Barkskins (42 page)

He had done moderately well on the examination, then stalled for years as a “passed midshipman.” But the Napoleonic Wars had lofted him swiftly over a lieutenancy to post captain. And there he stayed until, in his fifty-first year, a letter arrived from his Boston cousin Freegrace Duke, asking if he would consider a director's seat on the Board of Duke & Sons to fill the vacancy left by the death of his father, Sedley.

That his father had died was a shock to James. He had heard no news from him nor of him for many years. He had never had a letter, nor a remembrance, never a visit. He thought that if Sedley had left him anything in his will it would be an insultingly paltry sum, as a single shilling, or a savage castigation for causing the death of his first wife, James's mother; he had always known why his father hated him.

As the days passed he considered the idea of sitting on the Board of the family timber company. Little had ever come to James from the Dukes beyond a yearly allowance of fifty pounds. If he accepted, he would have to make concessions, would have to revert to being an American. He would bring a touch of English distinction to the no doubt squalid Board meetings of Duke & Sons—likely the reason they invited him to join them. He could imagine those meetings, a scarred oaken table with half a dozen backwoodsmen slouched around it on pine benches, tankards of rum-laced home-brewed beer, tipsy ribaldries, for he had no illusions that the Dukes were models of moral behavior.

Before he could draft his cool note of refusal, a letter arrived from a Boston law office signed by the attorney Hugh Trumbull. It was late December, the days short and dark, the worst of the English year. Advocate Trumbull begged James's attendance at Trumbull & Tendrill as soon as he might manage the journey in order to hear something to his advantage; enclosed was a draft for one hundred pounds (drawn on Duke & Sons) for his passage to Boston. So rarely had the words “something to your advantage” come to him that he decided on the minute to accept Freegrace's offer and remove permanently to Boston. “Advantage” meant more than a single shilling! He made his arrangements and booked passage for Boston.

•  •  •

The
Western Blessing
was crowded with German immigrants journeying to Pennsylvania to found a utopia and these people quarreled incessantly with each other about the details of the earthly paradise to come. To keep free of them James Duke stayed in his cabin during the day, coming out only to take the wintery air or to dine and drink with Captain Euclid Gunn, who was even older than himself but of an equal rank. Over a roast chicken they raked through sea acquaintances held in common. They spoke of retired and disabled friends as the level sank in the decanter. “Captain Richard Moore, one of the most ablest seamen I ever knew, is forced to open a herring stall in Bristol. You are a fortunate man, Captain Duke, to be connected to a wealthy family. Some of us depart from the sea to live out sad lives ashore selling fish or driving a goods cart. I myself have no expectations of a rich sinecure but hope I will go to Davy Jones afore I wheel a barrow of mussels.”

“Shocked to hear that Dick Moore has come to such a pass. But, Captain Gunn, I am sure that a happier future awaits you than clam mongering. Do you not have a reputation for fashioning small attractive tables?”

“It is only my amusement, you know, never to make a living from it.”

“You might try—everyone admires small tables—as that one,” he said and he pointed to an example of the captain's handiwork, an ebon side table inlaid with a ship in full sail cut from walrus-tusk ivory. “Any mariner's family would be happy to possess such a handsome article of furnishing.”

“You must have it when you disembark! I will make another, but you shall take this one as a memento of your years at sea and this voyage. I insist. Look, it has a secret drawer where you may keep your love letters,
heh.
”

•  •  •

Once a week other choice guests joined the captain's table, and once a female, Mistress Posey Brandon, a dark-haired lady of considerable stature, quite overtopping the gentlemen at the table, but sitting silent for the most part unless pressed to speak. She was traveling home after a long visit with a relative, to rejoin her husband, Winthrop Brandon, a Presbyterian preacher who had made his name with a book of virtuous precepts. Another passenger, Thomas Gort, showed her excessive attention. James understood why Gort fawned; she had great onyx-dark eyes fringed by thick lashes. But Gort made too much of her. When Mrs. Brandon said she had visited Madame Tussaud's exhibition, at the Lyceum Theatre, of wax curiosities of crime Gort begged for repulsive details. The lady demurred, saying she had averted her eyes before many of the exhibits.

