The Seventh Month in the Thirteenth Year of the Era of Kansei
August, 1800
August, 1800
Last trading season, Moses whittled a spoon from a bone. A fine spoon, in the shape of a fish. Master Grote saw the fine spoon, and he told Moses, ‘Slaves eat with fingers. Slaves cannot own spoons.’ Then, Master Grote took the fine spoon. Later, I passed Master Grote and a Japanese gentleman. Master Grote was saying, ‘This spoon was made by the very hands of the famous Robinson Crusoe.’ Later, Sjako heard Master Baert tell Master Oost how the Japanese gentleman had paid five lacquer bowls for Robinson Crusoe’s spoon. D’Orsaiy told Moses to hide his spoon better next time, and trade with the coolies or carpenters. But Moses said, ‘Why? When Master Grote or Master Gerritszoon hunt through my straw next time, they find my earnings and take them. They say, “Slaves do not own. Slaves are owned.” ’
Sjako said that masters do not allow slaves to own goods or money because a slave with money could run away more easily. Philander said that such talk was bad talk. Cupido said to Moses that if he carves more spoons and gives them to Master Grote, Master Grote will value him more and surely treat him better. I said, those words are true if the master is a good master, but for a bad master, it is never true.
Cupido and Philander are favourites of the Dutch officers, because they play music at the dinner parties. They call themselves ‘servants’ and use fancy Dutch words like wigs and laces. They talk about ‘my flute’ and ‘my stockings’. But Philander’s flute and Cupido’s fat violin and their elegant costumes belong to their masters. They wear no shoes. When the Vorstenbosch left last year, he sold them to the van Cleef. They say they were ‘passed on’ from the Old Chief to the New Chief, but they were sold for five guineas each.
No, a slave cannot even say, ‘These are my fingers,’ or ‘This is my skin.’ We do not own our bodies. We do not own our families. Once, Sjako would talk about ‘my children back in Batavia’. He fathered his children, yes. But to his masters they are not ‘his’. To his masters, Sjako is like a horse, who fathered a foal on a mare. Here is the proof: when Sjako complained too bitterly that he had not seen his family for many years, Master Fischer and Master Gerritszoon beat him severely. Sjako walks with a limp now. He talks less.
Once, I thought this question: Do I own my name? I do not mean my slave-names. My slave-names change at the whims of my masters. The Acehnese slavers who stole me named me ‘Straight Teeth’. The Dutchman who bought me at Batavia slave-market named me ‘Washington’. He was a bad master. Master Yang named me Yang Fen. He taught me tailoring and fed me the same food as his sons. My third owner was Master van Cleef. He named me ‘Weh’ because of a mistake. When he asked Master Yang – using fancy Dutch words – for my name, the Chinaman thought the question was ‘From where does he hail?’ and replied, ‘An island called Weh,’ and my next slave-name was fixed. But it is a happy mistake for me. On Weh, I was not a slave. On Weh, I was with my people.
My true name I tell nobody, so nobody can steal my name.
The answer, I think, is yes – my true name is a thing I own.
Sometimes another thought comes to me: Do I own my memories?
The memory of my brother diving from the turtle rock, sleek and brave…
The memory of the typhoon bending the trees like grass, the sea roaring…
The memory of my tired, glad mother rocking the new baby to sleep, singing…
Yes – like my true name, my memories are things I own.
Once, I thought this thought: Do I own this thought?
The answer was hidden in mist, so I asked Dr Marinus’s servant, Eelattu.
Eelattu answered, yes, my thoughts are born in my mind, so they are mine. Eelattu said that I can own my mind, if I choose. I said, ‘Even a slave?’ Eelattu said, yes, if the mind is a strong place. So I created a mind like an island, like Weh, protected by deep blue sea. On my mind-island, there are no bad-smelling Dutchmen, or sneering Malay servants, or Japanese men.
Master Fischer owns my body, then, but he does not own my mind. This I know, because of a test. When I shave Master Fischer, I imagine slitting open his throat. If he owned my mind, he would see this evil thought. But instead of punishing me, he just sits there with his eyes shut.
But I discovered there are problems with owning your mind. When I am on my mind-island, I am as free as any Dutchman. There, I eat capons and mango and sugared plums. There, I lie with Master van Cleef’s wife in the warm sand. There, I build boats and weave sails with my brother and my people. If I forget their names, they remind me. We speak in the tongue of Weh and drink kava and pray to our ancestors. There, I do not stitch or scrub or fetch or carry for masters.
Then, I hear, ‘Are you listening to me, idle dog?’
Then, I hear, ‘If you won’t move for me, here’s my whip!’
Each time I return from my mind-island, I am recaptured by slavers.
When I return to Dejima, the scars from my capture ache, a little.
When I return to Dejima, I feel a coal of anger glowing inside.
The word ‘my’ brings pleasure. The word ‘my’ brings pain. These are true words for masters as well as slaves. When they are drunk, we become invisible to them. Their talk turns to owning, or to profit, or loss, or buying, or selling, or stealing, or hiring, or renting, or swindling. For White men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free. Only Dr Marinus is free from these complaints. His skin is a White man’s, but through his eyes you can see his soul is not a White man’s soul. His soul is much older. On Weh, we would call him a kwaio. A kwaio is an ancestor who does not stay on the island of ancestors. A kwaio returns and returns and returns, each time in a new child. A good kwaio may become a shaman, but nothing in this world is worse than a bad kwaio.
The doctor persuaded Master Fischer that I should be taught to write Dutch.
Master Fischer did not like the idea. He said that a slave who can read might ruin himself with ‘revolutionary notions’. He said he saw this in Surinam. But Dr Marinus urged Master Fischer to consider how useful I will be in the Clerks’ Office, and how much higher a price I will fetch when he wants to sell me. These words changed Master Fischer’s mind. He looked down the dining table to Master de Zoet. He said, ‘Clerk de Zoet, I have the perfect job for a man like you.’
When Master Fischer finishes his meal in the Kitchen, I walk behind him to the Deputy’s House. When we cross Long Street I must carry his parasol so his head stays in the shade. This is not an easy task. If a tassel touches his head, or if the sun dazzles his eyes, he will hit me for carelessness. Today my master is in a bad mood because he lost so much money at Master Grote’s card-game. He stops, here, in the middle of Long Street. ‘In Surinam,’ he yells, ‘they know how to train stinking Negroid dogs like you!’ Then he slaps my face, as hard as he can, and I drop the parasol. He shouts at me, ‘Pick that up!’ When I bend down, he kicks my face. This is a favourite trick of Master Fischer’s, so my face is turned away from his foot, but I pretend to be in great pain. Otherwise he will feel cheated and kick me again. He says, ‘That’ll teach you to throw my possessions in the dust!’ I say, ‘Yes, Master Fischer,’ and open the door of his house for him.
We climb the stairs to his bedroom. He lies on his bed and says, ‘It’s too bloody damned hot in this bloody damned prison…’
There is much talk about ‘prison’ this summer because the ship from Batavia has not arrived. The White masters are afraid that it will not come, so there will be no trading season and no news or luxuries from Java. The White masters who are due to return will not be able to. Nor will their servants or slaves.
Master Fischer throws his handkerchief on the floor and says, ‘Shit!’
