Annag Duncan
BarkskinsAnnag Duncan enters Lavinia Duke’s company as a capable office worker rebuilding her life after her husband’s death. Lavinia values her Glasgow office experience, appoints her office manager, and entrusts her with increasingly important work. Annag’s rise from a job applicant to a central member of the company’s administration makes her later participation in Lawyer Flense’s embezzlement a personal as well as a financial betrayal.
Background and appointment
A middle-aged widow with threadbare clothes and no money, Annag tells Lavinia that she once worked in the office of a hat manufacturer in Glasgow. She gave up that work after marrying Alasdair Duncan, who hoped to make a living in the New World as a purveyor of fine woods. The couple went first to New York and then to Detroit, where Alasdair was to examine pinewood. He died two weeks after they came ashore, before he could reach the dry mountain climate a doctor had recommended for his illness.
Lavinia hires Annag because her office experience offers practical value, despite her poverty and lack of other advantages. She also brings back the young Miss Heinrich, whose principal qualification is her stated willingness to learn, and assigns her to work under Annag. Lavinia expects hard, accurate work from both women: the appointment reflects her effort to build a competent office staff rather than treat employment as charity.
Office manager and trusted colleague
Annag soon becomes a visible presence in the company’s offices. When Cyrus Hempstead arrives after James Duke’s funeral, smoking one of James’s cigars and demanding to know who she is, Annag identifies herself as the office manager and asks who he is in return. Cyrus’s hearing difficulty and his indignation at not having been consulted sharpen the contrast between his established authority and Annag’s recently earned place. She remains composed and offers to announce him to Lavinia.
As Duke Logging expands, Annag’s responsibilities extend beyond routine correspondence. In a boardroom meeting with Lavinia, Lawyer Flense, and Accountant Pye, she serves coffee and cakes while the company discusses staffing needs, including a replacement for Lennart Vogel’s former role. Later, she compiles the production figures that Lavinia uses to report that Avery Mill is expected to cut three million board feet that year. The figures inform a discussion of sawmill capacity, the transition from older water-powered equipment to circular saws and steam engines, and the possible use of double circular saws for larger logs. Flense praises Annag’s work, though his stage-whispered compliment also draws Lavinia’s private skepticism about his attentions to her.
Annag’s work includes decisions about how the office itself must grow. During one of Chicago’s windy days, she tells Lavinia that the company’s success has created too much correspondence for the existing staff. She recommends hiring two more clerks and promoting Miss Heinrich, who has handled the letters, to assistant director. Lavinia authorizes Annag to advertise for and hire office workers and emphasizes the need to train capable staff. Because Lavinia and Dieter Breitsprecher expect to be abroad for nearly two years, she also requires detailed weekly cables. The arrangement places Annag at the center of the information network on which the company’s operations and Lavinia’s oversight will depend.
Standing within the company
Annag appears alongside Lawyer Flense, Accountant Pye, David Neale, Noah Ludlum, Glafford Jones, and major shareholders Theodore Jinks and Axel Cowes on Duke Logging’s board during the American Civil War. Her place on that board marks the extent of her advancement from a widow hired for her past office work. The company’s prospects are buoyed by demand for lumber, including rebuilding in the South after the war, while its business depends on the expanding systems of logging, milling, and transport that Annag helps administer from the office.
Her professional competence also makes her indispensable in smaller, practical moments. When Lavinia receives a rude demand from a subcontractor logger for a survey map of the Sticker River camps, Annag offers to handle the matter and notes that it should not have reached Lavinia’s post because Flense already knows about it. The exchange shows her managing the flow of information and shielding the company head from matters that can be dealt with through established channels. It also places Flense between Annag’s operational responsibilities and the legal affairs of the company—an association that becomes important in retrospect.
Flense, betrayal, and consequences
Flense’s relationship with Annag is presented through a pattern of personal attention. He stops at her desk to praise both her office management and her pastry cooking; Lavinia thinks Annag is foolish to be flattered. Dieter later recalls that Flense praised her cookies, brought her small bouquets, smiled at her, and drove her home after long meetings. He suggests that Annag was taken with this attention, while also recognizing that he and Lavinia had taken her work for granted. In his account, Flense’s attentiveness offered an opening that the company’s leaders had failed to notice.
When Flense’s financial betrayal is exposed, Lavinia is furious not only about the stolen company assets but also about Annag’s part in it. She says that she trusted Annag and had given her a job when she had nothing; she cannot understand how Annag fell into Flense’s grasp. The novel distinguishes the company’s losses from Lavinia’s private fortune: Flense rifled company assets but did not touch her personal property or her Chicago land holdings, which are now worth millions. Lavinia nevertheless experiences the theft as the destruction of an inheritance built from generations of lumber wealth and resolves to have the Pinkerton agency seek the guilty parties.
Annag’s trajectory is therefore marked by a sharp reversal. Lavinia’s decision to hire her creates the opportunity for professional security and responsibility; years of reliance make her betrayal especially intimate. Yet the text also gives the betrayal a context: Flense courted her with attention, while the people who depended on her failed to acknowledge her fully. That context explains the vulnerability Dieter identifies without undoing Annag’s responsibility for her role in the company’s losses. Through her, the novel joins the growth of a timber enterprise to the human ties and oversights beneath its formal organization.
