Barkskins

32. a funeral

On the day of old Forgeron’s funeral, unusually warm for mid-November Boston, the sky was covered with mild cloud. A dozen elderly men sat in the front pews to remember the surveyor who had made them fortunes with timberland. At last the three Duke brothers, Jan, Nicolaus and Bernard, aided by the company bookkeeper, Henk Steen, carried the clear-pine casket, lacquered and rubbed to a glass-like glare, an elegant burial case for a man who had spent almost forty years taking the measure of Pinus strobus. Jan silently willed Bernard not to stumble, not to fall. Outger, the youngest brother, should have been there but he refused to leave the house on Penobscot Bay, refused to give up the great table, a single board from the largest pine Duquet had ever cut. This icon belonged in the company’s Boston council room.

“I need it for my work,” Outger had said with passion.

“What sort of work would that be?” Bernard had asked of the ceiling; he thought Outger an imbecile. It was said that Indians visited him often. He could not be depended on for anything except to receive his annual stipend. Still, he should have been there.

The sermon had gone on for two hours, but at the graveside things began to move briskly. A rising wind wrinkled the milky sky. Nicolaus shifted from foot to foot, his boots gleaming like oiled hooves. All warmth leaked from the day as the wind hauled to the north. The brothers looked knowingly at each other. It was the Forgeron weather curse. The sudden chill urged the minister on. They lowered the coffin into the dark hole, and at last came the words “rest in peace.”

The brothers and the skeleton-thin Henk Steen, one of the many Dutch orphan protégés who came to Duke & Sons as apprentices over the years, walked away from the graveside. In a body the fittest mourners walked to Nicolaus Duke’s house, treading in the center of the street, where it was smoothest.

“Do come along, Henk,” Nicolaus said to the bookkeeper, who hovered at the edge of the crowd. “Join us in farewell to the old fellow.” Nicolaus was the best diplomat among the brothers and had learned the art of persuasion from his grandfather Piet Roos, with whom he had made voyages to China and Japan. Now his dark hair, when not covered with a wig, was ragged grey. His face and neck had swollen with fat though he still moved easily, unlike Jan and Bernard.

Deceived by the mild forenoon, none of them was warmly dressed. They hurried on past a wooded lot, a large garden stiffened by the last week’s frosts, until they saw the candlelight glowing enticingly in Nicolaus’s front windows. Through the wavery glass they could see his wife, Mercy; Bernard’s wife, Birgit; and the Panis slave girls passing to and fro with tureens and pitchers, for Bernard had brought Panis — Pawnee — Indian slaves down from Ville-Marie.

The door to the best parlor stood invitingly open with Mercy welcoming them. In the center of the room a long table covered with a fine turkey carpet presented the collation of covered dishes, an array of silver and twist-stem glasses. Some fragrant wood burned in the fireplace; Steen thought it might be a few pieces of sandalwood to perfume the room, a scrap of Charles Duquet’s oriental plunder. Beeswax candles in brass sconces lit the room, their trembling light reflected in a large pier-glass mirror. Henk Steen gaped at the dozen black walnut chairs with cushions — so many, so rich.

“Please enter, dear guests, come in,” said Mercy, guiding them into the warmth. She wore a loose grey silk saque pleated at the shoulders over a scarlet bodice and underskirt, her wig low and neat. She often suffered from crushing headaches that sent her to a quiet room and she now silently prayed to get through the evening without an attack. Their children, Patience, Piet and Sedley, lived nearby, the two sons well settled into the family lumber business. Patience had married a boatbuilder, Jeremiah Deckbolt.

• • •

Henk Steen hung back in the entryway staring at the luxuries and rich clothing of the guests. He felt out of place, and longed for his cold little room, but Nicolaus urged him to take a tankard of steaming cider laced with rum. Mercy led him to the cold sliced meats and Birgit’s famous horseradish sauce, so stinging, she said, it would make the devil gasp. “Hardly an inducement to try it,” Steen muttered to himself and his hand veered away. He took a small marzipan cake. The fireplace crackled and spoke to itself. Yes, thought Steen, Nicolaus Duke lived very well. And why not, with Duke & Sons’ swelling sales to the timber traders whose millmen converted logs into planks, barrel staves and clapboards, hogshead staves, shingles, masts, spars and bowsprits, dike timbers. All the Duke brothers lived gallant lives, except perhaps the strange one, Outger, who kept to the disappeared father’s house in Penobscot Bay and whom Steen had never seen and imagined as a crabbed hermit clutching a blackthorn stick. The marzipan cake surged in his gut and he thought he might have to rush outside.

Mercy glanced over the room to see if everyone had a cup of comfort, a chair, someone with whom to converse. In truth she wished the company were different. These old men with their timber holdings! She wished very much to entertain (and be entertained by) the wealthy Boston families connected with commercial shipping, quite different from the fishing boat owners who had thought themselves the crème de la crème in her parents’ day. The merchant shipping families had replaced them and built magnificent houses. She and Jan’s wife, Sarah, gossiped enviously of their social doings. But never had any member of the Duke families been invited to their collations or soirees. Mercy told Nicolaus that she longed to give a grand party and invite these worthies, but Nicolaus said, “My dear, better not. You do not wish us to be regarded as jump-ups”—that most odious word.

Bernard and his lanky Danish or Norwegian wife, Birgit, stood in a corner talking with Joab Hitchbone, who was even older than old Forgeron. Birgit spoke in her odd accent, smiling and nodding.

What a jolt they all had felt when Bernard returned with Birgit from one of the Baltic or Scandinavian countries, precisely which one was never clear. She once told Mercy she had been born near the great Kongeegen tree in Denmark. It was a shock, for Bernard had been a remarkably attractive youth with wavy hair and cobalt-blue eyes. His habitual expression indicated he was about to smile and a mole on his left cheek encouraged that impression. Cornelia, his adoptive mother, had imagined that he was the by-blow of some French aristocrat and a pretty seamstress. He was still handsome though the dark hair had disappeared and the fine jawline had been replaced with a jowl; he limped. No one understood what had drawn him to Birgit. But their marriage, though childless, had lasted nearly thirty years. Birgit kept an orderly house and a rich table. She spent much time in the kitchen, not content to leave cookery to the slaves. Despite hoopskirts she preferred to mix and singe and roast herself. Her flummeries were renowned.

Sarah, the only daughter of the wealthy molasses and sugar importer James Pickering, had been a beauty with dark oiled hair and melting hazel eyes. She rejected hoops in favor of stiff petticoats that swelled out her skirts at the ankle, showing pink silk stockings, an unseemly mode for a woman in her fifties. Their oldest son, George Pickering Duke, had recently returned from reading law at the Inns of Court in London. For years he had struggled against being pushed into this profession, saying he wished to go to sea, not as an officer but as a common sailor, to visit other lands.

“George,” said Jan, “it is necessary to the business to have a trained legal mind among us. You will have a good income and in later years you can see the world in a more comfortable manner than you would before the mast. Only ask Bernard what that life is like.”

He had, in fact, talked with Uncle Bernard, who froze his bone marrow with stories of typhoons, men overboard, the paralyzing Doldrums, the boredom, the eternal work, the noisome ports, the capricious cruelty of captains. George Pickering Duke was dissuaded and took his adventure in books.

Bernard spoke to Joab Hitchbone, young Piet standing with them. “Old Forgeron would have taken joy in knowing the day started with good weather.” Hitchbone sucked at his cup of syllabub. “And how goes your pitch production? Do you still travel down to the pinewoods in the Carolinas?”

Bernard made a wry face. “Oh no. I have ever preferred the Québec end of the business. We still operate logging enterprises in the north. As for Carolina, young Piet here”—Bernard touched his nephew’s shoulder—“took on that responsibility. He works two hundred black slaves and our pitch and tar are best quality. We’ve done well despite England’s punitive laws.”

“I return to the plantation in several days’ time,” said young Piet. The older men ignored him.

“Forgeron,” said old Hitchbone, “a good man, but you know — he had some strange ideas. His outlook remained both French and English, surely an uncomfortable mixture.”

Bernard’s eyebrows rose. “Perhaps you do not know that Forgeron was born in Ostende, not France. He encouraged our father to deal with the Low Countries. Father always said that Hollanders had an innate sense of landforms. That was a talent, he said, that made good timberland lookers such as Forgeron.”

But old Hitchbone went on. “He deplored wholesale cutting, those who felled trees but took only the trunks and burned the rest. He had a frugal mind.”

“Oh, he was ever a leading spirit in controversies,” Bernard said. “I well remember his sentiments. He believed that men, when confronted with a vast plenitude of anything, feel an irresistible urge to take it all, then to smash and destroy what they cannot use.”

Old Hitchbone peered at him. “Hah! As we might descend on our host’s table, gobble the dainties, then shiver the cups and plates on the hearth?”

“Few of us feel that urge, I trust,” said Bernard.

“I meant it as an example of Forgeron’s thinking. Better you remember your Bible: ‘And God said replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and every living thing that moveth, and every green tree and herb.’ Of course, here in New England there is such bounty of every wild resource that there is no limit to the assets, whether fish or furs or land or forests.”

Bernard did not correct Hitchbone’s misquotes; the old man was known for twisting scripture to suit his intent.

“Then perhaps, with all this bounty, you will explain the shortage of firewood in Boston and its ever-rising price? A good thing for Duke and Sons, but driving some inhabitants away from the city.”

Old Hitchbone refused to be drawn; he examined the low level of syllabub in his cup. “The Indans. That is our problem. The Indans do not use land correctly because of their raw roaming and hunting. As the Bible tells us, it is a duty to use land. And there is so much here that one can do what one wishes and then move on. You cannot make the Indans understand that the correct use is to clear, till, plant and harvest, to raise domestic stock, to mine or make timber. In a nutshell, they are uncivilized. And un-Christian.”

Bernard dipped his head, not wishing a quarrel, but thought to himself that King Philip’s War had not come about through some vague whim of the Indians. They had fought like rabid dogs to keep their lands and they had lost. Why was hunting and plucking berries not considered as use of the land? But he kept this question to himself. “Well, sir, although Forgeron scalped Indians for the bounty, he also had Indian friends. And he once or twice remarked that the reason New France did not prosper was because of the fur trade, which pulled all the able men away from the settlements and thereby cost a great deal in enterprise and development.”

“There may be something in that,” said old Hitchbone. “But I might advance popishness being their great pitfall. And their low population for all that they breed like mice.”

Bernard ignored this and went on. “He was ever a man of contradictions. He urged Duquet et Fils to keep a hand in the fur trade — which we have done in a small way. He thought that if a certain military triumph occurred, trade could revive.”

“They say the Ohio valley is stuffed with beavers. If the English are successful in seizing New France — the inevitable triumph you avoid naming — that trade might become lucrative once more.”

“Yes, Forgeron said much on various points which did not always make him agreeable company. One felt extremely nervous near him, not only because he attracted lightning and high winds. And yet he himself did more to drive down the forest and the Indans than anyone else.”

“And so in him we see the double nature of man quite revealed.”

“He profited in many ways,” said Hitchbone, who had himself profited in those ways.

“I only saw our father angry with him one time. They were speaking of the Wentworths and Forgeron had the temerity to tell Father that he — Father — could never hope to become one of the merchant aristocracy. That the Wentworths had connections with the English peerage and knew well how to move in those exalted circles. By my God, Father flew into a fury.”

Hitchbone smiled, returned to the Wentworths. “I remember what your father used to say about old Wentworth. ‘His foot shall slide in due time.’ Deuteronomy.”

Bernard laughed. “It ain’t yet slid. A wily and unscrupulous man.”

