Barkskins (33 page)

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

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

Your loving Brother and Uncle, Nicolaus Duke.

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

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

“We must persuade her,” he whispered.

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

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

“Like Outger in cold disposition,” said Nicolaus.

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

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

“All ready, Piet?”

“Of course.”

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

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

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

•  •  •

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