“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.”