Barkskins

8. Forgeron

Duquet had escaped Trépagny, but what next? Gripping the sapling he had cut for a stick, his remaining teeth burning in his mouth, coughing and with a stitch in his side, he followed the river west until dark. Before full light he was on his way again, swallowing whole the chunks of fish pudding he had hidden in his jacket the night before. He drank river water and plunged on. He followed the river from the ridge above in case Trépagny and that fool Sel came nosing after him. The higher ground was rough and gullied. He could see crashing water below, trees half in the water, sodden heads thrashing in the current. Hunger drove him back to the bank, where he knotted the neck and sleeves of his shirt and held it sidewise underwater, the open end inviting fish in. He had enough success to get nourishment, sucking the juice from the raw flesh as a spider with an insect. After eight days, scratched and filthy, lost in the wild, but driven by an inchoate need, he reached another river flowing down from the north. To the northwest were rich beaver grounds, the Indians who trapped the beaver and the traders who transported the pelts down the river. He began his long walk.

In the third week of his journey Duquet awoke and opened his left eye, the right stuck shut with hardened pus. In his exhaustion he fell often to the ground and lay with his face against the leaf litter. He was beyond the pain of his abscessed jaw; swathed in veils of mosquitoes he sucked in raw air with its taste of decaying wood. On his hands and arms were five or six suppurating wounds. He had found rib bones with strings of dark meat clinging to them under a serviceberry bush, but when he put one to his mouth something wild came at him, tearing with teeth and claws. It ran with the prize. He was weak from the loss of blood, not only from the biting animal, but from blackflies, from mosquitoes. Then he lost the river. He tried every direction, but it had disappeared. For an entire day he scooped at the dirt with his hands to discover if it was underground. How much easier it was to crawl than to stand and walk. And so he crawled, weeping, mouthing syllables. It rained, the dark grey clouds like unshaven jowls. His horizon was a sawtooth jag of black spruce. He caught a slow duckling, the last in a parade of ducklings on their way to — water! He had found the river again. He thought he might be dying, but it seemed inconsequential. First he would get to the north, to the fur traders, then he would die. As he crept along the rediscovered river he found small frogs and one more duckling that he caught and ate, cowering under the hammering beak and painful wing blows of the mother. Here the riverbank was soft mud, more comfortable for crawling.

• • •

An Odaawa hunting party surrounded the creature. They had watched it for two days inching around and around the margin of a small pond, sleeping in mud under the alders, then creeping again on hands and knees.

“He is sick,” said one. They all backed away.

“He is wounded,” said another.

At the sound of their voices Duquet reared up on his knees. He glowered at them out of his left eye. A pattern of alder twigs indented his cheek. He shaped his mud-crusted fingers into claws and hissed at them. He said something.

“He wishes to attack,” said one. The rest laughed and their laughter enraged Duquet.

“He is a French,” said one.

“We cannot take him. The French bring sickness.”

“He is already sick. He cannot come among us.”

“Leave him.”

They backed away, disappeared.

• • •

Days later a party of French fur traders stopped at the Indians’ riverside camp.

“We want peltries,” said the old trader. “Look! For you we have axes, hatchets, needles. For you we have guns! Bullets and powder.” The others displayed the goods in the bottom of their canoe.

“Oui, oui,” said the middlemen hunters, bringing out beaver robes, well worn and of best quality, collected in the north. They had few beaver, but many marten and lynx. Before the traders left, these Odaawa, laughing, mentioned the sick French crawling around and around the little pond.

The traders discovered Duquet. The mud had dried and to get at the man underneath they had to crack and break it away. They carried him to the river and soaked him in the waters until he emerged from his clay armor. They doubted he would live, but the Indian woman with them took his case in hand. In treating him she smelled the foul infection in his mouth. In her medicine bag she had a small wood stick with a leather loop at the end. With this she removed his rotting teeth, gave him an infection-fighting mouthwash and an opiate.

“Not die,” she said.

The voyageurs put him in their worn canoe and set out for a distant Ojibwa village to the northwest.

• • •

It was spring, the rivers almost clear of ice except in early morning, the warm afternoons fragrant and easy. A few mosquitoes flew around them slowly, legs dangling. In the Ojibwa village, where a stream flowed into a small lake, Duquet rested against a log and watched the Indians making canoes, a complex business that involved the whole encampment. The voyageurs made themselves useful going with some of the younger men to gather the great sheets of birch bark, twenty feet long. As they brought them into camp they laid them carefully in the stream to keep them supple and weighted them with stones. Some went into the swamp and felled white cedar trees they had girdled the year before, riving the seasoned wood lengthwise. The women went out every day to gather spruce roots and gum. They sat near Duquet, skinning the roots and halving them lengthwise.

• • •

The Indians made five canoes for themselves and another five for the voyageurs, while Duquet healed. He was up and walking stiffly, eating gargantuan meals of soft foods he could manage with his healing gums. His eyes cleared, his hearing improved, he felt his arms flood with strength, and when the new canoes were finished, the guide, an officious imbecile with a burn-scarred face, ordered him to take a seat with the milieux and paddle until he dropped. The fragile craft flew down the cold, boulder-studded rivers. There were days of burn and pain in his shoulder blades, wrists and arms before his body accepted the tireless and rapid strokes, and every day he paddled longer. His neck, shoulders, arms began to swell with muscle. Always short in stature he now took on the look of the voyageur, almost as wide at the shoulders as he was tall. He learned to read water, to understand currents, recognize eddies, whirlpools, to listen to the old hands, whose expert knowledge of this violent, dangerous water world came from the bitterest kind of experience. In the evening he told his story of being a poor boy from the Paris streets come to make his fortune in New France.

A sinewy man with legs too long for the canoe, Forgeron, a Dutchman turned French by accident, a sailor and fisherman, a surveyor when he could get work and an unhappy voyageur when he could not, spoke quietly to Duquet.

“You are ignorant of the coureur de bois life. The woods runner’s way is no road to wealth. We and the Indians do the dangerous work and the company gets the money. We are all fools.”

And in recent years, he went on, the fur trade had become unsettled and insecure. The coureur de bois no longer directly approached the trapper Indians to trade for furs — there were Indian specialists, middlemen, who arranged all that. Even now those good Indians were being pushed out by enemy tribes and the decline in beaver numbers. As Duquet learned the intricacies and politics of the fur trade he saw that what Forgeron said was true. Paddling in the milieux was no entry to wealth. The best that could come of it would be a short life of striving, of sleeping on riverbanks and looking up through the trees at a narrow slice of darkness stinging with stars like cast handfuls of salt.

Some of the men carried flintlock muzzle-loaders, most the Charleville muskets used by the French army. But for Duquet the loading procedure was impossibly slow — without teeth he could not bite off the end of the cartridge, but had to tear it open with his fingers. Instead, he took as his weapon the French tomahawk, practiced endlessly until he could cleave the tail off a flying bird, gather up the body, have it gutted and half roasted while a comrade was still loading his musket.

• • •

Duquet hardened. He saw how the beaver quickly disappeared from hard-trapped areas, where the Indians took every animal, so intent were they on getting European tools and spirits, so harried were they by the acquisitive traders. The beaver country moved always farther north and west. Yet there were white men who gained prodigiously. They were not penniless runaway indentured servants. Duquet set out now to get as much as he could from his lowly position in the fur trade and swore to watch for better opportunities. He had come to New France hoping for quick riches and a return to Old France, but now he wondered if his destiny was not linked to the vast land with its infinite forests and violent rivers. Was not this country his place in the world? Yes, and he would make something of value of it. He went through a rare hour of introspection, seeing that his nature chilled other men. He consciously began to act as a smiling, open fellow of winning address who always had a good story and who, in the tavern, treated with a generous hand. He was sharpening his claws, and in his private center he was an opportunistic tiger — if he had to tear and maul his way to wealth he would do so.

• • •

He began to barter privately for furs, offering a drink or two of cheap rum to the naïve red men, hiding his activities from the others, sometimes caching the furs and returning later to pick them up. He bargained ruthlessly with the Indians, smiling guilelessly into the savage faces as he accepted their heavy bundles of furs for a yard of cheap cloth and a cup of adulterated whiskey — a monstrous profit.

Within the year he was sick of the traders who had rescued him.

“Forgeron,” he said one day as they struggled up a portage trail. “I do not enjoy these persons, especially the guide. I intend to look for another opportunity. Will you come as well?”

“Why not?” said Forgeron. “One canoe is very like another. The guide is difficult, perhaps because of his terrible history. The Iroquois threw him into a fire to roast.”

“Then why did they not finish the cooking and eat him?”

“Perhaps you will have the chance to ask them that one day.”

• • •

They worked in harmony, although Forgeron attracted storms and wind. But he had a certain regard for the wild woods. He spoke often to Duquet of the forest and its great untapped wealth.

“If a man could get the logs out, there are a hundred thousand fortunes all around us the like of which the world has not seen since the days of Babylon. It is entirely a question of moving the wood to those who need it.” Duquet nodded and began to look at trees with a more acquisitive eye.

They fell in with a flamboyant company of coureurs de bois, among whom were the easygoing Trépagny brothers, so unlike the high-minded seigneur. They had a reckless style and could outhowl wolves. Duquet needed every paddling skill he had learned for some of the wild water they ran, between rock ledges that squeezed the canoe through violent chutes, and in one extraordinary place between two towering cliffs that leaned toward each other, narrower than the river so that the sky was a rock-edged slice. When they emerged from the pinching canyon the river hurled itself into a maelstrom. It was necessary to leave the water and edge upward along the Indian trail, little more than a foot width of slippery rock, somehow carrying the canoe over their heads, its weight making their arms quiver. At last they gained the cliff top and could look down on the thrashing water below.

“Tabernac,” said Toussaint Trépagny. “I pressed against the cliff face so passionately I left the imprint of my manhood on it.” They carried their canoes for many miles that day.

One night, lying under an overturned canoe, Forgeron murmured that he intended to leave.

“My legs are no good for the canoe,” he said. It was true that his long arms worked the paddle with great power, but his legs were folded and doubled under him for many hours and when he left the canoe he often had trouble standing upright, so cramped and tightened were his muscles. Many nights he lay groaning from the pain and rubbing his thighs and calves. Voyageurs were short-legged and strong-armed. Long legs did not belong in a canoe.

When he finally left, saying he would look for surveying work, Duquet left with him, persuading the Trépagnys to come along. They headed back toward the St. Laurent. Within a month Forgeron found work laying out property lines east of Ville-Marie.

“Our paths will cross again,” said Forgeron, “but not in a canoe.”

Duquet continued gathering furs with the Trépagny brothers and they became an infamous trio, pouring rum and whiskey for the Indians, red men who gave away their furs in return for terrible and vision-invoking spirits.

9. Les Quatrains de Pibrac (Guy du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac)

He prospered during the seasons following a bad year when the settlements were sick with longing for overdue supply ships from France, sick with fear of the Iroquois, who had only ten years earlier surprised and slaughtered the inhabitants of Lachine and might do so again. In spite of ongoing fighting, huge loads of beaver pelts came down the river and kept coming, until the hatters and furriers of France could use no more, until the warehouses were packed full of rodent fur. Again Duquet saw the great weakness of the trade — surplus or scarcity. Beaver might disappear from overtrapping or disease or for no discernible reason. Or the Indians took too many. He watched and considered. He now regarded tales of immense profits in the fur trade as fables. He wanted great and permanent wealth, wealth for a hundred years. He wanted a fortune to pass on to his sons. He wanted his name on buildings. He was surprised to discover in himself a wish for children, a wish to establish a family name. The name Duquet would change from a curse to an honor. But there were difficulties — especially the ugliness of a toothless, collapsed jaw. It might be impossible to find a handsome wife. Unless he had money.

His agile mind ceaselessly worked over the question: what resource existed in this new world that was limitless, that had value, that could build a fortune? He rejected living creatures such as beaver, fish, seals, game or birds, all subject to sudden disappearance and fickle markets. He repeatedly came back to the same conclusion. There was one everlasting commodity that Europe lacked: the forest. Duquet knew, as everyone knew, that the English colonists to the south did well cutting pines for English navy masts. Could the French not do the same? He remembered Forgeron’s talk. The forest was unimaginably vast and it replaced itself. It could supply timber and wood for ships, houses, warmth. The profits could come forever. Yes, there were many problems of transport and markets, but it was an unexploited business that could expand and dominate. In France there were men who dealt in forest goods, but few in New France and perhaps not in the colonies to the south. So, he thought, he would get as much money as he could with the furs in the next few years, prepare himself in every way and then change to timber when he was ready. He would not yet give up the lucrative fur trade, a stinking, complicated business for trapper Indians, but with high profits for white traders with market connections.

He briefly sketched his plan to the Trépagny brothers and told them he would be glad if they continued with him as partners when he made his future move to timber and wood. He was surprised that they were not enthusiastic. Their eyes reflected the evening fire like orange beetles. Perhaps, Toussaint said, and Fernand said they would see. They looked away into the trees.

“Well, let it stay as it is.” Duquet passed on to another subject and said there was one great obstacle he had to overcome. He could neither read nor write, and it was necessary to gain those skills if he were not to be cheated in dealings with sly merchants. He did not know even a single letter such as that fool Sel had doted on.

“The world cheats men who cannot read. I know this as I have often seen it,” Toussaint said. “If you wish to do this, you need one of the Black Robes. The Jesuits all can write countless pages, all can read both silently and aloud until their eyes cross. Let us get one of these fellows and carry him with us. He can convert Indians while we bargain and in quiet moments he will teach you those arts you wish to acquire.” And so they kidnapped Père Naufragé, one of several missionaries on the way to the Hurons.

• • •

For several days they watched the little group and their Huron guides before acting.

“See,” whispered Toussaint from behind their tree, “there are four of them. Choose the one you like. We’ll get him when he steps aside to answer the call of nature.”

Duquet studied each of the fathers. One seemed quicker and more sprightly than the others. He was first to rise, made the fire with the high technology of a burning glass if the sun shone, packed and unpacked their goods with alacrity, and spent the least time in prayers.

When the missionary stepped into the shadows and hiked up his robe to relieve himself they sprang like savages. Toussaint clapped a leather gag over the priest’s mouth, Fernand bound his hands behind him and Duquet frog-marched him into the forest and away to their camp.

“You are French!” exclaimed the priest later when Duquet pulled off the gag. “I thought you were Indians. Why have you taken me from my brothers? We are traveling to the Hurons.”

Duquet explained that the Hurons could wait. Père Naufragé would stay with them until Duquet learned to read and write. The Jesuit would be treated well and was advised not to try to escape.

“For if the Iroquois get you, you will become a martyr.”

Père Naufragé said he was eager to become a martyr, more eager than to teach illiterates the rudiments of the alphabet. “My friends expect me. I warn you, you will pay dearly for this outrage.”

Duquet described the ample opportunities the Jesuit would have to convert savages as they traveled about the country gathering furs.

“What you ask is not even possible. My books of instruction are with my traveling companions.” The Jesuit smiled triumphantly.

“That is no problem,” said Fernand, opening his possibles bag and rummaging to the bottom. With a vengeful smile he pulled out a stained, worn book and thrust it at Père Naufragé.

“Icitte! Here is your instruction book—Les Quatrains de Pibrac. It was a gift from my mother and I have never been parted from it. ‘First honor God, then Father and Mother—Dieu tout premier, puis Père et Mère honore,’ ” he quoted. “Everything in the world can be found in the pages of Pibrac.”

“God knows you will do more good with us than with a thousand Hurons.” Père Naufragé, habituated to obedience, nodded acceptance but insisted on daily devotions, a weekly mass and time set aside for disputation on a theological subject which he would select.

