The Great Level

by Stella Tillyard

  Later, in the evening, I ask you if you will come down when it is dark and there is no one about. We walk up the embankment and you stand on the edge in front of me. The water in the new river is stippled in the moonlight. My arms circle you and my chin rests on your hair. You stand very still, and I want you; success is rushing through me.

  You appear strongly taken by this, the first fruit of my great labour. I feel you stand straighter as you look down into the cut. After a moment you ask, ‘How long will it be until your work is done?’

  ‘In a year this part of the Level will be drained and the new sluice almost complete. Then we must consider where the land needs smaller ditches and dykes. I do not know how long it will be, Eliza; only that I am happy with the work I have done, since I have never before attempted anything of the size and difficulty.’

  You turn round so that the moon shines on me and leaves you in the shadow. I pull you gently towards me.

  ‘When you give it all to the Gentlemen, then it will be finished?’

  ‘For me it will be finished. Other men will make the land ready for dividing into estates, hedging and planting. But no work with water ever ends. In my country we know this and remain always vigilant.’

  You are silent. I still cannot see your face, or what thoughts might be running across it.

  ‘Eliza,’ I say, my arms still around you, ‘will you stay with me tonight?’

  ‘I cannot.’

  The disappointment I feel is quickly swept aside by my mood of triumph. If you do not stay tonight, you will come tomorrow. You have never left for long. I no longer allow myself unease.

  ‘Goodbye, Jan.’

  ‘Goodbye, Eliza.’

  I feel your lips brush across mine. Then you slip into the dark. You know the ways across the fen; the moon is behind you. In a minute you are gone, deep into the blackness, and I am alone.

  I remember that night now, my happiness and the moonlight, but most of all the feel of you leaning against me, your shoulders back against my chest and all of you weighing on me, strong and warm. I can feel my arms around you, hands around your hands, the two of us one being, so it felt to me, standing in the dark on the embankment.

  When the autumn rains come the new cut will fill, and as we dig the secondary channels, the expanse of water that has always covered this land in winter will begin to shrink. By next summer the smaller meres will be gone, so water will become land, and this will be a land to make a fortune from, rich with the silt of ages. Where now the sky picks up and reflects back the grey-blue glint of the water, it will then find pasture or the golden ripple of barley in the sun. The colours of this place will change. New forms of life will arrive, inland birds to feed on seedheads, field mice to nest in stalks.

  In the summer evenings I sometimes venture out onto the meres, drawn to their shimmering expanses and impelled to present myself, in plain sight, to the hidden watchers. As I glide along I sense them, silent and following, as once I sensed you. Now that my work comes to fruition, my worst fears have faded. I had thought the watchers might menace or attack me, but now they appear less a threat than a simple presence.

  Curiosity begins to replace my fear. Gradually I extend my wandering, coming closer to the islands dotted in the meres. One August evening, with the light still in the sky, I come across an island encircled completely by reeds except for an overgrown landing stage half collapsed into the mere. I see no coracles or nets that might give sign of habitation. Perhaps the ague has carried off all those who once lived here, or a better island called them away, and they have not returned.

  I tie my coracle up to a rotten post by the jetty and jump out, pushing through the barrier of young reeds into the interior, where I find myself alone, with the red sun slanting in. Before me are several huts, rectangular in form, raised upon stilts to take them away from the island damp. They appear deserted, and I hear nothing except for the sighing of the reeds and, if I stand and listen, the rustle of birds in the reed heads.

  I walk round the habitation, stooping as if I expect some attack. No one comes; nothing disturbs me. The huts are built with frames of willow branches covered with mud plaster and roofs that slope up to an apex. Except for the door entrance they have no windows. I bend low and step inside the largest of them. It is quite dry underfoot, the floor of beaten clay with rushes laid upon it. When my eyes are accustomed to the gloom I look up and see that the reeds that form both the walls and the roof are bundled together and tied round and round at intervals so as to form patterns.

