Barkskins

54. vegetable wealth

James had spent the early August morning hour combing very carefully through the monthly household accounts and totaling up Posey’s expenditures. Since their marriage he had kept her on a liberal but strict allowance; in their early days it was his only ascendancy over her. She had found him rigorous — a single penny beyond the allowance and the next month’s amount was halved. But now he cared less and since the birth of Lavinia (long after they resumed subdued marital relations), Posey had changed, all her tigerish flauntings behind her. The waves of her affectionate care washed beyond Lavinia and over James, his cousins and their wives, the house staff — all except Phineas Breeley, who had been banished to New Brunswick, far, far from infant Lavinia. Posey read stories and poems from Tales of the Robin to the child every night; Lavinia developed a tender regard for “the pious bird with the scarlet breast.”

James closed the account book. Posey had become almost frugal in her expenditures. For himself, beyond his cigars, presents for Lavinia, decent port and a very occasional waistcoat, he spent little money — except for new horseflesh. He had just purchased Throstle, a handsome chestnut Hanoverian saddle mount, and decided now on a half hour of manly horse talk with Will Thing, his aged coachman. As he rose to go down to the stables the new butler came in and said, “Mr. Vogel requesting to see you, sir.”

“Let him come in, let him in,” said James, for Lennart Vogel had become a particular friend. “Lennart, you must be just now returned from your annual jaunt?” He was slightly shocked. There was no sign of Lennart the elegant. He wore dark fustian workman’s trousers, a grey wool vest and heavy boots. The boot heels were crusted with mud.

“I am. And very interesting it was, James,” said Lennart. “Forgive my appearance. I am so charged with information I came straight here. Apropos of my journey I wonder if you have a little time to talk with me. This last week I have been forced to consider the future of the company. I see pitfalls ahead that must be avoided. But also a chance to enlarge our scope if we exert ourselves. No use talking to Edward or the others just yet.”

“Would you like to walk about the grounds while we converse? The day’s heat is not yet intolerable.”

“Better to walk about outside,” said Lennart, “I am so disheveled.”

They strolled through the grounds, under the grape arbor with its clusters of unripe fruit, past the gaudy geometries of bedding plants. Posey was delighted with the strident colors of pelargonium, salvias, petunias and calceolarias, but James preferred roses, which at least had some height and perfume; the bedding gardens, very much the new thing, were like cheap oriental carpets.

Lennart walked too quickly for James’s taste; James finally sat on a stone bench near the roses and said, “Lennart, stop a bit and tell me what troubles you.”

Lennart did not sit but walked back and forth, the words tumbling out. “James, I believe we now must urgently consider the future and our forest holdings. We have had several rather lean years and you know as well as I that we do not have many good patches left in New England or York state. The pine is cut out. I know, you are going to say, ‘What about the forest lands in Ohio’ that your father bought some years back. That purchase is the catalyst to my visit here today. In my woodland journey this year I went to that Ohio property and what I saw utterly dismayed me. It was no longer the pine forest that your father persuaded us to purchase. In his day there were only Indians and fur traders passing through great stands of white pine, but now settlers, mostly from northern Europe, have come there in number. Thousands arrived en masse eighteen months ago and they have burned and cut almost all of those trees and replaced them with farms. Can you imagine? The finest white pine heaped up to burn. There is nothing left. And they keep coming.”

“My God,” said James. “It was several thousands of acres.”

“Yes, we should have had a trespass agent in attendance. But the forest stood empty of all but trees and the inrushing people believed it was free for the taking. They took it. It is gone.”

“I thought Armenius Breitsprecher was supposed to make yearly inspections of those holdings.”

“We settled on every two years as it was a long and arduous trip and he has other duties. When your father went there he had to traverse the Great Black Swamp, one of the most horrific barriers to travel on the continent. Now with new roads and the Erie Canal it is all greatly improved. Breitsprecher planned to go this year — too late. These settlers are so many that they have taken those thousands of acres to the ground in little more than a single year.”

“That is difficult to believe.”

“James, you have seen birds of prey pick a fallen deer to the bone in one or two days?”

“Of course.”

“Consider settlers as human birds of prey,” said Lennart. “Birds of prey with the weapon of fire. They burned great swathes of our trees. You have certainly read in the papers of wilderness glades that become towns of more than a hundred houses in two months?”

James could feel the old pain starting to grip his stomach, reminiscent of the days when Posey threw her temper fits. “But surely there is still a glut of forest in other places. We can find other forests. I have heard it said that this continent has unequaled vastness of forests, the most in the world.”

“Quite true. There are still untouched and unknown forests. And that brings me to my point. We need to find these forests and get our woods crews on them as soon as we may. Else all of Europe will come in and burn and cut everything. In some European countries there are laws and prohibitions against free cutting of trees, and the more rebellious peasants who chafed under those rules now are here, and released from those ukases, they go mad with the power of destruction. They are like no people seen on the face of the earth before now. They are like tigers who have tasted blood. And like tigers they pass on their lustful craving for land to their children and grandchildren, who continue to believe it is their right to take whatever is there in this land of plenty.” He threw his cigar stub down. “I propose that you and I make a reconnaissance to find new forest. We are not young, James, but both hale and strong. On my journey I went no farther than those properties in Ohio, but while there I heard that to the north in Michigan Territory there are pines. Very many white pines.”

James sat smoking and thinking. “Yes, I suppose our usual way of buying land or stumpage in New England or York state and then cutting it with no idea of where new timber will be found could undo the company in future. There are more competitors than ever and we have learned our near forests are not eternal. Trees grow too slowly. This is not a fresh idea; we have gnawed on it several times at meetings. But Edward and Freegrace balk at exploration, they delay and counsel waiting, for what I do not know. I recall that at a gathering several years ago Cyrus spoke of excellent chances in Pennsylvania, but Edward said, ‘Not now, not now!’ and our competitors gobbled them up.”

“It is time for action, it is our turn to be first. If we can convince Cyrus, we can outvote Edward and Freegrace. It has come to that. They are timid. Since Lydia died Edward exchanges ideas only with his housekeeper and the cats.” This was patently untrue, for Edward was a passionate Trinitarian and Freegrace a seduced Unitarian dabbling in the new Higher Criticism and the two brothers had fiery discussions that flamed into shouting matches.

James considered that Lennart and he were not many years behind those brothers; they were all old, he thought, though he didn’t feel it. And Lennart was spry enough. No doubt Edward and Freegrace felt able to run a business. The Duke blood promised longevity.

“James, they hold the company back. What do you say, are you willing to undertake a journey to Michigan Territory with me? Or even farther if we choose. I am intrigued by occasional remarks by mariners who have worked the otter fur trade on the west coast — sightings of heavy forests. I would like to see for myself, for what do sailors know of trees?”

“That is very distant. Almost Japan.”

“We are speaking of the future, James, the future! We must not let these chances pass us by.”

“What about Breitsprecher? Would he come with us?” James wondered why childless Lennart was so emphatic about the future.

“I think Breitsprecher is essential. It is he who can best judge the board feet of standing timber.”

“Lennart, I will go with you. And Breitsprecher. When do you think of leaving?”

“I have several important things to attend at once. First, I must see Cyrus. Then an immediate Board meeting. I must enlist Breitsprecher and persuade Edward and Freegrace that this exploration is vital. With luck I think we might leave in two weeks’ time.” He stopped talking, paced around the fragrant damask La Ville de Bruxelles, turned and flicked his finger at a Maiden’s Blush. “The first part of this journey by coach and rail I know well. The most tiresome is the canal boat to Oswego. Bring a large book to read on the canal boat. It is the greatest boredom known. Rail to Buffalo and the last leg to Detroit by steamboat. Progress has eased the traveler’s lot. When I think of poor Sedley in the grip of knee-deep mud…”

James was interested not in his father’s travail in that hundred miles of infested swampland but in what he should pack for the journey. Cigars, he thought, were of first importance. The Indians were in love with Cuban tobacco — as was he — and they rarely got it, so he planned to carefully wrap hundreds of cigars and fill two saddlebags. “But is there any transport beyond Detroit? I would be surprised.” They strolled toward the end of the property marked by aged oaks filled with quarreling squirrels.

“No, though steamboats, roads and trails extend travel every week. From Detroit it will all be terra incognita. Bring sturdy clothes for rough weeks of living off the land. And guns and ammunition. Only one thing I am sure of — we must go beyond Ohio.”

Near the oaks James picked up a fallen stick and pointed it like a gun; the squirrels fled. The friends shook hands. Both had a sense of urgency, a feeling that the North American forests were going up in clearance fires and fireplaces, that armies of immigrant settlers were seizing everything. Lennart Vogel, thought James, had looked into the treeless future and decided to act. It would be dangerous, but he recalled Lewis and Clark, who, three decades earlier, had safely made their way to the far Pacific and back.

• • •

When they met the next day Lennart Vogel had spruced up and looked pleased. “I had good fortune of a sort since Cyrus now lives in Boston. We talked and he will side with us against Edward and Freegrace if it reaches that point. Also, there is a Post Office map for Michigan Territory and I have procured a somewhat worn copy. It shows post roads and stage roads, but the intelligence is twenty years past. More useful I think is word of a well-traveled Indian path suitable for horse travel from Detroit to that mudhole Chicago. The westward Sauk Trail has many branches and I think that if we can discover one northbound we will find the reputed forests by horse and shank’s mare. Indian guides and paddlers are easy to come by everywhere along those great lakes where the fur trade flourished so long ago. The natives will do anything for a bottle of spirits.”

“Would that Freegrace and Edward were so easily managed.”

“Give Edward a present of catnip for his beasts and he will smile on us.” It was true. Since his wife, Lydia, died of a profound asthma aggravated by the inescapable brown manure dust in the streets, Edward doted on Casimir and Vaughn, her two pampered striped felines.

• • •

And so, on an early September morning of drizzling rain Lennart Vogel, James Duke and Armenius Breitsprecher (accompanied by his kurzhaar hunting dog, Hans Carl von Carlowitz) got into their hired coach and headed northwest. Lennart set a hamper of roast chickens and beer on the floor. Hans Carl von Carlowitz ran beside the coach. “He may become footsore,” said Lennart. The dog heard this and ran faster.

• • •

They bought horses in Detroit and rode into the hardwood forest. As they left Detroit behind Lennart said, “I have heard that a hundred years ago old Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac thought La Ville d’Étroit and its environs ‘so beautiful that it may justly be called the earthly paradise of North America.’ ”

They were in unpopulated country and James was disturbed by the green gloom. There were no landmarks, only trees, no open sky, only wind-rustled canopy. He felt as he sometimes had felt at sea, that glittering, hallucinatory sense of trackless immensity. But unlike wind-fated ocean travel the Sauk pathway was obvious, an ancient trail made by weighty mastodons and already very old when men from the steppes of Asia found it.

At a ravine they looked down on a sinuous course of dry stones.

“A sign that settlers are nearby,” said Breitsprecher, pointing at the desiccated watercourse. Another quarter mile took them past an eroded cutover slope. They could hear ax blows and smell smoke as they came to a stumpy clearing of twenty acres where three men were cutting trees in a windrow for a winter burn. An adjacent field already fired showed incinerated soil and cracked rocks.

The settler — James judged him somewhere between forty and sixty years old — came toward them swinging sinewy arms. His hair hung to his shoulders, pale expressionless eyes gazed at them.

“Where ye headed?”

“West. Going west,” answered Lennart. “I’m Lennart Vogel.”

The settler looked them up and down. The ropy sons came near and stared at the strangers, jaws relaxed.

“You, Moony, Kelmar. Git back t’ choppin, schnell,” the father said fast and hard. He turned his eyes on James, on his horse, looked at his boots, squinted up to see his face better. “Look like you might be some kind a govmint man?”

James said nothing. The father gave Armenius Breitsprecher one of his lingering looks, opened his mouth, closed it when Breitsprecher treated him to a similar examination. “We’ll be getting along,” said Armenius to Lennart and James with some emphasis. Without another word they clucked at their horses and moved out.

They had ridden half a mile in silence when Armenius suddenly motioned them into the woods and down an incline to a swamp. At the end of a beaver dam, willows, brush and saplings had all been clear-cut by the rodents, making open ground with good views over the pond and their back trail.

“Stay with the horses, keep quiet and no smoke,” he whispered. “That old man means trouble and I’m going up to see if he and the imbeciles are creeping along the trail. Hans Carl von Carlowitz, komm!” In a minute man and dog were out of sight. James and Lennart waited, the pond surface, the beaver house, the horses, their faces honey-glazed by the setting sun. The day began to close in and the mosquitoes thickened. “I got to have a cigar,” said James in a low voice. “Better not,” whispered Lennart. “Some settlers been known to kill travelers, take their money and goods, their horses. You see how the old man looked us over? How he marked us with his eye?”

“Suppose they got Armenius? Suppose he don’t come back,” whispered James.

“Cross that bridge when we get on it.”

James took out his vial of pennyroyal and slathered it on to repel mosquitoes, fell asleep leaning against a mossy but damp spruce log. Something, a noise, woke him. He was more wide awake than he had ever been in his life. Something — someone — was there, near them, not moving carefully but letting branches swish, footsteps squelch.

“Armenius?” said James very quietly. “Is that you?”

“Hunh!” said something that clumbered off into the swamp, and for the rest of the night they could hear dripping water as the moose pulled up weed. James dozed against Lennart’s comforting snore. In the cold fog of dawn they both woke violently alert when the yellow horse nickered quietly.

“Someone coming,” whispered Lennart. The horses had their ears cocked in the same direction, then placidly began to pull at some blueberry bushes. “Breitsprecher. They know his tread.” They waited. The swamp mist took on a tender color showing it would be a clear day. James fished in his saddlebag, found his Boston cheddar and cut it in half. As he was putting it to his lips a terrific splash startled him and he dropped it in the muck, cried, “Damnation!” A beaver, galvanized at the sight of Armenius Breitsprecher and his dog whipping along its dam, had signaled danger. Hans Carl von Carlowitz took a pose, pointing at the expanding rings of water. Beaver far down the pond slapped their tails. Breitsprecher stepped off the dam and walked up to the horses, patting each on the nose. He smiled broadly at Lennart and James and opened his coat to show a cotton sack. From the sack he drew a flitch of bacon, half a dozen eggs, striped apples and warm biscuits.

“Guter Mann,” he said. “Name was Anton Heinrich. He was on the trail, not following us with evil intent but to bring us to their Klotzhaus for the night. I did not have time to return for you before the woods went dunkel—so I went on with him. He was ein Deutscher, once a Bauer in Maine. We only talk Deutsch—you would not like it. No English. They give me a big supper and sleep in a hay bed in the barn. Here is breakfast that the wife, Kristina, gives to us. Maybe eight Kinder, sets a good table, ja, es gab reichlich zu essen und zu trinken. Gute Menschen.”

“Do not forget how to speak English,” said James.

“Ja, sorry. He bought that farm from the Witwe—widow Kristina — when the first owner died from a fever. Anton used to have a farm in Maine but die Erde, the soil, didn’t last. It couldn’t, the way they burn the ground dead and then try to grow crops in the ashes year after year. Four, five years it’s done. Erde that the forest took tausend years to make.” He bit into an apple and continued. “But you cannot be too careful. There are settlers — and there are settlers.”

Lennart said to himself, “There’s travelers — and there’s travelers,” for he saw blood on Armenius’s trouser leg. He wasn’t going to ask.

• • •

The trail took them through a clearing thick with bracken fern edged by red pine and hemlock and occasional white pine. By late afternoon they were again in forest, and in a mix of deciduous and conifer, frond and lichen, Breitsprecher pointed out white birch and aspen groves and more scattered white pine, taller than other trees. The next morning as they scrambled up a south-facing ridge Breitspecher scraped up a handful of the dry sandy soil and said, “Now we come where white pine rules.” Yet on the other side there were more hemlocks than white pine and the trail betrayed them with a knot of intersecting pathways. Which was the Sauk Trail, which the unknown way to thick growths of white pine?

“We have to try the different ways,” said Breitsprecher. “Let us start with this north branch.” As they hiked along, young hemlocks and hardwoods fighting for space slapped at them, and even smaller pathways cut in — game trails, said Lennart. James wondered if any might lead them to what they were seeking. By noon the next day they were confused by the multiplicity of unknown trails.

“I find it strange that we have not seen any Indians,” said Breitsprecher. “If we meet Indians we can ask them where to find the white pine. I think we must go back to the main trail and wait until a party of Indians comes by.”

They camped and waited, and after two days a hunting party of six Chippewa stopped and asked in English for “bacco” when they saw James smoking his morning cigar. “Give bacco,” said the youngest Chippewa, a boy of about ten. The others repeated the magic phrase, and Breitsprecher, speaking to them in some all-purpose linguistic mix, said James would give them tobacco if they showed the correct trail to many big white pines. He pointed to a handy example fifty feet off the trail, a large tree with exposed roots spread out like monstrous fingers. They all spoke at once and pointed in the same direction — back toward Detroit. An older man in the party broke a twig and drew a map in the soft soil. “Him d’Étroit,” he said. He drew five trails coming out of Detroit. “Sauk,” he said, pointing at a southwest way. “San Joe,” he said, pointing to the trail they were on. Breitsprecher’s choice of the right-hand trail at the intersection had taken them off the Sauk, which was wrong in any case. “Saginaw,” he said, pointing at a line that ran northwest. “Shiawassee,” he said prodding another. “Mackinac.” The Shiawassee and the Saginaw connected to the Mackinac and two other important trails. They should have taken the Shiawassee or the Saginaw trail from Detroit, not the Sauk.

“Do we have to go back to Detroit?” said Lennart. Armenius put the question and the Chippewa talked excitedly.

“He says there is a side trail that will take us onto the Shiawassee. The Mackinac crosses the Shiawassee. But we do not go on the Mackinac but continue straight on a trail that follows the shore of Huron. He calls it Along-the-Shore Trail.” The Chippewa volunteered to show them the side trail that would take them to the Shiawassee and without waiting for more talk set off at a fast lope.

“I’ll just go with them, mark the trail and return for you,” Breitsprecher said. Before they were out of sight the Indians stopped suddenly and spoke among themselves, then the youngest one looked back at James. “Bacco! Bacco now!” James plunged his hands into his pack and pulled out twelve Cuban cigars, two for each man. He was about to present them to the Chippewa with a bit of a flourish when Breitsprecher said, “They will want to stay and smoke with us, so give them to me and when they have pointed out the connecting trail I will give them the tobacco and return for you.” He explained this to the Indians and they set off again, Breitsprecher stretching his legs to keep up. Once again James and Lennart and the horses waited. And waited.

“Suppose they killed Armenius?” said James in the afternoon. “They could do so and take the cigars. It’s a long time he’s gone.”

“Backtracking can take time. Did not Armenius say about eight miles? I warrant it is at least eight miles. But I do not understand why we could not all have gone with them. There’s less danger in numbers. And it would have saved time since we must go there anyway. I’ll smoke one of your remaining cigars with you while we wait.”

“To be sure. Cigars are useful when hunting white pine, eh?”

• • •

Breitsprecher was back before dusk. Before he could say anything, Lennart, who had been coming to a slow boil, said, “We should all have gone with you. We would be on that trail now if we had. We lost time. From now on we do not sit and wait while you run ahead. Do you understand me, Herr Breitsprecher?”

“I do. Of course you are right, but I was afraid it might be a ruse and that the proximity of James’s cigars would have incited them to bad actions. In fact they were very agreeable, very pleased with the Cuban tobacco. They sat down at once to smoke at the trail junction.”

“How far is it?” said James, stiff from the long wait.

“Not above nine miles, less than two hours horseback. Then they said maybe five, six days’ walk, which I think we may do in three as we have horses. The connecting trail looked not so bad. A bit overgrown. We can go there now if you like or rest until morning. You decide,” he said to Lennart Vogel.

“Immediately. The wait was very tiring. I, for one, am anxious to find these pines.”

• • •

Breitsprecher’s assessment of the trail was inadequate. The first mile was relatively open but then they were on low ground forcing their way through such choking rampant growth they had to dismount and lead their suffering animals. “Not so many Indians use this trail,” said Breitsprecher. “Nature is taking it back.”

When they finally stopped for the night and had rubbed grease on the horses’ cut legs he said, “The Chippewa told me when they go up to those pines they go by water in canoes. That is good news for us as it means the forests are on a river or the lakeshore. Michigan is all lakes and rivers. It is country made for the lumber business.”

• • •

There was no mistaking the Shiawassee when they reached it, a fair trail well beaten by many travelers. Their path climbed ever higher, ever clearer into forest. And what forest. Big white pine were everywhere, thicker and thicker. As they curved northeast the Saginaw Trail came in on their right and they were in the most choice pine forest any of them had ever seen. A pure stand of huge trees four and five feet in diameter, the tiered branches resembling great green pagodas a hundred and fifty feet tall, two hundred feet and more of the prized fine-grained wood, easy to float downriver or hold in bays and pounds.

They made an early camp and Breitsprecher spent the daylight hours walking, looking, measuring, computing, marking, marking. He came back and sat on a log beside the fire. He was trembling a little and ate the last of the near-rancid venison.

“Well?” said Lennart. “What do you think?”

“I walked off ten acres square and did some computing.” He jerked his thumb at the trees. “This right where we are measures out to about twenty-five thousand board feet each acre.”

“That cannot be correct,” said James. “You must have made an error.”

“I did not believe it myself, so I surveyed twice. That is a modest estimate. I have never seen a forest like this in my life, did not know such a thing existed. This must be the greatest stand of white pine in the world. Now we must try and grasp the extent. It may be just a few hundred acres of these extraordinary trees. It may be more.”

It was more. Mile after dense mile after mile of the largest and straightest pines. “God,” said Lennart looking up at the clouds, “we thank Thee for this glorious treasure.”

None of them could sleep that night and Breitsprecher was up before first light, making a fire, boiling coffee, dropping things. They drank the scalding black stuff, packed up and set out as soon as there was light enough to see. Day after day they walked and rode through the magic forest. They reached a great bay on Huron’s shore, but of the pines there was no end.

“This is so far beyond anything we expected,” said Lennart. “Here is what we must do. First, we must get to the land office and start buying up as much of this forest as we possibly can. We must establish a headquarters, whether Detroit or where I do not know. We must rush back to Boston and explain to the Board what we have found. Armenius must continue looking, continue surveying and grading. There are centuries of timberwork here. But we have so many things that must be done we will not be able to start cutting for at least a year, perhaps two, while we lay the groundwork. We shall have to hire you some assistants,” he said to Breitsprecher. “And someone must deal with the land office. Cyrus has to help. We must contact our markets. Albany may well be a good shipping point as it has the canal terminus. This is our future for generations, right here,” he said, and he stamped his boot on the pine duff. “This is the making of Duke and Sons. There can never be anything better than what we have found.” He was babbling.

“Great gods,” said James. “A thousand men could not cut all this in a thousand years. We’ll get them. We’ll get a thousand men.”

Armenius Breitsprecher gazed into the fire and said nothing. Not for the first time he saw the acquisitive hunger of Duke & Sons was so great they intended to clear the continent. And he was helping them. He hated the American clear-cut despoliation, the insane wastage of sound valuable wood, the destruction of the soil, the gullying and erosion, the ruin of the forest world with no thought for the future — the choppers considered the supply to be endless — there was always another forest. Rapine had been a force in the affairs of Duke & Sons since its beginnings, but with this find it would likely become the company’s engine.

He himself did not stand to become wealthy from his percentage of the glorious treasure. In the years he had worked for the Dukes he had only received a little pinch of the forestland he cruised — twenty acres here, a section there, two acres on a mountaintop, fifty acres of tamarack swamp. Small pieces too widely separated that were difficult to sell, a meager return for his work. If he wanted any of the big Michigan pine he would have to connive to get it. The thought troubled him.

• • •

As they always did James Duke and Lennart Vogel smoked a cigar before they unrolled their blankets, and as he always did Armenius gathered an armful of wood, called Hans Carl von Carlowitz to him, ruffled his ears and lay down beside the fire. It was his task to keep it stoked through the night.

Lennart spoke in a near whisper. “James, I wish to ask you a delicate question. I would value your frank answer.”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Do you — please answer frankly — do you — do you entirely trust Armenius?” James considered for a long time. Despite the excitement of the day and the gravity of the question Lennart was nearly asleep when James said, “I have no reason to distrust Armenius.”

“Nor I,” said Lennart. “It is just that this vast richness of pine breeds suspicion and worry. It is so great it can hardly be encompassed by my mind.”

55. never enough

It was a clear October dawn when they reached Boston, the autumn leaves in their fiery coats. James went straight to his house. On his way out again in clean linen, and a butternut-brown frock coat, he looked in at Posey and said, “My dear, I am returned.”

“Well, James. Did you find what you hoped for?”

“We certainly found good timber. The difficulty will be in getting it out.”

“Isn’t that always the same problem? Well do I remember the stratagems of log extraction in New Brunswick and Maine.”

“This is a somewhat different proposition. How does Lavinia do? When does she leave for England?” Lavinia had been sent to a school for girls in London the past year.

“Thank you for your interest, sir,” said Posey acidly. “Very much appreciated, I’m sure. In truth we are having a tussle over this. She does not wish to go back to that school — why I cannot say beyond her stubborn character. She finds no fault with the school except to denigrate the mathematics teacher, whom she calls ‘an ignoramus.’ ”

“No doubt. She has always been very quick at figures and abstract notions.”

“At first I was opposed to these vapors, but this morning I have been considering if it may not be for the best to keep her here and hire private tutors.”

“I quite agree,” said James. “She is too impressionable for school in England.” He thought of his own unhappy childhood in that place.

“She is young but it is in her and our interests to see she meets young men of the best families. In England I worry that she might become the prey of impoverished fortune hunters.”

“Likely enough. The place swarms with old families who have nothing but their names and crumbling houses. A wealthy American girl is a plum to them. I saw it often. Really, it would be better to keep her here.”

“Good, we agree. Should I begin a search for a proper girls’ school in Boston? Or a tutor?”

But James was already cantering down the stairs and into the New England morning.

“Always the selfish ruffian,” said Posey.

• • •

Lennart and James tried to set the Board afire with descriptions of the mighty pines of Michigan, the great rivers and streams all connected to Lakes Huron, Michigan or Superior, the strategic placement of Detroit on the narrows between Huron and Erie, road expansions, the Erie Canal connection to Albany and on to New York City. Edward and Freegrace sat stone-faced. Cyrus Hempstead was nodding yes, yes, yes.

Lennart said, “We all know that getting the logs out of the forests and to the mills is the key to timber profits.” James got up and opened a window, letting in the bright air.

“Ah,” said Edward sourly. “A very rosy picture. But where are the lumbermen to come from? You are speaking of an unpopulated region. Or do you intend to teach Indians how to use the ax?”

“Some of our best axmen began life in a wigwam. But that is beside the point. White men are coming into the southern part of Michigan like spring geese heading north. The population is in spate. Have you not heard the expression ‘Michigan Fever,’ which denotes the rush? I am confident we can attract men to work in the woods. Many of the newcomers are Maine men — they smell the trees. We’ll put out advertisements. Where there are trees such as we saw, men will come for them. But first we must procure the land and build our sawmills. James is returning to the Detroit land office immediately to buy up sections — if the Board agrees. The government cost is one hundred dollars for an eighty, eight hundred for a section.”

