grapes—swung lightly in the morning breeze. He would have a glass of wine to soothe his nerves.

It was dark inside the tavern. A few candles guttered in their wall holders on either side of the broad planks that served as a bar, and a bed of coals glowed brightly in the facing hearth. Rough-hewn tables and benches filled a plain room, and a few posters and handbills adorned the smoke-blackened walls. The atmosphere differed entirely from the cafés Paul had taken him to.

He removed his hat, ordered a pitcher of wine, and sat near one of the narrow windows that looked out onto the alley. Boisterous conversation and laughter came from a room in the back, but only half a dozen people occupied the front room. Baptiste greedily drank a glass of wine, then relaxed and sipped a second. Three men wandered in from the back and sat at the table next to his, loudly talking about politics. They reeked of alcohol.

“Taxes, and then more taxes! Tell me, how is this better than Bonaparte?” The man who slouched at Baptiste's side was tall and burly, and he slurred his words.

“Bonaparte, Bourbons, it's all the same shit!” his companion cried, and was immediately shushed by the third, who looked around nervously.

“Shut up, you imbecile,” he hissed. “The police have informers everywhere.”

Baptiste's attention was riveted on his neighbors, though he pretended to be uninterested. They looked at him, and he felt menace in the air.

“So they do,” the big one said slowly; then, looking directly at Baptiste, he continued with an unctuous grin. “Perhaps you are one, Monsieur.” He picked up the hat Baptiste had laid on the table and held it up appraisingly, as if it were a piece of evidence. “Such a fine hat in such a poor neighborhood.”

Baptiste put his glass down, returned the man's stare, and said evenly, “Put the hat down.” The husky man's friends watched in excited anticipation, as if they had seen this before.

“And if I don't?” The big man rose unsteadily from his seat and straightened up to his full height. He lifted the hat to put it on his greasy head, and as it passed in front of his eyes, Baptiste jumped to his feet, grabbed the man's shirt with his left hand, and pulled him forward. His right hand emerged from his vest grasping a hunting knife whose eight-inch blade flashed in the candlelight as he thrust it against the troublemaker's throat. All was still in the room. The two friends leaned back from the confrontation; laughter continued to drift in from the back.

Baptiste said softly, “You will put the hat down.”

The other man didn't dare take his eyes from Baptiste's. Beads of sweat covered his brow and spittle caught in his scraggly mustache and beard as he silently mouthed his assent. He reached out and opened his palm, and the hat fell to the table, where it hit with a muffled thump.

“Stand up, all three of you!” Baptiste demanded. He released the burly man and pushed him toward the others. Still holding the knife in the direction of the three cowering together, he picked up his hat, put it on, and pulled several coins from his pocket and threw them on the table. “Monsieur, this is for the wine,” he said to the owner, who was still behind the bar. He drew his knife in close to his face, looked at the three men across its tip, and said, “Good day, gentlemen.” Then he was through the door.

He knew enough not to linger. The knife had surprised them, but it wouldn't be possible again. Baptiste hurried down the street and turned the corner, then headed down the first alley he came to. Once he had made sure he wasn't being followed, he relaxed. Then he recalled the initial exchange, so like boyhood quarrels, but with the strange addition of politics that were unknown to him. He reached up and touched the brim of his hat.
So this makes me look like a police informer,
he mused.
What else don't I know that could get me into trouble?

His route back to Prince Franz's house took Baptiste along the Seine in the heart of the city. He sat on a stone wall at the water's edge.
It's
not much of a river,
he thought,
but at least it has a current you can see.
As he watched workmen loading barges, his mind drifted to the life he had known before.
What would my mother think if she could see where
I am?
he wondered.

When Baptiste thought of his mother, he thought of his spirit bird and the day she had said goodbye. Many more times in subsequent years she had told him to have strength, and he heard her voice now.
The spirit bird will always protect you, no matter what path I have taken.

He felt in his pocket and found the little obsidian bird that meant strength. Since her death the stone figure had never left him, wrapped in a square of elk hide that fit neatly in his closed fist. It represented his tribal ties in a way that meant more to him than the Kit Fox Society, to which he could never fully belong. He thought of his mother's broken childhood and why a guardian spirit would have been important to her. She had fashioned the idea of this protective companion from her own mixed experience among the Shoshone, the Mandan, and the white
voyageurs,
and this, he thought, approximated his own destiny. The spirit bird seemed right for someone living in two different but overlapping worlds.

T
WELVE

M
ARCH 1824

P
rince Franz had decided to give a ball. Officially it was to be in honor of Paul before he and Baptiste left for Stuttgart, their next stop, but the reason mattered less than the gathering itself to this lover of the good life.
“Tout prétexte est bon!”
Paul said good-naturedly. “Any pretext will do.”

Paul and Baptiste sat in the dark green leather-covered armchairs in the room Paul's uncle called his library, a long formal space on the second floor with five full-length windows that looked down onto the garden. Although shelves of books lined the walls, the owner's principal activity in this chamber was not reading, but the examination of his extensive collection of maps. Three or four large maps lay unrolled on a long trestle table in the center of the room, their corners held down by magnifying lenses, rocks, and fossils. Nearby, a huge globe nestled in a floor stand; its upper hemisphere turned so that North America faced the adjacent chair.

