The Covenant

  ‘Which widow?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Abigael, the tall one,’ and when he saw the incredulity on Paul’s face, he explained, ‘This way we can combine our two houses and save a good deal of money.’

  ‘What of the other widow?’

  ‘She moves to the Herengracht … with us. The other good part is that the seven ships will come …’ He hesitated, then said, ‘Well, under my management.’

  Paul wanted more than anything else at that moment to run out and find Vermaas, who might be able to explain this absurdity, a wealthy man over seventy conniving to get hold of a few ships, but Van Doorn wished to discuss news that was even more exciting: ‘We’re assembling a Compagnie fleet right now. They sail for Java within the week, and two hundred and ninety Huguenots will be aboard. It works out well, Paul, because when we close down the Bosbeecq house you and your wife won’t be needed any further …’

  Paul was disgusted. He had risked his life to find three hundred and twenty vines for an experiment, and while he was gone this tall Dutchman had sat in this office scheming, burying his wife and proposing to another before the earth on the grave had settled.

  ‘Mijnheer van Doorn, my trip to Caix was possible only bacause my little boy Henri accompanied me. He’s eight, and I wonder if you would like to make him a special present? For his bravery?’

  Van Doorn reflected on this, then said judiciously, ‘I don’t think so. The contract was with you.’ He showed Paul to the door, where he said warmly, ‘I hope the boys will enjoy life aboard ship. It’s an exciting trip.’

  As soon as Paul was free of the Compagnie quarters he ran to the weigh-house to consult with Vermaas: ‘I heard the Widow Bosbeecq with my own ears warn me that Van Doorn was a thief, that he could not be trusted …’

  ‘And you come home to find she’s about to marry him?’

  ‘Yes! It passes understanding.’

  ‘Except for what I told you, Paul. Every widow who ever lived wants to get married again. I said even you could marry one of them, if you were single.’

  ‘But I know she despises Van Doorn.’

  ‘If a widow can’t find a real man, she’ll take Van Doorn.’ Then, with a cry of animal delight, he shouted, ‘Good God, Paul! Don’t you see how it happened?’

  When De Pré looked blank, the big warehouseman cried, ‘They took you over to Van Doorn’s to work his garden because they wanted to be close to him in case his wife did die. They were using you as bait.’

  Paul reflected on this for some time, then asked, ‘Do you not think, Vermaas, that Dutchmen make use of everybody?’

  ‘They’re in business, Paul.’

  The wedding was a solemn affair, with most of the business leaders of Amsterdam in attendance at the Old Church beside the canal. Some came in barges, poled along by their servants, but many walked, forming long processions in black, as if this were a funeral. The church was filled, and when the choir chanted the metrical Psalms so beloved of Calvinists, the place reverberated. The Widows Bosbeecq did not weep; they marched steadfastly to the front of the church, where they waited for the arrival of Karel van Doorn, tall, stately, handsome and whiskered. The marriage couple made a fine impression, two old people joining their lives and their fortunes for the remaining years of life.

  ‘Oh, no,’ the roundish widow said that night in the old house as she talked with De Pré about his adventures in France. ‘They’re not uniting their fortunes. You think a woman as clever as my sister would allow a scoundrel like Van Doorn to lay his hands on our ships?’

  ‘But Mijnheer van Doorn told me himself—’

  ‘When did he tell you?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘Aha!’ the woman chortled. ‘That was last week. Well, this week we presented him with a contract, specifying everything. This house? We sell it and keep the money. The farmland? We join it to his. The seven ships? They’re all put in my name, not his.’

  ‘I should think he’d back out.’

  ‘He wanted to. Said we were robbing him. So we revised the contract to keep him happy.’

  ‘Did you give him the ships?’

  ‘Heavens, no! But we did agree that when my ships took their salted herring to Sweden, he should be the agent for selling them, and he keeps the commission.’

  Paul was amazed at the cold-blooded quality of this transaction, and started to comment upon it, when the old woman placed her hand on his arm and said softly, ‘You know, Paul, it was partly your fault that Abigael decided—that we decided, really—to get married.’