“You say ‘we’ but James does not have authority to loose Duke and Sons’ purse strings.”

James spoke up. “Because Lennart and I feel immediate action is vital I have agreed to use my own money to secure the lands. I will then sell them to the company for an additional twenty-five cents an acre.”

Edward, who as elder and Board president did hold the purse strings (Freegrace was nominally the treasurer), scribbled and said, “That is nine hundred sixty dollars a section. A tidy little profit for James.”

“I think it fair as I have the ready funds and, if I am not mistaken, Duke and Sons do not. Is it not true that we would have to liquidate some of the New York and New England holdings in order to make large purchases?”

“Of course, but I cannot see what the all-fired hurry is about,” snapped Edward.

When Freegrace made a disgreeable sound, Lennart, though he felt like shouting in the old men’s faces, said in a calm pleasant voice, “Breitsprecher gave a conservative figure of twenty-five thousand board feet per acre. With lumber at four dollars a thousand the company would net one hundred dollars per acre or sixty-four thousand a section. Duke and Sons will take in sixty-four thousand dollars on each section, for which they will have paid only nine hundred and sixty dollars.”

“I have never heard of such a high per acre yield,” said Edward, drumming his fingers on the table. “It cannot be correct.” He glared at the open window as though he would shut out the azure day.

“Breitsprecher took his tally and measurements over and over to be sure. It is unprecedented. Yet the trees are there. We saw them, touched them, walked through them for two and a half weeks. You cannot envision the vast extent of this monstrous fine pinery.” Lennart spoke as though to dangerous idiots.

“The competition is no doubt rushing in.”

“They have not yet begun rushing. We are the first,” said Lennart, barely subduing the triumph in his voice. “It was a tiresome journey and not many would wish to undertake it.”

“Then there is no reason for haste,” said Edward.

“Remember Pennsylvania,” said Cyrus, who had watched the company lose a rich chance.

The meeting lasted longer than any meeting in Duke & Sons’ history and continued the next day as they wrangled over the advantages and difficulties of setting up a new headquarters in Detroit, the impossibility of running an expanded company with only family members sitting in Boston. The good weather held and it became a punishment to be shut up in meeting after meeting.

“We will certainly have to hire outsiders,” said Freegrace. “Outsiders! Against Duke and Sons’ policy.”

“That is the case,” said Lennart. “And we must start this hiring at once. We need more landlookers. There is too much forest for Breitsprecher and we must get all the experienced men we can. Other timbermen will soon smell the perfume of those Michigan pines. There will be a scramble.”

“And more employees in the office here, and in Detroit to keep track of the land purchases, the maps, the subcontractors, our markets, the shifting tides of lumber prices, boats and transport — everything. Everything. We must build an office building and houses in Detroit as soon as ever we can.”

“Let us not rush ahead so quickly,” moaned Freegrace.

“James,” said Lennart, who somehow during the course of the meeting had moved into a primary position to order the company’s affairs, “how soon can you return to Detroit and commence buying up of the lands Breitsprecher surveyed on our exploratory journey?”

“Fairly soon. In ten days perhaps. I have some affairs to set in order and need to make arrangements for certificates of deposit and surety for the payments.”

“I have nightmares of interlopers getting those lands before we do. It is urgent that we buy now. We can always buy on credit — that would hasten acquisition.”

“Duke and Sons have never bought on credit,” said Edward stiffly. “We pay cash and that is why our custom is favored. It is our signature.”

“If we commence buying townships, with such large purchases we may need to proceed with buying on credit,” said Lennart. “The day will come.”

• • •

A week later James went west again. In Detroit he took rooms near the government land office. In three days of intense work with the clerk, a cold-syrup sort of man he thought, Duke & Sons owned all the timberlands Breitsprecher had surveyed on their exploratory trip, a hundred thousand acres. He bought three city lots and hired carpenters to begin putting up an office building and three houses. He returned to Boston to await the land patent certificates. Breitsprecher stayed in Michigan surveying, marking sections and whole townships.

“We should buy up the townships sight unseen,” said Lennart. “We know the trees are there. It is not essential to send a landlooker to comb through every acre before purchase.”

Edward and Freegrace recoiled. “What, take a flyer on getting worthless swampland or cliffs and sinkholes? Or nothing but grass or spindly trees?”

“It is not in the nature of these Michigan lands to deviate from pine. It would save a great deal of anxiety if we bought sight unseen straight from the land office map.” Lennart’s voice was hoarse with talking. But the two oldest Dukes flamed up with such passion, and Cyrus Hempstead unaccountably sided with them, that he dropped the idea.

• • •

In December, Breitsprecher returned. It was a cold day. He went up the cramped stairs of the old Duke building and into the boardroom to make his report. As he heard the first figures Cyrus sucked in his breath. The board foot estimates were so enormous they could barely be grasped.

“It is all standing timber. I saw no sign of other landlookers but I did see a government surveyor and his chainman on the trail. He said there are many such surveyors at work in Michigan Territory now, those in the south doing section work, the men to the north in the timberlands roughing out townships. He said some of the early surveyors were far from expert and because of their inexperience Michigan has two base lines. I do not know how much Mr. James has procured of the timberland that we saw on our first journey. I have heard of connivance and foul play at the land offices, though I think the men in Detroit are reasonably honest.”

Cyrus spoke up. “Mr. James Duke procured most, if not all, of those lands you examined earlier. And now we must acquire these you have just marked for us. We cannot move quickly enough. No reflection on your excellent work, Armenius, but we need more landlookers. If you have any names to put forward this is the time to do it.”

He had no ready names.

As they left the meeting room Lennart drew Cyrus aside and said, “We need you to help James make the purchases. There is another Michigan land office in Monroe, and I think it would be best to use it and allay possible competitors’ suspicions that Duke and Sons are taking all of Michigan. We have liquidated some of the New England holdings now and there is money for this. I wish you to think how important it may be to buy on credit if we want to secure large holdings. The immediate investment is small compared to the future income. So far we have only begun. There are many millions of acres of pineland in Michigan, and perhaps contiguous areas to the west and south. You can take the coordinates Breitsprecher has just given us, go to Monroe and start buying. Come with me now and I will give you the bonds. Buy as fast as ever you can.”

• • •

Armenius Breitsprecher left the overheated office, walked home enjoying the smell of a coming storm. At his small house Frau Stern welcomed him back with his favorite, a lemon posset. There was a great sack of accumulated mail on the kitchen floor. He swallowed the posset and four roast pigeons and slept for sixteen hours.

The next morning he got at the mail. The Christmas season was at hand and the homeland Breitsprechers flooded their relative with affectionate greetings and presents — cakes and Blutwurst, a small keg of best sauerkraut, tins of nuts and candied fruits, and his grandmother Fredda had written out a description of the geese that were to be roasted. The Blutwurst delighted him and before he opened the rest of the letters he sent Frau Stern for some good dark bread.

With the plate of sliced Blutwurst and bread and a thumb-size blob of Flower of Mustard beside him he read the letters one by one. The Blutwurst was gone, the bread gone and only a smear of mustard left by the time he reached the pages from his cousin Dieter Breitsprecher. Dieter had suffered in his childhood — both his parents on a holiday in the Jura had been caught in an unseasonable snowstorm and avalanche. The orphan was brought up by his severe maternal grandmother. Armenius could almost see Dieter before him, tall and with gooseberry eyes. He had studied privately with Heinrich von Cotta in Saxony and now was working as a forester on the estate of Graf Ernst-August von Rotstein. The estate’s most distinguished feature, he wrote, was a large forest. Armenius moaned with envy at Dieter’s description of his catalog of the forest’s insects and how they affected the different species of trees, temperature diaries and rainfall measurements, boundary plantings, a coppice experiment. Yet Armenius had seen enough wild American forest to slightly dampen his enthusiasm for management. How could one possibly control the fantastic complexity of the New World forests?

Several days passed before he could begin to answer his cousin’s letter and so filled with discontent were his paragraphs that he crumpled and threw down page after page. Hopeless, hopeless to try to describe the situation in North America, where people spurned the age-old craft of forestry, a craft he knew only partially from books, his father’s lectures and his own observations. He had to get Dieter to come and see for himself the Michigan forest, a massive but innocent forest standing complete before the slaughter began. What discussions they would have! He scribbled rapidly and posted the result without rereading it.

• • •

An answer came in March. Dieter was making the journey. Armenius worked it out that his cousin was at that moment on the high seas and with fair weather would arrive within two weeks.

• • •

With his dog, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, beside him he stood on the wharf staring, as he had for the last half hour, at the docked Hansa. Passengers lined the rails, eager to get off. He looked for Dieter’s head, which should be among the highest, but did not see him. Nor did he see him in the flood of passengers. He was startled when a hand closed on his shoulder and the familiar voice said, “Wie geht’s, Menius?”

“Ach. You startled me. I was looking for you.”

“Yes, I saw you staring. I tipped my hat. Sehr kalt hier.”

“It is. Amerikanischer Frühling. Komm, komm, we’ll be at my house very soon.”

“You have your own house? And is this your Hund?” He patted Hans Carl’s head.

“Ja, this is Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who goes everywhere with me, and as for the house, it was my parents’ and I am not often in it as I spend most of my time in the forest making computations of board feet. As I mentioned in my letters.”

“Ideal name. So the observant one is always at your side, nicht wahr?”

“Ja, ja. Always. And on cold nights— Ach, Dieter, I can’t say how glad I am you have come, and with time enough for me to show you everything.”

“I have always wanted to see the famous forests of North America, and the Graf, who is a second cousin, though reluctant to see me go, was generous with the time — because of your letter, which I showed him. ‘See everything,’ he said, ‘and if you find good timber investments for me write at once.’ ”

“Ah, he is just like the Dukes. Just like the Americans.”

“I think not,” said Dieter, laughing, his pronounced Adam’s apple rising and falling, his gooseberry eyes trying to see everything at once. “He suffered a great deal from the Peasants’ Uprising a few years ago. They reject his control of the forest, the laws, they hate the managed plantations.”

“As soon as you have rested from your voyage we will start for Michigan. But first I will introduce you to the Dukes and Lennart Vogel. We will go to the Duke office tomorrow morning.”

“Dear cousin, while I get warm with some hot spirit and water you will tell me all about the Dukes, their plan to seize the forests of the earth, their fiendish little ways.”

In half an hour the two cousins had finished Frau Stern’s boiled pigs’ feet and kraut and settled in front of the Franklin stove with their pipes and the port decanter to talk about the Dukes and forestry while the wind shrieked around the corner of the house.

• • •

Edward Duke did not take to Dieter Breitsprecher. Later he complained to Freegrace. “Why, he looks like Ichabod Crane, a great thin tall gawk. And how he stares!”

“Yes, but Armenius says he is a forester on a great estate in Germany. He manages a large forest. He might be useful to us.”

“God’s sake, how on earth does he ‘manage’ a forest?” snorted Edward. “Cut ’em down! That’s forest managing. Tell Ichabod to take his managing back to Germany. No use to us.”

• • •

James sat at the breakfast table with his plate of toast and the honey jar. He smiled when Lavinia came in. She had changed from a child with a sullen expression to a young woman whose greatest charm was the bloom of youth. Her mustard-colored wool dress caught the stream of sunlight as she passed the window.

“My dear Lavinia,” he said. “How very well you look. Well kempt and soigné. Will you join me at breakfast this morning and tell me all your secrets?”

“I have no secrets,” said Lavinia, turning scarlet, tears suddenly brimming over and running down her cheeks.

“Good lord, girl, I do not mean to pry. I only wanted to be agreeable. I have seen so little of you since I came back and I cherish each hour in your company.”

But Lavinia was weeping loudly into her napkin. It seemed a long time until she stopped and James felt it was rude for him to attack his toast while his daughter wept. So he waited.

“Papa,” she said, mopping the tears. “I do have—” She wept again.

“For God’s sake, child, what is it? Tell me. And here, have a piece of toast.” He buttered a now-cold slice and dabbed on honey, handed it dripping to Lavinia. She took it and held it at arm’s length as though it were a poison snake, then put it on the edge of his plate.

“It drips honey,” she said and unaccountably began to laugh at James with his tower of cold toast when the whole world knew he liked it hot and crunchy.

“Yes, that is a known property of honey — it drips. Would you care for toast without honey?”

“Yes.” She took the toast, put it on a plate, went to the sideboard and slid a poached egg onto the toast, brought the plate back to the table and began to cut up her breakfast. James observed that the egg also dripped, perhaps more fluidly than honey. They sat in companionable understanding while they ate.

“Papa,” said Lavinia. “I do have a secret.”

“Yes, I thought you might. We all have ’em. What’s yours?”

“I think I might shock you.”

“Oh try, dear girl, do try. It has been years since I was shocked and I am keen to know the sensation again.”

“You are too silly.” She was a trifle fat, with dimpled hands and a plump chin.

“Not in the least. Silliness finished. I am your adoring papa and wish to know if there is any wish, no matter how picayune, I might grant you. You have only to speak.”

“Very well. It is this: I do not want to be ‘finished.’ Nor do I want to ‘come out’ nor catch a beau nor marry.” She took a breath. “I want to learn the timber trade.”

His hand lurched and coffee spilled. If she had said she wished to learn how to slaughter pigs she could not have startled him more.

“But my dear girl, there simply are no women in the timber trade. It is a man’s affair from ax to beeswax. If you were a boy we might place you in one of the lumber camps for a season so you could know the work, but I can’t imagine what role a girl — a woman — could have in the timber trade. I just cannot! Have you considered what you might do as a ‘timberwoman’?” He smiled at the preposterous image the word raised. She did not return the smile but scowled.

“Mother helped her father in his timber business. She learned a great deal and was considerable use in all those affairs. She said she even helped you when you came from commanding ships. Papa, I know I would be good at it. I am very good with mathematics. I could work out problems with board feet and measurements. I am good at compiling papers and sorting them into categories. I am interested in finance, in banks and loans, in credit and assets, in prices and factors that change them. I know I could do something of value. And I will not get married. Mama is harping on marriage day and night and I shall run away rather than marry. I am quite, quite serious about this. I think of nothing else. Why cannot I do something in the office of Duke and Sons? I know you have clerks — I could be a clerk. I would learn much that way. You say the company is going to open new offices in Detroit. I will be a part of this. I will!” Now she resembled Posey, eyes flashing dangerously, bosom heaving.

For a very brief second James considered how a lumber buyer might respond to such a display. Ye gods, he thought, ye gods, what can I do, what say? He ate the last piece of toast, very poor toast now, cold and somewhat sodden from spilled coffee.

“Lavinia. Give me several days to think about your surprising request. I will seriously consider how something might be arranged.”

The chance came sooner than he imagined. Lennart stopped by one May morning and begged James to go with him to the offices. “We have several applicants for clerical positions in Detroit and even two landlookers from New Hampshire. One of them has been as far west as Ohio. Clerks are another matter. Most of them are barely able to read, and as for ciphering — you might whistle.”

“I have a rather unusual applicant for a clerk,” said James. “Let me find my hat and I will tell you on the way.”

• • •

Armenius thought his cousin Dieter Breitsprecher was, aside from Hans Carl von Carlowitz, the best traveling companion he had ever known. Their large knapsacks were packed, they were ready for the wild forests. Armenius brought tobacco, not Cuban cigars but dark and tarry twists. Dieter carried his heavy.60 caliber jaeger rifle, and Armenius a new.50 caliber plains rifle with a beaver tail cheek piece — Dieter slavered over this gun and before they left he ordered one from the Missouri gunsmith.

“It will be my memento of this journey,” he said.

“You will have other mementos.”

The journey, familiar to Armenius, was full of shocks and wonders for Dieter. The Erie Canal boat was insufferably tiresome at four miles an hour. On fine days they ran along the towpath, sometimes ranging out to see the countryside. They had time for talk.

“The thing is,” said Armenius, “there is here a complete lack of knowledge of forest management. Americans do not understand shelter belts, they have never heard of thinning trees nor pruning them, they cannot believe that soil has anything to do with forests, nor water. Hedgerows? What an idea! They do not believe in hedgerows. Nor coppices. The most elemental precepts of forestry are as Chinese.”

“Surely they have some sense of soil erosion, so painfully obvious when it appears?”

“Not at all. They accept it as the natural order of the world. And although they choke in the fumes of the city they do not make a connection with the purer air in the forest. ‘Why is the air clean and fresh near the forest but not in the city?’ one can ask. The answer is ‘Because God made it thus.’ So extensive are the forests here that Americans cannot see an end to them. Therefore, they have no interest in preserving them.”

“Do not your employers see the economic advantages of maintained forests? Is there no reforestation at all?”

“None. They do not even leave seed trees in their vast cutover lands. One hard rain or a deep snow comes and the soil begins to run downhill like molten gold. If I say anything to the Dukes about commonsense ways to protect and repair their cut forestlands for the future they look at me as if I were mad. Well, perhaps I am mad. I hate aiding them in their quest to destroy every forest in North America.”

“This is quite sad. What are the most pressing uses here for cut timber? Houses, I suppose.”

“Railroad ties. I think that the railroads should manage private forests where they might grow trees for ties. But it is not done. They take down wild forests and transport the timber at high cost. Charcoal furnaces for smelting use uncountable numbers of trees. Moreover, every household consumes almost one hundred cords of wood during the long cold winters. The fireplaces here are large enough to roast an entire ox. But stoves are making an advance. And speaking of fires! Mein Gott, the forests are constantly on fire, but not controlled fire — the settlers set vast acreages ablaze to clear the way for farms and houses. Then, disappointed that the soil is poor, they move on west, always west, and do the same elsewhere. Not one in a hundred American farmers can tell you the characteristics of soils. The Indians were better managers of the forest than these settlers. They were very good observers of water, weather, all animals and growing things. And they forbore to cut lavishly. They used many parts of many trees for different tools and medicines, not unlike the old German peasantry.”

“I wonder you do not return to Germany,” said Dieter.

“Dieter, through no doing of my own I was born in this country. It is a population where each settler vies to be more of a Nichtswisser than his neighbor — learning is considered shameful — but I am used to it. It would be difficult to change. Besides, Germany now is not the Germany I have in my mind.”

“I wonder,” said Dieter.

“I want to see what happens next. Always this is my interest.”

• • •

In Detroit they spent a day walking about, passed a small plank-sided building with a sign that read GENERAL LAND OFFICE MICHIGAN.

“Let us go in,” said Dieter. “I want to see what sort of man the recorder is.”

He was tall and pale from lack of sunlight, his eyes colorless and expressionless. He greeted them with a jerk of a smile. “What can I do for you? Land purchase today? A few town lots?” He stared at Armenius.

“No, not today. In a few weeks, perhaps. We are just getting our bearings,” he said.

“I think I have seen you here before,” said the man, “in the company of Mr. James Duke?”

“It is possible.”

“Yes, I believe he said you were his landlooker.”

“I was,” said Armenius.

“And you are no longer?” asked the man almost happily.

“No, I am yet, but I am on leave of absence just now. This is my cousin Dieter Breitsprecher, who is visiting. He is a forester from Germany. We are going to look at the timberland.”

“Right,” said the man. “This is the place for timber, yes it is.” There was a silence and the man, now gazing out the window, said almost dreamily that one of the federal surveyors and his chainman had stopped in the day before. “Dozens of surveyors measuring Michigan these days. And some like you coming to get hold of timberland.”

“Where are those surveyors working now?”

“Marking out townships. Northwest of where Mr. Duke purchased. They said the prospects for a timberman are even richer up north. I think to myself that I might buy a forty, could I ever have the money. Clerks make very little, you know, though the employment is steady.”

“May your wish be granted,” said Armenius, smiling like the famous cat who caught the mouse. He spoke kindly to this man remembering that James Duke had treated him as a servant, saying “Come, fellow, we haven’t all day,” and ordering him to copy the papers out in a fair hand “instead of black claw marks as an ink-foot crow might make.”

“Are they surveying along the shore?” asked Dieter, looking at the map on the counter. The man nodded. “Along the shore, inland, along the rivers, almost to Mackinac — a huge amount of territory — all pinelands.” Armenius would have asked more questions but a man came to complain about the old French long lots in Detroit. “Like damn noodles,” he said. “Long, long skinny noodles. I want my money back.”

“Many thanks,” said Armenius to the clerk. “We may come back tomorrow and speak a little with you.”

“I look forward to that.”

They left and returned to their boardinghouse. “I could not follow all that was said,” said Dieter. “What is a ‘forty’? Is he giving us important information about the surveying?”

“A ‘forty’ is a quarter of a quarter section — forty acres. And he was certainly giving us important information — and, I believe, asking for a bribe. We might modify our trip a little. I would like to see that northern region.”

“I would also like to see it. Perhaps you will not always be a landlooker for Duke and Sons. Let us find some dinner in this rough place. And talk with the clerk again tomorrow, then set out to find those wondrous pines.”

A day later they started their journey on two hired horses, one the yellow horse from Armenius’s former trip. “At the junction we will bypass the trail to the Duke purchases and go north. Cousin, I mention that we will pass a stump farm that belongs to an incompetent farmer, Anton Heinrich. He has worn out two farms already and is quickly ruining the third. He has a quite pretty daughter. You have heard all the old stories about farmers’ daughters? Yes, they are true. I lay with this girl but it was rather — I can’t say. Maybe we stop there again.”

So Dieter discovered an unknown side of his cousin. Nor had he suspected he could speak so casually of bribes, for the clerk had made it clear when they returned the next day that information about the pines farther north should be rewarded. Armenius told him that if they found heavy timber to be there they would certainly stop in on their return and make an arrangement. His cousin had become an American.

• • •

The Heinrich log house came in sight. Moony, one of the dummkopf sons, was splitting stove wood, Kelmar, the other, stacking it on the listing porch. As they came nearer Moony slammed his ax into the chopping block and ran inside, calling, “Ma! Ma!” A woman with two small children clutching her skirts came out. Dieter thought she looked like a barn cat. She had been at her washtub and her hands were like wet roots.

“Hullo, Mistress Kristina,” said Armenius cheerfully. “Is Anton at home today?”

The woman gave a howl, threw her apron up over her face and lurched inside. Armenius and Dieter looked at each other. Moony edged closer and stood clenching and unclenching his hands.

“What is wrong? Where is your father? Anton. Is he here?” Armenius saw the daughter holding the hands of two more children. He stepped toward her and she stepped back.

Moony opened his mouth to speak, as though he had something to tell but didn’t know how to go about it. Armenius looked at Kelmar.

“Was ist los? Tell me!” He remembered the two fools had a few words of English, a few words of Deutsch.

“Vater—” said Kelmar forcefully. And again, “Vater.”

“Ja?” encouraged Armenius.

“Kaput,” said Moony.

It was the girl who, keeping at a distance, told them a bizarre story. She looked only at Dieter and spoke to him in a low voice. If Armenius made a step in her direction she moved back. She said the father had been chopping trees with Moony and Kelmar. Father was not so quick. A big tree had fallen and pinned him to the ground. He cried for help. Moony and Kelmar came to him. They were strong. They seized the butt end of the tree and began to pull. They dragged the entire tree across Vater’s body as he shrieked. At this point Moony, who had been listening and grinning, gave an imitation of Vater’s agonizing cries.

“And where is he now?” asked Armenius.

“He did not live. That tree’s branches tore his belly and his inside came outside when they pulled.”

“Kaput,” said Moony.

“Fucked,” said Kelmar in clear English.

“Let us get away from this place,” said Dieter sotto voce. He did not like Moony and Kelmar and it was clear the girl was avoiding Armenius. The whole family seemed deranged. The thought came to him that his cousin might be something of a scoundrel. So?

• • •

They said nothing until dark fell and Armenius had a fire going.

He said, “I have never heard anything as stupid as that. Never. They could have trimmed the limbs and lifted it off him. They could have chopped away the crown and butt to small size. One could have pried it up while the other pulled the man out. They could have rigged a hoist.”

Dieter murmured, “Sometimes one must get tired of chopping trees endlessly.”

For the next ten days they walked through the great pines and Dieter became very quiet. Occasionally he scraped away the needles and examined the soil beneath the duff.

“You see?” said Armenius as they stood tiny and amazed in the kingdom of the pines.

“I do,” said Dieter as though pledging a marriage vow.

• • •

A decanter of brandy stood on a side table in Edward Duke’s mahogany office. Edward was turning the pages of a thick sheaf of survey pages and locating them on a crisp, new-drawn map of Saginaw Bay’s shoreline with the Duke & Sons sections neatly crosshatched in sepia ink. He had come to believe the exploration and discovery had all come about at his urging.

“Hullo, Cyrus. Ready for the great move?” Cyrus would head up the new offices in Detroit. A wagonload of desks and chairs, boxes of papers, ink bottles, pens and other office impedimenta had headed west two weeks before, three fresh-hired clerks to oversee the journey and unpacking. A fourth clerk, Lavinia Duke, would remain at the Boston office and work for Edward, Freegrace and James for a year arranging markets for their Michigan lumber. Edward had not been scandalized — Lavinia was blood kin. She was cleverer than any clerk Edward remembered. She brought order to chaos.

“I have something you need to see,” said Cyrus. He unfurled another map, laid it over Edward’s desk and handed him a new wad of survey information.

Edward stared at it without seeing anything remarkable.

“What is this supposed to be?” he said. “It looks like land parcels farther north — has James been enlarging the scope of the purchases? I do not feel we are ready to do this. We are quite overextended and need to see income before any more goes out—” He had finally noticed a name on the top survey page.

“What is this? Graf Ernst-August von Rotstein? A competitor?”

“Indeed. Look more closely.”

Edward peered. The purchaser of these northern timber lots was the RBB Timber Company. “Who are they? Maine men? How did they learn about this?”

“RBB stands for Rotstein, Breitsprecher and Breitsprecher. Our old landlooker has become our formidable competitor. You may remember his cousin, the manager of an estate forest in Prussia?”

“Ichabod Crane. I remember him perfectly. Dreadful fellow.”

“The dreadful fellow is related to Graf Ernst-August von Rotstein. He is enormously wealthy and already their holdings almost equal ours.”

“I knew it! I knew it! I never trusted Breitsprecher. The snake, the damnable cursèd python.”

“It is too bad Lennart chose this time to be away. But I will go to James’s house and let him know.” Lavinia, behind the door, heard it all and ran home, getting to James before Cyrus arrived.

“Papa! Treachery!” she shouted. “Breitsprecher and his cousin and a rich man have bought a quarter million acres of Michigan pine. They are now our enemies.” And so a rivalry began.

56. Lavinia

Edward, fat ancient Edward, who had become a great gourmand in the years since his wife Lydia’s death, called for a dinner party to celebrate the rich returns of the first Michigan cut.

“Everyone must come, though of course Cyrus and James cannot, for they are in Detroit. We’ll have those hearty lobsters, though how they shall be prepared I will leave to the chef, thrushes à la Liègeoise, and one of the black turkeys from Newport sweetened on acorns, la surprise and then an English rosbif with Russian salad. And whatever else the chef wishes to give us. The wines I will discuss with Freegrace.” He laughed his old man’s reedy heyheyhey as Lavinia wrote out the invitations. It was a Duke & Sons business affair, and without a doubt the company could afford to scrape the Boston Market stalls empty, stalls always heaped with the bounteous harvests of market hunters at pennies for a brace — pigeons, turkeys, wood thrushes and robins, pipits, countless ducks, swans and geese, even owls, reputed to taste like chicken.

