Call Upon the Water
Page 25
Opening the door it is not you, who I have been longing for and thinking of. It is a man, who turns towards me as I step in. My heart first drops, then picks up and leaps like a young fish hurtling out of water. Unmistakably, joyfully, it is Jacob Van Hooghten, gray-haired and smiling.
“Jacob; oh, Jacob.”
“Jan. It is you.”
He comes towards me and I look down into his eyes again, familiar and deep set amongst the wrinkles.
“Jan.”
I am staggered and unable to speak. All this time I have been expecting you, and instead Van Hooghten has come. Two worlds that were once joined and then seemed parted forever have come together again.
Van Hooghten puts his arms round me and draws me to him. He is still thickset and solid. Comfort spreads through me like cream. He pushes me back, looks at me, and pulls me close again.
“It has been—too long.”
“Yes, yes—too long,” I say, my voice almost failing me.
“Twelve years, Jan—thirteen almost. We are old men.”
“Jacob, you are in the prime of life. What are you doing here? You sent a boy to me to say you would be coming.”
“Jan—Jan. One thing at a time. It is not like you to be disordered.”
“Forgive me; forgive me. I am delighted to see you. You can stay a little?”
“Yes, yes. I’ve come on Company business, Jan. But I sent no boy. I am only just arrived. It is easy to find you. I heard a rumor in Amsterdam that you had come here and once arrived I merely asked and was directed here.”
“Forgive me, again. I received a message some time ago announcing a visitor; of course, too long ago. No matter. I will ask Lysbet—you have met her—for coffee and you must tell me all your news.”
I hurry out into the hall. There is nothing more to think; you sent a note and have not come. Instead, here is Van Hooghten, a man I love, who did me great kindness long ago and whom I welcome now. For a few moments I walk up and down to calm myself. Now, no more than then, do I wish to let out my rawness and disappointment. Besides the indignity to myself, what an unkindness that would be to Jacob who has shown himself in every way my friend.
“Lysbet. Lysbet,” I call as a distraction, and ask her to make coffee. By the time I return to Van Hooghten in the parlor I have sealed over my agitation and determine to show him only my happiness and gratitude. You are not here, but he is. If I believed in miracles, this might be described as such.
Lysbet brings almond biscuits in a Delft bowl with the coffee, setting them down with a flourish. As I pour the coffee I accustom myself to seeing Van Hooghten in my house, with the rug on the oak table, and bright blades of sunlight glancing through the half-open shutters.
The colors of my parlor are golden and red, deep with the life I live here. I think of Van Hooghten the last time I saw him, on the quay in King’s Lynn, the viscous gray mud glistening with salt water, the sky low and the air heavy with rain, and feel a sudden lightening. After all these years when I have kept him in mind, my past has come out of memory, looped around and is here to meet me. Life, suddenly, shines bright and rich.
Silence falls as we look at one another. Van Hooghten is smiling and I know that I am also.
“Jacob,” I say finally, “tell me how fortune treats you.”
“She treats me fairly, Jan. I am grown old and prosperous. I work for the Company and came here on regular business on the warship Gideon. Then this happened; this takeover.”
Here Jacob throws his arms wide and laughs.
“And so what now?” I ask.
“Now they ask me to stay, there being few Company officials in this town. I will oversee the Company’s departure from this place—accounts, files, any other property they demand back home.”
“A great responsibility.”
“Not so, Jan; just a sudden one. The Company has lost interest in Nieuw Nederland, seeing more profit in sugar and spices than in furs. A mistake, I believe.”
“It is of little importance,” I say. “The world turns and empires come and go.”
In my mind I see a picture of the wildmen of this place in a line of canoes and then suddenly, as if Van Hooghten’s presence has conjured it, another picture, of the prisoners by the embankment so long ago, one tied to another, their spades rising and falling in arc after arc.
I hesitate then, not wanting to turn our talk to the Great Level, but Van Hooghten goes on.
