Van Hooghten rides up, and stops by a circle of carts piled with axes, ropes, saws, spades and bundles of wooden pegs I have had made in the camps in the last weeks. I take a deep breath of the mud-heavy air.
‘Good morrow, Jacob. Now we start.’
‘At last, yes.’
Behind him I can see Major Wade. He leads a line of prisoners, with Captain Townley at the rear.
‘I am ready,’ I say.
‘I’m glad of it. You will see me often, though I must visit in turn all the works that are in train, here and to the west.’ Van Hooghten leans over and puts a hand on my shoulder, then turns his horse away; and so we set to work, I to my part, he to his.
The path of the new river will be laid out with rope and pegs, following my plan through reeds and marsh, across the meres and streams. Everything along its route will be cut down. When the new cut is deeper than the existing river bed, water will collect in it and the meres start to drain. Thus we proceed layer by layer, the deepest cut left to the last, and build the high embankments for the new rivers and the old at the same time. Later we will cut divers smaller drainage channels to lead the water to its new outfalls. Lastly we will build the great sluice and its run-off channels. Windmills, as necessary at intervals, will lift standing water from the fields and carry it into the new rivers at times of heavy rain.
The prisoners cut stands of alder and beds of reed and lay the branches across the marshy places. Foot by foot they peg down the rope until the whole river course is stretched out across the land. Soon the washes between the rivers are a morass of mud, pitted, scarred and hardened in the summer heat. New grass struggles to push through; here and there a daisy flowers. In my mind’s eye I see a picture of the new landscape, its fields bordered by ditches, stretching away to the horizon. Cattle graze the pastures, and fields of shining grain ripple in the breeze. But this beauty I imagine is a long way off. Instead the landscape turns grey, thick with dust that rises from the churned-up land. The sun shines weakly through it.
Shouts and curses hang over the Level. The men from the towns around dislike working with the prisoners and many collect their wages and leave. The soldiers beat the prisoners with wooden sticks if they throw down their spades. After some weeks it is found expedient to tie one to another those prisoners who try to escape, both as an example to others and as the only way to be sure of them. Such men have then to work as one, lifting their spades and bringing them down together; otherwise the rope between them slackens by one man, tightens by another, and impedes them all.
Worse than the cries of the men and the commands of the soldiers are the times of silence, when the prisoners neither shout nor sing, but push their spades into the ground, lift the soil and throw it without a sound to where the embankment is building. Their acquiescence is tinged with a sullen acceptance of fate that I shrink from despite myself. The weakest prisoners fall ill with the ague that rises from the meres. Many become too sick to work and lie damp and feverish in their huts. Some die, and are buried by their fellows in accordance with their rites, though no priests are allowed them.
But this is not all that is askew. You are now also a part of myself and of the work here. For the first time in my life I have found my drawing, calculating, planning, and the beautiful execution of all, to be insufficient. I wish, also, to be close by you, to eat my dinner and spend my nights with you, to bring to you the best examples of my labour – a piece of land tilled and made productive, a straight and well-lined canal, its water making a picture with the sky above. When once it was enough to know that I worked in accordance with the will of God and to the satisfaction of my master and my family, I desire now to offer you all that I do. This I cannot, for the fact of having agreed a measure of secrecy with Van Hooghten. Though the generality of our work here is known and the courses of the new rivers now plain, the exact sites of the sluices and outfalls are kept hidden. Van Hooghten reminds me of what happened in the late wars.
‘We have no need to go into details with anyone, Jan. Mijnheer Vermuyden has that task, and we only the work of carrying out what is agreed.’
It occurs to me that Van Hooghten’s injunction need not apply to the generalities of the works or to the map we have made of the Great Level drowned, and this I show to you one evening, rolling out the paper on the floor of the little parlour in my lodging. Pride fills me when I look down on the map, where the slow curling rivers are shown with a line for each bank, while thinner lines enclose the large islands. The winter meres, which turn to pasture in the spring, are shown as marsh is on all our Dutch maps, with close-marked dashes. The thousand islands in the meres such as your people make are shown as dots and circles; the towns outlined and coloured grey.