“Forgeron amassed considerable wealth, but I was always surprised that he lived as a wild Indan on game and maize. His was a lonely life.” He lowered his voice. “I wonder who will inherit his properties.”

Bernard’s eyebrows rose. He ignored the question. No doubt everyone in the room was squirming with curiosity to know Forgeron’s bequests, not the usual tiresome accounts of linens, laying hens and chairs, but his timberland holdings. “Perhaps not so lonely. I have heard he had a dozen Indian consorts. May I fetch you another dollop of syllabub?”

“My dears,” said Birgit, striding up to them, “the syllabub is quite finished. Do try the maple cream cakes. Piet, dear boy, come with me instead of standing here like a fence listening to these old fogies mumble. There is a gentleman I think you would like to know.” Joab Hitchbone thought once more that she had an especially sweet and gentle voice, the voice of an innocent girl, not the tough old matron she looked.

• • •

While the Indian slaves cleared the table the women followed Mercy into the second parlor, where there were turkey-work chairs with the look of wooden animals, four or five small tables scattered among them like waterholes. The women sat in front of the fire sipping China tea and laughing over rumors that the pope worshiper Duc de Richelieu had invited dinner guests to dine in the nude. “And,” said Birgit, “we have heard that after his spring ‘success’—if we may call it that — over the English at Port Mahon, his chef invented a sumptuous dressing of olive oil and egg yolk. The duke called it ‘mahonnaise.’ ” They made some wordplay over the juxtaposition of nude diners and dressed viands.

“The table looked brilliantly handsome tonight, dear Mercy,” said Birgit.

“Oh, pshaw! Nothing compared to your exquisite collations — those blue dishes with gold rims.”

“You really are too kind, my dear. But, you know, four of them slid to a smash in that untoward earthquake a year past. We nearly fell out of the bed. I told Bernard that if this is one of the delights of New England I would prefer Chimborazo. I still do not understand how, if the tremor was located at Cape Ann as they say, it damaged so much in Boston.”

Mercy sighed and said, “I expect there will be more such grief in our days as human depravity continues to irk the Omnipotent.”

• • •

The evening wore on, Mercy several times raising her hand to her temple and sighing. At last she admitted what they all knew.

“My dear guests, what I dreaded has come to pass.” She called the slave girl to bring cold water and her headache powder.

“I must retire,” she said and went to a back room scented with orris root and reserved for headache recovery, murmuring general farewells.

“Poor Mercy,” said Sarah. “Those headaches are truly her cross. A pity after such an evening.”

“Yes, but a great deal of work. Mother is not really strong enough for this,” Patience said and waved her hand at the room and all that was in it.

The guests, taking the hostess’s retreat as a signal, began to leave by ones and twos. Nicolaus pressed their hands, made apologies for Mercy and begged them to come again soon on a happier occasion. Henk Steen the bookkeeper bowed, bowed and grinned as he backed toward the door. Nicolaus half-expected him to tug his forelock.

“Peace be with you and your syllabub,” murmured Joab Hitchbone, doddering down the steps.

33. an interesting case

Then the outsiders were gone except for Jan’s hollow-chested father-in-law, James Pickering, once a notorious molasses smuggler, and the judge, Louis Bluzzard. The judge’s trousers were too thin and emphasized the manly bulge, the more disturbing as he was elderly.

“Judge, do show my brothers that paper,” said Jan, his long fingers tapping the side of his rum glass. Jan was the one who clinched deals with merchants and arranged contracts; he worked out complex shipping arrangements. He had the duty of smoothing the ruffled feelings of men who were aggrieved by Duke & Sons’ business proceedings, in part because he had the dispassionate nature of one who cares for nothing, too often mistaken for neutrality. In his private mind he wished the ax for all royalists.

The judge passed around a rather grubby newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. The page showed an illustration of a snake cut into many parts, each segment with the label of one of the colonies and the motto below, JOIN OR DIE.

“There are so many papers these days,” George said, rolling his eyes.

“Ha!” said Nicolaus. “That’s that fellow Franklin. I knew his brother James. A family distinguished for their seditious bosoms. Ben is back here or in Connecticut now and I can tell you that this joined colonial snake he calls for can never happen. There are too many here who are English to the bone, for all they were born here. And the tobacco colonies are markedly different from the fish and forest colonies.” For decades Duke & Sons had managed a precarious balance between their French allegiances and the new ambitious generation of American-born men. A separation of opinions was beginning to surface.

Young Piet ventured a comment. “The forest legislation the Crown has imposed on us has driven a wedge between colonists and England, has it not?” The older men ignored his dim-witted observation.

James Pickering, showing a violet silk waistcoat, spoke. “Let me remind you, dear friends, that this city harbored two of the regicide judges a century back. There are loyalists sprinkled about but the colonial heart desires independence and cherishes a distaste for kings and their men. It is nothing new. And is not forest legislation despised by all American businessmen?” He turned and spat gracefully into the fire.

Jan said, “The tangled situation grows more tangled every day. Louis, tell them what you told me.”

“Ah. That. I ventured to say that England’s plans of attack increase the danger to your forest property in Québec. When they take Québec they will take your woodlands.” The judge flicked a glance at Bernard. He considered him a little too fond of French Canada.

“Perhaps,” said Bernard, “but remember that New France has a strong militia. The regional troops are excellent and we have good aid from our Indians. Governor-General Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, I think, is intelligent and knows the country. I have heard that this Montcalm prefers to fight in European style, sieges and rigid opposing lines — Braddock’s great fault. But in New France we have developed the stealthy woodcraft style of the Indians.”

“That is the situation here as well,” said the judge, sneering a little. “Your French half-breeds are hardly singular in their fighting abilities. But beware — there are many houses in Boston where your opinions would sound as treason.”

Bernard ignored this dart. “I have heard also that Montcalm and Vaudreuil loath each other and show it openly.” He sighed. “When the French defeated and killed Braddock I thought that would be the end of it.”

The judge shook his head and gave a hard barking laugh. He stared at Bernard. “I think not. I thoroughly believe England will seize New France using colonial troops however long it takes. The battle on Lake George last September shows their perseverance.” His tone was combative.

Jan thought it time to raise the question. He looked at his son. “George, after your study of the law, what is your opinion on this difficult matter? Where should Duke and Sons bestow its allegiance? France or England?”

“Would it were that simple,” muttered Bernard.

“In our law readings this particular situation never arose, but there were several of us from the colonies who discussed it privately among ourselves.” George puffed himself up a little.

“And what did you think?” Bernard suspected that there in the heart of London studying English law, George would have been and probably still was an advocate for eternal obeisance to England.

“We thought that in terms of law and jurisdictions the colonies were drawing ever more distant from England. The veer became sharply evident in 1686, when the British government, concerned that we were growing too independent and too wealthy on our own abilities, sent Governor Andros to us and revoked our colonial charter.” Well, thought Bernard, so much for obeisance.

Nicolaus said, “After two generations of colonial self-government this was a gross error on their part. Nor did getting rid of Andros repair the situation.”

George boldly put in his oar. “And what do we have today! Englishmen in positions of power who make the decisions that affect us, who rarely know anything of the colonies, have no real experience here nor do they wish to have. They put forth their ukases and rules based on ignorance and self-interest. What matters to them is how much they can squeeze from the colony into their personal strongboxes.”

“It seems not so different in the example of France and New France,” said Bernard, rather surprised at lethargic George’s impassioned tone. “It may be the misfortune of all colonies.”

“If the rancorous discontent continues — well, I can point out a legal example that is particularly telling for Duke and Sons as it concerned cutting the forest.” George felt his importance.

“I wonder if I know your reference,” said Nicolaus, squinting his eyes. “Do you mean the Dregg case of about ten years ago?”

“No, I had in mind the Frost case — somewhat earlier than Dregg. In our private discussions we student colonials thought it an important case. It came up only once with the faculty. A lawyer at Inns of Court saw it as evidence of the sly and impudent colonial character.”

Bernard looked at young George. “Will you relieve us of our ignorance? What was this ‘case’?”

“On the face of it, Uncle Bernard, it could have been construed as yet another example of the common tendency of Massachusetts court judgments in favor of colonial lumber millmen accused of trespassing on private land and cutting what they found there.”

“Yes,” said Nicolaus. “Those liberal courts were one of the attractions of the region for our father. And we have endured Surveyors General of His Majesty’s Woods, those damnable wretches, for more than sixty-five years. It is right that they suffer in the courts.” He gave a small whinny.

“And how does this dispute you mention differ?”

George looked at Judge Bluzzard.

The judge refilled his glass of rum. “It started, as many of our problems do, in London — think of the massive land grants to Mason and Gorges.” He swallowed.

“To the point, in 1730 the Crown granted a five-year mast procurement license to Ralph Gulston, a Turkey merchant, one of those swarthy fellows who trade with the Levant. The license allowed him to enter any Maine lands belonging to the Crown in 1691—id est, public land — and cut mast pines for the Royal Navy.” He nodded at George.

George set out the case of trespass, which hinged on the date of 1691, when the land in question belonged to the Crown. “After some delay, Gulston hired a colonial logger, William Leighton, to cut the pines for him. And through the winter of 1733–34 Leighton cut them and dragged them out. No one objected. However, in the passage of years since 1691, title to the land had passed to an American, John Frost, of Berwick, Maine. The Royal Surveyor General chose to ignore Frost’s title. When spring came in 1734, John Frost, waving his legal title, sued Leighton for trespass.”

“I think I know how this must end,” said Bernard. “But continue.”

“Yes. The court — no surprise — found for Frost.”

“By God, I now recall the hubbub,” said Jan. “Leighton stupidly paid the judgment, did he not?”

“He did,” said George, “but—” He extended his hand as though announcing the kingpin fact on which all turned. “On the other side of the ocean when Gulston heard, he began to turn his monstrous wheels. He had the King’s ear. In due time a royal order arrived in Boston.”

Judge Bluzzard, smiling like a wolf, took up the tale.

“It was not until June of 1738 that the hearing on the motion came before the court. Everyone was astonished when the court declared it had no authority to execute that royal order. The court’s attitude was that its authority was to set out laws and hold courts for events that occurred only within the province. They claimed they had no power to enforce what they referred to as ‘a foreign judgment.’ It was the same as if they had declared an intention to disobey that royal order. Do you see? It was the same as if they had said, ‘The King is a foreigner and he is nothing to do with us.’ It was a triumph for the independent American spirit.”

“Sir!” cried Jan, as if to warn of agents who might have heard this traitorous remark.

Bernard closed the discussion by bringing them back to the simpler question of how they should choose sides — England or France. “We may ask ourselves what Father would do.”

“Hardly difficult. He threw in his lot with the English when he left New France.”

“Father did not reckon on the growing discontent of the colonies with each other and with England as Franklin’s severed snake shows. Today our situation is rather different.”

“I agree,” said Jan. “There is increasing murmuration that the colonies should join together and flout England. We already do so flout when it comes to timber and shipbuilding, to smuggling and molasses. The constant promulgation of punitive acts and taxes do threaten our region’s livelihood. If we were not the creature of England we would thrive greatly.”

Bernard smiled. “As businessmen must we not maintain cordial relations with all parties? The French, the English and the colonials both south and north — and the Wentworths?”

“Yea,” said Jan. “We must remain cordial with all factions, including the English, and often test the direction of the wind. And stay aware of new Acts. The Crown seems as determined to shackle us as we are to evade the bonds.”

“Hear, hear,” said Pickering. The rum bottle made its rounds.

Bernard came up to them holding his wife’s blue woolen cloak. “It is time,” he said gently, and they slid out the door.