Lavinia begged off attendance. The thrushes were sure to be robins and she could not bear to see them lying roasted on a platter. “You know, Uncle Edward, that I cannot be in a house where cats live. My eyes swell and burn, I can barely breathe. And I get dizzy. It has been so since I was a child and Mama allowed no cats in our house for which I thank her.”

“Oh pish,” said Edward. “Mrs. Trame will put them out in the garden and you will not be troubled.” It was useless to explain to him that cats did not need to be present; a house with cats was permeated with the invisible poison residue of their breath, their hairs. “Do you not remember the last time I tried to dine at your house? How I fell ill and had to be carried home?” It was an unpleasant memory, the gripping choke in her chest, the painful wheeze.

But Edward said stiffly, “I regret you do not show the same regard for cats that you exhibit for birds.”

• • •

The conflagration spared four — two cats; the household cook, Mrs. Trame; and Chef Laliberte, who had been hired for the dinner. The scullions escaped early by chance and were sitting in the garden over a wooden platter of orts. In the half-cleaned kitchen, enjoying the leftover birds and a glass of steely hock with Chef Laliberte, Mrs. Trame heard a roaring in the adjacent dining room. She got up and opened the door. A sheet of flame leapt out, scorching her from hem to cap. The chef, no stranger to fire, seized her by the arm and rushed her outside, where they joined the servants. The opening of the kitchen door allowed a blast of oxygen to surge through the house and they could hear the shrieks upstairs, where the dinner party had retired with the port and walnuts. A figure appeared in the upstairs window briefly — Mrs. Trame thought it was Lennart Vogel — then fell back into the rosy light.

Afterward, when her injured throat allowed her to speak, she whispered she had twice chased the cats off the vacated dining room table that evening. She intended to clear it after she and Chef Laliberte had their own dinner and a restorative glass. She surmised the cats had knocked over the candle on the sideboard. They often romped on the furniture.

“When Mrs. Duke was alive the cats were not permitted in the dining room,” she said and wept. “But after she passed on Mr. Duke doted so on Casimir and Vaughn that he allowed anything, even letting them sleep on his bed though it be well known that cats will suck your breath at night.”

• • •

James Duke and Cyrus Hempstead left for Boston as soon as word of the fatal dinner party reached them. Edward and Freegrace had been very old, both into their nineties, but Posey and Lennart had been still in strong life.

• • •

James, speaking slowly so as not to jostle his headache, found Lavinia in Posey’s room sorting out her clothes, packing them into a great wicker hamper.

“Papa! I am so glad you have come,” said Lavinia. “It has been dreadful, just dreadful. People call at all hours to express their regrets. Many think you were in the fire as well as Mama. I have had to repeat endlessly that you were away. I don’t know what I would have done without Mrs. Trame.”

“Poor, poor child. What a trial. And tell me what you intend with that clothing. Is any of use to you?” He doubted this as Posey had been stout and busty. His head pounded.

“The church ladies will send someone for the garments. They are to be distributed to the needy. I will keep Mama’s jewelry and winter cloaks.” James thought that very few needy women would feel comfortable in Posey’s silks, but what did he know? It might be a tonic for them. His hand fell on a kingfisher-blue dressing gown Posey had often worn. Marabou feathers, fur muffs, satin slippers with tiny glass beads on the toes… he could imagine some slattern stuffing her horny feet into them.

“I saved out the crimson ball gown that she loved so well — for her funeral dress.” James shuddered inwardly at the thought of his wife’s charred corpse in red satin, but dredged up a painful smile for Lavinia. “You have a strength of character far beyond your years, and I salute you.” He needed to lie down with a cold compress on his forehead later.

James breathed in and out gently, straightened up. “Come, dear daughter, let us go down to the library and make a list of what must be done. We will have our plate of toast and decide on the future. We must work together, you and I, to make a life.”

He staggered a little with the force of the tightening vise.

“Papa, are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, it’s just one of my headaches — my grandmother Mercy was prone to headaches.”

“Shall I send for Dr. Cunningham?”

“No. I shall be well after a good night’s sleep.” How he longed for that deep draft of laudanum.

But as they entered the library Lavinia said, “Papa, I think Mama’s clothes are too fine to give to the poor. I have an idea I might sell them. Do I have your permission to try?”

“Sell them to whom? I agree that they are of too high quality to just give to those who will not appreciate their value. But who would buy them? I hope you do not think of approaching her friends on this?” He heard his voice meanly snappish.

“No. I think I may go to her dressmakers, Madame Aiglet in New York and Mrs. Brawn in Boston. Both know her wardrobe — indeed, many of the dresses originated with one or the other — and they have a select list of customers, some of whom may appreciate and purchase these beautiful garments. Mama kept them clean, protected from moths in the cedar closet, safe in drawers and chests away from the destroying sunlight. They are like new.”

James, impressed by both his daughter’s business acumen and her cool and unsentimental regard for the wardrobe, said she had his approval. He would have approved if she had said she wanted to boil cabbages. He wanted only to lie down.

“I’ll go to New York in a few days and speak with Madame Aiglet.”

• • •

“Dear Lavinia,” said the dressmaker, a tall woman with coiled black hair, her square face very heavily powdered, “I am sorry for your loss.” She allowed ten or twelve seconds for grieving. “Your mother dressed very well in the most fashionable garments and although this is a somewhat provocative situation I think I can place a number of the dresses. One of my clients, married to a rising politician and of Mrs. Duke’s size — perhaps an inch shorter — has many evening dinner demands. She is ever asking for dresses ‘a leetle less expensive’—and of course I never have such a thing. It takes time to construct an elaborate dress. This situation may answer the purpose very well. Now, let me ask, what of her furs and capes? She had an exquisite yellow satin evening cape with glass bugles at the hem. Very desirable.”

Mrs. Brawn in Boston was even more eager to have the finery, the hats and gloves, boas, even the silk undergarments from Paris and the least worn of the shoes.

• • •

Some weeks later at the breakfast table James read his paper while Lavinia opened her letters. “Papa! Here is a bit of cheer which I badly need. It is from Mrs. Brawn. We have cleared two thousand dollars on Mama’s dresses. Should we invest it in Michigan pinelands? It will gain us a few more sections.”

For the hundredth time James thought that his daughter had an unusually canny eye for business. She was — always had been — a go-ahead type. If she had been a man she would have been in the thick of every business fray, following the go-ahead method, accelerating, progressive! He remembered her childhood horse. Posey gave her a small amount of pocket money each week, but she had to “earn” it by taking instruction in sewing, cookery, music (piano); she had to make her own bed and run errands for Posey.

“But the cook’s boy can do that, and the housekeeper can make the bed,” said spoiled Lavinia.

“Yes, but I want you to do it. If you know from experience what others must do to earn a living you will be a better person with deeper knowledge of others. I have no use for the weak and helpless woman. You may need independence in your life, for women are too often taken advantage of — no one knows this better than I.” But when Lavinia pressed her for those details she said, “Never mind, you need not know. It is only that I do not want you to be helpless if your expectations are dashed. You will thank me someday.”

• • •

One August morning that summer young Lavinia had come to the breakfast table with a bulging red purse. She opened it and poured out twenty-seven dollars in coins. “I have saved this money from Mama’s weekly gifts and my birthday gift. I wish to buy a horse.”

James’s eyes had flooded with tears of pride. He had looked at Posey and shaken his head in wonderment. “Dear child, I will take you to the horse fair this coming Friday that you may see what manner of horse goes for twenty-seven dollars.”

• • •

The Friday horse fair was not crowded at the early hour James and Lavinia arrived. They walked around, examining horses, James naming good features and warning Lavinia not to choose solely by the color of the coat or a bright eye.

“We look for a strong short back, a nice muscled croup, straight legs, oh, a hundred little things. And the teeth. It takes some years to know a good horse — it’s like learning the ropes on a ship. And I warn you now that for your twenty-seven dollars you will not be able to afford a Thoroughbred.”

James suggested two animals, a gray Tennessee Walker with white on its face and a handsome black three-year-old Morgan mare. Lavinia loved both of them and could not decide. The owner of the Walker wanted fifty dollars firm; the owner of the Morgan, Mr. Robinson, an elderly farmer with silvery whiskers and red-apple cheeks, asked thirty-five, but he winked at Lavinia and they went over to the fence together to bargain, for James was determined not to step in.

Lavinia rushed back, seized his hand. “Papa, she was born in Vermont. They call her Blackie, but I will call her Black Robin. We have an agreement — if we can go straight back home now and get Greengage, my parakeet, and his cage and dishes, Mr. Robinson will take him in addition to the twenty-seven dollars.” James could tell she put a high value on the man’s name — the son of a robin could only be a good man, and, allied to birds by his name he would be kind to Greengage, the most valuable parakeet in New England. Silently he thanked Posey for Lavinia’s character. And now that Posey was dead and all her faults forgotten he thanked the lucky day he fell into Boston harbor. But all he said as Lavinia mounted her new mare was “I doubt Greengage will enjoy the Vermont winters.”

“Mr. Robinson said he will live in the kitchen near the stove and Mrs. Robinson will knit him a wool vest and leggins if it’s a terrible cold winter.”

• • •

Several weeks after the mass funeral a letter of condolence reached them in Boston from Armenius Breitsprecher with the postscript that if James and Cyrus needed aid he and Dieter would be pleased to help in any way. Lavinia was inclined to think it presumptuous, but James took it in good heart and said Duke & Sons were in no position to offend other timber companies. “We cannot tell what the future will bring. In fact, other timbermen are beginning to buy parcels of Michigan pinelands. Many of them are from Maine. Now, Lavinia, I think it is finally time to shift all our operations west,” he said, dipping a crust in his cocoa.

“Is there any decent society in Detroit? Or is it still a captive of the wilderness?”

“Oh, Detroit is very well, it is not Boston but it has a growing population and is convenient for our current business. We have a good solid establishment there and the lakes provide transport, though they are difficult and dangerous waters, quite as perilous as the oceans, yet not saline — one drowns more quickly they say. But as for society — there is not much of that. It is, as you say, yet a captive of the wilderness.”

“Papa, have we a great deal of money?”

“The truth is that indeed we do have a great deal of money despite the timberland purchases of recent years. Why do you ask? Is there some great expense you contemplate?”

“Yes. I would wish for this house”—she waved her arm over her head in a compassing sweep—“to be replicated in Detroit to the last roof slate. Perhaps it would be the first mansion in Detroit. Would it not be soothingly familiar if we had our old rooms? I can make lists of the linens and Mrs. Trame may enumerate the kitchen goods, the plates and silver. We can order those.”

James felt a frisson of fear — it would take many thousands to replicate Sedley’s Boston house. But he could afford the expense, and what better way to use the money now coming in from the Michigan pines? And there were the legacies from Edward and Freegrace, even from Lennart. He did not hesitate. “Yes. We can do this. I will contact an architect. We might even have a few embellishments added, as bathing tubs. Bigger stables and new equipages. A chapel dedicated to your mother. But I put my foot down on one thing — that monstrous mahogany hall stand will not come to Detroit.”

“We must have something where people can hang their hats and put their umbrellas.”

“We will get another, something elegant and simple rather than carved elks and hunting horns.” For a week they talked of this new house. Mrs. Trame entered the sport with an eager list of improvements — a bigger pantry, a butler’s room for cleaning silver, a larger staff that included two housemaids, a wine decanting room with a private staircase to the cellar, piped-in water instead of a kitchen cistern.

But old Will Thing would have none of it. “No Detroit for me. I was born in Boston, I will stay in Boston. I worked all my life for your father and you right in this stable and here I will stay.”

“But as soon as may be we intend to sell it all,” said James. “You would have a new family in residence. Suppose you do not like them?”

“It is not my place to like or dislike, I shall get along,” said the old fellow and there the conversation ended. James was disappointed and still hoped to prevail. Perhaps Will did not realize the horses were going to Detroit.

Planning the new house became a postprandial exercise for Lavinia. After dinner a stack of paper, sharp pencils and samples of wallpaper littered the mahogany. James had years before chosen a hilltop site in Detroit with a sweeping view south to Lake Saint Clair, that extra lake too small to be Great. He made a sketch for his daughter, outlining the back and sides of the lot as an encircling arm of forest opened to frame the bluest lake and distant smudgy Ontario.

“This house will eclipse Black Swan,” said Lavinia.

“Oh, we will have no black swans,” said James. “In any case let us leave the water feature to the landscape designer, whom we must still discover. We might send to England, where these fellows abound. This country is too young to have acquired such glossy professions. It will take several years to construct this house as we wish, so we must put up with something simpler now. The company houses I had built two years past will do.” He felt his headache creeping in, a tiny pain in his neck that would, he knew, grow into a throbbing agony. He resolved to find another doctor who might help him.

• • •

But if this was the amusement of evenings, for Lavinia the daytimes were packed with study and reading of newspapers and government bulletins that came in the mail coach, writing letters and quizzing visitors for news of new inventions and technical advances. Most of the news concerned the exploratory claims of various would-be railroad promoters; short local lines were springing up all over the eastern cities like weeds after rain and there was no doubt that a transcontinental railroad would be built sooner or later but the fights over the central-northern route or the southern route were ferocious. Both James and Lavinia were in favor of a northern route. “It will be another twenty years before they lay the first rail,” said James. His thoughts were on another invention. “Have you read anything of the telegraph experiments? No? They say the electric telegraph will allow people to send messages over great distances as long as there is a copper wire to carry the impulses. Imagine. If the process comes to pass and if the wire comes to Detroit I can send an immediate message to someone in Boston, a message that can be read within minutes. But so far it is only on trial in England.”

Lavinia was charmed by the idea of words traveling along coppery wires like ducks swimming across a river inlet. It seemed close to a fictional tale. James lit his cigar and puffed, immediately put it out as it urged the headache to reappear, then said, “What do you think of a rotunda with a stained-glass ceiling for the entrance?” But his heart wasn’t in rotunda discussions. A new doctor, a neurologist, was coming at eight with a curative contraption.

• • •

James, wearing Putnam’s Head Electrode on his cranium and hoping static electricity would finally overcome his headaches, was overwhelmed with work; the design of the new house caught only fitfully at his imagination. With the loss of Lennart the work of handling jobbers, the new-hired landlookers and scalers, their lumber volume reports, the lumber camps and their expected yield, the actual yield, their sawmills and the requests for new equipment as well as technological developments in milling, commissioning shipyards to build lumber barges to deliver the milled lumber to brokers in Albany all fell on him. Nor could Cyrus do Lennart’s work as he was busy with the complex order department. He personally knew every naval buyer, every lumber dealer. No, Cyrus could not take on Lennart’s work and no one could replace that head full of company history and lumber knowledge. But someone could try.

“Lavinia,” he called, “will you come here a moment?” He explained that someone had to handle the details of the current production work. They could hire an outsider, and likely would in time, but immediate attention was vital. If she could temporarily take on some of Lennart’s work — well, not the exploration, but the day-to-day affairs. He knew it would be very difficult for her — she was only a woman and there would be resistance to her from every logging contractor. Duke & Sons had two jobbers at work in Michigan now, both more than a day’s ride from Detroit. Five more applying for winter work had to be interviewed. Lennart had been able to saunter into a camp, eat pork and beans, josh with the men, discover how the cut was going. But James would not ask Lavinia to go to the individual camps. Instead he would request the jobbers to come to Detroit and make a report to her.

“Why should I not go?” she said.

“Because you are a girl — a woman. It isn’t done. It is impossible.”

“Papa, it is not impossible. It is not customary, perhaps, but I will make it so. I insist. If I do not know the jobbers and see how the camps operate there is no way I can judge their worth — or the cut. You and Lennart told me I am doing well learning the business. This is a necessary step. If I could I would hire on to cut trees, the better to know the work. I will visit the camps starting as soon as we can get ourselves removed to Detroit.”

“Lavinia, this is only temporary. I am searching for a permanent replacement for Lennart.”

It was time to go. Sixteen wagons of household goods and linens had been crated and shipped. Lavinia leaned far out of the coach looking at her childhood home. I go into a new life, she thought. I will succeed.

• • •

In Detroit, Cyrus and his wife, Clara, welcomed them with a heavy pork and potatoes family dinner. Clara’s pride was the elaborate dining room chandelier with a thousand crystal prisms. James ate little. He had come down with intermittent fever on the journey and after the roast pork dinner took to his bed for five days. Clara and Lavinia instinctively disliked each other. Clara, from an important Boston family — Judge Spottiswood was her father — was the Ideal Woman with a simpering way, averted gaze and subservient fealty to Cyrus, who sprawled about in a lordly manner. She was known for her collection of silk scarves and shawls. The children were automatons, chirping “yes, Mama,” “yes, Papa,” curtsying and very quiet. After dinner the company had to go to the music room and endure an hour on narrow chairs while Clara played the parlor organ and entertained them with mournful songs of lost dear ones.

• • •

Duke & Sons’ three company houses in Detroit were a great step down from the Black Swan estate. Cyrus and his family had the center house with two wind-whipped rosebushes in the front yard: they called it Rose Cottage. James, with a manservant and cook, settled in the one to the east. Lavinia had the west house, which she thought extremely rustic, but the rooms on the second floor had a view of the lake and its marine traffic. “I shall learn every ship,” she said. “I shall get a spyglass and study them.”

On the ground floor there were servants’ rooms, kitchen, dining room and parlor. The Boston house maid, Ruby Smythe, rather sniffy about the situation, had one room and Mrs. Trame settled into the other and her new kitchen with a bare minimum of cookery equipment. She had no complaints with the great cast-iron stove, its hot water reservoir and the brimming woodbox filled every morning by Robert Kneebone, an all-purpose Duke employee. The plan was to live very simply for several years until the new mansion was ready. It was only the promise of the great new house that kept the snobbish maid in service. James had found a New York architect, Lyford L. Lundy, who studied Black Swan until he knew every feature to be replicated in the Detroit house. He had ideas for improvements and set them out in letters that arrived daily and irked James.

“We must get the business established here,” said James, “and let Mr. Lundy and his assistants deal with the new house. I have given him all the suggestions we discussed, which he is to work into the design. Let him do it. He has carte blanche with the money and as much fine Michigan pine from our Arrow Mill as he can use.” As soon as he thought of the mill James decided a tour would instruct Lavinia.

“Tomorrow I’ll take you to our sawmills. You must understand every part of the business, and the mills are at the heart of it. Arrow Mill, the closest, is not as I would wish — we have ordered new saws and equipment.”

• • •

To Lavinia the mill seemed a wandering, ramshackle affair spread over acres of yard with narrow passages between stacks of drying lumber. The mill was on a good stream and the dammed pond produced enough power to run an overshot wheel and two heavy up-and-down saws in the same frame. But the place was silent when they arrived, and a boy came out and said his father was picking up a replacement saw from a shipper near the wharf. “The old one bust out most the teeth.”

“Then let us go on and look at the other mill,” said James. The Push Mill, called after its foreman, Joe Bouchard, sawyer and millwright, better known as Joe Push, lay a mile upstream. When Lavinia stepped through the doorway into the roar Push shut off the saws — a single muley saw and a two-blade gang. He came bustling up to James, looking at Lavinia from the corner of his eye. “Mr. Duke, I never know you was comin.”

“That’s how it is, Joe — surprises now and then. I’m taking my daughter around to see the parts of our operation. Go ahead, turn ’em back on — she wants to become acquainted with milling. She has a position in the company.”

The millman threw the lever and with a wet clatter water dumped onto the wheel outside and the muley saw began to gnaw slowly through the log with a steely nasal sound. A rain of sawdust fell below, the air thickened with the smell of pine, earth and hot metal. Lavinia saw how the log carriage was pulled forward by a cable and at the end of the log another small wheel gigged the carriage back. Two edger men put the fresh-cut boards on top of the log, Joe Push reset for the next cut and the saws began to bite again, removing the bark edges from the passenger planks. Men carried them outside to a stack. The pondman sent another log up the ramp.

“Slow, but she gets it done,” Joe Push said, pointing to the great ziggurats of boards outside, temples of wood boards. They walked about in the noise and dust, watching the men in the millpond harry the logs to the bottom of the ramp. In the yard a dozen men were buck-sawing small and crooked logs into firewood chunks, stacking them in drying sheds.

“A nice bit of extra income from waste wood,” said James. He pointed at a mountainous stack, said, “Lavinia, note the bottom front crosspiece. It ensures the pile slopes and allows rain and snow to run off. There’s an art to building a proper pile.”

“How long does it dry?”

The stacker spoke up. “For this here pine? Say a year for your one-inch boards, better two-three years or more for thick stuff.”

“Yes,” said James, “of course we want to get it onto the market as soon as we can, so drying sheds such as the men here are using for firewood are helpful to get your market lumber ready sooner rather than later. One of our problems with drying lumber on site is that when the cut is finished and the men move to another area the mill is usually dismantled and transported as well. Lumber thieves come and help themselves to untended drying stacks so we usually hire one of the shanty boys, an injured or older man not as strong as he was, to stay behind until we move the lumber ourselves.”

The stacker grunted.

“This is why some timbermen — not I — say it is better to move the logs to a permanent mill that is always guarded.”

They walked to the back of the mill and Lavinia glanced at a pile of something — shrieked and put her hands over her eyes.

“Great gods! Mr. Bouchard, come out here and explain this — this horror,” shouted James.

Joe Push hurried out, not knowing what they had found, a corpse or a ruined board, and then laughed. “That’s all them snakes the boys got last week. Had a big parade of frogs and ever snake for ten mile around showed up to eat on ’em.” There were thousands of huge muscular snakes in a six-foot pile, now beginning to rot and give off a memorable stench.

“Better pitch them into the river, Joe, or you’ll have a dozen bears on your hands.”

“Already shot two, but sure, we’ll give ’em the heave-ho.”

• • •

On the way back Lavinia asked James why they did not have circular saws in the mill. “I have read or heard that circular saws cut much more quickly as they are continuous and do not have to be reset.”

“Why, you are quite right, and we have them on order, but it is not so easy to do everything at once. This mill was already in operation and we bought it from Joe Push, whom we now employ. There will soon be hundreds of sawmills in the Michigan woods if it is anything like Maine. This old gang rig will be sold and replaced with circular blades as soon as they arrive. I would like to put turbines in place for the extra power and really cut some wood. This rig can only produce about three thousand board feet a day right now and the shanty boys cut trees so fast the mill can’t keep up — the weak link in the chain is the milling. I want to put a portable mill at every cut where it is convenient and transport lumber, not just logs. There is no reason why the mills cannot follow the lumber camps, cutting on site as we go. But a permanent mill near a town or city has several advantages beyond foiling thieves. Lennart and I once discussed someday adding a finishing mill to our operations that could sand planks smooth and even a wood-steaming oven to form stair balusters and such.”

Cyrus objected strongly to Lavinia’s plan to visit the lumber camps, and when she persisted in writing to the jobbers — Hobble Peterson and Vernon Roby — announcing her coming inspection he said that although he was terrible busy he would put his work aside and go with her as her protector. “You cannot go alone,” he said. “You are too young and too — too womanly beauteous. You simply cannot go alone.”

Lavinia blushed scarlet. “Uncle Cyrus, I am no such thing. And I will go. I will ride Black Robin. She will see me through safely. I know I can do this.”

But James agreed with Cyrus. “It is not just the trails. There are roughnecks in the woods everywhere. There are men who would — harm you, renegades and low fellows as well as stray Indians. You must have someone — a man — with you. You must. I mean it, Lavinia. It may be different when you are older but now it is not. No argument. The travel is arduous. You do not know the way, you cannot build a fire in the wilderness, you cannot defend yourself against wild beasts or human beasts. Cyrus is needed here so I will find a steady woods-wise man to go with you.”

He inquired of the Detroit hostler Paul Roque about a suitable travel companion and protector. On the next afternoon Roque suggested his oldest son, Andre Roque, a competent hunter who knew the ways of the forest and who had worked in both of the camps Lavinia proposed to visit. He could speak French and some Indian. James met the young man, taller than his father, very bashful and shy. But he answered all of James’s questions easily. Yes, the best way to make this journey was on horseback. His father, the hostler, could provide the best horses in the stable. They were used to the forest trails and so would be better than a Boston horse, however highly esteemed. He would cook all their food and serve it, groom and feed the horses, prepare the bedrolls and blankets, point out whatever local landmarks they passed. He would protect Lavinia with his life. He would do his best.

• • •

It was early October and the first inches of snow lay in the cold woods. The horses’ breath, their own breath steamed. The endless procession of huge trees aroused a new sensation in Lavinia — a powerful sense of ownership; they were her trees, she could cause these giants to fall and be devoured by the saws. She regarded their monolithic forms with scorn. Her trees — well, her trees with James and Cyrus. And the birds that rested in them, her birds, her squirrels and porcupines; all of it.

At the end of the day Andre built a lean-to shelter with the fire in front of it, their separate blankets at each end and the impedimenta and saddles stacked between them. She was asleep before he finished rubbing the legs of the horses. But she woke in the night to feel the youth embracing her from behind, his breath on her nape, one hand over her left breast.

“What are you doing?” she said fiercely.

Andre Roque was silent, breathing slowly and regularly. Stiff with outrage she lay still and gradually realized that he was asleep, not plotting rape, but deeply asleep. Did he fancy he was protecting her, or was this how he slept with all his siblings in the home bed? She would explain in the morning that proper people of opposite sexes did not lie together unless they were married. And fell asleep herself. In the morning Andre was some distance away making a fire, fetching water for tea, cutting hunks of bread from the loaf, feeding the horses. He seemed his shy, quiet self and handed her a cup of hot black pekoe. He said nothing about his presence under her blanket and although she opened her mouth to begin, somehow she said nothing. The most troubling part of the experience was the depth of his sleep; when she spoke he should have awakened. Suppose hostiles or predatory beasts had been creeping toward them? — he would have slept blissfully on while wolves gnawed her arm. And what if the fire had gone out in the small hours — such a deep sleeper as he could not replenish it. Perhaps he was even feigning sleep. These possibilities were marks against him. Still, in a few nights it seemed quite the ordinary way to sleep and she was glad of his warmth and closeness when branches cracked in the darkness and the owl called, and he was always up and at work by dawn.

• • •

They reached Vernon Roby’s camp in midmorning, the sun very bright in a cloudless sky, the river so brilliantly reflective the sun glint was painful. They came into a clearing surrounded by forest except along the shore, a landscape of stumps as far as Lavinia could see. There was no one around. They went to a shack with a sign saying OFFICE over the door; it was empty.

“Hey-o,” called Andre and got a jay’s call for answer. There was smoke coming out of a stovepipe from a log building. A door was ajar and Lavinia pushed in. A man slinging tin plates along an endless table was making such a clatter he did not hear her speak. She tried again.

“Sir. Sir!”

He turned and saw them, gave a high shriek and dropped the armful of plates. Lavinia rushed to help pick them up but the man motioned her away. “What you want? Who you are!”

“I want to see Mr. Roby. I am Lavinia Duke and I sent him a letter telling him I was coming to look at the cut.”