The priest had a face like a short sword — thin and sharp. His olive skin stretched over jutting cheekbones and his crenellated hair was as black as that of any Spaniard. Ah, thought Duquet, the fellow looks like a Moor. But it was when he smiled — which he did not do until the third day after his capture — that his face changed entirely. His mouth was very wide and his face seemed to separate into two unrelated parts. And his pointed teeth—mon Dieu, thought Duquet, muttering under his breath “how many is there”—dazzled with an unnatural whiteness.

As for the lessons, Duquet learned quickly. He scrawled his letters and numbers — arithmetic quickly became part of the curriculum — on hundreds of pieces of birch bark. His hands, heavily muscled by years of paddling, labored with the small muscle coordination necessary to form elegant letters, and his handwriting was coarse. No matter; it was legible. The priest became embedded in the little group and closed his eyes to the whiskey trades and his pupil’s disturbing aura of ambitious greed. He was fascinated by Duquet’s grasp of information, for he seemed to remember everything, scraps of German, Greek, Latin and English, all that the priest uttered, even prayers. At the end of the first year Pibrac retired to Fernand’s bag again as he was suffering wear, but Duquet had memorized the contents and had quatrains to cover every situation in life — should he care to quote doggerel. But he preferred to despise Pibrac.

• • •

In early spring, two years later, Père Naufragé, dressed now like a woodsman as his cassock had shredded in the brush, left them unwillingly.

“But it is time for you to go,” said Duquet with a patient smile. “As Pibrac says, ‘The steps of man are directed by God.’ We will take you now to the Hurons as I must travel to France on business.”

“Another year of study and I believe you could have acquired a considerable handiness with Latin, the most important language for men of business such as you intend to become.”

But Duquet only twitched his mouth; his thoughts ran in a different direction.

Six days of travel skirting burning fields and woods brought them to the edge of the forest around the Huron mission. Fernand, coughing, said, “Every time I have been in the Huron country the place is afire.”

Duquet stood aside while the Trépagnys embraced the priest and wished him good fortune. They watched him make his way toward the clearing. Then he disappeared into the smoke.

10. all the world wishes to go to China

Duquet could not keep his mind on furs. Again and again he considered the dense problems of the timber trade. First, the trees; the best ones did not always grow near river landings. And who would buy the raw logs when every man could cut what he needed? But sawn planks, ready to carpenter — that was the way. A water-powered sawmill or a sawpit with tools and men was a primary necessity.

He began to note objects made of wood: everything in the world. And it was all around him in quantities inexhaustible and prime. Could the Royal French Navy be persuaded to buy New France timber? England, he knew, badly wanted naval stores as the endless war had disrupted their heavy Baltic trade. Although England was the enemy there were great benefits in trading with them, perhaps possible through a third party. And what of Spain and Portugal? His mind began to weigh the possibilities.

He talked to himself as the Trépagnys did not care for the subject.

“Which trees are most desirable? Oak, of course, but oak is scattered and seems to grow only in certain places. Why it is not widespread, as pine and spruce, I do not know.” Could English shipbuilders use pine? Hemlock? Beech? How could he move the desirable mast trees from the forest to a ship? Indeed, he needed a ship and a captain if he was to deliver wood products to a land as distant as France.

Thinking of uncommon woods sent his thoughts back to the fur trade, his immediate calling. Why should he concentrate on beaver as everyone else did? There must be those who desired other furs as mink, ermine, otter, muskrat, fox, spotted lynx and marten. He decided to take a season gathering such luxury furs, then go to France with a shipload of rare pelts. He began at once, harrying the Indians for every kind of fur, acting as his own middleman. Sitting at the campfire drinking the harsh whiskey intended for the Indians (fiery with pequin peppers from the Caribe to prove its strength), on his last evening with the Trépagnys he declared that, while he was in France, he would find himself a wife and set her to work bearing children. The Trépagny brothers, in their farewell debauch, said jokingly, while he was at it, to bring back women for them.

• • •

Duquet took passage on a ship bound for France commanded by Captain Honoré Deyon, a grey and weathered man with a syphilitic chancre on his upper lip. When the captain invited him to dine Duquet used the opportunity and asked how he might find passage on a China-bound ship.

“I know European ships go there,” he said. Captain Deyon brushed the chancre with the knuckle of his right index finger and sighed heavily.

“All the world wants to go to China,” he said. “They say, sir, that it is an immensely rich country with many interesting and beautiful objects. On the return one may stop in the islands and purchase the best coffee. And it is known the profits from tea and silks are enormous, and coffee as well, I daresay. But it is not so easy to trade in China. For permission, one must be part of an official delegation as well as prepare great gifts for the emperor and the many officials. This gift, and many others, they take as their just due. And they are not much interested in western goods, only silver. They say they have everything they need or want in their own country. I have no idea what your goods are, but a lone merchant — if you are such, sir — really cannot do business there. It is too difficult.”

“My business is fine furs. But even if I cannot get there,” said Duquet, “how is it others reach China? Who does trade there? Who sends ships to China?”

“The Portuguese were first. Now the Dutch, England, and even France — all are trying to work the eastern trade. But the Dutch are the ones who go there regularly. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie — the Dutch East India Company, largest business in the world, controls everything. Perhaps you can find a sympathetic captain who will take you aboard. And I have heard there are a few independent captain traders who are not tied to the VOC. Those are the men you should seek out. But I know none of them.”

He swallowed his tumbler of rum and delicately touched the sore on his lip with the long nail of his little finger. “And,” he said, “I doubt you speak Chinese.”

“Very little,” said Duquet. He would learn the most important words as soon as he heard them.

• • •

In La Rochelle, unpleasant feelings came over Duquet. The old smells of poverty nearly sent him bending and creeping along close to the walls as he had done in childhood. Relentless hunger and chilblains had been his childhood lot. Of his father he remembered beatings and curses, and at the last, a pair of receding legs.

His eyes burned from the smoke of greasy street fires and he thought of the clear rivers of Kébec, of the forest air, and with these cleansing memories he regained himself. Yet he was mortified that his clothes and person announced him as a country bumpkin in French streets.

In New France he and the Trépagny brothers had been skillful with war hatchets but he saw no hatchets on the streets of La Rochelle. He went to the armorers and purchased a Walloon sword, ambidextrous, flexible. He saw many of these on the street. It was a gentleman’s sword. One day, he swore silently, he would order fine garments and a full, rich wig.

• • •

In the area between rue des Petits-Bacs and rue Admyrauld, where the merchants congregated daily, he talked with a sallow wool merchant whose greasy hands trembled; when Duquet casually mentioned China, the merchant said his cousin had been a sailor pressed into three years’ service on a Dutch voyage from Hoorn to Guangzhou, that the English called Canton.

“He said it was a very long journey to a horrible place,” and the merchant passed back Duquet’s brandy bottle. “Very strong stink. Food? Affreux! Foreigners not allowed in the city, but penned up in a horrible foreigners’ quarter. He prayed to return home. And they despised the ship’s cargo, which was horses, the captain having heard the Chinese longed for them horribly. But in Canton the go-between merchant said China now had secured its own horses from the north. So the trip was for nothing. And on the return journey the captain was so angry he pushed all those horrible worthless horses into the sea. They could see them swimming after the ship for a long time.”

“Oh, horrible,” said Duquet, at once planning to make his way to Amsterdam or Hoorn. How many times had Forgeron told him the men of the Low Countries had a talent for business?

“Stay away from the East India Company ships. They are bound by hard rules and the captains take blood oaths to uphold them. It is a horrible, grasping company that allowed no competition for many years. Only East India ships were allowed to traverse the horrible Strait of Magellan. Now the Cape Horn route has been discovered their grasp is broken, but the old animosities linger. You must choose a captain with care.”

11. Dutch sea captain

Without exception every ship captain he approached was exceedingly suspicious, for trade routes and overseas contacts were under constant threat by spies, and Duquet was immediately and repeatedly identified as a French spy. Only after detailed descriptions of the forests of Kébec and the rigors of the fur trade — as well as a flash of the marten skin he had begun to carry as proof of his identity — could he prove his disinterested innocence in matters of trade route secrets.

In the Rock and Shoal, a sailors’ tavern on the waterfront, he noticed a group of convivial men who seemed all to be captain mariners. They spoke in a mixture of languages, mostly German, French, Portuguese, Flemish and Dutch, and seemed to be placing bets. One, whom he heard called Captain Verdwijnen, a fair-faced man with a large nose and scarred cheek, wheaten wisps of unshorn hair sticking out from the edges of his ill-seated wig, particularly caught his eye because of his ceaseless motions and apparent sanguine temperament. Duquet edged closer to the group until he was nearly among them, grasping at half-understood words in the Babel of discourse. After a long time Verdwijnen made his excuses to the company and said he had to get back to his ship. Duquet followed him out into the dark street. The captain suddenly spun around and flashed a dagger at Duquet.

“Footpad!” he shouted into the night. “Help! Robbery! Assault! Murther!”

“Captain Verdwijnen,” said Duquet. “I am no footpad. I am a friend, I am a fur merchant from New France, begging your favor.” And he bowed low, making a clumsy leg. He presented himself as an enterprising businessman. He became the sweet-voiced persuasive Duquet, talked on, explaining and mollifying, opening his pack of furs, which he carried on his back like a peddler. He said that he could pay for his passage — he had enjoyed a good sale of his furs in Montreal, keeping out the best to trade in the east. Moreover, he would supply the captain with cases of the best Schiedam jenever for the voyage, the special distillation of gin with a green label showing a large yellow eye, the eye of a furious lion, far superior to the slop the captain had swallowed in the Rock and Shoal. Look, he had a bottle in his coat pocket this very minute, and he swung the garment open to show the luteous eye. The Dutchman thawed a little and told Duquet to follow him aboard his ship, Steenarend, the Golden Eagle, where they could speak more comfortably. Duquet was surprised to see it was an armed, full-rigged, three-masted frigate, which could accommodate more than a hundred men, the gun room painted red to hide bloodstains.

“There are many pirates in the South China Sea,” explained Captain Verdwijnen. Duquet had seen him drink countless glasses of jenever in the sailors’ tavern, but the man spoke with clarity and decisiveness.

The captain said he was indeed suspicious of foreigners, especially the French and English, most of whom were spies, and it could cost him his livelihood to take Duquet aboard if the ship’s German owner heard of it, and of course he would hear of it. He glared at Duquet and clenched his fists.

“What you are asking me to do is a grave thing. I cannot do it. Why, sir, it is a thing that was never done before. And never should be done. Nooit—never.” He wrenched his face through an extraordinary series of grimaces and frowns. Duquet spoke humbly.

“I am only interested in securing a market for my furs. And I am most sensible, dear captain, of the honor you do me by even discussing such a matter.” His mouth curved, his eyes winked. He smiled, opened his coat and took out the bottle, uncorked it and handed it to the captain. “Perhaps we can discuss it further,” he said softly, “if you do not hold me to be completely odious?” He had marked the captain as one who would do much for a little cup of spirits, not unlike the Indians of the north.

The captain’s cabin was a great room, the rear windows giving a vertiginous view of the port. There was a single chair before a mahogany table covered with charts. The captain waved Duquet to a small side bench bolted to the floor; under it lay a huge mastiff that growled at Duquet. The captain sat in his chair, now holding a glass brimming with that best jenever. He nodded at the glass.

“Good. We Dutch must drink or die, you know.” He swallowed. “Or so they say.”

Duquet opened his pack and laid several of the furs atop the charts. The dog looked at the furs with interest.

“Of course I am always happy to buy furs myself to take to Amsterdam,” the captain said.

“I shall keep that in mind, but my information is that I can get a great deal of money for them in China. And I wish to establish a trading connection in that place.”

Captain Outger Verdwijnen squinted his eyes. Duquet might understand more about business than he showed. Or, indeed Duquet might be a spy, evil thought. But after an hour of serious drinking, when the captain knew Duquet a little better, he abandoned the spy characterization, and when he learned his guest would send ten cases of the green-and-gold-labeled bottles aboard, he told Duquet he might make the journey.

“We sail in two weeks. It is already April, late in the season to begin this voyage. We must catch the southwest monsoon winds that carry ships to India and China between June and September, so make ready and be here on the appointed day. I will show you your quarters, which you will share with Mijnheer Toppunt,” he said, and he led Duquet to a pitifully small and rank cubby, though there was a scuttle. His bunk was a wide plank. The other contained a roll of grey blankets and a great leathern bag. On the floor, as though tossed there, were sea boots and heavy gloves, and that constituted Mijnheer Toppunt’s presence.

Ashore the next day Duquet ordered three dozen cases of the green-label gin delivered to the ship. At the ship chandler’s shop he outfitted himself with a hammock, rough, sturdy clothes and an oiled cape sworn to keep rain out, a bound ledger, quills and ink, an expensive spyglass and a bag of brown sugar.

A week before they sailed, Captain Verdwijnen hailed him. “Monsieur Duquet,” he said. “I am going to the coffeehouse to arrange my insurance. As you propose to get into business, perhaps you would like to accompany me for the valuable contacts?” Certainly Duquet would. What a stroke of fortune.

They walked for twenty minutes before they reached the coffeehouse and entered a large room where men sat at tables with papers and account books in front of them. Some scribbled furiously, others talked, pushing their faces forward. At the back of the room five bewigged men laughed as a sixth read from a letter. Near the front a woman handed bowls of hot beverage to serving boys and Captain Verdwijnen called out for two coffees—“deux cafés”—and led Duquet to the back table of laughing men, the marine insurance brokers. As they approached, the laughing faded away and six serious and attentive faces turned toward them.

“Ah, Captain Verdwijnen. Here to arrange your insurance, no doubt? Would this gentleman with you be the shipowner?”

Captain Verdwijnen’s laugh was a bray. “No, no, he is not the owner of the ship, he is Monsieur Duquet, a gentleman from New France in the timber export business. At the moment he is carrying furs. I thought he might like to meet you gentlemen for future consultations.”

The serving boy brought the coffee. Duquet looked suspiciously at the sinister black liquid. It was scalding and bitter, a very dreadful potion, but he drank it. In a quarter of an hour he felt ideas rushing into his head — he memorized the faces before him with newly sharpened senses.

As he looked around he saw a man of about thirty-five with a face that seemed made of some flesh-like material that, once formed, remained set and immobile. A pair of little obsidian eyes looked out at the world as if measuring an antagonist. The unsmiling mouth was pinched and suggested meanness. The ringed fingers and flamboyant crimson sleeves did little to soften the impression of suspicious calculation.

The man’s gaze rose from the black sums he was making and fixed on Duquet. The space between them quivered with a discharge of mutual antipathy.

“Who is that man?” Duquet murmured to the captain, letting the words slip out quietly.

“He is a Lübeck trader in wax and metal ores I believe — here and in Bruges. How he does stare! It is as if he knows you.”

“He does not know me, nor will he ever know me,” said Duquet, but the man’s stiff look indicated that he was familiar with the likes of Duquet through and through; it was the stare of a predator encountering another of its kind nosing about in its territory.

12. Steenarend

The ship’s crew was polyglot: Spanish, French, Flemish, Greek, German, Genoese, young men from the Malay, from the Canaries, the Isle of Dogs. Duquet thought they looked dangerous, very unlike the rough-cut good-natured voyageurs he had known in New France.

Captain Outger Verdwijnen served as his own master and, in this time of dead reckoning and anxious guesswork on the exact location of one’s ship, had a reputation for accurate navigation, which Duquet thought might be related to the man’s constant study and annotation of charts, but the captain said the charts told nothing of a ship’s ever-changing longitudinal position, the bête noire of international trade. But he could recognize the warm black Kuroshio Current, and was often within forty miles of the desired port, by which margin men generally considered him an expert navigator.

The captain’s bonhomie evaporated the instant he stepped aboard the Steenarend, though he continued his cordiality with Duquet over a glass of the yellow-eyed jenever in the evenings. His conversation was lively, of ships and their cargoes, of their short lives and the myth of hundred-year-old ships, of pirates and great storms at sea. He described the Sunda Strait as treacherous, the equatorial Doldrums as maddening, the Guinea Current as a trap and getting caught in the southeasterly trade winds as the sure failure of a voyage.

