Du Kai's big cedar table

The great pine table in the old Duquet house is at once a prized business furnishing, a claim to family history, and a material test of who has the right to possess the Duquet estate. Duke & Sons tries repeatedly to recover it, but Outger Duquet’s letter establishes that the table belongs to his daughter Beatrix, and her later refusal to hand it over turns the company’s assumption of ownership into an open dispute.

The table and the company’s ambitions

The table’s importance reaches beyond its size or use. Duke & Sons wants it in its company office, where it would serve as a prominent remnant of the family’s earlier presence at the Penobscot house. When the company’s members are away in Holland, Jan hopes Outger will remain there, since that would let Duke & Sons finally take possession of the table. The object’s continued presence in the old house frustrates that expectation: it remains tied to a place and a family history the company wants to absorb into its own institutional life.

The table’s later replacement in Boston makes the dispute tangible. After Duke & Sons fails to wrest the old single-board pine table from Outger’s daughter, the company’s conference room uses a long maple table made from four planks. This new furnishing is functional, but it is also evidence of defeat: the company has had to construct a substitute because it could not secure the particular table it wanted. The episode makes material possession a practical matter and a question of status at once.

Outger’s letter changes the claim

The conflict sharpens when Cornelia tells the family that a letter has arrived from Outger. He has accepted an invitation to join the faculty at Leiden and says he will not return to the colonies or to the house on Penobscot Bay. His private message to Bernard makes clear that the great table, together with the other contents of the house, is the property of his daughter, Beatrix Duquet. Outger explains that Beatrix’s mother was a Passamaquoddy woman who helped him with his studies of Indigenous ways and beliefs, and that Beatrix received a good education from him. At the time of the letter, she is living in the house; he says he may visit her and might eventually have her join him in Leiden.

The disclosure unsettles the family not only because Outger has a daughter, but because he has formally placed the house’s contents beyond the company’s claim. Nicolaus responds by insisting that the house was never Outger’s to own and that the company had allowed him to stay there only to keep him from interfering with its business. He proposes that Bernard return with him to investigate and recover the property. The men discuss ways to dislodge Beatrix, punish Outger, or cut off his company stipend, but these are plans rather than rights established by the letter. Outger’s statement has already named an owner, and that fact changes the table from an object awaiting collection into disputed property.

Negotiation at the Penobscot house

Jan and Nicolaus travel to see Beatrix in person. They find her at the familiar house, where the table remains in the room beside the fire. Jan runs his fingers over its deep amber wood, darkened with age, while the two men consider how to persuade her to part with it. Over coffee mixed with Dutch chocolate and cinnamon, they invoke the danger of another fire and Nicolaus claims that their father, Charles Duquet, must have intended the table for the company office.

Beatrix listens, then offers a condition: if the men send her a handsome small table, they may take the large one, which she considers too big for practical use. She also says that she does not understand Outger’s attachment to it and expects he will be angry when he learns it has gone. Her apparent willingness seems to settle the matter. Yet the exchange is not an uncomplicated surrender. Beatrix has set the terms, does not offer the visitors the intimacy of family confidence, and leaves them to talk among themselves about the company’s history and successes. The men depart with the table supposedly promised, but Nicolaus senses that something is wrong.

A month later, Piet arrives with a wagon and the replacement mahogany table Beatrix requested. The situation reverses at the gate. Asked for the large table, Beatrix says she knows nothing of the arrangement, denies that it is there, and tells Piet to take the mahogany object away and not trouble her again. Her abrupt refusal prevents the company from turning the earlier conversation into a completed transfer. Piet leaves angry, while Nicolaus suggests that Piet may have spoken in a way that offended her. The table stays with Beatrix; the company’s plans, assurances, and replacement furniture do not alter that outcome.

Inheritance, memory, and material value

The struggle over the table shows how corporate and family claims overlap without being identical. Duke & Sons treats the table as an asset belonging to the company and invokes Charles Duquet’s intention, while Outger’s letter names Beatrix as its owner and she exercises that authority by refusing the handover. The object’s history therefore cannot be reduced to the company’s account of its own succession: it also belongs to the household Outger maintained and to the inheritance he chose to pass to his daughter.

The table’s material presence gives the disagreement a force that an abstract ownership claim would lack. It is a single-board pine furnishing in a particular room, its surface marked by age; in Boston, a four-plank maple table stands in its place. That contrast records both continuity and loss. Duke & Sons can furnish a conference room and conduct its business, but it cannot make the substitute into the object it failed to acquire. The great pine table remains a small but consequential limit on the company’s effort to turn family history into corporate property.