The Great Level

by Stella Tillyard

  I think of us together as Adam and Eve were, in Elysium, alone. I want more, though. I long also to be as Adam and Eve became: adventurers who had to discover and make the world for themselves.

  One day I find the courage to ask you, ‘Eliza, why do you come to me? Why do you stay?’

  At first you say nothing, but turn and look away, and I think you will get up and leave; but you do not. Instead you say, ‘Because your life is different from all I know.’ With a leap of my heart I hope that your curiosity is for me also. From there is only another step to ask you if you will come away with me to another, even more different life when the work here is finished.

  I do not ask you that, but I say, with teasing in my voice, ‘And do you like what you find?’

  ‘I cannot say; I never knew another life, Jan. The way the uplanders live is closed to me.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now with each step I take I move away from something that I can never leave behind.’

  ‘That is a riddle.’

  ‘No, Jan, it is just as it is.’

  You say no more, and turn away, but not before I see sadness sweep through your eyes. This conversation brings me hope and unease in equal measure; hope that we are making something new in our fashion, unease that you see no other life than this one here today.

  I have taken a new lodging on the marshes at the edge of Lynn. It is a fisherman’s cottage with a chimney running up the middle, the kitchen on one side of it, that is also a small parlour, and on the other the bedroom. Besides my horses in the stable I have a cat that chases mice across the floor and brings them to me, half alive, when I return in the evening. I like to light the fire to warm your arrival. For the kindling I have hung bunches of reeds from the ceiling so that the heads are dry and friable. I layer them on the hearth and sprinkle sulphurous powder on them before bringing my flint and steel close enough to send a shower of sparks to ignite the fire. The roar of the flames up the chimney fills me with a childish joy, though I know not why, except that fire is man’s alone, and with it began his conquest of all nature.

  To the reeds I add the willow logs I have cut, and soon have a good fire going. I fill the lanterns and hang them from the beams. You often find me bending in, careful not to bang my head on the rough mantel, to turn a chicken or stir a pot of cabbage and barley. On the table I have laid out bread and cheese, two knives, two spoons, two rough pewter plates and a jug of beer. When you come close you brush aside my hair and kiss my neck beneath it so that I turn and circle you with my arms, and feel you steady on the ground. This little room, low enough that I must duck as I go through the doors, grows bigger with you in it. It stretches to everything.

  Some evenings I sit one side of the fire, you another. We feed it with squares of peat cut from the fen. They glow long into the night and fill the cottage with their comfortable vegetable smell. Though at a distance from you, my fingertips run over your skin from afar, over your skirts, under and up, and you might then raise your eyes to mine, and from them streams a deep light that calls me to your side. Then I sit beside you on the floor, my cheek against the linen of your petticoat. I draw light circles on your sun-browned skin. Everything is warm and secret, and what comes next is not oblivion, but, as the ancients thought, a way for man to share the gods’ divinity.

  At other times you sit at the small table with your writing. You practise with seriousness, as if you have no time to lose. When I mention this you say that you are eager for this skill that you see comes so easily to me, and you wish to acquire it so well that you never forget it. At first you sound the words you wish to write, one by one, and turn each letter into its mark upon the page.

  You still copy from my books and my pages of figures, but when I say that one day this new knowledge will be useful to you, you deny it. ‘I do not think so, Jan; nor that of reading neither; but I wish to know it.’

  One dark winter evening I see a light burning in the cottage as I come near to it. You have lit the fire and sit at the small table in the yellow pool of lamplight. I put down my instruments, take off my cloak and put my arms around you.

  ‘You are writing, Eliza?’

  ‘Yes, Jan. Just words; practising the writing of words.’

  I glance at a loose sheet of paper on the table. You have written on it, over and over, mother, father; father, mother.

  ‘You want to write to your mother and father?’

  ‘Just the words.’

  I draw up a chair and sit down.

  ‘Will you write their names?’

  ‘No. I cannot.’