This Dutch word can be a curse, or a bad name, but this time Master Fischer is ordering me to put his chamber pot in his favourite corner. There is a privy at the foot of the stairs, but he is too lazy to go down the steps. Master Fischer stands, unfastens his breeches, squats over the pot and grunts. I hear a slithery thud. The smell snakes its way around the room. Then Master Fischer is buttoning up his breeches. ‘Don’t just stand there, then, you idle Gomorrah…’ His voice is drowsy because of his lunchtime whisky. I put the wooden lid on the chamber pot – and go outside to the Soil Barrel. Master Fischer says he cannot tolerate dirt in his house, so I cannot empty his chamber pot into the privy like other slaves do.
I walk down Long Street to the Crossroads, turn into Bony Alley, turn left at Sea Wall Lane, pass the Headman’s House, and empty the chamber pot into the Soil Urn, near the back of the Hospital. The cloud of flies is thick and droning. I narrow my eyes like a Yellow Man’s and wrinkle shut my nose to stop any flies laying their eggs there. Then I wash the chamber pot from the barrel of seawater. On the bottom of Master Fischer’s chamber pot is a strange building called a windmill from the White Man’s World. Philander says that they make bread, but when I asked how, he called me a very ignorant fellow. This means he does not know.
I take the long way back to the Deputy’s House. The White masters complain about the heat all summer long, but I love to let the sun warm my bones so I can survive the winters. The sun reminds me of Weh, my home. When I pass the pig-pens, d’Orsaiy sees me and asks why Master Fischer hit me on Long Street. With my face, I say, Does a master need a reason? and d’Orsaiy nods. I like d’Orsaiy. D’Orsaiy comes from a place called the Cape, halfway to the White Man’s World. His skin is the blackest I ever saw. Dr Marinus says he is a Hottentot, but the master hands call him ‘Knave o’ Spades’. He asks me if I am going to study reading and writing at Master de Zoet’s this afternoon. I say, ‘Yes, unless Master Fischer gives me more work.’ D’Orsaiy says that writing is a magic that I should learn. D’Orsaiy tells me that Master Ouwehand and Master Twomey are playing billiards in Summer House. This is a warning to walk briskly so that Master Ouwehand does not report me to Master Fischer for idling.
Back at the Deputy’s House, I hear snoring. I creep up the stairways, knowing which steps creak and which do not. Master Fischer is asleep. This is a problem, because if I go to Master de Zoet’s house for my writing lesson without Master Fischer’s permission, he will punish me for being wilful. If I do not go to Master de Zoet’s house, Master Fischer will punish me for laziness. But if I wake up Master Fischer to ask his permission, he will punish me for spoiling his siesta. In the end, I slide the chamber pot under Master Fischer’s bed and go. Perhaps I will be back before he wakes.
The door of Tall House, where Master de Zoet lives, is ajar. Behind the side door is a large, locked room full of empty crates and barrels. I knock on the lowest step, as usual, and expect to hear Master de Zoet’s voice calling, ‘Is that you, Weh?’ But today, there is no reply. Surprised, I climb the stairs, making enough noise to warn him that I am coming. Still there is no greeting. Master de Zoet rarely takes a siesta, but perhaps the heat has overcome him this afternoon. On the landing, I cross the side room where the house interpreter lives during the trading season. Master de Zoet’s door is half open, so I peer in. He is sitting at his low table. He does not notice me. His face is not his own today. The light in his eyes is dark. He is afraid. His lips are half mouthing silent words. On my home-island, we would say that he has been cursed by a bad kwaio.
Master de Zoet is staring at a scroll in front of him.
It is not a White man’s book, but a Yellow man’s scroll.
I am too far away to see well, but the letters on it are not Dutch ones.
It is Yellow man’s writing – Master Yang and his sons used such letters.
Next to the scroll on Master de Zoet’s table is a notebook. Some Chinese words are written next to Dutch words. I make this guess: Master de Zoet has been translating the scroll into his own language. This has freed a bad curse, and this bad curse has possessed him.
Master de Zoet senses I am here, and he looks up.
Around three o’clock on the 16th October, 1800
Indeed it seems [John Penhaligon reads] that Nature purposely designed these islands to be a sort of little world, separate and independent of the rest, by making them of so difficult an access, and by endowing them plentifully, with whatever is requisite to make the lives of their Inhabitants both delightful and pleasant, and to enable them to subsist without a commerce with foreign Nations…
The Captain yawns and cricks his jaw. Lieutenant Hovell declares there to be no better text on Japan than Engelbert Kaempfer’s and never mind its age; but by the time Penhaligon staggers to the end of one sentence, its beginning has receded into fog. Through the stern window he studies the ominous, busy horizon. His whale’s-tooth paperweight rolls off his desk, and he hears Wetz, the Sailing Master, ordering the topgallants trimmed. None too soon, thinks the Captain. The Yellow Sea has changed colour from this morning’s robin’s-egg blue to ordure-grey, with a sky of scabby pewter.
Where is Chigwin, he wonders, and where is my damn coffee?
Penhaligon retrieves his paperweight and pain bites his right ankle.
He squints at his barometer, whose needle is stuck to the g of ‘Changeable’.
The Captain returns to Engelbert Kaempfer to pick at a knot of illogic: the corollary of the phrase ‘Whatever is requisite’ is that man’s needs are universal whereas, in truth, a king’s requisites differ radically from a reed-cutter’s; a libertine’s from an archbishop’s; and his own from his grandfather’s. He opens his notebook and, bracing himself against the swell, writes:
What prophet of commerce in, let us say, the Year 1700 could have foreseen a time when commoners consume tea by the bucket and sugar by the sack? What subject of William and Mary could have predicted the ‘need’ of today’s middling multitudes for cotton sheets, coffee and chocolate? Human requisites are prone to fashion; and, as clamouring new needs replace old ones, the face of the world itself changes…
It is too rough to write, but John Penhaligon is pleased and his gout has calmed down again, for now. A rich vein. He takes out his shaving mirror from his escritoire. Sweetmeat pies have fattened the fellow in the glass, brandy reddened his complexion, grief sunk his eyes and bad weather blasted away his thatch, but what restores a man’s vigour – and name – better than success?
He sketches his first speech at Westminster. ‘One recalls that the Phoebus,’ he shall inform their enrapt lordships, ‘one recalls that my Phoebus was no five-decked ship-of-the-line with an auditorium of thunder-spouting guns, but a modest frigate of twenty-four eighteen-pounders. Her mizzen had sprung in the Straits of Formosa, her cordage was tired, her canvas threadbare, half our supplies from Fort Cornwallis were rotted, and her geriatric pump wheezed like my lord Falmouth atop his disappointed whore, and to as little profit -’ the chamber shall erupt with laughter as his old enemy flees to die of shame in his stoat-hole ‘- but her heart, my lords, was English oak; and when we hammered on the bolted gates of Japan, we did so with that resolve for which our race is justly notorious.’ Their lordships’ hush shall grow reverential. ‘The copper we seized from the perfidious Dutch on that October day was but a token. Our truest prize, and the legacy of the Phoebus, was a market, sirs, for the fruits of your mills, mines, plantations and manufactories; and the gratitude of the Japanese Empire for rousing her from feudal somnambulance into our modern century. To claim that my Phoebus drew the political map of Eastern Asia anew is no hyperbole.’ Their lordships nod their cluttered heads, and declare, ‘Hear, hear!’ Lord Admiral Penhaligon continues: ‘This august chamber is cognisant of History’s diverse instruments of change: the diplomat’s tongue; treachery’s poison; a monarch’s mercy; a pope’s tyranny…’
By God, Penhaligon thinks, this is good: I must write it down later.