Young Piet was wrapping up in his own cloak when his cousin George came over to him. He spoke sotto voce. “Cousin, shall we meet again? I must leave for Carolina in three days’ time. I wish us to be friends as one day we will work together for the company. I feel we — and Sedley — represent the young blood of the family. Do you know the Wolf’s Den tavern?” George was twenty-six and Piet a year younger.

“Well enough. Do you prefer it to the Bear Tavern or the Turkie Cock?”

“I do — quiet and less chance of a drunken hubbub. Let us meet there tomorrow evening.” They touched hands and young Piet went out into the fresh night with its sweet odor of woodsmoke and the not-distant evergreen forest.

34. the thing in the trunk

The Wolf’s Den was a quiet and pleasant tavern with half a dozen small tables, and a commodious fireplace at one end of the room. The place was empty except for the pockmarked innkeeper, busy decanting a keg into bottles. The two cousins went to the smallest table near the fireplace. Both ordered hot peppered rum, for it was a cold and windless night that promised a hard frost. Piet stretched out his hands to the dying fire.

“I relish a good fire. In Europe and England I am always cold with their stingy little twig arrangements in fireplaces the size of soup bowls. Only here do we drive the cold away with a proper blaze. This one needs replenishing.”

The innkeeper, overhearing, said, “We were to lay a new back log this morning, but one of the men was detained. He is here now.” He held up a finger indicating a short wait. Within minutes four men, one of them a colossus crowned with dirty white hair, all redolent of fresh air and tree bark, came into the room. The innkeeper came to their table. “You gentlemen may wish to move to a more distant table to avoid the commotion. Robert Kemball, who is necessary to the task, has only now arrived.” That would be the big man, thought Piet.

The door opened and through it came a bolt of cold air and the men lurching under the weight of a monstrous green beech log eight feet long and two feet in diameter. They got it into the great fireplace with grunts and swaying and shoving, with remarks on its hundredweights. The innkeeper rushed forward with an iron bar to lever the great log to the back. Then came a hemlock forestick of considerable dimension, and the innkeeper heaped ashes onto the fresh wood to slow combustion. A boy brought in a basket of pitch pine splinters and in a minute or two a young blaze filled the room with heat and dancing light. The innkeeper gave each of the men a glass of rum and a coin, slapped Robert Kemball on a shoulder like an ox rump. He looked at Piet and George, asking if they would return to their original table with a questioning gesture of his arm. But now the fire was too hot to sit near and they stayed where they were.

“Ah,” said George Pickering Duke, swigging his toddy and patting his red lips. Piet, as angular as tree branches, nodded and smiled. They were quiet for a long time, enjoying the fire’s warmth and the hot spirit.

“I wonder we have not met like this before,” said George, who saw his cousins rarely. “Neither you nor Sedley. But one day, not too distant, you and I will make the decisions for the company of what should be done and what not done.”

“Yes. We should meet more often. Of course, you are sometimes in Carolina.”

“Unfortunately. But I do find reasons to return to Boston.” They sat in comfortable silence. George cleared his throat. “I assume, following last night’s discussion, that you would side with the colonists rather than England or France.”

“Yes, I would. And I think Uncle Bernard would support New France rather than France itself. Although he has lived in Boston so long he may be on the side of the colonies.”

“So much of the news we get is conjecture.”

“Indeed. And much is, I suspect, deliberately misleading.”

George stretched out his legs and broke into their meditations. “Dear cousin, I have a somewhat private question for you.”

“Ah?”

“Have you ever clapped eyes on our uncle Outger?”

“Yes. But only once. The same day that you saw him.”

“I? I have never seen him. He is a mysterious and unknown figure to me.”

“No, no. You saw him. Surely you remember that day when we gave the birds great happiness? It was springtime and we must have been seven or eight years old. Not older.”

“That occasion of the birds’ rejoicing is fixed forever in my memory. But what of Uncle Outger?”

“Do you not remember a thin little man with wild eyes spreading bedsheets over a table and telling us to get away from him?”

“I do. I remember his violent expostulations and the way he swung the sheets around as though he were raising sails. Surely that wasn’t—”

“That was Uncle Outger. He is said to have many connections abroad, men of science to whom he writes and sends specimens of plants and weeds.”

“That mad old—? That man is our famous uncle Outger? He sends weeds to men of science?”

“Indeed. To them the weeds of New England are novel.”

“So that was Uncle Outger. I am horrified.” He called for two more hot rum flips. “My truest memory is of the birds and what we found in that old trunk.”

The innkeeper brought the hot drinks, the cousins held up their glasses and remembered.

Their parents had been closeted with the mad uncle in what they called the “old assembly room.” The boys had explored the house, crept up the creaking narrow stairs to an attic. A small and filthy window let in the only light. There was a desiccated owl carcass in one corner, which gave them a pleasant frisson. A leathern trunk stood against a low wall and they were drawn to it, worked at the rusty hasp, trying to guess what might be inside, then leapt back as the lid flew up with a crash and showered them with dust and owl feathers. They waited. George then walked boldly up to the trunk and looked inside. With a scream he bolted for the stairs crying, “It’s alive!” Young Piet galloped beside him. “What? What was it? A wolf?”

“Maybe a wolf! Maybe a Indan! It was a horrible hairy thing. It looked at me. It moved!”

It took long minutes for them to creep up the stairs again. All was quiet. The trunk stood open, the owl lay in its corner.

They approached the trunk, looked inside. The thing, all twists and tangles, did not move very much, but it gave off a sense of suppressed liveliness. Piet reached inside very slowly and touched it, then sprang back.

“Very hairy,” he said. “Nasty.”

It was George’s turn to touch it. He did so and even, to show his boldness, closed his fingers on the mass for a few seconds before backing away. In truth they both knew what it was but it served their mood to pretend it was an incarnation of evil. Piet wrenched at the begrimed attic window and raised it to admit light.

At last they lifted the mass and for the first time in more than thirty years Duquet’s wig resurfaced. They hauled it around the attic, draped it like a shroud over the owl, tried to throw it at each other though it was heavy. At last George dragged it over to the window and stuffed it through the opening. It fell on the ground below with the whoosh of a gassy cow.

“George Pickering! Young Piet!” called Patience from below. “What antic gambols are you practicing up there? You are making more noise than the militia. Go out into the garden at once.”

In the fresh air their prize looked less interesting. Piet got a strip of leather from the stable and tied it onto the wig. They ran with it, the hairy mass bounding and gathering twigs. When Piet’s mother Mercy called them to come and have a dish of apple slump, they left it in the brambles. Later the adults returned to the assembly room, ever talking, and the cousins drifted outside once more. A marvelous sight! Birds were wrenching hairs from the wig.

“They’re building their nests with it,” said Piet. “They are very well pleased,” said George. They watched for a long time and even as their carriage drove away in late afternoon they saw birds flying in the direction of the garden. In this adventure a childhood friendship formed.

• • •

“Yes,” said George, who knew nothing of his grandfather Charles Duquet, “it was the memorable day of mad Uncle Outger’s wig. Had he seen us he would have become madder.”

Young Piet got up and unnecessarily prodded the fire, driven by masculine instinct. Fresh sparks roared up the chimney and heat pulsed out.

“That’s the way,” said George as the warmth licked his face. “And what of your brother, Sedley? He was not at the funeral or the gathering.”

“No, Eugenia is near her time and Dr. Perry advised complete bedrest. Sedley felt he should stay with her as she is very delicate — and may not survive.”

Into George’s mind leapt a cruel sentence he had read somewhere in his London days, the comment about colonial American women by a Mr. Ward: “the Women, like Early Fruit, are soon ripe and soon Rotten.”

Piet talked on. “Moreover, Sedley always disliked old Forgeron so Father excused him.” He sat down again and looked into his toddy mug; still plenty in it. “Do you ever return to London since your studies?”

“No. Though I very much like voyages. You know, I wanted to follow the sea but Father insisted I read law. Our fathers seem to think only on business. Business and business again.” Everyone in the family knew of George’s fondness for sea adventure tales, stories of shipwreck and castaways, ships that disintegrated in violent storms, wild men with spears on remote islands who captured sailors and ate them raw, rogue waves that swallowed entire fleets. When the London bookseller sent a copy of Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, George was enamored for weeks and read the book over and over.

“I am glad to hear you like voyages, as we may be making one. Father recently had a letter from Uncle Outger, that uncle you have utterly forgotten. He plans a trip to Amsterdam next year to see his aged mother and sister, Doortje. Father says we must all go as Grandmother Cornelia is very old and infirm. And we cousins have never seen Auntie Doortje.”

They talked for a while about the ongoing wars, Major Rogers and his bands of ruffians, putting off the moment of going out into the night. But it was late. Piet looked at the handsome watch pinned to his waistcoat. “I dream that the colonies will unite. At the moment there is jealousy and business competition among them. For Duke and Sons there is much that should be changed, beginning with certain difficulties in North Carolina. I hope we may meet and work out ways to improve the company’s income when you and I and Sedley are in a position to do so.”

“And improve the Duke social standing. At present, ignored as we are, it is damned difficult to meet girls of interest and with good connections.” Piet got up, paid the innkeeper, put on his heavy cloak and moved toward the door. “Are you coming?” he said to George.

“Yes, as far as the church. The fresh air will do us good and dissipate the fumes of rum.”

They stepped out of the Wolf’s Den into a blaze of stars so flagrant and shuddering the sky seemed to emit sounds like plucked wires.

“Cold!” said Piet.

“Very cold,” said George. “Very, very cold.” They breathed the tingling piney air. Yet there was the sense of an implacable, even malevolent, force bending the meteorite-streaked night.

35. Etdidu

Bernard Duke, fifty-five, had two great problems. His mind gnawed at them constantly. The first worry was his successor. There was no one in the family who could take on the crucial landlooker’s job of assessing the valuable timber on Duke & Sons’ vast acreages after he was gone. He himself had learned from Charles Duquet before the man’s unexplained disappearance, then from old Forgeron, but among the nephews he had found no one remotely interested in judging trees, estimating cubic volumes and board feet.

Nicolaus’s son Sedley had come out with him several times. But even explaining the difference between linear and piece measurements made Sedley’s eyes glaze, and working out the cubic volume of a tapering eighty-foot log was beyond him. When they were moving through an area of standing timber, Bernard making notes and calculations and then, moving to another plot, Sedley stumbled behind.

“Uncle, is it not possible just to hire a surveyor who can say whether or nay there are big trees worth cutting?”

“It’s a business,” said Bernard one noon after a repast of scorched stale bread and hot tea, sitting on a stump and lighting his pipe. “We need to know what timber we’ve got and what board feet it will make. Finding a good surveyor is difficult. It is arduous work, and inaccurate estimates and outright lies abound. Surveyors we have tried have sometimes submitted false maps and false reports to save themselves trouble. They have sworn that trees were sound, trees that proved rotten or with hollow centers.”

He sucked on the pipe, knocked out the dottle and refilled it. “It smokes hot,” he said. “I must get a new one.” He took a burning stick from their noon fire and lit the tobacco.

“Those surveyors accepted bribes from the Wentworths and others to wrongly value a stand of timber as sound. One time our cutters arrived with their axes and found a thousand stumps left by timber thieves. The stumps were grey with age; id est, the surveyor had never been there. Another sent a report of a thick-forested township — we were confronted with ashes.” He made a face, emptied his half-smoked pipe again and put it in his pocket.

Sedley, on an adjacent stump, waggled his feet, slapped at mosquitoes. He saw a fine tendril of smoke coiling up from the duff where Bernard had knocked out his pipe. The lecture continued.

