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.”