I say nothing to Mrs Suckling about my box, which I find one evening with the lid up, but return with a new one that has a strong lock. In this I store my papers and take the key with me when I leave, hung on a string around my neck. Still I have the feeling of being watched and followed, though I never see a man behind me, and, our purpose becoming known, I can see no benefit in it. In Ely some of the people talk openly about the works. Opinion divides, as do the water and the land upon our maps. Some see good profits in draining the Great Level and the increases in all kinds of business that will follow. Others, who stand neither to gain nor lose, are indifferent.
I know not if it was people from Ely, or fensmen, who destroyed the earthworks and turned the last scheme into ruin, but Van Hooghten tells me it was a combination against the King whose business it was. Now that the war in England is finished the temper of the people here must be different. This being the case, I tell myself that my sense of being watched and my papers disturbed is imagination only, and comes about from feeling myself a stranger in this place.
Steadily the work advances. I start each day at the staithe as the sky lightens. Autumn comes towards us; the days shrink and the sky darkens early on the horizon. We are now bringing every creek and mere, every turn of water and curve of land, into being on our maps; giving the Great Level an outline and a form. Sometimes I work with other men, but I am often by myself. I tell Van Hooghten that I am watched, but he shrugs me off, and assures me that it is the place itself, the great wide feel of it, that oppresses me.
‘There is no one here concealed,’ he says with a smile. ‘It is your own loneliness that conjures watchers, as wanderers see phantoms out of fear and hope.’
He is mistaken, or has forgotten where we come from. I am a Dutchman and an islander. Water and sky are safe to me as my mother’s skirts. I know an empty silence and a full silence. Stand still in a full silence and it’s loud with noises. A heron takes flight; he creaks like a ship in sail. Ducks scuffle in the reeds. I hear the beat of wings, the movement of creatures in the grass, water rippling, and the wind that accompanies me everywhere, sighing and roaring. Nature, that seems so quiet, pours out its songs. Even in the darkness there is a velvet purr of sound, of moles underground and field mice above.
An empty silence is quite different. If I hear a silence as quiet as the earth must have been before all things living were placed upon it, I know that something is amiss. Something has stopped up sound. Then ill-ease comes over me; a drawing-in of breath.
This is what I hear one hot afternoon towards September. I have the boat tied up, and have laid upon the bank a plumb line, a measuring rod and chain, triangulation poles and the chronometer that will confirm the calculations I make concerning the speed of the water. Next to them sit a compass and my papers with the figures written in. Clouds move slowly across the bleached-out sky, everything lit from my left hand towards my right. In the distance, seawards, I see a group of men, hear their words as they float over the marsh as I have seen angels’ words writ in ribbons in the churches of the old religion. They are fensmen, come to lift wicker traps and empty the tangled eels into nets that they pull behind their boats. I hear the splashes as they throw the traps back into the mere. If they have seen me they show no sign of it, take no notice of what I do, and soon drift out of my sight.
Alone with my instruments, and engaged in my work, I forget myself. Even as we map this wilderness of mere and reed, we talk and plan how to drain the whole. Van Hooghten and I are in agreement. The whole of the Great Level must be scored across from south-west to north-east. Two new cuts will take the water from the present marsh and mere, stop the overflows of the rivers that now flood whenever there is a heavy fall of rain, and discharge the excess water into the sea. The first cut, though yet marked even upon the map, we call New River.
To plot a course for this new cut, I must first measure every shift in the gradient, and map every curl and tributary of the Ouse that already runs here. Today I am some miles north from Ely at a place where the last works were destroyed. I can see the remains now, a long line of hillocks and depressions. Nature is quick to take back what she might consider stolen from her and already they are covered over with bright summer grass and encroached upon by water. If you had no notion of history you might think them natural formations, or that the mounds concealed ancient ruins such as have been left by antiquity.
This afternoon I am calculating how high the embankments of the New River will have to be. Almost lost to the world, sitting on the grass, I pick up my papers and begin to write. At this moment I hear the silence empty behind my back. Apprehension presses on my senses and the feeling of being watched steals over me with a shiver and a lurch in my stomach as if I have dropped from a great height. When I look up, there she is, though how she has arrived at this place I cannot make out.
She stands at a distance, alone and without her companions. Though I wish straight away to speak so that she must reply, I cannot. No words come to me, either Dutch or English. I jump up and then see that my instruments lie scattered on the ground. I bend forward as if to gather them and go. In that instant she picks up the chronometer and turns to me, at the same time taking a step away.
‘This – what do you use it for?’
Instead of asking how she came here or what she wants from me, I answer her, as if such a meeting as this might happen any day.
‘It records the passing of time.’
Indeed, though I cannot think it then, while I turn my eyes to her, a chronometer does more. It snips up time, as much as if I were to take a pair of scissors to the air itself. And then it drives us on, towards tomorrow and the very moment of our extinction. I should look at my chronometer with distaste; it is keeping time with my dissolution. Yet I do not fear or dislike it. On the contrary, it is a source of joy to me; the newest to be found, Leiden-made. Its case is silver, egg-shaped and burnished to a soft brightness. As soon as I saw it in the palm of the watchmaker I determined to have it, and saved to buy it. The movement, under the oval face, turns with the earth itself, obedient to the same force.