The words written upon the map you can now make out easily without the letters falling over one another, and it is the words and not the map itself that capture your attention. You go from one to another, from the towns to the rivers and the biggest islands which have their names written upon them.
Now that you read so well I encourage you to write yourself, and not just for the practice of it. I wish myself to read what you write and so learn, perhaps, something of what you do not say aloud.
‘There is nothing for me to write, Jan,’ you say when I make this suggestion one evening. Your eyes are full of their challenge.
‘You might write a letter.’
‘A letter such as you receive from the messengers?’
‘Yes. Or from any other person who writes to me.’
‘You suggest I write to a person?’
‘Yes. Not a letter to send out, but as an exercise in writing.’
‘Yet there is no need to write, Jan, since you are here beside me.’
‘Write to another.’
‘There is no person I can write to. I have no need of writing.’
‘Then you may write for yourself.’
‘What should I write for myself ?’
‘Many people have written the story of their life, or related some of their days, and you might do the same.’
This notion hangs in the air. You do not pluck it out, or talk of it again, though you go on with copying and making lists of words, which you add to one by one down the length of the paper I have given you. Strangely enough, it is I who seem to take up the suggestion of relating a story. While I stir the vegetables in the pot, and you sit at the table, I begin at last to unfold my closed self; to talk of the life I lived on Tholen and in Leiden, and soon, in a way vague enough to satisfy Van Hooghten, about the progress of the works.
One evening I describe the cut of the new river that runs straight and proud across the land, and the embankments along both the new and the old rivers.
‘How does the embankment hold in the water?’
‘By its strength. We build so high and wide, and so solid, that the water is constrained to flow between embankments when it rises.’
‘Yet I know that water is stronger than anything.’
‘Not if we build properly.’
‘Does it ever happen that the embankment fails?’
I pause then, and remember my childhood. I know the force of water; I have seen it.
‘Only if we build badly, and leave a weakness for the water to gnaw at. Then an embankment can fail.’
‘Water works its own holes.’
‘Only if we give it a start. A weakness that water pushes at. That is why my calculations must be correct.’
But my pleasure, though it grows when I talk of my work, has a darkening edge. It has come to me that for one world to be made, another must die. Now, as my vision begins to come into being, I am filled with sadness as well as joy. I have seen that this unimproved world has its own way of being which will be lost. It has, even, its own splendour. I determine to tell you this, but you have turned away and then it is too late, for joy has awoken in us and is roaring round now, and you come to me, very close so that I can feel it in you, and I lower my head and kiss you, and feel the thought as I
do so that with you everything opens out as we gather one another in and then all thought is washed away.
Chapter 4
Near King’s Lynn.
The Great Level.
Autumn, 1650.
The works go on while columns of insects sing above us. Fevers run through the prisoners’ bodies, and into the soldiers and numbers of the engineers. Any place other than the Great Level now seems far away to me, as unreachable as a mirage across the desert. It is many months since I wrote to my parents and my sisters. My father’s hand on my shoulder, my mother’s anxious admonitions, the laughter of Anna and Katrijn: they seldom break into my mind. The Great Level, though I know it to be a small part of the earth, might stand for the whole of it.
In October the camp is swelled with hundreds of prisoners from another war, waged by General Cromwell in Scotland. Covenanters, I am told they are called, taken at a battle by the town of Dunbar. These men are short and tangle-haired. They dress in all manner of ragged clothing and many speak a language that some of the Irish can understand in part, but none of the English soldiers. I try to make out one word from another, but, having no success, allow their talk to surround me as if it were a kind of music.
