Call Upon the Water Read online

  Lysbet asked me once why I keep these objects and I replied that they are a warning that all the things of this world will come to dust. Yet it seems to me today as I look that they will not decay, but rather endure forever.

  It is the two figures propped by the stove that always draw my eye; two women who seem from another world. One is carved from some crystalline rock, the other made of fired clay. The clay woman stands on stumps of legs, her arms insignificant. Most of her is massed round her long breasts and hanging belly. The gash of her belly button looks like an opening to the underworld, that of her mouth like a wound.

  The other woman is cut from crystal. She is fishlike and liquid in comparison to the rough clay of the first, and cool to the touch, even in summer. Breasts, stomach, hips, buttocks and thighs grow from one another in smooth egg shapes; legs fused like a mermaid’s tail, pinhole eyes. She is a sea creature flung up from the deep, ancient and suspicious. While I write at the table, the note before me, she watches and waits, impassive, through the morning.

  Hendrick comes back at midday. He is dragging his heels in a jaunty way.

  “Well?”

  “Nothing. Frederick cannot remember who gave him the paper, only that having your name on the front made it easy, and so he gave it to me.”

  Hendrick looks at me with curiosity. I cast my eyes down to the path, not wishing him to see anything that might pass across my face, then right myself and dig about in the pocket of my gown for a few coins.

  “I thank you, Hendrick. If you hear anything, or if Frederick does, come back and tell me.”

  “Of course, Mijnheer Brunt.”

  Hendrick takes off his old hat and stows the coins in its lining. He is a boy used to fighting, and spends his days roaming the city. He lives off its scraps and sometimes its kindness, though he takes no heed of that. I watch him put the hat back on his head and run off down the path, and think that Nieuw Amsterdam is a good place to hide things. And this holds true for me as well as for him.

  Nature, the whole of our earth, is full of an intelligence that I try to discover. Each day I estimate the rise of the water by the Stadt Huys by means of a device I have set in the wharf there, and so record the hours of high and low tide. My friend, Albert Jansen, a man of parts who built the two windmills beyond the Fort, makes the same observations at his jetty on Staaten Eylandt. These, together with the speed of the wind and the lunar calendar, we compare when Albert comes to my door by the Heere Gracht.

  I do more. Each day, if not abroad on business, I write the temperature of the air at first light and then again when the sun is at its highest. These observations I have written in the form of a table each year since my arrival. I am the first man ever to make record of the climate of Manatus Eylandt, its excesses and variations. This precedence pleases me as a toy does a child, though I know it is vanity. The wildmen of this place plant their corn and harvest it without knowledge of recorded time or the months of the year. Neither do they talk of distance as we mark it out along the ground. I have seen them observe me take my measurements, but they do not linger long in looking, saying that everything needful is shown to them by nature.

  Chapter 2

  Tholen Eylandt, Zeeland, Nederland.

  The 6th day of May, 1649.

  Wind from the north. Overcast.

  To start, not at the beginning, but a long time ago. Here is a portrait, since we Dutch are so fond of them. Jan Brunt, engineer, painted in words by himself, and so depicted with the mixture of kindness and cruelty we afford ourselves. This Brunt faces out of the picture with as steady a gaze as he can pretend to. He is cloaked in brown velvet for the outdoors, his hair loose over his shoulders, eyes (though the painter may have mistaken them) a pebbly mixture of brown and blue. In his right hand he holds his drawings. Some of them are fantastical, over-embellished with scrolls and flowers, or fleets of merchantmen in the distance. That is to say they are the work of a young man who wants to impress. Yet they offer proof that, as far as embanking and drainage are concerned, he has not wasted his time.