Paul and Baptiste had gotten into the habit of spending at least part of their mornings together in this long, cluttered room. It was the one place in Prince Franz's vast house where they could step out of the constant round of his activities: the frequent visits, official and unofficial, of diplomats with business to conduct with Württemberg; the comings and goings of mistresses; the dinners and card games that sometimes didn't wind down until after the sun had risen. The prince was not only an ambassador from a small but strategically important state and an aristocrat with ties of blood or marriage to most of the princely families of northern Europe; he was also a
bon vivant
with a prodigious appetite for women, gambling, hunting, and good food. An army of servants maintained the life of his household. The library was his refuge, the only room where servants were forbidden when the prince was in residence.

“We'll have to visit a number of suppliers before leaving Paris next week,” Paul said. He mentioned half a dozen scientific instruments he was anxious to acquire.

“We are also to meet with Professor Picard,” Paul went on. “He is an old friend of Professor Lebert, my teacher at the Stuttgart Gymnasium. Both of them worked with Bonpland and von Humboldt, and together they have educated an entire generation in the importance of the natural sciences. He's keen to examine some of the tribal objects I brought back.”

Paul picked up one of the magnifiers and turned it slowly by its handle. “Now, it occurs to me, my friend, that before we travel to Württemberg I owe you a bit of background if you are to understand my family. Other than the bits and snatches you may have picked up on our passage from America, you really know next to nothing about my country and my family's place in it. Let me tell you about where I come from.”

Paul pulled his chair close to the table and riffled through the maps until he found the one he wanted and laid it on top of the others. “Europe—
1820
” was printed in large gothic letters across the top.

“Here we are in France,” Paul began, gesturing toward the large, roughly hexagonal shape colored in light blue. Close by, to the east, he indicated a much smaller territory in yellow. “This,” he said as he pointed to it, “is the Kingdom of Württemberg; Stuttgart is its capital. My cousin Wilhelm is the king; that much you know. His father—my uncle Friedrich—was a duke. Then Napoleon came along and started making alliances with everyone but the devil, and all of a sudden, in return for fighting the Austrians, Friedrich woke up with a crown on his head.” Paul shook his head at the image he had conjured. “It goes without saying that whatever I mention here today remains strictly between us.”

Baptiste nodded.

“My uncle Friedrich was extremely clever and, let us say, original. His middle name could have been ‘Excess,' starting with food. Napoleon said of him when they first met to conclude their alliance, ‘King Friedrich is God's laboratory for testing the ability of the human skin to stretch!' He was far taller than me, and fully two hundred pounds heavier. You can imagine.” He shook his head at the memory. “For whatever reason, my uncle took a particular interest in my education and made sure that I was part of his official entourage. Some of the older courtiers said I was his twin as a boy. When I was nine, I was named a captain in the King's Guard. Not even my older brother was given that honor. When I finally resigned my army commission at nineteen, I held the rank of major general.”

“Why did you leave the army?”

“I never wanted to be a soldier in the first place!” Paul responded. “Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the essential point,” he added quietly. “There simply aren't other avenues available to a lesser member of the royal family. A young duke can't be a diplomat, he can't be a government functionary, and he certainly can't be involved in commerce. That leaves the clergy”—Paul grimaced—“but that has always seemed other than a real life to me. And so it was the army, whose ideals of chivalry, honor, and duty align perfectly with those of a small state whose very existence has been assured by feats of arms. My father and uncle were soldiers, my brother is a soldier, my sister married a soldier. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers! It must seem unusual to someone from the wilds of the Missouri, where you do as you please, but this is what happens in the little world of the Württemberg aristocracy.” He was laughing now, though halfheartedly. “They manage these things better in England. There a nobleman can have his enthusiasms as well as his passions, and learning is respected for its own sake. And here in France not even the Bourbons have been able to corrupt the idea of scientific exploration as an honorable pursuit. There's a reason von Humboldt has spent decades in Paris. Alas, things are different on the other side of the Rhine.”

He saw the question in Baptiste's eyes. “The essential point is that I've chosen to devote myself to natural history, and it has set my family against me. That is what I am returning to.”

“So your family disapproves of your trip,” Baptiste said, trying to understand Paul's agitation. “Will I meet them all in Stuttgart?”

Paul shook his head slowly. “No, actually. But my cousin the king is in Stuttgart, and where the king goes, the court must follow.”

“So we must go there,” Baptiste said.

“Think of it this way, Baptiste. A royal family is like a grand version of Chouteau's fur traders on the Missouri, a family business where trust, loyalty, and control are everything, even over a difficult cousin like me.”

Paul rose from the table and added, “With the difference, of course, that fur traders are actually expected to
do
something.” He walked to one of the windows and gazed down into the garden, his hands clasped behind him.

The massive door to the library burst open. “So here you are!” Prince Franz cried, a tumbler of red wine in one hand, a lit cigar in the other. “Cooped up with my maps again, up to God knows what sort of mischief.”

Paul and Baptiste both smiled as Prince Franz strode into the room and settled into one of the armchairs. He placed his glass carefully on a side table and drew deeply on his cigar.