As they sailed out into the quilted ocean Duquet noticed three or four ships were always in sight. When he remarked on it, Captain Verdwijnen said knowingly, “My friends—vrienden,” smiled and shrugged.

The ship stank fearfully though Captain Verdwijnen was proud of the pissdales and the officers’ closeted seats of ease with their drains into the sea. The crew perched on an open row of holed seats in the beak, cursing when the icy waves rinsed their salt-raw backsides.

“For we learned from the Portuguese that this is the way to avoid what they called bicho do cu, a painful anal infection so burning and biting that seamen went mad with the agony in the olden times,” said the captain.

To Duquet the officers looked a rather seedy lot in comparison with the younger crew, though when he made the remark, Captain Verdwijnen laughed and said appearances were deceiving, that while most of the crew looked strong they were riddled with venereal diseases, were laced through with insanities and as stupid as penguins. The officers, on the other hand, were not an attractive lot but each was skilled and experienced in a useful way.

Duquet’s cabinmate, François Toppunt, was a pockmarked man whose narrow arms and fleshless face gave him a look of weakness, dispelled by his agility. He dressed smartly in contrast with the crew in their tarry red nap trousers cut high and wide and the caps they knitted themselves. He was as limber as a dancing master, with a knack for making lightning decisions. He thought he had been born in Bourgogne and brought as a young boy to Amsterdam. When his parents both died of the plague he had been adopted by watchmaker Willem Toppunt and his childless wife.

There were similarities between the two men. They both moved at high speeds in body and mind, both were pleased to be able to converse in French, although Toppunt’s use of the language was crippled by long neglect and interlarded with Dutch words and phrases. He was also a devotee of the sailors’ great pastime, collecting rarities of the natural world. He told Duquet that in his home cabinet of curiosities he had a set of spider teeth and a stuffed bird of paradise, that strange vogel born without feet. Then he told Duquet that the captain’s mastiff enjoyed climbing into the rigging, where he would bark a warning at the sight of pirates.

• • •

A few days after he came on board Duquet confided to François Toppunt that he wanted to order new clothing and a wig that would be ready when they returned from China.

“You will have to pay in advance,” said Toppunt, “but I know a good tailor in Paris and there are wigmakers in the same street. There are yet five days before we sail. Let us persuade the captain for leave, take a coach to Paris and visit these worthies, for I, too, would like a wig for special occasions.”

The jolting coach nearly liquefied their livers and Duquet chose to get out and run alongside the equipage at every chance. In Paris they found an inn near the street of wigmakers and tailors.

The next sunrise brought one of those blue and spicy days when the wind cleared away noisome odors. It was a fine day for walking and Duquet and Toppunt strode through the streets. Toppunt pointed out a popular coffee shop. They went in and Duquet decided to risk the coffee again. Toppunt smacked his lips over the sugared chocolate and declared it delicious. Despite the tarry flavor of the coffee, Duquet once again felt charged with energy and sharp-minded. Toppunt said that was one of the many virtues of the dark fluid.

“It is good for ailments as well,” said the grey-headed coffeehouse server, joining their conversation. “It is the favored drink of merchants and businessmen as it allows them to do great sums in their heads and to work long hours.”

• • •

At the tailor’s shop Duquet selected blue velvet for his coat and accepted the idea of a pair of culottes cut on the bias. The obsequious tailor suggested a fine English cloth, remarking that this fabric was very much preferred. But Duquet chose a striped blue satin, though he couldn’t resist the man’s suggestion to visit the boot maker next door for a pair of the delicate shoes with rounded toes just coming into vogue.

The wigmaker, his hands shaking with some ague-like affliction or a surfeit of coffee, urged the latest style, smaller, flatter on top and with “pigeon wings” rippling back over the temples, instead of the full-bottomed wigs both men wanted. He stressed greater comfort and ease. Toppunt said yes, but Duquet, his ideas of what a wealthy man looked like set, insisted on the great wig with its expensive mass of curls and frizz.

“Ready when you return, my dear, dear sirs, but only,” said the man, “if you pay now, as shipwrecks, pirates, plague and scurvy are not unknown among those who travel to the Far Eastern lands. If you perish, your survivors may call for the hair.”

They endured an even more unpleasant journey back to La Rochelle; one of the coach horses fell dead in the traces and then the axle broke on a rough detour. They hired saddle horses and rode more comfortably, but reached the ship with only hours to spare before she sailed. Captain Verdwijnen was in a foul temper and accused Toppunt of neglecting his duty.

“That will be a black mark against you, sir,” he said. “You will hear the result of my displeasure shortly.” What Toppunt’s punishment was Duquet did not know, but he noticed the captain constantly found fault with all the mate did.

• • •

So the ship departed, down the Channel, past Brest, past Portugal, then west, well out to sea to avoid Africa’s bulge and the Doldrums, down, down through a zone of variable winds until Captain Verdwijnen claimed he could smell Brazil, then swinging southeast for the Cape of Good Hope, keeping well away from the Agulhas Current, and on, ever eastward, until they picked up the southwest monsoon in season that would carry them to the treacherous Sunda Strait and on to China.

Duquet had no love for the sea. Rivers were the thing, ever-changing, muscular waterways that challenged one to decipher their linear characters. In comparison the ocean was a tiresome medium of waves that broke and swelled, sometimes lost their shapes and separated into confusion. Storms and throbbing rollers he endured, and hoped never to see a towering rogue wave as the sailors described, never to hear the awful moaning of a cyclone wind.

• • •

Captain Verdwijnen kept a Spartan table and dined alone in his cabin on boiled pork, beer, bread and cheese. At the officers’ table, often augmented with fresh-caught dolphin or octopus soup, the dinner talk was conducted in a variety of languages and pointing at the bread or wine was more useful than asking for it. Duquet could understand how Captain Verdwijnen had come to wave his arms and twitch his face in universal sign language. The cook, Li Wen, was Chinese, on his way back to China, said Captain Verdwijnen, after years of study in Amsterdam.

“What did he study?” asked Duquet, suddenly interested.

“Dutch medicine, I believe. He is somewhat important in China, but frugal enough to work his passage by acting as cook.”

“So he is a physician?”

“For this voyage he is a surgeon, a master of head injuries. And he is the cook.”

“But beyond the voyage is he a physician in China?”

“He is a coroner.”

“What is that, a coroner?”

“It is a skilled man who understands the signs of death and who examines bodies to say if they have been the victims of foul play or natural causes. I would rather have him attend me than most ships’ doctors, a group given over to drink and devious actions. Coroner is an important profession in China, where jealousies and rivalries are the equal of any at the French court. And one may purchase venoms at numerous shops.”

Duquet cornered the coroner and said in his broken Dutch that he would like to learn at least a few phrases of the Chinese language. He showed a coin but Li Wen looked horrified. He expostulated in fluent French.

“Not possible. Chinese government not allow foreigners learn Chinese. Forbidden.” Li Wen then recited Chinese poems, translated and explained them to Duquet. There was, he said, no law against declaiming Chinese poetry. Duquet immediately saw himself as the powerful animal in Zhang Ji’s poem of a tiger prowling mountain forests, so frightful that an entire village stood rigid, staring at the sight of his tracks. So, too, Duquet thought, he would claim whole forests.

• • •

One evening over their postprandial glass, Captain Verdwijnen looked slyly at Duquet and told him that in Guangzhou — Canton — he could order a set of ivory teeth to be carved that would fit his jaws and give him the appearance of a handsome rogue. The work could be done by the very same carver who fashioned dildos for sailors’ wives. The carver, he said, was expensive but worth it. And, raising his hands as if in discovery, he said the Hong businessman who acted as his assigned merchant could arrange this and would likely be interested in Duquet’s furs. He stroked an especially fine lynx pelt that Duquet had brought into his quarters.

“This was intended as a gift to the emperor of China, but I give it to you.” Duquet pressed it into Captain Verdwijnen’s hands, adding that perhaps his wife would like it as company for the ivory implement.

“Ha ha,” said Captain Verdwijnen, uncorking another jenever bottle with his teeth. “Just as well. No foreigner has ever gained an audience with the emperor of China.”

• • •

It was late October when they and the ships that had kept them company entered the China Sea. The weather had been unusually fine down the west coast of Africa, but then the monsoon winds became dying and fitful. They stopped briefly at the Cape of Good Hope but did not linger as the VOC had a station there with men watching out for independent entrepreneurs. The wind was increasingly unreliable on the east coast. Four stormy days, the sky shuddering, the sea choking on itself, impressed Duquet as very violent, but he was alone in that opinion. Twice threatening sails came over the horizon. Captain Verdwijnen said they were pirates, for through the spyglass he could make out their sinister flags. Duquet asked innocently when the pirate-warning mastiff would climb into the rigging, and only caught on when he heard the crew’s smothered laughter.

Listening to the table talk Duquet conjured up a picture of the oceans of the world dotted with ships suspended somehow in fog loom, all unconscious that other ships were near. Those ships carried cargoes of everything in the world.

“What might be the principal cargoes?” asked Duquet one evening at table. The men began to name goods they had known on ships. At first they spoke grudgingly, but a spirit of competition took them and they began excitedly interrupting each other:

“Baskets of truffles, camel wool — bolts of yew, gunpowder, parrots, Potosí silver — yes, silver mined by dying men! tobacco, musk, ocher and indigo, Brazil nuts, do not forget madder, paper, pepper, cinnamon — all noble spices, calicoes, cotton, dyed silks, Brabant cloth, Biscay hatchets, piñones from monkey-puzzle trees, horses and elephants, coral teething rings, lacquer, wool, fleeces, woven linen, cowrie shells for slave buying! pounded bark — bales of goats’ hair — barrels of Shiraz, oxen, musical instruments, medical instruments. Arab scissors, jewels, shot cannon and precious metals, grain, maize and rice, ivory dominoes, salt, tea, Turkish shoes with curled toes…”

Many of the men had served on VOC ships in earlier years and as memories of old cargoes floated up so did recollections of outstanding traders. The crew said ships’ surgeons were especially canny traders.

“Whether Good Hope or Batavia, the healthiest ones made their profits.”

“There is everything in the world if you only know where to find it and how to get it,” said Toppunt, seizing the bread. And the surgeons knew.

But most of these tales ended with the satisfied declaration that the surgeon had not lived long enough to realize his profit, especially if he were bound for Batavia, where the life of a white man was brief. Only the occasional European survived the fetid atmosphere of that port.

“Then, too, they spent much time doctoring the sick, often coming down with the same malady they attempted to cure in another.” And so the conversation straggled away from cargoes to the dangers of the east.

13. garden of delightful confusion

Captain Verdwijnen explained China’s intricate system of trade to Duquet. All the ship’s provisions had to be purchased from licensed provisioners. And everything was licensed. “Ship captains have to deal with licensed Chinese merchants, with licensed translators, we must pay more than sixty separate fees, endure cargo inspections, to trade here. Moreover, all foreigners must stay in the special Factory quarter and may not enter the city.”

As they arrived in Guangzhou, Duquet stood on the deck, gazing at the long, long row of warehouses and storerooms that made up the foreign traders’ quarter. The flags of different trading countries flying from them looked like a city. He stepped ashore into the novelty and noisy bustle of China.

They settled into the assigned buildings that housed other Dutch traders. Captain Verdwijnen reverted to his established regimen, including Duquet in it: in the morning he made a pot of coffee, roasting the beans in a pan, grinding them in a hand mill, casting the grains into boiling water, counting to fifty and allowing all to settle.

The captain had another vice as well, picked up in the coffeehouses of Amsterdam: he took in smoke from a pipe. That, too, had its ritual. He took out the roll of leather wherein he secreted his tobacco leaves. He chose a likely leaf, then cut it fine and finer. He filled the pipe. He lit a paper spill at the fireplace and sucked in a quantity of smoke, exhaled slowly through pursed lips with a sound like the east wind. At last he was ready for the day’s trading, and carrying two heavy satchels, he led Duquet to Wuqua, his Hong merchant contact.

Wuqua was a richly dressed man with a complexion like fresh butter and a black arabesque mustache. The official translator sat between Captain Verdwijnen and Wuqua. Duquet watched the two men bargain, the interpreter going back and forth fluidly, first Mandarin, then Dutch. Captain Verdwijnen wanted special kinds of tea and silks in divers colors and porcelain painted with garden scenes, he wanted lacquer boxes, he wanted unusual plants not too demanding of care as the return voyage was long. Wuqua suggested teas from a bewildering number of remote locations, teas in ropes, boxes, cakes, he named amounts and tempting prices; Captain Verdwijnen flung up his hands and reared back in his chair as though shot. Panting, his hand over his heart, he protested the ghastly prices. He opened one of the heavy bags. Bars of silver gleamed in the darkness of the valise. He countered with an offer. Now it was Wuqua’s turn to become pale and wave his ivory fan. He mentioned another set of figures, the same prices but greater amounts of lesser qualities of tea, fewer colors of silks, more modestly painted ceramics and quite ordinary plants. They were at loggerheads. Both men sat stiff and unyielding. After a long silence Wuqua suggested they go into the garden.

• • •

The Garden of Delightful Confusion pulled something inside Duquet as a child pulls a toy with a string. He had not known such places existed. They walked slowly along a mosaic path of tiny pebbles arranged in the pattern Wuqua said was “plum blossoms on cracked ice.” At every turn there were rare views of flowering shrubs, moon gates; the Cloud-Piercing Tower appeared, then the coarse lacework of Lake Tai rocks in the shape of a mountain. From its highest crag fell a waterfall no wider than three fingers, wrinkling the pool below. On the way to a pavilion called Painted Boat in Spring Snow, they passed between peach tree rows; at the terminus stood black stones like shrouded figures. It was a merchant’s garden, and masses of peonies symbolizing wealth, delicate pink with carmine centers, grew in it. Duquet stood on an arched bridge gazing at water flowing over pebbles.

“Many times in New France have I seen water sliding over stones but never considered it especially notable. But this is — different.”

Wuqua bowed. “It is assuredly different. In your forest clear streams occur commonly. In a city garden they are precious. I wish you to see the two twisted junipers, undoubtedly rooted in the beginning of the world, that are the secret of this garden. They are hidden from casual view.” They followed him along the perimeter paths before crossing a bridge fashioned from a single massive stone. As Duquet looked up from the slightly perilous placement of his foot, the ancient junipers appeared, deformed by centuries of snow burden.

“You see,” said Wuqua, “that in addition to rock, water and plant, this garden of reflection and harmony embodies the invisible element of time.” He was surprised that this coarse foreigner took pleasure from the garden. He recognized that Duquet was certainly no aesthete, but emanated that irresistible power found in men of strong wills or great wealth. Duquet did not quite see the garden as itself; in his mind he regarded it as though he were suspended some distance above and looking down at himself walking along the mosaic paths. His presence in such a curious place made it notable to him. And it stirred him with an indefinable sensation.

At the edge of a lake they entered a pavilion. A servant brought tea. White flowers seeped a musky perfume. The pale liquid beauty of the garden calmed the negotiators. Duquet watched the way the others held their translucent bowls, inhaled the aroma, sipped, sighed, sipped again. He did the same.

At last Wuqua and Captain Verdwijnen rose, bowed to each other, bowed to the translator and Duquet and they all returned to the business room. The negotiators were gentle with each other now, and each man’s offer was presented as a gift, but refused by the other with flowery, elaborate speeches that seemed acceptances. Duquet watched everything intently, memorizing the procedure. Duquet felt he was in a fantastical world, but it was his skill to adapt to strange circumstances, and even to find pleasure in them. As the day drew on, the warm air thickened. At last Wuqua stood up, spoke rapidly to the translator and left the room. Captain Verdwijnen said they all, even the translator, had been invited to a banquet that evening at one of the merchant’s private residences.

Back at their rooms Duquet and Captain Verdwijnen washed and changed. They had an hour to wait before Wuqua’s servants came for them. Duquet got out the gin.