  ‘How me?’

  ‘Because Mijnheer van Doorn came to us the night of his wife’s burial and said, “Good women, your man De Pré is sailing shortly for the Cape. You’ll be alone again, so why don’t we arrange something?” And he was right. We would be alone again, and you reminded us how pleasant it was to have a man in the house.’ She laughed. ‘Any man.’

  When the Bosbeecq house was emptied and the shutters closed, the widows suggested that the De Pré family move with them to the Van Doorn house for the few days before the ships loaded for the Cape, but Mijnheer would have none of this. ‘Let them sleep in the old place,’ he said, and a few blankets were taken there. But the widows did carry hot food to them, which they ate sitting on the floor.

  ‘You must be sure that Van Doorn pays you all he owes,’ they warned Paul, and on the last day in Amsterdam, Paul went to the Compagnie offices and reminded Van Doorn that the third part of the payment was still due him.

  ‘I have it in mind,’ Mijnheer assured the émigré. ‘I’m handing this packet to the captain of our ship, and the moment you land the vines at the Cape, you get your final payment. See, it says so here. Ninety florins.’ But Paul noticed that he did not hand over the promissory note; he kept it, saying, ‘This goes to the captain of your ship.’

  At dusk that night the Huguenots gathered in the old French church, two hundred and ninety children and women and men who had dared the terrors of this age to retain their faith. They had braved dogs that hunted them, and men who rode after them on swift horses, and frontier guards who shot at them. They had crossed strange lands and come to towns where their language was unknown, but they had persevered, these woodworkers, and vintners and schoolteachers. They had sought freedom as few in their generation had sought it, volunteering their fortunes and their lives that they might live according to the rules they believed in. And now they were embarking upon the final adventure, this long passage in rolling ships to a land about which they knew nothing—except that when they reached it they would be free.

  ‘Cling to your God,’ the minister cried in French. ‘Cling to the inspired teachings of John Calvin. And above all, cling to your language, which is the badge of your courage. Bring up your children to respect that language, as we in exile here in Holland have respected it against all adversity. It is the soul of France, the song of freedom. Let us pray.’

  In the morning Paul led his family from the Bosbeecq home and lined them up on the bridge over the canal. ‘Oudezijdsvoorburgwal,’ he said for the last time. ‘Always remember that when we were naked, the good people on this canal clothed us, as it says in the Bible. Keep that name in your heart.’

  He then led them to the house of Mijnheer van Doorn, where he knocked on the door, asking that the Widows Bosbeecq appear, and when they did, he told his sons, ‘Remember these good women. They saved our lives with their generosity.’

  Next he took them to the French church, where the doors were opened for families to say their last prayers, and inside its warm hospitality he and his family prayed in French, committing themselves again to the promises made the night before.

  When they left the church and started toward the waterfront where the ships waited, Paul saw as if for the first time the quiet grandeur of this city, the solid walls behind which sat the solid merchants, the stout churches with their stout Dutch ministers, and above all, the charity of the place—the simple goodness of these burghers who had accepted ref
ugees from all the world because they knew that if a nation could feed and manage itself, it could accommodate strangers.

  He was sorry to leave. Had he reached Holland sooner in his life, he might have become a Dutchman, but he was French, indelibly marked with the mercurial greatness of that land, and Holland was not for him.

  Seven different Compagnie ships would carry the Huguenots to their new home. They left at various times and encountered various conditions. Some made the long run in ninety days; the poor China, buffeted all the way by adverse winds, required a hundred and thirty-seven, by which time many of its Frenchmen were dead. The De Prés and sixty others were loaded upon the Java, but not by plan. There were two ships at the wharf that day, Java and Texel, and Paul was inclined to choose the latter, but his friend Vermaas would not allow it: ‘Look at the planking, Paul.’ He looked and saw nothing amiss, but Vermaas said, ‘It’s uneven, not laid on carefully. Bad in one, bad in all.’ And he led the family to the gangway of the Java.