“It takes an experienced man more than a week to determine the timber value of only five hundred acres. An honest surveyor is crucial to our business. A member of the family must take the responsibility. Otherwise, when I am gone you will be cheated.” But Sedley would not take this bait.

“Uncle, I fear we must make a great effort to find someone outside the family who will work for a good income and nurture him. My attraction is to the expansion of the business. I am interested in going obliquely beyond trees and lumber.”

“You consider potash the crown of the future?” His tone was disparaging, as though Sedley had announced an interest in growing lettuces. Bernard rose.

“Come. We can be back at the inn by nightfall if we ride at once.” Behind them the pipe dottle glowed in the pine duff, waxed and grew into a small licking fire. In Boston the next day Bernard saw the distant smoke and reckoned it was in Duke & Sons’ forestland; but fire could not be helped. Forests burned, according to God’s will. The end of summer was always smoky.

Bernard felt himself getting old; he had no time to lose. He would have to look outside the family for his surveyor. He would inquire of sawmill operators, the latter themselves no slouches at board foot estimations — once they had the logs before their eyes. Yet estimating the lumber in a standing tree was more difficult by far. There might be a bright lad or two out there who could be trained. If only he could find them.

As for the other problem, it was insoluble, it was all up to God. If he saw the problem approaching he could do something. But if he was dead he could not and fate would have its way.

• • •

In 1758 the French were losing their territories in Africa and America to England. It was a dangerous time to travel, but when was travel ever safe? The Duke party of six — Bernard, Nicolaus, Jan, Outger, Piet and George Pickering — would take passage on a new Dutch merchant frigate, Bladwesp, carrying Duke & Sons cargo (dike timbers) from Boston to Amsterdam. Bernard wished to stop at La Rochelle for business meetings, but because of the war it was out of the question; they would do well to slide up the coast of France without harm and go straight to Amsterdam. Sedley would remain in Boston as Eugenia, delivered of a son, was weak and sinking. Dr. Perry thought she could not last long. The child was strong — it was as though he had drained all of the mother’s vitality into himself. Eugenia whispered that they should name him James; Sedley promised, but already harbored a hatred against the murdering infant.

• • •

For Bernard it would be a quick trip. He planned to return after a month. The others could stay as long as they wished; indeed, George Pickering talked of a European tour — excluding France because of the war — which Jan and Bernard encouraged. But Nicolaus said no to Piet, who wished to join his cousin. George Pickering was well enough pleased to travel alone as he planned a private adventure in whoring and drinking and preferred not to have a witness, no matter how congenial. It was too bad to miss France, which he had always heard was the apogee of depravity.

“You, Piet, have the responsibility of the pitch plantation,” said Nicolaus. “You cannot attempt such a tour. I had thought we might send Henk Steen to oversee the plantation if you wished to travel for a few months, but he made a scene. He said he was unsuited for the responsibility. Apparently he has moral scruples on slavery. On my return I plan to replace Steen with a harder-headed man. He may take his moral scruples elsewhere.”

There was but one day until they sailed and still Outger had not arrived. It was unthinkable to sail without him — the voyage had been at his urging. Bernard talked with Captain Strik, a dour old Dutchman who disliked passengers no matter how well they paid. He was pleased when they died at sea and had to be pitched overboard. Now he said he would sail at the appointed time, Outger Duquet or no. He already had the passenger’s money and if that passenger chose not to arrive in a timely fashion, why then he could walk to Amsterdam. He wheezed out a laugh.

• • •

Piet and George Pickering hung over the rail keeping watch for the infamous uncle. Their patience was rewarded. Piet clattered down to Bernard’s quarters and found him writing in his red leather business book.

“Uncle! He is here. In a coach. Followed by three wagons of trunks and boxes.”

Bernard followed his nephew up on deck and saw Outger. He resembled Charles Duquet though he lacked his father’s muscle mass and shrunken jaw. Limp yellow hair stuck out from under his tie wig, but the pale eyes had the piercing Duquet focus. He was thin and very white, obviously one who lived indoors.

Outger ignored Bernard and rushed to the captain’s cabin, where he yammered and jawed for a quarter of an hour. When he came out again six sailors followed him off the ship to carry his boxes and trunks on board, stowing them in the extra quarters Outger had engaged. A fourth wagon holding a massive packing crate arrived at the dock. It took twelve sailors to move it up onto the deck, where it stayed, covered with a tarpaulin and lashed down. The sailors, laughing and biting Outger’s coins, returned to their duties. Outger examined Bernard, displeased at what he saw — a heavy, aging man, somewhat gimpy.

“Welkom, broeder,” said Bernard. Outger pursed his lips.

“Please to remember, Bernard, that we are not brothers. My parents may have adopted you and the others, but we are, most emphatically, not blood brothers.”

“I am in no danger of forgetting that. Yet we were ever closer to your father than you yourself.”

He was surprised when Outger laughed. “Yes, yes. But that’s hardly an enviable distinction. The man was a brute.”

“He was also a very good businessman, to our mutual advantage — yours as well as mine. A great pity for Duke and Sons when he vanished.”

“Quite. But amidst all the fanciful imaginings put forward I wonder you have never suspected that he was sickening for the smallpox, which was very prevalent in those days, and went into the forest alone and died of it? It is logical, I think.”

“You may be right.”

“Yes. And now that we’ve got the spleenishness out of the way shall we try for civility as we must travel in each other’s pockets for the next six weeks?”

“That would please me inordinately. And I am glad to see you.” They were like two terriers sniffing and circling.

“And I to see you, though I know you doubt it. But tell me, who are those goggling monkeys staring at me?” He gestured toward the ship’s rail.

“That one with the watch chain on his vest is young Piet, one of Nicolaus’s sons. Piet oversees our pitch production plantation in Carolina. The other is George Pickering Duke, Jan’s son, recently returned from London, where he read law at the Inns of Court. Missing is Sedley, Piet’s brother. He has just become a father and is staying in Boston with his wife.” He took a breath and turned to his nephews.

“Gentlemen — this is Outger Duquet, of whom you have heard.”

They had also heard Outger’s disclaimer of kinship with Bernard and were rather at a loss how to address him. Outger saw their confusion and said, “You may call me Uncle as long as we all understand it to be an address of respect for an elder rather than a claim to a nonexistent kinship.” He spoke as though he were a prince of the blood.

“Thank you, Uncle,” said Piet; George mumbled the same.

“We will meet again at the captain’s table,” said Outger haughtily and went below to arrange his belongings.

• • •

The dinner was reasonably pleasant, even Captain Strik twisting a half smile out of his crusty features now and then. When pressed for his opinion about danger from French warships he said, “I heard this very morning that the British have captured more than two hundred French ships. The French are concerned for their West Indies trade, and for Nova Scotia. I doubt the few of their ships under way will waste time chasing a Dutch merchant.”

When the pudding had come and gone a good port arrived and the older men took out their smoking paraphernalia. Uncle Outger flourished a yellow tobacco pouch with horrid claws.

“It is made from the foot of an albatross. All the bones were drawn out and the leather well tanned. Many parts of the albatross have uses — the beak makes an admirable clip to keep papers from flying apart. And the flesh is as tasty as any pheasant.”

“And where did you happen to capture an albatross?” asked Jan.

Outger waved his hand eastward.

Jan peppered him with questions. “Will you spend considerable time in Amsterdam?”

“Not at all. I’ll have a few days with my mother and sister, Doortje. Then away to the University of Leiden to meet with scholars of natural history. I have been in correspondence with some of these learned men for decades, and although I feel I know them well, we have never met.” He swigged the port. “Nor would they know me if we were to be introduced this very moment. As a caution I have ever used a disguised name in my correspondence with them.” He went on to say that he had derived that mysterious name by writing the alphabet in a circle and choosing the letters opposite those of his last name. As an added precaution he then reversed the order of those letters and came up with his secret correspondence name — Etdidu.

“Very clever,” said Nicolaus, humoring him. He forbore to ask why Outger felt such a pressing need for anonymity. Bernard was both gratified and disconcerted that he had been correct about Outger. The man, penned up in Charles Duquet’s Penobscot Bay house for decades, had developed into a full-blown crank — a code name, worthless plants and who knew what else?

“What is your subject of interest if I may ask?” he asked.

“Various. The flora of the New World. Indian artifacts and descriptions of their strange rites. Weather manifestations peculiar to Penobscot Bay. Mathematical conundrums. And my invention, now situated on the ship’s deck with the kind compliance of Captain Strik.”

The captain bobbed his head.

“My invention, which I prefer not to discuss. And very much more.” Outger, smoking his pipe fiercely, helped himself to a final ladle of pease and another boiled potato.

“It sounds as though you may be there for some months, if not years.” Bernard watched Outger swish his potato through the greenish pond of pease.

“At least a year. I shall make my home in Amsterdam or Leiden, depending which I find more salubrious. I might live with Doortje; her letters show she has many of the same interests in natural history as I. Or I might stay with the men of science in Leiden — if my invention captures their approval. However, I am aware they may see me as a hopelessly ignorant colonial and bid me adieu. Though I do not think so. I know any number of things of which they do not dream. We shall see, eh?” And he puffed out a forceful cloud of smoke and a few flecks of pease.

Jan hoped Outger would remain in Holland for the rest of his life. Then Duke & Sons could finally get possession of the great pine table in the Penobscot house.

But Nicolaus, who spent much time with the company’s contract tree cutters, saw Outger had some similarity with the half-unbalanced men who came in from the isolation of the woods. The forest had made them strange—“woods-queer”—as some called it. They leapt with fright at any loud noise, they took their pay and then stormed back into the office an hour later demanding to be compensated — and were flustered when Henk Steen showed them their Xs or signatures on the receipts. But Nicolaus understood. The moment of payment had been too matter-of-fact; there had been no ceremony, no release from the tensions of solitude and dangerous work. He invited the overwrought barkskins to a nearby tavern for a drink. He urged them to tell him of the perils of the recent job — the catface growth that caused a tree to twist and fall badly, illnesses and other afflictions, unseen tree limbs that hurtled down, food shortages, troublesome men. An hour or so of putting the past into the past restored their hearts. It was the same, he thought, with Outger. He would take the man aside and urge him to talk of his invention and the difficulties he had suffered in creating it — whatever it was.

It was at dinner that Etdidu shone most brightly. He ate rapidly, like a dog, hunching and gulping so he then could command the conversation. He dominated the talk with a succession of bizarre tales, all recounted as though he had experienced them himself, an impossibility, thought Bernard, unless he possessed the power of ubiquity. It was difficult to grasp the tendrils of these stories, which emerged from intertwined sentences spangled with English, French, Dutch and fragments of some Algonkian tongue. The rest of the diners were forced into a zone of silence.

He spoke of hurricanes that sought out Papist churches, of mandrakes, rains of blood, burial vaults where unseen forces shifted coffins from their positions and disgorged their contents onto the floor. He knew of birds that built their nests of cinnamon sticks, and others that used only the entrails of sea lions for the purpose. He described cities of ice floating in the polar ocean, leaps of death from high places and persons who could leave their earthly bodies at night, transmute into mosquitoes and annoy their neighbors. As proof of this he advanced a description of a Paris baker who, in mosquito guise, feasted on the blood of a handsome mademoiselle, was slapped by the bitee for his impudence and died on the windowsill as he sought to escape, in his human shape, but horribly squashed.

Bernard grew irritated with Outger’s monopoly of talk. “Surely you do not expect us to believe that you yourself actually went to the isle of Cagayan Sulu and saw cannibal vampires at their fell banquets?”

“Non, non, not I personally. But my good friend E. Skertchley of Dublin wrote me the full description as he witnessed it. As I read his letter, terror palsied my limbs.”

