The Great Level

by Stella Tillyard

  ‘Hombre,’ he says, and shuffles them. ‘I am the dealer.’

  Chapter 4

  The Isle of Ely, on the Great Level.

  May, 1649.

  Wind from the west, with high cloud.

  The next day begins in sunshine that comes through the small dusty window. While the servant is carrying my boxes down the stairs, I rub a hole in the dirt and look out on another city; not the one I saw yesterday. The wind lifts the hem of a grey cloak and I see a flash of scarlet underneath. In the breeze a woman stretches up a hand to steady her hood and a bracelet winks in the sun. Two soldiers walk down the street as a little girl in short skirts, grubby and shoeless, skips through yesterday’s puddles. Other children, rag-clad and bony, follow her. The city’s ghosts have disappeared.

  I take the Cambridge coach at Charing Cross as Vermuyden has ordered, squashed between a silent pastor all in black and a woman whose chatter is soon frustrated by my shrugs to show I do not understand the language. I am glad of the quiet, and peer out at the passing gardens and villages. The inns where we stop to change horses are dirty affairs and the lodgings I am offered in the town of Cambridge little better. I care not, and sleep late, heartened by the flatness of the country and the information that Ely is no more than a dozen miles off.

  These last miles I can accomplish on horseback, the road being too poor to admit a coach and only fit for carts and horsemen. A few miles from Cambridge the fields on either side of the road fall away. My journey takes me across a flat and marshy plain studded with ponds. I am going into the fenland.

  By the afternoon I am riding along a muddy causeway that crosses a broad silver mere. My mood lifts to meet the distant horizon. I have reached a world where water has its empire still. Frogs croak in the shallows; a heron hunches his grey shoulders on a blackened stump. Up ahead, floating in the fading light, a dark bar appears beyond the water. As I come closer I make out a great cathedral, a black silhouette, high and vigilant.

  The town of Ely has lost the splendour it promised from a distance. Many buildings lie ruined and open to the sky. Their walls are pitted, glass has gone from the windows and wood rots in the damp air. Pigeons stand in the empty casements, fat against the squares like portraits ready framed. They rattle up and away as I ride past, and I hear them wheel round and settle again behind me. The streets, in the late afternoon, are empty, but I feel sure that I am followed by dozens of eyes, and am relieved to find the way up into the town immediately.

  At the inn by the cathedral I take a room on the top floor and cross to the window as soon as my boxes have been set down. Beyond the low bulk of the island, which by my reckoning must extend some three or four miles to the north, I make out the turning skeins of rivers and expanses of silvery water stretching as far as the horizon. My mind’s eye journeys towards the sea, as a geographer’s must. This is the drowned country I have come to drain, and I try to get some measure of it before nightfall.

  I know not how long I remain transfixed, but darkness falls as I stand there, and then all I can see are pale beams from inside the shuttered houses opposite, and the swinging lantern of a passer-by. The wind has dropped, and the watery air is dense around me. Yet I do not fear this damp as many do. No, I have a sense from home, of being alone with myself, with the green world, and with God. Peace settles on me, and I silently give thanks that I will be tested here and surely not found wanting.

  In the morning I send a boy to Van Hooghten at the address given by Mr Vermuyden. I am soon up and ready, dressed in my work clothes, a linen suit and oiled boots. The day is blue and still, and I am eager to start. Van Hooghten is waiting for me by the door to the inn. He proves to be a man of middle height and a few years older than myself. His hair is chestnut, falling in thick curls; his blue eyes deep-set. From the way he holds himself, I feel sure that he is well built and strong, though he stands no higher than my shoulder. He greets me quietly, as if we share a secret.

  ‘Engineer Brunt?’

  ‘Jan Brunt, engineer.’

  He nods and says, ‘Jacob Van Hooghten.’

  ‘Mijnheer Van Hooghten, I bid you goedemorgen. I am ready to begin the work.’

  ‘Walk with me to the staithe and I shall explain it to you. It is best we talk in the open air.’

  We speak in Dutch, but alarm runs through me.

