The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  Wetz works the wheel until the Phoebus is set to port tack.

  Ledbetter, the well-named leadsman, plumbs the depth, clinging to the clew line.

  Halfway to the dripping sky, men straddle the topgallant yards …

  The prow describes an arc of one hundred and forty degrees …

  … and with a tight lurch, the frigate veers toward Nagasaki.

  A smoke-dried Dane makes a Finn’s cock of a tangled vang.

  “Might you excuse me for a moment, sir?” Hovell indicates the Dane.

  “Go,” says Penhaligon. His curtness signifies, And don’t hurry back.

  “In fact,” he tells Wren, “let us take in the view from the prow.”

  “An excellent idea, sir,” agrees the second lieutenant.

  Penhaligon proceeds at a gouty hobble as far as the foremast shrouds. Cutlip and a dozen marines watch the remaining guard boat, just a hundred yards dead ahead: a meager twenty-footer with a small deckhouse, clumsier-looking than a dhow. Its half dozen swordsmen and two inspectors appear to be arguing about the correct response.

  “Stand your ground, pretties,” murmurs Wren. “We’ll slice you in two.”

  “A gentle peppering,” suggests Cutlip, “might clarify their senses, sir.”

  “Agreed, but,” Penhaligon addresses the marines, “don’t kill them, men.”

  “Aye, sir,” reply the marines, as they prepare their rifles.

  Cutlip waits until the gap is closed to fifty yards. “Fire, lads!”

  Splinters fly off the guard boat’s stanchion; the sea shatters into spray. One inspector crouches; his colleague dives into the deckhouse. Two oarsmen jump to their positions and haul the boat out of the Phoebus’s path—and not before time. The prow affords a fine view of the soldiers: they stare up at the Europeans, unflinching and unafraid, but make no move to attack with arrows or spears or to give chase. Their boat lists clumsily in the Phoebus’s wake and is lost astern in little time.

  “Steady-handed work, men,” Penhaligon compliments the marines.

  “Load your next round, boys,” says Cutlip. “Mind the rain doesn’t dampen your powder.”

  Nagasaki, spilling down the mountainside, is growing closer.

  The Phoebus’s bowsprit points eight or ten degrees east of Dejima: the Union Jack flies stiff as a board from the jack staff.

  Hovell rejoins the captain’s intimates without a word.

  Penhaligon glimpses a wretched hamlet shat out by a muddy creek.

  “You seem pensive, Mr. Hovell,” says Wren. “Upset stomach?”

  “Your concern, Mr. Wren”—Hovell stares ahead—“is unwarranted.”

  Spring-heeled Malouf shimmies down the fish davit. “About a hundred native troops are assembled, sir, in a plaza just ashore of Dejima.”

  “But no boats putting out to meet us?”

  “Not a one so far, Captain: Clovelly’s watching from the foretop. The factory appears to be abandoned—even the trees have legged it.”

  “Excellent. I desire the Dutchmen to be seen to be cowards. Back aloft with you, Mr. Malouf.”

  Ledbetter’s soundings, relayed to Wetz, remain comfortable.

  The drizzle is heavier, but the wind stays pushy and brisk.

  After two or three terse minutes, Dejima’s urgent bell can be heard.

  Gunner Waldron shouts in the gundeck below: “Open starboard hatches, men!”

  The gunport hatches crack like bones against the bows.

  “Sir.” Talbot has his telescope. “Two Europeans on the watchtower.”

  “Oh?” The captain finds the pair through his own telescope and eight hundred yards of rainy air. The thinner of the two wears a wide-brimmed hat like a Spanish brigand’s. The other is bulkier and appears to wave at the Phoebus with a stick as he leans on the railing. A monkey sits on the corner post. “Mr. Talbot, rouse me out Daniel Snitker.”

  “They fancy,” mocks Wren, “we shan’t fire so long as they stand there.”

  “Dejima is their ship,” says Hovell. “They are on their quarterdeck.”

  “They’ll scurry away,” predicts Cutlip, “when they know we’re in earnest.”

  The Phoebus is seven hundred yards shy of the eastern bend of the bay. Wetz bellows, “Hard a-port!” and the frigate rotates through eighty degrees, bringing her starboard bow running parallel to the shorefront, two rifle shots away. They pass a rectangular compound of warehouses: on the roofs, huddling under umbrellas and straw cloaks, are men dressed like the Chinese merchants Penhaligon encountered at Macao.

