One more thing, Jake.

That catalogue you’ve Been Compiling for a while?

Your Hornbook, I believe you Call it?

Bring it, too.

~ ~ ~

D: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The third posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: the Battle of New Orleans and Napoleon’s surrender to Bellerophon.

Aboard S.S. Statendam

Off Bermuda

Wednesday, August 6, 1969

Dear Henry:

Dreamer that I still am (even as I approach the 52nd anniversary of my birth), I had imagined I would have word from you however curt, even sight of you however fleeting, in the weeks between my last and this. Especially last week, when I was at our work in the Buffalo/Fort Erie theater, I half-expected—

Je ne sais quoi, particularly given my disappointment of the week before, when, having transcribed at so long length for you Andrew IV’s adventures from the birth of his children through his “death” at Fort McHenry, and posted copies of my transcription to you c/o that novelist I had thought my partner (on the off chance it might be he who’d showed you the “prenatal” letters), I receive from him—crossed in the mails — nothing less surprising than a rejection of my acceptance of his own invitation to collaborate with him on a Marylandiad! And he has returned the four prenatals, which I must now assume will be followed by what followed them.

He will be sorry. Not because I plan, at least for now, any particular retaliation, but because he has cut himself off (as have you, Henry; as have you) from much that either a novelist or a 2nd-Revolutionary could make use of: the account of our forebear’s “Second Cycle,” of my own, perhaps even of yours. See how drolly, in despite of rude awakenings, I still dream!

We have, then, you and I, not yet begun to talk. Nevertheless, I shall continue, per program, that series of decipherments and anniversary transcriptions, withholding them from the mails till I shall have your proper address, or find you, or you find me. What’s more, as we are no longer to be monitored by that authorial “third ear,” I shall speak more confidentially: not of Andrew Cook IV, of whom I know only what his wife would have known had she not (like our novelist, but with better reason) declined to read these lettres posthumes, nor — yet — of my own history, but of the circumstances of these transcriptions and what I’ve been up to this past month with my left hand, as it were, while the right transcribed.

As “Andrew Cook VI” (who I “became” in 1953, nel mezzo del cammin etc.), I spent July preparing for my lectureship this fall at Marshyhope State University, where I have advertised a course in The Bonapartes of Fiction & the Fiction of the Bonapartes (did you know that Napoleon’s brothers Joseph, Louis, and Lucien all wrote romantic novels?). In that same capacity — I mean as the person I am — I have served as historical consultant to Mr. Reginald Prinz’s filming of events from the 1812 War, a project I am turning to our own purposes. I have also monitored, to some extent even discreetly managed, a number of our potential allies or adversaries: Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation, for example; the historian Lady Amherst, whom I’ve mentioned before; and the heirs of the late Harrison Mack, Jr.

At the same time, as “Monsieur Casteene”—our archancestor’s name, which I have seen fit to use at our Fort Erie base — I have been preparing an eccentric putative descendant of the American Bonapartes (Jérôme’s line, through Betsy Patterson) for a certain role he himself will be unaware of playing. And I have overseen the movement of our people from that base (which is of use to us only as long as the U.S. continues to draft civilians for military service in Viet Nam — another year or less) to “Barataria,” disguised as extras for upcoming sequences of Prinz’s film. My lodge there is our headquarters for the next academic year.

Finally, as “Baron André Castine”—the man I was until 1953 and in this single capacity am yet — I have been at the most immediately important work of all: the financing of our Seven-Year Plan for the Second Revolution. That is the work that brings me to be “vacationing” here (as of last night, when I flew out from Washington) for a few days with your future stepmother, of whom I also happen to be fond. As we cruise in Netherlandish comfort through the waters where in May of 1814 our forebear — or some ship’s officer — impregnated the hapless Consuelo del Consulado, I make plans with the handsome widow of Harrison Mack for the settlement of his estate, which with certain other sources of revenue should carry us far toward 1976.

You remember the admirable Jane Mack, Henry, to whom (as her distant cousin A. B. Cook VI) I introduced you at her husband’s funeral. Some time before his death, when their alcoholic daughter first sought treatment at the Fort Erie sanatorium, I had arranged Mrs. Mack’s introduction to “Baron André Castine,” who subsequently comforted her, in London and elsewhere, through the terminal stages of her husband’s illness, and consoled her for his death. (I was also, for a certain reason, protecting Harrison Mack’s own comforter, the aforementioned Lady Amherst.) Mrs. Mack has taken it into her head to end her days as a baroness: she frankly suspects me of fortune hunting; I her of title hunting. We agree on the legitimacy of both pursuits when they are not cynical, and believe each of us to esteem in the other more than just the title and the fortune. Jane assumes, wrongly, that I want to enrich myself for the usual reasons, and does not disapprove: indeed, next week I shall take delivery in Annapolis of a large trawler yacht, her gift for my 52nd birthday. I have not apprised her of our cause (or the real reason I want that yacht) because — like her son, like most of our young “Baratarians,” like my own parents — she would mistake the Revolution to be still political in its goals, and would of course be as wrongheadedly its foe as Drew Mack is wrongheadedly its friend.

It is my fiancée’s plan to contest her late husband’s will — which leaves the bulk of his estate to his philanthropic foundation — on the grounds of his madness, and to negotiate distribution half to herself, the other half in equal portions to her two children and the Tidewater Foundation. Inasmuch as Jane’s moiety would be to some extent mine even during her lifetime (she is an astute and frugal manager), and Drew Mack’s would be largely applied — by his lights — to our cause, I acceded to this plan, while privately seeing to it that things will turn out somewhat differently.

Suppose, for example — but never mind! Like Jane’s (that excellent businesswoman’s), my plans are intricate but clear, and best not babbled about. True minds, we shall marry in the new year. If you’ve any objections, Henry — or suggestions for dealing with “A. B. Cook VI” when Jane Mack becomes the Baroness Castine! — speak now…

Our ancestor. The postscript to his second “posthumous” letter found him resurrected from his “death” and bound for New Orleans to meet Jean Lafitte, hoping somehow to forestall the British movement on that city. But it was a postscript penned, like the letter it ended, six months after that fateful battle; Andrew wrote it, with but the merest hint of what he is doing there, from the orlop deck of H.M.S. Bellerophon, off Rochefort in France on July 16, 1815, one day after Napoleon Bonaparte’s surrender to the commander of that vessel. Not until this third and central of his lettres posthumes does Andrew’s past overtake his present, and the intricate labor of exposition give way to more immediate drama. The letter (before me) is dated August 6, 1815, and headed, in “Captain Kidd’s code”:

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