The Great Level Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Tillyard

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Six

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘I am an engineer and a measured man of the world. I prefer to weigh everything in the balance, to calculate and to plan. Yet my own heart is going faster than I can now count.’

  In 1649, Jan Brunt, a Dutchman, arrives in England to work on draining and developing the Great Level, an expanse of marsh in the heart of the fen country. It is here he meets Eliza, whose love overturns his ordered vision and whose act of resistance forces him to see the world differently. Jan flees to the New World, where the spirit of avarice is raging and his skills as an engineer are prized. Then one spring morning a boy delivers a note that prompts him to remember the Fens, and confront all that was lost there.

  The Great Level is a dramatic and elemental story about two people whose differences draw them together then drive them apart. Jan and Eliza’s journeys, like the century they inhabit, are filled with conflict, hard graft and adventure – and see them searching for their own piece of solid ground.

  About the Author

  Stella Tillyard is a writer and historian whose acclaimed biographies include Aristocrats, Citizen Lord and A Royal Affair. Her first novel, Tides of War, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. She has lived in the USA and Italy and now lives in London.

  Also by Stella Tillyard

  The Impact of Modernism, 1900–20: The Visual Arts in Edwardian England

  Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832

  Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763–98

  Aristocrats: The Illustrated Companion

  A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings Tides of War

  All those who sailed the seas.

  Inscription written by the architect Sostratus; carved on the Pharos lighthouse, Alexandria, 280 BCE

  Prologue

  Nieuw Amsterdam, Manatus Eylandt.

  The 1st day of April, 1664.

  I am afloat in the Oost Rivier, rocking on the waves, when I hear a song. Silence covers the city and wraps me in darkness. In front of me it is still night, but behind me, to the east, all the day stands ready to arrive. In a moment the sun will burst above the horizon on Lange Eylandt and the city of Nieuw Amsterdam will wake and stir. By noon we will feel the thin warmth of April; half winter, and half the promise of spring. I am happy to be alive on the water and to smell the salt.

  On the sandy shore I find the dry carcass of a horseshoe crab, hollowed out and turned to the sky. A thousand lives will follow this death. In a month the horseshoe crabs will come back. The water will be black with them. Each year they surf the waves, washing back and forth until they can scramble up the beach with their blue-and-orange claws. They do not pause after this struggle, but climb to safety, lay their eggs in the sand and crawl back to the water. Clouds of seabirds wait for this moment, migrants from the south. They clatter down and gorge themselves on the eggs, fattening for their journey. All nature is on the move, restless and lively.

  As I pull my canoe up onto the frosted grass of my orchard, the song comes again, carrying itself over the lap of the water and my heavy steps. The melody is unknown to me, but somewhere inside myself I meet the voice that sings it. I feel certain that it comes from close by. For a moment I forget where I am, in the New World, in Nieuw Amsterdam. I feel myself lifted into the past, to the Great Level, where first I heard that voice.

  Back in my own house, enclosed in its walls, it seems to me that the song did not come to me today, but arrived from long ago. The same sound comes and goes, most usually in the quiet of my garret or in the sounds of the flames that murmur in the grate. But I felt certain that I heard that voice today, somewhere between the sea and the land. Then it faded, as it does, and I can only conclude that it came to me on the winds of memory.

  And yet around nine by the clock, a boy I know knocks at my door. I answer it myself and let in the sunshine.

  ‘Hendrick.’

  The boy takes off his battered beaver hat, worn in imitation of a grown man. Stooping under the lintel, as if he is tall, he enters my hall.

  ‘Mijnheer Brunt, good morning. I have a message from the wharfs.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘A paper, Mijnheer Brunt. Shall I wait and take a reply?’

  The paper he hands me has my name written on the outside, nothing else. The strong penstrokes look familiar. When I hold the paper at arm’s length to read I see it tremble.

  ‘Who gave it to you?’

  ‘The boy Frederick, sir. He stays about the wharf, takes messages from the ships’ captains into the town and back. He gave me the paper.’

  ‘Why did he not bring it here himself, by which he might have told me who put it in his hand?’

  ‘He said he had no time, sir. There are ships just arrived from the north, as well as the usual traffic.’

  I read the note again.

  ‘I want you to return to the wharfs. Find Frederick and ask who gave him this letter. Then come back to me.’

  Hendrick nods and turns to go. He ducks under the lintel with a grin that acknowledges his game of being full grown. I watch him run off down the path along the Heere Gracht. He knows I will give him a coin when he returns.

  I am an engineer and a measured man of the world. I prefer to weigh everything in the balance, to calculate and to plan. Yet my own heart is going faster than I can now count. I am at a loss for what to do, though the words of the note are plain enough.

  Finding myself in New Amsterdam with business to transact, I intend, if time permits in the next weeks, to pay you a visit after many years.