It is not in my hands now, but in hers, and with a sudden gesture she hides it behind her back. I wonder if a woman such as she seems to be, from the unimproved part of this land, has seen a chronometer before. Does she know its beauty and its value? I am filled with a fear that she will throw it in the water and so I put out my hands towards her.
‘I beg you, give it back.’
At this, she smiles, though her eyes remain steady upon me.
‘You believe, sir, that no man or woman has a timepiece here?’
Lost for the English words, I stay silent.
In that moment I begin to see her clearly, and that she is not a girl, but a grown woman, tall and solid on her feet. Her face is brown from the sun as if she scorns to wear a bonnet, her hair cut short and stiff above her neck. Everything about her is golden and brown. She is without a scratch or a mark. She is dressed in a bodice and skirt that meet at her waist in a manner rough but serviceable. Except for her shoes, which resemble a man’s boots, and the lack of stockings on her legs, she might step unremarked into my mother’s kitchen.
Now, as if my chronometer is not enough, she picks up my measuring rod and holds it out to me.
‘And this – how do you use this in your profession?’
I am considering how I might answer with the English words I know, and in a way that will not reveal my purpose, when she walks towards me across the spongy grass. For a second I fear that she will throw both rod and timepiece into the water, but she does not; she goes on holding them as if they are now her possessions. We are close by one another, and look into one another, eye to eye. I am the taller, but not by so much that I can see over her head, as is usual in my case with women.
A shadow seems to pass over me at that moment, not of darkness but of some material that I cannot see. After an instant of time that my chronometer might not register, I come into myself again and wish
to speak. Or rather, it is a stranger within who bids me to talk; as if another man entirely has been resting inside me, waiting. This stranger is not a man such as I have known myself to be. He is a man without calculation, with a forwardness that I have never had; and yet he is a part of myself.
When I speak it is with his voice, not mine own that I know to be so halting and behindhand.
‘I have seen you already.’
‘And I you.’
‘I have wished to see you again.’
There is no reply, but the stranger within me is bold.
‘What is your name?’
‘Eliza.’
I am a prudent man, embarked upon this task to advance in my profession; sure in purpose and firm in outline. Yet at this moment I feel none of that. I wonder if the heat has invaded me, caught me off-guard. I know that I am disordered. Believing myself alone and unobserved, I have rolled up my sleeves and tied them above my elbows. My stockings and my shoes lie in the boat.
In the drowsy heat, and in the glare of her presence, my bare feet begin to sink into the fen. The space seems endless, though if I stood in the boat and turned to the south-east I might just make out the grey bulk of the cathedral at Ely even from this great distance. But now my eyes follow the low contours of the numberless floating islands, and trace the winding river courses by their borders of dense alders. Everywhere towards the northern horizon lie the meres, one after another, flattened to silver discs in the sun. Only to the west is my eye stopped, for here the reed bed is so high that I can see nothing beyond it, just the sky above and the sun blazing in it like an emperor.
You are Eliza; not a girl, but a woman. Not out there beyond me, but here, at my side. I feel you present, already, from your gaze, inside me, alongside the stranger who spoke.
I stand back for a second, and see you again, as if for the first time. You look straight into my eyes, and I know again that things have changed, and that a part of my life will be addressed to you.
You have come here from somewhere in this expanse, and somewhere must lie the island on which you live, for you are a native of the fens, of that I am at once quite sure. It does not seem strange that you have appeared or that straight away I begin to tell you how I use the measuring rod and the chain that lies coiled on the grass of the riverbank. As well as I can, I explain the principles that my countrymen Snell and Van Royden laid down when they invented the system of triangulation that we now use to map every feature of a landscape with perfect exactitude. I even show you how it is done and explain the way I measure and calculate, and how, knowing distance, I can with the chronometer find the speed of the water at any time.
I tell you all this, full of my own knowledge and pride in my work. You listen with stillness, though my speech is rushed and my English imperfect. In truth my answers are just talk, language that bubbles up through my confusion. Though the stranger within me is bold, the man that I am finds that this is all he can say. A greater thing hangs between us that has nothing to do with the words I use.
Then, as suddenly as you have come, you lay down the measuring rod and put my chronometer back in my hand. For a second your palm closes over mine. The touch of your skin is warm and rough. In the moment that I bend to stow the instruments in my bag, you turn and walk away. The opening you make in the reed wall sways and closes; you are gone through into another world.
Chapter 4
Ely Town.
The Great Level.
August and September 1649.
When I meet Jacob Van Hooghten in the evening, I hope that the darkness of the inn will make it easier for me to tell him what has happened. I want to open my heart to him, to show him that it beats faster and more strongly. In this strange place Van Hooghten has become my friend, the first that I have found, and I have placed my confidence in him more than I have dared with any other person, either man or woman. But I stumble before I can find the words, and at that moment feel my courage drain away. I say nothing, and the evening goes on in the way of countless others. We drink the weak beer of the country and smoke a couple of pipes of rough tobacco. Through the fug we talk of progress and how, if our surveys proceed with speed, a map will be ready by the winter.