“I do not see how a member of the gentler sex, even a German or French lady, could have fastened on such an unpleasant mode of expression,” she said and cut at her meat. “I understand she first gained her skill in making wax flowers for family funeral wreaths.” After that she said nothing more.

•  •  •

The days of tilting horizon passed slowly. As they neared the continent they saw increasing dozens of ships, wooden leviathans rope-strung like musical instruments, shimmering with raw salt. Boston harbor was so jammed they anchored a twenty-minute row from the docks.

James located his trunk, a scuffed brown affair, on the deck. He did not see the promised inlaid table with the boxes and bundles to go ashore and found Captain Gunn on the bridge.

“I thought I would thank you again for the table,” he said.

It seemed to him Captain Gunn showed a coolness. “Ah,” he remarked.

“Sir, I look forward to enjoying it in my new quarters.”

“Ah.”

“Shall I fetch it on deck myself?”

“Ha! You, Woodrow!” He bellowed at a sailor. “Fetch the small table in my cabin to the deck for this gentleman.” There was undoubtedly a sneer embedded in the word
gentleman.
James Duke guessed that Captain Gunn was in his true self a parsimonious man made momentarily generous by Madeira.

•  •  •

He was crowded into the tender with two dozen passengers, Bostonians from their accents. In their anxiety to get on shore they were very restive, passing bundles back and forth. A portly matron stood up to receive a small trunk. The weight surprised her and she swayed, tried to hold it, then fell with a shriek into the wintery harbor. Gasping, she clutched at the gunwale, and her weight dislodged two more passengers. Captain Duke stretched out his hand to a terrified man and in slow but inexorable motion the tender rose on its side and sent ten or twelve more people bellowing and clawing over the side. Gasping (for he could not swim), James Duke thrashed his arms, trying for the gunwale. His hand touched it, though he could barely feel it, then he went under again as the heavy woman wrapped one arm around him. He escaped his captor and with an atavistic swimming motion burst upward into the sweet air. Something clenched his hair and dragged him to the side of the tender, something got hold of the back of his coat collar and hauled relentlessly. He came up over the gunwale, crashed into the bottom of the boat and looked up at his savior—a woman wearing a black bonnet and staring at him with lustrous, intensely black eyes—Mistress Brandon, who had exhibited the strength of two men.

Chattering thanks and promises to call on his rescuer in a few days, James Duke returned to his homeland on this first day of February. In a sopping freeze he managed a cab to take him to the Pine Tree Inn. Waiting for his trunk to arrive he stood as close as he could to the fire drinking boiling tea. At last the trunk was hauled up to his room and trembling, he pulled on his warmest clothes—wool, wool, good English wool.

•  •  •

It was exceedingly cold in Boston; snow fell an inch or two every day for a week until all was muffled and silent, roofs, carriages, and still the snow came. Two days after his arrival, and with a drumbeat headache, James Duke walked to the offices of Trumbull & Tendrill slipping on icy cobblestones.

The clerk who let him in and took his hat gave him two swift startled looks before his habitual air of indifference returned, an empty expression that classified the people he met as side chairs or pen wipers. It was the same with the advocate Hugh Trumbull, whose mouth fell open and then closed. His wrinkled face suddenly creaked into a smile. He might have been English, thought James, taking in the fashionable double-breasted coat with notable lapels. Half-laughing in welcome, Trumbull made James comfortable in a chair near the snapping fire. The clerk brought in tumblers of hot rum toddy.

“You quite shook me! It's uncanny how you resemble your late father.” Trumbull drank off half his glass of rum and waved his hand at the window, where the flying snow half-obliterated the street and the buildings across the way. “Would you believe that I have killed deer from this window?” he asked. “Of course it was many years ago and deer are now scarce. Now, sir,” he said, “to business,” and over the next hour laid out the details of Sedley Duke's will.

