Lawyer Flense

Lawyer Flense is a legal adviser and senior employee whose financial authority helps Duke Logging and Lumber expand, but whose unchecked power becomes a route to betrayal. Trusted by Lavinia Duke as a friend and empowered to act for the company, he takes advantage of the absence of contractual limits on his dealings: he disappears with company funds, and a later audit establishes that he had also secretly sold company property.

Position and Business Outlook

Flense belongs to the inner circle of Duke Logging and Lumber, alongside Edward Pye and Axel Cowes. Its members avoid small talk; conversation centers on business. Flense’s approach is notably unsentimental: he despises James Duke’s timberland purchases when he believes the same land could have been obtained without payment, and he argues that the government cannot prove that land claims were not made in good faith. The company uses land laws and nominal settlers to acquire timber tracts at minimal cost, while Flense handles the deeds. His confidence in exploiting legal and administrative openings makes him an architect of the company’s expansion, not merely its legal observer.

The contrast between Flense’s methods and James Duke’s idealized reputation is consequential. Lavinia later explains that her father conducted business through personal trust and a gentleman’s agreement, and that she had believed Flense loyal both to her and to the company. Flense operates in a world where legal authority and moral responsibility are not the same: his access to the company’s affairs is extensive, while the safeguards on that access are slight.

Advice and Corporate Expansion

Flense’s influence extends beyond land transactions. After an inventors’ gathering, he advises Lavinia to incorporate. The Duke Logging Corporation then forms the Prairie Home Division, giving it responsibility for the packaged-house business, including transportation to the prairies and the supply of milled lumber and finished architectural components. The inventors who developed the venture are offered salaried employment and a ten-year contract rather than the full partnership one of them wanted. Flense’s advice thus helps place a new business under corporate control and defines the terms on which its creators participate.

He also represents the company in negotiations over overseas timber. When Duke and Breitsprecher’s first shipment of its best pine reaches Sydney, Australia, Flense travels to San Francisco to meet buyer Harry Blustt. Blustt seeks a decade-long supply contract for Michigan pine and raises the possibility of establishing efficient logging camps in New Zealand to obtain kauri. Flense immediately understands the business opportunity and affirms the company’s interest in new overseas timber sources. The exchange shows him acting as an agent of expansion across markets, with the company’s search for wood moving from Michigan toward the Pacific.

Authority and Trust

Before Lavinia and Dieter Breitsprecher leave on their journey to Australia and New Zealand, Lavinia gives Flense power of attorney to handle business matters. She explicitly places him among her financial advisers and executors, calls him a friend, and expresses complete confidence in him. She asks him to consult Cowes if questions arise; Flense reassures her that matters will be handled as she herself would handle them. This transfer of authority is the immediate condition that makes his later betrayal damaging: he has been entrusted not only with routine advice but with the ability to act on the company’s behalf.

The later accounting review identifies the structural weakness beneath that personal confidence. The accountants explain that Flense had extraordinary powers to acquire and sell properties for Duke Logging, with no contract limiting his actions on the company’s behalf. He was an employee, not a partner or stockholder, and the review finds that moral responsibility was the only prohibition on wrongdoing. The episode exposes how a business built on informal trust can leave corporate assets vulnerable when authority is broad and oversight is inadequate.

Absconding and Discovery

Cowes eventually brings Lavinia and Dieter the news that Flense has left the city and the country for parts unknown with a substantial portion of Duke and Breitsprecher’s funds. Annag Duncan has gone with him. The announcement turns Lavinia’s confidence into a public financial crisis: the man she had empowered to represent her interests has vanished with company money, and an associate has joined his flight.

The accountants’ investigation shows that the loss is not limited to the funds taken when Flense disappeared. He had secretly sold the company’s woodlands, lumber barges, and warehouse contents. Lavinia responds that she had trusted him personally and conducted business with him by gentleman’s agreement, as her father had done. The auditors answer that this time she has been defrauded. Flense’s defining reversal is therefore from trusted administrator to a figure whose access enabled extensive disposals of company property. The evidence establishes his flight and the concealed sales, but does not state where he goes or what ultimately becomes of him.