  This occasioned some difficulty because friends of the De Prés were already aboard the Texel, and the boys wanted to stay with them. But Vermaas had convinced Paul that the Java was safer, so there were tearful farewells, and kisses blown and promises to farm together in the new land—and it was appropriate that the parting should have been sorrowful, for after the Texel passed Cape St. Vincent at the tip of Portugal, where Prince Henry the Navigator had dreamed of voyages like this, it ran into heavy seas and perished.

  The Java was a medium ship, not small and swift like a flute, nor large and wallowing like an East Indiaman. It was a slow ship, requiring a hundred and thirty days for the tedious passage, and it carried no lemons or pickled cabbage. For four long months the passengers ate only salted meat, and scurvy rampaged through the lower decks.

  They were dreadful, these low-ceilinged hovels below the waterline. Fresh air was unknown, cleanliness impossible. Men emptied their bowels in corners and children lay white and gasping on filthy bunks. During the transit of the equator the temperatures were intolerable and dying people pleaded for a breath of air, but when the lower latitudes were reached, the next to die cried for blankets.

  At the hundredth day Paul became aware that his wife, Marie, was not handling the long passage at all well. Her life in the cold, damp shack close to the river IJ in Amsterdam had started a lung congestion which had never really mended, and now, with worsening conditions belowdecks, she began to cough blood. Frantically Paul sought assistance among the passengers, but to no avail. There were scholars aboard the Java, and a failed clergyman, and some excellent farmers, but no doctors or nurses, and Paul had to watch in despair as his wife declined.

  ‘Marie,’ he pleaded, ‘we must walk on deck. To catch the breezes.’

  ‘I cannot move,’ she whispered, and when he forced her to her feet, he saw that her knees crumpled, so he returned her to the filthy bed.

  He sought counsel among the women passengers, and all they could do was look gloomily at the stricken Frenchwoman and shake their heads lugubriously. It was no use appealing to the crew, for they were a miserable lot. Dutch sailors of merit preferred to work the Baltic ships, from which they could return to their homes periodically; also, the pay was better. For the long passages to Batavia, the Lords XVII had to rely principally on those untrained Germans whom De Pré had seen outside the Compagnie offices. They were not sailors, nor were they disciplined. For twenty years they had been conducting religious warfare back and forth across Germany, and it was unreasonable to think that they would now settle down and obey orders. Uncertain of what their Dutch officers were saying, totally unable to comprehend the French emigrants, they barely kept the ship afloat, and it was probably they who had been responsible for the sinking of the Texel: the Dutch captain had surely shouted the right order at the moment of peril, but his sailors had not responded.

  So the Java rolled and pitched through the South Atlantic, with all hands praying that the wind would steady so they might make land before everyone was dead. Under these circumstances it was not strange that Marie de Pré should sink closer and closer to unconsciousness; her husband watched in horror as her vital signs diminished.

  ‘Marie!’ he pleaded. ‘We must go aloft. You must walk and regain your strength.’ As he argued with her three sailors moved through the filthy quarters collecting bodies, and Paul ran to them begging for fresh water for his wife. The Germans looked at him and grunted. The Cape would soon be reached and then these troublesome passengers would be gone, such of them as had survived.

  Long before any sailor could win his silver schilling for crying, ‘Table Mountain!’ Marie de Pré fell into a coma, and since there was no proper clergyman aboard the rolling ship, the Dutch sick-comforter was summoned. He was a small, round fellow with rheumy eyes and the self-effacing manner of one who had tried to pass the courses at Leiden University and failed. Forbidden to preach like a real minister, he discharged his deep convictions by serving as general handyman to the Dutch church; especially he comforted those who were about to die.

  As soon as he saw Marie he said, ‘We’d better fetch her children,’ and when Henri and Louis appeared he took their hands, drew them to him, and said softly in Dutch, ‘Now’s the time for courage, eh?’

  ‘Could we pray in French?’ Paul asked, hoping that his wife would be heartened by the language she had used as a child in Caix.

  ‘Of course,’ the sick-comforter said, but since he spoke not a word of French, he nodded to Paul, indicating that he must do the praying. ‘It will ease her,’ he said, even though he knew that she would never again hear human speech.