“Did you work out a fair price for the goods you want?” he asked the captain.

“Not yet, not yet! We have only begun. We shall continue tomorrow and perhaps the next day and the next. Haste is not advisable. Slow, contemplative weighing of loss and gain, of prestige, of honor and much more are involved.” Duquet envied this captain who so skillfully played the cards.

Captain Verdwijnen lit his long clay pipe and puffed out smoke. “You are wondering when we will get to your furs, no?” His foot waggled.

“Yes,” said Duquet, “I do wonder.”

“Eventually. There is no hurry. In any case we cannot leave until we finish conducting our business — next year with the correct wind for our return. So enjoy your time here. What did you think of the garden?”

“Why, very — very — agreeable.”

“I also like beautiful gardens and constich objects.”

This Duquet knew, for he remembered Captain Verdwijnen waking him from a deep sleep one night—“Get up! There is a great sight! Awake!”—and commanding him to come on deck immediately to see a wonder. Swaying in his nightshirt, barefoot and bleary, he clung to the rail and looked down. The water curling back from the rushing ship’s prow was a froth of luminescence and behind them the fiery glow marked their recent passage.

“Look! See there!” cried Captain Verdwijnen gesturing at the water-riding phosphor and waving his hands. Alongside the ship the bodies of dolphins trailed sparks that twisted and writhed as the fish moved. A sailor hauled up a bucket of quivering light. Captain Verdwijnen plunged his hands into it and held them up, his fingers and palms glowing as the water dripped away. The crests of the waves caught fire, darkened. The ship seemed to be sailing through a burning sea. Duquet yawned, said “remarkable,” and returned to his blanket.

• • •

Before they stepped into the palanquins, the translator said Wuqua had noticed the foreigners’ pleasure in the garden earlier in the day and the dinner invitation included a walk through his personal Garden of Vermilion Dragonflies. But when they arrived, and their host conducted them under the rustling trees, it was dark. There was no moon. The pathway was lighted by a tremble of distant lightning and by paper globes of imprisoned fireflies, which cast a greenish light. Of dragonflies, whether vermilion, amber or blue, there was no sight. But Wuqua took their hands and led them to the darkest shade. “We stand here under a duck-foot tree, the largest in the city. My garden was once part of an ancient temple and this yin-kuo tree was old then; they say it lived in the time before Buddha. It is not like any other tree. It is believed to be one of the first trees to live in the world.” In the darkness he pulled at the leaves and gave one to Duquet, another to Captain Verdwijnen.

“You must come another time in daylight to see the dragonflies,” said Wuqua and led them into a room faced with intricate carved screens. Two dozen lanterns threw a radiant light on the guests and the wine winking in silver bowls. Duquet looked at the yin-kuo leaf in his hand; it looked very like a leaf from a maidenhair fern which he had seen a thousand times in the forests of the north. At the back of the room musicians played in the Xinjiang style and a performer sang in a high, strangled voice. The translator said the great dish of the dinner, following many courses, was called Buddha Leaps over the Wall. Duquet enjoyed it while Captain Verdwijnen, longing for herring and headcheese, picked at it fearfully.

On the way back to the Factory quarter, Captain Verdwijnen said, “I offer a wager that wall-jumping concoction will make you ill — perhaps kill you.”

“It was worth it,” said Duquet.

• • •

Weeks passed before Wuqua deigned to consider Duquet’s offerings. He seemed to expect a request for ceramics, teas, lacquerware and silks. He seemed to think Duquet’s pack contained silver. So when Duquet took out the lustrous furs, one by one, shaking them until they snapped with static electricity, Wuqua’s face, trained never to show surprise, showed surprise. He took up a snowy arctic fox fur and caressed it, examined the mink and marten furs, the ice-white ermine and two thick sea otter pelts. At the sight of the velvet-black fur tipped with silver, the world’s most desirable luxury, Wuqua sucked in his breath.

“Very pretty. Very, very pretty. We do not too often see furs of such beauty and quality. However, the Russians do bring us furs, so they are not unknown here. And in Guangzhou it is really too warm for furs, but at court and in the north… What do you wish for these?”

Instead of the usual list of luxury goods Duquet named a very high price — in silver. Wuqua pretended to faint, his head slumped to one side but watchful eyes glinting from the slitted lids. He revived and named a small sum that would be bolstered by a few rolls of silk and a bale of tea.

Duquet hurled himself to the floor in a fit of shrieking, spasmodic, disbelieving laughter. Even as he fell he realized he had gone too far. He got up, sure he had lost face in the negotiations and that the morning — perhaps the entire trip — was wasted. He sat again in his chair and looked at Wuqua.

The expression on the businessman’s face was peculiar. Amazement? Disdain? But Wuqua nodded his head, the slightest nod, but it expressed a kind of calculated admiration, an acceptance of Duquet’s behavior as a tolerable and even admirable ploy. Decorum returned. The day progressed, the bargaining continued. They again went to the garden for tea and arranged to meet in two days’ time. At the end of the month of bargaining Duquet accepted a princely sum in silver for his furs. He had gained a staggering profit.

“If you come in a future year,” said Wuqua, “with furs of equal quality and variety they may excite a greater passion.” The servant poured more tea. Wuqua sipped, looked into the distance and then asked offhandedly, “And do you have this in your forests of New France?” From his sleeve he withdrew a gnarled root vaguely shaped like a hunchbacked, three-legged man. Duquet had seen this root before, in the hands of the Indian woman who had saved his life.

“Yes, we have this.”

“Ah. If you bring me a quantity of these roots I will pay as much as for the furs. Perhaps more, depending on the quality and quantity.”

“Very good. And I also have rare woods for fine cabinets,” said Duquet, trembling inwardly, knowing he was on the edge of extraordinarily advantageous arrangements.

“Rare woods are of interest. Especially sandalwood. Scented woods are prized.”

In a stroke Duquet had become a wealthy man and, he thought, after one or two more trips — if Captain Verdwijnen were willing to take him — his forest enterprise would begin. As they spoke of woods Duquet was emboldened to ask a question.

“Sir, honorable Wuqua, as foreigners may not leave the Factory compound I have wondered many times about the forests of China. I see that men in China make gardens that seem the essence of forest and mountain, but in miniature. But what of the real forests? It is my belief that forests are everlasting and can never disappear, for they replenish themselves, but I have seen in France that they are… diminished. And I have noticed that even in New France the forest is drawing back — a little, wherever there are settlements. How far back can a forest withdraw before it replenishes itself?”

Wuqua looked at him as though trying to judge whether or not Duquet had designs on China’s woodlands. He glanced at the translator. He hesitated.

“I can only say that China is very large and very old with many people. More than that I cannot say. Perhaps another time?”

Duquet understood that he was dismissed, rose, bowed and backed away.

• • •

After some months Duquet yearned to leave. It was irritating to wait for the monsoon to shift. Then one day Wuqua requested his presence in the trading room. It was a clear chill day in springtime and outside the wind cast plum blossom petals on the courtyard tiles. There was a different translator.

“You wished to know about our forests,” said Wuqua in a low, hurried voice, pausing impatiently for the translator. “I spoke with an elderly scholar on the subject. He said that our venerated sage Meng-tzu wrote of the people clearing land for crops, pulling grass and weeds, cutting trees ceaselessly, dividing the land and plowing. The people were very numerous even in Meng-tzu’s time, and very poor. People must eat or they die. They need fuel to cook rice. They must keep warm. So trees fall.” A rod of sunlight touched the toe of Wuqua’s black silk slipper. “We are a country of agriculture. You understand of course that land division is the base of all human government.”

“The forests then are diminished?”

“It is an arguable point, for men transplant many trees — bamboo, pine, oak and the valuable ones that produce lacquer or rich oils. Bear in mind that if forests and timberlands are diminished, cropland is very much augmented — more food, more money, more people, more contentment.”

Duquet nodded though he did not see contentment in this recipe. He knew very well that Wuqua hoped to gain his favor by telling him these secret things.

“But even beyond increasing our agricultural land we cut forests for other reasons. For example, do you know the scholar’s four treasures?”

“No. I regret to say I do not.”

“This is a country of scholars, poets and calligraphers,” said Wuqua, “and the four treasures are brush, paper, ink and inkstone, the necessities of calligraphy. But the source of the ink is the soot from the burning of pine trees. Very many pine trees must burn to supply China’s scholars.” The sunlight had moved up Wuqua’s robe and made a bright band across the embroidery. “And there was war. And metalworkers, potters, brickmakers — all craftsmen’s trades demand wood. In some tree-denuded places peasants are forced to gather grass, twist it into hard bundles and burn it as fuel. In other places animal dung.” He whispered. “There are wood shortages…”

“So the forests of France and China are not everlasting,” said Duquet unhappily. “And I have heard that Italy’s mountains are stripped.”

“Perhaps. But nothing is everlasting. Nothing. Not forests, not mountains.”

“But how came the gardens that honor forests and wild country?”

“We do not forget the forests when we have removed the trees. We make gardens to give us the pleasurable illusions of wilderness.”

“I myself,” said Duquet, “despise the gloomy and unruly forest, even while recognizing that it is a source of wealth and comforts. Yet I would never make a garden alluding to it.”

“Of course you would not. You do not understand the saying ‘tian ren he yi.’ It refers to a state of harmony between people and nature. You do not feel this. No European does. I cannot explain it to you. It is a kind of personal philosophy for each person, yet it is everything.”

Duquet thought it likely that the forests of China and France and Italy had been puny in their beginnings; he believed that the uniquely deep forests of the New World would endure. That was why men came to the unspoiled continent — for the mind-numbing abundance of virgin resources. Only he grasped the opportunity.

• • •

Duquet visited the ivory carver, who took a wax mold of his toothless jaws and set to work fashioning teeth. There was a wait of several months until they would be finished. The day came and the carver showed him how to insert the plates of large white teeth hinged with fine gold wires. Duquet looked in a glass for the first time in many years and although the teeth felt monstrous and uncomfortable, they undeniably improved his appearance. The carver told him he would get used to the intrusive feeling, but that the teeth were only for display, not for chewing. “Clean every day with brush, white cloth.” In pantomime he showed Duquet that he must expect they would become yellow over time, especially if he let sunshine fall on them. It could not be helped; it was the nature of ivory. Perhaps he should have a second pair made for spares? Yes, nodded Duquet. He wondered if ceramic teeth could be fashioned, then thought of a likely mouthful of broken shards.

• • •

Late every afternoon when the day’s continuing bargaining was finished Duquet and Captain Verdwijnen enjoyed a glass of jenever in the courtyard. The two men had become used to each other. Duquet several times, between panegyrics on the forests of New France, said he wished to arrange another passage as soon as possible, but Captain Verdwijnen always slipped to another subject.

“How do you like this pretty little table I’ve bought for Margit? That old rogue Wuqua bargained as though I was trying to buy his precious dragonfly garden. At one point he actually fell off the chair and rolled on the floor laughing like a madman. A complete loss of face. But in the end I got it for a good price.”

“Hah!” laughed Duquet. Wuqua, the old rogue, had learned a new trick from him.

• • •

Often one or two of the captain’s maritime friends, Piet Roos and Jan Goossen, captains of their own ships, dined with them. The face of Piet was like a pale plate set with two round eyes the color of raw sugar. His hair was almost the color of his skin and thus invisible. He dressed in the French mode, black silk culottes and coat set off by a froth of fine lace at the neck. Jan wore an immense sword and coarse workman’s fustian trousers. These contrasting men seemed familiar to Duquet and he finally asked about them.

“Of course they are familiar. You saw them in the Rock and Shoal in La Rochelle.” Captain Verdwijnen lowered his voice to a whisper. “I told you, they are my partners, my vrienden. Piet is my brother-in-law, Jan is my cousin. You didn’t think I could defy the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie and bear the expense of this voyage alone, did you?”

Duquet said, “I would like to be a partner with you for the sake of the furs. And for my future lumber enterprise. We could make money together, don’t you think?”

After a long silence Captain Outger Verdwijnen spoke slowly. “You know that the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie for many years tightly controlled Dutch trade with India, China and Japan, the Spice Islands. No private merchant was allowed to do business nor travel through the Strait of Magellan.”

“But men do try. And succeed,” said Duquet.

“If you tried and were caught your goods were seized, your ship taken, and you were punished by the VOC’s stony hand. That is what happened to Willem Schouten, who discovered Kaap Hoorn. Now the Company is weaker, but still watchful. My vrienden and I made a secret partnership to enter the India-China trade ourselves — and someday even Japan — by banding resources together and sailing together. This is our fourth voyage and it is going well. Of course Piet and Jan own their boats and I am just the captain for Herr Grinz, but I hope to make enough on this trip to buy a good little fluyt. I am not altogether sure there is a place in our arrangement for a timber merchant. There may be — I don’t know. I fear a fluyt could not carry great loads of timber. Our West Indies want lumber, but I prefer to continue the China trade. If I were you I would look into the Indies trade.”

But Duquet, with stubborn single-mindedness, began once again to describe the forests of New France. The Dutchman interrupted him.

“My young friend,” he said. “Allow someone with knowledge of the world to offer a comment. You speak always as though New France were your country.”

“It is. Our fortunes are intertwined. It is a new world, rich and beauteous with massive forests and powerful rivers. It is a place that has earned my respect.”

“May I remind you that your New France is not a sovereign country but the colony of a major European power? May I, from long observation of the political machinations of these great powers, introduce a note of caution? The kings of these strong countries do not know their colonies and overseas settlements. They have never been there, nor have their ministers. For them those colonies are colored blotches on maps, they are only counters in the savage games of war, only sources of income. They do not give a fig for anything else. And I might observe that you are not wary enough of France’s European enemies, especially England. It might fall out that France trades or otherwise divests itself of New France, as the occasion dictates.”

“That could never happen.”

“Of course not. But I have heard that France, the mother country, is not particularly enamored of New France, that supply ships are often very late, that she keeps her population at home instead of urging settlement in this northern paradise, that favors and help are conspicuously absent, that she is unwilling to open her markets to what is in a way her own child.”

“That is only temporary,” said Duquet sullenly, not liking these truths.

“You will see how temporary and remember this conversation if France comes to war with one of the powers and, not doing well, is forced to give up something. How long do you think New France will stay inviolate?”

• • •

In the months since they had arrived Captain Verdwijnen arranged to have the ship hauled onto a nearby beach where it could be cleaned, everything removed from the interior. A hundred Chinese men removed the ordure-coated ballast stones from the bilges and laid them in the beating surf, scraped down the bilges, removed the stinking limber ropes and threaded new ones. They laid down a bed of clean sand before replacing the surf-scoured ballast, scraped the exterior bottom free from barnacles and seaweeds (for it was an uncoppered ship), recaulked and repainted the vessel inside and out. The Steenarend was refloated and for days long lines of men carrying chests and boxes packed the hold. The reprovisioned ship was fresh and clean, stuffed with the luxury goods of the China trade, and fifty flowering plants. They set off for the Bay of Bengal, with crates of lemons and mangoes to keep them safe from scurvy.

• • •

In India, Captain Verdwijnen exchanged some of the ceramics and silks for more cabbages and fruit, spices, especially cloves and pepper, and picked up a chest of Patna opium for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. Duquet’s busy mind, once again dense with forest thoughts, took note.

“Such a three-corner trading route could work for a lumber merchant, could it not?”

“Yes, but in my case the profits would be better if I bought the opium going forward, for there is a growing market in China for it. But we were pressed for time. Many foreign traders are taking advantage of the demand. Why should I not as well? But perhaps you were not thinking of opium?”

“But, yes. I was.” He was thirty-two and on the way to his fortune.