So this land gathers strangeness as well as change. With the new prisoners the works progress fast, but they bring difficulties with them. The two bodies of men, the Scots and the Irish, must be housed in separate quarters, for they are of differing persuasions, the Irish of the old Roman religion, most of the others its sworn enemy. Notwithstanding the remoteness of our situation, where a pastor is rarely seen, the prisoners talk of little else than their faith and the battles they fought to preserve it. I am told that when the Scots and the Irish mingle they come easily to blows over the nature of the sacrament or the power of priests. New huts are therefore hastily thrown up for the Scots. It is getting crowded inside the stockade, a circumstance that worries the apothecary who comes regularly to the camp. He brings bags of herbs and medicines that he sells to the soldiers and to us Dutch who know from long experience that the ague can be held off by such infusions as we can make from his wares.
Adriaan Renswyck finds a new way of bringing order to this place of strife. Each morning before the work parties are assembled, he orders the men to stand in a line outside their huts. Then he walks by each line and counts the men in it. He is seldom alone now, and comes accompanied not only by Wade and Townley but also by a sort of secretary he has picked out from amongst the Dutch. This man carries a large pocketbook, leather bound. At certain points in his inspection, the same each day, Renswyck stops and gestures for his book, into which he deftly writes his tallies, hoarding prisoners as if they are gold.
One morning I pass a number of the Irish prisoners who stand in the half-darkness, and see a grizzled old man cup his hand over his young neighbour’s upturned palm. Something glints before fingers close over it. Curiosity pricks me, and an undertow of fear. Perhaps this sleepy boy has a knife, or some other rough weapon.
‘What do you have there?’
Tiredness makes me suspicious. Here are men whose hatreds slow my work and place at hazard my reputation.
‘Nothing,’ he says, and puts his hand behind his back.
On an impulse I call a soldier. He is on guard, but has turned away to stare towards the stockade, waiting perhaps, as I have so often waited, for the sun to glide up above the fen and bring the comfort of daylight to the camp. He comes with reluctance to my summons and waits by me as I talk to the boy.
‘Give it to me.’
Slowly the boy holds out his hand and opens his fingers. Red rises in his cheeks, and, at the same time, in mine. From his flat palm I pick a thin, cheap medallion; tin, and imprinted with the face of the Madonna, picked out with the sharp tip of a nail.
‘Take it, take it.’
I close the boy’s hand over the metal scrap, and wave the soldier away. Shame fills me that I felt fear of so little. My apprehension has overcome me. The day has started with feeling running too high, and ill will follows it. If a Scot should come across a man with such a charm in his hand he may try to pull it away, such is the Covenanters’ hatred of the old religion. The Latin prayers of the Irish also draw the anger of the Scots. When I hear a Scottish and an Irish prisoner in dispute, and the shouts and growls of those who quickly gather around and add their angry faces to the crowd, I turn my back and walk off.
The men’s resistance is complete. The guards hurry them to work each morning. They tie those most likely to flee and patrol the length of the works all day. The ground itself seems to take the prisoners’ part. Near the middle section of the new river, where I expected an easy cut through peat, we encounter gravel, which slows us down. Then storms drive over the whole Level, one after another. Soil in the washes runs off into the cut just made, clogs the bed of the new river and destroys its gradient. Again the atmosphere darkens and I have the feeling of the watchers getting closer in the misty nights. Some days I take to sleeping under my coracle near the works. Van Hooghten teases me, saying I am become a fensman, or a savage, or a Scot, wrapped in my blanket under the sky. The solitariness of the night will do me no good, he adds, and the bad air after the rains will bring the ague.
Then, as the days shorten towards winter, an insurrection breaks out at the works north of the new sluice. One sunny afternoon I arrive to see a long line of prisoners sitting on the ground, their tools lying beside them and a soldier standing by. Adriaan Renswyck walks up and down, and as I approach slaps one of the men with his glove. The man flinches as the leather whips against his cheek, but he does not move. Renswyck turns to the soldier in rage.
‘Make them get up.’
‘There are too many, sir,’ one of the soldiers says. ‘They cannot flee, to be sure, but they refuse to stand.’
‘Why have they done this? Tell me; you were here.’
