Call Upon the Water: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stella Tillyard is a British novelist and historian. She was educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her bestselling book Aristocrats was made into a miniseries for BBC1/Masterpiece Theatre, and sold to over twenty countries. Winner of the Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Longman-History Today Prize, and the Fawcett Prize, Tillyard has taught at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, London. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her latest novel is Call Upon the Water (published in the UK under the title The Great Level).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Call Upon the Water

Chapter 1

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 daresay 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 most 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, jeweled 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 amongst 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 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 center. 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...