  The paper shakes again as I stare at it. There is no signature, no place of dispatch, yet I run out of my open door as if I might see someone pass who can explain it. The scene outside is the same as it is every day. At the end of my path I see across the canal and to the houses on the other side. Everything lies somnolent in the morning sun. Nothing has changed except inside myself.

  I call for coffee and climb up to my garret. Waiting for my housekeeper’s heavy tread on the stairs and knock at the door, I look about the room and place myself amongst the familiar things there, which steadies my heart and quietens it. Feeling the note in my hand now all crumpled and twisted by my agitation, I lay it on the table and smooth it out.

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Nieuw Amsterdam, Manatus Eylandt.

  The colony of Nieuw Nederland in America.

  The 1st day of April, 1664.

  A fair day in prospect.

  The sky clear, the wind, by my weather vane, from the east.

  High tide by the Stadt Huys at 20 minutes after 1 o’clock.

  I have lived, for almost a dozen years, here in
the colony of Nieuw Nederland, that we call the New World, though it is rightly only new to us, being as old as all creation. This, the city of Nieuw Amsterdam, is sited on the Eylandt of Manatus. It is truly not much of a city: to call it such is the pride of the inhabitants, or the way they talk in letters home. It is a town, most on the firm ground, but in part, as is our Dutch way, on land we have drained. I dare say that before long, if the colony grows and survives the difficult times, we will begin to take land from the sea both as protection and out of habit.

  When I think as a Dutchman, if such I am still, I know that it is not other nations that we Dutch dream of conquering, or other peoples. Our real enemy and our best companion is something quite different: the force of nature itself. We have been compelled for centuries to attempt the separation of land and water wherever we find them muddled up. This is our struggle; this our way of being. Here in the New World there is surely land enough for all. Mountains and plains, hills and huge valleys, it is supposed, stretch away beyond the western horizon in a vastness never seen before. They bring fear and entrancement for some. Yet we Dutch turn the other way. We seek out the waterlines: shores, rivers, estuaries and marshes.

  So it is no surprise that from my garret window I look down on the canal that my men dug from a filthy stream and embanked as my contract demanded. It’s a strip of water, the Heere Gracht, jewelled silver in the morning sun. I ran it straight south to the river’s edge, clean and simple, as befits an engineer. At the shore, where once the land slid under the water in a disorderly way, the two are now divided by pilings that have given Manatus Eylandt a firm edge all round its tip. Such is the purpose of embanking: to make an edge, a clear boundary and separation.

  Beyond the confines of Nieuw Amsterdam, marsh, sand and river still mingle raggedly up the island’s eastern side. There, twice a day, the tide pushes up the ribbony creeks and into the marshes. The glistening brown mud waits, and welcomes the water. When the tide goes out the flats are dappled with gulls and egrets sucking up worms and shrimp. Their cries reach me in my attic in the early morning, and through the darkness, with the casement open, comes the quock-quock of night herons searching for crabs. This is still a small place, two thousand souls. The shore and the sea are right there, beyond the wharfs and the wall. They wait, as once the flood waited, for the call to rise and cover the earth. One day the flood will come again. This is the knowledge that a Dutchman always has.

  I have been in possession here long enough to call this place my home, though it is inside my house, more than on these streets, that I am myself, which is all that I wish for. Nieuw Amsterdam cannot be like the old city of Amsterdam, though the people still have the voices of their homes, the ne and ja, goedemorgen and goedenavond when the sun sinks beyond the far bank of the Noort Rivier. The very first to come here in the ship the Halve Maen also brought the flags that flew from the Fort and the Stadt Huys in bands of orange, white and blue.

  That was half a century ago, and Nieuw Amsterdam flourishes in many respects, and now begins to grow. The better sort among the houses, such as mine is, in every way resemble those that were left behind, with gabled ends proud onto the street, high stoops and half-doors for the summer. Tall windows flank the front door, with sturdy casements and the clearest glass to be found here. I have tacked a brass plate to the door with my name and profession: Jan Brunt, Ingenieur. Along with the hinges of my doors and the clasps on my windows, this plate is polished so bright that the clouds may be observed running across it, or a face reflected if it comes up close.

  On the first floor of my house stand three more windows and another in the gable end where the year of building, 1654, is finely writ in curling iron numbers, bolted into the bricks. On the gable top stands my weather vane, by which each morning I see at a glance how the wind blows. Behind my house I grow vegetables and fruit trees, sheltering them with a fine wall and taking advantage of the western sun. Tulips and other tender bulbs do not flourish here, or flower once only. I lift them for the hottest summer months, when they lie cool in my cellar like gentleman’s claret, and replant them in the autumn, yet they come back too tall and without strength.

