Then, a few days ago, great flocks of geese were driven in from the islands to be plucked by the townswomen whose employment this is. I watched a woman at her task, the goose trapped neck first between her chapped calves. In a few minutes she pulled out its feathers, working both sides of the bird from breast to tail, and then released it, pink and naked, leaving by her feet a pile of feather and down. The bloody tail feathers are cleaned, cut and sold for quills. The lightest down plumps up pillows and mattresses. All day the air is filled with feather fragments that float through the narrow streets and settle on my clothes. Five times a year, I am told, the geese are brought to be plucked, five times returned to their island homes.
The people of Ely Isle like to stay upon their upland. They mistrust outsiders, not just foreigners such as I am, but all those from other places, especially their neighbours, the fensmen, who live out on the meres, and come to Ely only to trade. Though they are close as to miles, the fensmen are spoken of with lowered voices. I have seen townspeople cross themselves in the manner of the old religion when the fensmen pass. Witches are said to be common amongst them, and many, I heard an old man say, still practise the pagan religion that long ago held sway across these islands. Upon my enquiring what this might be, he said that the fensmen make offerings to pagan gods, and declared that no traveller who wishes to return ventures into that treacherous place. Wraiths and spirits live out on the meres also, he added. At night their fires burn and the fensmen pass through them without harm.
The world beyond the Great Level arrives slowly, carried by chapmen who hawk their goods in the streets and bring sheets of printed paper with the news. London news is also told abroad by the carters who go back and forth with eels, goose down and quills. London, I am told by one of them, is a place of felons and dissolute persons. War is again in the air, the struggle between the royal cause and those who want no king. Ireland declares for kings, and the old religion, and rebels against the republic. One day, as I walk up Fore Hill towards the cathedral, I chance on a detachment of soldiers fifty strong on horseback.
The sound of hooves on the flagstones rings loud off the sides of the buildings. A thickset man rides at the head of the group. His long leather coat is spotted with grease and a heavy helmet jogs his knee. I stand in the entrance to a mean shop and measure him with my eyes. He is of middle height and age. With little presence on a horse, he slouches in the saddle and holds his head poorly. He has no air of either modesty or grandeur. Sparse grey hair falls about his shoulders, through which his scalp is pink and visible. Even from a distance I see that he has a growth between his chin and lip that draws the eye to it as to a sore, and others over his lips and brows.
I turn to a native of the place who stands by me.
‘Sir, do you know this man?’
‘What is it to you?’ he asks and considers me keenly, as if I might be the agent of a foreign power. Though I know myself to be a stranger here, it is unpleasant to be brought up close to the disdain of one man for another, where war begins, and might begin at any time.
A young man turns to me as if to suggest without words an acceptance of my presence in this place, and says with kindness in his voice, ‘It is General Cromwell, come to raise troops for new wars abroad. He once lived here, in St Mary’s Street, so I know the look of him, though not every man does, or wishes to.’
So this is General Cromwell, who commands the army and was principal among those who killed the King. Many here were his supporters; but war has dulled their admiration and their joy at victory. Few run forward to thank him, or kiss his hand. No one cheers or presses close to his horse. General Cromwell does not have a face to love, or even a face to be afraid of.
The horsemen halt at the cathedral door and several foot soldiers come up. A table is called for and set on trestles. Cromwell does not dismount, but carries on towards his old house. Like the man of property he is, he has come to make sure it is in order before he leaves these shores.
Though at first reluctant, a few young men now begin to press up to the table. The harsh weather of the last winter has taken its toll. Food is scarce and most of those who push forward look ragged and poor. I watch one of them, urged on by his companions. As he approaches the table he stands up a little straighter, throws back his shoulders and tips up his chin. Looking at him, I see myself, two months before, advancing in that London room towards Mr Vermuyden, my maps and drawings in one hand.
The boy signs, and is gestured to one side. Others come up. One man jumps down from a passing cart and approaches, as if possessed of a sudden whim to leave his life and take another without a thought. The helmets of the soldiers glint behind the trestle; the horses sweat in the summer heat and stamp on the cobbles. They dip their heads and flick their tails to drive away the gathering flies. Swords poke out from the soldiers’ long leather coats. The sight excites those who are watching.
Someone shouts for General Cromwell, and more men press forward. Even I, a Dutchman with no notion of the past histories of these islands, feel that what has brought them here, besides hunger, is more than the hatreds that fester from the last wars and now burst out again. In this ruined place people long for something to happen. Men are restless creatures, and tired of standing at street corners, hungry and casting about for work. They chafe at inactivity. The horses, the arrival of General Cromwell, a sense of the danger that is to come: all this stirs the crowd like a sudden squall over a field of corn.
A young man, little more than a child, breaks out of a group, approaches the table and leans over it. A soldier holds out an old quill, but the boy seems to turn away. Then, right there, one of the soldiers comes up, pulls his hands behind his back, pushes his head down and marches him off. Though the boy screams and calls out no one runs forward to help, and I stand there, immobile like the rest.
I look round, but General Cromwell has not returned. The men next to me have already gone. Quickly, the whole crowd breaks up and disperses. I walk away not wanting to encounter a soldier. This is how an army is built, how young men go unsuspecting to war; and the people of this town, after years of fighting, do nothing to stop it.