‘… and it is nothing less than the greatest honour of my life that, in the first year of the nineteenth century, History chose one plucky ship, His Majesty’s Frigate Phoebus to open the doors of the most reclusive empire in the modern world – for the glory of His Majesty and the British Empire!’ By now every last bewigged bastard in the place, Whig, Tory, cross-bencher, bishop, general and admiral alike shall be jumping to his feet and roaring with applause.
‘Cap-’ outside his door, Chigwin sneezes ‘- tain?’
‘I trust you disturb me with coffee, Chigwin.’
His young steward, the son of a master shipwright at Chatham who overlooked an awkward debt, peers in. ‘Jones is grinding the beans now, sir: the cook’s had Old Harry of a time keeping the stove alight.’
‘It was coffee I ordered, Chigwin, not a mug of excuses!’
‘Aye, sir: sorry, sir; it should be just a few minutes more…’ a slug-trail of mucus glistens on Chigwin’s sleeve ‘… but those rocks Mr Snitker made mention of are sighted to starboard, and Mr Hovell thought as you may wish to survey them.’
Don’t chew the boy’s head off. ‘Yes, I should.’
‘Would there be any instructions for dinner, sir?’
‘The lieutenants and Mr Snitker shall dine with me tonight, so…’
They steady themselves as the Phoebus plunges down a trough.
‘… bid Jones serve us up those chickens that are laying no more. I have no space for idlers on my ship, not even feathered ones.’
Penhaligon hauls himself up the companionway to the spar deck where the wind slams his face and inflates his lungs like a pair of new bellows. Wetz has the wheel whilst lecturing a wobbly cluster of midshipmen on recalcitrant tillers in labouring seas. They salute the Captain, who shouts into the wind, ‘What think you of the weather ahead, Mr Wetz?’
‘Good news is, sir, the clouds’re scattering to the west; bad news is, the wind’s swung a point northerly and blows a couple of knots harder. Regarding the pump, sir, Mr O’Loughlan’s fashioning a new chain, but he thinks there’s a new leak – rats chewed the devil aft of the powder magazine.’
When not eating our victuals, thinks Penhaligon, they eat my ship.
‘Tell the boatswain to hold a miller-hunt. Ten tails buys an extra quart.’
Wetz’s sneeze sprays a downwind midshipman. ‘The men’ll enjoy the sport.’
Penhaligon crosses the rolling quarterdeck. It is in a slutty state: Snitker doubts the Japanese lookouts could distinguish an unkempt Yankee trader from a Royal Navy frigate with gun-ports blackened, but the Captain is taking nothing for granted. Lieutenant Hovell stands at the taffrail, next to the deposed former Chief of Dejima. Hovell senses the Captain’s approach, turns and salutes.
Snitker turns and nods, like an equal. He gestures towards the rocky islet, passing at a fair clip and a safe four or five hundred yards. ‘Torinoshima.’
‘Torinoshima, Captain’, thinks Penhaligon, but inspects the islet. Torinoshima is more a large rock than a little Gibraltar, plastered in guano and raucous with seabirds. It is cliff-bound on all sides, except for a stony scree-fall to leeward where a brave boat might attempt an anchorage. Penhaligon tells Hovell, ‘Ask our guest if he ever heard of a landing.’
Snitker’s answer takes up two or three sentences.
What a gagged, mud-slurping thing, thinks Penhaligon, is the Dutch tongue.
‘He thinks not, sir: he never heard of any attempted landing.’
‘His reply was more involved than that.’
‘ “None but a bloody-minded simpleton would chance his longboat”, sir.’
‘My sensibilities are not so easily wounded, Mr Hovell. In future, translate in full.’
The First Lieutenant looks awkward. ‘My apologies, Captain.’
‘Ask him if Holland or any nation lays claim to Torinoshima.’
Snitker’s response to the question contains a sneer and the word ‘Shogun’.
‘Our guest suggests,’ explains Hovell, ‘that we consult with the Shogun before planting our Union Jack up in all that bird-shit.’ More follows, with Hovell paying close attention and verifying a detail or two. ‘Mr Snitker adds that Torinoshima is referred to as the “signpost to Japan”, and if this wind keeps up, tomorrow we’ll catch sight of the “garden wall”, the Goto Islands, subject to the Lord of Hizen, in whose dominion Nagasaki is located.’
‘Ask him if the Dutch Company ever landed on the Goto Islands.’
This question earns a longer answer.
‘He says, sir, that the Company’s captains never provoked…’
The three men grip the taffrail as the Phoebus plunges and bucks.
‘… never provoked the authorities so blatantly, sir, because Hidden -’
A cascade of spray falls over the bow; a drenched sailor swears in Welsh.
‘- Hidden Christians still live there, so all comings and goings…’
One of the midshipmen tumbles down the companionway with a yell.
‘… are watched by government spies, but no bumboats shall approach us lest the crew be executed as smugglers, along with their families.’
Rise by plunge, Torinoshima diminishes in stature off the starboard stern. The Captain, Lieutenant and traitor sink into their own thoughts. Shearwaters and terns hover, roll and plunge. The fourth bell of the first dog watch is struck, bringing out the men of the larboard watch without lagging: word has spread that the Captain is abroad. The off-duty men go below-decks for two hours of make-and-mend.
A narrow amber eye of sky opens on the southern horizon.
‘There, sir!’ says Hovell, childlike for a moment. ‘Two dolphins!’
Penhaligon sees nothing but heaving, slate-blue waves. ‘Where?’
‘A third! A beauty!’ Hovell points, aborts another syllable, and says, ‘Gone.’
‘Until dinnertime, then,’ says Penhaligon to Hovell, moving away.
‘Ah, dinnertime,’ repeats Snitker in English, and mimes drinking.
Grant me patience, Penhaligon musters a thin smile, and coffee.
The purser leaves the cabin, having worked through the day’s subtractions to the Pay Book. His buzzing voice and charnel-house breath have left Penhaligon with a headache to match the pain in his foot. ‘The one thing worse than dealing with pursers,’ his patron Captain Golding advised him many years ago, ‘is being one. Every company needs a figure-head of hatred: better it be him than you.’