14. risk

On the home voyage some of the sailors refused to drink the scurvy-preventing lemon juice and threw the mangoes overboard (as they had the oranges and bok choy) when they thought they were unobserved. Those who were caught had the choice of sucking two lemons dry or enduring ten lashes. Most chose the lashes, for they believed that salt meat, hardtack and cheese so stale and granitic they had to be cut with an ax were manly foods suited to sailors. Lemons were not well regarded. Captain Verdwijnen smiled and said he hoped they would enjoy their scurvy. And soon enough those men began to move stiffly, leaving bloodstains on their hardtack, bending double with gut-ripping pains. There was great laughter one day and Toppunt, seeking the cause, found one of the lemon haters staring at his ration of hardtack. He had tried to gnaw it and it came away from his mouth bloodied and with three teeth embedded in it. Now the voyage seemed interminable but Captain Verdwijnen made one more stop.

The ship made port at Ghana, picked up thirty slaves and crowded them into the cargo hold with the crates of porcelain, the rare plants and the chest of Patna. There was not a cat’s whisker of free space on the vessel. In the dark hold the slaves got at the contents of the opium chest, a fortuitous find which greatly eased their passage. They found and ate the rare plants, blossom, leaf, stem, root and soil. It was only when they sighted France that the loss was discovered.

Captain Verdwijnen, when he had recovered from his shock, drinking his evening jenever put a question to Duquet.

“So, my friend, what think you the value of those slaves now?”

Duquet thought before he answered. The affair had its comic side but he would keep his smiles to himself.

“To you, they must have a very high value, for when you add up the cost of the slaves themselves, then cipher in what you paid for the plants and the opium, they become precious, likely far above the market price for slaves.”

“Quite so,” said Verdwijnen. “But. It is more complicated than that. For neither the plants nor the opium have fixed prices that are the same everywhere. What amount might I have received for the opium, which is an expensive and desirable medicine? And what if some of the plants soared in value as tulips did in my grandfather’s time? Should those estimated future prices be factored into the value of the slaves? And what about the slave buyer? He would see only a slave, not the opium and rare orchids the creatures ingested. To him, the value is the slave-market price.”

He thought a moment, then went on. “The slaves, opium and plants were mine. That’s all.”

“But do you not hold marine insurance for this trip? With the men in the coffeehouse in La Rochelle?”

“That, too, is complicated. Of course Herr Grinz’s ship was insured by the coffeehouse men against loss, piracy and wreck, and also his cargo of silk and tea, but the rest… no. Piet, Jan and I are self-insured through our partenrederijen, so the risks fall equally on all of us. Piet and Jan own their ships — I alone had to hire out to Herr Grinz. They will share my losses and I will share their profits.”

Duquet nodded. The motion of the ship was very slight as they were passing through slick water in which long windrows of seaweed made a pattern like a gigantic tweed cloak. He felt slight sympathy for Captain Outger Verdwijnen, who had made a negligible profit from the long, perilous journey, very little to show for all his bargaining and diplomatic skills. Unexpected dangers in business were part of the game. Captain Verdwijnen gave a hard laugh and said, “It’s always a risk, such a voyage. We might easily have lost the ship and all its contents, we might have lost our lives, we might have been captured by pirates and sold as slaves ourselves. I look on the pleasant side. We have evaded cyclones and pirates. I still have Margit’s little table — and I still have the slaves. I’ll get something for them, so in the end it is only the opium and the rare plants that I have lost. In any case we Dutch do not mind taking a risk. If business and enterprise is a fruit, we understand risk is its inner kernel.” He stretched his legs and half-smiled. “Besides, I also placed some bets at the coffeehouse before we sailed that the ship would not wreck, that we would dodge pirates, and that I would return very much alive and twice as clever. There is my profit.”

And so they returned to France, where the Steenarend would stay for three weeks, Duquet chafing to see the new finery which would present him as a person of value and importance.

15. hair

They were late arriving in Paris and rather than go to the tailor’s shop in the deepening dusk Toppunt and Duquet spent the night at an inn.

The tailor seemed surprised to see them. Duquet, trying on his finery behind an embroidered screen with the help of Jules, the tailor’s assistant, listened while Toppunt and the tailor conversed.

“We have heard so many ships were lost in storms and to pirates that I thought yours was surely among them.”

“Not this time,” said Toppunt, “though we were severely lashed by typhoons and came close to being driven onto the rocks off the east coast of Africa, a vicious shore. There is more to the sea than water — there is the land that constricts it.”

“The sea is the master of all men.”

“Not our captain. He is a skilled navigator and of a pleasant nature unlike most ship captains. He is a good man. This was my fourth voyage with him and I will never ship out with another captain.”

“And if he dies?” asked the tailor. “Will you accompany him on that voyage as well?”

“Ha ha,” said Toppunt, “we’ll see. It depends on his port of call.”

Duquet, a vision in blue, stepped out from behind the screen and turned about to show the fit of his costume.

“So,” said Toppunt. “Even a prince would envy you.”

The tailor held both hands up and praised Duquet’s legs—“You are certainly a man not in need of calf pads. You, sir, have a well-turned leg.”

After this blandishment the tailor tried to wheedle more money from him. “It’s for storage. And I gave the costume very much care, dusting the shoulders, airing it outdoors, protecting it from my cat.” Duquet took out his smallest coin and spun it on the tailor’s table.

• • •

The wigmaker’s shop was closed, but with loud pounding they raised the proprietor, whose pointed nose gleamed wet. He coughed incessantly.

“The powder on the wigs, you know. It’s quite irritating. I have lately changed to a powder made from curious lichens that grow on rocks, and it does not trouble me so severely. I have heard they use it to poison wolves, so rest assured that your fine wig will never be plagued by those ferocious animals.”

He brought the wigs out. Toppunt’s was black and glossy and very smart. Duquet’s was enormous and heavy, of auburn color with countless long ringlets that cascaded down his back and over his shoulders.

“Do you wish it powdered?” asked the wigmaker. He produced a hacking sound.

“No, no,” said Duquet, staring at himself in the shop’s watery mirror. Between the blue shimmer of the garments, the flash of his ivory teeth and the expensive wig he was transformed into an apparent gentleman — what Toppunt, not altogether kindly, called a schijn-heer—an almost-gentleman.

They left the street of shops, heading for a certain eating place. Toppunt had heard the cook came from Bourgogne and was a genius of the kitchen. This inn was in a distant street and the longer they walked the hotter Duquet became until he felt his brains roasting, his shoulders laden with coals. His neck ached with the weight of the wig. The sun glowed as a smelting furnace. They pushed through crowded streets, down alleys that ran at angles. A man carrying a large covered tray on his shoulder came toward them. He brushed past Duquet, who suddenly felt the expensive wig ripped from his head. He spun around in time to see the man with the tray running, and on the tray a ragged child clutching Duquet’s new wig. The load was heavy and the man lurched as he ran.

“Au voleur! Au voleur!” shouted Duquet and Toppunt. A passerby stuck out his leg and the man fell, the child, tray and wig hurtling into the mud. The child scampered away at extraordinary speed but the passerby held down the man. A crowd gathered and pinioned the thief.

“It’ll be the galleys for him,” said Toppunt. “He will join the Huguenots.”

Duquet, in an icy rage, retrieved the huge wig that had cost him so much. It looked twice as large as before, quite the armful, as big as a mattress and with clots of mud dangling from its curls; as he shook it he saw it had become entangled with another wig, apparently stolen earlier than his and hidden beneath the cloth.

“It’s a good one,” said Toppunt, examining the modish second wig critically. “You can sell it.” But as he examined it more closely he grimaced.

“It’s full of lice and nits.” He held it up. “But you could have it fumigated and cleaned. It is a valuable wig.” While they were examining the hairy mass the passerby, still holding the thief and craning his neck to better see the wigs, relaxed his grip a little and the miscreant wrenched loose and ran into the faceless multitude. A chase was hopeless.

Duquet had had enough of wigs for the day, and, carrying his own under his arm, he strode away, Toppunt, carrying the lousy wig, running after him, calling, “Slow, slow.”

By the time they reached the inn they could laugh at the adventure. Duquet said they should return to the wigmaker and see what he would give for the stranger’s wig. It might pay for their dinner. They recklessly ordered dishes with the feeling that someone else would pay — some good French wine. At last, sated and half drunk, they ate a sweet tart, and after that neither could move.

“We need coffee,” said Toppunt. The innkeeper told them of a coffeehouse two streets away. They waddled in that direction, passed it twice before seeing it and went in.

When they were finally restored to mobility and mental clarity they returned to the wigmaker’s shop, Toppunt carrying the stolen wig. The man recognized it as one he had made himself for a great gentleman. He said he would return it to his client, but Duquet insisted on a reward, naming a sum that covered the cost of their lavish dinner. Moaning, the wigmaker paid it, protesting that his client would hardly pay twice, even for a stolen and returned wig.

In the street Toppunt said the wigmaker would likely cleanse the wig, hide it away and, when the client came to him telling of the theft, the wigmaker would promise him a new one, as like the old as a pea in the pod resembles its neighbor, and charge an even greater sum (for the verisimilitude) than the wig’s first sale.

“In truth,” he said, “I believe the thieves are in the employ of the wigmakers.”

• • •

A week later, dressed in his finery and wearing the ivory teeth and stifling wig, Duquet attended a formal return dinner at Captain Verdwijnen’s house in Amsterdam. The captain and his wife, Margit, Captains Piet Roos and Jan Goossen, their wives and Piet’s two nearly grown daughters, Josina and Cornelia, made up the company. In the entrance hall Duquet noticed the table Captain Verdwijnen had purchased for Margit in Guangzhou.

As Margit looked him over Duquet saw that her right eye was more kindly than the left, which shot out a ray of antipathy. He felt that eye erase his fine clothes, discard the wig, dissolve the ivory teeth and identify him as a scavenging opportunist. He dared not eat anything but soup and gravy as he did not wish to remove his teeth in company. They were inadequate for anything beyond blancmange.

To avoid Madame Verdwijnen’s cruel eye, all through the dinner Duquet shot his own glances at young Cornelia. There was a resemblance to Piet and she was passable, though certainly not a beauty. Her eyes were of a blue so pale they seemed white, her nose was broad. She wore a dark brown silk dress with a filmy ruff collar and an embroidered linen cap. Duquet made up his mind that she would be his wife. At the flashing thought of any opposition or denial the inner tiger stirred.

• • •

During his time in Amsterdam, at a popular coffeehouse Duquet met a colonial Englishman from Boston, Benton Dred-Peacock, dressed in smart clothes of the best quality but with a face that seemed made from stale bread crusts. Most colonial settlers were of low circumstance; it was obvious Dred-Peacock was a moneyed gentleman. As they talked Duquet learned Dred-Peacock had intimate business dealings with the newly appointed New England royal mast contractor Jonathan Bridger. The man knew very much about the forest business in the colonies, and made it clear that his allegiances lay with the colonists rather than the Crown. And Dred-Peacock recognized in Duquet a man who knew how to get money from turnips if nothing else was at hand. Money was power and Duquet gave off the smell of both. He was one of those men others wished to know, even while they despised him.

Duquet gathered from the conversation the knowledge that many colonials bitterly disliked English rule and the public taxes that went (unfairly, said Dred-Peacock) to support England’s reckless wars. Especially did they dislike the restrictive policies of the Royal Board of Trade, which set stringent rules for cutting the dense and dominating forests, rules pressing on amounts and procedures for supplying the Royal Navy with ships’ stores — masts, bowsprits and yards, not to mention pitch and tar. The residents were incensed over the Acts of Trade and Navigation, which clamped like vises on colonial trade. And this Bridger fellow was apt to be troublesome about the sale of townships and the cutting of mast trees. But, said Dred-Peacock, “that man is eager to make a name for himself, and I believe he will respond to careful smoothing.” And Dred-Peacock knew the Elisha Cookes, both formidable powers in colonial affairs.

Dred-Peacock, his breath heavy with black rum fumes, whispered to Duquet, his eyes casting about for listening spies; “As Dr. Cooke says, we ought to have the rights to trade with the whole world if we have the enterprise to produce the goods and timber, to grow hemp. But these Acts bind us at every turn.”

Duquet suggested they move to a more private table near the back, and he ordered a flagon of rum. As the evening wore on he learned there were many sly ways the New Englanders evaded those thousand and one strictures, most generally in collusion with colonial officials, especially the sawmill owners. Dred-Peacock leaned closer, thinking an alliance with this brute could be to his purse’s advantage. It was all about money.

“Chief among these exigencies is procuring ownership of great white pine tracts by purchasing old township grants. One must cultivate understandings with men who enjoy political influence and connections. I have done so. The enemy is the King’s Surveyor, a dotard in London who makes a big fluster examining the licenses and permits of lumbermen. He is cowardly and dare not come to the colonies lest he suffer an accident. He sends his henchmen, the lowest of men.”

“I would know more about acquiring those townships,” said Duquet.

Armed with a dozen new names and Dred-Peacock’s promise to meet him on his return, Duquet sailed for Boston, reflecting that the great and important advantage of the colonies over New France was the ice-free ports. The St. Laurent was locked in ice for six or even eight months of the year.

He found a small house in the colonial city and for the next year practiced speaking English and cultivating acquaintances with men who could grant him favors, all introduced by Dred-Peacock. Duquet did not quite trust Dred-Peacock, yet the man was a tolerable woodsman, a grand walker with legs cutting distance as springily as sheep-shearing blades. In the early spring Duquet fell ill with cholera, gradually regaining his health. He planned one more trip to China, and then he would buy up old Maine land claims and paper townships. But first he had to go north.

16. “a wicked messenger, fallen into evil…” (Guy du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac)

Back in New France Duquet reverted to buckskin and moccasins and set out to find the Trépagny brothers. Everywhere he went there were stump-choked clearings, charcoal kilns and settlers’ cabins, for men were cutting maple trees to make charcoal; the English needed it for their glass and gunpowder factories and paid high prices. He could not find Toussaint and Fernand — but that could be explained by the new war. New France, Indians and the English colonies to the south boiled with spies; there were constant ambushes by roving bands of combatants. Duquet was impatient to get the brothers aligned for another season of fur trading. They would dodge the fighting.

Then it was cooler and there was rain in the woods, the smell of leaf mold and mushrooms. The refreshed river hissed. He looked up at a sky that seemed set with rondels of thick glass. He found the brothers tearing out a beaver dam near their old hut on the Rivière des Fourres. Both brothers, muddy and glad to leave the beaver dam for a reunion, were in fair health though Toussaint’s beard showed white side streaks and Fernand groaned when he straightened up.

“They call this Queen Anne’s War, but it seems the continuance of our old antipathies,” Toussaint said. “I blame the Indian factions. One day a tribe is your enemy. The next you are fighting beside them, or they stand back from the battle and smile, like the Iroquois.”

“I hope you do not think I came back to fight Indians and English,” said Duquet sourly.

“Many do feel an allegiance to New France,” said Toussaint.

“I feel an allegiance to gathering furs.”

Toussaint poured water into the black kettle and when it boiled Duquet showed them somewhat officiously how to make tea. They sipped it, making wry faces. Duquet said they would develop a taste for it, that it was considered a luxury in Europe. He said he wished he had brought coffee for them but it was extremely dear and doubtless they would not like it as it was very bitter. The rum was more welcome. He apologized for the small amount of fur money he gave them, told a tale of pirate capture and the loss of most of his profits. He was anxious to start trading again and would surely make up the poor showing of this venture. Smoothly he asked for their history. The brothers exchanged a long look.

Toussaint said drily that they had experienced coffee in Ville-Marie, nor was Duquet the only one to see the world. They had traveled on the Mississippi the last several years with Pierre LeMoyne, the son of a man in Ville-Marie who had started his New France life as an indentured servant and become rich.

“Some people now see that there should be French forts all across the land.” As Toussaint spoke, Duquet sensed that he was seething with the desire to build forts and fight the English, guessed that they disbelieved his pirate story. But what could they do? Enjoy the rum, that’s what.