Later, Van Hooghten, who has been here long enough to know, tells me that many are turning against Parliament. People are sullen. They do not speak out, but look to their own safety. Under the cloak of darkness rich men flee, he says, some to the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where the planters wish to proclaim Prince Charles their king.
The Prince has got clean away to The Hague, and waits for destiny to pick him out. His court grows daily. In ones and twos men of ambition loyal to the late King arrive there, and bring money, which they lend to the Prince in the hope of future reward. It is said this court is a racketing place, built upon all possible licentiousness. The more such tales are told here, the more the Dutch are reviled by sober men. Van Hooghten’s demand for vigilance now begins to gather sense. We are doubly spied-on and disliked, as improvers and as Dutchmen. I am the most careful of men, yet our purpose is now well known. Worse than this, I believe that my travelling box, which contains my instruments and contracts, is opened when I am out. The woman Suckling denies it, the girl who works for her being, she affirms, a drudge who would never give herself the trouble of disturbing a gentleman’s effects. I do not believe her, say nothing and plan to move my lodging as soon as I can find another. We continue our conversations in the evening and I begin to feel the words of the language separate from the general noise and sound one after another plain and clear.
As word of our work gets out, some dozen of the Ely Islanders come forward to offer us their services. Some say they know the meres, others that they worked on the embankments that were destroyed and so can be useful to us. Van Hooghten refuses every offer. None of the people native to this place are to be trusted, he says, as their conduct in the late war plainly shows. Discretion demands that we find our workmen from outside.
When at last we have the men we need, come from Holland and skilled in the a
rts of triangulation and drawing, it is past midsummer. The days henceforward are shorter and the tides higher. We must quickly map the islands and the watercourses before the rains come and the summer landscape sinks underwater.
I take great pleasure in making maps and charts and know that the creator himself is my guide. When he created the earth, it was without form and covered all over with water, just as this land is in winter. On the second day of the world, he made the firmament that is heaven, and divided the waters with it, so that half the water lay under the firmament and half whirled beyond. It is beautiful to know that, drawn on a map, nature takes the shape and outline that only heaven sees. When he makes a map, a geographer lifts the surface of the earth, as an anatomist might lift the skin off a skull, and pegs it out flat. It gives me joy to think that I will do it.
Chapter 3
The Isle of Ely.
The Great Level.
July and August, 1649.
Fine summer weather.
And so our work begins. Van Hooghten, with some of the two dozen men come from Holland, geographers and navigators in equal numbers, has the charge of surveying the whole of the Great Level. He and his men will determine its outer limits, which task means covering it with their triangulations, all five hundred square miles that Mijnheer Vermuyden spoke of. His geographers will begin also to survey the middle and northern sections, while I and my men take the southern part.
To redeem the drowned land it is necessary for us to understand it; that is to say, to measure it. I will measure the breadth of every channel and all the islands as we find them. We will calculate also the lengths of the channels and the gradient or fall of the water to the sea.
For us earthly geographers, the job is compounded part of science and part of imagination, for in this place the line between land and water is not as clear as the map must make it. It is a line that wanders and shifts with the seasons and the years. One summer an island comes up clear from a channel, only to shrink away when the rains arrive. Another year a river decides on a new turn, gambols about and abandons its old course.
This is the nature of the Great Level, and it has never before been fixed on paper. The reason is simple. None of the natives of these parts has need of a map, neither the people of the islands such as Ely, who fear to venture into the fen, nor the fensmen, who know all the watercourses as they twist and change and all the islands as they rise and fall. This land, since the creation, has slept sound under its watery covers each winter and thrown them off in the heat of summer.
Now everything will begin to change. The land will wake and emerge, as improvement demands. With the maps of the middle and northern sections, and Van Hooghten’s survey of the extent and perimeter, we will make one whole map of the Great Level drowned, and so proceed to a plan of its draining.
In the heat of the summer I begin my task. We start each new day where we left off the day before. At precise intervals of distance we tie up the boat to measure the depths of the waters as we map them. This, in a river, is a simple matter, easily accomplished, the depth varying only with the time of year and the fall of rain. But north beyond Ely Isle is a place of meeting that alters the case. Twice a day at high tide there is a mingling of salt and fresh waters, the heavier seawater sliding below, the lighter river water turning lazily above it, trying to go on its way, yet pushed back towards its source.
In the summer, when the fresh water is low and idling, this conjunction is a benign one, two old friends tipping their hats and nodding as they pass. But in the autumn and spring, at the highest tides, Van Hooghten tells me, they may come up fast against one another, and neither has the space to yield. The water then overflows the banks of the channels and rises through the reed beds and above the tree roots. Sometimes all in a rush, or sometimes with a slow and steady elevation, the waters grow until the meres are enlarged and joined and sheets of water like the great flood of old spread out under the sky all the way to the grey horizon.
These great winter meres I have not yet seen, only the meres that are permanently established. Yet even a small mere seems large to the eye close up. The water takes in the azure of the sky and gives up its shining light so that at the horizon solid and liquid cannot be prised apart.