  Inside, too, the houses are much the same as you might see in Leiden or in Delft. New World oak makes good dense flooring, and the carpets on the tables are come from the East Indies as do those at home. Our hearths are tiled in blue and milky white. More than anything, more even than the portraits and little landscapes transported in trunks and boxes, these tiles bring Holland here. Sitting by my fire I can lean close to its canals and windmills, its dogs and children, soldiers, scholars and skiffs at sea. Each blue brushstroke is tender and familiar to me, like a touch on the cheek.

  Much is taken from old Amsterdam, but not the light, or the wind, or its long low sky. Even as a child I knew my home, its extent and look on the map. ‘That is Holland,’ I could say to myself. I knew its shape, the round blue scoop of the Zuyder Zee, and the splayed fingers of the River Rhine that stretched into the sea.

  So familiar was the picture of Holland in my mind, that I did not pay it any heed. Only when I came here to the New World did I understand the comfort of that shape, its borders drawn in black or red. Here we are, it says; here we are snug and safe, and beyond the lines lies something different. Here one thing ends and another begins. Mark it well and preserve it well.

  In the New World we are just beginning to make our edges safe in this very small part, four or five islands with that of Manatus at the centre. Of the rest we can say little and draw less. We know the rivers well enough, and the great lakes in the northern areas. We know there is another side, and I have seen a map of it; but what lies between, the great immensity of it, is unknown. Sometimes men appear in Nieuw Amsterdam with tales of high mountains and huge animals, but they may be liars or tell fantastic stories for the fame of it.

  There was a man here, a trader in furs with a large fortune, who determined to get across to the far coast discovered by fanatic Spanish missionaries. He talked of nothing else but the journey and his desire to make out the whole shape of America once and for all and then to establish settlements therein. The wildmen, with their vagueness in matters of distance, were no good to him in his preparations. He showed them a map of the two coasts and the blank between, but they shrugged, not knowing what a map might be; or perhaps, wishing him to leave that land to them, they turned away. So he would have to do it himself, make the journey and the map.

  One fine autumn day about five years ago he set off, crossed the Noort Rivier and struck west. I never heard of him again. Somewhere his bones lie in that space, unless he went south to the French territories or somehow made it to safety. We still do not know what this great land looks like, neither with our own eyes, nor in the way that map makers have it appear, stretched out on paper.

  So I live with the unknown at my back, yet happily. I have determined, this April morning, with the note next to me on my table, to record what occurred, and let nothing remarkable escape me. The wilde mannen, the wildmen who inhabit the lands beyond the city, say that the sun sees all things. I wish, then, to be a bit like the sun; to see all things, to write them down, and also to record the cloudy world in our hearts that so often cannot come to the surface but shakes life from below.

  Today the sun shines across my table onto the inkstand, with my pens and the sand that blots the ink. The pen I hold is my companion, balanced and patient. Words spread from its beak across the paper and follow the twisted ribbon of my life as the maiden Ariadne followed the thread, back to where I start. Word by word my scratches make a shape, a history that comes to me in the form I have writ it.

  Oh, how small a word is and how much it must carry. I picture one curled in a basket, weighing almost nothing, though a whole heart might lie in it. Little wonder then that I often score my words through impatiently, or exchange one for another. A man may put a whole thing in language and still find it does not fit what he wishes to say.

  It is difficult, but I hav
e time. I am not a man of words, though I have made my peace with them. Often I cannot catch the sort of chatter that falls through the air. I am uneasy in gatherings where talk and laughter are loud and swelling. I aim for solidity, and trust to things that can be measured. I like to pace out the world, understand it with the soles of my feet and my compass and rope. If not that, in other ways, with the tips of my fingers.

  This morning, the cuff of my gown moves across the desk with a dry murmur. This gown is deep blue, indigo dyed, and lined in silk the colour of ivory. Layers of wool are packed between the silks like pages of a book. I describe it thus precisely because, wearing it every day in winter and on brisk spring mornings when the wind hits us from Lange Eylandt and the ocean beyond, it is become a part of me. Beneath, I’m all black and white; stockings and breeches black, a fine Virginia cotton shirt – white if the girl Griete has done her work – and underneath there is my own nakedness, as nature sees it. There I am a big-built man, and am in height also much taller than most of my countrymen, who are in the main a squat people. My hair is grey and falls to the shoulder in the manner of men here. I have not grown a beard, but shave myself each morning before the glass, a square of muslin round my neck, the razor sharpened daily on its stone. Facing out at me from the glass I see a man counting through his forty-fourth year. I am not yet old, but neither in the prime of life. I am somewhere in between, though I regard it not. My own person interests me little; it is all beyond me that makes up the horizon of my eye.

  Here, as in every place, it pleases me to order the day. I rise early, for I sleep ill, and have done for several years, and do not like to lie in bed. If it is fine and already warm I may throw on my gown and take a turn around the garden, where I check the plants and enjoy the quiet half-light before dawn. On other days, and in the winter, I light the stove in my garret and heat the jug of coffee left from yesterday. Then the day will unfold according to my duties and inclinations.