‘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.
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
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.
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 have 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.
Once she arrives and has the range heated, my housekeeper Lysbet Thyssen brings me hot water with San Domingo ginger. When she first came to work for me, I showed her how I like it. I snap a finger off the tuber or take a slice of it, and peel away the rind, then cut the flesh to small cubes and pour the boiling water onto them. I have noticed that a tuber of ginger, once cut, puts forth immediately tentative filaments into the world. One might think that the amputated part this way seeks what is lost or, like a person young at heart, straight off puts forth a new shoot.
With the ginger I have a slice of dark bread, with butter at its side and a piece of honeycomb like a rich man’s ruff, sometimes from my neighbour’s hive, most often from the wildmen who bring it in. I have watched the wildmen harvest honey, contriving to smoke out the inhabitants of the hive before lowering it from the trees. At the appointed time, if I am at home, Lysbet comes with coffee, fresh ground in the pestle – and so we go on in an orderly fashion.
With Lysbet Thyssen I have an understanding. Her husband Maryn having died, she came to work for me some years ago. She brings her apron with her each day, rolled and ironed. Lysbet is a well set-up widow of forty-five, a buxom, bustling woman with broad calves and curls tucked under her bonnet. I know well that she would like more from me than wages, but though I have shared my bed with her on some occasions, I do not allow her a way to my heart, and marriage I can never contemplate. This she discerns though we do not speak of the matter. I have my joys and pains and she has hers. It will do no good for them to be mixed together.
On the hearth before the stove I have left a few shells, delicate and waxy, each half of a hinged pair. They might be wings of angels, white as the moon. On a shelf set into the wall encrusted objects lie scattered. Some are pitted old things – buckles, buttons and keys; others are coins, fused together like bunched petals. Copper gleams green through the ancient earth that clings to them, hard as stone; they seem not to have decayed in the ground, though lying, perhaps, for hundreds of years. Next to them stands a pottery vessel, light brown in colour, scored round the neck and open at the top. It once housed human ashes, buried in the ground from where I took it.
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 for ever.
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 fish-like 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 the 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.
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 grey 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 colour against the russet sails. Beyond the river the painter has added a thin grey 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 any more what nature gave and what the islanders took. They have protected and farmed it well, built villages and windmills.
A grey 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 among 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 favour 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 panelled 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 signalled 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 panelling. 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 woollen cloaks. Some use a pew or two to mark a space; others hang thin walls of hessian between the tombs. I realise 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 colour 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 map maker.
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 favour 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 sea wall 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 among, 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 jewellery 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.’
‘That is a vast area, sir.’
‘Indeed, Jan, it is. We start with nothing, for it is a great wilderness of fen that stretches from the city of Ely to the North Sea, and as wide again from side to side. That is a great chunk of England. A Dutchman would not credit it lying unimproved. Yet so it is, and now affords little benefit to the realm other than fish and fowl, being for the most part great sheets of water called there meres.’
‘Is it a lived wilderness, or at present water only?’
‘It is inhabited, yes, Jan; but, the island of Ely excepted, inhabited by a lazy and barbarous people who trap eels and other such trash foods.’
‘Does not the place belong in some manner to these people, sir?’
‘Indeed not, or only by custom, for much rightly belongs, as underwater, to the realm, having formerly been the property of the King.’
Vermuyden takes a turn around the room.
‘The people there are few in number, and of concern only to the Adventurers, who now propose to bring the whole place into proper cultivation. We will make order where at present there is none. No person shall lose their life in floods, no islands drown. It will be an immense labour, the like of which this country has never seen.’
He pauses and adds, ‘There is a profit in it for both of us, Jan; a profit in land and standing. You cannot ask that any labour in the world should give you more.’
With the fatigue of the day and the confusion of talk that seems so often to say one thing and mean another, my mind becomes vacant. Although I know that I should feel the happiness that comes with the prospect of work for which I am fitted, I struggle to thank Vermuyden, or say anything at all.
Vermuyden brings me back to the room when he taps my roll of maps and drawings on his velvet thigh. I am proud of my drawings and now wish that he would unroll them. I am looking for praise as a son does from a father, but Vermuyden seems uninterested in my past. The present and the need for speed engross him. Our family connection, and not the work I have done, stands surety for me.
‘So tell me now, Jan. Do you wish to work for the Gentlemen Adventurers? Don’t dally about. I cannot keep company with ditherers.’