  Even in the half-dark I am astonished. Grace and harmony fill the space, and light pours through the door to a bright patch on the floor. Rising upwards, the reed bundles have the appearance of the columns and roof beams of our churches and cathedrals. At four points as they rise they are bound round with thinner reed stems, and these circles are found at exactly the same height up each one. Thinner stems are bound back and forth in diagonals across these bands, serving no purpose that I can see except that of joy.

  So your people have an idea of the beauty of things. Though they do not paint portraits or landscapes as mine do, yet still they bind the reeds and make patterns with them, taking a pride and a pleasure in their forms. Looking up into the roof and towards the evening sky framed by the chimney hole, I wonder who works these miracles and whether they are held in high esteem, as are the most skilful painters in my country.

  Outside again, I walk quickly round in the fading light. Between the houses and the landing stage is a lattice of wooden stakes banged into the ground, some still standing straight, others falling haphazardly. I wonder if these stakes serve as a frame to dry nets or for some other purpose, but have not time to examine them. Fearful of getting lost on the mere, I slide down into my coracle and push off from the jetty, paddling hard to reach a spot known to me before the sun slides beneath the horizon and leaves me lost and in the darkness.

  The columns of reed, tied with such exactitude, measured to have an equal circumference, glow in my mind. I remember the church at Sint-Maartensdijk and myself as a small boy who saw the light and grace of God stream through the windows. The men who made the reed columns appear now to me like the stonemasons who built our churches, men who learn from their masters how to take the materials nature offers and fashion them into beauty.

  When I get back to my cottage I find it empty. Closed in my parlour, I sit down, then get up, pace across the little room and light the fire, though it is a warm night. I want to talk to you, to touch you, to weave with you our secret world of jokes and habits, to watch you practise your letters while I lay out bread and cheese on the table with beer from the barrel in the corner. I want to talk to you about the island.

  Gradually the happiness of the afternoon leaves me. God has gone, and taken his reassurance with him. Now in the cottage I feel darkness and uncertainty press in. I am quite alone, and, by the time I light the candles, I am sure that you will not come. My questions run round the whole rim of the earth and find no answering voice. Where are you now? Are you out on the water with your family? Are you sleeping under such a roof as I saw today? The silence brings me no answers, and I can only push these questions away.

  I long for you to open the door and come in briskly, without looking about, as if the cottage has always been your home. Though a man familiar with solitude and formerly settled within it, I am assailed by sadness. Where I want warm flesh there is only air. Where I search for a voice there is a void. I want to touch you, to run my fingers across your lips and feel them pucker and yield. I want to run my mouth over your breast and so learn, as I have learned a hundred times, how smooth it is and how rough at the peak. I want you thus inside me, and myself inside you, possessed and given and gone from myself.

  I think for a moment of taking my horse and riding over to King’s Lynn. There I could knock on Van Hooghten’s door and he would ask me in. But it is too dark. I might miss the path and fall into the river or my horse stumble and throw me off. My only recourse is
to walk the way with a lantern, and for that it is too late. Besides, what can I say to Jacob? That I, who chose this cottage out on the fen, am now afraid of emptiness; that I long for you, whose presence I have hidden; that I have seen the beauty of the houses on the fen and wish to tell him of them?

  I sit and look at the dinner I have laid out, and do not eat it. Instead I reach for one of the baskets I have hung from the ceiling and find the brandy bottle. It fits easily in my hand and its rough earthenware reassures me. I unstopper it and drink, gulping the gold liquid until the fear in my stomach is quietened.

  The brandy soon makes the world swim and myself with it. I forget where I am and seem to see Cornelius Vermuyden in London last winter, praising my progress and promising to report it to my village, a clap on my shoulder as he spoke. How eagerly I drank his words, and allowed them to warm my body. I see my mother on Tholen opening the door to our house. She takes the letter from the postmaster and puts it on the parlour table. It lies there, heavy with Vermuyden’s report. My father opens it when he comes home. I see my sisters laugh and chatter, oblivious to my absence.