Penhaligon drains the silty dregs. Coffee sharpens my mind, he thinks, but burns my guts and strengthens my old enemy. Since leaving Prince of Wales Island, an unwelcome truth has become irrefutable: his gout is launching a second attack. The first occurred in Bengal last summer: the heat was monstrous, and the pain was monstrous. For a fortnight he could not endure even the light touch of a cotton sheet against his foot. A first attack of the ailment can be laughed away as a rite of passage, but after the second, a man risks being dubbed ‘a gouty captain’ and his prospects with the Admiralty can be poleaxed. Hovell may harbour his suspicions, thinks Penhaligon, but daren’t air them: the ward rooms of the Service are cluttered with first lieutenants, orphaned by the premature loss of their patrons. Worse yet, Hovell may be tempted by a nimbler patron and jump ship, depriving Penhaligon of his finest officer and a future captain’s indebtedness. His second lieutenant, Abel Wren, well connected via his marriage to Commodore Joy’s ruthless daughter, will smack his lips at the thought of these unexpected vacancies. I am, then, Penhaligon concludes, engaged in a foot race against my gout. If I seize this year’s Dutch copper and, please, God, prise open the treasure box of Nagasaki before gout lays me low, my financial and political futures are assured. Otherwise, Hovell or Wren shall take the credit for bagging the copper and the trading post – or else the mission fails altogether and John Penhaligon retires to West Country obscurity and a pension of, at best, two hundred pounds a year, paid late and begrudgingly. In my darker hours, I declare, it appears that Lady Luck won me my captaincy eight years ago just for the private pleasure of squatting over me and voiding her bowels. First, Charlie mortgages the remains of the family estate, takes out debts in his younger brother’s name and disappears; second, his prize-agent and banker absconds to Virginia; third, Meredith, his dear Meredith, dies of typhus; and fourth, there is Tristram, vigorous, strident, respected, handsome Tristram, killed at Cape St Vincent, leaving his father nothing but grief and the crucifix salvaged by the ship’s surgeon. And now comes the gout, he thinks, threatening even to wreck my career…
‘No.’ Penhaligon picks up his shaving mirror. ‘We shall reverse our reverses.’
The Captain leaves his cabin just as the sentry – Banes or Panes is the man’s name – is relieved by another marine, Walker the Scot: the pair salute. On the gun-deck, Waldron the Gunner’s Mate crouches by a cannon with a Penzance boy, Moff Wesley. In the gloom and noise of the heavy sea, they do not notice the eavesdropping Captain. ‘Speak it back, then, Moff,’ Waldron is saying. ‘First?’
‘Mop inside the barrel with the wet swab, sir.’
‘An’ if some sottish cock does a cack-thumbed job o’ that?’
‘He’ll miss embers from the last shot when we puts in the powder, sir.’
‘And blow a gunner’s arms off: I seen it once an’ once’ll do. Second?’
‘Put in the powder-cartridge, sir, or else we pours it in loose.’
‘An’ is gunpowder brought hither by scamperin’ little piskies?’
‘No, sir: I fetches it from the aft magazine, sir, one charge at a time.’
‘So you do, Moff. An’ why we don’t keep a fat stash to hand is?’
‘One loose spark’d blow us all to piss-’n’-sh- pieces, sir. Third…’ Moff counts on his fingers ‘… ram home the powder with a rammer, sir, an’ fourth is load up the shot, sir, an’ fifth is ram in a wad after the shot, sir, ’cause we may be rollin’ an’ the shot may roll out again into the sea, sir.’
‘An’ a right crew o’ Frenchmen we’d look then. Sixth?’
‘Roll out the gun, so the carriage-front is hard against the bulwark. Seventh, quill down the touch-hole. Eighth, it’s lit with a flintlock, an’ the flintman shouts “Clear!” an’ the primin’-powder sets off the powder in the barrel an’ fires out the shot, and whatever’s in its way it blows to – Kingdom Come, sir.’
‘Which causes the gun carriage,’ interjects Penhaligon, ‘to do what?’
Waldron is as startled as Moff: he stands to salute too quickly and bangs his head. ‘Didn’t notice you, Captain, beggin’ your pardon.’
‘Which causes the gun carriage,’ repeats Penhaligon, ‘to do what, Mr Wesley?’
‘Recoil shoots it back, sir, till the breech-ropes an’ cascabel stops it.’
‘What does a recoiling cannon do to a man’s leg, pray, Mr Wesley?’
‘Well… there’d not be much leg left if it caught it, sir.’
‘Carry on, Mr Waldron.’ Penhaligon continues along the starboard bulwark, recalling his own days as a powder-monkey, and steadying himself on an overhead rope. At five foot eight, he is much taller than the average sailor and must take care not to scalp himself on the deck-heads. He regrets his lack of a private fortune or prize money to buy gunpowder for firing practice. Captains who use more than a third of their quota in this way are viewed by the Sea Lords as imprudent. Six Hanoverians whom he plucked off a whaler at St Helena are doing their best to wash, wring out and hang up spare hammocks in the rolling weather. They intone, ‘Capitarn’, in one chorus, and return to industrious silence. Further along, Lieutenant Abel Wren has men scrubbing the deck with hot vinegar and holystones. Up above is dirtied for camouflage, but below-decks needs protection from mildew and bad airs. Wren whacks a sailor with his rattan and bellows, ‘Scrub it – don’t tickle it, you daisy!’ He then pretends to notice the Captain for the first time and salutes. ‘Afternoon, sir.’
‘Afternoon, Mr Wren. All well?’
‘Never better, sir,’ says the dashing, ugly Second Lieutenant.
Passing the canvas-screened galley, Penhaligon peers through a loose flap into the sooty, steamy enclosure where the mess-men help the cook and his mate chop food, keep fires alight and prevent the coppers overturning. The cook puts chunks of salt pork – Thursday being a pork day – into the bubbling mixture. Chinese cabbage, slabs of yam and rice are added to thicken the stew. Sons of the gentry may turn up their noses at the starch-and-salt-rich victuals, but ratings eat and drink better than they would ashore. Penhaligon’s own cook, Jonas Jones, claps a few times to earn the galley’s attention. ‘The wagers’re all in now, boys.’
‘So let the games,’ declares Chigwin, ‘begin!’
Chigwin and Jones each shake one chicken into a state of terror.
The dozen or so men in the galley chant in unison, ‘A-one, a-two, a-three!’
Chigwin and Jones snip off their hen’s head with a pair of secateurs and set them on the galley deck. The men cheer the blood-spouting headless corpses as they skid and flap. Half a minute later, when Jones’s fowl is still kicking on its side, the referee pronounces Chigwin’s ‘One dead fowl, boys.’ Coins change hands from scowlers to gloaters, and the birds are taken to the benches for plucking and gutting.
Penhaligon could punish the servants with the feeble charge of Disrespect to the Officers’ Dinner but carries on past the galley to the sick-bay. Its wooden partitions reach not quite to the ceiling, allowing a little light in and disease-bearing airs out. ‘Nay nay nay, you headless tit, it goes like this…’ The speaker is Michael Tozer, another Cornishman sent as a volunteer by the Captain’s brother Charlie to the Dragon, the brig whose second lieutenancy Penhaligon held eleven years ago. Tozer’s band of ten – now all able seamen – has followed their patron ever since. His broken and tuneless voice sings:
‘Don’t you see the ships a-comin’?
Don’t you see them in full sail?
Don’t you see the ships a-comin’
With the prizes at their tail?
Oh my little rollin’ sailor,
Oh my little rollin’ he;
I do love a jolly sailor,
Gay and merry might he be.’
‘ ’Tweren’t “gay”, Michael Tozer,’ objects a voice, ‘ ’twere “blithe”.’
‘ “Gay”, “blithe”, who humps a hog? What matters is what’s next so cork it:
‘Sailors they get all the money,
Soldiers they get none but brass;
Oh I do love a drink-me-down sailor,
But soldiers may all kiss my arse.
