Across the Endless River

by Thad Carhart

  They feasted on what the Ludwigsburg kitchens served up for a princess’s outing: quail’s eggs in aspic, duck liver pâté, slices of lean beef dressed in herbs, even a small jar of caviar with its own special spoon made of horn. They drank a light white wine with a sweet aftertaste that Theresa explained came from a cousin’s vineyards along the Rhine. She replenished Baptiste’s glass, sipping from her own infrequently. The midday sun shone fiercely through the green canopy above, raising the temperature noticeably. Even the insects ceased their hum, so the fountain’s gentle splashing was all they heard in the heavy air beneath the trees. Baptiste asked Theresa’s permission to remove his coat—he had seen Paul do the same once—and when she nodded her assent, he rose and put it aside, then stretched his arms high overhead as he yawned.

  Her look seemed to draw him to her, but he hesitated until she extended her hand to him. He caught her arm and drew her into his arms and kissed her. When at last they separated, she was smiling, and her eyes said yes, and he repeated what he had just done, this time holding her tight, as if she were a deer that could escape and disappear into the forest. When he let her go, Theresa kept her hand on Baptiste’s neck.

  “Let us save the rest for later, shall we?” she said in a languorous tone. To his searching eyes, she responded, “They will have ideas about us at the palace. It wouldn’t do to prove it to them.”

  That night they made love in Theresa’s rooms. During dinner, Theresa had managed to join Baptiste alone at the buffet table and slipped a note into his hand while she offered him more soup. He opened the small envelope in his room afterward and unfolded a half sheet of vellum. She had written in a bold hand, “Come to the small music room at ten and wait. Leave your boots outside your door. Bring your lovely smile.” No one had ever addressed him that way, and as he heard Theresa’s voice say the words in his head, he felt a thrill of anticipation.

  He stood before the small oval mirror that hung between the windows, composing his face in the reflection and analyzing its parts. What did Theresa see when she looked at him? His blue-gray eyes were set wide, beneath a prominent brow, like his father’s. From his mother came his dark and finely shaped eyebrows, his high cheekbones, and his olive skin, which had caused one woman at court to ask if he was a Sicilian, another to assume he was Spanish. Both were compliments, Theresa had assured him. For the first time he considered that his copper-hued skin and chiseled features might make him attractive to a woman. The idea surprised him.

  Theresa’s beauty was less pronounced than that of many of the other women at court. Her fine features appeared almost sharp in certain lights, but her curious eyes gave her face its power. She was fifteen years older than his nineteen, and yet she didn’t seem old at all. Unlike so many of the unmarried women he had met at Ludwigsburg, many of them younger than Theresa, she wasn’t sad or forlorn or frivolous or lonely. Was it because she had been widowed so young and found herself rich and independent? Or was it just who she was, someone who was determined to draw from life everything it could offer?

  In the music room, he found a single oil lamp lit and the heavy drapes on both windows pulled shut to ensure that the light would not be visible. The piano that stood against one wall looked like an oblong table, its keyboard inset in one side; it differed from the far larger piano, with its voluptuous curved top, that they called a Flügel, a wing, that reigned in the palace’s larger music room where concerts were often held. The scale here was more intimate. Only a small harp and a cello laid on its back on a narrow table suggested that this room was given over to music. Baptiste stopped at the piano and lifted its fall board to examine the keys. The door from the hallway opened suddenly, and he let the cover drop with a slam. He looked up in horror, suddenly aware of how anxious he felt, and saw Theresa’s maid, Marie-Claire, swooping down upon him with a reproving hiss.

  “Shhh! Monsieur, you must be very quiet!” Her sharp look softened, as if she were addressing a child. “We must be silent if our passage is to remain undetected.” She picked up the lamp and motioned him to a door in the room’s paneling. Baptiste understood that they were to negotiate the hidden world of the servants’ interior corridors. Before opening the door, Marie-Claire turned to him and said, “If we come across anyone, conceal yourself at my signal.”