“Our work on the Great Level is done, Jan; long done, and well. The Level is drained, just as we planned and foresaw; though . . .”
“Though?”
“Well, Jan, we are Dutchmen, accustomed to gravels and clays, and I have reports that we overlooked the nature of the place.”
“It is flooding?”
“No, no. Not that. Those are Dutchmen’s fears you voice. It is a matter of land, not water, or at least land drained of water, separated from the element that it had lived in. It seems the peat is shrinking.”
He laughs and shrugs.
“Nature is a demanding partner, is she not, Jan? The men there will have to treat with her, find a truce.”
“Renswyck—did he stay on for that task?”
Jacob looks at me keenly then.
“Renswyck—ah, no. Reason left him, Jan, after the work was done. He refused to leave the camps and drank his way through the day. His clothes turned to rags, his mind slackened and the only thing that was left was his rage. He sought my company, sometimes, in the evenings.”
“And you listened to him.”
“For some months. He railed against the world and all the people in it, until his mind was overthrown completely.”
“And then?”
“Then he left the Level, and I never saw him again.”
Sadness passes over Jacob’s face like a gust of wind; then it rights itself and comes back to me.
“And you, Jan, have you made a truce with nature here, or is it even wilder than in that place?”
I am not ready to begin.
“We have much to talk over, Jacob,” I say. “The work will keep you awhile in the city?”
“Some weeks, certainly.”
“And you will stay here as my guest?”
“With great pleasure, Jan. You have done well for yourself.”
“Well enough.”
I can see that Jacob wants to learn more, he wants my story, pat as I can tell it; but there is little I can really tell him, in truth, and nothing of the sort he might like to hear.
“Tell me more of yourself, Jacob,” I go on. “You are married to Maria?”
“Yes, indeed; we married as soon as the Great Level was drained and I had returned home. I was set up well for the world then, and earned the approbation of her family. We live in Amsterdam with our children—four of them, Jan—but spend much time on my estate.”
“You are become a man of property.”
“Yes; I have a small estate. It is near Muiden up on the edge of the polders. I’ve built an elegant little country house; everything well ordered and modest. I am improving the lands there; planting also.”
“And you work still as an engineer?”
“Ah, Jan, that’s a labor for a younger man. I no longer set my feet in the mud these days.”
Van Hooghten places the delicate coffee cup on the table with care, and looks around. He seems to be searching for something to indicate success and wealth to balance his own.
“You have a fine parlor here, Jan. And a wife yourself?”
“No; I am content as I am.”
I see him hesitate.
“Yet you had a woman in England?”
“A long time ago.”
“She was sent as indentured labor along with the prisoners, was she not?”
“I saw her go, Jacob, at least I believe so.”
“You said nothing of that to me.”
“No. There was nothing to say, or know. She was gone.”
“And is?”
“And is.”<
br />
“In truth, Jan, there were rumors about the breach. Renswyck insisted on the guilt of the fensmen.”
“Ah, he did.”
“Yes.”
Van Hooghten leans back and looks straight at me.
“Did you notice nothing, Jan? Did you see nothing?”
“See? What did any of us see, Jacob? So little, either near or far; either above ground or below it. Now I am in the New World, I observe that it is the same here. We all of us see just what we want to and no more.”
Van Hooghten shrugs.
“You are probably right, Jan. Besides, the flood was forgotten soon enough, though for your sake I kept an ear open to news. After some months I heard that your woman was taken indentured by a Captain Maybrick, a planter in the Virginia Colony.”
“Maybrick?”
“Yes, I am sure of it. Captain Maybrick. The harbormaster at Lynn had the lists and told me the name.”
“Ah.”
Then the world recedes; Van Hooghten disappears and I am with Captain Maybrick in the Ship Tavern. Captain Maybrick. When was it that he sought me out with those drawings? Eight or nine years ago, at least; and I sat there and looked at them, the drawing of the sluice especially, made of brick with wooden gates in the Dutch style. They were good drawings: precise and simple.
