The Covenant

  His name was Vermaas and he held two jobs, each of which proved crucial to De Pré: during the week he worked in a dark, drafty weigh-house where shipments of timber, grain and herring from the Baltic were weighed and forwarded to specialized warehouses; on Sunday he served as custodian of the little church near the canals where only French was spoken. Here Protestants from the Spanish Netherlands and Huguenots from France gathered to worship God in the Calvinist manner, and few churches in Christendom could have had a more devout membership than this. Each person who came to pray on Sunday was an authentic religious hero who had sacrificed position, security and wealth—and often the lives of family members—to persevere in Calvinism. Some, like the De Prés, had crept at night across two enemy countries or three in order to sing on Sundays the Psalm that Huguenots had taken specially to their hearts:

  ‘I called upon the Lord in distress: the Lord answered me, and set me in a large place.’

  Amsterdam with its burgeoning riches and crowding fleets was indeed a large place, spacious in wealth and freedom, and Vermaas epitomized the spirit of the town, for he was a big man, burly in the shoulders and with a wide space between his eyes.

  Intuitively he liked Paul de Pré, and when he learned how this resolute family had fled French tyranny, he embraced them. ‘There’s a good chance I can find you work at the weigh-house,’ he assured Paul, and to Marie he said, ‘I know a little house near the waterfront. Not much, but it’s a foothold.’

  Vermaas was master weigh-porter, and Paul sensed immediately the importance of this position. Never before had he seen such scales: huge timbered affairs with pans that weighed as much as a man, but so delicately balanced that they could weigh a handful of grain. To these scales, each taller than two men, came the riches of the Baltic. Stout little ships, manned by Dutch sailors, penetrated to all parts of that inland sea, selling and buying at a rate that would have dazzled a French businessman. At times the weigh-house would be occupied with timber from Norway; at other times copper, iron and steel from Sweden would predominate; but always there were tubs of North Sea herring waiting to be cured by a process known only by the Dutch, after which it would be transshipped to all the ports of Europe.

  ‘Gold with fins,’ the men at the weigh-house called their herring, and De Pré learned to tell when a ship with herring was about to unload; this was important, for when the workmen hauled in the tubs of gold, they were permitted to sequester a few choice fish for their families.

  De Pré had deposited his wife and children in the miserable shack near the banks of the IJ River, trusting that he would in time be able to find them better quarters. It was a vain hope, for Amsterdam was crowded with refugees from all parts of Europe: Baruch Spinoza, the brilliant Portuguese Jew, had lived here while unraveling the mysteries of God; he had died only a few years ago. René Descartes had elected to come here to conduct his work in mathematics and philosophy, and a score of great theologians from all countries had considered Amsterdam the only safe place to conduct their speculations. The English Pilgrims had rested nearby before sailing on to Massachusetts, and it was still the major center for the rescue of Jews from a score of different lands.

  Houses were not easy to find, but with the aid of timber Paul acquired at the waterfront and cloths with which to stuff the windy cracks, he and Marie converted their shack into a livable home, and although the dampness caused much coughing, the family survived. The boys—Henri, six, and Louis, five—reveled in the canals that cut across the city and the endlessly changing river up which the Baltic ships came.

  ‘The Golden Swamp’ Amsterdam had been called in the old days, for it was then four-fifths water, but engineers were ingenious in filling in the shallow lakes to build more land. Son Henri’s first comment on his new home was apt, and the De Prés often quoted it: ‘I could get in a boat, if I had a boat, and row and row and never come back.’ And every year men dug new canals, so that the city became a network in which every house was connected by water with every other, or so it seemed.

  The French church, seated on one of the most interesting small canals, had started in 1409 as a Catholic cloister, but during the Reformation it was converted into a refuge for generations of fleeing dissidents. Rebuilt many times, it became a monument not only to Protestantism but also to the essential generosity of the Dutch, for its ministers, a courageous lot of French-speaking Walloons, who had dared much in coming here, had always been given pensions by the Dutch government on the grounds that ‘we are seekers after truth and are richer in having you among us.’ No other nation in recorded history gave immediate pensions to its immigrants, or profited more from their arrival.