  “Fischer spoke of a Chinese Dejima,” recalls Wren. “That must be it.”

  Gunner Waldron appears. “The starboard guns are to be primed now, sir?”

  “All twelve to fire in three or four minutes, Mr. Waldron. Go to it.”

  “Aye, sir!” Below, he shouts at his men, “Feed the fat boys!”

  Talbot arrives with Snitker, who is unsure what attitude to strike.

  “Mr. Hovell, lend Snitker your telescope. Bid him identify the men on the watchtower.” Snitker’s response, when it comes, contains the name De Zoet. “He says that the one with the stick is Marinus the physician, the one in the grotesque hat is Jacob de Zoet. The monkey is named William Pitt.” Snitker, unprompted, says a few sentences to Hovell.

  Penhaligon estimates the distance to be five hundred yards.

  Hovell continues: “Mr. Snitker asked me to say, Captain, that had you chosen him as your envoy, the outcome would have been very different, but that had he known you were a Vandal bent on destruction, he’d never have guided you into these waters.”

  How useful, Hovell, thinks Penhaligon, to have Snitker utter what you dare not. “Ask Snitker how the Japanese would treat him were he to be thrown overboard here.”

  Hovell translates, and Snitker withdraws like a whipped dog.

  Penhaligon turns back to the Dutchmen on the watchtower.

  At closer range, Marinus, the scholar-physician, looks lumpen and uncouth.

  De Zoet is younger and better turned out than expected.

  Dutch courage, Penhaligon thinks, versus English munitions.

  Waldron’s torso appears above the hatch. “At your word, Captain.”

  The Oriental rain is fine as lace on the sailors’ leathern faces.

  “Give it to them, Mr. Waldron, straight in the teeth.”

  “Aye, sir.” Waldron announces the order below: “Starboard crews, fire!”

  Major Cutlip, at Penhaligon’s side, hums the melody for “Three blind mice, three blind mice …”

  Out of the gunports, over the bulwarks, fly the flintmen’s cries of “Clear!”

  The captain watches the Dutchmen staring down the mouths of his guns.

  Lapwings fly over stone water: their wingtips kiss, drip, and ripple.

  Work for a soldier or madman, Penhaligon thinks, not a doctor and shopkeeper.

  The first of the guns erupts with a skull-cracking ferocity; Penhaligon’s middle-aged heart pulsates as it did in his first fight with an American privateer a quarter century ago; eleven guns follow, over seven or eight seconds.

  One warehouse collapses; the seaward wall is smashed in two places; roof tiles spray upward; and, most gratifyingly, the captain is confident as he squints through the smoke and destruction, De Zoet and Marinus are scuttled to earth with their tails firmly between their Netherlander shanks.

  “… she chopped off their tails,” Cutlip sings, “with a carving knife …”

  The wind blows the gun smoke back over the deck, bathing the officers.

  Talbot sees them first: “They’re still on the watchtower, sir.”

  Penhaligon hurries over to the waist hatch, his foot howling for mercy and his stick striking the deck: damn you, damn you, damn you … The lieutenants follow like nervous spaniels, expecting him to topple. “Ready the guns for a second round,” he bellows down the hatch to Waldron. “Ten guineas for the gun crew who cut down the watchtower!”

  Waldron’s voic
e shouts back, “Aye aye, sir! You heard the captain, crews!”

  Furious, Penhaligon drags himself back to the quarterdeck.

  “Hold her steady, Mr. Wetz,” he tells the sailing master.

  Wetz is engaged in an instinctive algebraic sum involving wind speed, sail yardage, and rudder angle. “Holding her steady, Captain.”

  “Captain,” Cutlip is speaking, “at a hundred and twenty yards my lads could embroider that brassy duo with our Brown Besses.”

  Tristram, the captain was told by HMS Blenheim’s Captain Frederick, was minced by chain shot on the quarterdeck: he could have thrown himself against the deck and possibly lived, like his lesser warrant officers, but not Tristram, who never blinked at danger …

  “I’d not risk grounding us, Major. The day would end badly.”

  Remember Charlie’s bulldog, Penhaligon sighs, and the cricket bat?

  “The smoke,” the captain blinks and mutters, “is wringing out my eyes.”