  ‘We are surely unremarked; besides, these people cannot make out our speech.’

  ‘As to the last,’ Van Hooghten says, ‘it does not help.’

  He laughs, and I see the wrinkles gather round his eyes.

  ‘Hearing Dutch or another language convinces people, merely, that we are attempting to be secretive.’

  ‘It seems that we are.’

  ‘Mijnheer Brunt, our intentions are already hated by many here. Has Mijnheer Vermuyden not told you that in the late wars the people of these parts, at General Cromwell’s bidding, I may say, breached the dykes that had been built in preparation for the great works?’

  ‘He told me only that the works were started and then halted; but also that General Cromwell now takes it all in his own hands.’

  Van Hooghten looks at me steadily, and I remember Mijnheer Vermuyden’s instructions to listen to him.

  ‘I am ready to take your advice, Mijnheer Van Hooghten.’

  He smiles again, and says, ‘In the first place, find somewhere to live that is out of the way and unobserved. We start work immediately – our first job, as you yourself will know, being to survey the land, find out its gradients, and so make a map of the whole Great Level. In this I shall be taking overall charge and the middle and northern sections, while you map the difficult part to the south.’

  ‘We will work well together, I trust, Mijnheer Van Hooghten,’ I reply.

  ‘I am told you are a fine map maker, so I am sure that we shall. The Gentlemen Adventurers demand maps and plans, as you know. Without them they become restive, uncertain. Though you and I might proceed directly from a survey, keeping the findings in our head and working simply to a plan, yet they wish for fine maps, to pass around, to reassure.’

  ‘The sums of money already advanced perhaps demand them.’

  ‘Indeed so, and the more we can furnish, the more likely we are to be paid our instalments. So we start with a map of the Great Level drowned, upon which we can draw our plan for its draining.’

  I begin at that moment to like Van Hooghten, and to enjoy his company. He puts out a frankness that I do not find in myself but yet am drawn towards. As we speak, my anxiety falls away and an eagerness for the work takes hold of me.

  ‘Well, Mijnheer Van Hooghten, I am ready at your service.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Van Hooghten says. ‘One other thing – call me Jacob, do. There’s no point in formality in a place like this.’ He takes my arm. ‘Now, I shall show you just a little today; how the land falls from Ely Isle, and the general turn of the channels hereabouts.’

  All this time I have been following Van Hooghten down narrow streets from the cathedral, and now we arrive at the river, where dozens of small boats are tied up to the wharf. Some are skiffs, their sails rolled up across their masts; some rowing boats and others strange round craft, so light they shift back and forth with the currents and the wind.

  Van Hooghten jumps into one of the rowing boats and as soon as I am down into it myself – which movement is as unthinking to us Dutch as mounting a horse – he pushes off from the staithe and into the centre of the channel. A sluggish current carries us away, and for the first hour or so we skirt the island. We pass cattle grazing, my eye at a level with their blue-veined udders. Willows line the banks and our boat sails through their reflections. Behind them bloom mounds of hawthorn and a thousand meadow flowers.

  The sun is up now and rises through the sky as we head further into the wilderness. We are soon right in the reed beds, deep and deeper until the last sight of open river closes behind us. The water seems still, though I know it must be flowing seawards, down the gradients. Everything
is lush and heavy. I see immediately that my sense, this morning, that this place resembled the Holland of my youth was mistaken. Holland is a land taken from the rivers and the sea, built up and made fertile. It is a place of commerce, and though we fear always the coming of a flood, we battle the power of the water day and night, and for the most part a truce holds.

  In this strange land, water is still the master. Here are thousands of islands that come and go, swept away or created at the water’s whim, while the channels between them shrink and swell from year to year. No estate can make a claim upon the land. It looks a useless place for agriculture and real husbandry, though I see places where the reeds have been cut, for matting or for roofs.

  Still the channel narrows. Van Hooghten has to pull in the oars and let the water carry us forward. I begin, as I never have at home, to lose a sense of where we are headed. Though I know from the sun’s ascent that our craft travels in a northerly direction, I soon give up the notion of taking measurements, and let my mind go. In a while – who knows how long or how far we have come – the channel splits and narrows again. There is now no space for oars; I can reach out and touch the reed wall on either side.