  You don’t see his feet, just the turned, loose tops of his soft leather boots. And he is standing somewhere known only to the painter, on neither land nor water. We must presume an embankment, which suits him. Behind him a bristling river flows, whipped into gray waves by the paintbrush. A pair of small boats, leaned over in the breeze, work along the waterway from left to right. Tiny figures stand in the sterns, two in brick-red jackets, two in black; flicks of color against the russet sails. Beyond the river the painter has added a thin gray slice of land. That’s my island, Tholen, rising (a very little) from the Oosterschelde estuary, one of the flatlands that sit between the channels of the many-fingered river as it slows towards the sea. Tholen is man’s work as well as the river’s, its mud solidified with pilings and filled in with estuary silt. Who knows anymore what nature gave and what the islanders took. They have protected and farmed it well, built villages and windmills.

  A gray church spire and a smudge of gabled houses stand black against the sky. But all this is not the real interest of the painting, and neither am I. A palace of clouds rises through the pale blue, pushed along by the wind. The sky and the clouds are what the painter loves best. He is a virtuoso of the heavens. To be sure I stand there in the middle, but only because I paid the painter and the sky cannot.

  My village, dabbed out on the horizon, is reached from where I stand first by a ferry and then by bridges. The ferry takes me across the main river and the bridges straddle the dykes. Once across the Oosterschelde it’s about twenty minutes’ brisk walk from the bank opposite where the painter places me. Amongst that smudge of houses stands the one where I was born and grew up. It is too far away to show clear in the painting, but just by the open front door stand my mother Beatris, and Isaac Brunt, my father. Katrijn, who is only five, hangs onto my mother’s skirts. Anna and Margriet stand by my father, hand in hand.

  I am leaving and they are here to say goodbye. My sisters are excited by my departure, and I have told them that when I return I will bring them a present each. “What sort of present?” Anna asks, and I say I don’t know yet, I will have to see what she might like. She is seven years old now, but when I return in a year, or two or three, she will be nearly a woman and her wishes will be fitted to her new age. Margriet, who is thirteen, asks for a fan like the one my mother holds, tortoiseshell and red silk, bound together with ribbons.

  My mother does not smile or encourage. She stands inside a velvet gown, its folds full of shadows. My father will send me off with few words. He does not demand to hear from me and anyway, he might say, the stretch of sea that will now separate us is the same water that surrounds our own island. It is not as if I am going amongst strangers. Across the street live Giles and Sarah Vermuyden. My family is connected to Sarah by marriage, and so to Mr. Vermuyden, whose kinsman directs the work I am leaving for. It is Sarah who has helped me; a favor to the whole family, my mother has said.

  A chill rests in the air around my mother and father. I have never found a way to them through that cold, and now it is time to go. I kiss my sisters, this cheek, that and this again; first Anna and Margriet, then Katrijn, who runs circles round my legs. I catch her as she ducks past, throw her high and kiss her as she comes down. Then, with my father, a nod. Last there is my mother, who has waited. She does not kiss me, but brushes my cheeks with hers, then steps back into the shadow where I lose her.

  Four days later I stand before a polished mahogany door open to a paneled room. I am just that morning disembarked at Greenwich, rowed with the incoming tide to Puddle Dock by the Blackfriars and directed on to St. Paul’s churchyard. I see the great length of the room signaled by three brass chandeliers that hang at equal intervals. Their branches gleam in a pale sun that comes and goes through four long windows. Even in my unease I count and measure: three chandeliers; four windows; twenty paces. At the far end stands a man in black velvet with a long-toothed lace collar. He is severe, as befits those
heartsick days in England.

  It is time now to advance towards him. My courage falters when I hear the loud knock and echo of my heels on the wooden floor. The room has been stripped of softness and the noise bounces off the paneling. Alert to the habits of estuaries and seas, I smell the salty tidewater from the river as I pass the open windows. Cornelius Vermuyden waits, and looks me up and down. Then, when I come near, he grasps my arm, pulls me towards him and asks after my parents. It seems impossible, as I look at him, that he ever lived on Tholen or knows its mud and sand. He looks rich and well washed, and too quick in his movements for the patient work we are trained in.

  “Here you are then, Jan. Are you ready to start?” He does not wait for an answer, but goes on, “How do you find London? Nothing compared to Amsterdam?”