  Baptiste walked behind Marie-Claire down a plain, unadorned passageway that apparently continued along the entire inner perimeter of the palace’s rooms, providing access to each by one or more service doorways. Racks of keys, piles of fresh linen, serving trays and flower vases, brooms and mops were neatly arrayed at periodic widenings of the corridor alongside small staircases that led to the upper floors. Baptiste saw the backs of each room’s heating stove, which servants could stoke without entering the rooms.

  His musings were cut short by the sound of voices approaching from a side hallway. Marie-Claire stopped and motioned furiously with one hand behind her back for Baptiste to enter a small alcove on the right. This he did, hiding behind long aprons hung from hooks in overlapping profusion. Two men’s voices came closer, their tones strained as they apparently carried a great weight down the passageway.

  “Who’d have thought the old lady would call for firewood so late in the season?”

  “Ah, she’s a hundred if she’s a day. At that age, the cold is in your bones for good.”

  Both of them grunted and wheezed as they grappled with their load. Baptiste understood most of what they said, though a few words were beyond him. He knew from Schlape that the “old lady” was the dowager queen, the king’s stepmother, who lived in semiseclusion in the far reaches of the palace.

  “If you ask me, she should— Why, good evening, Madame. A latenight errand for your good mistress?” Marie-Claire bantered with the two of them, telling them she had to fetch some correspondence that Theresa had left somewhere and commiserating with them about the caprices of the royal family. They continued down the hallway with their lantern and, Baptiste saw, two large canvas bags of firewood. Marie-Claire proceeded, obliged to make it seem as if she were walking purposefully, leaving Baptiste in utter darkness. A few minutes later she returned and retrieved Baptiste from his hiding place. They turned down another corridor and took a staircase to the next floor. Marie-Claire then led him down a narrower service corridor to a door, knocked lightly three times, then twice, and opened the door. She hurried Baptiste in as if he had been standing out in the rain, then closed the door quietly and set down her lamp.

  “Please wait here. Madame will be along presently.” Marie-Claire disappeared into an adjacent room and Baptiste contemplated his surroundings. It was as if he had surfaced from subterranean murk into a world of sunlight and splendor, so great was the contrast between the servants’ passageway and this room. The walls were painted the palest yellow, with light blue detailing on the paneling, a scheme that was echoed in the drapery, the embroidered upholstery, even the carpet. A dozen candles flickered in wall sconces and candlesticks, casting a soft glow and pervading the air with the aroma of a spice unknown to him.

  Baptiste caught sight of himself in a mirror that hung above a small inlaid chest of drawers, and he was stunned by the transformation of the face that had stared out from the mirror in his own room. The light here was strange, captivating and golden, suffusing his skin with a radiance that seemed to come from within. How different I look, he thought.

  He heard muffled voices, then the door to the next room opened and Theresa was framed in the doorway. The robe she wore was lightcolored and the room behind her darker, so that she stood out like an apparition before she took a step forward and broke the spell. She wore a long dressing gown embroidered with shimmering metallic threads, and her hair was worked with golden ribbons. Baptiste struggled to find words. He had never seen her look so beautiful. Is it possible this apparition has chosen me?

  Transfixed by Theresa’s radiance, Baptiste was acutely aware that he had done nothing special to prepare for this moment, and he regretted it intensely. H
is shirt was clean at least, but his trousers were rumpled and his coat had seen long wear since its last cleaning.

  Theresa crossed to where he stood, held his hand in both of hers, and said, “Come, Baptiste, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost. You’ve reached your safe haven and now you must relax. Sit down here and I’ll pour us something cool to drink.” She led him to the couch and kissed him full on the lips, a long, lingering kiss that made him forget everything that had come before it. Then she withdrew from his embrace, poured two glasses of champagne from a bottle that stood on a nearby table, and sat beside him. He was struck by her ease, as though this rendezvous was natural. He wondered if he would know how to play his part.

  “To life, and all its myriad surprises.” They touched glasses and Baptiste was about to drink when Theresa caught his arm. “No, Baptiste. Lovers must look in each other’s eyes when they toast. Otherwise Cupid’s curse will descend upon them.”