“We went to find the true mouth of the river. Sacrebleu! I swear! Some river — a maze of swamps and black waterways like spiderwebs. LeMoyne explored in a canoe with an Indian and some soldiers. We stayed in the Indian village near the old La Salle fort.”

Fernand picked up his brother’s story, spoke rapidly, saying that other Indians had stayed in that village — a dozen of them from a Western Ocean tribe who had come to hunt bison. “For they do not have those beasts in their country. The Western Ocean hunters had packs of furs for trade. They came by those furs trading with the North Indians who live near the world of ice.”

Toussaint opened a small pack and showed eight rich sea otter furs and four arctic fox.

“Ah!” Duquet stroked the sensual otter pelts. He draped one across his knee and slid his fingers into the caressing warmth. His mouth watered.

“They said the North Indians had so many otter pelts they paved the streets of their villages with them. They said the North Indians traveled with the Russians and all got sick.” He stretched out his hand for his otter fur in Duquet’s hand and returned it to his pack.

“Did the North Indians with the Russians trade willingly with the Western Ocean Indians?”

Fernand made a deep sound. “At first, yes, then they changed. The Russians were already dead and the North Indians were dying when the Western Ocean Indians came on them. The sick North Indians did not want to trade. The Western Ocean men persuaded them.”

“Some of the persuasion was severe? Even fatal?”

Fernand was fumbling with the second pack, Toussaint clearing his throat and frowning at his brother. But Fernand, always a braggart, said, “It is true. Look at this.”

He withdrew a rolled skin and opened it out. The brilliant gold and black fur dazzled. “A tiger,” he said. “The Russians had it.” He stroked the striped pelt. “It is why the sick North Indians did not want to trade.” Toussaint turned away.

“Where is the head?” asked Duquet. “The head is valuable.”

“The Russians did not have the head. They likely ate it. One must look after oneself in this life, isn’t that right?”

“Right,” said Duquet, watching Toussaint pull the tiger skin away from his brother and roll it. They would not give up that skin readily. The old easy partnership was gone. In fact, thought Duquet, his feeling for New France was gone. Late in the night, each rolled up in his bison robe, he heard Toussaint’s voice, low and rough, oppressing his brother.

• • •

Duquet grew restless during this time with the Trépagny brothers, noting their cramped vocabularies, their repetitive stories, but he drove himself and the brothers into a short but frantic season of gathering furs, letting the Indian middlemen know he especially wanted wildcats. He kept two of the best aside as a present for Cornelia. He had told Piet of his intent to marry her, and although the captain had pursed his lips and shook his head in denial, Duquet thought he would agree when he heard of Duquet’s accumulating wealth. The girl had good teeth and looked healthy enough, with broad hips, but each of her features was off-kilter, those colorless eyes too small, the wide nose and heavy cheeks. But it was the father and his business connections, his allegiance with Captain Verdwijnen that Duquet truly wished to marry. Cornelia was to give him the sons he needed to build his business empire. He looked now beyond mere wealth.

• • •

The season passed and when the time came for Duquet to return to La Rochelle and China, Toussaint mumbled that he and Fernand would keep their share of the furs unless Duquet would pay a high price for them on the spot.

“We know several traders now,” said Toussaint. For months they had built their evening fire apart from Duquet and in the daytime conversed only with each other.

“We cannot wait years for your return, perhaps empty-handed if your pirates strike again. We need ready money,” said Fernand, “as we wish to rejoin Pierre LeMoyne. He is in France preparing an expedition to the Caribbean.” He stared at the ground as he spoke, unwilling to meet Duquet’s eyes, but the tiger was calm. The brothers had no idea what furs brought in China, nor would they ever know. Duquet had learned something about negotiations and after two days of palaver with Toussaint, who spoke for himself and Fernand, Duquet made a wondrous bargain — except for the tiger skin and the white fox furs, which they would not give up.

“I have no doubt there are many adventures in the Caribe attractive to coureurs de bois,” he said, letting the sarcasm show. Toussaint countered with acerbity: “I understand the Dutch West Indies are a most lucrative market for lumber, and certainly nearer than France or China.” Duquet guessed the brothers were waiting for him to renew his offer of a partnership in the timber trade so that they might have the pleasure of refusing him. He said nothing. It was the parting of ways.

He rose near midnight, disappeared as silently as fog. It was many hours later that the brothers discovered the tiger skin, the fox and otter furs were gone. Fernand cursed and said there was no verse in Pibrac to ease the situation, but at least they had got a little hard money.

“Let us drink a toast to that man whose sugar mouth disguises his gall-choked heart.” They opened the jenever and drank to the riddance of Duquet.

“Perhaps you’d rather have coffee,” mocked Toussaint.

“Oh no, it is too bitter for one so backward as I,” answered Fernand.

17. “unto a horse belongeth a whip” (Guy du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac)

He could barely waste time sleeping, for his mind was in ferment, his body burned with the intense desire to get on with things. All was occurring as he had hoped. The first morning light was like an armful of dry wood tossed on a fire, and he was choking with energy and ambition as he pulled on his clothes. He despised men who slept until the sun was high — inept laggards who would never be anyone.

In Ville-Marie, before he had found the Trépagny brothers, Duquet had hired bûcherons to find and cut white and red cedar, balsam fir and fragrant sumac, others to shape and finish the wood into small boards. These were packed in odorless birch chests to preserve their natural fragrances. Indian women had gathered ginseng roots, bundles of sweetgrass, other plants and roots for him.

He chartered a ship, the Hendrik, to take him, his fragrant woods, his magic roots and furs to La Rochelle, where he would meet Captain Verdwijnen. The ship’s captain was Gabriel Deyon, the son of Captain Deyon with whom he had first traveled to France years before. The son told Duquet his father had been lost, ship and all hands aboard, in the treacherous Strait of Magellan, whose narrow passageway he had chosen as a safe alternative to Cape Horn.

“One never knows,” said Duquet piously. But he knew.

Deyon’s ship stopped at every settlement along the river. At dusk it moored for the night at Wobik and Duquet went ashore to see what changes had come in the years since he had left.

He could scarcely believe it. Where was the forest? The landscape had been corrupted. The village had swollen by fifty houses, a grain mill, a water-powered sawmill, a large sheep commons. The forest had been pushed out of sight, and in the place of woodlands were rough fields with crops growing between stumps. The muddy trail west that he remembered was now a fair road. For a moment he was frightened; if miles of forest could be removed so quickly by a few men with axes, was the forest then as vulnerable as beaver? No, the forest returned with vigor, resprouted from cut stumps, cast seeds, sent out mother roots from which new trees grew. These forests could not disappear. In New France they were vast and eternal.

• • •

One thing had not changed; Monsieur Bouchard still handled the passage money for river travel, still welcomed newcomers.

The old man, looking strong though white-haired, did not recognize him. Duquet asked him to open the ledger where he had made his mark half his lifetime earlier. He pointed.

“There. That is my ignorant mark.” A few lines above he saw the pathetically elaborate R of René Sel and asked if he was still alive.

“Certainement. He has Monsieur Trépagny’s old house, where he lives very comfortably with his wife and children. You knew, did you not, that Claude Trépagny met his untimely end seeking you, whom he determined to punish as a runaway?”

“I did not know. He was a vindictive, unforgiving master and I was justified in leaving because of that maltraitement. He treated me badly.”

“There are some who believe you had him dispatched by the Iroquois.”

“What a canard! If the Iroquois killed him it is because they had their own reasons.”

And although he did not care, he diverted the conversation. “So, René Sel has become a landowning farmer?”

“He is a woodcutter and keeps a few cows and sheep out in the forest. But there are several farms near his place these days. He cuts firewood and makes potash. There are perhaps six good farms between here and Sel’s place. As you can see, Wobik has made tremendous progress in clearing and destroying the wilderness. The only person who laments this labor is that sauvage Mari, René’s wife. She has become a woman of some importance for her abilities to heal the sick. She mourns the loss of woodland grottoes where certain plants once grew but are no more because of the industry of the settlers. She speaks out more and more against the white settlers. We cannot subdue that streak of vengeance that is part of their character. Her Indan sons have gone to the village of St. Francis, which is crowded with rebellious Indans of every tribe.”

“Mari!” cried Duquet. “Married to Mari? But she is much older. Surely a country marriage.”

“No. Trépagny forced it years ago so that he would not lose his rich French wife. In the end he lost her and everything else, even his life.”

“His brothers do not know this,” said Duquet.

“Ah, but they do. I told them myself at the time of the events. By rights they should have inherited at least Claude’s big stone house, but they did not wish it. They are wandering men with good hearts and said the house should go to one who was content to be a woodcutter. I expect they are both dead by now, killed by Indans or drowning.”

“No doubt,” said Duquet, “if they are not in the Caribbean whipping slaves.” With that he took his leave and returned to the ship. He felt stifled, he was ready to get away. He had longed to be back in the northern forest but now that he was here he wished for the glittering worlds of La Rochelle, Paris, Amsterdam, even Canton, as the English called Guangzhou. New France had nothing for him now except timber.

“A hard one,” murmured Monsieur Bouchard to himself. “Hardened. Very much hardened.”

18. reunion

As the ship entered the Bay of Biscay the pale limestone cliffs of La Rochelle gleamed in the first strike of sunlight. Duquet could smell salted cod, the smoke of twisted salt grass from the fires of the poor. Despite the early hour a crowd of fishermen and mariners were on the wharf looking for share employment. Once they had worked the Newfoundland coast, but this was increasingly dangerous and difficult as the English and the New England colonists and even the Spanish and Dutch were pushing in. The La Rochelle boats now fished the offshore Grand Banks, where the poissons were larger, stouter and sweeter than those along the coast — and closer to home.

In La Rochelle while he waited for Captain Verdwijnen and his ship, Duquet carried two boxes of his specialty woods one day to the shop of Claude Citron, the merchant who, on his first journey years earlier, had expressed warm interest in unusual cabinet woods. Citron was older now but no less fervent on the subject of woods.

“Ah,” he said as if Duquet had been in only the day before instead of long years, “let us see what you have brought from New France — delights, I am sure.”

Duquet set his sample boxes of scented cedar and balsam on the table, a few pieces of figured maple. He explained that he was taking most of his stock to China. Citron handled the satiny wood, sniffed and tilted the pieces to catch the light.

“You know I am connected with esteemed cabinetmakers always anxious to buy fine woods. You are taking your fragrant woods to China? They would find a market here as well, you know, but I suppose the profits will be greater in China, though the cost of shipping and the possibility of loss to pirates and storms greater. You might consider it.”

He would make some money selling the cabinet woods to Citron, but it was the fur and growing opium profits of the China trade that made the hazardous journey worthwhile. For this last time, he thought. With the break from the Trépagny brothers he was at the end of his fur-trading days. He was a wealthy man, and although he was strong and hale he felt the pressure of time. He wanted much more; from now on he would concentrate on his forest empire.

He settled on a price for two boxes of his scented woods, said farewell and turned toward the wharves. He passed a patisserie emanating essences of sugared fruit and chocolate, then a small open-air market packed with great luscious lettuces and early onions. It was remarkable how much more interesting the smells of La Rochelle were than those of Boston.

He was staying at the Botte de Mer, the oddly named Sea Boot, a good enough inn with private beds and even private rooms, but the attraction was the extraordinary and ever-changing menu. Night after night an accomplished and inventive cook sent out salpicons, cassoulets and ragouts of sweetbreads or chopped pheasant or chicken, various fish, mushrooms, all savory, all seasoned with the local salt. The cassoulets were especially succulent. Alas, there were only six small tables and two sittings each evening. If you were unfortunate enough to be the seventh diner at the second sitting you would be rejected. Duquet had no intention of being turned away and looked forward keenly to that evening’s meal. But first he would store his remaining wood samples.

As he started up the staircase that led to the upper rooms someone spoke at his shoulder in a quiet but familiar voice.

“Duquet. Is it you?”

“Dieu! Forgeron! I thought you to be in Nouvelle France?” Lean and dark Forgeron stood at his shoulder.

“Of course I was there for many years, but two years since I have been surveying in the Maine woods. You cannot believe the white pine in Maine.” He smiled. “You are looking very well. Clearly you have progressed.”

“Forgeron, you, too, look well — healthy and strong. This meeting is fortuitous. I have wished often to speak with you about the Maine forests.”

“I have wished often to tell you of the opportunities for the timber business in Maine. Have you visited that region?”

“Only a little. Indeed, I am planning to explore further as soon as this, my last journey to China, ends. Let us dine together and tell all that has come our way since last we met. What affairs have brought you to La Rochelle?”

“I was in London to speak with an Englishman who has just won a mast contract for some Crown lands in Maine. He wants me to survey the area and arrange for woodsmen to cut masts. But I foresee difficulties with this fellow. He had other masts cut several years ago and stored them at his property in the West Indies. He was unable to sell them for reasons I do not understand and the masts perished from dry rot. He could not pay the cutting contract and the affair is now in the courts. So I am not eager to accept his offer.”

In came their cassoulet of veal and chicken with pink beans and a loaf of still-warm bread as large as a bull’s head. They drank good burgundy and when it was gone Forgeron raised his hand for more.

“I have a suggestion,” said Duquet. “Why do we not renew our friendship and practice joint business? I shall be two years on this last trip, but perhaps you could survey Maine timberlands for me and purchase townships for Duquet et Fils while I am away?”

“What! You have sons? You have married?”

“No, no, but I hope soon this will come to pass.” And he told Forgeron of Cornelia, of his plans for a timber empire and his hope that Forgeron would share in this.

“I do not know if Amsterdam should be the seat of this business, or New France? Or even the English colonies? Should I bring Cornelia to the New World?”

“I would suggest that Boston, with its great and open harbor, its connections to London, and to other colonies by way of the post road, the newspapers which inform, the mail service between Boston and New York and the Connecticut towns, and its nearness to the Maine pineries, is the most advantageous location.”

“I had nearly come to that conclusion myself and your opinion settles the matter. Forgeron, if you work with me I will make you a rich man.”

“Or will I be the one who makes you the wealthy fellow?”

They laughed and clasped hands.

19. “Exitus in dubio est”

In Amsterdam, Captains Piet Roos and Verdwijnen at a table in their favorite coffeehouse discussed the possibility of the match.

“I do not like the man,” said Piet. “Beneath the pleasant manner he is cold and calculating. He is more addicted to his own interests than anything else. There is something in the way that ugly head sits on his shoulders that signals defeat to anyone with whom he converses. He smiles often, yes, but while his lips curve his eyes remain like dried peas. I detect no real fondness for my daughter. His conversation is always about his wishes, his plans, his travels and his money. Of the rest of life aside from his personal advantage he knows little.”

“Yes, I agree that may be true, his is a rough and masculine view — though I have seen him pleased with a Chinese garden, but he is already wealthy and in a way to command enormous sums.”

“Yes, I like money as well, but not as Duquet does. With him it is a sinful greed. Nothing else matters.”

Captain Verdwijnen took down his clay pipe from its ceiling hook. He sat again, spilled tobacco leaves on the table and began to cut them fine. “He has a monstrous good head for business and, as you say, a will to dominate. And a rather terrifying lust for work. If Cornelia weds him it would be a familial tie to a great deal of money and credit. You can always make stipulations in the marriage agreement — for example, you can insist that if you give permission for this marriage Cornelia and the children — and children there will be — must remain in Amsterdam until a certain age — say, fourteen or so. He will look after his interests in New France and now, I understand, in the English colonies in some manner, and travel to Amsterdam when business allows, for protracted visits with his wife and family — and business partners. I have no hesitation in doing business with him. And I think if you set it out to him that marriage with Cornelia is an impossibility without these provisions he will accept it, perhaps even welcome it as I see no indications that he would ever be a family man dandling infants on his knee, though I sense that he is lonely.”

“He is one of those who cannot be other than lonely. He was born to it. And I dislike the idea of him clambering aboard Cornelia as if she were an Indian canoe.” Piet Roos paused for a long moment. “I might do business with him but I do not want him for a son-in-law.”

