Captain James Duke, at fifty, was complicated, dark-haired, and somewhat handsome. He took a hardheaded and hardhanded stance to disguise an inner recognition of worthlessness. Quixotic, he swung from morbid self-pity to rigid authority over his crews and himself. The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments.

On the annual occasion of an all-day drunk (his ill-starred birthday), he dragged out the piteous litany of his life: he had been pitched onto a British ship as a midshipman in his tenth year “as an unwanted pup-dog is tied to a sapling in the woods and left to be torn apart by wild beasts.” Even his appointment had come about only because his paternal grandfather, old Nicolaus Duke, of the venerable Boston lumber company Duke & Sons, wrote to the more ancient Dred-Peacock and begged the favor of a recommendation. The favor granted, Nicolaus Duke and the antique English peer died within weeks of each other and could be depended on no more. James Duke lasted, repeatedly passed over for promotion in favor of candidates from influential landed families or members of the peerage. But the Napoleonic Wars had lofted him swiftly over a lieutenancy to post captain. And there he stayed until, in 1808, his fifty-first year, a letter arrived from his Boston cousin Freegrace Duke, asking if he would consider taking a director’s seat on the board of Duke & Sons, to fill the vacancy left by the death of James’s father, Sedley.

That his father had died was a shock to James. He had heard no news from him or of him for many years. He assumed that if Sedley had left him anything in his will it would be an insultingly paltry sum, 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. If he accepted, he would have to make concessions, would have to revert to being an American. He could imagine the meetings, a scarred oaken table with half a dozen backwoodsmen slouched around it on pine benches, tankards of rum-laced home-brewed beer in hand.

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 as soon as he might manage the journey in order to hear something to his advantage; enclosed was a draft for a hundred pounds, drawn on Duke & Sons, for his passage to Boston.

The Western Blessing was crowded with Germans journeying to Pennsylvania to found a utopia, and these people quarrelled incessantly 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 wintry air or to dine and drink with Captain Euclid Gunn, who was even older than him 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. 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.”

Other choice guests joined the captain’s table, and once a female, Mistress Posey Brandon, a lady of considerable stature, quite overtopping the gentlemen at the table, but sitting silent for the most part unless pressed to speak. She was travelling 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 mentioned that 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 a 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 by 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 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 and found Captain Gunn on the bridge.

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

It seemed to him that 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.

“Bernard, nobody likes an ‘I told you so.’ ” Facebook

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He was crowded into the tender with two dozen passengers. 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 wintry harbor. 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 him and 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 an 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.