East India

by Colin Falconer

  They were met in the harbour by a painter from the shore and he scrambled down the cleats to board her, followed by Heer Raemburch and his officers. Brown-backed natives bent to the oars, rowed them past the other Indiamen in the harbour and towards the forbidding walls of the castle. The cannons on the battlements pointed towards the green jungles and a distant unseen enemy. The castle was still under siege by the Sultan of Mataram, the soldiers he had abandoned on the reef had been headed here here to help fight this war. Another Company asset richly squandered, at least that’s what Governor Coen would say.

  They passed through the entrance to the Waterpoort, gliding along the canal that divided fortress from town, past the guardhouse and merchant's houses with their white Dutch gables and tree shaded courtyards, the supplies store, the arsenal, the armoury and the Kirche. They reached the landing steps just on sunset.

  Darkness fell quickly.

  Native slaves led the way inside with torches. Ambroise saw several corpses swinging from the gibbets, and the stink of them stayed in his nostrils long after he entered the castle.

  Chapter 59

  The Houtman Rocks

  “SALOMON,” Christiaan said.

  Look at the fear in this man's eyes, he thought, how the blood has drained from his cheeks, how his hands shake! The little Jew could not keep a secret if his life depended on it--which in many ways, it does.

  “Salomon, we need to talk.”

  Christiaan sat on the little stool the Jew had fashioned for himself outside his lean-to tent, a piece of driftwood perched on two coral slabs.

  “Sit down,” he said and Salomon hesitated, then dropped obediently onto his haunches on the hard ground.

  “Give it to me,” Christiaan said.

  Salomon contrived to look puzzled, did a poor job of it. “What is it you want, Heer Undermerchant?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I don't, Heer Undermerchant.”

  “Do you want me to send David Krueger and Steenhower over to search for stolen Company goods? Krueger has never liked you, Salomon. You know that.”

  “But...Commandeur Secor said that...”

  “Commandeur Secor is not here. I am the senior VOC man now and I am responsible for all Company goods. Should anything befall them, I am the one who will be held responsible, so I think it is better that you hand the casket over to me for my safekeeping.”

  Salomon got to his feet, but his kees were shaking so badly he could barely stand. He went inside his tent and came out a few moments later holding a carved wooden casket. He handed it to Christiaan.

  “The key,” Christiaan said, and held out his hand.

  Salomon reached into his coat and gave it to him. Christiaan put it in his pocket.

  “There is something else.”

  Salomon hesitated then went back inside a second time and reappeared holding a small wooden crate, no larger than a wine flagon.

  “I don't know,” Christiaan said, shaking his head.

  “Heer Undermerchant?”

  “I don't know if I can use you or not,” he said, appearing fretful, and then got up and walked away, leaving Salomon to sleepless nights and troubled, fearful days.

  Chapter 60

  Batavia Fort

  AMBROISE sat at the window of the governor's apartments, holding a glass of Raemburch’s fine French brandy, watching the lighters hurry like water beetles between the Indiamen anchored in the gage roads and the shore. The unfinished gateway of the castle lay directly below, a painful reminder of his failure. Much of the great portal that the Amsterdam stonemasons had fashioned for the gate now lay under the waves beating around the Houtman Rocks.

  Gossip about the disaster had travelled quickly around the tiny colony. Old friends who had welcomed him with elaborate sympathy that first night now treated him with a great deal more circumspection. They did not snub him, exactly, but he understood they were waiting to see what Governor Coen would make of his actions before they declared themselves friends.

  Ambroise passed every hour of this waiting in an agony of self examination. He was in poor health. He still had fever and this had now been compounded by the flux. He found he could not digest the rich foods and wines they offered him after so many weeks living on plain water and hard biscuit. His cheeks were hollow, his vitality gone; he looked in a mirror and saw a yellowish skeleton, grotesque in its borrowed finery.

  He did not want others to know how sick he really was. Although he dreaded the prospect of another long sea voyage, his abiding fear was that Coen would not grant him command of the rescue ship that would return for the Utrecht.

  His redemption now lay on the Houtman Rocks.

  Every night since their rescue, he had lain sleepless in his bed, asking himself the same question over and over: Should I have acted differently?

  “By the way, Ambroise,” Raemburch said, breaking their silence. “I believe there was a certain lady named Cornelia Noorstrandt among the passengers on the Utrecht.”

  He felt a dull ache in his chest at the mention of her name.

  “Indeed.”

  “Did she survive the wreck?”

  “I saw her myself onto the boat,” he said. Not literally true, he supposed, but true enough. He tried not to let Raemburch see how his enquiry had disturbed him. Not a moment passed when he did not think about her with longing, or with guilt. “She was on her way here to join her husband,” he added.

  “Such irony.”

  “Your Excellency?”

  “He's dead. I just heard today. Died of the fevers, two months back, while you were on the way from Table Bay.”

  It was like a stab in the heart. If not for the skipper and his stupidity then, she would have arrived in Batavia a widow, and he would have been free to pursue her.