“Some of your feelings are the natural feelings of a father for his daughter. But you need only keep him in check. He is, aside from his raw greed, something of a fool. He is obtuse, has no subtlety and often acts on impulse. He feels his position as a lowborn uneducated man who has had to make his own way. He can be manipulated. He has a respect for older men such as we are. He will listen to you. In this life we meet difficult people. We must take the time to listen and try to understand them. We must never take an adversarial position.”

Piet Roos, half convinced, snorted. “I feel he can be dangerous.”

“Dear Piet, even a sparrow has a sharp beak. If you set it out that Cornelia and any children must remain here, it is a way you could exercise control over the children at least. You do not yourself have any sons and a sturdy grandson or two might be a real benefit. Or, if the children are girls, carefully chosen sons-in-law could be useful. You might also add business terms that would be to your benefit as well as his; you, after all, have three ships plying the China-Japan trade and he has none and salivates for them. And he has money and will have more. He will make money for us. I know it. So be fatherly. But be watchful.”

• • •

It took Duquet another year of cross-Atlantic courtship, not of Cornelia, but of her father, to get his way. But he persisted. He would have her. In Amsterdam in 1711 he spent days with Piet Roos, who pored over Duquet’s account books with great thoroughness, listened to his future plans and asked shrewd questions, weighing the answers before he allowed the marriage.

“If I correctly understand what you are proposing, there would be a three-way business partnership working the China trade — Charles Duquet, Piet Roos and Outger Verdwijnen.”

“Yes,” said Duquet, vibrating internally at the sound of the three linked names.

“Well. In that respect I think we can work an agreeable arrangement. The marriage is perhaps more — delicate. My wife and I do not wish to part with Cornelia. You understand she is our youngest daughter and her mother’s pet.”

Duquet half-smiled.

“I am not refusing your suit outright, but suggesting certain conditions. We would wish Cornelia to stay in Amsterdam.” There was a long silence. Piet rolled and unrolled a corner of the paper on which he was writing. “I would make her a gift of a house I own in the next street, a very pleasant house and close by her parents and sister.”

Duquet shifted in his chair. A house, Cornelia’s house, his house.

“Moreover, we would prefer that any children from the union would live with their mother in Amsterdam. With her family close by she will be well looked after. You can live there, of course, but if you prefer, New France — or, better yet, you may travel between that place and Amsterdam, not only on business, but to spend time with your family.” He looked at Duquet, who sat with his face motionless and his mouth slightly open. Duquet looked at the tapestry that hung on the wall behind Piet. He saw only the figure in the border — a hawk stooping on a heron. The heron lay on its back, its claws up to defend itself. But the hawk was fierce and sure. Below ran the words “Exitus in dubio est,” which Piet, seeing his puzzled expression, said was Latin meaning “escape is in doubt.” Duquet’s sympathies lay with the hawk. Piet cast aside the shell of the conversation and came to the kernel.

“The routes are well traveled and others manage this. If you wish I will put a ship and crew at your disposal for that transatlantic passage. How seem these conditions to you?”

Duquet nodded, for this was the connection he needed.

“Yes, yes, my thanks, it is a thing undreamed of.” He thought it would be better to have his Dutch wife in Amsterdam, leaving him free from female manipulation and vapors, but still serving as the blood link to Piet Roos and Captain Verdwijnen. He knew that wherever he was, he would be a stranger. It was a price. He would pay it.

• • •

The marriage was celebrated with a wedding feast and drinking match that lasted for days. Captain Verdwijnen presented the couple with a splendid present of a set of silver vorks, the new eating implements. Margit’s left eye bored into Duquet as he regarded the present. Although he expressed loud admiration for the forks, in his private thoughts Duquet took offense at this gift; he knew it was a reproach to his still-coarse table manners. More to his liking was the handsome coffee mill. And the rich tapestry from his father-in-law. It was a week before Cornelia spoke a word, and what she said was known only to her and Duquet.

• • •

Within eighteen months he had fathered a daughter and a premature stillborn son. Duquet thought constantly of that lost son, and it seemed everywhere he turned he saw rugged boys. Men his age were accompanied by stout half-grown youths shaped to their fathers’ wills and callings. Particularly was he irked by the example of William Wentworth, a growing power in New Hampshire whose wife produced sons as a shingle maker rived the shakes from a bolt of cedar. With nine sons what could Wentworth not do? He, Duquet, needed sons badly, and said so to Captain Verdwijnen one evening.

“You are in a hurry with sons as in all else,” said the captain. “If you cannot wait until God grants your wish you might get some ready-made sons from the Weeshuis, that place of orphans, as many as King Priam should you wish. Indeed, I believe Cornelia is on the committee that operates the Weeshuis. You might speak of it to her.” He lit his pipe and looked at Duquet. “And let her choose the boys. Her affection will then be greater. She can see to their schooling, and you can have them trained in business matters or for the sea.”

Duquet was excited by this idea of adopting ready-made sons, and though he did not much wish to leave the choice to Cornelia, he recognized the value of Captain Verdwijnen’s diplomatic suggestion.

Cornelia, who was on a committee that oversaw the operation of a home for aged women, not the Weeshuis, warmed to the idea of doing orphans a good turn. She said she would be pleased to choose several boys for Duquet’s inspection and final decision. And so in 1713 Jan and Nicolaus, both nine years old, became Duquet’s sons and immediately began their schooling and a course in manners and correct behavior that Cornelia wished might rub off on Duquet. He had prepared a speech before he saw the children.

“Many boys would give their right hands for the opportunities that are being given to you. You have a chance to help build one of the great fortunes of the world, a chance to remove yourselves from the street mire. I, too, was a boy of the slums, not even so fortunate as to be taken into an orphanage, and you see I have removed myself from the mud.”

As sometimes happens after children are adopted, late that year Cornelia gave birth to a healthy, fat boy, little Outger, named for his godfather, Outger Verdwijnen. Duquet was as satisfied as he had ever been but could no longer put off his return to Boston and New France. Then, on the way to La Rochelle, a lightning bolt of an idea came to him: why stop at three sons? In La Rochelle could he not choose a poor but promising boy from the streets, a ragged boy as he himself had been, wild to escape poverty and a dismal future? He would find this boy himself and take him to New France that he might learn something of the forests of the New World.

He wrote to Cornelia and Piet Roos and told them of his find, a clever boy of eleven, Bernard, who was now with him in New France. He would bring him to Amsterdam when next he traveled there — likely in the coming autumn — that he might know his mother, his brothers and sister and be properly schooled.

“You see,” said Captain Verdwijnen to Piet Roos. “Perhaps he is developing a kind heart.” Piet Roos kept silent.

20. rough deed

Back in New France, which people more and more called Canada after the old Iroquois word kanata, Duquet was everywhere, examining, prying, measuring, observing and calculating. He had sent Bernard, the boy he found in La Rochelle, to Cornelia for education and manners. Limbs and low-quality hardwood waste became high-quality firewood and every autumn he packed twenty wagons full for the Kébec market and for Paris when he could charter available ships with the promise of a good return cargo of tea or coffee or textiles, spices or china, but without the sure promise of a rich return cargo, let the Parisians freeze for all he cared. Leasing Piet Roos’s ships was well enough, but he needed ships of his own. What fortune if only he could find a competent shipyard in New France. He had heard of some Kébec entrepreneurs’ discussion with the French government but it had come to nothing.

“You know,” he said to Dred-Peacock at one of their Boston meetings, “it is so without hope I fear I must start my own shipyard.”

Dred-Peacock mentioned other possibilities — Boston or Portsmouth on the Piscataqua or even the growing coastal ports in Maine. “You will get a good ship made with local timber at a low price in one of those ports. And do you not know that the colonists build ships especially designed to carry the great pine masts to London? Well, then.”

And yet he delayed. The conversation veered from owning his own ships to the business of selling timber to shipyards. Duquet insisted he wanted English customers.

Dred-Peacock shrugged and connected him to an English shipbuilder and a new but promising yard on the river Clyde in Scotland, now joined to England by the Act of Union in ’07.

“Regard the map, sir,” he said, impatient with Duquet’s hesitation. “It’s the closest point to the colonies — the briefest sailing time. There are signs of success on the Clyde but they need good timbers. They will pay for them. It is an opportunity that cannot be neglected.”

Duquet took the plunge and Dred-Peacock took a goodly share of the profits, which increased year by year. There were good precedents in New France for trading with the enemy — Brûlé, Radisson, des Groseilliers had set the pattern — but arrangements with the English and Scots were at first secret, complex, expensive, even dangerous. It took fifty acres of oak to build one seventy-four-gun warship and in the hardwood stands along the rivers of New France the forests began to fall to Duquet’s ambitions. But he felt hampered by Kébec’s distance from the money pots of the world.

Never did Dred-Peacock present his ill-formed face to Duquet in Kébec; always Duquet made the trip to Boston. As they sat over their papers and receipts in the Sign of the Red Bottle near the wharves, the inn they favored, Dred-Peacock had some advice.

“Duquet, it is past time for you to consider shifting your business operations to Boston, to the colonies.” He signaled to the waiter for another plate of oysters.

“Oh, I think on it,” said Duquet, swirling the ale in his tankard until it slopped over the rim as if that settled the question. “I think on it often. I am half of a mind to do so, sir.” He had observed more hardwoods grew in the south, that great meadows and clearings made both settlement and transportation easier. Massachusetts Bay bustled with shipping. It was the better place for a man of business. And yet.

Dred-Peacock looked at the spilled ale with distaste. Duquet was an ill-bred boor, quite unable to even discern the picturesque, much less appreciate it. It was only his fantastic ability to make money that interested Dred-Peacock. “Damme, sir, it is quite time you acted. Finish with thinking and act. Every day poxy whoresons of millmen push into the forests and gain control over the land. In Maine there are countless white pine mast trees. You know there is a damned great market for these if you can get them on a ship bound for Scotland, England, or even Spain or Portugal.” The dish came, three great succulent oysters gleaming wetly, each as large as a man’s hand.

Duquet nodded but his face was sour. Dred-Peacock went on, his voice vibrating. “Where there is a market and money, the businessman must act. And all this will be immeasurably easier if you operate from Boston rather than bloody Kweebeck. And with my help these affairs can be managed.” He took up the first oyster.

Still Duquet hesitated. He had valuable connections in New France and a lifetime dislike of the English language. Dred-Peacock babbled on.

“And in any case I understand there are many in New France who are starting to believe that the English will one day prevail, even as a hare senses its pursuer’s increasing pace. Nor is it outside the realm of possibility that the colonies will unite, drive out the English and seize New France. Stranger events have occurred. And let me point out that so hungry are the whoreson Scots shipbuilders for the excellent timbers of America that some have removed to the colonies to be close to the supply.”

Now he was in partnership with the two Dutchmen, and several ships belonging to Roos, Verdwijnen and Duquet, but flying British flags, ran the seas between Portsmouth and Boston harbors and the ever more numerous Clyde shipyards. It was, they often told one another, like walking on a web of tightropes, but they swam in money as in a school of sardines. They had only to catch it in their nets. And share it with Dred-Peacock.

• • •

Over the next year, as his sons grew, fired by the detailed and advice-packed business letters Duquet wrote to each of them every Sunday, with Dred-Peacock’s help he began to acquire tracts of woodland in Maine. Dred-Peacock’s genius in the legal procedure of acquiring remote “townships” could not be measured, and his old acquaintance from voyageur days, the surveyor, Jacques Forgeron, scouted out the best timberland, Duquet learning the woods looker’s judgmental process from him. To outsiders Forgeron was a dour man who overcherished his plagued measuring chains. He could use a chain as a weapon, swinging it around and around until it gained velocity and the free end leapt forward to maim. Duquet knew well that long ago he had used that chain in the Old World and then fled to New France to start anew. Duquet thought there were probably many like Forgeron but he only shrugged. The old days counted for very little. Moreover, he was now a partner in Duquet et Fils, perhaps even a friend if a business tie between two friendless men could be so described.

• • •

Duquet and Forgeron landed their canoe one October afternoon on a sandy Maine river shore fronting one of their new white pine properties, twenty thousand acres at a cost of twelve cents an acre. There was a narrow hem of ice along the shaded shoreline. The rich autumn light touched the deciduous trees with xanthene orange and yellow. Their swart shadows fell on the ground like fallen statues. Without speaking the men began to gather firewood. Forgeron held up his hand.

“Listen,” he said quietly. They heard the sounds of chopping not far off and began to move cautiously toward the source.

With an acid jolt of fury Duquet saw unknown men in pitch-blackened trousers cutting his pines, others limbing the fallen trees and yet another scoring them. Two men worked with broadaxes to square the logs. Duquet was sure they had a pit sawmill set up nearby. By their bulging pale eyes and doughy faces he knew them to be English colonists. Although Duquet et Fils had no hesitation in cutting big trees wherever they grew, it was intolerable to be the victims of that practice.

“Holà!” Duquet shouted, then, in his clumsy English, “Who say you come my land, cut my tree?” He was so furious his voice strangled in his throat. Forgeron advanced beside him lightly revolving his chain.

The startled woodsmen stared, then, still gripping their tools, they ran on an oblique course toward the river, where they likely had bateaux. But one with a dirty bandage on his right thigh lagged behind.

Duquet did not pause. He drew his tomahawk from his belt and hurled it, striking the runner’s left calf. The man fell, crying to his comrades for help in a high childish voice. One of the escaping men turned around and stared at Duquet, called something to the fallen one. The confrontation lasted for only a few seconds but left an unfading impression of a man swelling with hatred. Duquet did not forget the man’s mottled slab of face encircled by ginger hair and beard, the yellow animal eyes fixed on him, the sudden turning away and violent run for the river.

“They come from the settlements along the coast,” said Forgeron as they ran forward.

They bound their wounded prisoner, a boy not older than fourteen, and dragged him to a pine, tied him against it in a hollow between projecting tree roots.

“You boy, garçon, talk up or I cut first your fingers. Then your balls. Who you are? What men you with? How you come here?”

The boy folded his lips in a tight crease, in either pain or defiance. Duquet wrenched the boy’s arm and spread his left hand against one of the great humped roots. With a quick slash of his ax he took off a little finger and part of the next.

“Talk or I cut more. You die no head.”

Duquet’s bloody interrogation gave him the information that the Maine thieves were in the employ of a mill owner, a man named McBogle, an agent of Elisha Cooke. Duquet had heard of Cooke for years; all described him as a passionate opponent of Crown authority. But McBogle’s name was new. Although his heart was pounding with anger, Duquet thought Elisha Cooke and perhaps even McBogle sounded like useful men and he fixed their names in his memory. He would learn more from Dred-Peacock.

“Why you come here steal pine?” he said.

“We thought only to cut a few trees. Away from the surveyor’s men.”

“Show your wounds.” When the boy held up his maimed hand Duquet said angrily, “No, not that. Only scratch. Leg wound.” He could smell the stink of infection from a distance. With his good hand the boy unwrapped his right leg and disclosed a deep and rotten gash in the thigh. It was a foul injury. A streak of red inflammation ran up toward the groin.

“How happen?” he demanded.

“Uncle Robert felled a big pine. Broke off a branch that gouged my leg.”

It was an evil mess. In contrast, the cut in the boy’s calf inflicted by Duquet’s hawk was clean though it had nearly severed a tendon, and the chopped finger was a trifle. Nothing to be done. They carried the youth to the interlopers’ camp half a mile downstream, strewn with abandoned clothing and cook pots, a deer carcass suspended in a tree, and laid him near the still-smoldering fire.

“We will stay here,” said Duquet to Forgeron, “as the thieves have prepared a camp for us.” He tried to speak calmly, but he was filled with a greater anger than he had ever experienced. After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done, crossing to the New World, escaping from Trépagny, learning the hard voyageur trade, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, learning to read and write and cipher, traveling to China, all the business connections he had made, these Maine vermin had come to steal his timber.