“Oh Christ! He’s out with the boys.” He gestured at the stumps. “Bout two mile up the lake. Jesus Christ! He don’t know you comin here.”

“I wrote a letter.”

“He don’t read. He don’t get no letter.”

Lavinia was annoyed. This was a charade. “Please go and fetch him. Right now.”

“Can’t! I’m cook. Soon they come eat. Be mad if ain’t on table.”

“Go now. Now! Or I will fire you from your job.”

The unfortunate man went out.

“We might as well sit while we wait,” said Lavinia to Andre. “Perhaps I had better see what he is cooking.” It was a great pot of stew. Biscuits rising but not quite ready to go in the oven stood on a table half-covered with a forest of sauce bottles. Lavinia, unable to sit and wait, stirred the stew, just beginning to catch to the bottom of the pot. She put a few sticks in the fire and opened the oven door to gauge the temperature. Hot enough for biscuits. They waited. The biscuits rose. Lavinia put the pan in the oven and noted the time on her little watch. Just as she was taking out the browned biscuits the cook came rushing in, his chest heaving with anxiety. He saw the hot biscuits, turned to the stew, which Lavinia had pushed to the back of the stove, where the heat was less. “I stirred it,” she said.

“Okay, okay. Good.”

Vern Roby came in a few minutes later. He was a short, heavyset man with an eye patch and thin scars on his face. He said nothing, just stared at her, then turned to Andre.

“What she doin here?”

“Mr. Duke sent her. She’s his daughter. She come to see you, look over the cut.”

“A woman! This ain’t woman’s business.” He turned to Lavinia. “You better pack up your kit, miss, and skedaddle. Where’s Mr. Vogel? Lennart Vogel, he’s the one we work with for Duke.”

“I sent you a letter, Mr. Roby, explaining that my uncle Lennart Vogel died in a fire last year. I am assuming some of his duties. Knowing the men cutting for Duke and Sons is one of those duties. This gentleman is Mr. Andre Roque, who is accompanying me. Uncle Lennart is gone and whatever you may think of the arrangement I am taking his place. You may find me ignorant at first, but I hope we will get to know one another and be able to speak frankly and honestly. Perhaps you will tell me the situation. It looks like an extensive cut. I would like to see the landings and hear your plan for the spring drive. I would like to hear of any problems you have or anticipate, problems of any kind whatsoever. I am not here to interfere but to see what we may expect in the spring — precisely what Uncle Lennart would wish to know from you. And I have the authority to fire or retain you according to what I may find.”

Roby took a deep breath. Another. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, standing like a trained bear. He looked at Andre, tried to regain his command. “I remember you — worked horses for me last year, yah?”

“Yah,” said Andre in an insolent tone. No help for Roby there.

• • •

She wanted to see the choppers at work. Roby shook his head in disapproval but they walked along the edge of the icy skid road to a hillside where men chopped and the echoes flew back at them. A tree fell, axmen went at it, slashing the limbs, severing the top. The men glanced covertly at Lavinia. Hot breath puffed from their mouths. The air tingled with pine. The men hitched a chain around the log butt and jockeyed it onto a sled. Someone’s foot slid, she heard a muffled curse.

Out of the corner of his mouth a man wearing a red tuque said to his fellows, “See that woman? That’s the rich man’s daughter of privilege there come to see the workin stiffs like a zoo, old Duke owns everything you see. He got it free from the govmint, the big giveaway, stealin public forest land, cut it down and get rich.”

“Save it for later.”

“Don’t you worry, I will. Tell you how they get the power and legal rights, fix the laws, them takin everything got value — trees, copper, everything — for their selves. Workin man don’t get nothin but older.”

Lavinia did not hear what he said but after her year in the English girls’ school she was sensitive to the most subtle of oblique sneers, the hunched shoulder and lifted chin, and she felt his antipathy. Two could play at this game, she thought, and looked often in his direction, always finding his hard little eyes.

“One more question, Mr. Roby, who is the man, the chopper, in the red tuque?” He knew instantly who she meant.

“Heh. Rattle is what he calls himself.”

“I would like you to dismiss him.”

“Miss Duke, he is a bit of a talker but a good axman.”

“Dismiss him, Mr. Roby. Today.”

Horses drew the logs from the cut to a landing where Lavinia was startled to see a young woman, younger than she, a girl, come forward with a branding hammer and strike the D&S mark into the end of the log.

“That girl?” she asked Mr. Roby.

“That’s Angélique, the cook’s daughter.”

“Is he not concerned for her safety among so many rough men?”

Vernon Roby laughed for the first time that day, a great roaring hearty laugh. “No! She got seven brothers choppin here. See? Him, him over there, that one—” He pointed. “Nobody bother her they want to live. She most strong as a man anyway. She got that hammer. She break his arm.”

That was something new to think about as she made counts of the number and sizes of the logs. Lavinia determined to learn scaling; it was useless to say that you had five hundred logs with an average diameter of thirty-seven inches. How many feet of inch-thick boards would come out of that log? How did you allow for the bark, for the saw kerf, for the taper of the log? She wanted to learn the mathematics of scaling. She knew there were log rules that took all of these variances into account and let the scaler make at least an estimate of the number of boards in a single tree. How to learn the skill? She wished that Breitsprecher still worked for them — he had been a good scaler. Once Lennart had spoken of a minister turned schoolmaster at a female seminary somewhere in Ohio who was working out a detailed mathematical guide to estimate board feet in standing trees. One thing she knew from life was that nothing could be known precisely; no one could make a perfect rule to accommodate every tree, no one could know when a cat would knock over a candle. She had determined as a young child on her way to England not to be taken aback by the most untoward events. She might arrange a visit to that minister and beg him to show her the art of scaling, though a ladies’ seminary seemed far from the right place for such instruction. But perhaps not — and because of Angélique and her hammer Lavinia entertained an image of an army of young women advancing into the forests with their scale sticks. In the afternoon, the light beginning to draw in like the neck of a sack, they left Vern Roby. Lavinia shook his hand, promised — threatened? — to come again in the spring for the drive, the log drive, her logs running to the mill. Roby caught her casual expressions of ownership. He knew which side was up, smiled, said he would look for her in spring. As they disappeared into the trees he beckoned to the man in the red tuque. He did not know how Lavinia had picked the one troublemaker in the crew, but she was right, somehow she could judge men. Rattle constantly stirred the boys up for higher wages, better hours, special food. “You, Rattle,” he called. “Pack your turkey and hit the road. Here’s your time. The lady don’t like your looks.”

• • •

The visit to the Hobble Peterson camp did not go as well. Peterson disliked women, whom he considered brainless and backward, refused to talk to her and addressed sarcastic replies to her questions only to Andre Roque. His camp was dirty, the ground littered with wood chips, torn rags, a ragged ox hide, several broken barrels surrounded by circling flies, broken ax handles, rusted wire and worn-out saw blades, discarded boots. The drying lumber stacks looked ragged and the ends sagged. As they rode away from the camp Andre, who had been silent until now, followed her glance and said, “Them boards won’t dry even.” Lavinia noted all of this in her little red book, a book that became infamous in the logging camps, for a bad report from Lavinia meant the jobber would not work for Duke & Sons again, as Peterson discovered when the spring drive ended.

On the return trip there was one night when Andre was thoroughly awake. A storm had been hovering on the horizon all afternoon. They made camp early and dinner was the inadequate New England “nookick,” parched corn ground to a powder and mixed with hot water, filling but tasteless, and as dark fell the storm arrived. Lightning cracked without interval and violent rain doused the fire. While Andre sat near, Lavinia tried to sleep but the mad winds tore their lean-to apart. They could hear trees falling in the forest and even see them in the stuttering blue flashes. With the shelter gone they were soaked through in minutes. When lightning cleaved a great pine a short distance away Andre wrapped his wet arms around Lavinia as if to take the brunt of any falling tree. Two hours passed before the rain slackened and suddenly stopped, pushed southeast by an icy wind. Andre got up, groping in the dark for a log he had set aside earlier and with his ax laid the dry interior open. He spent the next half hour with the tinderbox and char cloth, and when that was not successful put a little gunpowder on the log. The spark ignited, the log surface showed a tiny flame, which he fed with a feather stick and twiglets, then pulled out the dry branches he had cached under their bags. Only then Lavinia remembered the little box of Congreves her father had pressed on her before they left. The next morning she dug out the box, opened it and tried rubbing one of the little strips on a piece of wood and was utterly surprised when it flared up brilliantly. She held the box out to Andre, who examined the matches, frowned and handed them back. He preferred steel and spark. And a week later, back in the Detroit house, she learned that matches were dangerous.

She was copying out her notes from the trip while Ruby unpacked her bags. She heard a slight noise and a smothered word, then a shriek from the unfortunate maid, who had dropped the Congreves box and stepped on one of the spilled strips, which immediately ignited her cotton dress. Lavinia seized the pitcher in the washbasin and sloshed the contents on the fiery dress, shouted for Mrs. Trame to bring a bucketful, pushed the maid to the floor and stamped on the still-burning cloth, singeing her own wool skirt hem.

“Butter,” said Mrs. Trame. “Butter will calm the pain,” and she ran back down to the kitchen. Ruby’s burns on her hands and neck were painful despite the butter. James called in a physician who pooh-poohed the butter and substituted a salve of his own making and prescribed generous doses of opium for the pain. The burns healed but Ruby’s attachment to opium increased and after several months James sent the scarred and addicted maid back to Boston with a generous allowance. Lavinia replaced her with a local girl.

• • •

It was not necessary to go to Ohio to learn scaling. Lavinia swallowed her pride and wrote to Armenius Breitsprecher, explaining what she wanted and asking how to gain the knowledge. Both Breitsprechers were in their Monroe office, just back from surveying heavy river sections. Armenius was amused; laughing, he showed the letter to Dieter.

“Duke and Sons are our chief rival — it seems they may have to change their name to Duke and Daughter, as there are no sons except the young children of Cyrus Hempstead. James is old and it looks rather as though this Lavinia, a chit of a girl, will have a position in the company. I think we may quickly swallow them up.”

But Dieter thought it must have taken courage to write that letter. “She has spirit. Does she have brains? Do you know her?”

“I never met her. I just knew she existed. It’s lächerlich, a woman wanting to learn how to scale logs. A rich girl’s passing fancy, something she heard about but hasn’t any idea of the reasons or procedures.” He crumpled and tossed the letter into the woodbox near the fireplace. It was Dieter who plucked it from the woodbox the next day and answered the letter himself, offering his personal instruction if she could manage to come to Monroe for a week.

“I hope you have some knowledge of mathematics,” he wrote. “Few women do, but familiarity with numbers is quite essential in estimating log volumes. I would be pleased to tutor you in the rudiments of the art and if it is to your liking you may advance to more difficult problems.” He thought she would not reply; he made the work sound disagreeable and difficult. She wrote back with a list of dates she could be in Monroe and assured him she had no fear of arithmetic nor mathematics and particularly enjoyed calculus above all things — not quite the truth.

57. a cure for headache

For James there was one highly annoying disadvantage to living in Detroit — his wine cellar remained in the Boston house and in Detroit there were rivers of whiskey but no wineshop. It had always been his intent to have his cellar shipped, but he shuddered when he thought how many good bottles would suffer from stirred-up sediments and take years to settle down. The longer it took to arrange for the packing and shipping the more he pined for the dark dusty bottles of choice Madeiras and clarets in their silent racks. His mouth watered. Dinner without wine was insipid. There was no pleasanter end to a day than a glass of port and a cigar by the fire.

James and Lavinia made a point of dining together at each other’s table in turn. This night it was James’s house. After dinner — venison roast with baked apples, potato soufflé and small business talk — in the library, each with a glass of whiskey, he said, “Lavinia, I am determined to return to Boston and arrange to have my wine crated and shipped here. While I am gone — I will be about six weeks away — I’m having a carpenter put bottle racks in this cellar. Of course I shall stay at Black Swan, though likely eat out, visit my tailor and bankers. Where did I put my — there they are.” He hung the cord of his pince-nez around his neck. “I’ve spoken to Cyrus and he said that while I am away anything you wish he will help you procure.” Cyrus was becoming hard of hearing and it meant strenuous shouting to explain anything to him.

“I shall do very well, Papa, and look forward to your return and perhaps a glass of champagne?”

“Oh, we will have a champagne gala,” said James. “You and I and Cyrus and Clara. I shall bring all the news of Boston with me as well as wine. If there is anything I may fetch for you give me a little list. Why not let me choose a new dress for you — something colorful?”

“Books, Papa, I would have some new books. That is all I want.” And, thought Lavinia, when you return I will know how to scale logs.

• • •

But two days before his departure he came storming to Lavinia’s house in a froth. She invited him into the little parlor with the deep green velvet curtains making a dusky forest-like gloom; the gilt tassels glinted dully. She sat on a chair, ankles crossed; he strode up and down. “Daughter, I have just made an unpleasant discovery. I am sorry to say this but that rascal, Andre Roque, cannot accompany you again on any trips whatsoever.”

“May I ask why not?” said Lavinia. “I have always found him to be most accommodating.”

“I daresay,” sneered James, continuing to stamp across the carpet.

“Oh do sit down, Papa, sit down. And tell me calmly, what has he done? What is wrong? Why?”

James sat on the edge of a large, throne-like chair. “Why! Never mind, it is not something for a young girl to hear.”

She sat straight, both feet flat on the floor, a combative attitude. “Let me remind you I am no longer a ‘young girl’ but almost a woman grown — and with a masculine mind as you have several times remarked. I am immune from vapors and fainting. I demand to know why you are forbidding me his company and protection.” Her dark eyes glinted and the red mouth pressed into a knot.

Now he was really irritated. “Very well, since you fancy yourself so advanced in worldly experience I’ll tell you that Andre Roque has got his sister with child. He cannot be trusted with females. Some men are that way.” He thought of his lascivious old father-in-law. “I do not want him to travel with you again.” He waited for her shocked exclamation.

Lavinia said coolly, “I suppose it comes from all the children sleeping in the same bed.”

“How would you know that!” He was back on his feet.

“I surmise it, that is all.”

“A piece of advice, Miss Lavinia. Surmising is the way to the greatest error. Never surmise, never.” But what he really feared was that Lavinia might have a streak of Posey’s abandoned ways and the hostler’s son would sniff it out and give him an illegitimate grandchild.

“I quite agree that surety is preferable to the most advanced surmising,” said Lavinia, “I will do as you say,” and she offered him tea.

• • •

Back at the old house in Boston, James was struck by its shabby condition. The familiar interior was musty and chill with an air of fatigue, the furniture, especially the hall stand, seemed cruelly old-fashioned. The rooms looked rather mean. He thought they should not copy every detail in the new house but simply sell Black Swan as it stood and start anew in Detroit. He would have a talk with the architect while he was in Boston and cancel the copycat plans — present Lavinia with a fait accompli when he returned to the lake country.

• • •

Mr. Prentiss, his wine merchant for many years, was excited to see his second-best customer again. His wattled red face contrasted with his pink turkey neck stretching naked above the new style of low collar and bow tie, and James thought he should have kept to a high stock that would keep him decently covered. The merchant flapped his hands open as though inviting James to dance and said, “I am delighted to see you again, Mr. Duke. Are you returning? Oh, just a visit, tsk. How may I help you? Would you like to know of the new wines? I have some really good German hock. At your service, sir,” and he made a body movement very like a bow. Nothing had changed in the wineshop, the same dusty musty smell, Mr. Prentiss clucking and nodding.

“Mr. Prentiss, you look well and I trust you do well. Indeed, just a visit. And as much as I would like to explore the hock I have come on a different errand. I wish to have my cellar crated and shipped to new quarters in Detroit. But I fear breakage and disturbance will wreak havoc on the contents unless the job is carefully undertaken. Can you advise me of the best way we may do this?”

“Mr. Duke, to disturb those hundreds of bottles, to crate and jostle them halfway across the continent would ruin a great portion. It would be a true sin. Why not trade with me — a move from your cellar to my shop is not a great journey. In exchange I will give you a greater measure of aged Madeira or whatever else you like in casks and barrels that can stand the trip without damage.”

“That seems a logical course of action. Let us do it.” They spoke for a while and then the merchant asked offhandedly if Freegrace’s cellar had been sold or passed to a family member.

“It passed to me,” said James. “Freegrace’s will left it to Edward, but Edward’s possessions have become mine. I haven’t thought of Freegrace’s cellar though I always heard it was very good.” His eyes kept straying to the bottles. He looked forward to an excellent dinner — with wine and more wine.

“Very good! I should say it was very good! Among the best in Boston.” He coughed. “If you think of disposing of it I would be interested in buying. I would never consider moving those rare bottles any distance.”

“Well,” said James. “I do not know the extent of what he had. But I have a set of keys at my house. Shall we meet tomorrow morning and examine what is there?”

“Nothing would delight me more,” said Mr. Prentiss, suddenly sneezing.

“Shall we meet here at ten?”

“Excellent. Now, Mr. Duke, will you take a glass of amontillado with me?”

“I will,” said James. “It will set me right. I keep having bouts of malaise.”

“Are you sure you would not rather have a hot toddy?”

“No, no, amontillado is what I crave. And please send a half dozen of the hock you mentioned round to Black Swan — I must have something to drink while I am here, though I can certainly make inroads on my cellar.”

“I advise it,” said Mr. Prentiss. “If you have special wines this visit would be the very best time to enjoy them. Now, just step into the tasting room.”

James felt it was good to be back in Boston. And tonight, he said to himself, a very good dinner.

• • •

He had a headache the next morning and sent it on its way with a large glass of champagne and the most savorous coffee he’d had in a year, taken at Bliss’s Coffee House, where not even the waiter had changed — old Henry with the great wen on his chin, who greeted him by name. The morning was sharp with frost, the hired horse lively. He drove up to the wineshop, where Mr. Prentiss’s florid smiling face floated in the window. The door opened and the wine merchant skipped out carrying an abacus and a notebook.

“I heard that Mr. Freegrace Duke kept a cellar book and I thought I would count bottles with this”—he held the instrument aloft—“and take a few notes.” He was in high humor.

It seemed to James he had never left Boston so familiar was this street, the clopping of the horse. “Brisk day,” he said. The headache was quite gone. He felt very well; sea air was certainly healthier than lake vapors. “He-up!”

“Brisker to come. The almanac promises a hard winter. I suppose the winters are pleasanter in Michigan?”

“I would not say that,” said James, “never would I say that.”

Inside Freegrace’s house everything was coated with dust. There were a great many tracks on the floor. No sheets protected the furniture. The house was bitterly cold.

“Only a few months ago, I paid his butler a year’s salary to stay on and look after the place until we could make arrangements,” said James. “It looks as though he left as soon as I did. What was the fellow’s name — Eccles, I think. I will look into this. Damn, I will have him taken up! Well, never mind. Let us find a lantern and some candles and go down into the cellar.”

The door to the cellar was ajar and as they went down the broad stairs James noticed chunks of plaster and mud on the stairs and gouge marks on the wall.

“I don’t like the look of this,” he said, pointing at the plaster dust with his toe. Mr. Prentiss made a clucking sound. He knew what they would find; he had seen it once before.

The bottle racks were empty, the cask cradles empty, shelves tipped over. Broken glass glinted in the light of their lantern and the air had a winy stench. Freegrace’s wine cellar had been stripped.

They turned to each other and spoke as one: “the butler!” And James was impressed to see tears in Prentiss’s little eyes. The Adam’s apple bobbed in his turkey neck.

James drove Prentiss back, then went to the new-formed police office, and told of Freegrace’s missing wine. Two men James thought rather thick-minded came with him and looked at the shambles in the cellar. They pointed out circles in the dust on the sideboards where silver chafing dishes and other ornaments had once stood. In five minutes they concluded that a criminal gang of immigrants must have done the deed. “Comin in Boston by the t’ousand,” said one, likely an immigrant himself, thought James.

“But the butler—” he said to no response. They went out. He went into the library, for what he did not know, picked up the several old copies of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine on the table — something to read at least.

He returned to Mr. Prentiss and made the arrangements to exchange most of his bottles for casks of Madeira to travel by cart to Albany, then by canal and lake steamer to Detroit.

“At least we can do that much.” But he saw the wine merchant was still grieving the loss of Freegrace’s cellar and shifting James’s wines would be little consolation.

“The terrible sin of that theft. I’ll warrant the swine did not know what they had. I have heard for years that Mr. Freegrace possessed Château d’Yquem sauternes from Thomas Jefferson’s private cellar — the 1784 vintage. And I heard of a 1792 vintage Madeira. Madeira is truly the prince of old wines, at its best after half a century. The 1792 would just now be coming into maturity. Open a fine old bottle and it fills the room with such rich deep aromatics—” He broke off and turned away from the light.

• • •

The actual taking up of the Black Swan bottles, and Mr. Prentiss’s excruciatingly slow methods of packing and transferring the bottles to his shop delayed James’s return by nearly ten days. The blazing autumn faded and November rain began the morning after Guy Fawkes Day, which Bostonians still called Pope Day, drowning the last smoldering bonfires. A day or two later the first line storm to screech off the Atlantic shook the oak outside his old bedroom window and brought down the dead leaves.

The house agent called. He had sent a letter saying that he represented a leading Bostonian and wished to discuss a real estate purchase with Mr. Duke. James knew the man was the son of one of the shareholders in the New England Mississippi Land Company, which a few decades earlier had enjoyed a controversial congressional appropriation of more than a million dollars. Now the son, who had inherited the windfall, offered $90,000 for Black Swan and its grounds. James pretended reluctance and was finally persuaded to part with the property, house and all its contents (save his small inlaid table, which would travel with him to Detroit) for a rather larger sum. The next day he put Edward’s place, Freegrace’s rifled mansion and even Lennart Vogel’s handsome brick Federal-style house in the agent’s hands. A week before Thanksgiving he began his own return passage. The wine would follow.

• • •

In his stateroom on the steamer Liberty Tree he read the last Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and was disturbed by a story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the opening paragraphs unpleasantly reminiscent of his cousin’s ravaged house. He had a sore throat. He was coming down with a cold. The worst place to have a cold was on a steamer on Lake Erie in winter. In his valise he had a copy of Nicholas Nickleby for Lavinia. He would read this. So the last leg of the tedious and cold journey began with James wincing at the antics of Mr. Squeers, who certainly would not have balked at stealing a cellarful of wine.

He felt it before he knew what he felt. His own marine experience lay in the days of sail on the Atlantic but he sensed the change in the beat of the inland sea, the increasingly labored response of the steamer. He knew that the Great Lakes and especially Erie were among the most treacherous waters of the earth and that the winter storms wrecked ships as men trod wildflowers. Duke & Sons had lost two lumber boats the last winter, delighting settlers along the shore with planks that floated to them with no labor but to bend over and pick them up. He read on but felt the cold. When he got up to search for his heavy coat he nearly fell with the ship’s violent pitch. He could hear it groaning now, every timber twisting as the vessel gyred through mountainous waves. He put on his coat, a hat, heavy gloves and went out on deck.

A savage wind blew spume off the tops of the waves. It was a fresh gale and God, God it was cold! His first breath of the sharp air wakened his old headache, which struck like a hurled rock. Ice formed as he watched — along the rail, on the deck, on every rope, the hatch covers, heavy deep blue ice, tons of it. With fascination he watched it glaze the front of his coat. He felt his eyebrows weighted. The footing was treacherous. Passengers coming out of their cabins to see how the ship did gasped in the searing cold and one heavy man immediately fell and slid across the deck, but was able to cling to the bottom rail. He could not get up again and at each lurch of the ship his feet swung outward over the abyss. James saw ice forming on the man’s legs. Could James reach him? He could not. He looked for rope, saw a coil, but it was frozen in a great lump of ice. Passengers were clinging to anything they could reach. James wondered if he could get back to his cabin and tried a step without relinquishing his hold on the rail. His foot skidded and he gave it up. People were shrieking now, calling, “Help, help.” Never in his life had he felt such cold. Two icicles hung from his snotty nostrils. The fallen man suddenly shot away under the rail and into Erie. The entire ship was sealed in a casket of ice a foot thick, and it labored and wallowed in the troughs of the waves — slower, lower. Why had no crewmen chipped ice as soon as it started to form, James wanted to ask, but his mouth could not shape the words. Through the sheeting spray he thought he saw land nearby, less than a mile distant. They were making for a local harbor or at least the lee of an island, and he felt cheered. He would last — he’d been through worse. The wind pushed the helpless Liberty Tree on and a quarter mile from a desolate stump-choked shore she smashed onto the foaming rocks; he knew he would never drink that damn Madeira, but with a bizarre sense of victory he felt his headache become a dwindling spicule.

• • •

Cyrus had the news first from the steamship owner and came for Lavinia.

“We must go there,” she said. “We cannot wait. It is my father. We must go to him.” It took them two days to reach the shore near the wreck through some of the coldest weather of the century. Cyrus was exhausted by Lavinia’s agitation, her restless head-tossing and weeping. The bitter temperatures persisted until the entire Erie shore humped up in crystalline domes of ice. Among the stumps, converted to glittering ice cylinders, they found thirty-odd frozen bodies where loggers, summoned from their chopping work a mile distant, had laid them. The passengers were frozen in angular postures just as they had been when the blood solidified in their veins. Many had hands crooked in their last grasp of rope or rail, and the faces fixed in final expressions of struggle or resignation. The captain in his ice uniform held an ice watch in his solid hand. They found James, congealed eyes glaring up at the sky, his tight lips narrow as a crack. Lavinia touched his marble cheek. She looked at Cyrus. He made a hopeless gesture and said, “We shall meet him in heaven.” Some of the shanty men were trying to salvage the last bits of rigging and spars still tumbling in the heavy surf. Lavinia called to a man whose rounded back and sloping shoulders she somehow knew.

“Mr. Roby? Oh, oh it really is you, Mr. Roby. You can do me a very great favor and I will pay you for it. My father, James Duke, lies among those bodies. I must have him brought to Detroit so we may bury him. Will you help me?” The man looked in her face white as dirty old snow, tracked with frozen tears.

“What! Mr. James Duke? Your father? Oh Jesus and Mary, Miss Duke, I will. We’ll take him out soon as we may. And I’ll take no pay for it.”

“I’ll never forget this kindness,” she said.

• • •

Now she was alone, except for Cyrus and Clara, who did not count. She had encountered aloneness in the hated English school. And now with James buried in the Mount Elliot Cemetery and Posey buried in Boston, the uncles all dead, it was the same. She lay on her bed and tried to breathe slowly. She breathed, breathed and then almost heard the saddest sound in the world, the far notes of a piano played in an empty room… re mi fa sol… “Mama. Mama!”

Hours later in the dark she woke, her heart galloping, her salty face stuck to the silk pillow slip. Why had she not thought of this before? She was not alone. There was someone who would protect her, care for her. Although he was a common man she sensed he had a noble character no matter what they said. She got out of bed, lit the oil lamp and began to write. Her pen gouged into the paper page after page, ink sputtering, and when she stopped it was milky dawn. She folded the pages, wrapped, sealed and addressed the packet. She felt a sense of completion, knew she had saved herself. Very tired she crept back into the chilled bed and slept.

She rose at noon, dined on a poached chicken breast. She carried her letter to the post office and saw it on its way. Now she could only wait. She was not anxious. He would not fail her.