  ‘Great God in heaven,’ Paul prayed, ‘we have come so far in obedience to Thy commands. Save Thy daughter Marie that she may see the new home to which Thou hast brought us.’ When he finished, the sick-comforter clasped the two boys and prayed with them in his language, after which he said in a low voice, ‘We can call the sailors now. She’s dead.’

  ‘No!’ Paul shouted, and the fury with which he embraced his wife, who had accompanied him so far and with so gentle a compliance, made those about him weep.

  ‘Call the sailors,’ the sick-comforter said forcefully. ‘Boys, you must kiss your mother goodbye,’ and he edged them toward the pitiful bier.

  In due time two German sailors shoved their way through the passengers, took the corpse away, and holding it aloft, pitched it into the sea, after which the sick-comforter indicated that he would lead public prayers for those who were still ambulatory. A stout Dutch merchant who had once served as deacon at Old Church pushed him contemptuously aside as unworthy; he would do the praying, and all on deck bowed their heads.

  When the Java finally anchored in the lee of Table Mountain, Paul de Pré, thirty pounds lighter than when he sailed, reported to the captain, asking for his final payment for acquiring the grapevines, but instead of handing over any money, the captain informed Paul that Mijnheer van Doorn had arranged for the delivery of some one hundred and twenty acres of land toward the eastern mountains, and he produced a document affirming this: ‘The Compagnie Commander at De Kaap is directed to give the French emigrant Paul de Pré sixty morgen of the best land, contiguous to the farm of Willem van Doorn in the settlement of Stellenbosch, there to raise grapes and make wine.’

  By paying De Pré in Compagnie land rather than his own money, Van Doorn had saved himself ninety florins.

  Paul—brooding over the loss of his wife—was halfway across the desolate flats before the immensity of Africa struck him, and he was suddenly overcome with dread lest this enormous continent reject him, tossing him back into the sea. The land was so bleak, the vast emptiness so foreboding that he began to shiver, feeling himself rebuked for his insolence. Clasping his sons to protect them from the loneliness he felt, he muttered in French, ‘Our grapes will never grow in this godforsaken soil.’

  That night the Dutchman in whose wagon he was riding pitched camp on the loneliest stretch of the flatlands, and Paul stayed awake, listeni
ng to the howling wind and testing the harsh, sterile earth with his fingers. Driven with fear, he rose to inspect his grape cuttings, to see if they were still moist, and as he replaced their wrappings he thought: They are doomed.

  But toward the end of the second day, when the laden wagon completed its traverse of the badlands, he was allowed a gentler view of Africa, for they now traveled along the bank of a lovely river edged by broad meadows and protected by encompassing hills. He thought: This is finer than anything I knew in France or Holland! A man could make his home here!

  Begging the driver to halt, he lifted his sons down so that they could feel the good earth that was to be their home, and when he had filtered it through his fingers he looked up at the Dutchman and shouted in French, ‘We shall build a vineyard so great …’ When the driver looked at him in stolid unconcern, for he understood not a word De Pré was saying, Paul cried in Dutch, ‘Good, eh?’ and the driver pointed ahead with his whip: ‘Ahead, even better.’

  They camped that night beside the river, and by noon next morning they saw something that sealed Paul’s love of his new home. It was a farmhouse, low and wide, built of mud bricks and wattles, and so set down against the hills rising behind it that it seemed always to have been there. He noticed that it stood north to south, so that the west face looked toward Table Mountain, still visible on the far horizon. From this secure house a lawn of grass reached out, with four small huts along each side for tools and chickens and the storage of hay; they were so placed, and at such an angle, that they seemed like arms stretching to invite strangers, and when Paul had seen the entire he whispered to himself, ‘Mon Dieu! I should like to own this farm!’

  ‘Has the master a daughter?’ he asked the driver.

  ‘He does.’

  ‘How old?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Nine, I think.’

  ‘Oh.’ He said this in such a flat, disappointed voice that he added quickly, lest he betray himself, ‘That’s good. Someone for my boys to play with.’