Call Upon the Water

by Stella Tillyard

  Chapter 23

  New Amsterdam.

  Mrs. Polet’s Tavern on Brouwers Street.

  The 27th day of August, 1664.

  There being a tumult in this town today, I stay indoors with my pens and paper. Another letter has arrived from Mr. Lee, which repeats his proposal and adds a request that I come home, life being dull and flat in my absence, which has now stretched to many weeks. He has ridden past my door; Bellevue is empty and melancholy without me. That is his flattery. Bellevue is not empty, or only of my presence. A dozen servants now work in and about the house, six inside with Dorcas the cook and John Campbell my steward, and six others outside in the park and kitchen garden. Mrs. Lyle is my housekeeper, and I have long taken her into my confidence. On the plantation Hawker and his men keep the hands at work and he has all the business of the planting and harvest. I leave that task to him, but keep an eye upon him. Hawker hopes for advancement from me and may get it.

  But then—home. What a word, what a word. There is nothing for me inside it. It is a round O, scarcely held in by the weak letters either side. It is like an empty box or a stringless viol. Home is a false promise. Long ago I had something, but I left it and can never return. For several years I had no thought of home, or any new place, my mind being fixed upon survival only. Now a place has come to me, but I maintain my hold upon it in certain circumstances only.

  Mr. Lee has often sailed down from Grace Dieu to dine at Bellevue, and I have often been his guest since his father died. The house there sits right at the confluence of the Jones Creek with the James River. Ripples on the water come reflected into the dining room when the sun shines low. The woods (the same woods after many weeks of wrangling and legal business are now mine) being further away from the house than those at Bellevue, he does not hear the trees thrash in the storms and sigh in the breeze. So much is fine at Grace Dieu: the tablecloths, woven with a pattern of leaves and flowers; crystal glasses from Waterford carried from Ireland on straw beds in wooden boxes; the steady tick of the clock, made in London; the portraits of the family mounted on the wall.

  I do not believe, when Mr. Lee asks me to come home, that he sees me alone in his mind’s eye, but rather sees me framed by my estate and made desirable by it. This is what his request and his proposal mean to a woman in my situation. If he married me I would be his, a part of his property. What then of my estate? I would no longer have one; Bellevue would be his.

  Mr. Lee is a fine man who knows the country and that propriety matters less in a place where death cuts so many down than it does in the old country. We have much to discuss over wine when we have thrown our napkins down and pushed back our chairs from the table. We talk business, with other thoughts woven in. Mr. Lee desires me and Bellevue together and expects from me a return of the feeling.

  While I might perhaps return Mr. Lee’s desire, being a woman like any other, I do not wish to pay the price attached to it. Besides that, I cannot touch the idea of home. It flies away from me and I have given up the pursuit. Land, and the possession of it; these are the words I can grasp. The land I own is warm to the touch after a long summer day; the river runs gently over my hands; the tree roots move constantly in search of a foothold. Underneath lies the rock that is anchored to the center of the earth. This is solidity and I have title to it.

  Captain Maybrick began to understand the value of his idle land only when I drew for him my first maps of his estate. Until that time, he knew the extent of Bellevue only by what Hawker told him of acreage and yield, and had little understanding of its elevation or the creeks that ran down to the river. He could not join my enthusiasm, but he could be a gentle man to those he considered lived within the boundary of his power, and I was one of them. So he allowed me to tour the whole plantation on foot and use one of the small boats as I needed it. He could not know the joy I felt to glide away from the jetty alone and row myself up a narrow creek, or paddle with a single oar in the green shade of the swamps with frogs for company.

  Yet I never stayed longer on the water than my business demanded. A few weeks later I presented Captain Maybrick with a map of Bellevue, having begun with the sketches I found at the house, which showed the extent of the captain’s holdings and the boundaries of the whole estate. This I supplemented with a better drawing of the shorelines and swamps made from my own observations of the river and creeks.

  I wished to give the captain something as beautiful as others I saw long ago, made with the help of a chronometer and plumb line and a training in trigonometry and drawing. Though I lacked the tools and skills for that work, I nonetheless painted the edges of the tobacco fields with a brush dipped in saffron yellow, filled the James River and the creeks with blue and washed the swamps with spinach water. The map, once unrolled across the parlor table, showed a full third of the estate to be green swampland, that the captain could see immediately.

  “You wish that I drain these swamps? How is that to be done?”

  I told him how seawalls would prevent the high tides getting to the swamps, and sluices on the creeks would regulate the flow of water to irrigate the fields. Then a variety of new crops might be grown. The captain objected to that idea, saying he had never seen it and wished only to continue with tobacco, but added that I might draw him a plan of a sluice to explain its workings. This I did, along with a plan to show where I intended for the sluices to go. Though I presented both to him, he took them away and said nothing, and for some months things went on as usual, with no more said about my scheme.

  In the summer of the year 1655 Captain Maybrick left to undertake business in New Amsterdam. I roamed the house in his absence and allowed myself to study such accounts as he had left to lie about. I never found the map of Bellevue and the plans I had made with the drawings of the sluices I proposed.