  Then the visions quicken. Lines of prisoners, tied together, flounder across the mere in the dark. A coracle drifts away from its mooring and sinks, listing and full of water. I hear Renswyck’s cur bark and lift my head from the table and seem to see Renswyck himself peering in at the parlour window. His eyes are like fires, and blaze through the glass. The brandy has maddened me, I tell myself, as the untethered room begins to turn.

  I make myself stand and go to the window. Perhaps you are there, waiting to come in. I can see no one outside, but I open the casement and shout into the darkness. Only silence answers and I turn back to the room. Nausea rises in my stomach and I put out a hand to steady myself by the wall until I can reach the table again. How long I sit there I do not know, only that by the time my head sinks to the rough wooden surface these visions have gone from it. I have banished the foreboding that was settling inside me and shunted it beyond the border of myself. When I wake in the morning I swallow two or three cups of water, take my horse, and ride fast to the site of the works by the sluice. My memories of the night just gone are jumbled and I feel shame that I imagined such terrors.

  Day after day, time presses in. The heavy force of it pushes me into the future. By October the sluice near Denver is dug, and the brick placements built. The prisoners are dispersed in groups and camp by the works. I frequently lie in different places, some nights in my cottage, some in King’s Lynn, others in the open air. Everything on the Great Level becomes fragmented; the works, scattered across the land; the landscape, scored with new embankments and rivers, ditches and paths; the encampments of soldiers and prisoners; the rhythm of the days and nights, and all our lives.

  Then comes another discovery that pulls me up short. It is not of urns or ashes this time, but human forms brought to me by one of the soldiers. He has taken them from a prisoner, he says. They are women, goddesses or witches.

  One is baked from clay, the other carved from sparkling rock. Where the first absorbs the light so that her navel and the secret place between her legs are black as caves, the second seems to glow with magic power. I cannot tell if the same hand might have made them, yet they belong together. They are old women, many times mothers. Both are full of ancient art, and once were surely worshipped.

  I put both creatures in my pocket, all day feeling the weight of them there and their mysterious force. In the evening I wash them in my copper, wrap them in muslin and conceal them in the strongbox in my cottage. Though they are locked out of sight, their gaze still reaches me through the wood. They add another reason to my wakefulness and another mystery to this place.

  One night when sleep eludes me I dress, pull on my boots and greatcoat and step outside. A fire burns in the distance. No sound comes from it, and I cannot make out any figures. With my lantern on the ground I overturn my coracle and let it down onto the water. Thin cloud has come in from the west but there is light enough from the shaded moon to see the banks of reeds and a glistening on the mere.

  I paddle softly towards the fire, and gradually I make out several standing figures. They are on the bank in a clearing they have made, and hold poles out over the water. A fire burns on the flattened area between them. Now and again one of the men stoops and feeds it with reeds. They are dressed in jerkins and breeches and have bound their stockings with bands of cloth. They stand still, with no hint of any fear. Yet I know they are watching me.

  ‘Our greetings.’

  The voice comes to me in the half-light with no menace or even enquiry in it. It is the man on the left of the group who speaks, inclining a little in my direction as he does. His voice is open and clear, with the rising notes characteristic of the fens people, as if they have added the lapping of water to the ordinary speech of the English. So it seems that I am quite mistaken in my fears. These are men fishing, nothing more. The fire keeps them warm and throws light on the water. Perhaps fish are attracted to it, as moths are to candles.

  Smoke drifts between us.

  ‘My greetings to you, sirs.’

  I am at a loss now. How can I explain myself ? The four men stand impassive, their fishing lines slack. I am disturbing the fish and any fowl they might be after. They say nothing more, though I have come close enough to feel their gaze upon me. Without a word I turn round and make my way back along the reed wall. By the time I reach home the sun has pushed off from the horizon and pulled the cloud up with it. It will be a fine late-summer day, blue and golden.