  He did as she said, looking long into her eyes. He knew then that he had only to follow his instincts and she would do the rest. After they had drunk together he asked, “What is Cupid’s curse?”

  “It is taking each other for granted.”

  Later he remembered that Theresa’s dressing gown was covered with tiny embroidered butterflies, and it had seemed important, beautiful, and true to who she was. When she led him into the dark bedroom, she kept two candles burning, and he learned that a dim, flickering light was more inviting than the total dark that had prevailed with the girls he had known. He would remember, always, how she had asked him to remove the golden ribbons from her hair, and how humbled he had felt. When she removed his shirt, she took one of the ribbons and draped it loosely around his neck so that it hung down on his chest, and it had felt like tiny tongues of fire upon his skin. Beneath her dressing gown Theresa wore a sheath of white silk, and in his excitement he had pulled hard at the straps. Without a hint of reproof or dismay she said, “There is no need for haste, my love. We have all the time we need,” as if she wanted him to enjoy with her this great gift of forgetting time. She helped him with the clasp, and then there was the softness of her skin on his, and the expanse of linen and pillows upon which they sailed, and the golden steady light of two candles, like an undying sunset upon the river.

  TWENTY-THREE

  After that first night, Baptiste went to Theresa’s rooms two or three times a week as spring turned into summer. After their lovemaking she would sometimes kneel by his side as he lay on his back and run her finger lightly across each of his four scars and bend forward and kiss each one, finishing the ritual with a whispered prayer: “Neither knife nor ball shall pierce the flesh of him I hold dear.” Her incantation gave her a feeling she could protect him against the things she could not control. Her husband had died in battle, he reminded himself. Baptiste’s scars, though, had only been the result of childhood games and foolish accidents. He tried to tell Theresa this, but she hushed him.

  Just below his left eye he had a small triangular indentation from a stubby arrow shot in haste by a fellow member of the Kit Fox Society as they played at war. An inch higher and he would have lost his eye, but the cheekbone had protected him. On his left breast, just below the nipple, he bore a diagonal scar six inches long and one inch wide, an impressive mark of other roughhousing with his Mandan cousins, when the head of a war club, brandished in glee, came loose and struck him to the ground. He had bled spectacularly, his chest and stomach latticed with red, but the wound was superficial and had soon healed. Another puncture wound on the right side of his stomach had been far more serious. He had fallen onto the blunt end of a lance when his horse shied at a rattlesnake. The fever had lasted for over a week. When Baptiste recovered, the shaman told him that he had left to visit the Great Spirit and had only reluctantly returned when they called to him through the big pipe.

  The last scar caused him pain. He had jumped into the river from a high bank, responding to the cries of his father, whose overloaded canoe had upended. As strong a paddle as he was in a canoe, his father had never learned to swim; though he was only thirty feet from the bank, his terror was real. Baptiste leaped and hit a submerged rock, which peeled off a flap of skin on his right hip as cleanly as if it were a strip of hide flensed after the hunt. Once he got his father and his load of pelts safely to shore, he had looked in awe at the flesh hanging from the bone and had come near to fainting. But the shaman bound up the skin and muscle with a poultice and changed the herbs frequently. The wound had taken a long time to heal, and still, five years later, he felt a deep ache in his hip when the weather was damp. It sometimes frightened Baptiste to look at the mottled patch of skin with its thick, ragged edge. He realized that these must seem like savage wounds to one not used to life on the frontier.

  Theresa was contemptuous of the cult of war, which she derisively called “men and their endless games.” Her husband’s death surely played a part in her attitude. She was dismissive about the practice of dueling over points of honor. The dramatic scars on the faces of fashionable young men she referred to as “self-inflicted.” He wondered what she would make of the life he had known as a boy among the Mandan if she could see it for herself. If these marks from boyhood pranks made such a strong impression on her, what would she think of the ones borne by his kinsmen and friends when they became full members of the tribe?