  Cowards, like crows, he believes, consume the courageous dead.

  “This all brings to mind,” Wren tells Talbot and the midshipmen, “my Mauritius campaign aboard the Swiftsure: three French frigates had the legs of us and, like a pack of baying foxhounds …”

  “Sir,” Hovell says quietly, “might I offer you my cape? The rain …”

  Penhaligon chooses to bridle. “Am I in my dotage already?”

  Robert Hovell retreats into Lieutenant Hovell. “No offense meant, sir.”

  Wetz shouts; topmen reply; ropes strain; blocks squeak.

  A tall, thin warehouse on Dejima belatedly collapses with a shriek and clatter.

  “… so finding myself stranded on the enemy ship,” Wren is saying, “in the dusk, smoke, and pell-mell, I pulled down my cap, took a lantern, followed a monkey down to the powder locker—’twas black as night—slipped into the adjacent cordage locker where I played the firebug …”

  Waldron reappears. “Sir, the guns’re primed for the second round.”

  Strike the pose of naval officers, thinks Penhaligon, watching De Zoet and Marinus …

  … then you may die as naval officers. “Ten guineas, Mr. Waldron.”

  Waldron disappears. His bedlamite’s yell orders, “Let ’em have it!”

  Small cogs of time meet and mesh. The flintmen cry, “Clear!”

  Explosions hurl the shots in beautiful, terrible, screaming arcs …

  … into a warehouse roof; a wall; and one ball passes within a yard of De Zoet and Marinus. They drop to the platform, but all the other balls fly over Dejima …

  Damp smoke obscures the view; the wind lifts the damp smoke.

  A noise comes like a shrieking trombone, or a great tree, falling …

  … it comes from behind Dejima: an appalling crash of timber and masonry.

  De Zoet helps Marinus stand; his stick is gone; they look landward.

  Courage in a vilified enemy, Penhaligon thinks, is a distasteful discovery.

  “Nobody can accuse you, sir,” says Wren, “of failing to give due warning.”

  Power is a man’s means, thinks the captain, of composing the future …

  “These medieval Asiatic pygmies,” Cutlip assures him, “shan’t forget today.”

  … but the composition—he removes his hat—has a way of composing itself.

  Unearthly screaming boils up through the hatches from the gundeck.

  Penhaligon knows, Someone caught the recoil, with nauseous certainty.

  Hovell hurries to investigate, just as Waldron’s head emerges.

  The gunner’s eyes bear a hideous afterimage. “’Nother round, sir?”

  John Penhaligon asks, “Who was hit, Mr. Waldron?”

  “Michael Tozer—the breech rope snapped clean through, sir.”

  Stabbed sobs and rasped screams sound in the background.

  “Is his leg to come off, do you suppose?”

  “It’s already off, sir, aye. Poor bastard’s bein’ taken to Mr. Nash now.”

  “Sir—” Hovell, Penhaligon knows, wants permission to go with Tozer.

  “Go, Lieutenant. Might I have the loan of your cape, after all?”

  “Aye, sir.” Robert Hovell gives his captain his cape and goes below.

  A midshipman helps him into the garment: it has Hovell’s warmth.

  The captain turns to the watchtower, drunk with venom.

  The watchtower still stands, as do the men; and the Dutch flag flies.

  “Demonstrate our carronades. Four crews, Mr. Waldron.”

  The midshipmen look at one another. Major Cutlip hisses with pleasure.

  Malouf asks Talbot in a low voice: “Won’t carronades lack kick, sir?”

  Penhaligon replies: “They are built for closer-range smashing, yes, but …”

  De Zoet, he sees, is watching him through his telescope.

  The captain says, “I want that damned Dutch flag torn to rags.”

  A house on the hill spews oily smoke in the wet and falling air.

  The captain thinks, I want those damned Dutchmen torn to rags.

  The gun crews clamber up from below, grim-faced from Tozer’s accident. They remove panels from the quarterdeck’s bulwarks and maneuver the short-bore wheeled carronades into position.

  Penhaligon orders, “Load up with chain shot, Mr. Waldron.”

  “If we’re aiming at the flag, sir, then …” Gunner Waldron indicates the watchtower, just five yards below the top of the flagpole.

  “Four cones of whistling, spinning, jagged, broken chains”—Major Cutlip shines like an aroused lecher—“and jagged links of metal will wipe the smiles off their Netherland faces …”

  “… and their faces off their heads,” adds Wren, “and their heads off their bodies.”