Oh my little rolling sailor,
Oh my little rolling he;
I do love a jolly sailor,
Soldiers may be damned for me.
‘That’s what the Gosport whores sing and I’d know ’cause I had one after the Glorious First o’ June an’ sunk my fork up her figgy-dowdy-’
‘Though come mornin’,’ says the voice, ‘she’d gone with his prize money.’
‘ ’Tain’t the point: the point is we’ll be pluckin’ a Dutch merchantman stuffed with the reddest, goldest copper on God’s Beautiful Globe.’
Captain Penhaligon stoops through the sick-bay’s entrance. The half-dozen bedbound inmates stiffen to guilty attention and the loblolly, a pock-scarred Londoner called Rafferty, stands, putting to one side the tray of tenaculums, ball-scoops and bone-rasps he is oiling. ‘Afternoon, sir: the Surgeon’s down on the orlop deck. Shall I send for him?’
‘No, Mr Rafferty: I make my rounds, is all. Are you mending, Mr Tozer?’
‘Can’t say my chest is better-knitted than last week, sir, but I’m grateful to be here at all. ’Twas a fair old fall without a pair of wings. An’ Mr Waldron’s been saying as he’ll find a space for me on one of his guns, so I look on it as a chance to learn a new trade an’ all.’
‘That’s the spirit, Tozer, that’s the spirit.’ Penhaligon turns to Tozer’s young neighbour. ‘Jack Fletcher: do I have it?’
‘Jack Thatcher, beggin’ your pardon, sir.’
‘Your pardon, Jack Thatcher, and what brings you to the sick-bay?’
Rafferty answers for the blushing youth: ‘Big round of applause, Captain.’
‘The clap? A souvenir of Penang, no doubt. How far advanced?’
Rafferty answers again: ‘Mr Snaky’s as scarlet as a Roman bishop’s hat, sir, an’ oozin’ curds, an’ Jack’s one eye’s all blurry, an’ widdlin’s a torture, is it not, lad? He’s been fed his mercury, but there’ll be no shuntyin’ along the yards for a while yet…’
To blame, Penhaligon reflects, is the Navy’s policy of charging sailors for the treatment of venereal disease, thereby encouraging the men to try every Sea-Daddy’s cure before coming to the ship’s surgeon. When I am made a peer in the Lords, thinks Penhaligon, I shall rectify this pious folly. The Captain, too, once contracted the French Disease at an Officers Only bagnio on St Kitts and was too scared and too shy to speak to the Trincomolee’s surgeon until passing water was the purest agony. Were he a petty officer still he’d share this story with Jack Thatcher, but a captain should not dent his authority. ‘One trusts you learnt the true price a doxy’s cully must pay, Thatcher?’
‘I’ll not forget it in a hurry, sir, this I swear.’
Yet you’ll lie with another, Penhaligon foresees, and another, and another… He speaks briefly with the other patients: a feverish landsman pressed at St Ives, whose crushed thumb may or may not have to come off; a luckier Bermudan, glassy-eyed with pain from an abscessed molar; and a Shetlander with more beard than face and a severe case of Barbados Leg which has swollen his testicles to the size of mangoes. ‘I’m fit as a smashed fiddle,’ he reports, ‘God bless you for asking, Captain.’
Penhaligon rises to leave.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ asks Michael Tozer, ‘might you settle a dispute for us?’
Pain shoots through Penhaligon’s foot. ‘If I may, Mr Tozer.’
‘Shall sailors in sick-bay still get their rightful slice of the prize, sir?’
‘The Naval Rule Book, which I uphold, states that the answer is yes.’
Tozer fires an ‘I told you so’ glare at Rafferty. Penhaligon is tempted to quote the proverb about birds in hands and bushes, but leaves the Phoebus’s rising morale untouched. ‘There are some miscellaneous matters,’ he tells the loblolly, ‘on which I should like to consult Surgeon Nash, after all. He is most likely in his cabin down below, you mentioned?’
A mongrel stink smothers the Captain as he descends, step by jolting step, to the berth-deck. It is dark, cold and damp in winter, and dark, hot and airless in the summer: ‘snug’, the ratings call it. In unhappy ships, despised officers are well advised not to venture too far from the companionways, but John Penhaligon has no undue worries. The larboard watch, about a hundred and ten men, are sewing or whittling in the wells of dim light from above, or moaning, shaving or curling up for a cat-nap in improvised booths between sea-chests, hammocks being unstrung during the day. The Captain’s shoes and buckles are recognised before the rest of him: a cry rings out, ‘Captain on deck, lads!’ The nearest sailors stand to attention, and the Captain is gratified that resentment at his intrusion is concealed, at least. He hides the pain in his feet. ‘I’m on my way down to the orlop, lads. As you were…’
‘Shall y’ be needin’ a lantern or a support, sir?’ one of the men asks.
‘No need. Blindfolded, I’d find my way around my Phoebus’s guts.’
He continues down to the orlop deck. It reeks of bilge-water; though not, as on a captured French ship he once inspected, of decayed corpses. Water sloshes, the sea’s belly churns, and the pumps clunk and squelp. Penhaligon grunts as he reaches the bottom, and half feels his way down the narrow passage. His fingertips identify the powder-store, the cheese-hold, the grog-store, with its heavy padlock, the cabin of Mr Woods, the boys’ careworn tutor, the rope-store, the Surgeon’s dispensary and, last, a cabin no bigger than his water-closet. Bronze light escapes and boxes are shifted. ‘It is I, Mr Nash, the Captain.’
‘Captain.’ Nash’s voice is a husky West Country wheeze. ‘What a surprise.’ His lamp-lit face appears, like a fanged mole, betraying no surprise at all.
‘Mr Rafferty said I might find you here, Surgeon.’
‘Aye, I came down for Sulphide of Lead.’ He places a folded blanket on the chest by way of a cushion. ‘Take the weight off your feet, if you’d care to. Your gout bites back, does it, sir?’
The tall man fills the poky cabin. ‘Is it so obvious, then?’
‘Professional instinct, sir… Might I inspect the area?’
Awkwardly, the Captain removes his boot and sock, and places his foot on a trunk. Nash brings his lamp close, his apron stiff and rustling with dried blood, and frowns at Penhaligon’s maroon swellings. ‘An angry tophus on the metatarsus… but no secretions, as yet?’
‘None as yet, but it’s looking damned similar to this time last year.’
Nash pokes at the swelling and Penhaligon’s foot jerks in pain.
‘Surgeon, the Nagasaki mission cannot afford for me to be invalided.’
Nash polishes his glasses on his grimy cuffs. ‘I prescribe Dover’s Remedy: it speeded your recovery in Bengal, it may postpone the attack this time. I want six ounces of blood from you, too, to reduce friction against the arteries.’
‘Let us waste no more time.’ Penhaligon removes his coat and rolls up his shirt-sleeves while Nash decants liquids from three different medicine bottles. Nobody could accuse the Surgeon of being one of those gentleman-physicians one occasionally meets in the Service, men who adorn the ward-room with erudition and verve – but the steady Devonian can amputate one limb per minute during engagements, pulls teeth with a steady hand, bends his accounts no more than is decent, and never blabs about officers’ complaints to the ratings. ‘Remind me, Mr Nash, what goes into this Dover’s.’