  How do I find this city? Scarcely seen this breezy May morning, though I walked into the cathedral as I made my way here. A great part of the roof is all tumbled down and lying in piles on the floor. Struts from the vaulting stick up into the sky. Pigeons perch on the brick columns that supported the vaults and clatter away in a dirty arc when I come close. Half the floor tiles have been lifted and stolen. Dust and feathers rise from my boots.

  The ruination horrifies me. God has deserted this place. Groups of people huddle in the side aisles where the roofs still remain, indistinct under woolen cloaks. Some use a pew or two to mark a space; others hang thin walls of hessian between the tombs. I realize that they live here. They have been displaced in the late wars, perhaps, too poor to find other lodging. At the end of the nave I find an open preaching place without chairs, benches or a lectern. People here must stand and listen, hats in hand. It is not a place for dreams or napping. It is a place for words alone. The remains of the great organ hang twisted off the wall.

  The cathedral of St. Paul is broken and the churchyard desolate. Stumps of trees stripped for firewood stand barren over the gravestones. The sky races above the tapered spire. A wind, as quick as fear, is getting up from the west. It is too cold for spring and the people glance upwards with troubled wonder.

  So what do I think of London? I think nothing yet, but I feel unease. I shall not venture a reply because I dislike haste, and am concerned above all to make my way here. I think of Amsterdam, alive with glass and water and the talk of citizens. The Dutch have made Amsterdam from the land, shaped clay into bricks that repel the damp. The city smells of prosperity, of cheese and milk and spices. Damasks and pearls shimmer in the light. Laughter and tobacco smoke pour from tavern windows. In London, rotting timber houses lean towards one another across the alleys. The plaster between the beams and struts is stained with soot. People hurry along in worsted and wool; if silk is underneath I cannot see it.

  Mr. Vermuyden does not seem much interested in an answer to his question; perhaps he has forgotten it already. His plump fingers drift across the surface of a table next to him. After a pause he asks about my work. His voice has lost the furriness of our Dutch; now it is quick and nasal.

  “I have not called you here on a whim, Mijnheer Brunt.”

  I incline my head.

  “Yet I did not wish to commit the details of my proposal to writing.”

  I can only nod again as Vermuyden tells me he needs engineers to take on a task that will be arduous and long. He must know, for he has only to ask his kinsman, that though I have advanced well since I am become a master engineer, I have never yet had charge of any part of a large project.

  “You wish to know of my education, sir?”

  “Not really, Mijnheer Brunt, but tell me anyway for form’s sake.”

  So I tell him that I learned the principles of mathematics from my earliest years at school and then, finding that I had an affinity with numbers and measurement, progressed to the Duytsche Mathematique in the Engineering School at the University of Leiden. I stand a little taller as I say these words, finding that I am proud of all my learning, the selections from Euclid’s Elements, the constructions with ruler and compass, the art of trigonometry and the months spent outside on the practice of surveying. I do not mention the art of fortification, which every student at the Mathematique was required also to study. The wars in England being finished, I cannot see that it will be of any use here.

  My studies made me skilled at surveying and I added my own talent at drawing upon the best linen paper Leiden supplied. That is to say, I made plans beautiful by adding those fanciful elements that I mentioned. The drawing teachers at the university taught me to give clients a picture of what they want. Though the first map of any place shows the present moment, a plan of works shows the future. Such is the distinction between a map and a plan. Drawings on plans are visions of a place as it will be. I like them to show my work perfected. No wonder they serve me better than any speech, a matter in which, my mother often tells me, I am deficient. I add color to my plans and roll them out with a flourish. Though I do not speak much I always add that I am first a master engineer and only then a mapmaker.

  Apprenticed to my master Claes Van Nes, I was soon given charge of making the plans and maps. How beautiful I showed the future to be; and how tranquil. I never now draw cannons or swords, never the fields I am going to make trampled by war or made hateful by dispute. For a rich client I like to make three drawings; the first the map, the second the plan, the last the plan perfected into a new world. My drawings offer peace and plenty. They show my clients their desires, not what might be if fortune does not favor them.