  The powder monkeys appear from the hatch with their bags of explosives.

  The captain recognizes Moff the Penzance urchin. He is pale.

  Gunpowder is packed into the short, fat muzzle by a bung of rags.

  Chain shot rattles from rusted scuttles tipped inside the carronades’ barrels. “Aim at the flag, crews,” Waldron is saying. “Not so high, Hal Yeovil.”

  Penhaligon’s right leg is become a pole of scalding pain.

  My gout is winning, he knows. I shall be bed-bound within the hour.

  Dr. Marinus appears to be remonstrating with his countryman.

  But De Zoet, the captain consoles himself, shall be dead within the minute.

  “Double-tie those breech ropes,” orders Waldron. “You saw why.”

  Might Hovell be right? the captain wonders. Has my pain been thinking for me these last three days?

  “Carronades ready to fire, sir,” Waldron is saying, “at your word.”

  The captain fills his lungs to pass the death sentence on the two Dutchmen.

  They know. Marinus grips the rail, looking away, flinching, but staying put. De Zoet removes his hat; his hair is copper, untamable, bedraggled …

  … and Penhaligon sees Tristram, his beautiful, one-and-only, red-haired son, waiting for death …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE WATCHTOWER ON DEJIMA

  Noon on October 20, 1800

  WILLIAM PITT SNORTS AT THE SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS ON THE stairs. Jacob de Zoet keeps his telescope trained on the Phoebus: the frigate is a thousand yards out, tacking adroitly against the wet northwesterly wind on a course to bring her past the Chinese factory—some inhabitants are sitting on their roofs to watch the spectacle—and alongside Dejima.

  “So Arie Grote finally gave you his alleged boa constrictor hat?”

  “I ordered all hands to the magistracy, Doctor. Even yours.”

  “Stay here, Domburger, and you’ll be needing a physician.”

  The frigate opens her gunports, clack, clack, clack, hammers on nails.

  “Or else”—Marinus blows his nose—“a gravedigger. The rain is in for the day. Look.” He rustles something. “Kobayashi sends you a raincoat.”

  Jacob lowers his tel
escope. “Did its previous owner die of pox?”

  “A little kindness for a dead enemy, so your ghost won’t haunt him.”

  Jacob puts the straw raincoat on his shoulders. “Where’s Eelattu?”

  “Where all sane men are: at our magistracy quarters.”

  “Was your harpsichord transported without mishap?”

  “Harpsichord and pharmacopoeia alike; come and join them.”

  Filaments of rain brush Jacob’s face. “Dejima is my station.”

  “If you’re supposing the English shan’t fire because a jumped-up clerk—”

  “I suppose nothing of the sort, Doctor, but—” He notices twenty or more scarlet-coated marines climbing up the shrouds. “They’re to repel boarders … probably. To take potshots, she’d have to come within … a hundred and twenty yards. There’d be too much risk of grounding the ship in waters hostile to British hulls.”

  “I’d rather a swarm of musket balls than a volley of broadsides.”

  Grant me courage, Jacob prays. “My life is in the hands of God.”

  “Oh, the grief,” Marinus heaves, “those few pious words can bring about.”

  “Repair to the magistracy, then, so you won’t have to suffer them.”

  Marinus leans on the railing. “Young Oost was thinking you must have some secret defense up your sleeve, something to reverse our reverses.”

  “My defense,” Jacob removes his Psalter from his breast pocket, “is my faith.”

  In the shelter of his greatcoat, Marinus examines the old, thick volume and fingers the musket ball, fast in its crater. “Whose heart was this boring into?”

  “My grandfather’s, but it’s been in my family since Calvin’s day.”

  Marinus reads the title page. “Psalms? Domburger, you are a two-legged cabinet of wonders! How did you smuggle ashore this rattle-bag of uneven translations from the Aramaic?”

  “Ogawa Uzaemon turned a blind eye at a crucial moment.”

  “‘It is He that giveth salvation unto kings,’” reads Marinus, “‘who delivereth David His servant from the hurtful sword.’”

  The wind carries the sound of orders being relayed about the Phoebus.

  In Edo Square, an officer shouts at his men; a chorus replies.

  A few yards behind them, the Dutch flag flaps and rustles.