“As it has mine. Excuse me, gentlemen. I must retire while my mental abilities are still intact.”

George Pickering and Piet were delighted. If one had to have a mad uncle, Outger was tremendous. They especially liked the mosquito story. It was a new comprehension of insect pests. Who knew if it might not be Genghis Khan plunging his proboscis into one’s flesh?

• • •

Captain Strik kept a lookout in the crow’s nest from dawn until full dark scanning the sea for possible French sails pricking the horizon. There were French ships faster than a laden merchant, and many evenings he stayed on deck, taking his meal standing until some distant speck of white was identified. In the third week of the voyage the weather showed storm signs: swells that the captain called “dogs running before their master,” heavier seas, increasingly overcast sky, and the wind moaning in the rigging. George Pickering strode about the deck sucking in the salty wind, leaning over the rail to stare at the leaping froth. The sailors all had huge misshapen hands and their faces seemed baked by the sun into corroded metal. Since the first day of the voyage he had pestered the crew with questions, particularly Wigglesworth, the heavily muscled ruffian with a beard like a wheat field whom they had seen in the tavern dancing a hornpipe two nights before they embarked. Bernard noticed Wigglesworth tried to dodge George Pickering, who was always asking for a rollicking chantey, not understanding that the songs were tailored to certain kinds of work as hauling at halyards, at the pumps, at stamp and go. Captain Strik frowned at this quizzing of his crew but gnawed his lower lip and said nothing.

Outger daily inspected the lashings holding his invention in place on the deck. “She’s sound, she’s bound, she can’t shift around,” he said. When he said it at the dinner table before launching into another fable, the captain shook his head.

Said Outger/Etdidu, “My old friend Captain Pearfowle of Iceland escaped a severe storm in a singular manner. His ship was off Cape Circumcision’s rocky coast when a storm forced them nearer the jagged cliffs. He had fitted out with eighteen huge anchors and nine large barrels, one for himself and each of the eight crewmen. The storm made foundering their likely fate, but he dropped the anchors, pulled the wood stopper in the bilges and took refuge under his barrel as did each of the sailors. The ship sank, and they with it, but in their upended barrels they had enough air to breathe until the storm passed.”

Captain Strik listened to this with a curious expression. “And then?” he asked menacingly.

“Why then — they plugged the hole, bailed away and emptied the water out, and continued on their way.”

“Stilte! Silence! This is a foc’s’le yarn that tests my temper, sir. I’ll have no more of these blatherings. Kindly take your dinner in your stateroom for the remainder of the voyage.” He found Outger Duquet a source of irritation and discontent; it was best to dampen his squibs. And he intended to have a word with George Pickering. Outger and George Pickering had greatly reinforced Captain Strik’s hatred of passengers.

But if Captain Luther Pearfowle’s storm was imaginary, the tempest that caught Bladwesp was terrifyingly real. Great seas rose and fell on them with shuddering crashes. The bare masts groaned and the rigging ropes howled. A black monster swelled on the horizon, raced toward them, then sprang on the Bladwesp with terrible weight, and the topgallant section of the foremast broke in a tangle of ropes and torn canvas. There was a grinding noise; the ship rolled, listed. As quick as an eel grasping its prey Captain Strik himself ran onto the deck with an ax, slashed the ropes holding down Outger’s invention and leapt back. The Bladwesp shrugged off the heavy case, which smashed through the rail and sank like the original rock. The ship, relieved of this weight, rose up ripped and leaking but afloat.

For the next two days the ship’s carpenters worked on the damaged mast, cutting away the splinters and ruined wood and replacing it with a new top section stored in the hold.

Outger locked himself in his cabin. They could hear him expostulating and excoriating the captain for hours. He emerged the next day haggard and morose, eyes blazing in a sore countenance, his fingers crooked into claws.

Nicolaus, fearing for Captain Strik, tried to calm the situation. “I am truly sorry about your lost invention,” he said.

Outger/Etdidu glared at him with red eyes. “I do not know what you mean. There is no invention. There never was an invention. It was simply a box to pique fools.”

“But the weight!”

“Steenen. Stones. New England granite.” And Etdidu turned away.

• • •

Captain Strik liked to put on a smart appearance when entering port, and when they were a week away he gave the order to shift sails, a difficult procedure demanding intense concentration and extraordinary effort for two days. George Pickering Duke, his mouth open, watched three men to a yardarm struggling to unbend the old sails from their spars from the topgallants down. One of the men on the yardarm above was Wigglesworth, the hornpipe dancer whom George Pickering admired.

From the deck George Pickering bellowed, “Wigglesworth! Give us a chantey, Wigglesworth!” The sailor twisted his head around at the sound of his name, just as a sudden burst of wind puffed the sail and broke the temporary slender rope yarns securing it. The sail jerked away from Wigglesworth’s hand and its convulsive twitch knocked the sailor loose and sent him cartwheeling down.

“Ah, God!” said George Pickering. Wigglesworth clutched, fell, hit a yardarm below and bounced off into the sea. George Pickering rushed to the side. Wigglesworth floated faceup in the center of a spreading wash of blood. Before George Pickering could think what to do two sailors had thrown lines over the side and were down in the water, rigging a bowline around the injured man’s chest.

“Haul away!” shouted one of the swimmers. “Haul!”

Captain Strik emerged from his cabin with a threaded needle, a pair of scissors and a swab. He snipped away the bloody hair, wiped Wigglesworth’s head, already well rinsed in salt water, and quickly stitched him up. He ordered two sailors to take him to his hammock and keep an eye on him.

“He’ll come through. Head hard as a quahog shell. Maybe more confused than usual for a bit. We’ll watch how he goes.” He turned to George Pickering, who was watching with great interest.

“You are not to speak to any member of this ship’s crew for the duration of the voyage. You would do well to keep out of sight or there might be an accident. The crew regards you as a Jonah.”

“They are just jealous of my friendship with Wigglesworth,” smiled George Pickering.

“It is Wigglesworth would give you the push, Mr. GEORGE PICKERING Duke.”

36. clouds

Before they left Boston, Bernard had arranged the hire of a private carriage to take them around Amsterdam as he was not sure if Cornelia and Doortje had a stable and conveyances. Outger had made his own arrangements. A wealthy merchant to whom he had sent crates of sassafras over the years had offered him the use of his berlin, horses and coachman.

It was a bright blue January morning when they came off the Bladwesp. Outger’s borrowed equipage stood at the end of the wharf. The travelers looked it over. The berlin was an exquisite thing, deep marine-blue enamel, glass windows, the merchant’s initials coiling like golden snakes on the doors. The body of the carriage was slung on steel springs, the apex of travel comfort. The coachman’s livery was a strong yellow and from a distance, Bernard said the ensemble resembled a blue teapot with a canary sitting on the spout. Outger ordered the Bladwesp sailors to load his trunks onto a waiting dray and in minutes the merchant’s cream-colored horses bore him away.

Amsterdam had grown so large it shocked Jan, Bernard and Nicolaus, so bustling, its port jammed with ships of every nation, the streets — the streets of their childhood — thick with people speaking twenty tongues. Jan found he could barely understand the street slang, yet it shot tendrils of painful nostalgia through him. The travelers recovered their legs by walking to their inn, then hired a laundress to wash their linen in fresh water. Jan strolled about the streets; Nicolaus bought an old book, Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium, a book of manners for children, but useful to adults, especially in uncouth New England, where force and boldness defied efforts at politesse. He opened the book and immediately read that wild eyes implied a violent character, and fixed stares were proofs of effrontery. Outger, he reflected, had both wild eyes and a fixed stare, depending on his disposition.

Back at the inn a messenger presented Bernard with a letter from Doortje telling them that in the morning they should go to Piet Roos’s old house, which was now Cornelia’s home. She, Doortje, was living in their parents’ house attended by her servant, Mieke. She would meet them at Cornelia’s and wished them Godspeed. She added a postscript: “Outger is here already one day.”

• • •

Amsterdam had swollen like a cracker in hot milk, but Bernard remembered the stale odor of the canals, the wet cobbled streets and sky milky with overhead cloud. After so many years in the dark forests at the top of the world, where trees rejected the puny efforts of men, he found pollarded willows ridiculous. He and his adopted brothers had changed very much, the world had changed. He felt he belonged neither here nor there. The next day when he entered his assigned room in Cornelia’s house he was pleased to see a half-remembered painting of a hunting scene, a huntsman raising a horn to his lips. This painting stirred some subterranean image of lost familiarity and it was a good omen that it still pleased him.

As for Jan, the return to his homeland affected him deeply — the light, the long, long horizon and the opalescent subtleties of clouds — the clouds! — made him long to toss away his present life, to remain here in the few short years left him, for he was fifty-four. He did not want to see Cornelia or Doortje; he only wanted to gaze at clouds. In their shifting forms and vaporous mutations they seemed uncanny manifestations of what he felt inside his private self.

• • •

The next morning they walked to the old Piet Roos house. Inside the entry hall the first thing Jan saw was a painting of horizon and endless sky filled with clouds of unraveling lace, clouds pulling up the dark of the sea into their nether regions. Why had he never seen this painting when he was young? How different his life might have been. But no, had he not been rescued from the Weeshuis orphanage he would likely have been apprenticed to some farrier or chimney sweep. But perhaps…

Nicolaus, too, was shuddering with recognition, with awakened recollections as ribboned as the shifting light. The bridges delighted him, bridges of many shapes and lengths, of stone and wood, the latter very likely of timbers from the forest properties of Duke & Sons. Arched bridges shaped the diffuse light so correctly he felt a flare of joy. He remembered cold winter ice and sliding along on his shoes under one of those very bridges. On one of his walks he saw the skinny bridge—Magere Brug—over the Amstel and he grinned like a fool as he crossed it.

Outger was in residence. He had to be first; he was the real son, and he was gratified when Cornelia said “my own dear boy,” and squeezed his hands in her buttery paws. He sat on the floor with his head leaning against her knee — a pose he had seen in a painting — and poured out his (expurgated) life history in the English colony which he had decided to renounce.

“I might live with Doortje, if you do not have room for me here, dear Mother. I do need several rooms and a very large table for my Work.”

Doortje looked at Outger, then at the plaster cherubs on the ceiling, back again at Outger. Cornelia was slightly alarmed. She began to talk of his childhood ways and of the great changes in the world since he had left. She did not mention Charles Duquet. But as soon as the others arrived she shifted Outger to the fringes of her affection, or so he felt. They all came at once, tall strong men filling the room, everyone pressing forward.

Age and plumpness had ironed out Cornelia. Her quite smooth face and broad nose seemed almost flat and one eye sat noticeably higher than the other. Her brows were invisible and the white-blue eyes seemed they might be sightless. Her thin hair was covered by a finely embroidered linen cap. She wore a grey silk dress and, as the day was chilly, a little cape of marten fur. One by one the sons approached, bent low and kissed her. The grandsons George Pickering Duke and Young Piet came forward in their turn and pecked at her hand. She tried to feel a stir of affection for these young sons of her adopted boys.

Doortje’s face had the same sharp features as Charles Duquet’s and Outger’s, but her body was obese. She wore a dress of fine blue wool. Her small eyes flashed around, taking in every detail of the colonial company, and she showed a slight, almost pitying smile. Bernard thought she looked intelligent and likely was sharp-tempered.

• • •

Cornelia had ordered a welcoming dinner and many relatives poured into the house, laughing and smiling, beseeching information on the New World and its rigors. Before they went to table there were drinks and delicacies. Jan had not tasted North Sea herrings since he was a boy — there was nothing better on earth. Bernard was enjoying good jenever and smoked eel. At dinner the main dish was waterzooi, a rich stew of freshwater fish.

