As I push through the mud and destruction, I watch the water flow in great volume through the breach and spread out across the fen. It has found its old winter habit and will stay, as it has always done, until I can find a way to repair the embankment. Even as I push aside branches and twigs, splintered planks and bottles washed up and left by the flood water, I am calculating and measuring.
It is one task to build an embankment and so to constrain and imprison water. It is quite another to mend one, for now the water is everywhere, pressing in on it equally from both sides. I know that the task is not beyond me; every Dutch engineer is trained to stop up a breach in a dyke. We can clear the camps, repair the stockades and get the prisoners back to work in a few weeks. Though it is a cold, ugly business, we can box in the area of the breach, fill the gap in the embankment and contain the river anew. That much can be done, yet it is beyond my capacity to empty the meres now filled with water. It will be weeks before the sitting water sinks into the ground, and the meres will remain until the spring dries them out.
As the light begins to fade I am standing once again on the embankment by the breach, on the King’s Lynn side. Gazing down into the river as it flows through the gap I think again of the four holes set at exact intervals.
There is a tap on my shoulder.
‘Jan, it is I.’
It is Van Hooghten, his short hair disordered and mud up above the tops of his boots.
‘Ah, Jacob.’ I am overcome at seeing him and the sympathy that makes him lean towards me.
‘We can mend it, Jan. It is not the end.’
‘No, it is not the end.’
I hear my voice, listless and lost to the wind. Van Hooghten takes my shoulders.
‘Jan, listen. It is a matter of weeks merely, and then picking up next spring as the meres dry out. It is just a setback. It happens all the time.’
‘But, Jacob, the embankment was undermined.’
‘That is not possible.’
Van Hooghten is always even-tempered. The misfortunes of others concern him but do not pull him under; their successes are his own. It is his defect to believe too much of his fellow man, or not enough. He cannot see what is plain, or does not wish to. I want to shake him, to throw him in the mud. All the anxiety that I have carried in me through the day, all the dread that I have pushed away, now assumes a shape: yours. Fear boils up in me, rushes through my stomach and grips my heart.
‘No, Jacob; there were four tunnels bored into the embankment, each at the same distance from the other. That is not the work of nature.’
‘Jan, the disaster has made you imagine things.’
‘No. I saw them before the collapse, just as the water began to flow out. I was here. You know that a natural breach is gradual, takes days. This was quick, Jacob.’
‘It is always quick, when it falls.’
Again that sudden memory: bitter cold; my father’s rough cloak against my face; the body floating past, rushed carelessly along by the flood. Again the roar of the water fills my ears.
‘This wasn’t the course of nature. The whole section fell like a shelf, all at once.’
Jacob says nothing. I am shouting now. I am covered in mud, exhausted and trembling.
‘You take me for a madman.’
‘Maddened, Jan. As any man might be.’
I feel then that I must leave this place; must leave Jacob, go away, go away and never return. I picture you suddenly, looking so intently at my drawings.
Van Hooghten pulls me round.
‘Come, Jan. Come to my lodgings in Lynn. You should not be out here any longer. There is nothing more to be done today.’
‘Listen, Jacob. Someone did this.’
Van Hooghten takes my arm and begins to walk me away from the breach. He is humouring me.
‘Who then?’
I clutch at his question. Many men, it is true, have cause to wish the works destroyed.
‘Prisoners who have concealed rods and shovels?’
‘Jan, they know they cannot escape. You know what Adriaan Renswyck is like; I saw him today prowling the fen beyond the camps, hoping to find runaways to shoot.’
‘They are desperate.’
‘No; it cannot be the prisoners.’
‘Soldiers, then. Many of them want to leave this place and go back to the army.’
‘Perhaps. But it’s a dangerous business, and they are not acquainted with the habits of water.’
Van Hooghten has his arm round my shoulders now. He is hurrying me along the embankment, past the camps and towards my house. As the sun goes down it casts a red glow to our left across the flooded land. All the way to the horizon is water. I allow Van Hooghten to steer me to my own stable, where we find the horses tied up. The man who brought my horse back has put hay in the mangers; but the cottage itself, when I open the door, is dark and empty.
We take the horses and set off for King’s Lynn. I ride like a dead man, letting my horse choose his steps along the muddy embankment. On one side of us the water stretches away into the distance. On the flooded meres a couple of fires are burning, their flames brightening in the fading light. Out towards the western horizon I see a single figure in a coracle, solid and upright, outlined against the falling sun. Though the light is dim I have no doubt that it is you. Your head is raised, your arms are by your sides. You stand like a sentinel, unmoving. The sight of you fills me with longing and, now, with dread.
Darkness takes hold as we arrive in the town. Van Hooghten’s landlady calls her son to take the horses. Upstairs in his lodgings, a fire is burning in the grate and the room is warm. Van Hooghten lights the candles, then takes off his cloak, leans his hand out for mine and hangs them both on a hook driven into the wall for the purpose near to the fire. Comfort and a homely ease fill the room.
I sit down without speaking, heavy with the whole day from its beginning.
