Sedley Duke

Sedley Duke is the grandson of Charles Duquet through Nicolaus, one of the boys Duquet adopted in 1713, rather than a biological Duquet descendant. He inherits from his father, Bernard’s brother Nicolaus, a substantial estate that includes forests, factories, ships, and other property. His story joins the Duke family’s uncertain succession to a developing commercial vision: though he does not become the expert timber assessor Bernard needs, he thinks expansively about the company’s future and ultimately leaves much of his estate to James Duke, whose resemblance to him becomes an unsettling sign of inheritance in both property and family history.

Family and inheritance

Sedley is one of the three children of Nicolaus and Mercy, alongside Patience and Piet. Nicolaus was adopted by Charles Duquet with Jan in Amsterdam; a third adopted son, Bernard, came from the streets of La Rochelle. The distinction between adoption and blood becomes consequential generations later: Tetrazinni explains to Lavinia Duke that her descent from Nicolaus gives her no Duquet blood, while the surviving blood descendants of Charles Duquet descend from his biological son Outger. Sedley nevertheless belongs to the adopted family line that inherits and operates the Duke enterprise.

The family’s history is carried through both formal inheritance and intimate recollection. When James visits the house he has inherited from Sedley, its hall stand recalls the daily routine of Sedley’s homecoming: hat and coat put away, the public self of the city left behind. James remembers their silent meals at opposite ends of a sixteen-foot table, then shakes the memory loose. The house preserves a domestic relationship marked less by conversation than by repeated gestures and distance.

The timber business and succession

Bernard sees Sedley as a possible successor but finds that he has little aptitude for the landlooker’s work. Sedley accompanies his uncle into standing timber, yet measurements do not hold his attention: even the difference between linear and piece measurements leaves him at a loss, and estimating the volume of an eighty-foot tapering log proves beyond him. He asks whether the family could simply hire a surveyor to identify valuable trees. Bernard rejects the shortcut. The business, he insists, depends on knowing the timber and its likely yield in board feet; outside surveyors may be inaccurate or dishonest, submitting false maps and reports or misjudging rotten and hollow trees. Sedley’s failure is therefore not merely a personal weakness but a problem for a family firm whose fortunes depend on information gathered in difficult conditions.

Sedley’s business judgment appears in another form when the Wentworth faction proposes social introductions and access to Duke pine holdings in exchange for a fair price and shared costs of moving logs. George Pickering Duke sees the social connections as useful. Sedley, however, fears that access could open the way to unauthorized cutting, false accounts, legal interference, or seizure of the family’s land. The elderly Jan and Nicolaus enter before the agreement is made; after the offer is softened to limit cutting to mutually agreed plots, Nicolaus orders the visitors out. Sedley’s caution is part of the family’s defense of control over its forests, not simply resistance to a commercial opportunity.

Sedley’s plans for expansion

During Nicolaus’s illness, Sedley visits his father daily, and he and Jan confer with him about the business. Nicolaus comes to admire the animated young man’s face as that of a businessman. Sedley argues that the company is too narrowly concentrated in New England. Boston’s prospects, in his view, are constrained by English control, weak financial institutions, and the movement of skilled workers toward Portsmouth, Salem, and other towns. His analysis begins with regional limits and points toward a longer horizon.

Sedley proposes exploring timber in the Ohio Valley and farther north and west, where forestland can be acquired cheaply and other Virginia investors are already looking ahead. The value of forest, he argues, must be considered years before it becomes money in the pocket. He also revisits the family’s abandoned interest in shipbuilding. Charles Duquet’s disappearance had interrupted the idea of owning a shipyard, but Sedley believes the time has come to acquire one: a ship carrying sawn planks to the French West Indies might pay for itself, and a return cargo of molasses or sugar could add another source of profit. The proposal treats forests, mills, ships, and overseas trade as parts of a connected business rather than isolated holdings.

Inheritance and family resemblance

Sedley’s will makes James the recipient of half his rich estate, a reversal that leaves James elated and confused. The bequest includes Sedley’s dwelling north of Tremont Street, its six acres of garden land, orchard and meadow, a twelve-stall stable, carriages and matched horses, and nearly two million acres of Maine forest passed down from Charles Duke’s old partner, Forgeron. It also encompasses warehouses of lumber, Ohio timberlands, interests in ships, potash works, a shingle factory, salt marsh, investments, household goods, and a library of eighty-four books. The inventory makes the inheritance a working commercial world as well as a private home.

The will’s choice is especially striking because James is not the son Sedley has known within the family. At the gathering where James meets his cousins, Freegrace Duke remarks on how closely he resembles Sedley, as though Sedley had returned younger. Hugh Trumbull has the same reaction when James arrives to hear the will. James dislikes having his appearance continually interpreted through his father, but the resemblance makes succession visible: an inheritance of land and enterprises arrives alongside an unwanted likeness and the memories of a strained household.

Narrative role

Sedley’s place in the family history exposes the difference between competence, ambition, and legitimacy. Bernard’s practical standard is exact knowledge of trees and timber yields; Sedley cannot meet it, yet he can identify the danger of uncontrolled access and imagine a wider commercial geography. His proposed expansion toward the Ohio Valley and shipbuilding contrasts with the family’s reliance on established New England holdings and local connections.

The later revelation of the family tree complicates the meaning of his inheritance without undoing it. Sedley belongs to an adopted line that has built and held the Duke fortune, while the novel also discloses living blood descendants of Charles Duquet outside that line. The tension between legal possession and biological descent gives Sedley’s estate a double significance: it passes the material power of the family to James, while leaving open the question of who can claim the deeper family legacy.