The days passed and Lavinia began to fret. After ten days there was still no response. She threw herself at the office work but it was hourly apparent that she could not run Duke & Sons by herself.

• • •

She arranged a meeting with Mr. Edward Pye. James had brought Pye, the company’s accountant, treasurer and paymaster, to Detroit and settled him in a house near the Duke offices. Mr. Pye, pale-faced with dark curling hair and beard, was reticent and responsible, the ideal employee. But he had a way of pointing out Duke & Sons’ deficiencies that Lavinia could not quite like. He introduced her to a Chicago lawyer visiting Detroit on business, Clayton Jasper Flense. Within two weeks Flense had become indispensable. He advised her to shift the company to Chicago — Chicago had a far better geographical location than Detroit, it was central to the entire country, it was becoming an important city. He advised her to incorporate and name a board of directors.

“Very many businesses do incorporate. For then, anything the company may choose to do, if some action excites litigation, why, such an attack does not fall on you nor on any individual director, but on the corporation, which is a thing, and not a person. It is a legal protection, you see. And this is a way you can raise capital to purchase extensive woodlands. Your investors enjoy limited liability, that is, they face no losses greater than their invested moneys. Incorporation is one of the great benefits to business in this country — incorporation lies with the states not the central government — and if you are not content in one state and the opportunities look better in another, why you may go there. It is the lifeblood of our American spirit of enterprise. We do not have tyrannical kings and despots squeezing us into poverty. We can invent and make and work and do and keep the fruits of our labor.”

“But my father said that corporations were often monopolies, and that they would prove fatal to partnerships and sole proprietor situations. He cited the East India Company as an example.”

“That was hardly an American institution. Remember, too, that it was a royal charter, under the ‘protection’ of the British government — and under its thumb. The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it. And I believe competition among corporations will make that concern null and void.”

She did see, she thought she understood the situation. It was time to reshape Duke & Sons. And every day she waited for the answer to that painful letter written in the night.

• • •

Flense and Pye were valuable but she needed an assistant, someone who could act as secretary, handle the paperwork and office supplies, oversee other employees, manage visitors and business callers. She put a small advertisement in The Democratic Free Press and Michigan Intelligencer for a responsible woman with a sense of order.

The advertisement brought only two responses. The first was a bony eighteen-year-old girl wild to get away from her father’s stump farm. She was alternatively doubled over with shyness and forthright. She picked nervously at bleeding cuticles and seemed to have only a few qualifications beyond her desire to escape farm life. “I can read. I can write. I can learn!” she said when Lavinia asked what skills she had.

“I admire your spirit, but that may not be enough, Miss Heinrich. I will keep your name in my book and let you know if we have a suitable opening in future.”

The second applicant was a middle-aged rusty-haired widow, Annag Duncan, thin, with long spider-leg fingers. She had a low easy voice.

“I worked in the office of a hat manufacturer in Glasgow before I met my husband, Alasdair Duncan. Then I stayed to home. We married and he wanted to come to the New World and make a living as a purveyor of fine woods. He knew what was desirable. We went to New York. But his cough — he had a little cough for years, nothing much — this cough became very constant and brought blood. A doctor said he had consumption and should go to a dry mountain climate. But before the mountains, said the man he worked for, he must go to Detroit and examine some beautiful clear pinewood, so we came and he died two weeks after we come ashore. He never got to the mountains.”

She was homely, had no money, indeed she wore threadbare garments. But her office experience with the hat manufacturer gave her value and Lavinia hired her. She sent again for the stump farmer’s daughter to help Annag. “I will put your avowal of wanting to learn to the test. You are hired. You will be paid five dollars a month with a chance of more if you do well. We will be shifting to Chicago in coming months. Report to Mrs. Duncan at seven tomorrow morning — she will assign your tasks. I expect hard and accurate work from you.”

Now, she thought, I must deal with Cyrus, for she longed to get him out of the company. His fussy, overbearing ways, his dulled hearing, were unwanted. She had every confidence in her own abilities aided and abetted by Flense and Pye. And still there was no reply to that letter.

The answer when it came was so contrary to her expectations she could hardly grasp what she was reading. She plowed through it again and again, sure she had made a mistake. But right enough, it was a refusal: “… your generous but unusual offer… prefer to keep my own name… choose my own helpmeet… earn my own way in the world.” Mr. Andre Roque had the effrontery to wish her good fortune.

She fell apart, she raved and shrieked, hurled clothes, furniture, smashed books through the window, screamed obscene words she didn’t know she knew and finally crashed sobbing onto the torn-apart bed.

Downstairs Mrs. Trame and the new maid, Alberta Snow, heard the uproar.

“Whatever ails her!” said Alberta.

“I expect she is grieving for her father,” said Mrs. Trame.

“That is no grieving. That is fury, that is a fiery rage. That is a mad-dog rage.”

“Grieving occurs in different ways,” said Mrs. Trame.

• • •

The next morning, dressed in black, Lavinia came down to breakfast table very quietly, drank three cups of coffee and ate toast and an apple.

“Mrs. Trame, I shall be going to the Duke offices today. I will be home at noon and would like something simple for lunch — whatever you have on hand. And please ask Mr. Kneebone to repair the lights in my bedroom window. I had a bit of difficulty yesterday but am quite all right today.” That moment, she told herself, had been her last emotional expression; from now on she would reject sympathy and condolences as evidence of weakness. She would feel nothing for anyone.

• • •

Cyrus came into the office smoking one of James’s cigars (he had taken the box from James’s desk after the funeral) and stood gazing at Mrs. Duncan, who sat at her desk, pin-neat in a black woolen dress with a modest collar.

“Who might you be?” His tone was offensive.

“Mrs. Annag Duncan. Miss Duke took me on as office manager. And you are—?”

“Hah? Hah?” At last he understood. “Office manager! I was not consulted. Where is she?”

Mrs. Duncan nodded at Lavinia’s door. “May I announce you, sir?”

“What! Hah! Foolishness!”

Cyrus began at once. “Who gave you leave to hire that woman?”

She shouted in his half-deaf ear, “Every member of the Board save you and me has passed on. I need permission from no one. I am the head of Duke and Sons, the heir to James Duke’s estate and business interests, and I shall do as I feel necessary.”

“Well that is blunt enough, ma’am.”

“Now, about your own place in this company. It is better if you leave.” Cyrus would bluster, make a scene — but he surprised her.

“Lavinia, I, too, think it is a time for a change. I have wanted my own lumber brokerage for some years. I have contacts with several logging companies, not just Duke and Sons. And every day sees a dozen new logging concerns at work in the woods. Of course I would hope Duke and Sons would be my prize client.” Annag Duncan in the outer room heard every word.

Lavinia smiled. “Cyrus, I congratulate you. I intend to shift this company to Chicago. And rename it Duke Logging and Lumber as there are no extant sons.” Cyrus started to say something but she put her finger to her lips and pointed at the door to the outer office. She took up her pen and wrote: “Company outgrown Detroit. Center shifting. Chicago ideal. Double population in 2 yrs, forest, lakes, rivers easy transport logs. Gal. & Chi. Railroad and more building. Ill & Mich Canal connect Miss.” She waited until he had read this and then shrieked into his hairy ear, “The flow of business is shifting from north-south to east-west with the railroads going where no rivers flow. Chicago the center. No business can ignore this.”

“Hah!” said Cyrus, impressed by this rounding out of Chicago’s situation. “Gad, it’s true.” Men all over the country, all over the world had caught the arousing scent of Chicago, the city of the century, already a central hub, everyone coming to it with a common hunger, coming to take and take and take again. Chicago was raw greed and action, and would perhaps become the most important business city in the world. He decided to shift his own enterprise to Chicago immediately.

Lavinia wrote again: “Board meeting, you formally step away. Please remain on Board of Duke Logging. Likely we incorporate.”

He read this, gave her a sharp, surprised look and said, “In many states the legislatures hamper the activities of corporations.”

“Duke Logging is in a favorable situation as far as the Michigan legislature is concerned.” Cyrus said nothing and she took his silence for understanding. “I want you to start your new venture without acrimony. Are Breitsprechers one of your clients?”

“That is for me to know, not to say. Ha ha.” He might as well have written it on the wall.

• • •

In another year she was settled in Chicago in a lakefront house topped by a glassed-in copper-roofed cupola, but Mrs. Trame was gone, a victim of dropsy that made her legs swell to the size, shape and color of Boston harbor seals. She had suddenly fallen dead on the floor while kneading bread dough. The new cook, Mrs. Agnes Balclop, was proficient enough. And old Kneebone kept things in repair, tended the horses and yard, got drunk and roared on Saturday night. Lavinia had a companion, Goosey Breeley, a distant New Brunswick cousin of Posey, who had found her way to Chicago. She looked somewhat like Posey and her voice and accent were very like. She became official sympathizer, consulting physician, favoring critic and errand runner. She managed the household, everyone in fear of her wicked New Brunswicker tongue. And she explained freely and often that nothing in Chicago could compare with the virtues of New Brunswick.

• • •

Lavinia, Lawyer Flense and Accountant Pye met in the new boardroom, a perfect square of white plaster walls with seven windows looking onto Lake Michigan, for a discussion of suitable candidates for the company’s positions. Annag Duncan put a steaming coffeepot and a plate of cookies and cakes on the long table under the windows. Although James had hired four new landlookers and their assistants before his fated trip east, they needed more; the Breitsprechers were buying vast tracts of land on credit — they were pulling ahead. Someone had to take on Lennart’s old job.

“In my current situation I cannot serve as company head and still manage the landlookers, jobbers and mills.” Lavinia tapped on a stack of papers. Flense bit into a crisp lemon cookie. Mr. Pye made a note. “You want a production manager,” he said, and she nodded. “Let me suggest Noah Ludlum — a Maine man familiar with everything from beans to boomage. He is subject to occasional fits of epilepsy so cannot work in the woods as a logging contractor, but he has great knowledge of all operations and a talent for working well with men and choosing good ones to carry out what he cannot.”

“Can I meet with him next week? Is he in the region?”

“He is currently working for the Breitsprechers, but I know he is not happy with their odd ways. Shall I contact him?”

“Yes, do so. And transport — do we not need someone responsible to oversee all our transport means whether rafts, barges, wagonloads or railcars? And ships? Should we build our own lumber barges?”

“Miss Duke,” said Flense, “wherever you can cut out the middleman you will profit. Reduce the number of hands through which your product must pass before it brings you income. Your company would do well to build its own ships and barges in its own shipyards.” Lavinia made a note but an idea was stirring. Flense got up and went to the cookie plate. He took two with lemon icing.

Pye spoke again. “And even small actions will make a difference in your bottom line. A question: do you have stores at the jobbers’ camps? Places where the axmen can purchase clothing, tobacco and other necessaries?”

“No. Is that not the business of the jobber?”

Flense leapt in. “Ah, precisely my point. You must directly employ camp overseers and run your own crews. Pass over the jobbers.”

Pye again, “Yes, pass over the jobbers, operate Duke Logging crews under strong-minded salaried overseers. Hire the best camp cooks at the lowest wage. At each camp introduce stores stocked with trousers, boots and socks, knives and axes, galluses and candy, tobacco, maybe even papers and candles, combs and such. Get these things at the lowest price. I can take on a buyer’s duty if you wish. Then charge a little higher than the merchants in town and you will get back a considerable part of what you lay out in wages.”

She nodded. She interpreted these suggestions to mean “pay as little as you can in wages and sell your goods to the workers for as much as they can stand.” Shanty men in remote locations would think it a benefit to have a camp store. Ideas were boiling in her mind. She said, “I have read of a Pennsylvania logging company with a short-line railroad from the cut to the mill, a small steam engine hauling the cars. We could look into doing the same. It would be an escape from the tyranny of rivers, for we now cut only trees close to waterways. Some of the most desirable timber is distant from water and deemed too much trouble to cut. Though of course a railroad would be frightfully expensive.”

“You have to spend money to make money. Do not fear innovation — that is where money grows.” Flense had demolished the lemon cookies and was starting on the molasses drops.

“I read also that same company milled on site and then sent the seasoned lumber to market by rail. We need to build our own railroads.” She hesitated a little then said, “Mentioning Maine made me think. I believe we still need someone reliable in Maine to handle our interests. My father planned to dispose of our forestland there since the white pine is almost completely cut, but he died before it could be sold and now I wonder if there might be a market for other kinds of wood than pine? There is spruce, hemlock, but also much hardwood — beech, maple, walnut, oak. These might have values we do not yet recognize. I think we should hold on to it and look into possible markets for other woods. The Michigan land also has many more kinds of trees than pine.”

“Miss Duke,” said Lawyer Flense. “You have business acumen beyond that of most men.”

“I learned from my father. And Uncle Lennart.”

“But one more suggestion.” He whisked crumbs from his vest. He squinted at her with great seriousness. She felt it — this was not a game, not fancy nor whim; he took her as an equal intelligence.

“Yes?”

“Buy as much Chicago city property as you can and sit on it. You need do nothing with it and as time passes it will swell and double, triple, turn pennies into thousands. When first I came here you could buy a central acre for a dollar or two. Now a quarter acre of downtown urban land goes for fifteen hundred dollars. This happened in New York and it is happening here in Chicago. It will be the source of tremendous wealth to those who have land and sit on it, hold it. Yes, yes, I know what you are going to say, that you have most of the company’s money tied up in forestland. Very well. When the wood is off, sell that land to settlers. But the big money, made with no effort nor outlay beyond the original purchase price, is right under your feet. City land. Mark my words.”

“I mark them well.”

Mr. Pye straightened up from his notes and suggested that after so much talk they go to the Tremont for a dinner. On the way out Lawyer Flense stopped at Annag Duncan’s desk. “You are a wonderful woman, Mrs. Duncan,” he said. “A remarkable office manager and a fine pastry cook.” Annag blushed and put her head down. Lavinia thought she was a bit of a fool to be flattered by the lawyer’s attentions.

Over chops and roasted potatoes they talked of properties, city lots and blocks, and Flense said he would introduce Lavinia to a knowing and shrewd real estate agent. She nodded, but her mind was still swarming with ideas for extending her kingdom and she said musingly, “We may look abroad as well — oh, I do not mean Europe with its worn-out old lands — Europe is not our source but our market — yet there are other countries, places we do not know about. Not now, but in future years. What fabulous kinds of wood may not grow in distant places?” Far to the east, deep under leaf mold and black forest soil, the bones of Charles Duquet relaxed.

• • •

She knew something now; the only true safety was money. Very well, Lavinia Duke, a wealthy and able businesswoman, would build a protective wall of money. And within ten years Duke Logging and Lumber had a general manager and assistants, a sales manager, dozens of landlookers, thirty logging camps, a few miles of forest rail and a steam locomotive named James; it had barges and ships and their crews, sawmills and finishing mills, two furniture mills that used hardwoods, as well as blocks and lots of choice downtown Chicago land; it had Flense’s roster of lawyers, who played legislatures, senators and congressmen like they were banjos. Chicago’s ten railroads covered the city like the spread-out fingers of two hands. Two lots Lavinia had bought in the summer for twelve thousand dollars each were valued at more than twenty thousand six months later. She bought as much land as she could. She knew Lawyer Flense was buying whatever he could for himself. The Chicago population exploded from twenty thousand to almost one hundred thousand in those few years.

She often watched the ship traffic on Lake Michigan, noticed fewer sails each month and more steamboats. She cultivated newspapermen who praised Duke Logging and Lumber as a philanthropic, job-giving business of impeccable moral distinction and Lavinia as a rare and progressive businesswoman. An occasional small municipal gift such as a bandstand or a contribution to Fourth of July fireworks set off yards of enthusiastic prose. She urged editors to praise the manliness and toughness of shanty men, inculcating axmen with the belief that they could take extreme risks and withstand the most desperate conditions because they were heroic rugged fellows; the same sauce served settlers unto the third generation, who believed they were “pioneers” and could outlast perils and adversities. Loggers and frontier settlers, she thought, would live on pride and belief in their own invulnerability instead of money. She learned that small gestures secured tremendous goodwill. When she heard that the shanty boys at one camp had played three old cat on a Sunday she decreed that work should stop at Saturday noon in Duke camps and the afternoon be given over to pastimes such as baseball, but that no amusements would occur on Sunday, the holy day of rest. For this she was held up as a devout but modern sportswoman and invited to Hoboken to attend a Knickerbockers’ game.

After these dinners she often sat at her rosewood desk and, in a habit she had taken from Posey, wrote down as much of the conversation as she could remember in a book bound in green leather. She outlined her plan to cheaply buy up schooners, strip them of masts and rigging and make them into lumber barges.

But dinners with political men and lawyers were even more interesting and the hot questions of the day — slavery, “free soil” and territorial expansion — never burned more fiercely. A well-known senator, a champion of democracy much inclined to oratory, used her table as a platform. “The people who live in whatever states or territories they live in have the right to make their own decisions. It is none of the government’s business to decide if a territory may permit slavery inside its borders or no.” He did not mention that his wife owned a cotton plantation with a hundred slaves and he himself received income as its manager. The phrase “will of the people” was always in his mouth; he meant the will of white people, for another of his banners was that “the Constitution was made by whites for whites.” After all, who else was there?

“Hear, hear,” echoed down the table.

• • •

People streamed into the country — almost a million Irish in twenty years, half a million Germans. They came from all over the world, Germans, Canadians, English, Irish, French, Norwegians, Swedes. The world had heard of the rich continent with its inexhaustible coverlet of forests, its earth streaked as a moldy cheese with veins of valuable metals, fish and game in numbers too great to be compassed, hundreds of millions of acres of empty land waiting to be taken and a beckoning, generous government too enchanted with its own democratic image to deal with shrewd men whose people had lived by their wits for centuries. Everything was there for the taking — it was the chance of a lifetime and it would never come again.

For some it did not come at all: a logger whose cheap boots fell apart during the spring drive, another who did not regard a slice of raw pork dipped in molasses as the acme of dining, the man laid up for six months by a woods accident immobile in bed while his wife took in “boarders” who stayed in the house less than twenty minutes, a drought-ruined Kansas family eating coyotes to stay alive. And in Chicago fast-growing slums, hovels built from scrap wood and rotted leather clustered around the stockyards, lumber mills and tanneries encircled by poisonous water.

58. locked room

Lavinia was corseted and dressed for the day in green silk, an elaborately draped skirt over a bustle. There was a lace frill at her throat. Out on the open deck of the cupola the wind was like a clawing, rolling wildcat trapped between lake and sky. She saw two distant ships on the trembling horizon, but looking south over the city with her opera glasses, she saw no slums. She turned again to the north and squinted at the ships. The wind pulled at her black hair piled on top of her head. There would always be the poor, hordes who had no ambition to better themselves. The world swarmed with terrible problems but they were not her affair. She strained to make out details of the faraway steamers. A telescope was needed. Despite her superior position she had her own difficulties: the gnawing aloneness (for Goosey Breeley was more like a chest of drawers than a companion), tiresome business negotiations, spiteful rivals — and succession. It was legal now for women to own property and she had to decide who would inherit Duke Logging and Lumber, the great timberland holdings, the mills and railroad stocks. The wind pulled at her hair. Smoothing the loose strands she went inside and laid the opera glasses on the marble-topped table just inside the door. The thought would not leave her. An heir had to be someone of the Duke bloodline. It would not be Goosey. She had a swiftly dissolving thought of the human flotsam that came to cut trees, their lives nothing beyond a few sweaty years with an ax. Despite their winters in the forests they all seemed to produce large families. They had no worries about succession, nor about credit or character.

“My God,” she said to her silver-framed dressing room mirror, “how do they stand it?” Her hair was a fright wig. But who they were and what it was they had to stand was unclear. People spoke of happiness, but what was that? What was anything? Posey had had no such doubts, nor James, who fretted over nothing except the most banal irritants. But she was different. She had terrible wrathy feelings directed everywhere. She was short-tempered with people who did not respond to her requests speedily. If they could not keep up with the pace of development, let them stand aside! James had taught her that getting ahead was the important thing. Of course the problems and impediments were endless, the brain-wracking decisions of which men she could extend credit to, and she almost envied women like Clara, who simply let a husband guide them. Honor and promise had ruled in James’s day, but now there were so many rogues about that money and contracts were the only safe way to proceed. Thank God for Tappan’s Mercantile Agency, with its reports on the worth of individual businessmen. She relied on their astute judgments. Bad creditors could bring the largest businesses down. And children: was not that the root of her discontent? Perhaps not, for she disliked the sight of pregnant women, who seemed everywhere, especially along the rural roads. Farm women were like sawmills. She shuddered and went downstairs for tea with Goosey.

“Your hair!” cried Goosey, clasping her large pale hands. “Shall I get a little lavender oil to smooth the flyaways in place?”

“Thank you, Goosey, that is what I need, but I would prefer the damask oil. Lavender is too reminiscent of bedsheets.”

Goosey was back in a minute with a vial of scented oil and a feather. “You should always wear a head scarf when you go to the cupola,” she said in a flat voice, knowing Lavinia would not bother.

• • •

The question of heirs began to disturb Lavinia’s sleep when Cyrus and his family, as well as many Chicago people high and low, fell ill with typhoid. Cyrus perished in great pain with intestinal perforations. The children went one by one and finally Clara, demented with grief and helplessness, fashioned a knotted loop in a heavy shell-pink silk scarf, stepped off a chair set on the dining room table and hanged herself from the chandelier.

That winter Lavinia herself had many illnesses, intestinal gripes and skin eruptions. She had not liked Clara but missed her, missed poor old Cyrus. Under the pressure of these afflictions she began to examine the Duke family papers for possible heirs and consult with foreign-born genealogists; she found few Americans interested in ancestral searches, as they took pride in being unshackled by the past — unless they had a distinguished early family member and then they waved him like a flag. She reviewed her relatives. Sedley Duke’s children by his second marriage had all died without issue. Lennart Vogel had never married. Edward and Freegrace had no known children.

“You know,” she said to Mr. Flense, “it is unpleasantly clear that I am the last surviving Duke.”

“Nonsense, Lavinia. There must be heirs out there. You must employ someone to search for them.” His tone was impatient as if there were undiscovered cousins stacked like cordwood in some nearby cave. But she had doubts; could genealogists discover any heirs, whether in the still-United States or in the Netherlands? The two savants she discovered — Sextus Bollard of Boston and R. R. Tetrazinni in Philadelphia — both presided over bookshops where tracing family lines eased long hours between customers.

Lavinia invited each to Chicago for an interview. The first to arrive at the house for dinner and the interview was Sextus Bollard. He was at least sixty, Lavinia thought, looking at his old-fashioned checked trousers. But he did carry a fine stick with a gold knob in the likeness of a gorgon’s head.

Goosey and Mr. Flense dined with them and they made small talk about Mr. Bollard’s journey (difficult) and the tale the conductor told him of the horrors of crossing the plains to the west. He said sparks from the engines often ignited the dry grass, and that passengers cowered in their seats as the train made its way through a sea of flame. He said that during one unfortunate traverse flames had seized the train and roasted the passengers like pigeons. “Indians came and ate them as we would a turnspit ox. I counted myself fortunate to have had no worse adventure than encounters with the uncouth inhabitants of Ohio and Indiana Territory.”

“A very disturbing tale if true,” said Mr. Flense, “but I fear the conductor was pulling your leg, Mr. Bollocks.”

“Bollard, sir, is the name,” snapped the guest. “And I believe he told the truth as he showed me the clipped illustration and account from Harper’s, which he kept in his breast pocket to entertain travelers.” He narrowed his eyes at Flense, to whom he had taken a dislike.

After dinner Goosey went upstairs and Lavinia, Lawyer Flense and Mr. Bollard went into the library to give him copies of the Duke family papers and discuss the terms of the genealogist’s employment.

“Of course Holland, but not France?” Bollard asked. “My cursory examination of your papers indicates your ancestor Charles Duquet came from France. Indeed, from Paris. Is that not correct?”

Lavinia felt a burning itch on her neck, one of the unpleasant blotches that came so often. “Yes, of course, France. It slipped my mind. Though we always have thought of Holland as our point of origin — Uncle Lennart Vogel fostered that idea. Our ancestor Charles Duquet has always been something of a mystery. It has been my understanding that he vanished in the wilderness. But do search in Paris. Who knows what you may find? I am thinking you might begin with a six-month search. Of course we will pay your travel expenses, and provide a purse. And if necessary to make more trips we can discuss it when the time arrives.”

“And do keep receipts for even the smallest purchases,” said Lawyer Flense. “That is the correct way.” And so Bollard, who considered Lavinia a paler, older, homelier and more modern imitation of the learned female characters in Thomas Amory’s The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., closed his bookshop and sailed for France on the trail of Duquet relatives, his valises packed with scratch paper, grammars and dictionaries; he read French but did not speak it and planned to write out his questions.

Tetrazinni, younger and with a wild red beard and spectacles in pot-metal frames, came a week later. He was more modishly attired than old Bollard — a pleated shirtfront with a turndown collar and a wide silk tie drawn through a heavy signet ring, velvet waistcoat and — were they? — yes, they were, black velvet trousers. The dinner was mutton and boiled potatoes. Tetrazinni stared musingly at his plate and looked several times toward the kitchen door, but no larded capons nor Pacific oysters came. Goosey was ill with a catarrh and sipped a little veal broth in her room. Lawyer Flense sawed at his mutton, listened to Tetrazinni’s verbose and excited account of his journey — by some stroke of coincidence he had been regaled by the same tale of the burning prairie as Bollard. Over the dried peach pie Lawyer Flense caught Lavinia’s eye, nodded and made his excuses.

“I fear I must run. I have a court appearance tomorrow and wish to be fresh for argument. Delighted to meet you, Mr. Tetrazinni, and wish you good fortune in your search,” he said, bowing and backing.

Lavinia and Tetrazinni went to the library for port and she gave him the bulky packet of family papers, most copied out by Annag Duncan and Miss Heinrich. Tetrazinni’s fingers flew through the pages for a few minutes but he did not stop talking. He had too many questions to suit Lavinia. They had hired him, why could he not do his job without harassing her for names? Surely the old family records and letters were enough — if he would shut up and read them instead of gabbling on.

“I cannot tell you,” she said for the fourth time when he asked for a list of Amsterdam relatives and all ancestors, their current addresses and business interests. “I suppose they all may be dead. It is for you to discover.” She was tired of him.

“Yes, but names will lead me to today’s generations. That is how we do it. I must have a place to start,” he said, jutting his chin out. She pointed at the wad of copied family papers in his hands. In the end Tetrazinni read aloud for two hours, culling dozens of names from Vogel’s Dutch correspondence. A month later he sailed with his list and Lavinia’s letter of introduction to whom it might concern for information on any living connection to Charles Duquet and Cornelia Roos.

Tetrazinni made an inner note to particularly examine the history of Charles Duquet’s son Outger, who had been something of a learned authority on American Indians. Scholar or no, he likely had cohabited with someone in Leiden and his other haunts. And had he not lived in America for some years? Where that might have been he had no idea. Although in the papers Lavinia had supplied there was frequent mention of a “large pine table” that Duquet possessed and Duke & Sons claimed, there was no mention of the location of either table or man. Tetrazinni assumed both had once been somewhere in Boston, but the old city directories had no Outger Duquet listed. As he read again through the meager family history on three faded pages held together with a tailor’s pin and signed Bernard Duke, two short sentences on the ancestor’s voyages to China caught Tetrazinni’s attention. “Well, well,” he said to himself, “if no one turns up in Amsterdam there may be Duquets in Peking, though perhaps rather difficult to sort out from Yees and Yongs.” He imagined the risible possibility of telling Miss Duke that her only living relative and heir was a Chinese noodle seller.