  The captain returned early one morning a month later. I came down the steps when I heard the boats arrive at the jetty, and stood waiting in the hot sunshine.

  “Ah, Eliza, Eliza, here I am.”

  He took me in his arms then and looked at me quizzically, saying nothing. A few days later he remarked while we lay side by side in the great bed, my hand upon his thigh, “I think we may begin the works.”

  “You have given it some consideration.”

  He turned towards me with a smile.

  “I enquired in New Amsterdam for an engineer. I was directed to a Dutchman reckoned skilled in that work, who has built the canal there, and has worked on many farms around the city and up in the English colonies to the north.”

  “A man of experience.”

  “You would not have believed it, dressed as poorly as he was.”

  “His name?”

  “Name? I do not remember, Eliza. It matters not. He believed that I wanted to hire him.”

  “And do you?”

  “It seems I have no need of him.”

  At that moment my heart turned inside me. Blood flooded my cheeks. The captain noticed my agitation.

  “You are distressed, Eliza; angry that I consulted another? Come, come. How could I do otherwise, you being a woman?”

  I pulled away from him, and hoped he had not felt my heart beat through my skin. If he had looked into my eyes he might have seen that I felt not anger, but joy.

  “What was he like, this Dutchman?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” the captain said, “though he spoke English well. A large man, much taller than most Dutch. I was warned that he was abrupt in manner and without civility. He was not the sort of person I should have chosen had he not been spoken of as the best in the city.”

  I knew then that it might be the man that I had known, and something passed through me, half shadow and half bright light. I wanted him, not just the solid form of him; no, much more. I wanted to settle with him of an evening and talk over my plans and everything that had passed while he stood at the fire and turned the dinner in the pot, or lifted the peat so a shower of sparks fell in the hearth. For a moment I wanted to go back, fit myself ag
ainst his shoulder and fold myself into the past.

  “Is he to come down to Bellevue?” I wished that the captain had demanded it.

  “No, no. That is not possible, Eliza. You know that, and, besides, he assured me the plans are sound. I paid him for his services and left.”

  I looked past the curls on the captain’s head. They had turned to gray and gave his face a softer frame than a few years before. Through the window I saw thousands of bright stars in the black sky, and the moon traveling across it. Into its light I took myself, until the captain and the bed we lay on disappeared. The moon was alone, yet it shone brightly, lit by the sun that burned so far away. Closer and closer I came, until my soul touched the moon’s surface. It hung there in the moon’s white light, quite free.

  That moment was a balm and returned me to myself. The man I knew was in the New World, in New Amsterdam, I was quite certain. That must now be enough for me. I had my present life with the captain, and would close up the weak place in my heart. It would not break. I would tell the captain nothing, and nothing would put in jeopardy the small freedoms that I had.

  “You are smiling, Eliza. You are happy that I took those plans to New Amsterdam.”

  “Yes, James, I am happy.”

  “It seems I have found myself a good engineer.”

  He laughed then, a full laugh, pulled me close and kissed my breasts, one after the other.

  “This way I may clear my debts without having to buy any more land. Who would have believed, Eliza, that you had any knowledge of such things? You have hid your light under a bushel, madam.”

  That night the captain took me as if he owned me. He pushed himself on me, into me. He was triumphant in possession. I was the path to his prosperity and he desired me all the more for it.

  The next day we began. That is to say, I began. I talked first to Mr. Hawker, explained to him the need for more land and appealed to him as a man in charge of many others. More land, I said, would mean more hands. When the draining was finished my first task would be to build a bigger house for the overseer. He leaned towards me at that, resting on his staff, and it seemed to me that we came to an agreement. He would forget that I had been indentured and picked tobacco until my hands bled. I would give his position the importance that he wished for. His new house would be the biggest built for any overseer in the county. I asked him to look out for a site that might suit him, and promised that it should be two stories high.

  To the captain I explained the need for more hands.

  “I wish to select and hire men to carry out the works.”

  “So you may, Eliza.”

  “A person who is indentured has not the right to conduct business freely. My dignity demands my freedom, James.”

  The tussle between keeping me indentured and having the works proceed was soon settled and forgotten as if it had never been. I became a free woman. The captain signed each contract as the owner of Bellevue, and I insisted on ceremony; that they be written on the finest linen paper, laid before him, and stamped with his seal. He never felt his authority weakened, though I took the whole project into my hands.

  In truth the works were not as hard or long as some I have seen in another place. I selected those men fittest for the task, and found ways to reward them if their labor was good. I had the women make new smocks for all the hands so that they were uniformly dressed, which delighted the captain, giving them the appearance, he said, of servants in the old country.

  After a year or so the biggest of the swamps was drained, surrounded with defensive pilings against the overflows from the river. Three new sluices controlled the creeks. By my new maps I reckoned that Bellevue was the larger by a fifth, the outlay only that of labor, wood and bricks. Marshes and reeds still stretched along the James River, but the prospect from higher by the house was more open and airy. The captain remarked that the view from Bellevue resembled more and more that of Combe Down, there being now meadows that stretched away from the house on all sides.