  With pride Paul led his family to this church on Sundays, pointing out to the boys the various other Frenchmen who worked along the waterfront. It was an impoverished congregation, with many families subsisting only through the generosity of Dutch patrons, but invariably someone in the group provided flowers for the altar, and it was because De Pré commented on this that his good fortune commenced.

  One Monday morning, as Paul and Vermaas were hefting bales of cloth onto their weigh-scales, the big man said, ‘You like flowers, don’t you, Paul?’

  ‘Where does the church always find flowers?’

  ‘The Widows Bosbeecq send them over. They’re looking for someone to tend their garden.’

  ‘Who are the widows?’

  ‘Aloo! This one doesn’t know the Widows Bosbeecq!’ And the workmen came to joke with him.

  ‘What ship have you been unloading?’ When De Pré pointed, the men cried, ‘That’s their ship. And that one and that one.’

  It seemed that seven of the best ships sailing the Baltic belonged to the widows, and Vermaas explained, ‘Two country girls married the Bosbeecq brothers. The men were fine captains who worked the Baltic for many years. In time they had seven ships, like that one.’

  ‘How did they die?’

  ‘Fighting the English, how else?’

  In 1667 the older Bosbeecq brother had accompanied the Dutch fighting fleet right into the river Thames, threatening to capture London itself; he had gone down with his ship the next year. The younger brother helped in three notable victories over the English, but he, too, had died at the hands of the English, and the family’s profitable trade with Russia might have evaporated had not the two widows stepped forward to operate the fleet. Choosing with rural skill those captains who would best preserve their profits, they continued to send their doughty potbellied vessels to all parts of the Baltic.

  Sometimes the widows would appear at the docks, always together and with parasols imported from Paris, and would primly inspect whichever of their ships happened to be in the harbor, nodding sagely to their captains and approving of the manner in which their cargoes were being handled. They were in their sixties, somewhat frail, dressed in black. They walked carefully, attended by a maid who shoved idlers aside for them. One was tall and very thin; the other was roundish, always with a broad smile. Never once did they complain about anything, but Vermaas assured De Pré that when they had their captains alone in the family office, they could be quite tart.

  A few days after their conversation Vermaas ran up to De Pré with exciting news: ‘It happened by accident. When the Bosbeecq factor was here the other day I told him you liked flowers. He became quite interested, because the Widows Bosbeecq are still looking for a gardener.’ So it was arranged that Paul quit work early one afternoon and accompany the Bosbeecq factor to the tall, thin house on the Oudezijdsvoorburgwal (Old sides-forward-city-dyke) where the widows waited.

  ‘We have a large garden,’ they explained, and from a narrow window Paul could see a garden so neatly trimmed that he could scarcely believe it was real. ‘We like it neat.’ There was also much work to be done inside the house, and the widows wondered if Paul had a wife. ‘Is she able?’ they asked. ‘Is she encumbered with children?’

  ‘We have only two boys.’ Quickly he added, ‘They’re quite grown, of course.’ r />
  ‘How old?’

  ‘Six and five.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear.’ The sisters-in-law looked at each other in real dismay.

  Paul sensed that his entire future depended upon what he did next, and he started to say, ‘Those boys have walked all the way from …’ Dramatically he stopped, for he knew that this was irrelevant. Instead he said quietly, ‘Please! We live in a cold, damp shack, and my wife keeps it like a palace. She could do wonders here.’

  The Widows Bosbeecq liked their servants to be at work at five in the morning; it discouraged sloth. But once on the job, the workers enjoyed surprising freedoms, the principal one being that they were exceptionally well fed. The widows liked to prepare the food themselves, leaving to Marie de Pré the cleaning of rooms, the sweeping of the stoep and the ironing of clothes sent upstairs by the slaveys. They were good cooks, and being country women, felt that one of man’s major requirements was an adequate supply of food, and where growing boys were concerned, downright gorging was advisable.