  She could have been his.

  His.

  “You look pale. Are you ill?”

  “A touch of fever. It is nothing.”

  “Perhaps you should take to your bed.”

  “You are right; I shall have an early night. I will be fine in the morning. Goodnight.”

  He finished his wine and returned to his apartments but still he could not sleep. Instead he stood at the window, staring at the night sky, wondering if she was still alive, looking up at this same distant moon, waiting for his return.

  Chapter 61

  GOVERNOR Jan Pieterszen Coen looked resplendent, his black beard neatly trimmed, wearing a ceremonial ruff and a thick chain of gold that nestled against a doublet of black velvet. He was a legend in the Company, with a reputation as a ruthless administrator, a man of pious disposition and rigid discipline. His dark eyes examined Ambroise with unbending gaze; a fevered and half starved skeleton without his fine letters of introduction, a man of bad news and trembling hand.

  He regarded him from an immense carved chair, finely posed as if for a portrait. A dark tapestry hung on the wall behind him.

  “So,” he said, ‘you have lost the ship and left the people.”

  Ambroise gaped at him. Judgment had been delivered before a word could be said. “The wrecking of the ship...was no fault of mine,” he stammered.

  “You took a sighting from instruments?”

  “Indeed, Heer Governor, on the island where we...”

  “What was it?”

  “The last position, the day before the disaster, was at thirty degrees on a heading north by east...”

  “The Houtman Rocks are at twenty-eight and a third degrees, of which all skippers were warned in the directive you would have received from me before you left Amsterdam, is that not correct?”

  “I warned the skipper...”

  “Warned him?”

  “I took issue with him. He was of a mind that we were still six hundred miles from the Great Southland. I had been sick and...”

  Coen dismissed this quibbling with a wave of his hand. “We have established that the Utrecht is lost to us. What of the other Company goods, with which you were entrusted?”<
br />
  “I was unable to salvage the chests. They are still on board the ship.”

  “You left the ship without first salvaging the money?”

  “I meant only to restore order among the passengers on the land. But then the wind came up and I was unable to...”

  “And the jewels?”

  “Those are in the care of my assistant, Salomon du Chesne.”

  Coen toyed with the heavy ruby ring on his first finger. His face might have been carved out of granite. “I see.”

  “By your leave, I beg that I be given a fast yacht so that I can return as soon as possible to the wreck for the people stranded there, so that I...”

  “Ah, yes, the people.”

  “I fear for those left there...”

  “As you should.”

  Ambroise wanted to say to him: but this is not at all how it happened. I have my reasons for doing as I did. But Coen's gaze stilled him.

  “You do know that your first duty was to secure the Company goods?”

  “It was not my intention to leave them. And afterwards I made every attempt to retrieve them...”

  “And the people. What possessed you to abandon them without government?”

  “After the wrecking of the ship I did not trust the captain, Jacob Schellinger, to return as he promised, so I...”

  “You trusted him to navigate you onto the Houtman Rocks.”

  Ambroise gripped the edge of the great desk; the dark tapestries and the candles in their silver holders seemed to spin around him. Exhaustion, sleeplessness, fever, flux; he was coming apart. He took a moment to compose himself.

  “There is the matter of the attack on the woman,” Ambroise said.

  “You had many untoward adventures on the Utrecht, didn't you, Commandeur?”

  “None of my doing.”

  “So you say.” He examined the documents in front of him. “Your high boatswain, Jan Decker, shall be put to question, and we shall discover the truth of your allegation against him. The woman...”

  “Vrouwe Noorstrandt,” Ambroise said.

  “As you say. Her husband was Boudewyn. Are you all right, Commandeur?”

  “By your leave, Heer Governeur, I feel unwell.”

  “I dare say your adventures have exhausted you. They would have exhausted anyone. Let us hope they do not also bankrupt the Company. We shall enquire more thoroughly into this matter. In the meantime we shall do our best to make you as comfortable as possible. You should get some rest after your adventures.”

  Ambroise was shown out, his boots echoed on the flags outside the Governeur's office. He should have been thinking about the lost guilders. But all he could think of was Cornelia Noorstrandt, perhaps now just bleached bones on the Houtman Rocks.

  Chapter 62

  The long island

  IT HAD rained twice while they were on the long island, but barely enough to put a few inches in the bottom of the water barrels, and their situation was desperate. They lit several fires but no one came to get them.

  Corporal Westerveld wondered if perhaps a plague had broken out among those on the other island. But Michiel knew what those bastards had done. We shall have to look to our own salvation now, he thought. An island this size, there must be water somewhere.

  The sun was sinking low over the ocean, the shoreline fading to grey, the dead coral on the beach like piles of small bones. The mutton birds were headed back to the shore with the sunset, whirring and circling overhead.

  Michiel watched them. Birds have to drink, he thought, same as a man does. Where do they get their water?

  One of them swooped down and disappeared into a hole at the rim of the limestone ledge. He stood up and followed. He noticed a gap in the rock, not much bigger than a man's fist.