• • •

For the Dukes and the Breitsprechers and lesser timbermen business was good. Insatiable markets along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers squalling for lumber unmade Albany and Buffalo. A tide of agricultural-minded immigrants — sinewy men, their swollen wives and bruised children — streamed onto the prairies, all needing houses and barns, silos and stables, needing furniture and shingles, lathes and pickets, rails and posts. New railroads to and from the prairies delivered them lumber and brought beef cattle and hogs back to Chicago, where the war and fulfillment of the Indian treaties guaranteeing annual livestock distributions meant acres of stockyards. There was a fierce need for planks and poles, fencing and pens. And if it all burned down every two or three years, there were more trees in the woods — endless trees.

• • •

During the war with the south the Duke Board of Directors included Lawyer Flense; Accountant Mr. Pye; David Neale, owner of the newspaper Chicago Progress; Annag Duncan, the office manager; Noah Ludlum, who oversaw the logging sites and sawmills; another Maine man, Glafford Jones, responsible for log and lumber transport; two wealthy logging kings, Theodore Jinks and Axel Cowes, both large shareholders in Duke Logging. Jinks and Cowes built mansions on properties adjoining Lavinia’s grounds. The three shared a park — thirty acres of woodland area on the lakeside of their abutting properties. It was Lavinia’s habit to walk on the silent paths in early evening, when she sometimes met Axel Cowes and his spaniels.

“Evening, Lavinia,” Cowes would say, half-bowing. “A fine day.”

“Yes, very fine, Axel.”

Cowes was in his sixties, white-haired and with a soft rosy face. It was he who had suggested the park. He collected paintings and had an artistic bent. He saw beauty in the forest as well as wealth, something Lavinia found as inexplicable as her pleasure walking the shadowed paths. As for art, he liked pictures that showed stags drinking from forest pools, lone Indians paddling canoes across mirrored lakes. Lavinia favored large canvases showing the triumph of the hunt and engravings with panoramic city views and lines of statistics enclosed in ornate scrolls. Cowes, despite his years and differing ways, had suggested marriage to Lavinia as some men did. They wanted her money and holdings, she knew this. Theodore Jinks, who was a rougher type and slightly tainted with gossip of a gambling habit, had done the same. Yet she did not hold the proposals against them. She liked both men, both were dependable Board members with solid knowledge of the logging business. When Cowes suggested the park it was easy to agree, though she noticed Jinks’s expression when Cowes talked of “sequestering” the valuable pines.

“Those pines would bring a good dollar,” Jinks said.

“Oh yes, but it is good to leave a few to remind us of our early days of fortune. No one wishes to live next to a stump field.” Cowes had an elevated way of saying such things that made Jinks shuffle his feet and curse under his breath. “Except agriculturists,” he said lamely. It was no use; Lavinia and Cowes only tolerated him. He found ease in the knowledge that one day those pines would come down as all pines must.

Pye, Flense and Lavinia made up the inner circle of Duke Logging and Lumber. None of them had any small talk; conversation was always business. The arrival of the telegraph some years earlier had been like a kettle of water dashed into a cauldron of boiling oil for the business world and the railroads. Giveaway Congress guaranteed the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads sixteen thousand dollars for every mile of track laid on level ground, and double that through mountainous terrain and included a forty-mile-wide corridor across the entire continent. Now there was real money, great great fortunes of which the Dukes could not even dream. But there were consolations. The center of the country exploded in hysterical expansion. Duke’s lumber shipments quadrupled as the Union Army hammered up forts and prison camps. Chicago businessmen joyously mulcted the government with shoddy war goods from canned beef to forage caps at high prices, and not Lavinia, Cowes nor Jinks scrupled to hold back warped and knotty lumber billed at the price of clear.

“Why pay more when you can get it for less?” said Flense, who cared little for archaic idealism and who despised James Duke’s timberland purchases when he could have got the same land for nothing. “The government can’t prove land claims weren’t made in good faith.” They used the General Land Office’s preemption acts, which allowed settlers to take up and then purchase land at the giveaway price of $1.25 for a quarter section—180 acres. Duke sent out its landlookers, chose the best woods tracts and used dummy men who went through the motions of settling and then handed over the deeds to Flense. An army of preemption brokers greased the nefarious skids. Nor was it any great feat to bribe the federal land agents. The Homestead Acts of the 1860s were sweet gifts to Duke, which hired perjurous “settlers,” who camped on the land for a few days, nailed up a feeble shack of a few boards — the “house”—shoved two empty whiskey bottles between the boards for windows, ground a heel in the dirt to indicate a well and claimed a homestead. Others toted around a dollhouse with windows, roof and floors, put it on the site and at the Land Office declared a house “fourteen by sixteen,” not mentioning that the measurements were in inches rather than feet. Still others had the smallest allowable “house” on skids that was hauled around to the various claims and designated a livable shanty. Duke bought up huge blocks of land in these ways, rushed in, cut the timber and then gave up the homestead rights. No one objected; they were smart American businessmen going ahead, doing what businessmen did. No one got rich by walking seven miles to return a penny. And there were hundreds of small loggers anxious to sell out to Duke after a few hard lessons — being shot at by unknown persons, suffering frequent sawmill fires and large-scale log stealage that made the game not worth the candle.

None of these affairs were discussed at Board meetings — it was business. Tappan’s Mercantile report had called James Duke “A-one. Wealthy family, sound business practices. Good as gold.” Duke’s Board was more concerned with such nagging subjects as continuing to outfit all their mills with steam-powered circular saws and what to do with encroaching piles of sawdust. Noah Ludlum, smooth-shaven except for a pointy little goatee, said, “Them big circle saws cut damn fast — beg pardon — but they don’t stay firm. There is a wobble. You can’t hardly see it but that jeezly wobble costs the comp’ny money as it makes a big wide kerf. I know for a fact every thousand board feet cut we lose more than three hundred in sawdust. Thing is, the steel in them saws is not good. So much steel goes into rails and guns we can’t git good saws. And you got sawdust piles higher than Katahdin. Course we burn it to power the boilers but—”

Lavinia interrupted. “Lose no sleep over the sawdust, Mr. Ludlum. There is nothing we can do about it at the moment except burn it or throw it in the rivers. The trees of Michigan are so plentiful we need not be frugal.”

“Wal,” said Mr. Ludlum, who was determined to have the last word, “we have to leave the biggest trees out in the woods. Them saws can’t cut nothin a hair more than half their diameter. Bigger saws needed, but the bigger they are the more they wobble.”

Lavinia looked down at her papers, glanced at Annag Duncan, who had compiled the figures, and said, “All the same, our Avery Mill alone will cut three million board feet this year, well ahead of last year. We still have a few old water-powered mills with up-and-down saws and the sooner we get circular saws and steam engines into them the better. That is our goal right now, whatever the wobble. And I would suggest we look at the new double circular saws that can accommodate larger logs.”

“Good work, Annag,” said Lawyer Flense in his stage whisper voice, smiling at the office manager.

There was no wobble in the government’s need for lumber and Duke Logging profited through the rich years of the war. Mr. Pye seemed almost sad when it ended in the spring, followed by Lincoln’s assassination. But the south needed to rebuild, and the cry for lumber had never been louder.

“There are rich forests in the south,” said Theodore Jinks, “closer to the need. I suggest we buy up some southern woodland and get our cutting crews to work. If the Board agrees, I can make a reconnaissance.” The idea was good and Jinks and Mr. Ludlum, their clothes neatly packed in carpetbags, left a week later to assess the southern trees.

Fires of invention blazed through the country; new ideas and opportunities for innovation crammed the mail basket that Annag Duncan lugged in every morning. There were so many of them and it took so long to understand the complex explanations and diagrams that Mr. Pye suggested that Duke hire an educated man to assess the proposals and even that the Board arrange a meeting of these inventors. At such a meeting men who had worked out logging industry improvements or new machines might show scale models or drawings and diagrams. The Board would talk with the inventors.

“This could be promising,” said Lavinia. “If something of value emerges Duke Logging can offer a fair price for the rights and then patent it. Let us set a date for the summer, when travel is less onerous. The company will put the inventors up, gratis, in the Hotel Great Lakes — a limit of twenty men. I believe it has a ballroom that may be ideal for exhibits. We will certainly find it interesting.”

• • •

The next spring in Detroit, more than 250 miles east, Dieter Breitsprecher scissored out the half-page ad in the Chicago Progress calling for inventors to apply for Duke Logging’s summer exhibit. The chance to mix with a collection of men whose brains buzzed with mechanics and machines was irresistible. Inventors did not write to Breitsprechers. He had a certain respect for Lavinia and remembered how quickly in the long-ago years she had learned the basics of scaling; he doubted she had ever used the knowledge — why should she? — she had competent employees, several lured away from the Breitsprechers. He wrote, asking if he might attend the exhibit, not as an inventor, not as a competitor, but as an interested friend. He offered to help defray the expenses of the gathering. He did not think she would refuse him; indeed, she wrote back cordially, refused his monetary offer and asked him to dine with her the Friday evening before the meeting.

This was their chance, she thought, to enfold Breitsprecher into Duke Logging. After their longest and most passionate meeting Duke’s Board had suggested making Breitsprecher a buyout offer. The Breitsprecher logging concern was worth ten of the little independent cutters who cleared fifty acres and retired. But Lavinia sensed it might be more diplomatic to offer a partnership. Despite their peculiar ideas on clear-cutting and replanting stumpland, Breitsprechers had the reputation of a highly reputable business that dealt fairly with loggers and dealers. And while Armenius was alive they had been successful. They also had the reputation of being honest, and while too much honesty could hold a company back, there were many people who still believed it a virtue. A partnership would add luster to Duke Logging, considered ruthless and devious by other timbermen. Lavinia was still grateful to Dieter for his help in teaching her how to read and apply the Scribner and Doyle scale rules to raw logs; and she was curious to know the details of Armenius’s rumor-tainted death two years past. But would Dieter agree? He had always seemed rather aloof. So his request to attend the inventors’ gathering seemed fortunate.

• • •

Two Civil War veterans, Parker Brace and Hudson Van Dipp, both from Cherokee County, Georgia, both house carpenters who had been friends before secession, fought for the south until they were captured at Shiloh and stuffed into Chicago’s notorious Camp Douglas. They survived in the squalid pen where there was no medical treatment, no hygienic tubs or basins, where scurvied prisoners sat in apathy. Brace and Van Dipp did their best to survive by constructing a complicated trap from a piece of wire and a crushed tin cup and lived on rats. To stay sane they made a carpenter’s game for themselves: through talk and scratched diagrams in the dirt they built an imaginary house from the foundation to the weather vane.

The dirty Yanks offered choices: be returned to the south as a prisoner of war; take an oath of allegiance and enlist in the U.S. Army or Navy; take the oath and be sent north to labor on public works; or take the oath and return home if that home lay within the Union Army lines. Brace and Van Dipp scorned these alternatives. But the day came when both showed symptoms of scurvy and Van Dipp said, “I am goin to take their goddamn oath and join their goddamn army and get out a the goddamn rain, get the goddamn hell out a here. Can’t git much worse than this and maybe find somethin I kin eat. Sick a goddamn raw rat.” Both took the oath and the two new Galvanized Yankees were sent off to fight the Indians in Texas. Van Dipp had never imagined such a dry hard place existed in the world. The sun rushed up in a tide of gilt that became the flat white of noon, then the torpid decay of visibility in an evening dusk still throbbing with accumulated heat. Brace was felled by arrows and lay for nine hours in the dust hearing the scream of a redtail cut the incandescent sky, but Van Dipp was never wounded. Mustered out, they went back to Georgia briefly, recoiled from Reconstruction, found their families recoiled from them and called them traitors.

Together they returned to Chicago, where the city was literally exploding with demands for carpenters. Hundreds of people wanted houses built yesterday. During a rare week of idleness Van Dipp said, “Parker, let’s don’t wait until we got the next job. We-all kin make up a stack of windows and doors beforehand. No telling what we’ll build, but I guarantee she’ll have windows and a door.” They added cupboards and sets of stairs and even wall sections that could be hauled to a site. It made putting up a house noticeably faster. It was this habit of prefabrication that led to a partner and a grander idea.

One morning, as hot and humid as only a Chicago summer day could be, a sharp-angled man in a wrinkled linen suit came into the workshop and stood looking at the stacks of made-up windows and staircases stored there.

“Good day. Do I have the pleasure of greeting Van Dipp and Brace?”

“Don’t guarantee how much pleasure is in it, but that’s us,” said Van Dipp. “Who-all mought you be?”

“Charles Munster Weed, sir, an architect. I have a contract to build a street of ten houses and I want good carpenters who will work quickly. You have that reputation. Are you currently involved in a construction project?” He looked pointedly at the extra windows and stairs.

“Not much this minute. Them’s frames and stairs we make up ahead to save us time. Doors and frames, pantry cupboards and such.”

When Weed learned that several of his houses stood right in front of him only waiting for assembly, he hired the two carpenters on the spot. The work went as merrily as kittens playing with feathers.

They met again a week after Weed’s houses were finished and the architect’s almost rabid enthusiasm fertilized the Idea; he understood where their preconstruction process could go. “Why, you could build a town that way. You could have a dozen different designs of houses so people could pick the one they liked, you could pack one or more up and ship them to wherever on the railroad.” His voice rose to an unmasculine pitch.

“We know where they-all need it, too,” said Brace. “Out on them ol prairies. No trees, no wood, but they got a have houses. Some a them are a-buildin dirt houses, full a bugs and snakes. They want barns. They want churches. I guess they would buy a house all packaged, ready to go. But the problem is it takes money to git them packages built.”

“And we ain’t got it,” said Van Dipp.

“Schoolhouses,” raved the architect, rowing his arms back and forth. “Shops and courthouses. They need towns and this is a way to get one to them.”

“We can bundle the parts up and ship by rail. Make the crates the right size fit in a farm wagon.”

“Yes! Yes! I could design different models, let the customers choose what they want. You listen to me! I got some investment money. I’d like to work with you boys — if you are willing.” They were willing and on the spot formed Van Dipp, Brace and Weed, and named their venture Prairie Homes.

• • •

More than a year had passed since Lavinia had sent the two genealogists out to search. Another autumn was closing in. Now she had a letter from R. R. Tetrazinni, who wrote that he had “discovered something you may find interesting” and wished an appointment. Lavinia named a day in late summer just before Duke’s Inventor’s Exhibition. To be fair she wrote to Sextus Bollard and asked what he had found. She was surprised when a letter came back from Bollard’s nephew, Tom Bollard, saying Mr. Bollard had returned from foreign parts in a grave condition and had died shortly thereafter; he, Tom, had taken over the bookshop and would send on the papers his uncle had amassed for Lavinia. These arrived before Tetrazinni’s visit, and Lavinia read that every one of Bollard’s leads had played out in a dead end. Charles Duquet had left no trace in Parisian records and it was thought that any papers naming his people had likely burned in the French Revolution. Of the Dutch connection Lennart Vogel had been the last remaining relative.

• • •

R. R. Tetrazinni arrived punctually. His red beard was trimmed close and his spectacles transmuted to a gold-rimmed pince-nez. He carried two leather cases. Annag brought him a cup of coffee and put it near his elbow. He took out his papers and began a long recitation of his travels and discoveries. Annag Duncan sat near, taking a few notes. Lavinia listened with increasing impatience. Why could he not get to the point?

“Mr. Tetrazinni, let me ask you bluntly, have you found any Duke descendants?”

“Indeed I have. Though I fear you may not relish the disclosure of their identity.” He cleared his throat and grinned, postponing the delicious moment. “I do not know how much you know of your family tree. In a nutshell. Charles Duquet adopted three sons, Nicolaus and Jan from an Amsterdam orphanage and another, Bernard, from the streets of La Rochelle. In those times adoptions were very informal, though he treated the boys as his sons and left them his goods in equal parts. You likely know that you are descended from Nicolaus, who married Mercy and with whom he had three children — Patience, Piet and Sedley, the last named your grandfather. In other words, you have no Duquet blood flowing in your veins, only that of the adopted son Nicolaus.” He took a great swig of coffee and watched Lavinia’s complexion redden.

“Back to Charles Duquet. After the adoption of those boys his Dutch wife, Cornelia Roos, bore him two legitimate children, Outger Duquet and Doortje Duquet. Doortje’s line died out with the death of her only son, Lennart Vogel, an unmarried bachelor. Outger Duquet lived for some years in Penobscot Bay in Maine, and took an Indian concubine. She gave birth to a daughter, Beatrix Duquet, on whom her father lavished attention and education. But when he removed to Leiden the daughter remained in Maine. She eventually reverted to native ways and, as near as I can be sure, married a métis named Kuntaw Sel, descended from Mi’kmaq Indians and a French habitant.” Lavinia’s cup clattered in its saucer.

“It seems Beatrix Duquet and Kuntaw Sel, who were legally married, had two sons — Josime Sel and Francis-Outger Sel. The only living bloodline descendants of Charles Duquet are the grandchildren of Josime and Francis-Outger. I have not finished my investigation as to these specific descendants’ names and dwelling places. It would involve trips to Canada and contact with remnants of the Indian tribes. I did not endeavor to undertake this until I knew your wishes. However, these people would be the rightful heirs of Charles Duquet — if one counts only blood relationship as meaningful. I personally think the adopted sons’ lines of descent have a stronger claim to the family fortune than the still-unidentified Indians. After all, we know that possession is nine points of the law. Here. It is all in my report.” He handed her a sheaf of pages in an almost insolent manner and his tone indicated those unnamed Indians had a valid claim to the Duke empire.

She sat silent for a long minute, then said smoothly, “I think you need not disturb the Canadian situation. We will consider the investigation closed.” She glanced at Annag, wishing she had not been present, and saw that the woman was frowning hotly at R. R. Tetrazinni. Good loyal Annag, thought Lavinia. She will keep her silence.

As soon as Tetrazinni left Lavinia tossed the report into the wastebin.

“I’ll just put this into the stove,” said Annag, carrying the bin into the front office, where she rattled the stove door but carefully placed Tetrazinni’s report at the back of the supplies closet under her rain cape.

• • •

The Hotel Great Lakes owner, Simon Drimmel, fair-haired and handsome, was excited by his filled-up hotel and apprehensive about possible scratches on the ballroom floor. When several large crates labeled PRAIRIE HOMES arrived and Drimmel heard of the contents he ordered them unloaded on the south lawn.

“I can’t have construction in the ballroom,” he said. “It would scar the floor. It is essential we keep the floor in flawless condition fit for satin-soled slippers. Balls are our principal income.”

“For all you know annual exhibits during the season when there are no balls may become a lucrative source of income,” said Mr. Pye, who was managing the exhibition.

“Ah, perhaps.” Drimmel smiled, hoping it was not to be. He very much liked the music, the perfume, excitement and beauty of the balls, the pretty gowns and shining ruddy faces.

“Quite all right,” soothed Mr. Pye. “That particular exhibit belongs outside in any case.”

At the end of the day, when everyone was drooping with fatigue, Lawyer Flense offered to drive Annag home “as it is on my way.”

“Very kind, sir,” murmured Annag, gathering her bags and traps.

• • •

Goosey Breeley, who usually dined with Lavinia, even when there was company, said, when she heard Dieter Breitsprecher was coming to dinner, that she would take her dinner in her room.

“That is hardly necessary, Goosey. Dine with us. It is no trouble. I had to invite him as a courtesy.”

“No, I understand very well how such affairs work, dear Lavinia. You may wish to discuss business. It is my choice to dine in privacy. I rarely have a quiet repast free of responsibilities, so it will be a treat.” Lavinia thought she was right. It would be easier with Dieter if she did not have to include Goosey in the conversation.

• • •

“Mr. Dieter Bridestretcher,” said Libby the housemaid.

“Show him in.” Lavinia, dressed in her customary black dress, sat on a crimson velvet sofa before the drawing room fire and steeled herself for the encounter. Rarely at a loss for words, she had no idea how to put the partnership offer. She should have written a letter.

“Dieter Breitsprecher, welcome. It has been a long time.” She had not remembered he was so broad-shouldered and tall. His yellow hair was beginning to dull at the temples. His overlarge eyes, his whole smiling face seemed to her open and amiable. Immediately she felt awkward and wished the evening over and done.

“Certain, dear Miss Duke, it has been a long time.” He spoke with almost no trace of an accent, held out a hedgerow bouquet of budded goldenrod, hawkweed, past-prime wild roses and grass-of-Parnassus. “It would have been tropical rarities — were there any.” He saw a middle-aged woman, broad in the hips, buxom in the fitted black dress, but with the strong presence of the one in charge of the money.

“Dieter, please call me Lavinia. And thank you for the bouquet — although wild, it is handsome, and on this occasion I prefer naturalism to artifice. Will you take a glass of wine? Or would you rather have spirits?” She would toss the weeds away after he left.

“To be truthful I would prefer whiskey — if you have it.”

“If I have it! It is my own preference, one I adopted from my father.” She went to the sideboard and poured two glasses of what purported to be aged Kentucky bourbon. They sat before the fire and at first said nothing, glancing at each other to get a measure.

“Well,” said Lavinia, making the effort, “has business been good for you this year?”

“Yes, very good, despite the second loss to fire of our Robin’s Nest Mill. I will never again hire a pipe smoker. The sawyer would knock his burning dottle into the sawdust despite a hundred admonitions. Sorrowfully the cause has been removed — he burned himself up in this one.”

“How wretched,” said Lavinia. “We, too, have lost mills to fire.” Another lengthy silence stretched out. Lavinia thought of the subject of the presidential election — everyone knew General Grant would win. Instead she said, “Do you travel much? Back east? Or to Germany?”

“Once a year to New York or Boston. Or even Philadelphia, and one time to California to assess my cousin Armenius’s unfortunate circumstances.” There was an opening but she could not press her question about Armenius so soon for fear of looking an eager gossip.

“So you had a sawmill named Robin’s Nest?”

“Yes. Every year a robin would build her nest on a rafter above the saw. I do not know if it was the same one. It very much worried the old pipe smoker, who feared the young ones would fall from the nest onto the saw.”

Lavinia clenched one hand. “Oh, I hope that did not happen.”

“It did not. That mill produced dozens of robins in its time.”

“Mills do not seem to last long. There is always some catastrophe.”

“You are quite right.” He hitched his chair a little closer. He enjoyed talking about catastrophes and had seen a good many in the Michigan forests. “Most are entirely preventable, but men are careless and I think millmen are the most careless, though the owners and the show foreman can do a good deal of damage. For instance”—he peered earnestly at her—“I do not wish to bore you with accounts of misfortune?”

Again, an opening to inquire about Armenius, but instead she said, “Dieter, you do not bore me, pray continue. But first let me refresh your glass. Now go on.”

“A Maine timberman told me of his reasons for coming out to Michigan. In Maine he had a big mill. He put his mill at the bottom of a steep hill covered with pine right to the water’s edge. His plan was to cut the pine, make a slide for the logs that would carry them down into the mill, then load the lumber on ships docked in front, a very smooth and continuous operation that fell out just as he predicted. But he didn’t understand what happens to a hill when you remove the trees.”

Lavinia had no idea what he meant.

“What does happen to a hill with the trees removed?”

“Spring came and all began to thaw. He told me he was standing on a nearby spit of land in a position where he could admire his mill cutting as fast as the saws could run when he saw that entire treeless hill gather itself together like a cat and rush down in a landslide of mud. It buried the mill and mill hands, sank the ship waiting to be loaded. It made terrible big waves in the harbor. Never found anything that was in its path. A monstrous wet pile of mud and stumps.”

“I had no idea such a thing could occur,” said Lavinia. “I admire your knowledge of these dark mischances. I must send a bulletin to our sawyers not to place a mill at the bottom of a slope.”

“Yes, or better still leave the trees in place. Tree roots hold down the soil. The branches shade the soil and protect it from heavy rain washouts.”

“Miss Lavinia,” said Libby in the doorway, “Cook says dinner is ready.”

“Thank you, Libby. Dieter, shall we go in?”

Somehow they could not let go of catastrophes as a subject and over the roast lamb and fried potatoes went from landslides and fires to shipwrecks, crazy cooks, suicidal loggers, woods accidents, even a daring payroll holdup. Was this the time to ask about Armenius? Or the other, more important question? No.

“I have heard, Dieter, that you have bought up a good deal of cutover lands. Is that true?”

“It is. Such land can be had for almost nothing, and it gives me pleasure to replant and make it good and valuable forest again.”

“But surely it will take many years before it can be cut, before it has value.”

“Of course. But in Europe people consider the past and the future with greater seriousness. We have been managing forests for centuries and it is an ingrained habit to consider the future. Americans have no sense of years beyond three — last year, this year and next year. I suppose I keep to my old ways. I like to know that there will be a forest when I am gone.”

“Very commendable, I am sure,” she said. “Where do you find the young trees you plant?”

“We grow them. Breitsprechers started a pine seedling nursery some years ago. We employ Indians in spring and summer to plant for us. White woodsmen who cut trees scorn such work. But the Indians have a deeper understanding of nature and time, and we employ them when we can.”

Lavinia thought that it was likely Indians were more glad of having paid work than of making forests for the future.

“Your care for forests is well known. And I have also heard that your logging camps have numerous small bunkhouses for four men instead of one great long building that can house a hundred?”

“Yes, it seems to me that more privacy will rest the men more thoroughly. These fellows labor greatly and appreciate small comforts.”

She bit her tongue to keep from saying that many of Breitsprecher’s woodsmen came to the crowded bunkhouses of Duke Logging because rough living challenged their male hardiness. They despised ease and comfort. That was certainly the wrong thing to say.

Lavinia fidgeted. She would have to make the Board’s offer soon. And if he agreed she could ask openly about Armenius. They had reviewed catastrophes and she had missed her chance to find that out. By the time the dessert came — cream-filled éclairs dipped in chocolate with a huddle of sugared strawberries at one end — they were more comfortable with each other, and she was almost enjoying his company.

“Would you care for a stroll in the park before coffee and a liqueur?” asked Lavinia. She would ask him then.

“What park might that be?”

“It is a small forest park I have made with two neighbors,” she said. “It is very pleasant on a summer evening and as it is still light we can enjoy the last rays.”

They stepped into the woods, passing under a magnificent silver maple, its long-stemmed leaves showing their silvery undersides. Dieter was amazed. “Why, Lavinia, you have preserved this beautiful little forest. I commend you.” He quoted from Uhland: “ ‘The sweetest joys on earth are found/ In forests green and deep,’ ” and thought that she was not entirely lost to the lust for money.

The park was ten acres of mixed hardwoods with another twenty of old virgin white pine at its east end, a remnant of the extensive shoreline trees cut by Duke Logging decades earlier. A pathway cleared of undergrowth wound through the trees, and as they crossed a log bridge he could see a rill coursing downslope into a pool lit by the sun, the evening insect hatch caught in the last rays. They walked to the pines in time to see the final orange slab fade into deep shadow.