  ‘Why not, Eliza? Why not? You may tell me; I shall not take anything you say amiss.’

  You draw back and pause, then say simply, ‘I cannot. They are dead. Both dead.’

  Your voice is flat and final; it has a warning in it to come no closer. I can only take your hand and hold it until, after a few minutes, you sigh and lean yourself against me. Feeling the fast beat of your heart against my chest, I determine then not to ask any more. I will wait. The time may come when you decide to tell me about your parents and the world you live in. If you do not wish to talk, I shall not demand to know, neither now nor in the future. I do not seek to force you to anything, but to love you as you are and as you wish to be.

  No one knows of the time we spend together in my cottage through the long winter. Van Hooghten wonders aloud that I have abandoned my town lodgings for such a dismal place. He has cut his chestnut hair right to his scalp, as if he does not want the bother of it any more. The wrinkles round his eyes have deepened in the cold.

  ‘Are you such a hermit, Jan, in truth?’

  ‘You think me rather a sultan, with a harem here, and a great stable of the finest horses in the world?’

  He laughs, and I feel a sudden fondness for him. Van Hooghten takes the world easily. His ambition is to stand well, to rise higher, and to marry when he is able. He looks on me, who entered our profession with no fixed plan of advancement, with puzzlement, yet for the most part asks few questions, and leaves me to myself. In this matter, though, he is not turned away so easily.

  ‘You did not return to Holland this winter, as I took the chance to do.’

  ‘I went down to London, Jacob, and gave our report to Mijnheer Vermuyden.’

  ‘To be sure you did, Jan, and I have not forgotten it; but I am guessing that was not your motive for staying on here.’

  ‘I did not feel the pull of home; it seems lost to me and over the horizon.’

  ‘And your sisters that you have spoken of ?’

  Margriet, Anna and Katrijn come into my mind like a painting, flat against a white sky. They stand on a sliver of grass and seem to float above the ground, far away. I cannot see their features, or if they smile at me. Margriet is in the middle, Katrijn and Anna to either side. It is now many weeks since I wrote to them or to my parents.

  I look at Van Hooghten and wait for him to add what his voice holds back.

  After a while he says, ‘It is rumoured that you have a woman here.’

  I do not deny this, but do not wish to speak of you.

  ‘It is common enough in this desolate place.’

  Van Hooghten comes forward and puts his hand upon my sleeve.

  ‘What do you know of her, Jan?’

  What do I know? I know as an engineer does, who understands the body as a place of channels, of liquid contained within veins. I know as a geographer does, who studies and describes the surface of the earth, its valleys and mountains. But I know also as a man who longs for your company and for the force that fills you, which is the same force that drives all of nature.

  Every night, when I am returning, I imagine that you might already be at my cottage; I look forward to the moment when I will open the door and find you there and that very act fills me with a future that opens out to the horizon in my mind. If the kitchen is empty when I lift the latch and step in, I go about my evening tasks still with a sense of you close by, and if I hear you open
the door I turn to hold you not as a delicate thing, but tight, feeling your solidness. You are a woman with the strength of a man, and this too I love.

  All this I might say to Van Hooghten, until I remember that he would take me for a madman or a fool, the people of the fens being spoken of as savages. Van Hooghten seems to consider me with a mixture of sharpness and sympathy.

  ‘These are not the times for holding yourself close, Jan. You need to look about you. The fensmen do not wish us well. Have you not seen groups of them watching, and lights at night? Have you not heard sudden sounds behind you, then turned to find no one?’

  ‘Those are the sounds of the mere, Jacob. You told me so yourself.’

  I think again to take him into my confidence, to tell him that I have come to find the Great Level a place of wonder, and so I go on. ‘Besides, Jacob, there is much to be admired here. Have you not ever felt the beauty of the place, the expanses of water, the stands of reed and the sky that mirrors it all?’

  Van Hooghten leans forward.