  He scrabbled at the loose rock with his fingers, pushed away the crumbling coral slabs, making a gap large enough to put his arm through. The bird came screeching out, and as it did he heard the soft plop of a loose rock dropping into water.

  Water.

  A mutton bird had just saved their lives.

  Chapter 63

  Batavia Fort

  HE LOOKS so sure of himself, Ambroise thought, striding in here in his sea boots and clean white linen shirt, his beard trimmed. A colossus of a man, even the way he towered over the Lord General seemed disrespectful. Coen's cold and deep-set eyes studied the skipper warily, like a man weighing the prospects of taming a large and unfriendly dog.

  The skipper nodded to Ambroise, who was seated in a chair behind Coen, at last relieved of the Lord General's forbidding gaze.

  Coen came direct to the point. “My preliminary investigations into the wrecking of the Utrecht are complete,” he said. “I have recommended to the Council that your conduct and seamanship should be more thoroughly investigated.”

  A muscle rippled in the skipper's jaw.

  “Do you realise the size of the loss the Company has taken due to your negligence?”

  “When we return, we will salvage the Company's goods, you have my word on it.”

  “You will not be part of the salvage mission, captain. Commandeur Secor is returning on the Zandaam, and that ship already has a skipper.”

  It was the first time Ambroise had ever seen the skipper's confidence punctured. He seemed astonished that the Governor-General could contemplate such an action.

  “That mongrel couldn't find the way to his own privy in broad daylight!’ he said and seemed about to slam his fist on the Governor-General's desk but thought better of it. “I am the only skipper in the whole Company who could find that wreck again. You ask the commandeur about my powers of navigation!’ He looked up, waiting for Ambroise to repeat the promise he had made that night in the yawl.

  “I have already questioned Commandeur Secor at some length about your conduct on the voyage from Holland. He has given me a full report on a certain incident that occurred in Table Bay, and this has been corroborated by the skipper of the Zandaam. He has also told me how you corrupted the morals of the ship with your relationship with Vrouwe Noorstrandt's maid.”

  The look on the bastard's face. If they were in any other place the skipper would have gone for his throat. But in the presence of the Lord General, with his guards standing around the room ready with their cutlasses and pikes, he could do nothing. His hands bunched into fists at his side and a vein bulged at his temple.

  “Also, we have put the high boatswain to the question. He has confessed that you were the instigator of the outrageous attack on Vrouwe Noorstrandt.”

  Ambroise saw the poisonous look on the skipper's face dissolve into terror. “Of course the bastard's going to blame me!’

  Coen said nothing for a long time; it was a deadly silent. “You forget who you are talking to, captain.”

  His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat like a cork. “You want your money, you have to send me back on the Zandaam.” He pointed a finger at Ambroise. “You don't think he can find it for you?”

  “Of course Sinjeur Secor will find it. He has no other choice.”

  Coen sat back, the interview over. Three guards stepped out of the shadows at the back of the room and surrounded the skipper.

  “Captain Jacob Schellinger, I am arresting you on charges of gross negligence in relation to the sinking of the retourschip Utrecht. Take him away.”

  The skipper lurched forward but he did not get very far. The guards held him, and dragged him struggling and roaring out of the office.

  Well. That was over.

  Did he really think me such a fool? Ambroise thought, that I rose to this high office by being utterly without guile? Did he think I did not guess what he planned for me after the wreck, that my admiration for his seamanship would blind me to the cost of my own survival, especially with a rogue bosun in the same boat?

  But when Coen turned around to look at him his smile was gone. Ambroise merely looked grave, as befitting the situation.

  Chapter 64

  The Houtman Rocks

 
THE culling was under way.

  They had started with those soldiers whose loyalty Steenhower questioned, like Luyster, and the handful of other sailors and gunners who could not be relied on. A few had been killed secretly at night, their throats cut as they stumbled out of their lean-tos to relieve themselves in the bushes; their bodies were dragged out into the shallows for the shark fish to find. Others met with accidents on fishing and hunting expeditions on the smaller islands.

  A number had fled during the night, suspecting they would be next, taking their chances with the shark fish and the currents to swim to the seal island.

  Well, much good it would do them, even if they made it, Christiaan thought.

  Today, another smudge of smoke hung in the sky above the long island, the third day running. Their water should have run out by now. How were they still alive?

  “You don’t think they actually did find water, do you?” Joost said.

  “It’s possible,” Gilles Clement said. “Van der Beeck wouldn't know water if he drowned in it.” They all laughed. Oliver van der Beeck growled and wanted to fight him but Christiaan put up a hand and hissed at him to sit down and be still.

  “We should have dealt with them when we had the chance,” Krueger muttered.

  Well, that was bold, Christiaan thought. Now he thinks himself so hardened with bad deeds he can criticise me. “You squabble like farmers’ wives at the market,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. Some of the women were watching them, wondering about this secret gathering on the beach, the lowered voices. “We can hunt them down like mutton birds, any time we like. It makes no difference. For now we have more important business.”