Behind them sounded the day’s final robin cries. The wind stirred the pine tops but they only heard the rich ringing calls cheeriup cheerilee, cheeriup cheerilee.

“They are telling us to be happy and cheerful,” said Lavinia, caught in the perfumed memory of lying on Posey’s silk pillow and listening to her hoarse low voice read of good Robin Red-breast.

“I wonder if you know how badly the robins are hurt when we cut down their trees,” murmured Dieter. “We take their trees away and they are forced to build nests over whirling saws.”

“Oh dear heaven,” said Lavinia. “I never thought of it that way. Why do not they fly away to other trees?”

“They can, and do, but nests cannot be moved and then, when the young are just ready to fledge, come the choppers and fell the tree, dashing the infants to the ground.” He stopped when he saw he was causing her real pain. “Dear Lavinia,” he said. “You are very tenderhearted toward robins.” He had discovered something.

“I know,” she said nasally, trying not to bawl. “I love them so. Do you know that if someone dies in the woods the robins come and gather leaves, cover them over…” And the tears ran. What could he do? Gingerly Dieter put his hands on Lavinia’s shoulders; she pressed her face against his shirt and they stood in amber afterglow with robins shouting all around them, adjuring them to cheer up, cheer up, for God’s sake, cheer up.

She did not want his warmth even as she craved it, the smell of his shirt, her own weakness, and she pulled back. He looked at her, said nothing and they walked on, with considerable space between, to the house, to brandy and coffee in paper-thin porcelain cups, the liquid black until a spoon of cream made its miniature whirlpool.

Dieter Breitsprecher found her a great puzzle. She was like the perennial locked room containing unknown objects found in every great castle. He set down his brandy glass and opened his mouth to say something about the forest park, but she interrupted and said in a rush, “Dieter Breitsprecher, there is something I wish to ask you. The Board and I would like to offer you a partnership with Duke Logging, we value your knowledge, we wish you to join us on terms we both agree on, the Board, the Board and I, we have discussed this and we want you, I, I–Libby,” she called without waiting for his response, “show Mr. Breitsprecher out.” She stood swaying and then gabbled, “Let us talk here tomorrow, Dieter, after the exhibit. You can give me your answer then, your feelings— I have enjoyed the evening so much. And we can discuss the inventors, discuss everything for the Board and I value your opinion.” And she rushed out of the room; there was no other word for it, she rushed away from him.

He stood flabbergasted. And although he had enough presence of mind to call after her that he, too, had enjoyed the evening, it had been more like spying through the keyhole into that locked room. “Unlikely I will sleep tonight,” he said to himself. “Verdammt noch mal!”

• • •

By morning she had recovered her aplomb. Although she regretted her weak sniveling, Lavinia had finally said what she had to say. Now she would wait for his response. She was prepared for a refusal.

• • •

At the exhibit she noticed that Dieter Breitsprecher came in an hour after the doors opened. Annag Duncan moved through the murmuring crowd with a tray of cups, Miss Heinrich following her with the coffeepot.

David Neale took notes for his newspaper, or perhaps, thought Lavinia, he was one of Tappan’s anonymous spies who reported on the characters of businessmen. Noah Ludlum and Glafford Jones seemed to be concentrating on a heavyset fellow with a jug of some thick tarry substance. Theodore Jinks and Axel Cowes had asked Mr. Drimmel to convert the cloakroom into a temporary office with chairs and table, and they sat there importantly, calling in the inventors one by one and quizzing them. She saw Dieter Breitsprecher approach Flense and Pye. They greeted each other and went outside, still talking. Flense looked at Lavinia and raised his eyebrows. What that meant she did not know. Should she follow them? Wait? Instead she went over to a lank-haired man in a rumpled linen suit who stood near the door with two other men.

“I am Lavinia Duke,” she said. “Do you have an exhibit?” As soon as he said his name she remembered his letter. Weed, the architect, was a good talker, and he began to explain Prairie Homes. He beckoned her outside and pointed. “This is a quarter-size prebuilt model house, our Prairie Home Number One. It is small apurpose so that yesterday you could see the boxes. Today you see the model house. Did you see the boxes yesterday?”

“Alas, I did not,” she said.

“Why, this house was all packed flat in those boxes yesterday. All of it.” Lavinia gathered that it was an error not to have seen the packed-up boxes.

But she did see the miniature neat attractive cheap two-story instant house complete to weather vane and lightning rod that stood on the lawn.

“There they are,” Weed said, pointing at empty crates lined up on the lawn. “The boxes. Each fits in a farm wagon. This house was inside the boxes yesterday.” She looked at the model. Charming it was, but her first thought was to wonder how this applied to Duke Logging.

“Yes,” said Weed, “and there are three other models and more to come.” He stood expectantly, as if waiting for congratulation.

“Mr. Weed,” said Lavinia, “I quite see it. But tell me about your plan for merchandising these.” Mr. Weed was fairly dancing with eagerness to explain.

“People on the prairies need houses but got no trees. And farmers are no carpenters so they end up with a pile of sticks that falls with the first storm. If you are trying to start a farm why you can die before you get the roof over your head. But anybody can put one of our houses together, even a farmer.” He shot a look at Mr. Drimmel, who was standing under a nearby beech tree watching hotel employees set up the picnic tables. “This model, if it was the full-size Prairie Home Number One, would cost four hundred and fifty dollars including rail delivery. Two men can put it together in about fourteen days. My partners and I are hoping Duke would supply us with lumber and investment money.”

“Ah,” said Lavinia. “But what have you reckoned about railroad transport costs? The prairies must have connection rails if they want these houses.”

“Chicago is blossoming with railroads and the great transcontinental is very close to completion — they say within a year. Spurs will branch in every direction through the hinterlands. The railroads are coming. Put your men to cutting ties. They will be needed very soon.”

• • •

At noon the Hotel Great Lakes served the alfresco picnic lunch of sliced ham, fried chicken, stuffed eggs and pie in the shade of the beech trees. Lavinia took her chicken leg to a bench on the far side of the beech.

“Thank you.” His voice was already familiar to her. She looked up at Dieter Breitsprecher. “I spoke with your lawyer and accountant. I accept your offer provisionally. It will take some time to work out the details of what role I might play in such a partnership, and how best it might be done. I think Breitsprecher should close down its logging operations — perhaps sell them directly to Duke — but our cutover lands which I still own I want to keep so that I may continue my reforestation projects.”

“Oh. Oh, Dieter. I am so glad.” She stood up and grasped his fingers with her chicken-greased hand before snatching it away, blushing, dropping the gnawed drumstick to the ground, where ants rushed upon it. “After dinner tonight,” she said, “we can walk in the park,” for she had seen how much he liked the little woodland.

“Oh yes, wild horses could not stay me.”

• • •

The second evening was easier. They talked as though they had been friends for many years — perhaps they had, thought Lavinia. They reviewed the inventors. Dieter did not like the thought of strychnine in the skid-road grease. “You have your robins,” he said, “I have my bears.” They agreed that the crated houses were smart and a sure success. Lavinia loved the little model house.

“It is our gift to you,” Weed had said, and within an hour of the exhibition’s close Lavinia had it placed under the great silver maple in her park. It stood as though waiting for small visitors, elves perhaps. Or children — she had read Lamb’s “Dream Children” first with an ache, then with revulsion at her reaction. She quashed the silly weak thought.

A few days after the gathering the Duke Logging Corporation, for Lavinia had acted on Mr. Flense’s advice to incorporate, formed a subsidiary they named the Prairie Home Division, which would handle all facets of the business, including transportation to the prairies, as well as supply all seasoned and milled lumber and stair rails, turned spindles, steam-bent balusters and decorative elements for the prebuilt houses. Van Dipp, Brace and Weed would direct the construction and, as employees, would receive salaries from Duke. But a full partnership, which Weed wanted, was not agreeable to the Board.

“We are better able to handle the business end of this venture,” said Flense. “Our offer of a ten-year contract at high salaries and a percentage of the income from the packaged buildings will ensure you stability and wealth. In ten years we can discuss the terms anew.”

• • •

At dinner, Lavinia asked for an account of Armenius Breitsprecher’s misfortune. Dieter sighed.

“If it is too painful, do not tell me,” she said.

“It is painful, but offers many lessons. You know, Armenius was impetuous in nature. He was always interested in getting ahead, in adventurous risks. Our business was nothing compared to his passion when they discovered gold in California. He became a lunatic. Nothing I could say deterred him from packing his valise and wayfaring to California. He was there for a year and a half before I finally had a letter from him. From San Francisco. He said he had collected a fortune in nuggets, waited for a ship to New Orleans. From there he would make his way up the Mississippi to Chicago and so to Detroit. I waited; then, after two months I received an envelope, empty except for a newspaper clipping that read ‘Timber King Fatally Wounded,’ naming Armenius. I had no idea who had sent this lurid account. So I went to San Francisco and after considerable asking discovered the facts and the sad news that Armenius was truly dead. May I trouble you for a little more wine, Lavinia?”

“Of course.” She poured it. “Go on. What had occurred?”

“He had flaunted his precious nuggets, bragging and showing them. Finally, he was accosted by two men in the alley behind a saloon, knocked unconscious, shot, robbed, and left for dead. But he was not dead and some Good Samaritans brought him into the saloon. They laid him on a table in the back room and called for a doctor. I heard that there were hundreds of doctors in San Francisco at that time on the hunt for gold, of course, and the man with whom I spoke, a fellow who knew Armenius from the hotel where they both were staying — it was he who had sent me the clipping — said many doctors crowded around him and fought for the privilege of treating him. I do not know whether they hoped for a fat fee or whether Armenius was considered, as the paper reported, a ‘Timber King’ whose cure would bring a doctor both money and fame. The doctor who seized him first cut open his shirt. The bullet had entered his chest and gone through his left lung. He was bleeding profusely. This doctor probed, then cut the wound further open to see how extensive the damage might be. He put a sponge in the gaping wound to stop the bleeding, then stitched up the incision. Armenius was brought to the hotel where he had been staying and put in his room. There he died four days later of a profound infection caused, I am sure of this, by the resident sponge.”

“How dreadful,” said Lavinia. “How very, very dreadful. Poor Armenius. Oh how sorry I am.”

“Yes, it was one of the darkest hours of my own existence. In my opinion Armenius was murdered by the doctor. We were doing well in the timber business and my poor cousin left all that was good to run after minute particles of gold in a distant mountain stream and paid for it with his life.”

They sat silent until Libby came in to clear the table and gasped when she saw them sitting in the dusk. “Sorry, miss, I thought you was outside.”

“No, no, but I think we might go there. Dieter, will you walk with me in the forest?”

“Certain, Lavinia.”

Dieter exuded a kind of calm surety. In his company she felt protected. The sun was down, the sky still suffused with peach and crushed strawberry light. They walked past the little house from the exhibition and Dieter smiled. Under the trees the air was still and close, tiny black mosquitoes rose languidly from the ground. Under the sultry pines it was nearly dark, a deep oceanic dusky green. There was a distant rumble of thunder. Dieter saw Lavinia in her black dress, the color of her dark hair absorbed by the shadow, everything concentrated in the pale intense face. A fragment of one of Catullus’s poems came to him and he murmured “ ‘Montium domina, silvarumque virentium…’ ”

He took her arm and they walked on slowly.

“Lavinia, why have you not married?”

His question startled her by its abrupt directness. She made a feeble sound like a cupboard hinge and said, “Oh, I never met anyone who took my attention in that direction. I am very selective in my friendships, I fear. And you?” A whip of lightning flicked through the sky.

“Much the same,” he said. “I am too picky, too demanding of certain traits which I have never found in a female.”

“And what traits might those be, Mr. Breitsprecher?”

“Why, grace, handsomeness, intelligence, the ability to tell red wine from white, a fondness for robins — and, rarest of all, the ability to scale logs.”

She burst into a fit of laughter and he started as well; they stood whooping in the gloom until a shocked owl swooped soundlessly over their heads.

“Lavinia,” he said when he could speak. “Shall we marry?”

“I think that is a very good question,” she said. “I think we had better see to it.”

Suddenly the thundercloud was upon them, blotting all the light. Veined lightning chased them to the house, the first fat drops rapping down as they came panting through the door. Has ever a woman had such a proposal? thought Lavinia. She was terrified, excited. Now, now would come answers to all her silent questions.

She pitched headlong into the most brutal and fierce love, the kind that could endure anything and that sometimes afflicted solitary women on the threshold of spinsterhood. She poured everything into this feeling. She scorched, she scorched. It was as if she had never been alive until Dieter. Since James’s death she had never been close to another person, but now she was annealed to Dieter Breitsprecher. Of all people!

• • •

They planned to marry within the month but first came abstruse details of obligations and business, of rents and scheduled work. And Dieter had a commitment to go to New England to meet a man he much admired. “This man — George Marsh — is a Vermont farmer who is the first American I have discovered who recognizes the extreme threats hanging over the forests of this country. Second only to our marriage is my desire to converse with this observant and intelligent person. Some time ago we made an arrangement for me to come to him and see the waste laid the land by thoughtless felling of the noble maples and oaks for trivial potash and pearl-ash receipts. We have planned a small tour of the New England forests, where trees have been taken now for a century, to see the results. I must do this, my love.” Lavinia was slightly amused at her betrothed’s interest in denuded forests.

Lawyer Flense and Mr. Pye went to Detroit to meet Dieter’s business manager, Maurice Mossbean, to work out the most sensible way of enfolding the Breitsprecher enterprise into Duke Logging and Lumber. “Indeed,” said Mr. Mossbean, “the company’s name had better change to Duke and Breitsprecher.” The hundred details would be threshed out in Board meetings. Dieter Breitsprecher seemed curiously uninterested in the business end of forestry and relieved to turn all over to Duke Logging. It would give him time to develop his management plans, to expand his pine nursery and look into the hardwoods, which were so abundant and little-known. He thought he might write a paper on the Aceraceae, for maple trees interested him.

• • •

Days later, exhausted and red-eyed, Mr. Pye and Lawyer Flense sat in the rackety coach as the landscape flashed past. They smoked cigars and Mr. Flense had a silver hip flask he shared with Mr. Pye. “Do you not feel a little uncomfortable with this — merging?” he said.

“Very much so,” said Mr. Pye, unscrewing the silver cap and taking a good swig of whiskey. “The possibilities for changes in the direction of our business are there. I applauded the idea of taking on Breitsprecher as a partner, but this marriage could bring deleterious changes to the way we do things. He may well persuade her to take up his conservative ideas of forestry and we shall see income drop even as it dropped for Breitsprechers when the cousin left.”

Lawyer Flense said something so grossly raw that Mr. Pye had to pretend he had not heard it.

• • •

The betrothed agreed that they would live in Lavinia’s house. “But I must have a library for thinking and reading,” said Dieter. “A small greenhouse and laboratory would be a dream fulfilled. A man whose life has been solitary cannot immediately give up all his accustomed ways.”

“I have been thinking,” said Lavinia. “It would be best if we added a wing onto the house. The current arrangement of space is not suitable for a married couple. Goosey can have my old room. But I shall miss the cupola, where I often watched the ships.”

“Let us have a cupola on the new wing — my dear girl must have her view of Lake Michigan shipping vessels.”

“And you shall place your greenhouse wherever you wish. While you are gone to New England the time will pass quickly enough. I can oversee construction of the new wing with our new living quarters. Will we go abroad for a honeymoon? There is such a great deal to do.”

He smiled. “A honeymoon! We shall go wherever you like. I leave it to you. I leave all such decisions to you. But consider if you would not like to see the results of untrammeled forest removal in the lands around the Mediterranean? It is what urged other countries to become mindful of forest care and management.” He picked up her hand and suddenly licked her palm.

“Dieter!” She was startled, pretended offense and pulled her hand away although his hot mouth had given her a strange sensation. But a honeymoon looking at desolate lands was not tempting.

“Lavinia, I shall do my best to make you happy. I see nothing but joy in our future. I will get this visit to New England out of the way quickly. There are train connections much of the way to Albany, the rest by hired coach and whatever local railways exist. Vermont is still very rural. And I will write to you. I will write a long letter on the train, another when I arrive, still another when I go to bed and another when—”

“I think you have a grand sense of silliness.”

• • •

She was in the old cupola looking out at the passing ships when she heard the crunch of wheels on gravel and looking down at the drive saw a carriage draw up at the front of the house. Mr. Pye and a tall thin man unknown to her got out. She heard the door knocker, heard Libby’s voice, yet felt no presentiment until she reached the bottom of the stairs and looked at the unknown man who had taken off his hat, disclosing a dark shaven head, a cannonball skull looking like it had just emerged from the birth canal, the face long and narrow down to the point of jaw. Mr. Pye said, “Lavinia, you must sit down. This is Mr. Averso from the rail office. Lavinia, there has been an accident—” She heard without understanding, heard heard heard. This had happened with James. It could not happen again. She looked at Mr. Averso, that face, that head was imprinted on her memory for the rest of her life. Her heart froze and Averso’s slowly opening mouth was the last thing she saw as she sank to the floor.

“Lavinia, we do not yet know!” shouted Mr. Pye. “Libby, fetch water!” He dashed the water into Lavinia’s face, shook her, slapped her cheek. “We do not know! He was on the train, but we do not know if he was in the car that — the car that fell.” What she did know was that Dieter had reserved a seat on an Albany-bound train. She heard Mr. Averso say that east of Cleveland the locomotive had steamed onto a high trestle bridge, the last car had somehow derailed, uncoupled, crashed into the chasm below.

“Lavinia!” shouted Mr. Pye. “Mr. Averso is telling us most of the people in the other cars survived, though some were injured. We must wait for news, Lavinia, we must wait! Hope is not lost. It is not sure who — who died or lived.”

She stared at him. Stared at Averso. “It is not sure?” she asked.

“It is not sure,” said Mr. Averso. “I have come to offer you transport to the scene so we may determine if Mr. Breitsprecher was among the — the saved.”

“It is not sure! I will come with you. I must know. Libby, Libby, my shawl. I am going to Dieter!”

So Lavinia learned that love came with a very high price and she sat clenched and bent in the seat as the special train rushed toward the accident. It was the familiar journey with Cyrus to find James frozen among the stumps. Once again she was rushing toward proof of the perils of modern life. Fate could not be so singularly cruel as to take Dieter from her.

Before dawn the next morning they reached a scene of horror lit by flickering bonfires and dim lanterns, the fallen car still smoldering in the rocks below the trestle. Blackened bodies lay in the stream below, the injured along the tracks moaning and calling. Where was help? All was the feeble chaos of the inept. Lavinia, Mr. Pye and Averso walked among the survivors looking for Dieter. She thought a huddled form had the wide shoulders of Dieter but the man turned his raw and bleeding face away. She could see one ear was torn so that it hung down below his jaw. His nose was a pulp and the swollen blackened features resembled a boiled hog face. She stumbled to the next one.

“Lavinia!” came a choking hoarse roar behind her. She turned. The hog-faced man, mouth agape, dribbling bloody froth croaked again, very low: “… viniaaaaa.” She stared, trembling. Mr. Pye ran up, looked in the creature’s face. “It’s Dieter! Lavinia, it is Dieter Breitsprecher.”

• • •

Goosey Breeley came into her element. She took on Dieter Breitsprecher’s injuries as a mission. The guest suite in Lavinia’s house became his recovery room and Goosey his private Clara Barton. She was indefatigable, dressing his wounds, changing bandages, airing the room, reading to the patient for hours, concocting tasty dishes famed as recuperative: oat porridge, beef broth, shredded chicken breast, poached eggs and the like. “Sleep,” she would say, “I am keeping watch, so sleep,” and he slept.

He asked her one day if she would go to the little forest park and bring him a sprig of pine; he thought the scent would refresh him.

Goosey asked Lavinia’s permission first, for there was an unspoken sense that the park was only for the use of Lavinia, Mr. Jinks and Mr. Cowes.

“Of course, Goosey, you are quite free to ramble in those woods all you like. Do bring him an armful of pine boughs.”

Goosey was gone for more than an hour, but she went back every day, occasionally bringing a fresh branch to the sickroom.

• • •

For Lavinia something important had changed. The foaming cataract of love that had coursed through her seemed to have shifted into a subterranean channel. Dieter stitched and bandaged and lying on pillows was not the Dieter against whose shirtfront she had wept. This vulnerable man could not protect her. Their positions had been reversed. Her desire for money and success swelled back into the space vacated by Dieter — that at least was permanent.

The doctors said Dieter Breitsprecher would likely make a complete recovery but when she entered the sickroom and looked at the swollen discolored face she could not quite believe it. When she sat at his bedside she turned slightly away and spoke to the wall or window. She could not quell the atavistic feelings of being alone and surrounded by wolves that had plagued her since James’s frozen death.

She plunged into work, leaving Dieter’s care to Goosey except for the hour in the evening when she came and sat beside him and, looking at the wall, held his hand and told him sketchily of the day’s business — too much detail might tire him. Although her feelings had changed she intended to go through with the marriage as soon as he was well. She liked him very much, she wanted a husband. But never had business been more absorbing: for the first time Duke was opening foreign markets.

59. lime leaf

If Lavinia cared less for Dieter Breitsprecher after his accident, he fell into a gyre of dangerous love. He could not escape. He sensed it would be a mistake if they married, but he was caught in the immediacy of the whirlpool and did not have the strength to stroke away. Some unsuspected need for Lavinia racked him. He knew it was irrational, knew her direction in life was injurious to his own beliefs. She would crush him. The unswallowable truth was that he wanted to be crushed. Although he would never say it to her, Lavinia returned him to his grandmother, that ruler-straight woman with the unlined face and black parted hair who knew the answers to everything and who ran a household that shone golden as the ormolu clock on the mantel. Her stringent rules, her commands and painful punishments, and the never-forgotten rare words of praise had arranged his emotions for Lavinia. So he lay abed, waiting for the scant hour when she came to his bedside and sat with face averted, talking of the day’s business and weather signs.

“Mr. Pye, our good old accountant, has requested retirement on account of ill health. He has some painful gnawing in his vitals and his eyesight is not good. Annag has assured me she is able to keep the accounts as well as he.”

“You would do well to give a little reception for him — a gold watch or a watch fob in the shape of a pinecone? What is the company policy?”

“I don’t think we have one. My father was never a sentimental man and I expect anyone who retired got a gold piece and a handshake. But I think you are right. We can arrange something pleasant for Mr. Pye, just a little collation in the boardroom. I’ll tell Annag to take care of it.”

To outsiders such changes seemed the mark of Dieter Breitsprecher; he was a man of some mystery but since his entry into the affairs of Duke Logging outsiders believed him to be the source of all the company’s deals. Lavinia’s character and qualities were ascribed to him; his own reputation as an astute and fast-striking businessman grew.

To escape from his own feelings and thoughts during this convalescence Dieter began to write letters to those men who seemed concerned with the disappearance of the North American forests, a concern that appeared more and more linked to a vague recognizance of national identity though he was not sure of this. Few now saw the forest as a great oppressive enemy; some even honored individual trees, especially those that were massive or stood as landmarks. A Unitarian minister in western Massachusetts gave a series of sermons on trees, sermons later published as a slender volume—Trees of Life. Dieter had a copy. Most stirring was the sermon on the cedars of Lebanon, al Arz ar Rab, great dark trees of God that had sheltered angels, trees felled by King Solomon’s hundred thousand axmen. The sermon ended with a plea: “the cedars are now imperiled by ravenous goats that eat the young shoots. Queen Victoria herself has sent money to build a wall to protect the trees from capric destruction.” The congregation contributed a generous sum for the salvation of the cedars of Lebanon while continuing to quarter their own herds on public forestlands.

Dieter shied away from transcendental disputation but he was interested in the American shift from hatred of the forest to something approaching veneration, a feeling he had known since his German childhood. After the deaths of his parents his grandmother had taken him to see the Heede Riesenlinde.

“A Lindwurm—dragon tree,” she said in a low intense voice, her heavily beringed hand drawing him close to it. As they stood under the great carbuncled tree, its splayed trunk thick with emerald moss, she said, “This noble and ancient tree is a justice tree and much more.” She told him the story of Siegfried, adapted for her own purposes, Siegfried the Bark-Skinned, who had acquired his horny covering after felling Fafnir, the dragon who lived in the lime tree. After swabbing himself with dragon’s blood, Siegfried was armored, safe from harm except for a little place on his back where a lime leaf had stuck.

“This tree? The dragon lived in this lime tree?” asked Dieter, his eyes clenching the dark hollow in the roots, half-afraid the great serpent would appear.

“Yes, but it was a very long time ago. The dragon is dead, thanks be to Siegfried. And now you must think of yourself as Siegfried. The sadness you feel over the death of your mama and papa is a kind of dragon—Sie müssen zurück schlagen—you must quell this sorrow-dragon. You must harden yourself, overcome grief and form a protection of will against superfluous love. Then nothing can hurt you.”

But Lavinia had found his lime leaf and pulled it away.

• • •

He wrote many letters to the Vermonter. Marsh was the best kind of farmer, for he noticed everything that happened in his world, the fall of tree branches, the depth of leaf mold in the woods and how rain was slowed by and caught in tree roots, tempered by the absorbent sponge of moss and decaying leaves. He saw what happened to soil when the trees were gone, how the birds disappeared when the pond was drained. When he traveled he compared landscapes and formed opinions. Dieter still hoped to visit him and see what the farmer had seen. As their correspondence went on he realized that George Perkins Marsh was considerably more than an observant Green Mountain farmer — linguist, congressman, diplomat, a traveler to foreign parts — one of the geniuses the young country seemed to throw out like seed grain.

• • •

The new wing would be added to Lavinia’s house while they were on their honeymoon journey to New Zealand. When they returned all would be finished.

“A great deal of money,” said Lavinia to herself. Still, one had to keep up appearances and Dieter must have his library and greenhouse. She put aside her black clothing and took up new fashions, form-hugging dresses with perky little bustles. And Goosey, that homely grey-haired matron who had been saving her stipend for years, had suddenly appeared in dresses of rich colors, unsparing of ruffles. Her hair was artfully plaited and wrapped into a crown.

At breakfast Goosey poured melted butter and maple syrup on her griddle cake. “Lavinia, I have meant to tell you for many a day but—”

“What is it, Goosey?” Lavinia preferred silence in the morning but this was not in Goosey’s nature. She glanced at her distant cousin, saw her pink face and knotted brows. Goosey gave off a faint scent of orris root.

“I have accepted to marry Mr. Axel Cowes.”

“But how do you come to know him?” Lavinia was greatly surprised. Goosey flared red and hunched her shoulders. It all came out. The day she had walked into the forest to cut a few pine twigs for Dieter she had encountered Mr. Cowes strolling with his dogs. They had chatted, they began to walk together, and over successive months they became daily walking companions, close friends and finally, betrothed. “He needs someone,” said Goosey. Ah, thought Lavinia, so does everyone.

“I wish you every happiness, dear Goosey,” she said, immediately planning to cut Goosey’s bequest from her will.

• • •

Lavinia went early to the office and returned late. There was very much to do, two or three businessmen callers every day and the correspondence such a daily flood Annag Duncan and Miss Heinrich could not handle all of it. Though Annag looked like a prosperous and successful businesswoman, Miss Heinrich had changed little; she remained timid, hiding in the paper supply room when strangers came to the office.