  ‘We are here to work, Jan, not to look as painters do and imagine things. Besides, you are not talking sense. The meres breed the ague. The people are barbarous and hostile; the land scarce productive of anything more than a few eels and grazing in the summer. You see that?’

  ‘Indeed, I know it. Yet though it is unimproved, this place sometimes seems to me finer than the greatest work of any engineer I can think of.’

  ‘False sentiment, my dear Brunt. You have forgot your profession.’

  ‘Then we’ll say no more of it.’

  The conversation ends, but I feel uneasy at my own reserve. Van Hooghten is the only friend I have in this place, and I should like to explain to him the beauty I now find here. My feeling for this strange place has grown with my love and now its beauty and your own are intertwined. As for the rumour that I have a woman, I do not know how it might have got about, and suppose that it is a supposition merely, because of my own reticence. I am sure that no one has seen you in my company. Yet Van Hooghten has noticed some change in me.

  The boats at King’s Lynn bring us more ragged men furious at their fate. Van Hooghten says it is at General Cromwell’s command; others that the Earl of Bedford, who will profit by the draining, insists the most. The Gentlemen Adventurers pay for the transport of the prisoners, it is said, and for the keeping of them here.

  Adriaan Renswyck demands some of the prisoners to build quarters for the new arrivals. I hand over the men with reluctance. He puts them to work no matter what the weather, and takes no notice of sickness amongst them. In a few weeks the camp by King’s Lynn is twice the size it was last year. The first stockade Renswyck built has been breached; a fenced corridor now runs from it to a new camp that bulges out beyond the market streets, once again stockaded and towered.

  One early spring morning I follow Van Hooghten’s muddy overcoat as it swings up and round the stairs of the furthermost watchtower. We come out into chilly dawn at the top, where the sentries stamp the wooden platform to keep the cold from their feet.

  ‘Good morrow, gentlemen,’ Van Hooghten says in his slubby Dutch English.

  ‘Good morning, sirs.’

  The soldiers nod at us but their eyes go past our hats and out over the camps. Though Van Hooghten and I can command them in the matter of the drainage works, they hold us in low esteem.

  Van Hooghten and I look down at the snaking wooden walls that define the camps.

  ‘Look at that.’ Van Hooghten points at the new stockade of the second camp.

  ‘Listing from the vertical, and only a few weeks built.’

  It is obvious; a section of the new stockade is leaning inwards like a drunkard. The second camp, built out on the marsh, has already begun to sink. After rain, peaty black water seeps into the huts. The prisoners fill hessian sacks with sand and pile them by the doors, but the water takes no notice, flowing through the holes, easy and unheeding.

  Next the prisoners raise their rickety bunks above the floor, where they sleep two together, head to toe. Fever and sickness weaken them. A doctor arrives from Ely and moves into a small house hastily constructed for him by the Adventurers Company beyond the stockade. He checks the men each day for rashes and signs of wasting fever, and orders the sickest moved to a hut that is set aside as a hospital, where other prisoners tend them. He demands volunteers for this job, but none come forward. I choose a dozen men who lack the strength to continue labouring outside, thinking that I am easing the burden of life for them.

  A day later, two of them have squeezed through loose planks in the stockade and run onto the fen. From the watchtower a soldier sees one of them splash through the icy water of a small mere nearby, and try to conceal himself in the reed beds.

  ‘Tell me, why have you fled?’ I ask when he is brought back and stands before me.

  He refuses to speak, and I turn him over to Major Wade, who has the authority to order a beating and will use it. There is a belief, Van Hooghten tells me, that strangers come into the camp in the dark, and go from hut to hut, speaking of destruction and the fires on the meres. These fires are marsh lights, the strangers say, will-o’-the-wisps conjured by spirits. Such talk inflames the prisoners; and since we continually turn up strange axe heads and other metal objects of no known use, the fear of spirits grows as the works progress.