Bernard was interested in some of the cousins. Jaap Akkerman he remembered as a small, black-haired boy picking fleas off a spotted dog. Now he showed a drooping face topped with heavy eyes, the lids like ivory covers on pillboxes. He was involved in some business with eelgrass, once used to procure salt, but now, said Akkerman, a very good material for packing fragile items.

“Zeegras—sea grass or eelgrass — has many virtues. You know of course, that in olden times they used it to help bind the dikes together?”

“I did not know,” said Bernard. He could not imagine how eelgrass could be made to hold back the sea, but by the end of the meal he was stuffed full of waterzooi and eelgrass particulars.

Bernard tired of the tales Outger told at every meal. Doortje bore it for two nights and then told her mother, “I will take dinner at home. I am needed there.” Some years earlier Doortje had married Roelof Vogel, a learned antiquarian who died before their son, Lennart, was three. Doortje said Lennart was ill at home. As for the idea that Outger might live there with them — impossible.

After dinner Cornelia announced that as this visit was a rare occasion she wished to have a painting of the family. The portrait of Piet Roos which hung in her bedroom would serve as the necessary paterfamilias. It would take center position and the rest of them would be grouped below. Two serving men took the portrait from its nail and brought it downstairs.

“There,” said Cornelia. “You see my father. It is true we no longer have the great painters of the last century, but Cornelis Ploos van Amstel is a fine portrait painter. I shall send a message to him at once.”

The next morning the painter arrived, a long-bodied chap with an arrogant expression on his florid face. He enjoyed coffee and cakes, heard Cornelia’s plan to have the portrait of Piet Roos included in the work. Ploos van Amstel sauntered around the room looking at the chairs, selected the two largest, heavily carved and gilded, ordered the servants to set them side by side in front of a faded tapestry. He put the portrait of Piet Roos in one and Cornelia in the other. Of Charles Duquet there was nothing except Outger and Doortje. His life had come and gone, and even here among the people he had imagined as a family he was forgotten.

Ploos van Amstel placed them around Cornelia and asked them to do something with their hands. Doortje folded hers primly. Bernard took out a little pocketknife and began to pare his nails. George Pickering Duke had spent the morning trolling the book stalls and had come back with a prize, an old quarto edition of Willem Bontekoe’s Gedenkwaardige Beschrijving Van de Achtjarige en zeer Avontuurlyke Rise Niewe Hoorne, and he held it in his hands opened to a woodcut of an exploding ship, pieces of human anatomy flung into the sky. Jan and Nicolaus folded their arms across their chests. Outger threw himself at Cornelia’s feet as though beseeching her for something. Two mornings dragged by. Then Ploos van Amstel took himself, his canvas, charcoal pencils and easel away to begin the painting, for, he said, the sketches were done.

• • •

It was happy news for everyone except Cornelia when, after a week, Outger left for Leiden with a trunk of papers. Nicolaus had many meetings with businessmen, even the eelgrass cousin. One morning he told Bernard that there were splendid opportunities just waiting to be picked up. They were sitting in a little smoking room. Nicolaus had sheets of paper under his hand, papers that described business ventures he found tempting. One by one Bernard dismissed them. He told Nicolaus it was better exercise to worry about their own market. For two decades Duke & Sons had supplied heavy timbers for the dikes, but in recent years the destructive Teredo navalis had come to Holland in bottom-gnawed cargo ships and attacked the dikes. The dike builders were now importing stone. Duke & Sons had lost several municipal contracts. And unless shipbuilding picked up in Boston they would suffer more losses. Nicolaus continued to describe bargain investments. It was good, thought Bernard, that they would soon leave.

At the end of a month Bernard was ready to go. He was concerned about Jan, who spent too much time wandering around in polders and along dikes staring at the sky. He had looked at small houses in the company of purchase agents. And Bernard saw him go into a shop specializing in pigments and canvas. What was the fellow thinking? He followed Jan on one of his daily rambles.

“Jan,” he called. “Have a cup of warmth with me.” He guided him to a coffee shop. They sat near a window.

He spoke kindly; he understood how affected Jan had been by their return, but what else drew him? They had to think of going home. Soon.

“Brother,” said Jan. “This may sound strange to you but I have always longed to be a painter. And here is the place I wish to paint.” He pointed upward. “The clouds.”

“Clouds? Jan, you are a mature man, you are — you are old! You cannot abandon the company and take up painting. Duke and Sons needs your services.”

“Bernard, I must try. Let me stay on for another six months to see if I can paint. I have so many pictures in my head. Brother, have you not ever wanted to do something that was — how can I say it — out of the ordinary?”

Bernard laughed bitterly. “Oh God, I have. I entirely understand the feeling.” He went quiet while Jan drank his mixture of hot sweetened chocolate and coffee. When his cup was empty Bernard sighed.

“So do that, stay here and paint clouds for six months. But give me your word that you will return at the end of that time.”

“I will,” said Jan. “I’ll bring you my best painting.”

“That is what I need, Jan, more than anything — a painting of Dutch clouds. But take care not to get windmills in your mind.”

“I will leave that to Outger,” said Jan.

They both smiled tightly. Bernard was ready to embark, his passage already arranged. He had only one or two last things to do; he had ordered a pair of bucket-top boots from a boot maker reputed to be an artist with leather and they must be ready. They would look well with his wraprascal coachman’s cloak. He stopped first at a lace maker’s shop and selected a present for Birgit, a needlepoint flounce, point de France, in something the shopkeeper called the candélabre pattern. His boots were not quite ready and the leather artist asked him to come back in two hours; only a few nails had yet to go into the soles. He waited.

• • •

The boots were ready, black and gleaming, lacking only a pair of silver spurs. Impatient to wear them Bernard put them on in the shop and walked back to old Piet Roos’s house. After some minutes he felt a painful sharp object digging into his left foot. As he could hardly take the boot off in the street, he went back to the boot maker’s shop, favoring his foot to avoid driving the sharp object further into his flesh.

The boot maker was surprised. “What, sir, back so soon? Not to your liking?”

“There is something sharp in this one,” said Bernard, sitting in the customer’s chair and tugging at the boot. There was blood on his stocking. He didn’t bother to look inside, but tossed the thing at the boot maker, who caught it deftly and plunged his hand into it.

“Ah,” he said. “A nail went awry. Haste made waste, ha-ha. I’ll have it right in a moment.” With pincers he drew the nail, threw it into a bin and set another with a few sharp taps of his hammer, plunged his hand in again and felt around vigorously. “There you are, quite sound. I am sorry for the nail.” He gave Bernard an oiled chamois cloth as a make-peace gift. Bernard pulled the boot back on and tested it. He left, heels ringing on the floor.

As he came through the door of the old Piet Roos house the servant girl was there. She curtsied and said, “Mevrouw wishes you to join her and the others in the library.” He expected Cornelia had arranged some sort of farewell party and was not surprised to see Doortje, Nicolaus, Jan, Piet and George Pickering Duke when he came into the library. On a side table there was a steaming coffeepot and cups.

“I have asked you all to be here,” said Cornelia, “because I have had a letter from Outger this past hour. He encloses a private envelope for Bernard. In the letter to me he says that he has been invited to join the Leiden faculty. He will send for his possessions once he has found a furnished and well-staffed house.” She passed the other envelope to Bernard, who opened it and drew out a single sheet.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh God damn his eyes — forgive my language, Mother. I must read this aloud since it is of importance to all of us.

Dear Almost-Brothers. This is to notify you that I will not be returning to the Colonies nor the House on Penobscot Bay. But do not think you can have the Large Table. It, and all the other Contents of the House, are now the Property of my Daughter, Beatrix Duquet. Her Mother was a Passamaquoddy Indian, a kind and gentle Woman who helped Me with My studies of Indian ways and beliefs. She died and I had the charge of my Daughter who has benefited from a Good Education. From Me. She is in Residence at My House on Penobscot Bay as I write this. I have told her all that I am telling you. Perhaps she will eventually join me in Leiden. I will endeavor to return occasionally in order to pay Her a visit. On such Trips I will not stop in Boston. Yours, quite sincerely, Outger Duquet.”

Cornelia put her hand over her heart and leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. The servant ran for smelling salts.

“Daughter?” shouted Nicolaus. “That fool has a daughter? Who else but an Indian would take up with Outger? We must go back and get her out of our house. It was never Outger’s to own, it was always the property of the company. We only let him remain in it to keep him from troubling the business. How soon can you be ready to leave, Bernard? We must see to this immediately.”

Doortje helped Cornelia up to bed, then rejoined the men. The talk went on for hours with a hundred bold and impractical plans to oust the “daughter,” to punish Outger, to cut off his company stipend, to get the large table, to claim the house. In the end they decided that Nicolaus and Bernard would go up to Penobscot Bay as soon as they were back in the colonies and see the situation for themselves.

The first available ship sailing for Boston was a tired old East Indiaman—De bloem. The captain’s small pointed face, a narrow pointed nose that led to a pointed chin embellished with a pointed wisp of beard, did little to inspire confidence. His cheeks were red, whether from drink or eczema Bernard did not know, but the man promised all speed.

“She looks tired but she moves smart over the waves,” he said. The ship was, in fact, going to be broken up in Boston.

• • •

The ship bucked and sidled in the North Sea. Nicolaus and Bernard put their shared stateroom in order. Bernard’s bucket-top boots took up a surprising amount of space and he finally folded them over and stowed them in his trunk. He would wear them when he was back in Boston.

Nicolaus noticed that Bernard was limping. He had limped for years with his old injury but now he also seemed unwarrantedly slow, as though dazed. Perhaps the news of Outger’s daughter had affected him.

“What is it?” asked Nicolaus. “Aside from our hitherto unknown niece?”

“Nothing, really. My new boot had a nail in it and it cut my foot before we left. Where it pierced seems very sore. I am not so worried about the girl, although we do not know how old she is. We may be able to talk sense with her.”

“If she is half Indian and half Outger I think there is a poor chance of talking sense with her. But we’ll find out. Now let me see your foot,” said Nicolaus. Bernard drew off his stocking and showed a swollen foot.

“I will ask for a basin of hot water,” said Nicolaus. “And perhaps some ointment — if there is any on board.”

The ship’s surgeon, an elderly man with bleared eyes, sent in the cabin boy with a basin of tepid grey water and himself brought the “ointment,” a thick, tarry substance they used on ropes to keep them from chafing. By afternoon Bernard said he felt better but the next morning he was unable to walk. His foot and lower leg were badly swollen. The old surgeon came in and looked at it.

“Keep it elevated,” he said to Nicolaus. “Soak in hot water. Drink rum, as much as you can stand.”

“It is my brother who is ill, not I,” said Nicolaus.

• • •

Nicolaus tried to brighten the fetid cabin by propping the painting of a woodland hunt Bernard had brought from Cornelia’s house. Perhaps he could find surcease from the pain of his leg in contemplating the vivid scene.

The hot water soaks did not help. Daily the leg — his bad leg, of course — swelled. Sores and ulcers appeared and festered from foot to groin. Bernard was unable to leave his bunk and lay in a half swoon, breathing stertorously. The surgeon came in one last time huffing fumes of jenever.

“That leg needs to be amputated,” he said. “Look for my saw.” He went out and did not return. When Nicolaus found him the old man was insensible with drink. The great medical chest stood against the wall, top flung back, the interior gaping. Nicolaus picked up a dried carrot among broken pieces of deer antler. The amputation saw lay on the cabin floor, its teeth crusted with old blood.

He went at once to the captain and told him of the empty medical chest. The little man twisted his pointed beard into a spike and bared his teeth.