Forgeron brought their canoe up to the campsite while Duquet searched until he found the trespassers’ pit sawmill. They had been there only a few days, but had the clear intention to saw. The stack of limbed and squared logs told him that. He wondered if they had planned to build a fort. It was said the English were plotting to build forts along all the rivers.

“Let us put our mark on them,” said Duquet, and he and Forgeron took possession of the logs with two deep hatchet slashes on the butt ends. They talked of ways to move them. In the end it seemed a raft floated to the nearest sawmill might be the best way, getting what they could. While Duquet stayed to guard the timber in case the thieves returned, Forgeron went to Portsmouth to hire raftsmen.

During the early evening the mildness went out of the weather. The sky filled with clouds the color of dark grapes, followed by an hour of rain; behind it the temperature dived into winter. Duquet woke at dawn, shivering. There was not a breath of wind but every twig and branch bristled with spiky hoarfrost. In the distance wolves howled messages to each other, their cries filleting the morning. They had likely scented the boy’s blood and infection and would linger out of sight hoping for a chance. Duquet got up and piled more wood on the fire. The wounded boy’s eyes were closed, his face feverish and swollen, cheeks wet with melting frost. Duquet thought he would be dead after one more cold night. Or he might not last until nightfall.

With some urgency he prodded the boy awake and fired questions at him: his name, his village, his family’s house, how many people. But the boy only croaked for water, which Duquet did not give him, and then went silent. He still lived. Duquet spent the short day estimating the board feet in the felled pines.

The light faded early as the growing storm invaded the sky, the wind and sleety snow rattling and hissing in the pines. While there was still enough light to see clearly, Duquet walked over to the prisoner. The boy lay on his back, the right leg bursting with infection, a yellow froth of pus oozing out from under the bandage, the leg a little splayed as though it were detaching itself. Nothing could be done with this burden except wait for him to die — one more cold night. The boy opened his eyes and stared at something across the river. Duquet followed his gaze, expecting to see Indians or perhaps one of the thieves returning. He saw only a wall of pines until a blink of yellow showed him where to look. A tall grey owl sat on a branch, seeing them. Its eyes were very small and set close together like twin gimlets.

The boy spoke. “Help. Me,” he said in English. “Help. Me.”

Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pinecone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with insensate and uncontrollable fury, a life’s pent-up rage. “No one helped me!” he shrieked. “I did everything myself! I endured! I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die! No one helped me!” The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm, closing only when the tomahawk split his brain. Duquet struck the hatchet into the loam to clean it.

In the flying snow he dismantled the sawpit scaffolding and threw the boy into the pit hole, piled the scaffolding on top and set it alight. The gibbous moon rose. Hours later when the burning ceased he went to shovel in the half-frozen excavated soil, but before he hurled the first shovelful he glanced down and saw the black arm bones crooked up as if reaching for a helping hand.

“Foutu! Done for!”

He shoveled.

Forgeron arrived four days later with six men who began constructing a raft of the cut pines. There was no sign of the wounded boy and although Forgeron opened his mouth as if to speak several times, he did not say anything except that the war was making it very difficult to find able-bodied labor.

21. shifting ground

Again Duquet changed, reinventing himself. In Boston, Duquet et Fils became Duke & Sons and he was Charles Duke. Still he kept his enterprise and some holdings in New France. He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

“Do you know aught of that fellow McBogle?” asked Duke, breaking the crust edge from his meat pasty with heavy fingers.

Dred-Peacock, bewigged and togged out, regarded his steaming coffee. “I have not made his acquaintance, but I hear much deleterious talk concerning his ways. Maine is full to the scuppers with woodland entrepreneurs, sawmills, surveyors, armies of tree choppers, potash and turpentine distillers and settlers, every man assaulting the free-to-all timberlands.”

“They think as I do,” said Duke, “so I cannot fault them. But although they love guns beyond telling, and protect themselves, the woods are dangerous with enemies, not only war foes, but the Crown Surveyor’s men. Yet they are only men.”

“The settlers are hard men, right enough, but there are others even harder, mostly in New Hampshire. I mean those men of Scots lineage lately removed from Ulster in Ireland.”

“Surely they are as other mortal men?”

“No. They are different. They are damned strange, cruel men, clannish and proud to a fault, thirsty for vengeance over imagined slights, hard-drinking and inhumanly tough. The whoresons prefer to sleep outside in storms rather than in the comfort of a house. They know the country as the poxy Indians know it and to live free is their banner. The buggers are impervious to cold and heat and they bear pain as the Indians do, stoically and silently, even with relish. The ridges and watercourses are their highways, the forest their shelter. They choose to live in the most remote places. And they are bloody damned key fighters in the escalating antipathy between the French and the English.” He paused and took up his coffee cup, stared into Duke’s eyes.

“Dud McBogle, his brothers and his sons are among these men.”

Duke threw back his head and laughed. “Well, I have heard bugbear stories aplenty and I would class McBogle tales among them. No doubt he eats children as sweetmeats and wears a red fur cloak bespangled with their bones. What do you say when I tell you I consider taking this man on as a partner?”

For once Dred-Peacock had nothing to say.

• • •

The ongoing war and marauding Indians forced Maine’s settlements to cluster along the tidewater margins; among them were several small shipyards. But Charles Duke discovered Penobscot Bay, where the great river discharged into the Atlantic and where he built a large house. He thought himself the first white man here, despising a few French-speaking métis, fruit of the fornicating priests who had lived earlier among the Indians. The land around the bay, called Norumbega by an unknown explorer, was fancied by credulous souls to be the site of a fabulous city crusted with gold and gems, as Kinkenadon or L’Isle Imaginaire. And here mustachioed Henry Hudson had cut the first mast pine in the New World. For that reason alone he liked the place.

Duke’s log house was more like a fort than a dwelling. Half the ground floor was given over to his business room, with its enormous table fashioned from a single slab of pine four feet in width. And it was time to bring his sons, now young men, to the New World and set them to work, although little Outger was still too young to leave his mother.

His Amsterdam sons, Jan and Nicolaus Duke, were fluent in Dutch, French and English with smatterings of German, Frisian and Portuguese. Jan was especially good with numbers and understood the finer points of bookkeeping. He was as forward-looking as a raftsman in a rocky river. Nicolaus, of imposing build, was physically strong and had a ruthless streak that Duke thought would make him feared at the bargaining table. He and Bernard were something of mariners, as both had several times sailed to China on the ships of Piet Roos. Jan and Nicolaus would deal with merchants, contracts and shipping. The French son, Bernard, was on his way from the Baltic, where he had studied the technical details of manufacturing pitch and tar, and where he had picked up a little of the Swedish language and enough Danish to be useful. He would be in charge of naval store production. And he, Charles Duke, the father, would continue to establish contacts, buy up paper townships and arrange for woodsmen and sawmills on the important rivers, to oversee the growing empire. It was time to gather his sons to him. And yet he was not interested in them in any way except an eagerness to recognize proofs of their success. They were the sons he needed. He wrote to Cornelia in English.

Beste Deer Wif.

I hope this liter find you and the childer in good helth I wishd to rite three Dayes pass but found ye Inkwel soe dry no Words in it and by some unhapy chance ye Cup Bord destit of Supply A qart come yester and todaye I take Quil in Hande to rite it is Time my Sons whose Care and Educasun you have fosterd begin Busines Life here with me in Boston and Mane cost New Franc I will rite them eache & mak ye Arangemt firm. I am covincd they will sucede in all our Procedings with ye help of your deer Fater and Unkul They are as capable as I hev ever wish I regret when I am far from and destite of frend hear and hop join you three mos. time I prey that you wil not want for hapy Compnee entil I return.

Charles Duke, Penoscot Bay Cost of Mane

Martch 3. 1717

He lodged his sons in Boston, but they came to the Penobscot Bay house once a month to meet in the business room, to spread out their papers and books on the great pine table.

He had not been wrong. Already, within a few months, the sons began to put forth their impressions and ideas. Jan, with his long bony face and hazel eyes slitted as though squinting into the future, was perhaps the most long-seeing, but they spoke among themselves before presenting him with new ideas.

“Father,” said Jan. “We have noticed that more and more English and Scots shipwrights are settling along the New England coast. We think it would be a sensible move to get a foothold in the shipbuilding industry. It would reduce the necessity of transporting lumber, masts, bowsprits and yards to English or European ports. It is an opportunity.”

“Yes,” said Duke. “I have often felt it would be good to move into shipbuilding, often and often, but I hesitated. You reassure me.”

“Also,” said Bernard, who had confounded them all when he arrived from the Baltic countries with a great horsy wife, Birgit, “pitch and tar. We have pitch pine here, of course, but the superior trees are in the Carolinas. And slaves. I would suggest that we purchase and operate a pitch pine plantation in Carolina.”

“It shall be done,” said the gratified father.

22. disappearance

In Boston one day Dred-Peacock came to him at the Duke warehouse, a cavernous building near the docks, redolent of pine, oak, furs and roots.

“I thought you might wish to know that the man you mentioned some time ago has been asking many people about you. How many sawmills you own, how disgustingly large your fortune may be, what ships you have, what tracts of timber and townships you possess. He himself operates five or six or more sawmills on the Penobscot tributaries and in New Hampshire. He begins to look like a serious rival.”

“Who do you mean? Elisha Cooke?” said Duke.

“His damned hard man, McBogle.”

“Indeed,” said Duke. “I hear this sometimes. He asks questions but we never see him. What is your own perception of this situation?”

“I think as you do, that he should be absorbed. He has the reputation of a dangerous man. I doubt we could buy him out but a partnership may be attractive. He has friendly relations not only with Elisha Cooke and the Wentworths, but with many judges and businessmen here and in New Hampshire. Yet he does not have our contacts across the Atlantic.” It was Dred-Peacock who had the invaluable English and European contacts.

“We must talk with him and see what might be arranged. Where do we find him?”

“That may be difficult. He has what they call a ‘thunderstorm sawmill’—because the only time it runs properly is when the water is high with rain — on the Moosegut and a house nearby. He keeps very much to himself in this remote place. If we go to him we must bring a few men with us for I hear he has a band of ruffians at his beck. I could accompany you a week today. But no sooner.”

“Bien,” said Duke. “Good enough.”

Then, within the hour, Forgeron, who had led a crew of woodsmen to cut one of Duke’s pine-heavy townships, arrived in Boston. His lean face was blotched with a red rash. He hesitated, as though he wished not to speak his news. When he did speak he threw his words down like playing cards.

“We found the best trees taken. The stumps still oozed sap.”

“Who?” said Duke.

“Ne sais pas—don’t know. But there is talk that the man McBogle last week shipped two great loads of masts to Spain. He will have made a fat profit. He is known for tree piracy.”

“I plan to find this man in a week’s time and see what can be arranged. We will work with him.”

“He is not known for compliance.”

“Nor am I. Dred-Peacock will accompany us on the Monday. You must come as well.” Something had to be done about McBogle and they would do it. “It is necessary we go in a body as we do not know the strength of McBogle’s men.” But over the last year Duke’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate, dimness alternating with flashing light and tiny particles gliding through his field of vision like birds in the sky. He said nothing to Forgeron of this, only “what is wrong with your face that it shows so rough and crimson?” Forgeron shrugged.

• • •

The plan was ill-fated. Two days later a packet entered Boston harbor with great sacks of mail. Among Dred-Peacock’s mountain of letters was one informing him that his older brother and nephew had both perished in fire, and that he, Dred-Peacock, had succeeded to the title, the great house (now with a somewhat charred east wing) and the family’s two-thousand-acre estate, Dred Yew in Wiltshire. In seconds his talk of colonial liberty and rights evaporated, his self-definition as a man dedicated to New England self-rule shriveled.

“I must go,” he said to Duke. “It is my responsibility to my family and to the estate — and the great yew tree now in my care. I cannot evade the title nor the responsibility. I leave at once.” In his voice Duke detected a long-suppressed tone of haughtiness. “I will write to you when I have settled my affairs. I believe we can continue our business ventures.”

“Yes,” said Duke. “I quite see it.” Scratch some New England colonists, he thought, and you find Englishmen, as the bark of a tree hides inner rot. “But I cannot believe your chatter about a ‘yew tree.’ What man would leave a fair and rich land for the sake of a haughty tree?”

“It is an immortal tree, centuries old. It has been on my family estate since a time before Christ, since the time when men worshiped yews and oaks. It is nothing you can understand.” What could Duke say to that? Nothing. What mattered was the continuance of their business dealings. And as if that were not enough, word came that Forgeron was ill with a fiery skin inflammation and the quinsy, a putrid sore throat that forced him into his bed. Duke said he would not delay. He would seek out McBogle alone.

• • •

He ordered a canteen of strong black coffee. He would ration it out, drink it cold, eschewing fires as the forest was sown with skulking Indians and French. A schooner took him to the mouth of the Penobscot and he began his solitary journey.

It was spring, rafts of rotten ice riding the current in company with thousands of logs. Crowds of woodsmen stood on the banks snagging the logs slashed with their outfits’ marks of ownership. The work continued all night by the light of enormous bonfires, cat-footed men running out onto the heaving carpet of mixed logs to hook and prod their property to shore. Impossible to put a canoe into that maelstrom. He had ordered his own timber crews to hold back his logs until the river cleared of the floating forest. Now he set out afoot. And noticed two riverbank men turn away from the heaving river and cut obliquely into the forest. He smiled. Did they imagine they were not noticed?

Sometimes he was on dim Indian trails following landmarks almost always obscured by the jagged skyline of conifers, but more often making his way through logging slash and blowdowns. Although timber cutters had worked the area along the river, a mile or so inland was still terre sauvage, and like the ocean it breathed wild grandeur. Tree limbs arched over the silent earth like the dark roof of a tomb vault.

He took an entire day to cross an autumn burn, charred trunks of the smaller trees with their own black limbs tangled around their roots like dropped drawers, still-smoldering logs that could not be quenched. The biggest trees stood lightly scorched but unharmed. Winter snow had converted the ash to black muck. On steep slopes it was the ancient wind-felled monsters that caused the greatest hindrance. Some, whose branches interlinked with those of their neighbors, had pulled them to the ground. Often he had to crawl beneath these barriers. It was not possible to get around them as the way was blocked by other recumbents. He could not count all the streams and bogs. The treetops dazzled, the flashing wings of hundreds of thousands of northward migrating birds beat above him. He saw snowy owls drifting silent through the trees, for they had come into the Maine woods in great numbers that winter and with the turn of the season were retreating to the cold lands. His eyes wearied of broken, wind-bent cedar and glinting swamp water. All one afternoon he had the feeling he was being watched, and as twilight thickened he saw a grey owl flutter to a branch stub and grip him with its clenching eyes. Of all birds he most hated this wretch.

After six days he cut back toward the Penobscot following Moosegut brook; McBogle’s sawmill could not be very far distant. He listened for the sound of falls. He felt the mill through his feet before he saw it, the metal clank and rasp of the driveshaft gears and pitman arm sending a thumping rhythm into the ground. It was spring, he thought, and the entire forest would soon reverberate with the noise of multiple mills as water ran freely again. His eyes troubled him, tree branches and needles sparked. Abruptly there was the mill, a heavy log structure to take the weight of gang-saw machinery. And there was Dud McBogle standing above him in a razzle of flinching lights.

Recognition was instant. Dud McBogle was the ginger-whiskered timber thief who had long ago turned back and called something to the wounded boy. Duke felt a red cloud of danger envelop him. His blood instantly flowed back on itself. The teeth of the moving saws gnawed and glinted. He saw that he was fatally imperiled. Exitus in dubio est.

“Been expecting you,” said Dud McBogle in an easy tone. “I went back, you see. I went back and dug up the pit where you burned my boy.” The two riverbank men stepped out of the corner and stood beside him. What could not happen began to happen.

“Not yet!” blurted Duke. “I’m not done—”

But at the age of fifty-three with his fortune only half-secured he was done.