The close smells of wet wool and tallow mingle in the warm air. I long to fall asleep but tiredness won’t come to me, or only its lunatic edge. I stare at the wall, where Van Hooghten has tacked a map of the world, coloured in red and blue. On a small table under the window a bible lies open on a stand, with a notebook and inkstand next to it.
Van Hooghten moves purposefully about, sure-footed and good-natured. First he presses a cup of beer into my hand, then brings out bread and cheese, with apples and a pie on a plate, setting it all between us by the fire.
‘Drink, Jan. Eat. There is nothing more we can do today.’
I do as he says, like a child. I want Van Hooghten’s warmth to take the chill from my heart. He seems not to wish to dwell on the day’s events. He tells me to consider only how quickly we can rebuild the embankment and so finish our work here. He knows better than I how to repair such a breach, being my senior in experience, and we talk quietly in the candlelight about how it will be done. I am grateful, and want to stay by him, fearing my own company; but he urges me to bed and walks me to a small room opening off the parlour.
‘Try to sleep, Jan,’ he says, and sets the candle down by a narrow bed that is already made up.
Once alone, I stare at the candle flame. It grows and grows as I look at it, until it fills the whole room. Inside me is neither order nor disorder. My mind refuses fear and anxiety. Everything has been swept away. A soundless empty space remains. I sleep as if dead, and wake only when Van Hooghten stands by the door and calls my name.
Chapter 4
King’s Lynn.
The Great Level.
Winter and spring, 1651–1652.
From the top of the battered embankment three days after the flood I can look to the west and see the sun glint across water. If I raise my eyes above the smashed stockade and the mess of the camps, nothing might have changed from my first winter here. Water from the washes has drained out and spread across the land. The whole Great Level seems asleep. Leafless trees shiver over the water and brown reeds ring the islands. Everything is pewter grey, soft and blue in the sunshine. T
he flocks of ducks and gulls are back, nodding on the shallows.
I stay some nights with Van Hooghten, and then return to my cottage. Van Hooghten rides over each day to the works. He is there to direct the repair of the breach, but also, I know, to keep me steady. I try to maintain the rhythm of life, and the press and hurry helps me. The days are not so hard to pass through, but I fear the evenings. Hope and dread jostle within me each time I open the cottage door, but I am always greeted by damp and darkness. You have gone, and taken my hope with you. Still my body, every particle of it, stretches out to you, wherever you are. I want you now, and with me. I feel in my mind the roughness of your fingertips and the hardness beneath your skin when I lay my head on your breast. I see your sturdy outline and hear the beat of your heart. I do not feel loss, as I expect, but desire. Desire arcs through me so strongly that I understand then that it has no boundaries of time or distance. Even death could not stop it.
This I can never speak. Even if I told Van Hooghten it would do me no good. Speech is no recompense for desire. It cannot assuage it. Even if I could speak there is nothing to say. How can I ask where I might find you when no one knows you are here? How talk, even to Van Hooghten, since he makes no mention of you himself ? Silence pools inside me, dark and oily. I fall into it, especially when I am alone, and see myself, a tiny figure, turning into emptiness.
I listen to the rumours about the flood that swirl through the soldiers’ quarters. Some blame the prisoners, some the devil, others the spirits out on the fen. The mood amongst the soldiers is skittish at first, but soon returns to the resentment that they showed before. After a few days several dozen escaped prisoners are brought back to the camps. Renswyck puts them to work in the wreckage. One group builds a new stockade, another lays floors in the soldiers’ huts, a third digs out the stinking ditches that have filled with mud and refuse. Renswyck prowls past again and again, checking on his charges. He glares at me if we meet, or greets me loftily as if I am far away and he at a great height.
‘Ah, Mijnheer Brunt, goedemorgen.’
‘And to you, Adriaan.’
He looks up. ‘You will be getting the prisoners back as soon as the camps are again in order.’
‘I thank you, Adriaan. We are ready to make a start.’
I want to know what Renswyck is up to; he is wearing a hooded look and watches me closely.
‘Arrests have been made amongst the local people,’ he says.
‘For helping the prisoners to get away?’
‘Worse, Mijnheer Brunt. I am told that some people of the fens were seen near the works in the days before the breach.’
I say nothing.
‘Several of them are now in the lock-ups at Ely and King’s Lynn. That may make them talk. There are women amongst them, something quite against nature, would you not agree?’
Renswyck does not stay to wait for an answer, and walks away. Although I ask around, discreetly, I can learn nothing about the women in the lock-ups, and wonder if Renswyck has made up the story to unsettle me. I fill the days with labour, and time passes. By the middle of December we have the prisoners back in the camps and a containing wall built round the embankment at the place of the breach. In those first weeks I work like a man spellbound, determined each day to tire myself to sleep.
Then it is that you come to me. In dreams I hear the sound of your voice, low and strong. You talk the language I strain still to untangle, but which in sleep is clear and easy. I feel you moving in the spaces of my mind. When I wake you are still with me. We talk as usual together and I feel you by my side until I leave my cottage. Though my dreams torment me I long for them, since only there do we meet.