“For heaven’s sake,” said Annag, “they won’t bite you. It’s just businessmen.”

“I don’t like that Mr. Wirehouse. He looks at me.”

“He looks at everyone. You may look back at him, for a cat may look at a king.” Lawyer Flense had presented her with an amusing book—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And this remark sent Miss Heinrich into tears. “I am not a cat!”

• • •

On one of Chicago’s blowy old days Annag, trim in navy blue with a modest hem frill, came into Lavinia’s office, her lips moving, rehearsing what she wanted to say.

“Miss Duke, the success of the company has made a great deal of work in the office. I feel we must hire two more clerks. The volume of mail is great. I suggest promoting Miss Heinrich to assistant director and getting two or even three new people to sort through and handle the letters, which she has done so far.”

Lavinia said, “You are free to advertise for and hire new office people. We must train good people. And you know that Dieter and I will be abroad for nearly two years. I must have regular intelligence of everything, detailed weekly cables, and I believe all will go well. It does mean extra work for you. As for Miss Heinrich’s promotion, do send her in to me and I will speak with her.”

Only a few days earlier Miss Heinrich, the model of a man-fearing spinster, had come to Annag nervously rolling some papers in her hands.

“Mrs. Duncan, as you asked me to do I have reexamined the proposals from last summer’s Inventor’s Day and there is one that is particularly — interesting. But we did not proceed with it. I do not know if Miss Duke thought it promising…” Her voice trailed away.

“What proposal is that?”

“It is one from Maine, from a Mr. Stirrup. Illness kept him from the exhibit but he is trying anew. He was a rag merchant and now he has a paper mill in Maine on the Mattawannscot River. He once used only rags to make paper, but he says he has experimented in pulping some wood and blending the fibers with the rags. With great success, he says. And also he tried making paper with different wood pulps. Alone. No rags.”

“That is interesting. I did not know of this proposal. Is there more to it than this?”

“Yes. He sent samples. Of the wood-pulp paper. He says he has made many experiments to find the best woods and the best processes. He writes of sulfite and sulfate processes. What does that mean?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Let me see the samples.”

Annag Duncan examined the paper sheets, scratched a few inky words on several, folded and bent the pages. She handed everything back to Miss Heinrich then sat in her chair looking out the window onto the construction site of a museum, the gift of one of Chicago’s many millionaires. At last she sighed, turned around and looked at her assistant. The poor thing was so nervous she was trembling.

“Miss Heinrich. I think you had better take this proposal in to Miss Duke and tell her that it caught your eye. She may not have read all the way through when it was first presented last year. I agree with you that there may be value here.” She escorted her to Lavinia’s office door, opened it and said, “Miss Duke, here is Miss Heinrich.”

• • •

While Miss Heinrich stood like a snowwoman on the turkey carpet in front of the desk, Lavinia read the pages and examined the samples. “Very interesting. Miss Heinrich, I commend you. You shall have a promotion and a salary rise.” Her mind was jumping ahead. Stirrup had mentioned that small logs, slash and otherwise unusable wood could be used for paper pulp — inexpensive paper made from waste wood. This, she thought, could open a lucrative market. Come to that, could not Duke & Breitsprecher build its own paper mill? “Take a letter, Miss Heinrich,” she said. “Dear Mr. Stirrup. I have today read your proposal…” It was a move that would take Duke & Breitsprecher into the next century.

• • •

The marriage had a business advantage for Lavinia. Dieter became the company figurehead while she continued to manage and control, to build the great Duke empire by all means possible. Dieter had asked that the company not sell its cutover pinelands to speculators, but sequester and manage them through a separate division called Maintenance Timberland, which he would oversee, replant and manage. This was in addition to the acreage he had held back from the merger with Duke. So the first evidence of forest conservation tinged Duke & Breitsprecher’s reputation.

“The day will come,” Dieter explained to the Board, “though it be difficult for you to believe, when timber is scarce and becomes more valuable than we can project. You saw the promise in wood pulp for the paper market as Lavinia and Mr. Stirrup explained to us this morning. Holding Duke’s Maine land for years was wise. If we ensure the continuation of our forestland, future wealth is guaranteed, whether for lumber or paper. We may have passed on by then but our work will be remunerative.” No one could argue with this, for some of the old Breitsprecher lands he had planted twenty years earlier were bristling with sturdy trees and would indisputably be valuable timberland in another three or four decades. It forced the Board to think in new ways, on a scale of decades rather than months or a few years. Very frightening stuff.

• • •

Duke & Breitsprecher sent its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, Australia. Lawyer Flense went to San Francisco to meet with the buyer, an Englishman doing business in Australia, Harry Blustt, who wanted to arrange a contract for a decade of supply. Blustt wanted Michigan pine, but said he also had an interest in the kauri trade — whatever kauri might be, thought Flense.

“We have a little of this wood in Australia, but most of it grows in New Zealand. We are interested in finding a logging partner to establish efficient lumber camps in that country.” His ginger goatee rose and fell as he talked.

“I see,” said Lawyer Flense. It was the first time he had heard the word efficient used in quite this way; he grasped the meaning immediately. “Of course Duke and Breitsprecher is interested in any overseas source of wood. We are ever interested in new timber supplies. And ‘efficient’ is our motto. But who are the New Zealand interests?”

Blustt laughed. “We arrange all that. We already have them — we have contacts with the right men. They look to Australia and London for advice and action in all things. But the native people are not satisfactory workers. We want American woodsmen who can use the ax and saw. Here is what the finished product looks like.” He produced four small pieces of golden kauri wood.

“Ah,” said Flense; the wood glowed as though sunlight were sequestered in every atom.

“Best house-building wood in the world,” said Blustt.

Flense brought the samples back to Chicago and the Board passed the polished, blemish-free pieces from hand to hand. Kauri was a pine, and when they heard of the tree’s generous manner of growth, enormous and straight for a hundred feet, all the limbs clustered at the top, they voted to know more. “It is reputed to be the most perfect tree on earth for the timberman,” said Flense. “Or at least this fellow Blustt claims it is.”

No one on the Board knew much about New Zealand. Lavinia wanted to meet Blustt, she wanted to see the kauri forests before the company made a leap into the dark. It might be the Michigan forests all over again. And so the journey was arranged. She and Dieter Breitsprecher, recovered though somewhat scarred, would travel to Sydney on their honeymoon trip, meet with Blustt, then continue to Auckland and for themselves see the kauri of the Coromandel peninsula.

• • •

Before they left Lavinia spent separate hours with Lawyer Flense and Axel Cowes.

“Mr. Flense,” she said, “I think of you not only as my adviser and executor in all financial affairs, but as a friend. I have complete confidence in you. While Dieter and I are away I will give you a power of attorney to handle business matters. If you have doubts or questions on any matter please consult with Axel Cowes.”

“Do not worry, dear Lavinia. All will be as you yourself might act.” He smiled his curling smile, a gold tooth sparking. He took her right hand in his. “On my life,” he said.

• • •

Both Lavinia and Dieter were prostrate with seasickness for the first weeks of the voyage. The captain (whose ship Duke & Breitsprecher owned) was at his wit’s end in suggesting cures until the mate gathered remedies from the scuttlebutt. The one that worked came from the Chinese cook — ginger tea and walking the deck every other hour.

“Never go belowdecks,” said the cook, bringing the invalids a great steaming pot reeking of ginger. Lavinia took three sweetened cups and walked for half an hour, her eyes on the horizon. Dieter found a single cup efficacious and by dinnertime the two vomiters were well enough to eat boiled beef and turnips. The shared illness somehow united them as the marriage ceremony had not and on board the bounding ship with a load of pine planks rubbing against each other in the hold Dieter and Lavinia began a sexual adventure. Dieter was delightedly astonished at how responsive and inventive Lavinia became in the narrow berth. The crew could hear laughter and occasional whoops from their quarters. The cook claimed it was another of the salubrious effects of ginger tea.

• • •

Harry Blustt met their ship. “Ah, a long voyage, what?” He explained that Sydney was still an infant city, both swampy and dusty, both crowded and empty, both brash and genteel.

“How interesting,” said Lavinia. “But all I hope for at the moment is accommodations on immovable ground.”

“Quite! Quite. Accommodations! You understand, guesthouses and inns are few — during the gold rush there were innumerable doss-houses, quite unsuitable. We have arranged for you to stay at a government official’s house — he is in London until the turn of the year. I think you will be comfortable for the weeks before you sail to New Zealand. I have arranged several small dinners with men in the timber business.”

The arranged dinners were all alike, vinous English businessmen hoping to strike deals to sell their lumber, most of which, Lavinia gathered, came from New Zealand, where choppers were bringing down the trees.

“Yas,” said one bland fellow touching his lips with his napkin, “lumber ships crowd New Zealand harbors, ships take on kauri, totara and rimu. I say most are bound here for New South Wales, which is expanding like — like — like the very devil.”

“But we are here to see about the possibilities of logging ourselves,” said Lavinia. The men looked at Dieter as if to ask him to silence his wife — a woman had no place discussing logging nor lumber. They could not bring themselves to discuss anything with her, deferred instead to Dieter. Conversation languished; Lavinia and Dieter said good night as soon as they could without giving offense.

“I hope it is better in New Zeland,” said Lavinia. “These fellows are small-time operators. They are only concerned to sell a load or two of their planks. They are supplying building material for New South Wales. That is their market. They do not understand serious logging.” She waved her arm in a circle that included the fruit bats. “It makes me question the abilities of Mr. Blustt. I hope it is not the same in Auckland.”

“Let us first see the trees,” said Dieter.

Before they had left Chicago, Dieter arranged — with advice from Mr. Marsh — the rental of a private house in Auckland for their monthlong stay. Their contact would be a man named Nashley Oval, an English artist, who had a government contract to paint panoramic views of New Zealand. “They are good people with interests that match our own,” wrote Mr. Marsh, “but I will warn you that the wife’s family keeps slaves, something the new government means to stamp out.” When Dieter read this to Lavinia she made a face and said, “Slaves! Oh dear!”

The small ship, manned by tattooed Maori sailors, entered the great blue harbor at twilight. “Would it not be best to have a good night’s rest and meet with Mr. Oval tomorrow?” asked Dieter, and Lavinia nodded, gazing down at the flashing paddles of men and women in carved canoes all around them. But Mr. Oval was waiting on the dock, a tall rumpled fellow with auburn hair and clear blue eyes.

“So pleased, so delighted,” he murmured, kissing Lavinia’s salt-chapped hand and shaking both of Dieter’s. “I thought I would see you settled into Fern House. I have arranged a very simple dinner at my table this evening so we might sketch out a plan. If you are not too exhausted by the journey? Planning is important as a month is not nearly enough time to show you the wonders of New Zealand.”

They went directly to his house in a garden of trees.

“What a majestic view,” said Lavinia, admiring the harbor painted umber and violet with sunset dregs. A Maori servant — one of the slaves? — showed them into a sparsely furnished room, the walls melting away in shadow. Candles were the only illumination, which Dieter found very pleasant. He disliked both oil and gas lamps. A small round table was set for three. The servant brought in green-lipped mussels, poured a chilled white hock.

“Mr. Oval, delicious — it is reminiscent of German wines,” said Dieter, wondering how it was cooled. Did they have ice or snow in this place? He thought not.

“It is a German wine — imported, as all our wine. I doubt this climate could support vineyards, but some think otherwise. I had twenty cases of Bordeaux shipped a decade ago and it has taken too long a time to recover from the journey — really still not drinkable. I’m told reds can take twenty years or more. But the whites have been good and I’ve developed rather a preference for them, or so I think. To our coming journey together,” he said and he raised his glass, smiled at Lavinia.

The mussel plates disappeared, replaced by a savory pie of the famous Bluff oysters.

“Tomorrow you can rest and get settled, and on Thursday I think it would be advantageous for us to sail to the Coromandel peninsula, where horses will carry us into the forests. Half a century ago horses were unknown here but they came in with the missionaries and the Maori took to them. Everyone rides. I understand, Mrs. Breitsprecher, that you especially wish to see the kauri. Did you bring riding clothes?” he asked Lavinia.

“No,” said Lavinia. “I haven’t been on a horse since I was a girl. It didn’t occur to me to pack riding clothes.”

“I think we can arrange a habit for you. My wife, of course, rides bareback. And in a pinch you can always wear men’s trousers — women here on the frontier of civilization are not fashionable. If you are sanguine in temperament I feel we shall do well.”

Lavinia’s interest was piqued at the thought of an Englishwoman riding bareback and tried to imagine what such a woman would be like — an extravagant hoyden, no doubt. And was she herself expected to wear trousers? Was that what their host was suggesting?

She kept her jaw clenched against falling agape when Mrs. Oval entered the room. Nashley Oval stood up. Dieter rose, smiling. The woman who came toward them was tall and shapely, beautiful in balance and bone. She wore a costume of orange cotton skirt fringed with feathers, and on top a long garment of supple flax that left one shoulder bare. A river of black hair streamed to her waist. Her chin was tattooed with a curious design and a delicate tattooed line enhanced her shapely lips. Lavinia realized with a shock that she was a Maori.

“Welcome, welcome to our land,” she said in perfect upper-class English, her soft voice dropping at the end of her sentence.

“May I present my wife, Ahorangi Oval. Dear heart, these are our guests, Lavinia and Dieter Breitsprecher, with whom we shall travel in your forests beginning on Thursday.”

“I am so pleased,” said Mrs. Oval in a soft fluid voice that reminded Dieter of a pigeon cote. “There is much to show you and I hope you will come to love this place as we do. We have learned about you both from our common friend, Mr. Marsh, whom we met in Italy several years ago.”

Great heavens, thought Lavinia, Mr. Marsh again! He plays an invisible role in our lives.

• • •

A broad path climbed gradually up toward the forests. Ahorangi Oval, again in her orange skirt and flax blouse, sat astride a nervous bay mare dancing and shifting about. Lavinia, feeling constricted and slightly tortured in an ill-fitting riding habit, was on a tractable piebald mare. Dieter on a rangy gelding, and Mr. Oval on his Thoroughbred Queenie, rode behind the two women, talking of Mr. Marsh. Two bareback Maori men — the brothers of Ahorangi — rode in front, turning and calling out comments in good English. The servant and a packhorse laden with full kete baskets followed the party.

“You speak English very well,” said Lavinia to Ahorangi.

“Yes, thank you. I went to school in London,” she said.

At noon the brothers reined up near a stout tree with a self-important air. “A cabbage tree,” said Ahorangi. “All parts are good to eat, we can thatch roofs, make our rain capes. It gives good medicines. It shows itself as different from other trees, so we plant them sometimes to mark a notable place. Let us have lunch here with the ti kouka.”

• • •

The path rose and they entered a totara grove, the elegant trees rising high, showing needled spikes and red berries.

“This,” said Ahorangi, gesturing with her expressive hands, “is the tree we esteem above all others.”

“Even above the kauri?” asked Lavinia.

“Yes. The kauri is important and we revere it, but it is whitemen who love it to the exclusion of other trees. For them it is the ideal timber tree. But it is the totara with whom our lives and religion are even more deeply entwined. Like kauri, it is one of the great chieftain trees — also rimu and kahikatea and rata. Those are our royal trees.”

“They remind me somewhat of yews,” said Dieter, looking at the totara, “though they are much taller. Very tall indeed.”

“Oh yes,” said Mr. Oval. “They are a much-favored tree, both by the Maori and whites. The Maori prefer totara for carvings and war canoes, houses and so much else — framing timbers, even. The fruit is tasty and plentiful, a bark decoction controls fever. White men like it for its rot-resistant timber.”

Ahorangi led Lavinia to a flounced rimu with drooping fronds. “This is my favorite,” she said. “I love the rimu, but so do the timbermen.” She touched a dangle of green. “The botanists say it is a pine, but it is different. It has no cones like European pines, but a good kind of berry. Kakapo — hear them? — like the berries very much.”

In fact all the previous night in the Fern House, Lavinia had heard a smothered thumping sound like someone dropping cannonballs from the trees. Now she heard it again. Ahorangi told her it was the mating call of the kakapo, a fat puffy parrot that could not fly but spent its time in the rimu gorging on fruit—“usually they make this sound only at night, but I think this one may be rather ardent.” Ahorangi touched Lavinia’s arm and with a sad half smile said, “I must ask you something. I am afraid for the rimu. My husband says you are an important lady who owns a timber company and that you come here to look at the trees with a thought to cut them. I hope you will love our trees and not cut them. They are our lives. To live happily in this place we need the trees. I am afraid for them. You will not cut them, please?”

Lavinia said nothing, and in a few minutes Ahorangi understood the silence and walked back to her husband and brothers. For the rest of the day she stayed with them and made no effort to speak again with Lavinia.

Dieter rode up. “What is it?” he said, aware something was not right.

“She does not want us to cut any trees,” said Lavinia. “She begged me not to cut them. I did not know what to say. There are so many trees here that there is no possibility they could be all removed as she seems to fear.”

“Let us hope so,” said Dieter. “That is my wish.” And he, too, fell silent.

They passed through the rimu and followed a twisting trail that wound around a slope and into a grove. Lavinia and Dieter knew at once these were the kauri; they could be nothing else. Massively broad grey trunks with branches bunched at the top like the victims of a robbery throwing up their hands; but the staggering size of these monsters stunned them both.

“My God,” said Dieter, “this is the enchanted forest from some ancient tale.” He dismounted, tied his horse to a shrub and began to walk around a very, very large kauri. He was suddenly joyful. “They are too big to be cut,” he said to Lavinia. “They cannot be brought down.”

They can, Lavinia thought, they will be. Yet she, too, had been a little moved by the great silent trees, so immense, so helpless.

• • •

After dinner Lavinia tried to make amends. “Dear Mrs. Oval,” she said.

“Please, call me Ahorangi.”

“And you must call me Lavinia. I want to say that if I am here to look at the kauri trees for cutting, my husband is here because he believes in replanting what one takes. We wonder if it is possible to plant infant kauri trees, perhaps one for each large one that is cut, to care for the young trees as they grow and age?”

Ahorangi gave a small laugh. “The big kauri trees are very old — thousands of years. We will take you to see Kairaru of Tutamoe. It is the largest one. It would certainly be a hundred human generations before a seedling could replace one fallen mature kauri of such girth.”

“One must have faith in the power of a seed,” said Dieter. “We plant them knowing we will never see them when they are grown. We plant them for the health of the world rather than for people not yet born.”

Nashley Oval leaned forward in his chair, his face tense and excited. “This — this idea of planting kauris. I like this very much. I wish to make a nursery — I suppose it would be a nursery — for starting young trees. I am not quite sure how they propagate…” He looked at his wife.

“They have cones and the cones carry the seeds. Many times you have seen the winged seeds spiraling down to the ground, riding on the wind, no?”

“Yes. So all one would have to do is gather those seeds and put them in a bed of soil?”

Dieter spoke up. “Likely one would get better results by gathering cones not quite ripe enough to disperse their seeds. And these should come from younger trees in vigorous good health. I know nothing of the germination rate of kauri seeds but there are bound to be variations. When do the winged seeds begin to disperse?”

“I would say February — March,” said Ahorangi. “In the autumn, a few months hence.”

“I should never get used to the seasons being opposite,” said Lavinia.

“Oh, it’s not difficult,” said Nashley Oval. “It all falls into place quite naturally.” He was quiet while the guests murmured over the roasted hoki fish with shallot sauce. “I plan to empty my glasshouse of lettuces and green pease and collect kauri seeds this coming February. I shall try my hand at starting young kauri trees.”

“You will be the first in the world, dear Nashley,” said Ahorangi, touching his hand.

Dieter spoke earnestly. “Mr. Oval, if you do such a thing allow me to congratulate you on a valuable hobbyhorse. You will find yourself lavishing your infant seedlings with affection and tender regard for their welfare. But pray do not give up your vegetables — if you can, do construct a glasshouse especially for the kauri. I would be most happy to contribute to such a venture in the interest of improving the future.”

Ahorangi spoke to Lavinia. “You have not yet seen the young kauris — they call them rickers, and they look rather different than the mature trees. Tall and thin, like young girls before they — develop. They are a bit amusing. We shall see all ages while you are here.”

• • •

Two weeks passed with excursions to kauri groves. Lavinia bought a large shoreline grove mixed with rimu and told Ahorangi and Nashley Oval that Duke & Breitsprecher would send men to begin cutting and milling these trees. It would take time to hire the right men, assemble the mill machinery and ship all to Auckland. No kauri in that grove would fall for a few more years. The woman sighed but nodded when Lavinia told her that Duke & Breitsprecher would pay Mr. Oval to set up a kauri nursery and maintain it, to plant young seedlings when the cut was finished.

• • •

Although Axel Cowes had known and worked with Lavinia for years, he chose to send his cable with news of the Chicago fire to Dieter, who came into the bedroom, where Lavinia sat writing in her notebook of expenses.

“My dear, we have had a cable from Axel Cowes. He says a great fire has burned half the city, even in the business district. People are ruined and homeless. There is much suffering.”

Lavinia read the cable for herself. “We have lost warehouses — but on the other hand Axel says orders for milled lumber are pouring in. The ashes are not yet cold but rebuilding has begun. That is the famous Chicago spirit,” she said. “But he does not detail our losses.”

“I daresay it will take some weeks to understand the situation fully.”

“He says Mr. Flense is away on business — he is not sure where — and so there is no comment from him. I very much wish there were. Mr. Flense could give some figures. One thing is clear, Dieter. We must go back as soon as we may,” said Lavinia. “We are needed in Chicago. Though I dread the return voyage.”

They left before the kauri cones were ripe, but Nashley Oval promised to send a bushel to Dieter, who was determined to learn the peculiarities of the plant. “We will write,” said Dieter. Lavinia’s mind was already in Chicago, responding to the city’s desperate need of lumber.

If the trip from San Francisco to Sydney had been rough, the return was worse. Ginger tea did not help Lavinia, who spent most of her time lying green and thin in her berth. Dieter urged her to come up on deck and get some fresh air, and she tottered up and almost immediately retched and then fainted. The worst seemed to be over by midvoyage although she took very little except bread and tea.

“I will be better when we are on solid ground,” she moaned. “Oh, speed the day.”

• • •

Back at their renovated house the air still carried the stench of charred timbers from the city when the wind was right. Lavinia improved only slightly. Nauseated and dizzy she could not appreciate the new wing with its opulent suite and, in place of a cupola, a large balcony with a broad view of Lake Michigan. Dieter crowed over his glasshouse and potting shed and was pleased to wear crusty boots and a long canvas apron all day long, dressing only for dinner. Lavinia could no longer bear breakfast.

“Really, this can’t continue. I am worried about you,” said Dieter. “I have asked Dr. Honey to call and examine you this afternoon, get his opinion of your health. All is so beautiful here now I wish to enjoy it with you. I want us to walk together in the forest again, to admire the moon on the water. I want you well again.”

But Lavinia knew what Dr. Honey would say. She had not expected it, but she knew. She waited until the doctor made his diagnosis and then, at the dinner table, eating only shreds of poached chicken breast, she told Dieter.

“I am going to have a child. This nausea will pass. I will be in health again. But I will be a mother and you a father.”

Dieter laid down his fork and looked at her. He nodded but said nothing. After a long silence he looked at her, smiled and said “hurra!” loudly. The maid rushed in from the kitchen, saw them smiling at each other. Back in the kitchen she said to the cook, “Mr. Dieter is glad to be home again.”

“I shall have to discover a first-rate nursemaid,” said Lavinia.

• • •

Lavinia went to the office the next day feeling quite well and even pleased. She would know the mystery of motherhood. They would be parents. She felt she was, at last, a complete adult.

“Good morning, Annag,” she said. “I’ll look through the post for an hour. Come in at nine to take letters.” The letters took all morning. One was rather annoying: a subcontractor logger wrote a rude note demanding the survey map of the Sticker River camps.

“This fellow sets out his demand as though he owns the property,” said Lavinia.

“Oh, I’ll deal with that, Miss Lavinia,” said Annag. “It never should have been put in with your post. Mr. Flense knows all about it.”

• • •

Lavinia expected the birth would be a frightful ordeal as she was not young and it was her first child, but she might have already produced half a dozen for all the difficulty. It was a quick and easy labor. The boy was healthy and perfect in form. Lavinia and Dieter had talked endlessly about names. Lavinia first suggested James Duke Breitsprecher, but Dieter made a face; next she suggested Charles Duke Breitsprecher, incorporating the name of the ancestor; Dieter asked why not use his father’s name, Bardawulf, but Lavinia repeated, “Bardawulf Duke Breitsprecher? What a mouthful for the poor mite,” and in the end Charles Duke prevailed. Dieter asked himself why humans reached into the ancestral pot for infant names, but found no answer.

She quickly regained her full health and went back to the office when Charles was ten days old, but not before she met with the elderly lawyer she and Dieter used for personal legal affairs and named Charles Duke Breitsprecher heir of her estate and business holdings. Now all was well; the future of the baby and the company was secure.

Her greater interest was not in the infant but in rotary lathes. Duke & Breitsprecher was entering the plywood market. Here was a use for birch, long despised as a weed tree. Her engineers were experimenting with various glued-up wood layers from different species. And they were discussing an interesting new wood, balsa wood from Ecuador, very light and very strong. She listened to their reports of its remarkable weight-strength ratio. The problem was that balsa trees did not constitute whole forests, but grew in scattered places throughout the dripping tropical forests. Finding the trees and getting the logs out was the difficulty. She thought it was not worth the effort, and balsa logging went on the shelf.

The day Lavinia went back to the office Dieter took the baby from his nurse and carried him into the park, laid him down under the newly leafed silver maple, propped himself on his elbow beside the child. Charles stared up into the quivering green, where dots of sunlight winked. But, wondered Dieter, how much could he see? Were the shapes of leaves sharp or was all a green massed blur? He picked the baby up and looked into his small pointed face seeing his expression change to one of interest as his eyes focused on Dieter’s mustache. The baby’s arms flew up in a nervous start.

“You see, Charles, it is a tree. Your life and fate are bound to trees. You will become the man of the forests who will stand by my side.”

• • •

One morning Axel Cowes walked through the forest to the Breitsprecher kitchen door at six in the morning. “Good morning, Mrs. Balclop. Is Lavinia up?”

“Awake, I am sure, but likely not up and dressed. I have orders to send her coffeepot up at six thirty sharp.” Lavinia had abandoned tea for cups of strong black coffee sweetened with honey.

“If you can add another cup I will take it up to her myself. There is most urgent business — a crisis I must discuss with her immediately.”

At that moment Dieter came into the kitchen for his coffee mug. He would take it out to the potting shed and begin the morning’s work.

“Axel! What brings you here at this early hour? A tree down in the forest?”

“In a manner of speaking. I came to break the news to Lavinia and to you that Mr. Flense has done a bunk.” Mrs. Balclop tipped her head to hear everything.

“What does that mean, ‘done a bunk’?”

“It means that he has left the city and the country for parts unknown — perhaps Texas, as they say of all absconders — with a great chunk of Duke and Breitsprecher funds in his pockets.” There was a ringing silence. Cowes drew in his breath, said, “And Annag Duncan, too. She went with him.”

“Oh oh oh,” said Dieter. “Let us go up to Lavinia. She will take this hard.”