•  •  •

Elated and confused James Duke returned to the Pine Tree with a weight of keys in his pocket. In essence, Sedley Duke had regretted his long hatred and left half of his rich estate to James, including his dwelling house north of Tremont Street complete with six acres of garden land, a fruit orchard, twenty acres of fresh meadow, a twelve-stall stable, two carriages and six matched pair of horses, nearly two million acres of forest in Maine (passed to Sedley from Charles Duke's old partner, Forgeron), a collection of Indian relics, a stuffed crocodile, eight silver platters, four and twenty pewter plates, a turtle-shell hafted knife, a library of eighty-four books, two hogsheads of Portuguese
vinho,
eight barrels of rum, two waistcoats embroidered with bucolic scenes, five turkey carpets, six warehouses of lumber, twenty-seven acres of salt marsh, part interests in several ships, potash manufactories, a shingle factory, Ohio timberlands, bank accounts and stocks. And more that he could not remember.

Trumbull had enjoyed detailing the provisions of the will. “The servants are staying on at the house and hope that you will retain them. You may remember that your father called the property Black Swan and populated his pond with those birds. Sixty-odd years ago it was all rough, gloomy forest, and now we see handsome estates. I would advise you to keep the servants as they understand the peculiarities and virtues of the place and will make the transition to Boston pleasanter for you.”

James sat with his mouth open, hardly believing what he was hearing.

“Mrs. Trumbull and I hope you will do us the favor of dinner with us a week hence? Some of your cousins will be in attendance and we thought you might wish to meet them away from the offices.”

“Sir,” said James, “sir . . .”

•  •  •

His head aching fiercely and his throat a raw ribbon of fire, he took to his bed at the Pine Tree for the next four days and lay swooning and dreaming of the delights that lay before him. He would move to the house as soon as he was well, and then pay a call on the Winthrop Brandons and thank Mistress Brandon properly with a gift. But he was embarrassed to have been pulled from the water by a woman.
He
should have saved
her.
And should he wait until the Trumbulls' dinner party or immediately pay a call on Cousin Freegrace Duke, who certainly knew of James's unexpected fortune? No doubt he would try to wheedle it away to himself and the other Dukes or at least to the failing business coffers, for the gang of backwoodsmen had likely put the company in disarray. Perhaps Sedley Duke had been the white sheep in a black flock.

•  •  •

He directed the hired coachman to his father's—now his—house. They rolled up a curved drive to a house of rosy brick with a black lacquer door set off by pedimented windows. He counted eight smoking chimneys. A grey-haired woman wearing a grey linsey-woolsey dress opened the door and her eyes widened as she took him in. She curtsied and said, in a welcome English voice, that she was Mrs. Tubjoy, “Mr. Sedley's housekeeper, sir. And now in your service. We all welcome you.”

As he stepped into the entrance hall he was dashed into his childhood as though seated on a swing that someone had suddenly given a great shove. He knew every inch of this place. There was the complex mahogany staircase rising into the dim upper hall, there a gleaming carpet rod and there—there—the terrible hall stand, ten feet high, intensely authoritarian. This piece of furniture with its blotched looking glass, its hat hooks and cloak holders was the ceremonial guard of the house. Every day when Sedley came home he had placed his umbrella in the crooked holder, hung his tall black hat on the hook, his greatcoat on another and, divested of his city exterior, passed into the world of “home.” He went into his library and drank whiskey until the housemaid rang the bell for dinner. Young James and Sedley sat at opposite ends of the sixteen-foot table with never a word spoken. He shook the memory loose.

In the hall behind Mrs. Tubjoy stood half a dozen servants. He caught vainly at their names; the beardless grinning boy was Tom, the cook, Louisa. Two men brought his trunk and Captain Gunn's small table into the hall. Mrs. Tubjoy said, “I am sure you wish to see the house, and after a little refreshment, rest until dinner? Follow me, sir, if you please.

“Perhaps you will wish to take your late father's room, Mr. James?” she asked, opening a heavy mahogany door. The room was large, the windows were large and gave a view of great-trunked oaks.

Mrs. Tubjoy said, “Forgive my familiarity, Mr. James, but you strongly resemble my late employer.”

“Yes, Mr. Trumbull said so as well. But I cannot help it. I never saw the late Mr. Duke—my father—from the time I was a boy. So I did not know of the resemblance.” The monstrous bed was mahogany with a fringed green canopy, the posts carved into dolphins and mermaids. He detected a faded scent of cigar smoke, wool, leather polish and horsiness. As he leaned over the bed to examine the monogram on the pillow slip, another smell, altogether rancid and disgusting, rose from the mattress.