Renswyck throws up an arm so that his cloak flares out behind.
‘Do something. Take a man out of the line and beat him in sight of the others.’
The atmosphere is thickening and needs patience to thin it out. Renswyck is already beyond sense. The soldier silently refuses to obey him. These men have no love for the Dutch. Most long either for real soldiering in the vortex of war, or for their homes. This half-life of keeping order is neither. It is, one told me, a humiliation, and unhealthy at that.
‘Upon what grounds do they stop work?’ I ask. I make my voice quiet and level.
The soldier turns to me and I add, ‘What is your name?’
‘Ralph Cooper, sir.’
‘I am Jan Brunt, the engineer here. Tell me what the prisoners say, Mr Cooper.’
‘That things are coming up from the ground, Mr Brunt, strange and wondrous things.’
‘Where?’
‘Just along the embankment, sir.’
‘Very well, Mr Cooper, let us go and see for ourselves, and speak to the men there.’
Renswyck turns to me and says in Dutch, ‘Speak to them? You need to restore order. Make an example of one man and the others will pick up their spades soon enough.’
I feel sudden rage. What is Renswyck doing outside the camps, which are under his authority?
‘Mijnheer Renswyck, might I ask why you have come here? This stretch of the works is looked after by Aelbert Mortens, who answers to me.’
Aelbert Mortens is a taciturn man apt to spend the evening with a bottle of brandy in one hand and a bible in the other. He says little and keeps his opinions close, though I should like to hear them, for he has worked in Suriname in the New World, and in many other possessions of the Dutch West India Company. Van Hooghten thinks him steady, despite his moroseness; another man who has seen better times and now seeks to recover his position.
‘Mortens –’ Renswyck jerks his head away again. ‘He’s over there, shaking. I happened upon him and have assumed command.’
I walk across to Aelbert Mortens, who sits on the bank of the new cut. He is about forty years old, bull-h
eaded and solid. A ragged velvet coat hangs from his shoulders. His face has fallen into deep lines. I tap him on the shoulder.
‘Aelbert; it is I, Jan Brunt. What is passing here?’
Mortens turns to me. Terror streams from his eyes.
‘We have disturbed the dead. Their spirits walk abroad as a judgement upon us.’
‘Do you see them, Aelbert, these spirits?’
Then I understand what Renswyck sees; that Mortens is deaf to human speech and speaks not to me but to himself.
‘Aelbert, do you hear me?’
He says nothing, only continues to look wildly about him. It is not within my power to bring him out. I turn away, and leave him to sit on the bank alone. I must talk to the prisoners and coax them back to the digging; force them if needs be. The work must go on, advance by the calendar we have laid down.
As I walk away from Mortens, my eye catches the raw edge of the new cut. Twenty feet below the surface the peat and silt stop and another formation begins. I know immediately what I see. I cannot be mistaken; it is as if a drawing I have long studied has come into being. I am looking at the layers of a road sliced through by the new cut as clean as a cake. It is of ancient construction, but as fresh as if just laid down. I stand and stare, forgetting all about the prisoners and their fears, then jump down to examine it close up. The flint at the top is familiar to this place, and used by the fensmen in their knives and axes. But I marvel at it, for though an extreme hard stone it is yet compacted with the finest gravel in the way set forth in every book I know upon the science of engineering. This top surface lies on sand and gravel mixed together to the depth of a foot, and the whole rests on a bed of branches and twigs, tangled to a dense blackness. It is a firm road, yet built beautifully to float upon the marsh.
I remember from my books of study that this is a road such as the Romans built. Scrambling up out of the cut I look around me and see the prisoners, who sit on the ground, tied one to another with rope. Beyond them, and beyond the excavations of the works, the meres stretch out on all sides, like silver coins thrown into the mist. This land looks as if it has always been like this, uncharted and unchanged. Yet here is a road, and surely, down this road Roman legions marched. In this desolate place, where had they come from; where did they go?
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