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.