Mosswood

Mosswood sits at the deep upper basin of the Loch Raven watershed, four miles north of the Dulaney Valley Road crossing, in a fold of second-growth oak and tulip poplar the city has not entered in eighty years. There is no road in.

The cabin is one room. A stove. A table under a chestnut tree. Books on every surface, a brass-bound notebook in his coat, a clay pipe he sometimes lights. Maps, always, pinned to the wall. The roof is cedar shake; the foundation is the bedrock the hollow was named for. The walls do not square. The Count chose them anyway.

Outside, the hollow itself: a small clearing of moss and last year’s leaves, ringed by stones placed by no one anyone remembers. A rough table outside the cabin door, where the work mostly happens. A path that drops to the basin where Becker takes his water by hand-pump twice a day.

Bus #11 from Inner Harbor to Towson. Bus #8 from Towson to the Dulaney Valley Road crossing. From the crossing, four miles north on foot — uphill, through oak and tulip poplar, on a deer path the Count keeps faint by walking it himself in different boots at different hours.

The buccaneers arrive sweating, with the question, and sit at the rough table. He listens; he asks what they think first; he gives a first cut. Then he sends them back into Baltimore with a specific assignment. They return a week or two later with what they saw. He breaks it down.

His mother brought home books whenever she could and read to him by tallow light. His favorite, a battered chapbook translated out of the English, told of a wandering scholar who lived in a woodland cottage called Mosswood Hollow, in an enchanted forest where one could become anyone one wished. He kept that name folded in his head for the rest of his life — through Brandenburg cavalry, through the long Saxon retreats, through Kliszów and Fraustadt and Altranstädt, through the burned master sheets and the awl in the courtyard and the boat to Philadelphia.

When the time came for a cabin in a fold of woods on the other side of an ocean, the name was already there.

He lives at Mosswood under the name Robert Clive Baker. The Baker name is his brother Karl Friedrich’s legal anglicization, kept on by Reinhard out of practicality and respect. The Forest Service knows him as a retired professor of medicine on a watershed lease, eccentric but quiet, with a brother in the city who handles his post. The pirates know him as Der Graf.