I lean over the stern of the boat as it sways by a reed bed, and drop a plumb line. When the lead touches the bottom, I can read the depth from the marks on the line and record the place in my book. In this way we will chart the course and fall of each channel. Once all are plumbed and mapped, Van Hooghten and I will decide where best to make a cut, a new watercourse to gather and drain the water from the land and carry it to the sea.
This is not the simple matter of a map only. The land here is not all of one substance. At points the clay comes to the surface and there are islands of more solid ground upon which grow a multitude of bushes and small trees. There are other islands, too, such as that to which Van Hooghten took me on my first day. These float upon the water, platforms of spongy vegetation. Still a third form of land, upon which grass grows plentifully, appears only when the spring waters have subsided. This summer land, peat-black and flat as the mere-bottom, will be most fit for farming.
A serenity comes upon me as we begin the work. I am sure in my knowledge and my skill, and the exercise of it calms me and takes away the feeling of being naked and observed that I have in Ely. Each day we push out a little further from the town, and work our way towards the sea. We part company and work alone on the smallest of the channels, with walls of reed about us. I take pride in the task, and recount it to Van Hooghten when we meet in the evening.
It is three weeks after we begin measuring that the first thing happens. I have left my men and taken a coracle such as fensmen use up a winding channel away from the main current of the River Ouse. This coracle, of the sort that I first saw by the wharfs in Ely, is a curious round craft, made of skin stretched over a frame of willow, and tarred black inside and out. It is small and shallow-bottomed; so light that I can hoist it onto my shoulders if land appears where I do not expect it. Paddling first one side and then another with its single oar I can nose my way up the narrowest of channels. In the height of summer when the water is low, the coracle floats easily over the shallows. When I work alone I use it almost every day.
Now we are in the dog days. Summer heat holds sway over the whole of the Great Level. Land and water, warm with sunshine, lie lazy and still. Reeds sway as I edge between their russet walls. High above, a lark sings its warning to the blue. Plumb line, measuring rods and ropes are stowed in the bottom of the coracle, my papers and chronometer in the large pocket I have sewn into my jacket for the purpose.
I am ready to lower and lift my line; to measure, check and write. Instead I let the coracle go, and drift with it, half asleep. The narrow channel empties out suddenly into a pool. In a splash of sunlight on the far side I see two or three women on the bank, indistinct in the dazzle, drying themselves after bathing, perhaps.
Nearer to me in the shade of a willow is another woman. I see her in the water, the hem of her shift loosely gathered in both hands. She does not notice me or hear anything, for at that very moment, before there is time to move or say a word, she bends forwards and pulls the garment over her head. So I see her as I have never seen a woman, her whole nakedness, half in my plain sight, half reflected in the water.
And the same instant, or so it feels, she lifts her head and sees me there. Her furious eyes strip me of everything and make me as naked as herself. The coracle floats closer to her. What can I do in that moment? Nothing. I cover my face with my hands. I cover my eyes, my nose and mouth. I want to block the operation of every sense. But it is too late; her look hits me like a spear. I cannot, even afterwards, give that look a name. It has a presence, and sinks inside me as surely as my own plumb line sinks into water. There is no pulling it up again. It is down in my stomach, ripping through my organs, settling into my flesh.
When I wake up, or take my hands from my eyes, the world
has tipped sideways, and there is a confusion of shouting, and I too try to speak, to defend myself from her sight. What can I say, in that whirl of legs and arms, as her companions reach to pull her up, water slapping the coracle as she scrambles on to the bank? Nothing. I cannot speak or steady the boat, only see through a mist as the women snatch up her clothing and cover her. Besides, she is already gone, or going, through a tangle of low bushes into a parting in the reed wall.
Silence falls on the afternoon. Coots sound their sirens round the meres. Feet first, a flight of ducks skids in. Water droplets catch the sunshine. The reeds shiver and sigh. For some minutes I sit there and then with an effort lean over and check my instruments and ropes. They are still there in the bottom of the coracle, and the sight brings me back to myself and slows the beating of my heart. When I look up I see the mere, the water and the sky, all unchanged. But I know that everything is altered and translated. I spin the coracle, work abandoned, and paddle back to Ely, heavy with whatever is inside me.
From that day on I live a different life. Something has happened to me, though it feels neither a curse nor a blessing, but simply a change. Straight away I accept it and ingest it. The woman I saw, who saw me, has taken up residence inside me. I begin to wait, though I scarcely know who I wait for. I cannot say with any certainty that I would know her again if I saw her in the street in Ely. I caught so little of her features, transfixed as I was by her piercing look.
I am the same Jan Brunt, engineer; a tall black-haired man, given to silence and sitting alone in speculation. It is only to myself that I am different. The men I work with say nothing. At my lodgings, Mrs Suckling regards me with the usual suspicion. In the evening we continue our conversation and now work through lists of plants, then the names of animals. Gradually I begin to make out sentences in English and find myself understood. It is in part a matter of pronunciation. Lay our two languages side by side and the resemblance is clear; they must at one time have known one another. It is only the speaking that makes them such strangers.
The Great Level Page 6