  ‘It must have been God who brought us here,’ Paul said frequently, and on Sundays he led his brood across the canal to the French church for prayers. One Sunday the widows intercepted him as he was about to leave: ‘You should attend our church now. It’s just as close.’

  The idea stunned De Pré. It seemed almost blasphemous that he should abandon the church of his fathers, the place in which French was spoken, and attend a different one which used Dutch. He had never considered this before, since he was convinced that God spoke to mankind in French and he knew that John Calvin did. It would have surprised him to know that Calvin’s principal works had been written in Latin, for the solemn thunder of Calvin’s thought had reached him in French translation, and he could not imagine it in Dutch.

  He discussed this with his family, even though the boys were scarcely old enough to comprehend the difference between French, the correct language of theology, and Dutch, an accidental: ‘Within the family we must always speak French. It’s proper for us to speak with the widows in Dutch, and you boys must always thank them in that language when they give you clothes or toys. But in our prayers, and in the services at the church, we must speak French.’

  He told the widows, ‘I went to see your church and it must be the finest in Christendom, because ours is certainly a small affair. But we have always worshipped God in our own language …’

  ‘Of course!’ the widows said. ‘We were thoughtless.’

  The fact that De Pré now lived in the Bosbeecq house, with no further obligations at the weigh-station, did not mean that he lost touch with Vermaas. On Sundays, after church, they would often meet to discuss affairs pertaining to the Bosbeecq ships, and one fine April day they stood together at the bridge leading from the French church as the two widows came down the cobblestones, attended by their servant.

  ‘Pity you’re married,’ Vermaas said.

  ‘Why? Marie’s wonderful …’

  ‘I mean, if you weren’t married, you could take one of the widows, and then the house …’

  ‘The widows?’

  ‘Never be deceived about widows, Paul. The older they are, the more they want to get married again. And the richer they are, the more fun it is to marry them.’

  ‘They’re older than my mother.’

  ‘And richer—’

  ‘Who are those men?’ Paul interrupted, referring to the horde of strange-looking men who seemed always to be clustered about a building which abutted onto the French church.

  ‘Them?’ Vermaas said with some distaste. ‘They’re Germans.’

  ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘They line up every day. You must have seen them before this.’

  ‘I have. And I wondered who they were.’

  ‘Their land has been torn by war. A hundred years of it. Catholics against Protestants, Protestants killing Catholic babies. Disgraceful.’

  ‘I knew war like that,’ Paul said.

  ‘Oh, no! Not like the German wars. You French were civilized.’ He made an ugly sound in his throat and drew his finger across it as if it were a knife. ‘Slash across the throat, the Frenchman’s dead. But in Germany you would …’

  ‘Why do they stand there?’

  ‘Don’t you know what that building is? You’ve been working here for more than a year and you don’t know?’ In amazement he led De Pré across the bridge and into the Hoogstraat (High Street), where a sturdy building surrounding a courtyard bore on its escutcheon the proud letters V.O.C.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie,’ he recited proudly. ‘Jan Compagnie. Behind those doors sit the Lords XVII.’ And he explained how this powerful assembly of businessmen had started more than eighty years ago to rule the East.

  ‘But the Germans?’ Paul asked, pointing to the rabble that waited silently outside the courtyard.

  ‘There’s nothing in Germany,’ Vermaas explained. ‘These are men who fought for some count … some baron. They lost. For them there’s nothing.’

  ‘But why here?’

  ‘Jan Compagnie always needs good men. The clerk will come out tomorrow morning, look them over, try to spot those likely to survive. And poof! They’re off to Java.’

  ‘Where’s Java?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the big Outer Warehouse of the East Indies Company?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, after we weigh the goods here and assess the taxes, they’re stored in the proper warehouses,’ and on Sunday he took Paul on a leisurely stroll along various canals, past the house in which Rembrandt had lived and the place once occupied by Baruch Spinoza before he had to grind lenses to keep himself alive. They crossed a footbridge to an artificial island that contained a vast open space surrounded by row upon row of warehouses, a very long rope-walk and a majestic, five-storied building for holding valuable importations.