“That hyena-headed flea has sold the medicines for jenever. Now his hour has come!” he declared and he rushed away toward the lair of the so-called practitioner of the medical arts.

Nicolaus went back to Bernard, who lay comatose and radiating heat like a birch fire. Bernard stared unseeing at the beams above his head, black and wormholed. The painting stood on a chair near the bunk. One of the huntsmen was raising a horn to his lips. Nicolaus almost thought he heard the sound of the horn and it came to him that his brother was not going to get home.

They buried Bernard at sea three weeks out from Amsterdam.

• • •

In Boston port Nicolaus felt fortunate to find a ship only days away from embarking for Amsterdam and sent a message by its captain to Jan, Piet and George Pickering Duke telling of Bernard’s death and demanding their immediate return.

“This is a Crisis beyond the Loss of dear Bernard,” he wrote.

It is not just a Question of the Penobscot Bay hous and the Dautter, but of our Company itself. Timber and lumber orders stacked hie but Henk Steen not to be fond. He is gone — no leter no word. the Retch. There is no Body to serve as our Book Keeper. No one to serve as Looker of Woodland. Sedley in Grief over loss of his Wife lies ill abed. Your Wifes upset and caling your return. Bernard’s Wife Birgit tears her hair with Soro. Return quick we may marshal our Forces in Business. Charter a ship ere all is lost.

Your loving Brother and Uncle, Nicolaus Duke.

37. change

In later years Piet Duke thought sometimes of Nicolaus’s nightmare letter and the hurried arrangements and great expense of taking passage back to Boston. Outger had not returned with them. Since then he and George and Sedley had suffered under the controlling leadership of Jan and Nicolaus, who allowed no innovation except closing down portions of the business. So the Carolina plantation was sold and Piet assigned the task of handling the New England logging jobbers, the Québec holdings diminished. Jan managed what remained of those forestlands. Nicolaus served as the company president at the Boston headquarters. But as Jan and Nicolaus doddered on they gradually allowed Piet and George a greater say in business decisions, though still watching from the sidelines. And today the cousins had a chance to make an important change.

Piet combed at his thinning hair with his fingers, adjusted his stock and moved his shoulders inside his coat. He called Oliver Wedge, his secretary, a rural youth with aspirations beyond maize and cows, the first secretary Duke & Sons had ever hired and now indispensable.

“Are the papers ready?” he asked Wedge, who pointed to a squared-up stack of pages.

Wedge loved his job passionately, loved being in Boston and away from the farm and its futile, never-ending work, away from his father’s anger at marauding wild animals, anger that Wedge and his six hard-worked brothers shared: huge flocks of birds pulled up the sprouted seeds, especially corn, beloved by turkeys, squirrels, crows, red-winged blackbirds and a thousand other avian robbers, raccoons and bears. The raccoons got the eggs the hens laid and the fox, hawks, falcons, skunks, wolves and weasels killed the hens. Bears took the pigs and calves and once a full-grown cow. Sheep were impossible as long as wolves and catamounts and lynx and bobcats could get their scent. But he thought squirrels were the worst as there were thousands upon thousands of them, the forest and woodlot alive with the furry devils — red, black, gray squirrels and he knew for a fact that two squirrels could make six, seven, even nine more squirrels every year and each of these was soon mature. He tried to work out how many squirrels one pair created over, say, ten years, but the sums became so large they frightened him. The earth might be carpeted with squirrels in his lifetime. And woodchucks ate salads, cabbage, turnips, onions and beans. The house swarmed with mice, more than one cat could ever catch. He would never go back.

• • •

“You are sure that the papers are ready?” Piet could not stop asking.

“Yes, Mr. Duke. Everything is ready.” Wedge’s long knobby fingers, early trained to pull thistles, now flew among papers, creating order. Although he had been employed as a secretary for only a year he had learned much of Boston life from a dirty manuscript folded in the back of an account book, a furious, rambling critique by a man who signed himself Henk Steen. Steen was aggrieved at the cruelties beyond slavery that he saw in the colonies: husbands who beat their wives with iron pokers until ribs crackled, an overbearing bully who pushed a road through an elderly widow’s property, thieving servants branded with B for burglary, the many who fornicated before marriage, trespassing swine, barrels of rotten fish sold as sound, breaches of peace, drunkenness and swearing — it was a wonderfully wicked place.

Silence and late-afternoon spring sunlight filled the second-floor conference room. Four stacks of paper, glittering inkwells and sharpened quills rested on the company’s long maple table, constructed from four planks after the humiliating failure to wrest Duquet’s old single-board pine table away from Outger’s daughter. Piet checked his watch again and again. He feared this coming meeting but it seemed the only way to get ahead. For years the King’s men had robbed both Crown and colony by granting lands — while securing for themselves the adjoining five-hundred-acre corners of those grants until they had amassed thousands of the richest, most heavily timbered acres. They and the important landholders clubbed together. That was how the Wentworth brothers and brothers-in-law, the Elisha Cookes and their cronies had made their fortunes — by stealth and holding.

Duke & Sons, perpetual outsiders, had never gotten involved in politics. If the younger men had not been forced by Bernard’s death to assume junior positions in the company they might have moved into rich political offices. It would have been useful to have a Duke as the governor of Massachusetts or Maine or even New York. Now that England had New France entirely within her claws everything was very different.

This time Duke & Sons had the upper hand, thought Piet. The entrenched political landholders with their great swathes of coastal pine had suffered tremendous losses a year earlier when an epic wildfire strode out of New Hampshire and incinerated fifty miles of seacoast forest, eating deep miles inland until beneficent rain fell. Duke & Sons’ chief holdings were along the interior rivers, a long distance from the fire. Even before the ashes cooled men whose timber had been destroyed looked covetously on the Duke timberlands.

He consulted his new waistcoat watch; half an hour to wait. Half an hour to stare out the north window. Once illimitable forest filled the horizon. Now there were dozens of streets and the forest was a distant smudge.

• • •

While the nephews waited, Jan, at his home a mile away, was sorting through personal papers. He also thought of a fire several years back after their hasty return from Amsterdam, a different and smaller fire only a dozen miles from Outger’s Penobscot Bay house. He and Nicolaus had used this fire as their excuse to rescue the great pine table — fear of future incineration. They journeyed to the house.

The daughter, Beatrix, was no beauty, but striking. She was young, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, and rather lissome, quiet-spoken. Her black, undressed hair hung loose, and this gave her a wild look that suited her brown Indian skin. But she greeted them in pleasant English and asked them into the house. They sat before the fire in the familiar room where the great table gleamed with waxy luster. She left them to admire it while she went to the kitchen. They heard the busy roar of the coffee grinder. Jan trailed his fingers over the deep amber wood, darkening with age.

“We must persuade her,” he whispered.

Over the steaming coffee mixed with Dutch chocolate and cinnamon, no doubt supplied by Outger, Jan enlarged on their fears for the table should another fire break out, and Nicolaus expressed his certainty that their father, Charles Duquet, had intended it for the company office. She listened attentively. They waited. In the firelight Nicolaus saw that Outger’s daughter might be called exotically attractive. Finally she spoke.

“That fire was distant, and the table,” she said smoothly, “is, as you say, too large for any practical use. If you would send me a handsome small table you may have this large one.” She rapped her knuckles on the pine. She said she did not know why Outger was so passionate about it. He asked after it in every letter and would undoubtedly be angry when she told him it was gone. She did not seem troubled by the promise of Outger’s rage. Nor did she seem interested in knowing these stranger “uncles” who came so suddenly, who spoke dismissively of Outger as though he were a castoff from the body of society. She retreated from the conversation and said nothing more while they talked eagerly on, telling her of the family history, of Duke & Sons’ many successes. Jan was sure she had heard a garbled and erroneous account from Outger, who had likely described the “uncles” as orphans with evil intentions who had cornered all power in the company. They invited her confidences, which were not forthcoming, and at last Jan and Nicolaus had no more to say. But the matter of the large table was settled. Despite this prize the two aging men were discomfited. They left in an uncomfortable silence. Something was wrong.

“Like Outger in cold disposition,” said Nicolaus.

“Like an Indian in conversation,” said Jan. “We were too easy. She is only a chit of a bastard girl.”

“It would be justice to send the cramped oaken table we use in the anteroom,” said Jan. “The one with the mended leg.”

“No, let us send a fine table, however diminutive, so she need have no complaint — one of exotic wood and with well-carved legs.”

“We’ll send Piet now that he’s available, as well as a skilled carpenter and long-bed wagon to fetch it to Boston.”

• • •

But it fell out differently. A month later Piet, followed by a wagon, approached the gate of Duquet’s old house with a ready smile; he was greeted by a growling mastiff. Afraid to open the gate and enter he called out.

“Hallo the house! Hallo. Mademoiselle Duquet! Are you at home?”

The door flew open and the girl stood on the great granite stone that served as top step. Her oval face was olive-toned and her hair blacker than soot.

“Who are you and what do you here, sir?” she asked with the warmth of a January midnight.

“I am your cousin Piet Duke. My uncles Jan and Nicolaus Duke spoke with you in recent weeks past about Duke and Sons’ large business table in this house. I have come for it. And look, I have brought you this smaller mahogany table as you requested.”

“I know nothing of this,” she said. “There is no large business table here, and you may take your mahogany object away. Pray do not trouble me again, sir.” She closed the door with a hard swinging crash.

Piet swore undying enmity for Beatrix and Outger and the table all the way to Boston. Nicolaus said only “You must have spoken in a way that angered her.” Useless to protest.

• • •

Boston’s population swelled to more than 150,000 people. England had seized New France and driven away the Acadians. Yet New France must be a disappointment compared to the extraordinarily rich income, more than four thousand times greater than any timberland investment, from sugar and molasses in the West Indies. People felt time rushing past ever since England had adopted the Gregorian calendar and forced the colonies to do the same, robbing everyone of eleven days of life. And who could count the new inventions and occupations? Colleges emerged from raw ideas; daring men invented river flatboats to penetrate the wilderness; shipmasters, not content with trade or passengers, began to pursue whales for the costly and fine oil; teacups suddenly had handles, an effete fad that Nicolaus thought would soon die out. And that fellow Franklin’s inventions: the lightning rods, which had saved hundreds of churches and houses from destruction, and the stove, which encased fire safely. It was an exciting time to live.

There had been changes in Duke & Sons after Bernard’s death. Sedley had remarried, and his new wife, Elizabeth, was a pretty young widow who had family connections to the second cousin of a Wentworth aunt. And after nearly a year of grieving, Birgit, Bernard’s old wife, had died. Then Nicolaus began his series of bouts with pneumonia. They had had to scramble to find a competent timber surveyor, but Sedley, who had at least some idea of what was needed, found two: Wolfgang Breitsprecher, a German forester newly arrived; and a French, Jacques Nadeau, who had worked with old Forgeron for a season in New France. These men were antagonists. There was a new bookkeeper to replace Henk Steen, Thomas Ashbridge, one of the first graduates of the College of New Jersey. With Wedge, Breitsprecher, Nadeau and Ashbridge, Duke & Sons had let in the first outsiders.

• • •

Piet had been engaged for a year to Silence Gibben, but she changed her mind. It seemed he might stay a bachelor. George had married Margery Buttolph and already had fathered two boys, Edward and Freegrace. There had been other events, one darkly mysterious. None of the cousins had ever understood the details of Birgit’s death, only that it was, in some unknown way, unspeakable. She had been buried at sea “to be with Bernard,” as Piet’s mother, Mercy, lamely explained. So, Piet thought, Aunt Birgit likely had had some deadly disease. He shuddered. He looked at his watch. Once more he called out to Wedge asking if the papers were ready. The political men would arrive soon. He heard a sound in the anteroom. Now!