  ‘Shift up, Jan,’ Van Hooghten says. ‘You go up to the prow there, while I move down to the back.’

  As I slide forward, Van Hooghten picks up a pole from the bottom of the boat, and stands up in the stern.

  A family of coots splutters up in front and as the birds hurry over the water’s surface, I am roused by the sensation that someone is watching. There is a shuffling in the reeds, a splash, and then no more. Is there a person, someone who observes us? I glance at Van Hooghten, but he seems unconcerned. He has planted his feet square in the stern, and now throws up the pole, and lets it fall through his hands, leaning forward as we slide through the water.

  After a time of this that I cannot quantify, I feel the boat taken by the current and pushed out between the walls of reed, discharged onto an expanse of water, wide and still. It is a great mere, and unexpected, for where are we? The mere fills the view to the horizon, bordered all round by reed and stands of willow. The water glitters, lit by the sun and burnished by the wind. Gold reeds push up into the blue immensity of the sky. Everything is ablaze. Tiny waves slap against the side of the boat; birds sing. The day is cloudless, the world washed clean.

  We are alone on the mere, and rock gently with the wind. When I look down into the water I see myself, rippling and indistinct. Below the boat fronds of weeds sway in the current, dense and green, as if I gazed at a forest with the eye of an eagle. So we drift on, quietly. Where does the water end and the sky begin? I cannot say. The whole world floats, and I with it, nearly to the point of sleep, or as if I was transported into man’s first kingdom of Elysium. In silence, so that Van Hooghten does not hear, I thank God for the trust bestowed upon me. Van Hooghten is quite still; perhaps he, too, is almost asleep.

  Then over the water comes a sound that breaks the veil; the voice of a woman, singing. It is a strong voice, deep and layered. I do not know the song, nor can I hear if it has any words, but in that instant I am startled back to the day.

  ‘Do you hear that, Jacob?’

  ‘Do I hear what, Jan?’

  ‘A woman singing, surely.’

  He pauses and turns to look behind him. The mere is empty. Everything is still.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Yet there was.’

  ‘Perhaps; though it is easy here to be deceived by sounds that have travelled far across the water.’

  I wish to believe Van Hooghten, and it is true, in a place such as this a light breeze may carry a song for miles, so that it reaches us as if uttered by our side. But I do not believe him. I sense the singer near and feel, indeed, an apprehension.

  ‘Ah, Jan, I have a sensation that we are watched.’

  ‘I have known many a man, out on the mere, feel there are eyes upon him, though he is regarded by nobody.’

  Van Hooghten shunts his pole along the length of the boat, and sits down, letting us rock. Reaching under the seat he pulls out a leather bottle, and drinks.

  As he hands it to me he adds, ‘It will be best, Jan, if you keep your measuring instruments out of sight when you are upon the water. The fensmen who inhabit this place are an envious people; barbarous, it is said. They live in their own way, calling all others uplanders.’

  I smile at that, of course; for we Dutch are lowlanders, which fact, once known to the fensmen, will surely allow us to commune with them upon better terms than in wartime when riot and destruction broke out.

  I swallow my beer and let Van Hooghten’s remark pass, the day being too young, and our acquaintance also.

  Van Hooghten goes on, however.

  ‘At your lodgings, though your business may become known, circumspection is also the best course.’

  To this I am able to reply with truth.

  ‘I am not a talkative man, and, further, do not speak the language with ease.’

  Van Hooghten now pulls up the oars again and settles them in the rowlocks. He rows quickly to the far side of the mere where the reeds have thinned and an old willow fallen. Easing the boat up against the trunk, he secures it with a quick knot of the rope and hops out on a stretch of bank.

  When I scramble up and look about I can see that we have not reached the far side of the mere, but landed on an island composed of silt, built up over the years, reed-circled and self-sown with spongy mounds of grass.