  One night, shortly before midsummer, he felt Theresa’s soft and pliant shoulder against his in the warm air, and he closed his eyes. He dreamed that night of the Mandan initiation. Once again he heard the chants and felt the throb of the drums in his bones, once again he watched as the young men cried out for strength. He saw Jumping Fox hanging overhead, twirling vividly in the firelight, and this time he sprang up to help him. He grabbed for his legs, and heard a piercing scream. Instead of holding the body spinning above him, his arms grasped something cold and brittle that seemed to disintegrate in his hands. Then a crash resounded below him and there was another scream, and he was awake. He was standing on the bed, and he heard Theresa urgently say, “Don’t move. There is glass all over. Let me light a candle.”

  When the light flared up, he saw what he had done. In his right hand he grasped one of the branches of the Venetian chandelier that hung above the bed; on the floor at the foot of the bed lay the shattered pieces of another. She lit two oil lamps on the dresser. There came a knock at the outer door and Marie-Claire’s worried voice: “Madame, is there some trouble? Madame?” Theresa put on her dressing gown, went out, and reassured Marie-Claire in low tones.

  Baptiste’s body shone with sweat in the faint light. “Let me move some of these sharp pieces from the bedclothes.” Theresa picked up several jagged shards of blue glass and placed them on a bedside tray. “Now you can get down safely.” He crossed to the opposite side of the bed and jumped to the floor.

  “You’re bleeding,” Theresa said.

  Rivulets of blood traced a scarlet net from his hands to his elbows. She sat him in a chair, gently uncoiled his fingers from the curved piece of Murano glass, and sat on a footstool with a basin of water and a small towel and washed his cuts. He was still captivated by the reality of his dream. Now, with just the two of them enclosed within the lamp’s gentle nimbus, the world seemed diminished, and he felt a stab of loneliness as he considered how far behind he had left his other world. He sat wordless before her and watched her movements with a distant interest.

  “What did you dream of?” Theresa asked gently.

  “I saw a friend very clearly.”

  “Ah,” she said as she wrapped strips of linen around his palm. “Was your friend in danger?”

  “No. Not exactly. He just seemed . . . he seemed to need me.”

  She tied off the last strip and touched his forearm with her fingertips. “Come, let me give you some cognac.” Her eyes were sad as she rose.

  The brandy spread a warm flush from his gut to his head and then slowly to his limbs. The pulsing in his hands eased, and the stinging of the cuts.
Theresa stoked the fire’s embers and added a log, and together they sat before it in facing chairs and watched the flames take life. Then he told her about the initiation ceremony.

  “I didn’t grab for Jumping Fox when I watched in the lodge. He became a Mandan brave that day, like all the others.”

  “And you?”

  “To the Mandan, I was part of the white man’s world. I took another path, and it has brought me here. But I sometimes think that there is no more place for me in this world than there was among the Mandan.”

  The silence was almost entire save for the fire’s gentle hissing, and they sat together for a long time before Theresa spoke. “Suppose I tell you a dream I sometimes have.” Baptiste inclined his head, and she went on. “I am flying, looking down on a carriage in which I am traveling. My body is in the carriage, but the real me, my essence, is flying high above. It is taking me to my parents’ house in Silesia on a trip I must have made a dozen times in the years before I was first married. It was a road I knew well, a comfortable voyage, a homecoming. Yet as I fly above, I imagine the coach turning off the road that leads home and taking another one, a turning at a crossroads. Sometimes the carriage turns left, sometimes right, but it always turns off the usual path. I don’t know where it is going, and that seems to be the important part. My destination is unknown, new, mysterious. As the coach turns, my being is filled with anticipation at the adventure ahead. I wake up excited, hopeful, and full of happiness at having set off for somewhere unfamiliar.” She looked at him full of enthusiasm and asked, “Can you imagine how the unknown can actually give us hope?”

  Baptiste was puzzled, and he shook his head.

  “In many ways that dream is curious,” she told him, “and yet it comforts me when I consider the turns my life has taken. I was sixteen when I married and moved to Russia. I had visited my grandmother in France every year, and I’d been to Vienna once or twice, but otherwise I knew only Württemberg. Saint Petersburg seemed familiar, but when we spent time on my husband’s estates in the country, I quickly realized how completely different Russia was from anything I had ever known.”