Oh, Eliza, you made those drawings. Of course you made them. You missed no detail of the sluice, and there it was on the paper, taking into account the tides in the particular place where you now live. Why did I not recognize the movement of your hand across the paper, not understand Maybrick’s reluctance that I should go down there? Bellevue, on the James River.
Maybrick was ashamed that his engineer was a woman. He came to me not knowing who I was and am. He did not want my services, since he had yours. He wished merely to know if your work was sound.
“Jan?”
I glance up to see Van Hooghten looking anxiously at me.
“I have brought back something you prefer not to remember.”
“No, indeed not, Jacob. It is a thing far away.”
“Is it of importance to you now, Jan?”
“Yes, and, no; something close and yet long gone.”
Van Hooghten laughs.
“You are still the same, Jan.”
He stands up and I stand too.
“May I return tonight, and send a boy with my things from the inn?”
“Of course, you need not ask. I will be very happy to have your company, Jacob.”
We move into the hall and I open the door for him. He pulls me to him and kisses me again, three times, in our manner.
“I have to hurry, but I look forward to the renewal of our friendship, Jan.”
“It was not lost. Nothing is ever lost, Jacob.”
When Van Hooghten has turned the corner into Begijn Gracht I climb the stairs to my garret and sit at the window. Gradually the sun goes down outside, while inside it seems to grow lighter. I am coming to the end of my history, or this relation of my past. You have not come, though you may, perhaps, on another visit. Instead Van Hooghten has come. He will be my guest and I his host as long as he stays here.
Long ago I came to understand that nature does not divide us up so simply, for we are all present in the other. Van Hooghten my guest is also my host, for he listens to me and brings forth from me much that has lain dormant for many years, and so carries that within him henceforth. No stranger then need be an enemy as many here have it. Every stranger may one day be my host and I his, each thus to carry the other through life. I am here, if anyone wants to find me: Jan Brunt, engineer.
Jan Brunt: but today I have another name in this new city of New York. In English I am John Brown, and I like my simple name in that language, it being the name of any man. I am a man reluctant to obey and unwilling to command; neither a man of achievement nor one who seeks obscurity. I live with doubt and questions, observe the world and seek to understand it. I am its citizen.
Here I live, and here live Karl Carstensen, a Norwegian; Congo, once a slave; Thomas Fransen, a quarrelsome Hamburg merchant; Maria Jans, who sells liquor without a license; the musician Albert Pieterson and his son Claes, who runs about the streets barefoot; Asser Levy, a trader in cotton and silks; Lysbet Thyssen my housekeeper, widow of Maryn Andiessen; Abraham Lucena, a surgeon and my friend; William Sharp. Here live two thousand others, in all conditions and states of content. Because they are here, it is a city, and a place where I feel safe.
I thought, until Jacob came, that here on Manatus Eylandt I had cast my anchor for the last time. I was secured to the bedrock, and found no need to go further than my work might take me, no need to sail the seas again. But this evening, as I look round my garret, at the note that still lies on my table and the figures on my hearth, I sense that another air has nosed its way into the house, and brought disturbance and possibility.
Jacob has come here, full of life, and rearranged the layers of the past. I told him no more than the truth when I said you were here and yet long gone. Wherever you are, dearest Eliza, in this city, or already traveled beyond its borders, you are always here within me, and I in you. Someday we must stand side by side and reckon with one another. Already my wings are opening, to the south.
About the Author
Stella Tillyard is a British novelist and historian. She was educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1999 her bestselling book Aristocrats was made into a six-part series for BBC1/Masterpiece Theatre, and sold to more than twenty countries. Winner of the Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Longman-History Today Prize and the Fawcett Prize, she has taught at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary University of London.
She is currently a visiting professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, at Birkbeck, University of London.
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Copyright © 2018 by Stella Tillyard
Originally published in Great Britain in 2018 by Penguin Random House UK as The Great Level
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ISBN 978-1-9821-2096-2
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