‘A variant of Ipecacuanha Powder, sir, being opium, ipecac, saltpetre, tartar and liquorice.’ He measures out a spatula of pale powder. ‘Were you a common Jack, I’d add castoreum – what the medical fraternity call rancid cod-oil – so you’d feel properly physicked. This trick I tend to spare the officers.’
The ship rolls and her timbers creak like a barn in a gale.
‘Have you considered turning apothecary ashore, Mr Nash?’
‘Not I, sir.’ Nash does not smile at the pleasantry.
‘I can see Nash’s Patented Elixir arrayed in a row of china bottles.’
‘Men of commerce, sir…’ Nash counts out laudanum drops into the pewter beaker ‘… for the most part, had their consciences cut out at birth. Better an honest drowning than slow death by hypocrisy, law or debt.’ He stirs the compound and hands the beaker to his patient. ‘Down in a single draught, Captain.’
Penhaligon obeys and winces. ‘Rancid cod-oil may improve it.’
‘I shall bring a dosage daily, sir. Now for the blood-letting.’ He produces a bleeding dish and a rusty lancet and holds the Captain’s forearm. ‘My sharpest blade: you shan’t feel a -’
Penhaligon bites on his ouch!, his oath and a shudder of pain.
‘- thing.’ Nash inserts the catheter to prevent scabbing. ‘Now…’
‘Stay still. I know.’ Slow drips of blood form a puddle in the dish.
To distract himself from the seepage, Penhaligon thinks about dinner.
‘Paid informers,’ avows Lieutenant Hovell, after half-drunk Daniel Snitker has been helped to his cabin to sleep off his mountainous dinner, ‘serve up that same dish their patrons most wish to -’ the ship sways, shudders, and the bulkhead lamps circle in their gimbals ‘- to dine upon. During his ambassadorship at The Hague, my father placed the word of one informer of conscience above the affidavits of ten spies working for lucre. Now, this is not to say that Snitker is ipso facto deceiving us, but we are well advised to swallow not a crumb of his “Prize Intelligence” without further verification – least of all his sunny prediction that the Japanese shall watch us seize their ancient ally’s assets without so much as a murmur.’
At a nod from Penhaligon, Chigwin and Jones begin clearing the table.
‘The European War,’ Major Cutlip, only a shade or two less scarlet than his marine’s jacket, sucks a last shred of meat from his chicken drumstick, ‘is no damn concern of the Bloody Asiatic.’
‘A point of view,’ says Hovell, ‘the Bloody Asiatics may not share, Major.’
‘Then they must be -’ Cutlip snorts ‘- taught to share it, Mr Hovell.’
‘Suppose the Kingdom of Siam had, let us say, a trading post at Bristol -’
Cutlip glances at Second Lieutenant Wren with a triumphant grin.
‘- at Bristol,’ Hovell carries on undeterred, ‘for a century and a half, until one fine day a Chinese junk-of-war sails in, seizes our ally’s assets with never a by-your-leave, and announces to London that henceforth they shall take the place of the Siamese. Would Mr Pitt accept such terms?’
‘When next Mr Hovell’s critics,’ says Wren, ‘lampoon his humourlessness…’
Penhaligon knocks over the salt cellar and throws a pinch over his shoulder.
‘… I shall confound them with his fantasia of a Siamese factory in Bristol!’
‘The issue is sovereignty,’ states Robert Hovell. ‘The comparison is apt.’
Cutlip wags his drumstick. ‘If eight years in New South Wales taught me anything at all, it’s that well-read notions like “sovereignty” or “rights” or “property” or “jurisprudence” or “diplomacy” mean one thing to Whites, but another to the backward races. Poor Phillip at Sydney Cove, he did his damnedest to “negotiate” with the raggle-taggle Backward Blacks we found there. Did his fine ideals stop the lazy shit-weasels filching our supplies like they owned the place?’ Cutlip spits in the spittoon. ‘It’s red-blooded Englishmen and London muskets who lay down the law in the Colonies, not any lily-livered “Diplomacy”, and it’ll be twenty-four guns and forty well-drilled marines who win the day in Nagasaki too. One can only hope,’ he winks at Wren, ‘that the First Lieutenant’s delightful Chinese bed-mate in Bengal did not tinge his Caucasian spotlessness a shade yellow, hey?’
What is it, Penhaligon groans inwardly, about the Marine Corps?
A bottle slides off the table into the young hands of Third Lieutenant Talbot.
‘Does your remark,’ Hovell asks, in a deadly calm voice, ‘impugn my courage as a naval officer, or is it my loyalty to the King that you denigrate?’
‘Now come, Robert: Cutlip knows you’ – there are times, Penhaligon thinks, when I am less a captain and more a governess – ‘too well to do either: he was just… just…’
‘Dispensing a little affectionate elbowing,’ says Lieutenant Wren.
‘The most trivial quip!’ Cutlip protests, all charm. ‘Affectionate elbowing…’
‘The wit was sharp,’ Wren judges, ‘but wholly lacking in malice.’
‘… and I apologise unconditionally,’ adds Cutlip, ‘for any offence caused.’
The readiest apologies, Penhaligon observes, carry the littlest worth.
‘Major Cutlip should mind his sharp wit,’ says Hovell, ‘lest he cut himself.’
‘Is it your plan, Mr Talbot,’ Penhaligon asks, ‘to smuggle that bottle out?’
Talbot takes the question seriously for a moment; then he smiles with relief and fills the company’s glasses. Penhaligon orders Chigwin to bring another couple of bottles of the Chambolle Musigny. The steward is surprised by such generosity so late on, but goes to fetch them.
‘Were our single objective in Nagasaki,’ Penhaligon senses that a ruling is required, ‘to dispossess Jan Compagnie, we could be as direct as the Major advocates. Our orders, however, urge us also to negotiate a treaty with the Japanese. We needs must be diplomats as well as warriors.’
Cutlip picks his hairy nose. ‘Guns make the best diplomats, Captain.’
Hovell dabs his lips. ‘Belligerence shan’t impress these natives.’
‘Did we subdue the Indians by gentleness?’ Wren leans back. ‘Did the Dutch conquer the Javans by gifts of Edam cheese?’
‘The analogy is unsound,’ argues Hovell. ‘Japan is in Asia but not of Asia.’
Wren asks, ‘Another of your Gnostic statements, Lieutenant?’
‘To speak of “the Indians” or “the Javanese” is a European conceit: in truth, these are a patchwork of peoples, fissile and divisible. Japan, contrariwise, was unified four hundred years ago, and expelled the Spanish and Portuguese even at the zenith of Iberian might-’
‘Pit our artillery, cannonades and riflemen against their quaint medieval jousters and-’ With his lips and hands, the Major imitates an explosion.
‘Quaint medieval jousters,’ Hovell replies, ‘whom you have never even seen.’
Better teredo worm in the hull, thinks Penhaligon, than bickering officers.
‘No more than have you, Mr Hovell,’ says Wren. ‘Snitker, however-’
‘Snitker is with child to regain his little kingdom and humiliate his usurpers.’
In the wardroom directly below, Mr Waldron’s fiddle strikes up a jig.
Someone at least, thinks Penhaligon, is enjoying the evening.
Lieutenant Talbot opens his mouth to speak but closes it again.
Penhaligon says, ‘You wish to speak, Mr Talbot?’
