Читать книгу Barkskins - Энни Пру, Annie Proulx - Страница 29

Again Duquet changed, reinventing himself. In Boston, Duquet et Fils became Duke & Sons and he was Charles Duke. Still he kept his enterprise and some holdings in New France. He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

“Do you know aught of that fellow McBogle?” asked Duke, breaking the crust edge from his meat pasty with heavy fingers.

Dred-Peacock, bewigged and togged out, regarded his steaming coffee. “I have not made his acquaintance, but I hear much deleterious talk concerning his ways. Maine is full to the scuppers with woodland entrepreneurs, sawmills, surveyors, armies of tree choppers, potash and turpentine distillers and settlers, every man assaulting the free-to-all timberlands.”

“They think as I do,” said Duke, “so I cannot fault them. But although they love guns beyond telling, and protect themselves, the woods are dangerous with enemies, not only war foes, but the Crown Surveyor’s men. Yet they are only men.”

“The settlers are hard men, right enough, but there are others even harder, mostly in New Hampshire. I mean those men of Scots lineage lately removed from Ulster in Ireland.”

“Surely they are as other mortal men?”

“No. They are different. They are damned strange, cruel men, clannish and proud to a fault, thirsty for vengeance over imagined slights, hard-drinking and inhumanly tough. The whoresons prefer to sleep outside in storms rather than in the comfort of a house. They know the country as the poxy Indians know it and to live free is their banner. The buggers are impervious to cold and heat and they bear pain as the Indians do, stoically and silently, even with relish. The ridges and watercourses are their highways, the forest their shelter. They choose to live in the most remote places. And they are bloody damned key fighters in the escalating antipathy between the French and the English.” He paused and took up his coffee cup, stared into Duke’s eyes.

“Dud McBogle, his brothers and his sons are among these men.”

Duke threw back his head and laughed. “Well, I have heard bugbear stories aplenty and I would class McBogle tales among them. No doubt he eats children as sweetmeats and wears a red fur cloak bespangled with their bones. What do you say when I tell you I consider taking this man on as a partner?”

For once Dred-Peacock had nothing to say.

The ongoing war and marauding Indians forced Maine’s settlements to cluster along the tidewater margins; among them were several small shipyards. But Charles Duke discovered Penobscot Bay, where the great river discharged into the Atlantic and where he built a large house. He thought himself the first white man here, despising a few French-speaking métis, fruit of the fornicating priests who had lived earlier among the Indians. The land around the bay, called Norumbega by an unknown explorer, was fancied by credulous souls to be the site of a fabulous city crusted with gold and gems, as Kinkenadon or L’Isle Imaginaire. And here mustachioed Henry Hudson had cut the first mast pine in the New World. For that reason alone he liked the place.

Duke’s log house was more like a fort than a dwelling. Half the ground floor was given over to his business room, with its enormous table fashioned from a single slab of pine four feet in width. And it was time to bring his sons, now young men, to the New World and set them to work, although little Outger was still too young to leave his mother.

His Amsterdam sons, Jan and Nicolaus Duke, were fluent in Dutch, French and English with smatterings of German, Frisian and Portuguese. Jan was especially good with numbers and understood the finer points of bookkeeping. He was as forward-looking as a raftsman in a rocky river. Nicolaus, of imposing build, was physically strong and had a ruthless streak that Duke thought would make him feared at the bargaining table. He and Bernard were something of mariners, as both had several times sailed to China on the ships of Piet Roos. Jan and Nicolaus would deal with merchants, contracts and shipping. The French son, Bernard, was on his way from the Baltic, where he had studied the technical details of manufacturing pitch and tar, and where he had picked up a little of the Swedish language and enough Danish to be useful. He would be in charge of naval store production. And he, Charles Duke, the father, would continue to establish contacts, buy up paper townships and arrange for woodsmen and sawmills on the important rivers, to oversee the growing empire. It was time to gather his sons to him. And yet he was not interested in them in any way except an eagerness to recognize proofs of their success. They were the sons he needed. He wrote to Cornelia in English.

Beste Deer Wif.

I hope this liter find you and the childer in good helth I wishd to rite three Dayes pass but found ye Inkwel soe dry no Words in it and by some unhapy chance ye Cup Bord destit of Supply A qart come yester and todaye I take Quil in Hande to rite it is Time my Sons whose Care and Educasun you have fosterd begin Busines Life here with me in Boston and Mane cost New Franc I will rite them eache & mak ye Arangemt firm. I am covincd they will sucede in all our Procedings with ye help of your deer Fater and Unkul They are as capable as I hev ever wish I regret when I am far from and destite of frend hear and hop join you three mos. time I prey that you wil not want for hapy Compnee entil I return.

Charles Duke, Penoscot Bay Cost of Mane

Martch 3. 1717

He lodged his sons in Boston, but they came to the Penobscot Bay house once a month to meet in the business room, to spread out their papers and books on the great pine table.

He had not been wrong. Already, within a few months, the sons began to put forth their impressions and ideas. Jan, with his long bony face and hazel eyes slitted as though squinting into the future, was perhaps the most long-seeing, but they spoke among themselves before presenting him with new ideas.

“Father,” said Jan. “We have noticed that more and more English and Scots shipwrights are settling along the New England coast. We think it would be a sensible move to get a foothold in the shipbuilding industry. It would reduce the necessity of transporting lumber, masts, bowsprits and yards to English or European ports. It is an opportunity.”

“Yes,” said Duke. “I have often felt it would be good to move into shipbuilding, often and often, but I hesitated. You reassure me.”

“Also,” said Bernard, who had confounded them all when he arrived from the Baltic countries with a great horsy wife, Birgit, “pitch and tar. We have pitch pine here, of course, but the superior trees are in the Carolinas. And slaves. I would suggest that we purchase and operate a pitch pine plantation in Carolina.”

“It shall be done,” said the gratified father.