But it was only George Pickering Duke, red face shining, who came in with a handful of additional papers.

“All ready, Piet?”

“Of course.”

“This is important. This can make us if we handle it correctly. I see it as our chance.”

“And I. With God’s grace it will go to our advantage. Pray that Uncle Jan does not make an appearance.” They were safe from Nicolaus, who was ill.

Sedley came in, stiff-faced and silent but sending out a feeling of discontent and rancor. He was just getting over a cold and his long thin nose was still red with chafed, sore-looking nostrils. He and Piet were barely civil to one another.

• • •

Under a goose-down comforter Nicolaus was thinking about that meeting. If Jan was there he could prevent Piet’s rash and headlong decisions. George Pickering Duke was as hopeless as Piet. He looked the part of a distinguished businessman, but the exterior masked a rather dim and credulous being. Best would be Sedley, who was more like Charles Duquet than any of the sons or grandsons — embittered, sharp, willful, full of purpose and drive. But Sedley held himself separate from the others. Nicolaus was sure that he would eventually dominate Piet and George Pickering Duke. If only, he thought, Bernard had fathered children and those children had inherited some of Bernard’s equitable, quiet character. If only hams and cakes could fly. If only it were always summer. Poor Bernard. And the shock he gave all of them. The memory of Birgit’s extraordinary departure from the world forced its way into his mind.

She sank rather quickly. One day she was well and busy, the next she was unable to rise from the bed. She complained of a headache, a twisting pain in her gut, her mind wandered, her thin arms thrust up toward the ceiling. She called for Bernard, forgetting he was in Davy Jones’s locker. Mercy and Sarah and Patience attended her bedside, fetching cold compresses, urging the sick woman to sup a little broth — which she promptly vomited up.

“You will be well again in a day or so,” said Mercy. “It is an indisposition, nothing more.” But as the day wore on the patient became more silent, concentrated on drawing ragged, bubbled breaths. She confounded them by dying in the late afternoon. One moment she seemed no worse, the next she stopped breathing.

Mercy came out of the sickroom and put the kettle on. “She has just left us,” she said. “She is with God.”

“How can that be?” asked Jan, who sat with Nicolaus at the table. “I thought it was a fleeting illness.”

“Apparently not. We never know when He will take us.” She sighed, lowered her eyes, then looked at Nicolaus. “If you could order the coffin from Mr. Kent, Sarah and I will prepare her body. I think that rose silk dress she liked so well.” She did not cry; death was too familiar and demanded its rituals. Older women were deeply familiar with the events of passage. She took the basin of warm water and dry cloths into the death room. She might have preferred to wait some time before this task but Sarah and Patience had already stripped away the comforter and top sheet. To avoid handling the body more than was necessary Sarah suggested they cut her nightgown off. It was soiled with dark vomit in any case. Mercy thought this a criminal idea — it was a good nightgown and, once washed and bleached, someone could use it. So they unbuttoned the high-necked gown and drew it upward over the thin shoulders, over the head, pulling the stick-like arms from the sleeves, and tugging the garment higher over the knees, up the thin thighs, and—

Nicolaus would never forget the way the door of the sickroom flew open with the two women jammed in the opening. He and Jan had been sitting in mourning quiet, watching the flames in the fireplace.

“Nicolaus! Jan! Come into this room.” Nicolaus had never heard his wife speak in that shocked tone. The scarlet-faced women half-ran into the kitchen and let the men go in alone.

The thin and wasted body of an elderly man lay on the still sweat-damp sheet. It was Birgit, certainly it was Birgit, but Birgit was a man. Indubitably. The wispy hairs on the narrow chest and the male sexual organs, shrunken and withered but quite real, confounded them. Nicolaus’s mind seethed. He thought not of Birgit but of Bernard. Why? Why? For forty years! And none of them had known.

He now wrenched his mind away from the still-shocking image engraved in his memory. It was in the past. Instead he thought of what was happening this very hour while he lay sick abed — Piet, Sedley and George Pickering Duke trying to bargain with some of the shrewdest, most ruthless men in the colonies, men noted for their rapacious ways. There was no help for it; if it killed him he had to go there.

Coughing, he called Mercy. “My clothes. I must go to that meeting.”

“You cannot. I forbid it. You are ill, dangerously ill.”

“Let me alone, Mercy. I must go, I tell you. Help me if you wish me to live. Bar me from this and I’ll die of spite.”

She thought he could do that; the Dukes were nothing if not stubborn and willful. He caught Jan descending from his carriage in front of the Duke building.

• • •

Piet, George Pickering, Sedley and their invited guests sat around the oval mahogany table. The Wentworth brother-in-law’s heavy mouth twitched and twitched with a small smile. The proposition was unusual: they would shower the Duke brothers and nephews with social invitations, they would encourage useful connections. They would make the Duke family known, not only in Boston society, but in England. In return they wanted free access to the Duke pineland holdings in the north country, for which, of course, they would pay a fair price. They would share equally the costs of getting the logs out of the forest and to the mills. George Pickering Duke thought it a good agreement as everyone knew that the way to gain advantages was through political and social connections, connections Duke & Sons had never enjoyed. Piet was a little concerned over the “free access” phrase. How free did these political men imagine such access might be? Sedley was in a cold sweat with visions of a thousand choppers cutting their pine, perhaps these very men presenting false accounts or smoothly saying that other men, unknown, had stolen the logs. Worse yet, once given this opening, they were in a position to tamper with the law and seize Duke forestlands. But before Piet could say “Done,” the door opened and the two aged Duke brothers, Jan and Nicolaus, came in. Nicolaus looked half dead, pasty-faced except for burning fever spots on his cheeks. He threw his black cane on the table, looked at the Wentworth brother-in-law and his cronies.

Piet explained the offer. The Wentworth brother-in-law, not liking the look of the old men, softened the offer a little by saying that they would only cut on mutually agreed-upon plots. The words “free access” were not spoken this time.

Nicolaus said, “Out.”

“Out,” repeated Jan. “Out now. The meeting is finished. We agree to nothing.”

“Thank God,” murmured Sedley, emboldened to pick up Nicolaus’s cane as if he would use it on the political men if they made an intention to stay.

But as the men left they treated the elderly Dukes to looks of pure malevolence. The Dukes would never be invited to even the meanest dogfight after this.

• • •

It took an hour and more for them to convince Piet and George Pickering Duke that they had been saved from a perilous fate that would have ruined Duke & Sons.

Nicolaus said, “Piet, I know that your mother, Mercy, has long wanted to put us into a brighter social light, but Jan and I feel it would be best if this company now cultivated a quiet presence. We should be more stealthy in our operations and avoid partnership entanglements — try to keep everything in the family as much as we can — use straw men for land purchases. We do not want Duke and Sons trumpeted about as a great power or even as important. If we remain quiet, grey and invisible, we will have advantages over our competitors.” In fact, they were afraid that details of Birgit’s death would leak into Boston gossip if the Duke women consorted with society in drawing rooms. Under the influence of a glass of sherry anything might be said.

Piet and George looked sulky, like chastised schoolboys. Sedley’s red mouth was fixed in a wolfish grin. The old uncles left the room and went down the stairs. At the bottom Jan said, “We may have trouble from Piet and George.”

Nicolaus coughed. “I love my son Piet, but I put my money on Sedley.”

Nicolaus said, “We can’t die now. We have to get Sedley in position.” But he began to cough again as though his end was at hand. Jan saw him home, where Mercy prodded him to the bed; she and the servant girls brought mustard plasters, syrups, hot bricks, cups of boiling chamomile tea and a beaker of imported malmsey. He would recover.

In the weeks that followed Sedley came every day to sit by his father’s bedside and encourage his health. Jan came often and the three parleyed. Sedley’s ideas, which he had long nurtured in secret, were expansive. He talked, the strong, highly colored face animated, his dark eyes glittering; a businessman’s face, thought Nicolaus. High praise.

“We are too narrow in our holdings, Father, though it was a good move to get out of Carolina. We are concentrated in New England, which has become a hotbed of grasping men with shipping interests and many in their hire. But I believe the future in New England — in Boston — to be very constrained as long as England controls our destinies. We need banks, we need insurance, we need regulated markets, we need a set currency — skilled workmen are moving to Portsmouth, to Salem and other towns as business languishes in Boston. The population is dropping. England’s hand squeezes us.”

“What would you have us do?” The sick man lay aslant stiff pillows.

“For the long plan I would wish us to look into the timber of the Ohio valley and north and west of there. There is a group of men in Virginia who are taking up much of that land. They have their eyes on the future. Forestland can be had for almost nothing. We should explore the region and see what might be valuable. We must, I feel, be more adventurous. Forests need consideration many years before they become money in the pocket.”

“You have the right attitude. Better than falling back on cozy local contacts with important men who will be unimportant tomorrow. What other ideas have you? I know you have been considering ways to strengthen the business.”

“I have. And you know, ever since I was a child I have heard that Duke and Sons thought it advantageous to own a shipyard. And yet when Grandfather Duquet disappeared so did the idea. I think the time has long passed for a bargain shipyard but I still feel we should act as soon as possible and acquire. That is my second idea. Think, one ship with a load of sawed planks to the French West Indies would pay for the vessel. And if that ship should return with a load of molasses or sugar—”

“Ah,” said Jan. “But who would manage this shipyard?”

“Uncle, I think George Pickering could make a success of it. He has often regretted that he was not able to go to sea as you two did when you were young. A maritime interest is there. His knowledge of English law might be an advantage. And he needs a controlling position of some sort.”

“And what of Piet?”

“I suggest he head Duke and Sons here in Boston. He will remain as the company figurehead. And I think Duke and Sons should consider shifting out of Boston. All is so muddled here, so lackadaisical and awry. Boston seems to me always in a lunatic mood, always suspicious that some entity is usurping its rights.”

“That may be a well-founded suspicion,” said Jan.

“Perhaps. But I think we will need a place with more vigorous businessmen, with less interference from England. Boston has ever been England’s spaniel.”

Nicolaus coughed phlegmily and said, “Even spaniels will bite if provoked. And something I find extremely trying is the masts on British ships, masts that we cut from our forestlands. The vaunted English navy is constructed from New England timbers. Our pines and oaks come back to us, eh?” But he thought it would be better to leave Boston to its aloof cliques and fulminating gossip.

Jan nodded but did not want to get into this uneasy topic. “What place are you thinking of, Sedley?” Privately he thought it would be difficult. They had been in Boston for decades.

“New York. Or Philadelphia. Men there are inclined to take the longer sight of possibilities.”

Jan thought Sedley had considered well, up to a point.

“You have mentioned the advantages of a boy going to sea to build character and confidence. You have given thought to the future. And yet you do not mention the possibility of sending your own son, James, to sea. He is of an age when he might be enrolled as a midshipman.”

Sedley frowned. He habitually avoided the boy, who had been sent away to school as early as possible.

“You surprise me, Uncle. You, who forbade George to go to sea.”

“George Pickering was beguiled by hornpipes and wharf swagger. He wished to go as a sailor before the mast. I propose an aim rather higher. James is a bright and quick youngster who might well advance in a naval career before taking up his place in the business. It is important to bring on the young sons. And it will set an example for the other boys of the family. I have no doubt that we can make use of our maritime connections to secure him a midshipman’s place on board a good ship.”

“I will think about it,” Sedley said, but he was already considering that to place James as a Royal Navy midshipman would be a step to the enemy’s side, with the colonial feeling against England stronger every year. He would look into placing the boy on an American privateer.

“Do,” said Nicolaus.