Talbot is unnerved by all the eyes. ‘Nothing of consequence. Sir.’
Jones drops a plate of cutlery with an almighty clatter.
‘By the by,’ Cutlip transfers his snot to the tablecloth, ‘I overheard a pair of your Cornishmen, Captain, making a joke about Mr Hovell’s home-county: I repeat it without fear of offence, now we know he is man enough to enjoy a little affectionate elbowing: “What, pray, is a Yorkshireman?” ’
Robert Hovell rotates his wedding-ring around his finger.
‘ “A Scot, by Jove, with the generosity squeezed out!” ’
The Captain regrets ordering the bottles of ’91.
Why must all things, Penhaligon wonders, go around in stupid circles?
An uncertain time
Jacob de Zoet pursues the link-boy’s lamp along a putrid canal and into the nave of Domburg church. Geertje sets a roasted goose on the altar table. The link-boy, whose eyes are Asian and hair is copper, quotes, ‘I will incline mine ear to a parable, Papa, I will open my dark saying upon the harp.’ Jacob is aghast. An illegitimate son? He turns to Geertje, but finds the soured landlady of his makeshift lodgings in Batavia. ‘You don’t even know his mother, do you?’ Unico Vorstenbosch finds all this inordinately funny, and plucks meat from the half-eaten goose. The fowl lifts its crisped head and quotes, ‘Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut to pieces.’ The goose flies through a bamboo grove, through slanted bars of light dark and dark dark, and Jacob flies too, until they reach a clearing where the head of John the Baptist glowers from its Delftware dish. ‘Eighteen years in the Orient with nothing to show but a bastard half-breed!’
Eighteen years? Jacob notices this number. Eighteen…
The Shenandoah, he thinks, embarked less than one year ago…
His tether to the netherworld snipped, he wakes, next to Orito.
Praise merciful God in Heaven, the waker finds himself in Tall House…
… where everything is exactly as it appears to be.
Orito’s hair is mussed from last night’s lovemaking.
Dust is gold in the light of dawn; an insect sharpens its scalpels.
‘I am yours, Beloved,’ Jacob whispers, and kisses her burn…
Orito’s slim hands, her beautiful hands, wake, and cup his nipples…
So much suffering, Jacob thinks, but now you are here, I will heal you.
… cup his nipples, and circle his navel, and knead his groin, and-
‘As a snail which melteth…’ Orito’s purpled eyes swivel open.
Jacob tries to wake up but the wire around his neck pulls tight.
‘… let every one pass away,’ quotes the corpse, ‘like the untimely birth…’
The Dutchman is covered with snails – bed, room, Dejima, all snails…
‘… like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.’
Jacob sits up, wide awake, his pulse galloping away. I am in the House of Wistaria, and last night I slept with a prostitute. She is here, with a mousy snore caught in her throat. The air is warm and fetid with the smells of sex, tobacco, soiled linen and over-boiled cabbage from the chamber pot. Creation’s light is pure on the papered window. Amorous thumps and titters emanate from a nearby room. He thinks about Orito and Uzaemon in various shades of guilt, and closes his eyes, but then he sees them more clearly, Orito locked, reaped and harvested, and Uzaemon hacked to death, and Jacob thinks, Because of you, and he opens his eyes. But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block, and Jacob remembers Interpreter Kobayashi’s announcement that Ogawa Uzaemon had been slain by mountain bandits on a pilgrimage to the town of Kashima. Lord Abbot Enomoto had hunted down the eleven outlaws responsible for the atrocity and tortured them to death, but not even vengeance, Kobayashi had opined, can bring the dead to life. Chief van Cleef sent the Company’s condolences to Ogawa the Elder, but the interpreter never returned to Dejima again, and nobody was surprised when he died shortly after. Any faint doubts in de Zoet’s mind that Enomoto had killed Ogawa Uzaemon were dispelled a few weeks later when Goto Shinpachi reported that the previous night’s fire on the eastern slope had begun in the library of the old Ogawa Residence. That evening, by lamplight, Jacob retrieved the dogwood scroll-tube from under his floorboards and began the most exacting mental labour of his life. The scroll was not long – its title and twelve clauses ran to a little more than three hundred characters – but Jacob had had to acquire the vocabulary and grammar entirely in secret. None of the interpreters would risk being caught teaching Japanese to a foreigner, though Goto Shinpachi would sometimes answer Jacob’s casual questions about specific words. Without Marinus’s knowledge of Oriental languages the task would have been impossible, but Jacob dared not show the doctor the scroll for fear of implicating his friend. It took two hundred nights to decipher the Creeds of the Order of Mount Shiranui, nights that grew darker as Jacob groped closer and closer to its revelations. And now that the work is done, he wonders, how can a closely watched foreigner ever transform it into justice? He would need the sympathetic ear of a man as powerful as the Magistrate to stand the remotest chance of seeing Orito freed and Enomoto brought to justice. What would happen, he wonders, to a Chinaman in Middelburg who sought to prosecute the Duke of Zeeland for immorality and infanticide?
The man in the nearby room is blurting, ‘Oh oh Mijn God, Mijn God!’
Melchior van Cleef: Jacob blushes and hopes his girl doesn’t wake.
Prudishness the morning after, he must admit, is a hypocrite’s guilt.
His condom of goat’s intestine lies in a square of paper by the futon.
It is a revolting object, Jacob thinks. So, for that matter, am I…
Jacob thinks about Anna. He must dissolve their vow.
That kind and honest girl deserves, he thinks unflinchingly, a truer husband.
He imagines her father’s happiness when she tells him the news.
She may have dissolved her vow to me, he admits, months ago…
No ship from Batavia this year meant no trading season and no letters…
A water-vendor in the street below calls out, ‘O-miiizu, O-miiizu, O-miiizu.’
… and the threat of insolvency for Dejima and Nagasaki looms larger.
Melchior van Cleef arrives at his ‘OOOOOOoOoOoOoooo…’
Don’t wake, Jacob begs the sleeping woman, don’t wake, don’t wake…
Her name is Tsukinami, ‘Moon Wave’: Jacob liked her shyness.
Though shyness, too, he suspects, can be applied with paint and powder.
Once they were alone, Tsukinami complimented him on his Japanese.
He hopes he did not revolt her. She called his eyes ‘decorated’.
She asked to snip off a lock of his copper hair to remember him by.
Post-climactic van Cleef laughs like a pirate seeing a rival mauled by sharks.
And is this Orito’s life, Jacob shudders, as Ogawa’s scroll describes?
Millstones in his conscience grind, grind and grind…
The bell of Ryûgaji Temple announces the Hour of the Rabbit. Jacob puts on his breeches and shirt, cups some water from the pitcher, drinks and washes, and opens the window. The view is fit for a viceroy: Nagasaki falls away, in stepped alleyways and up-thrust roofs, in duns, ochres and charcoals, down to the ark-like Magistracy, Dejima, and beyond to the slovenly sea…
He obeys a mischievous impulse to shimmy out along the ridge of the roof.
His bare feet grip the still-cool tiles: there is a sculpted carp to hold on to.
Saturday, October 18th in the year 1800 is calm and blue.
Starlings fly in nebulae: like a child in a fairy-tale, Jacob longs to join them.