  ‘I went out on the mere a few nights ago,’ I say when you come next to my cottage.

  ‘Why did you do that, Jan? It is treacherous on the water in the dark unless you know the ways of it.’

  You stand by the window, looking out. I want to reach out my hand, and bring you close to me. But I do not, for fear you might break away.

  ‘The moon was out and I felt no danger. A fire drew me out. I met four men, out fishing. We exchanged greetings; that was all.’

  ‘No harm was done, then.’ You put your arms around me.

  ‘I was frightened. For so long I thought they menaced me; but I was quite mistaken. They did not attempt to question or detain me – seemed only anxious that I be gone so that they might continue.’

  ‘Indeed; fishing and silence go together.’

  Chapter 3

  King’s Lynn and Denver Sluice.

  November, 1651.

  One crisp November morning, I oversee the lowering of the gates into the sluice at Denver, where the tidal river comes up to dominate the fresh one. With the sluice gates in place, all the southern part of the Great Level will be safe from high tides and salt water. It is a moment of joy for us engineers, and Van Hooghten is here to share it with me.

  ‘We are more than halfway done, Jan,’ he says, ‘and must send word to Mr Vermuyden of this triumph.’

  The sluice follows the pattern of those we have in Holland at the mouths of our rivers, built in brick and wood, with doors in the gates that rise to let the water through. The whole gates swing open with the equalisation of the water on either side, so ships can make straight for Ely by the new cut, leaving the old river to wander on its way.

  The moment of hazard comes when we close the sluice gates and doors to test them. From the embankment we watch as the tide comes up and is stopped there, rising high above the water level of the new cut, and then, after an hour or so, falling slowly down again. In truth the sluice is no miracle; greater things have been made in Holland. Yet the wild power of the sea has been contained.

  Standing up on the embankment by the sluice, I imagine this place when all trace of the prisoners and the works is gone, the scars of the camps healed. The new landscape is smooth and unsullied. Black soil lies flat and obedient, traversed here and there by lines of willow stumps not yet cleared from the paths of old creeks. The reed banks are ploughed into the peat, remembered only in patches of lighter soil. New land stretches away,
divided by stakes and young hedges. Drainage channels glow pink in the evening sun. Russet sails of windmills catch the eye as they turn in the wind. In the distance a farmer shepherds his cows towards their shed for milking. It is very quiet without the harsh cries of the geese and the splash of wildfowl as they land on the water, without the shush and murmur of the reeds. On and on, right over to the horizon, the Great Level lies pegged out in perfect order.

  A few days later I show you the drawings I have prepared for the next stage of the works. You glance at them quickly, moving the papers from one pile to another.

  ‘Look here,’ I say. ‘This drawing shows the marsh that pushes out from King’s Lynn to the sea, the limit of the land to be drained and made free from salt, and the cuts we will make across it.’

  ‘Now that I can copy and write, I need only learn the workings of drawings such as this to become an engineer.’

  There is a fierceness and alertness in you as you say this. I do not say that such has never been, and will never be, work for a woman; nor that it takes years of study and learning with a master to become an engineer. Your stillness makes me anxious.

  ‘I cannot be your master, Eliza. I wish simply to show you how I spend my days.’

  ‘And I wish to look with care.’

  ‘Why?’

  The question makes you impatient and you draw away from me.

  ‘Can it not be my study when it is yours?’

  ‘This is my work.’

  ‘I wish to learn about it.’

  Laughter and scorn are mixed up together in your voice, and I search to find the tenderness that I long for.

  ‘The idea draws me, that you can make a drawing here, quite flat, and have men bring it to life for you, out there.’

  ‘Your people make new lands also.’

  ‘But not this way. We do as we have always done. We give the water the task, and just help a little.’