So I do not speak out, but hide you straight away from the world. From a small boy I have been easy with secrets, neither my mother nor my father having looked to talk about themselves or hear what was in my heart. So I have become apt to hold both joy and insult fast inside and grow them as grit grows pearls.
I do not then think to myself I will continue to hide you, or whether you will yourself come out of the shadows. Though in all things a methodical man who plans step by step, putting one foot before another, I do not look ahead, but simply fail to speak out. If Van Hooghten notices my halting speech, he says nothing; besides, he is not a man to force a confidence from another.
By this time, Van Hooghten is the picture of a healthy man, with skin as brown as his chestnut boots. Whenever we meet he clasps me close and smiles. His teeth are very white now in his round face, his eyes deep blue, and his mood is high. We both sleep soundly, a circumstance he attributes to the nature of the work, which is arduous and steady. We measure and draw, calculate and note, he with his band of Dutchmen on the drier ground from where they can triangulate with ease, I with mine on the water. We are the first engineers to map this whole wilderness, and take pride in that fact, as if we were explorers out on the ocean.
I send my men to the south, and spend days out on the meres alone. I sleep under my upturned coracle, concealed in the darkness of its shell. You tell me later that spirits live on the meres, but that my coracle protects me. Its skin, taken from a living being, serves as a shield. This I do not believe, and yet the rough feel of the wicker frame brings a kind of comfort, though there is no animal abroad large enough to menace me. My instruments and food I keep with me, and I myself, should it rain, am preserved from damp and ague. In my schooldays I have read of the sage Diogenes, who lived thus in a barrel, and understand, as I lie alone, that his folly was less than I thought it as a child.
With this comes a picture of the school on Tholen, my parents’ house by the canal and my little sisters Katrijn and Anna, head to toe asleep in the large bedstead in the parlour wall. The bedstead doors open a crack for air, but like me my sisters lie in their wooden box, warm and safe. A quilt covers them, sewn and embroidered by my mother. Sometimes they up-end and lie side by side. In the gloom they whisper and tell stories. Seated at the parlour table my mother pretends not to hear. She leans her sewing into the candlelight. Her brow is golden in the brown room. Katrijn and Anna have a life snug and far from wars.
A letter in the hands of the postmaster at Ely goes aboard ship at King’s Lynn and arrives on Tholen in a few weeks. To my mother and father I send greetings and to Margriet I write that I have discovered a tiny iris here, its petals cream and blue with yellow splashed down inside. It grows on the damp banks, scarce higher than my finger. I tell her I have sent it to a learned gentleman of my acquaintance in The Hague and that if it is indeed undiscovered I shall name it for her. Beyond this, I find that I have little to say. I think of my mother pushing me, her only son, forwards from the shadows, too sparing with her love and praise, and understand that I am looking for another life.
Jacob Van Hooghten also writes home. With his customary regularity he sends news to his widowed mother and three brothers all making their way in the world, one a sea captain with the West India Company, another a lawyer in The Hague, the last a schoolmaster in his village in the north, as their father was before him. He writes also to his betrothed, Maria. He tells me about her in his eager way, smiling as if he sees her in his mind. Van Hooghten never doubts her love and says simply that they will be happy when life allows their union. He has no fear about the future.
‘This is Maria,’ he says, and snaps open a leather case. Inside, an oval portrait nests on its velvet bed.
‘Once the work is done here,’ he says, ‘I will h
ave saved enough to set up on my own.’
Life spools out ahead of Van Hooghten, a straight sunlit path. Time, also, in his imagination, is a steady progression, facing forward. Beyond Maria he sees children, then a good house with a piece of fertile land under a wide sky, credit at the bank, and his projects, one after another into the distance. Neither sickness nor death disturb the outline of this vision.
‘Look at her, my Maria,’ he says, holding out the portrait. ‘I’m a lucky man, Jan.’
I agree, and draw the small painting close to me so that I can see her, though in truth I feel no presence there. Eyes – blue; hair under the lip of her bonnet – fair. A young woman stares out steadily, though whether it is the painter who looks at her that way, or whether it is her own habit of looking at the world I cannot tell. I hand the little portrait back to Jacob, and nod my approbation, for that is what he wishes.
Although I have said nothing to Jacob, you are now always there in my mind. Whenever I am out on the water and closed in by walls of reed, my whole self and body is tensed and waiting. I can feel from the silence when I am observed. The white butterflies fly up and away and all around me the murmur and chirrup of the fens is lowered, leaving only the sounds made by the wind in the leaves and the gentle lapping of the water as it runs against the banks.
Sometimes the feeling fades away, but at other times, there you are, quiet and sudden. I am certain that you have watched for a time and then parted the reed stems to appear beside me. If I ask whether you have a coracle nearby or have come across the islands on paths unknown to me, you shrug and say nothing. The very way you stand, straight and solid on your feet, your head up on your neck, eyes nearly level to mine and shimmering in your face, has a challenge in it.
The Great Level Page 7