  Warmer weather brings no change. The prisoners are apathetic and live in mud and lice. Every morning after they have collected their tools, they file past the cookhouses. Pease pudding, boiled up, cut in slabs and slapped between slices of barley-bread, is their food for the day. I eat the same while I am at the works or ride from place to place. Beer is served to the soldiers and engineers, and everyone drinks the water from the mere, or from the streams and rivers. It appears wholesome enough except around the camps.

  We Dutchmen supplement the local bread and eels with our own supplies, brought from Holland. A barrel of salted herring stands in the corner of my larder, and from a shelf hangs a yellow Gouda cheese in a muslin bag. In the evenings I cut slices from it and nibble them with pleasure, feeling myself to be a student in Leiden again.

  In the camps, prisoners and soldiers, Scots, Irish and English, all begin to look alike. Peat sticks to their clothes and works its way into the weft. Beards make old men of everyone, and fear of sickness walks beside them. Now only the Dutchmen take care to display their cleanliness, as if they were in their own country with the neighbours looking on. Van Hooghten orders his housekeeper to brush the mud from his clothes each evening. I hang my own cloak before the fire where it dangles almost to the floor. I brush it myself. I do more, as if I were a man of fashion; upon advice I send to the city of Norwich for new boots finely made there, knee-high and supple. I buy two pairs and wear them by turns. Each night I scrape the mud off one pair, stuff them with dry rags and grease them with oil. Fearful that the rats will gnaw them, I air them in a wooden box with holes, while wearing the second pair, fine and dry, upon my feet the next day.

  ‘Quite a courtier,’ Van Hooghten says, to tease me, which, though I know it derives from his affection, I take also as a hint to draw me out.

  Adriaan Renswyck is one man unaffected by the squalor and discontent. Since the discovery of the urns he has lost all interest in works; the camps engross him. One evening I notice that his slovenly cloak is gone, replaced by one of plum-red worsted, fringed with rabbit fur. He wears a beaver hat, black with glints of moonlight. Seeing my glance he takes it off and holds it out.

  ‘From Nieuw Amsterdam. The best skin to be had.’

  In this empty desolate country, in the mud and sleet, Renswyck begins to look like a townsman. He buys a malacca cane with brown-stained knuckles, and plants it on the ground at arm’s length like a rich man in Dam Square. I come across him one morning running his palm back and forth over its silver top with a dreaming look. Even his low cur is fattening up, and though it skulks behind him still, its hair is brushed and clean.

  From the top of the
camp watchtowers one evening I look south along the length of the cut, and then turn round to the north, where the works stretch to the site of the new sluice. The air is heavy, the meres grey and darker grey where the wind is passing clear over them. A layer of orange lies under the cloud bank on the horizon. If I turn westwards the scene is as it always was, the silver meres streaked with the sunset, and the dark coming down. The scene is peaceful, but this evening I am filled with unease. A dozen fires burn in a ring around the camps. These days the fensmen are always out there, on islets that only they can reach. Are they watching? Can they see me up here? I wonder.

  I imagine that they might advance with stealth on my cottage and look through the windows. At night I take care to draw the battered shutters up and bolt the door.

  ‘The watchers who set the fires,’ I ask you one evening. ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘They are my people, Jan. Uplanders have many names for us, we ourselves none.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘They are working, waiting for fish to rise. They are always out on the mere when the moon shines.’

  Now there is impatience with me in your voice. I cannot stop myself from speaking again.

  ‘They ring the camps, as if to set a watch upon them.’

  ‘That is a trick of the eye, merely. They go about their labour in the night when some of the best fish are to be caught, and the fowl, too, as they sleep.’

  ‘Yet they never approach or greet us, neither during the day nor at night.’

  ‘You do not concern them.’

  So absorbed am I in the strong sense of you, that I do not say what I have thought, that such reticence is curious; that I feel I am watched, day and night, though I never see anyone close by; and that this sense is just the same as that I had when you first appeared to me, silently, more than a year ago.

  ‘The women who come to the market by the camp, do you know them also?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  The little parlour is safe and yellow in the candlelight. I am emboldened to go on by your closeness to me.