• • •
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.
She sank rather quickly. One day she was well and busy, the next she was unable to rise from the bed. She complained of a headache, a twisting pain in her gut, her mind wandered, her thin arms thrust up toward the ceiling. She called for Bernard, forgetting he was in Davy Jones’s locker. Mercy and Sarah and Patience attended her bedside, fetching cold compresses, urging the sick woman to sup a little broth — which she promptly vomited up.
“You will be well again in a day or so,” said Mercy. “It is an indisposition, nothing more.” But as the day wore on the patient became more silent, concentrated on drawing ragged, bubbled breaths. She confounded them by dying in the late afternoon. One moment she seemed no worse, the next she stopped breathing.
Mercy came out of the sickroom and put the kettle on. “She has just left us,” she said. “She is with God.”
“How can that be?” asked Jan, who sat with Nicolaus at the table. “I thought it was a fleeting illness.”
“Apparently not. We never know when He will take us.” She sighed, lowered her eyes, then looked at Nicolaus. “If you could order the coffin from Mr. Kent, Sarah and I will prepare her body. I think that rose silk dress she liked so well.” She did not cry; death was too familiar and demanded its rituals. Older women were deeply familiar with the events of passage. She took the basin of warm water and dry cloths into the death room. She might have preferred to wait some time before this task but Sarah and Patience had already stripped away the comforter and top sheet. To avoid handling the body more than was necessary Sarah suggested they cut her nightgown off. It was soiled with dark vomit in any case. Mercy thought this a criminal idea — it was a good nightgown and, once washed and bleached, someone could use it. So they unbuttoned the high-necked gown and drew it upward over the thin shoulders, over the head, pulling the stick-like arms from the sleeves, and tugging the garment higher over the knees, up the thin thighs, and—
Nicolaus would never forget the way the door of the sickroom flew open with the two women jammed in the opening. He and Jan had been sitting in mourning quiet, watching the flames in the fireplace.
“Nicolaus! Jan! Come into this room.” Nicolaus had never heard his wife speak in that shocked tone. The scarlet-faced women half-ran into the kitchen and let the men go in alone.
The thin and wasted body of an elderly man lay on the still sweat-damp sheet. It was Birgit, certainly it was Birgit, but Birgit was a man. Indubitably. The wispy hairs on the narrow chest and the male sexual organs, shrunken and withered but quite real, confounded them. Nicolaus’s mind seethed. He thought not of Birgit but of Bernard. Why? Why? For forty years! And none of them had known.
He now wrenched his mind away from the still-shocking image engraved in his memory. It was in the past. Instead he thought of what was happening this very hour while he lay sick abed — Piet, Sedley and George Pickering Duke trying to bargain with some of the shrewdest, most ruthless men in the colonies, men noted for their rapacious ways. There was no help for it; if it killed him he had to go there.
Coughing, he called Mercy. “My clothes. I must go to that meeting.”
“You cannot. I forbid it. You are ill, dangerously ill.”
“Let me alone, Mercy. I must go, I tell you. Help me if you wish me to live. Bar me from this and I’ll die of spite.”
She thought he could do that; the Dukes were nothing if not stubborn and willful. He caught Jan descending from his carriage in front of the Duke building.
• • •
Piet, George Pickering, Sedley and their invited guests sat around the oval mahogany table. The Wentworth brother-in-law’s heavy mouth twitched and twitched with a small smile. The proposition was unusuaclass="underline" they would shower the Duke brothers and nephews with social invitations, they would encourage useful connections. They would make the Duke family known, not only in Boston society, but in England. In return they wanted free access to the Duke pineland holdings in the north country, for which, of course, they would pay a fair price. They would share equally the costs of getting the logs out of the forest and to the mills. George Pickering Duke thought it a good agreement as everyone knew that the way to gain advantages was through political and social connections, connections Duke & Sons had never enjoyed. Piet was a little concerned over the “free access” phrase. How free did these political men imagine such access might be? Sedley was in a cold sweat with visions of a thousand choppers cutting their pine, perhaps these very men presenting false accounts or smoothly saying that other men, unknown, had stolen the logs. Worse yet, once given this opening, they were in a position to tamper with the law and seize Duke forestlands. But before Piet could say “Done,” the door opened and the two aged Duke brothers, Jan and Nicolaus, came in. Nicolaus looked half dead, pasty-faced except for burning fever spots on his cheeks. He threw his black cane on the table, looked at the Wentworth brother-in-law and his cronies.