  Only one thing grieved me. I had to fell the cypresses, which groaned as they came down into the swamps. I did not stay to watch the hands cut them into planks after the felling, though they made fine floors. Whole trunks were used to make pilings for new wharfs along the riverbank. Yet I am pained by the loss. Away from the immediate surroundings of the house I have maintained several swamps. There the trees still grow proud. After storms I wade into the water and lean my whole body against their rough trunks. When I know I am quite alone and out of sight I sing and listen to their speech.

  From the day that I began the works, Captain Maybrick became happy in his fashion, which was the fashion of a gentleman. I saw that he disliked the business of the fields and, even more, the sale of tobacco, and, one by one, I took these tasks away from him. I made myself the mistress of the accounts; first those of the works, then those of the house, and finally those of the whole estate. Captain Maybrick, having money with his banker, and time to do as he pleased, did not complain. Perhaps he scarcely noticed, except for the lightening of his mood. His content spread like silk between us. As time went on he began to ride a fine pony from house to house and visit his neighbors. He built new offices at Bellevue and supervised the putting-up of Mr. Hawker’s big house.

  After the first harvests I suggested a new occupation for the captain.

  “It would delight me, and be worthy of you, if you undertook to make a fine garden and bring renown to your estate.”

  Formally laid out in the meadow to one side of the house, surrounded by a low brick wall, the captain’s garden soon engrossed him. He divided the ground into squares and other shapes within them, all picked out by borders of box and divided by walks of sandy gravel taken from the river bed. Flowers filled the box shapes: lilies, irises and glossy peonies. Roses, most of all, were the captain’s favorites, their roots brought bare from England in wooden boxes in the holds of ships. White and cream and pink, they threw their scent across the garden in the evening, as we walked between the little hedges of the parterre and, like a proud parent, the captain bent and knelt to see the beauty of his creation.

  He called the garden his other Eden, and by making it he came to mind less the place he had left behind. I forbore to say that though he lost one thing he gained another, but watched as he dragged the weight more easily. One day in autumn he picked a bunch of purple-red flowers, Sweet William he told me was their name, and, offering them to me, asked for my hand.

  “We are used to one another, Eliza. I am past forty years old, and see no impediment, despite the difference in our station. What do you say?”

  “I say yes, sir.”

  The fact was that the captain had grown dependent upon me for the running of the plantation, and had no wish to learn that trade again as he must have done had he married another woman. His pride was hurt at the thought of my lowliness, but it was vanquished by his need, as may happen in the New World though it never could in the old one. I was a free woman and had more than once hinted at that, usually as we lay in bed.

  So it was that seven years ago I became the captain’s wife, and mistress of the whole estate of Bellevue. We married at Jamestown, and our names were entered in the register there for all to read. I might, at last, sit at the table as his wife, and all the planters and their wives visit me from round about. We soon enlarged the house to match the garden and all sorts and conditions of men and women took pleasure in their visits to Bellevue. From the beginning with the captain I kept a fine table and freely poured his wines. I mixed my guests according to rank and habit.

  Gentleman planters came for dinner or to sit under the trees and talk business. Land, and the getting of it, was their great subject; that and the shortage of labor and women. Their families came also. I kept two ponies, and had Hawker’s men build me a small cart with wooden seats to pull behind them for the children. I sat and listened. With the tea or dinner I handed round questions and heard stories. Of myself I spoke little.

  There were one or two
gentlemen coming to Bellevue who called themselves antiquarians or botanists, given to collecting objects. They wrote letters back to England about what they found here, and waited months for the replies. Some drew fine pictures of river creatures or plants with medicinal use, others sent narratives of the new-discovered land.

  Talk sometimes turned from the curiosities of the natural world to the natives of this place. Mr. Turner, a merchant of the neighborhood, made a study of their habits and life. Of these people I pretended to know nothing, but I had sometimes come across them in the swamps and observed them closely. I had seen that they were ingenious in the matter of trapping and growing, and at home on the water. Though not able to make coracles, they fashioned bark into canoes and got about in a manner familiar to me that I longed to try. I saw the natives and forbore to call them savage, since they were savage in a way I know.

  There has been a struggle between those newly settled and those who once lived here, who once owned this land. We who have arrived are already the victors. The natives are everywhere in decline and on the move. This is the way of the world that I have seen before. It is the operation of strength and skill and money, all of which the colonists possess in greater quantity than those who were content to let nature put a sufficiency in their hands. This I learned in another place and I applied the lesson to the New World; there is no more to be said of it.

  When the guests went away the captain and I walked in the garden. James Maybrick, a slender man of more than forty years and curly-haired; myself by him, a woman of the same height. The captain wore his soft boots. He took his ease, the strings of his white muslin shirt untied, his velvet breeches loosened. I liked to loop my right arm under his left, a silk shawl over my gown, my ankles neat beneath my skirts. I wore silk slippers with turned heels that the captain especially liked. Behind the house the oaks begin their rise up the hill; in front the ground falls away to the river where the pinnace and rowboat lie in the boathouse.