  ‘The treasure chest of the Lords XVII,’ Vermaas said, and he summoned a watchman, who granted admission. In the darkness the two men moved from one stack of goods to another, touching with their hands casks and bales worth a fortune.

  ‘Cloves, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon.’ Vermaas repeated reverently the magic names, and as he spoke De Pré grew sick at heart for contact again with the soil, the real soil of trees and vines and shrubs.

  ‘Now, these bales,’ Vermaas was saying, ‘they’re not spices. Golded cloth from Japan. Silvered cloth from India. Beautiful robes from Persia. This is from China, and I don’t know what’s in it.’

  ‘Where’s it come from, all this richness?’

  ‘From the gardens of the moon,’ Vermaas said. All his life he had wanted to emigrate to Java, where a purposeful man could make his fortune. He had an insecure idea of where Java was, but he proposed one day to get there. Grasping De Pré by the arm, he said in a whisper, ‘Paul, if you can’t marry a rich widow, for God’s sake, get to Java. You’re still young.’ And the sweet promise of this dark warehouse was overpowering.

  In the morning De Pré asked permission from the widows to visit the offices of Jan Compagnie. ‘Whatever for?’ the women asked.

  ‘I want to see what the Germans are up to. About Java.’

  ‘Java!’ The women laughed, and the older said, ‘Go ahead. But don’t you start dreaming of Java.’

  So he walked only a few blocks to the Hoogstraat, where the crowd of Germans was vastly augmented, men extremely thin and pinched of face, but willing to undertake the severest adventure if only it would provide sustenance. He stood fascinated as clerks came out of the Compagnie offices to inspect the supplicants, selecting one in twenty, and he saw with what joy the chosen men leaped forward.

  But when he returned to his work the widows said that they wished to talk with him: ‘Don’t get Java on your mind. For every guilder that reaches us from Java, six come from the Baltic. Yes, you’ll see the big East Indiamen anchored off Texel, transshipping their spices and cloth-of-gold, and you’ll hear that one ca
rgo earned a million of this or that. But, Paul, believe us, the wealth of Holland lies in our herring trade. In any year our seven little ships serving the Baltic bring in more money than a dozen of their Indiamen. Keep your eye on the main target.’

  They spoke alternately, with one making a point and her sister-in-law another, but when the roundish one repeated, ‘Keep your eye on the main target,’ the taller wished to enforce the idea: ‘We’ve been watching you, Paul. You and Marie have been chosen by God for some great task.’

  No one had ever spoken like this to him before; he had for some time suspected that he was among those elected by God for salvation, the basic goodness of his heart emitting signals that he was predestined. As of now, he lacked the financial wealth which would have proved his election, but he felt certain that in time it, too, would arrive, and in his self-congratulation he missed what the widows said next. It was apparently something very important, for one of them asked sharply, ‘Don’t you think so, Paul?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘My sister said,’ the taller woman repeated, ‘that if you learn shipping, you could become one of our managers.’

  With the bluntness that characterized most French farmers, and especially the Calvinists, De Pré blurted out, ‘But I want to work the earth. You’ve seen what I can do with your garden.’

  The widows liked his honesty, and the roundish one said, ‘You’re an excellent gardener, Paul, and we have a former neighbor who might use your services, too.’

  ‘I’d not want to leave you,’ he said frankly.

  ‘We don’t intend that you shall. But he’s a friend, and one of the Lords XVII, and we could spare him three hours of your time a day. You can keep the wages.’

  His hands dropped to his side, and he had to bite his lip to control his emotion. He had wandered into a strange land with no recommendation but his devotion to a form of religion, and in this land he had found a solid friend in Vermaas, who had gone out of his way to help him, a church whose members were encouraged to worship in French, and these two widows who were so kind to his wife, so loving with his sons and so generous with him. When the Huguenots fled France they found refuge in twenty foreign lands, where they encountered a score of different receptions, but none equaled the warmth extended to them in Holland.