Once or twice I am overcome, as if I have been fighting a battle. Then the desire to leave this place begins to worm its way inside me; to leave and never to return. I see myself riding away from the Great Level, as a horseman does in a painting, towards the edge of the picture, then out of sight.
I do not go because somewhere you are here. When I look over the flooded land and see the fires of the watchers I hope that you stand by one of them and watch my cottage at night. That hope pushes away all other questions. It leaves a wide space for your return to me.
I stay too from fondness for Jacob Van Hooghten. His disappointment in me would be more than I can bear. So I go on as I have done since I began my education and my apprenticeship to Mijnheer Van Nes. I rise, and work, and make my calculations before night. When I wake each day I find my arm flung out across the bed, as if it looked for you while I slept. I push off the covers and start again. I am, as I always have been, a man of method and care.
Adriaan Renswyck keeps up his air of feverish command, but he now wears only black, with a white muslin shirt under his jacket. To my Dutch eye, he has the tight look of a preacher. He is never still, and glances round ceaselessly, as if he might miss something. His cur is much fatter, and I wonder what it has found to eat in the flooded camps.
As soon as the prisoners return, Renswyck transfers those who escaped at the time of the flood to the lock-ups at Ely and King’s Lynn.
‘Surely, Adriaan, you need to put them back to work?’
‘To spread rebellion amongst the others?’
‘We have need of their labour.’
Renswyck looks triumphant.
‘Ah, you are behindhand, Mijnheer Brunt. Occupied with ditches. I am getting more prisoners. New ones. As for these reprobates, they are bound for the colonies. The gaols are to be emptied too; the officer at King’s Lynn is entirely of my mind and has everything in hand. General Cromwell himself has sanctioned it. The New World planters will take them all.’
‘A man sent to labour thus is a slave.’
‘Oh, no, Mr Brunt, he cannot be sold as a slave can; and besides, he has the promise of freedom after seven years.’
Renswyck stands so near me that I can see the red veins marbling the whites of his eyes. I fear to lose control of myself if I do not take a step back, but he seems not to notice, and continues to speak.
‘They will do very well on the plantations. The men who contract for them should thank me. As for the fensmen, they won’t trouble us in the future, though I doubt they will last long in the colonies. They’ve no notion of the world.’
‘The women that you spoke of ?’
Renswyck laughs.
‘No need to think about them.’
I do not reply, and he goes on, coming close again, pressing his forefinger into my chest and leaning towards me so that the heavy bottle under his jacket bangs against my thigh.
‘Yes, Jan, I have the prisoners back in the camps and more on the way. I have secured an extra detachment of soldiers to keep order. You’ll notice the difference. The whole job will be done in a couple of years.’
In my alarm at Renswyck’s elation I do not notice until later that he has addressed me in the familiar way. Brandy, not friendliness, has made him drop his guard.
In King’s Lynn a few days later I hear a tumult and walk towards it. At the quayside two sea-going ships are tied up. Their gangplanks are out and a few people have gathered, sullen and quiet. Many more are milling about in College Lane, massing where it opens out into the marketplace by the gaol-house. Having no wish to be seen and knowing myself to be conspicuous by my height, I find a doorway and stand there in the shadow.
It is midday, dark and warm for the year’s end, with rain on a west wind. I pull my cloak around me. My heart is tight under it. The people gathered here know that something is happening at the gaol. If Renswyck is right, the prisoners will be brought out and driven on board the waiting ships. If there are women amongst the prisoners, one of them might be you. Though I might feel fear or rage, I cannot. A sliver of happiness glows inside me, because if you come out I shall see you and know you to be alive.
People surge towards the gaol-house doors, which are opening inwards on their great hinges. Into the gloom come soldiers carrying heavy pikes, their metal helmets outlined against the flin
t-and-limestone chequers of the walls.
‘Move aside.’
Murmurs rise from the crowd; we can see the first prisoners behind the soldiers. Someone shouts a name.
‘Henry.’
‘Father, oh, Father, it is me.’
‘William, William, come here.’
The names come thick and fast; the prisoners try to turn; they shout and cry. Terror and love mix.
‘Stand back.’
The soldiers lower their pikes and the crowd parts. Out walk the prisoners, not singly but in lines, hands tied, with pikemen at intervals. There are many more than I had thought to see. Have they all been crammed into that gaol-house or brought there at night? All wear the same drab clothes, mud-coloured. I cannot tell who might have been a runaway from the camps and who is from this place. Some walk with defiance, but most appear cowering or resigned, as any man might do with a pike in his face. After a little, as they walk down College Lane towards the quay, a few raise their heads and look about.
‘Jonah.’
‘Richard.’
Soon the first woman comes out, then half a dozen more, their shawls over their heads.
‘Mary. Look here.’
A child in the crowd cries out, ‘Mother, Mother, oh, Mother. Is it you?’
One of the women staggers and tries to turn to her child’s voice, lifting her bound hands as she does so. People run to the line of prisoners, but the pikemen push them back roughly. ‘Make way; make way,’ says one as he lowers his pike.
The Great Level Page 17