  I take a few steps forward and straight away begin to sink; or the land begins to rise. Water settles round my boots. Van Hooghten, still standing on the solidity of the bank, calls me back to myself.

  ‘Jan, have a care! Are you a fool? A man can disappear here in an instant.’

  ‘I lost myself.’

  ‘Lost yourself ? Sir, you are a geographer.’

  Thus, with this sally, does Van Hooghten remind me of the work ahead and my place in it. He is back in the boat by the time I have reached the safety of the bank, and ready to cast off.

  ‘Can you hazard the way back, Mijnheer Brunt?’ he says with a smile, when I step in the boat. ‘Here, take the oars.’

  I row southwards away from the island and across the wide mere, then into the narrow channel and out again into the broader water. Ahead lies Ely Island, where distant lantern lights appear and twinkle. A cowman calls to his cows as he prods them towards milking. A few minutes later the boat bumps against the black wooden piles and we come to rest at the staithe. Van Hooghten jumps out and ties us up with two throws of the rope. As he holds out his hand to steady me I feel myself shrink back a little, wishing not to come to land just now. The feel of enchantment falls away with his touch, yet the remembrance of the day colours my mind as a dream does after we wake.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  Nieuw Amsterdam.

  The 24th day of April, 1664.

  The sky overcast, wind from the east.

  Squalls and showers.

  High tide by the Stadt Huys at 8 o’clock in the morning.

  Three weeks have passed since Hendrick came to my door with the note. For the first few days I stayed in my house or close by. Hope and apprehension, entwined together, stopped me leaving the Heere Gracht. But no one knocked, and little by little I have resumed my usual pursuits: my trips on the water and walks up beyond the wall; my measurements of the tides and wind, my observations and writings.

  My heart, that jumped and shook, has quietened, though Nieuw Amsterdam has sharpened a little in outline, as if I saw it with new eyes or I was showing it to a visitor. One day, on the edge of the Oost Rivier, where unkempt ground meets the water and trees still rise from the marsh, I felt that I was not alone. The sun, low in the west, dazzled my eyes. I persuaded myself then that no one was there, or if someone, then one of the wildmen, who can wait and watch without cracking a twig or stirring the water. I walked on and forced myself into tranquillity. There is nothing I can do but wait, and go on as I have alway
s done.

  And so at the edge of the known world I write this my account, and add to it both some events of the day and a description of the place that I have come to. I fancy that painters of portraits, and the writers of poems, no less than men such as myself who measure and record the rivers or the tides, have the same desire. We all wish to bring order to the passing world, to stop the pulse of nature for a second and hold it up for all to see. Here, the portrait painter might say, is your beloved, or a great man, not as you will ever see them with your eye, but as if time was stopped and their features fixed. Thus I, too, record the height of the waters, though the waters do not, at the point of high tide, cease their movement, but turn at the very moment of their height, marvellously, in a way that we can never see. Why else record or paint, when all around us nature streams ceaselessly on?

  I live on a crooked finger of ground that slides between two rivers and the sea. Some years ago I might have said that Our Lord, the first geographer, measured and laid it out with all its folds, its vantage points; making all the rivers and inland seas, the marshes and mountain ranges; the whole vastness of America. I would have said that he made this land in many layers, one atop another like the pages of a book to be worn and shaped by nature as he intended. These days I simply record what I see.

  It is a hard land that we sit upon here. The sea with the wind in it is a rough beast. Already, since I arrived, it has overwhelmed us twice. This morning the prospect of snow hangs in the air, notwithstanding the lateness of the year. I have known it snow here the first day of May, and in the month of October too. And this despite the observable fact that this city lies near forty-one degrees north of the Equinoctial line and shares its place on that latitude with the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea. It is a puzzle why one place should have weeks ago announced spring while here the winter teases us still. Some say it comes from the fact of the earth being not quite round, others from the continuity of this little island with the frozen northern wastes. This I cannot say, only assert that when I have asked the wildmen where the cold comes from or the heat, they laugh and give no opinion, but seldom mind the temperature of the air, frequently walking out half-naked in the snow.