  There is no table here except that next to Vermuyden, so I can only hold out my roll of papers as an offering that puts me at a disadvantage.

  Vermuyden takes it, and carries on talking.

  “My sister Sarah has no doubt told you of my work here?”

  “She admires what you have done, sir, and has herself shown me the map you sent of your reclamations at Oxenholme.”

  “Axholme, since you mention it. Axholme, in the county of Lincolnshire, some hundred miles north of where we now sit. But that was not my first work, Giles and Sarah could have told you. I had to start, as you perhaps have done, with riverbanks; with the Thames here.”

  He looks towards the window.

  “The Thames is a shifty river, faster flowing than the Scheldt, treacherous and liable to flood. My first work was repairing the seawall at Dagenham, a neat and simple job of piling and embanking. It served as something to show Joas Croppenburg, though he need not have put me through that, as a relative. You have at least heard of him?”

  It is a great relief to be able to say that I have. Our family branches part and then come together again. Croppenburg is not just a relative of Vermuyden but of myself as well, another man my mother has held up as an example. “Look,” she would say to me (my father saying nothing), “see how Mijnheer Croppenburg set out for London from Amsterdam with a few fine buckles and some introductions in his pocket. He was soon selling pearls and diamonds and all manner of precious trinkets along with his buttons and bows.”

  How quick Croppenburg was, my mother said, to put his profit into land. Here she looked at me to make sure I heard what she said, as a mother and a Dutchwoman. There is nothing more precious than land, she said; nothing more ingenious than taking it from the sea. Croppenburg knew this better than the Englishmen he lived amongst, and summoned his kinsman and ours—Vermuyden.

  “You won’t find Croppenburg in London now, Jan,” Vermuyden says, suddenly familiar. “He has gone to ground somewhere, though he will be back if times change.”

  “I see, sir,” I say, although I do not.

  “Well, back then,” Vermuyden says, “twenty years ago now, Croppenburg put me to work on Canvey Island, a wretched pancake of mud at the mouth of the Thames that any Dutchman would long ago have made something of. I strengthened it on the river side—the usual stuff: chalk, limestone, clay, timber pilings, ragstone for solidity. Then, once the river was kept out, I turned my attention to the land, to ditching, filling, draining.”

  Mr. Vermuyden glances out
of the window again. Does he see Canvey Island out there, as if it had been towed into the city in proof?

  “Between the embanking and the draining I made new land and enriched old. Croppenburg gave me in recompense a portion of the pasture, which yields a good income from tenant farmers. That’s a piece of advice for you.”

  Vermuyden makes sure I am paying attention.

  “Never take specie payment, young man, if you can get the land instead. You will be familiar with the principle, though too young as yet to go without a salary.”

  “Indeed, sir. My mother has expressed the same sentiment.”

  “Good. It is no more than I expect of a sensible Dutchwoman. Money passes through your fingers like water; land sticks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Croppenburg lives on his rents now. The war made his business hard and the King’s death has finished it off. Few dare to walk abroad with any jewelry these days, as you will see. It’s land that will get him through.”

  I nod and wait. I do not say that I have no particular interest in buying land or even in my salary. It is the subtle combat, the tussle between land and water, that catches and holds me tight. Mr. Vermuyden also says nothing and a silence gathers between us that I do not know how to fill.

  Then he adds, almost in a drawl, “The present scheme is altogether larger than anything I have undertaken. It is brought about by General Cromwell himself in alliance with several Gentlemen Adventurers. You will have acquainted yourself with its whole history during the late war.”

  “Only a little; I know a start was made.”

  Vermuyden looks up sharply at this. “Yes, indeed, a start was made; and a stop too. A very bad business. But now we begin again.”

  At that Vermuyden walks towards me, full of energy all of a sudden. “We are ordered to make a scheme for the draining of the Great Level, a large expanse, being in total area some five hundred square miles in the English way of measuring.”