Letters

Little woman or man to be: what blood runs in your veins! Blood of Castines, Cookes, & Burlingames whose histories, more intricate than History, are interlaced as capillaries. ’Tis a tale I knew but partially till this fortnight, when, perforce sequester’d here for a time with Andrée’s parents whilst the world looks in vain for the impostor “Comte de Crillon,” I have had both leisure & opportunity to search thro certain documents of our family. Nay, more, your mother & I have studied them with amazement, & have espied in them a Pattern, so we believe, that bids to change the course of our lives. It is to fix this pattern for ourselves that I mean to draw it out now for you, in the hope it may spare you half a lifetime of misdirected effort. For we firmly believe, Andrée & I, that ours has been a line of brilliant failures, and that while it may be too late for ourselves to do more than cancel out, in the latter half of our lives, our misguided accomplishments in the earlier, you may be the 1st true winner in the history of the house.

’Tis the house of Burlingame & Cook I speak of: the English side of the family, by contrast to which the French, or Castine, side has been a very model of consistency. The Barons Castine still inhabit St. Castine in Gascony, as they have for centuries: the American branch of the family descends from the 1st adventurous baron of the line, a young André Castine who came to Canada toward the end of the 17th Century. He took to wife a Tarratine Indian whom tradition declares to have been the daughter of “Chief Madocawando,” and from whom we Cooks & Burlingames inherit one half of the Indian blood that has served so many of us so well.

This “Monsieur Casteene,” as he was known to the English colonials, became a much-fear’d figure in the provinces of New York & New England in the 1690’s; even as far south as Maryland it was thot that he & the “Naked Salvages of the North” might sweep down & drive the English back into the sea. Amongst the children of André Castine & Madocawanda (a gifted woman who added French & English to her Indian dialects, & so master’d European manners that she quite charm’d the skeptical Gascoignes upon her one visit to St. Castine) was a daughter, Andrée, who married Andrew Cooke III and grandmother’d both the present Andrée & myself.

All subsequent male Castines have follow’d the peaceful example of their Gascon forebears and contented themselves with hunting, farming, timbering, & the breeding of handsome 1st cousins for the Cookes & Burlingames to wed. These belles cousines share their husbands’ penchant for political intrigue: a penchant that so marks our line, its genealogy, on the Burlingame side especially, is as tangled as the plots we’ve been embroil’d in.

To deal 1st with the simpler Cooks (or Cookes, as we then spelt it): Of the 1st Andrew Cooke we know nothing, save that he & someone begot Andrew II, of the Parish of St. Giles in the Fields, London. Andrew II was a tobacco factor in the Maryland plantations, who in the middle 17th Century acquired from Lord Baltimore patent to “Malden on the Chesapeake,” now call’d Cooke’s Point. Upon his wife Anne Bowyer he got twins, Anna & Ebenezer, of whom more anon. Upon his mistress from the neighboring point — a well-born French girl, disown’d by her father, Le Comte Cécile Édouard, for an earlier amour—he got a natural daughter, Henrietta, who bore her mother’s later married name of Russecks. Now, since my mother, Nancy Russecks Burlingame, was descended from this same Henrietta, ’twas but a partial pretence when I took the name Comte de Crillon for my recentest adventure: you spring from a Huguenot count on one side & a Gascon baron on the other, not to mention Tarratine royalty from Madocawanda Castine and Ahatchwhoop royalty from the Burlingames, whom I’ve yet to get to!

Thus Andrew II. His son Ebenezer Cooke is of no great interest to us, despite his claim to have been Poet Laureate of Maryland. He seems to have lost the family estate thro bumbling innocence, & to have regain’d it in some fashion by marrying a prostitute. An unsuccessful tradesman gull’d of his goods, he could make no more of his misfortunes than a comical poem, The Sot-Weed Factor. No better in the bed than at the writing desk, he got but one child, which died a-borning and fetcht its mother off into the bargain — and that ends the tale of your only artist ancestor.

But not your only artful! For with Anna Cooke, Eben’s twin, we come to the Protean Burlingames, whose operations have been at once so multifarious & so covert, that while ’tis certain they have alter’d & realter’d the course of history, ’tis devilish difficult to say just how, or whether their intrigues & counter-intrigues do not cancel one another across the generations. For a tree which, left to itself, would grow straight, if pull’d equally this way & that will grow… straight!