‘I am willing, sir.’
Vermuyden nods and then kisses me on both cheeks in a distant way, not holding me close to him but leaning towards me as if to dispatch the action as quickly as he can.
‘Well done, Jan; well done. Go now. I will have reports of your progress.’
‘Are we not to meet again before I go?’
‘I find no need for it. Set out at first light tomorrow. The journey will take you two days, the roads being very bad outside London. Jacob Van Hooghten will meet you at Ely.’
‘Jacob Van Hooghten?’
‘He works for me and you will work for him. He can explain the whole to you and get you started.’
‘I should like to meet others of the Gentlemen who I shall answer to.’
Vermuyden puts my maps down on the table next to him with a slap of impatience. He is a heavy man, with leg-of-mutton calves. He has a dozen children, my mother says, and one of them fought with General Cromwell in the late wars.
‘They are far above your head, Jan. You are an engineer; a master engineer, to be sure, and trained in the best schools, but nothing more. These men are not engineers; there is little they can say that would be of any use to you. Some of them know the Great Level, others think of it as they might a plantation in the New World; an empty place that will be a new land. They intend to take a profit from it, nothing more nor less. They are merchants or gentlemen. You might pass them in the city here and they would look like other men. Money is what they offer and you have no need to know more than that.’
‘Their names?’
‘All on the contract that I will have sent down to you. But it matters little. The chief of them is the Earl of Bedford; a man more merchant than lord, who smells a profit from a distance and has few scruples about heading towards it. But you will likely never see him. General Cromwell heads the company of Adventurers and has himself entrusted this scheme to me. We must begin. Summer is on the way and there is now enough dry land to make a tolerable survey.’
I understand that I have the position and that I am dismissed. I look at the roll of papers on the table and summon my courage.
‘You wish to check my drawings, Mijnheer Vermuyden?’
Vermuyden picks up my papers and glances at me, then puts them down again.
‘No, no. Van Nes has given his word. Besides, we are related.’
I say nothing and do not ask for my papers, anxious that my disappointment stays inside.
‘I have arranged a lodging for you by Charing Cross,’ Vermuyden says. ‘The Rose Tavern; usually so full of our countrymen you can hear them from the street. When you get up to Ely, find Van Hooghten and put yourself on an easy footing with him.’
So there is nothing else to be done but to bow, and turn, and walk away, which I do with a heart full of foreboding. Had I more experience of such work I might feel easier, but it is not even that, perhaps. It is more a sense of being alone in this city, no person or place nearby that I understand. I vow to begin my work as soon as possible, which is what Mr Vermuyden wishes. Measuring and mapping, steady and patient labour, will give me a feeling of ease greater than any contemplation of the final rewards.
London.
The 10th day of May, 1649.
Wind from the west with rain to come.
Outside in St Paul’s churchyard I wrap myself tight in my worsted cloak, for the company of the cloth and because now the storm is nearly here. I stop a passer-by and ask, as best I can, for Charing Cross. He looks at me with suspicion, and then, as if to be rid of me, points the way down from the cathedral and makes a gesture for straight on. Past the booksellers’ shops, at the bottom of the hill, is a narrow stream, choked and foul, with stepping stones that I take carefully. I wish to avoid notice and walk as those around me do, with my head down. My cloak is a dull brown, my hat the usual felt, with a white ribbon at the base of the crown. You would not take me for a Dutchman from the outside.
At the edge of the stream a woman stops me as if to ask a question, then pulls a bag from the folds of her gown and takes from it a small print, face up so that I can see it clearly. She is silent, just gives me a look and holds my eyes with hers for a minute. I understand; commerce speaks a language without words, and so does secrecy.
No one is behind me or anywhere near. I cannot say why, yet the very sense I have of being observed prompts me to put one hand out for the print and with the other find some coins and pass them over. When the woman rolls up the paper, ties it with twine and offers it to me, I feel none of the usual heart-lift that comes with small purchases; a corner sweetmeat or a pipe in an inn. This is a hurried and furtive thing between us; glancing round, I tuck the print into my sleeve and walk on.
The rain begins as I pass an old mansion by the river; not drop by drop, but in a sudden squall that throws down the storm in a sheet. Trees whip and bow eastwards. Their new leaves shuffle like an angry crowd. At midday it is dark enough to be night, in which another man might find a portent.