Or else, he daydreams, let my round eyes become nomadic ovals…
West to east, the sky unrolls and rolls its atlas of clouds.
… my pink skin turn dull gold; my freakish hair, a sensible black…
From an alleyway, the clatter of a night-cart threatens his reverie.
… and my boorish body become one of theirs… poised and sleek.
Eight liveried horses proceed along a thoroughfare. Their hoofs echo.
How far would I get, Jacob wonders, if I ran, hooded, through the streets?
… up through rice terraces, up to the folded mountains, the folds within folds.
Not so far as Kyôga Domain, Jacob thinks. Someone fumbles at a casement.
He readies himself to be ordered inside by a worried official.
‘Did gallant Sir de Zoet,’ hairy and naked van Cleef flashes his teeth, ‘find the golden fleece last night?’
‘It was…’ not, Jacob thinks, to my credit ‘… it was what it was, sir.’
‘Oh, hearken to Father Calvin.’ Van Cleef puts on his breeches and clambers out of the window to join him with a flagon hooked on his thumb. He is not drunk, Jacob hopes, but he is not altogether sober. ‘Our Divine Father made all of you, man, in his own image, under-tackle included – or do I lie?’
‘God did make us, yes, but the Holy Book is clear about-’
‘Oh, lawful wedlock, awful bedlock, yes, yes, well and good in Europe, but here -’ van Cleef gestures at Nagasaki like a conductor ‘- a man must improvise! Celibacy is for vegetarians. Neglect your spuds – I quote a medical fact – and they shrivel up and drop off and what future then -’
‘That is not,’ Jacob almost smiles, ‘a medical fact, sir.’
‘- what future then for the Prodigal Son on the Isle of Walcheren, sans cods?’ Van Cleef swigs from his flagon, wiping his beard on his forearm. ‘Bachelordom and an heirless death! Lawyers feasting on your estate like crows on a gibbet! This fine house,’ he slaps the ridge-tile, ‘is no sink of iniquity but a spa to nourish later harvests – you did use the armour urged upon us by Marinus? But who am I talking to? Of course you did.’
Van Cleef’s girl watches them from the depths of her room.
Jacob wonders about Orito’s eyes, now.
‘A pretty little butterfly on the outside…’ a sigh heaves van Cleef and Jacob fears his superior is drunker than he thought – a fall could end in a broken neck ‘… but unwrapped, one finds the same disappointments. ’Tweren’t the girl’s fault, it’s Gloria’s fault, the albatross hanging ’round my neck… But why would you want to hear about that, young man, with your heart not yet broken?’ The Chief stares in the face of Heaven and the breeze stirs the world. ‘Gloria was my aunt. Batavia-born, I was, but sent to Amsterdam to learn the gentlemanly arts: how to spout pig Latin, how to dance like a peacock and how to cheat at cards. The party ended on my twenty-second birthday when I took passage back to Java with my uncle Theo. Uncle Theo had visited Holland to deliver the Governor-General’s yearly fictions to East India House – the van Cleefs were well connected in those days – grease palms and marry for the fourth or fifth time. My uncle’s motto was “Race is All”. He’d fathered half a dozen children on his Javanese maids, but he acknowledged none and made dire warnings about God’s discrete races mingling into a single pigsty breed.’
Jacob remembers the son in his dream. A Chinese junk’s sails swell.
‘Theo’s legal heirs, he avowed, must have “Currency” mothers – white-skinned rose-cheeked flowers of Protestant Europe – because Batavia-born brides all have orang-utans cavorting in the family tree. Alas, his previous wives all expired within months of arriving in Java. The miasma did for them, you see. But Theo was a charming dog, and a rich charming dog, and, lo, it came to pass that between my cabin and my uncle’s aboard the Enkhuizen was accommodated the latest Mrs Theo van Cleef. My “Aunt Gloria” was four years my junior and one-third the age of her proud groom…’
Below, a rice-seller opens up his shop for the day.
‘Why bother describing a beauty in her first bloom? None of the bewhiskered Nabob-hookers on the Enkhuizen could compare, and before we’d rounded Brittany, all the eligible men – and many ineligible ones – were paying Aunt Gloria more attention than her new husband would wish. Through my thin cabin wall, I’d hear him warning her against holding X’s gaze or laughing at Y’s limp jokes. She’d reply, “Yes, sir,” meek as a doe, then let him exact his marital dues. My imagination, de Zoet, was better than any peep-hole! Then, afterwards, when Uncle Theo was back in his own cot, Gloria would weep, so delicately, so quietly, none but I could hear. She’d had no say in the marriage, of course, and Theo allowed her just one maid from home, a girl called Aagje – a second-class fare would buy five maids at Batavia’s slave market. Gloria, you must remember, had rarely gone beyond the Singel Canal. Java was as far off as the moon. Further, in fact, for the moon is, at least, visible from Amsterdam. Come morning, I’d be kind to my aunt…’
In a garden, women drape washing on a juniper tree.
‘The Enkhuizen took a bad mauling in the Atlantic,’ van Cleef pours the last sunlit drops of beer on to his tongue, ‘so the Captain settled upon a month’s stay at the Cape for repairs. To protect Gloria from the common gaze, Uncle Theo took apartments in the villa of the Sisters den Otter, high above Cape Town, up between Lion’s Head and Signal Hill. The six-mile track was a quagmire in wet weather and a hoof-twister in dry. Once upon a time the den Otters were amongst the colony’s grandest families, but by the late seventies the villa’s once-famous stucco-work was falling off in chunks, its orchards were reverting to Africa and its former staff of twenty or thirty reduced to a housekeeper, a cook, a put-upon maid and two white-haired Black gardeners both called “Boy”. The sisters kept no carriage, but sent for a landau from an adjoining farmstead, and most of their utterances began with “When dear Papa was alive” or “When the Swedish Ambassador would call”. Deathly, de Zoet – deathly! But young Mrs van Cleef well knew what her husband wanted to hear, and declared the villa to be private, safe and enchantingly Gothic. The Sisters den Otter were “a treasure-trove of wisdom and improving stories”. Our landladies were defenceless against her flattery, and her sturdiness pleased Uncle Theo, and her brightness… her loveliness… She pulled me under, de Zoet. Gloria was Love. Love was Gloria.’
A tiny girl skips like a skinny frog around a persimmon tree.
I miss seeing children, Jacob thinks, and looks away to Dejima.
‘On our first week at the villa, in a grove of agapanthus run amok, Gloria found me and told me to go and tell my uncle that she had flirted with me. Surely I’d misheard. She repeated her injunction: “If you are my friend, Melchior, as I pray God you are for I have no other in this wilderness, go to my husband and tell him that I confessed ‘inappropriate sentiments’! Use those very words, for they could be yours.” I protested that I couldn’t besmirch her honour or place her in danger of a beating. She assured me that if I didn’t do as she asked, or if I told my uncle about this conversation, then she would earn a beating. Well, the light in the grove was orange, and she squeezed my hand and said, “Do this for me, Melchior.” So I went.’
Fingers of smoke appear from the House of Wistaria’s chimney.
‘When Uncle Theo heard my false witness, he agreed with my charitable diagnosis of nerves damaged by the voyage. I went for a confused walk along the steep cliffs, afraid of what might befall Gloria back at the villa. But at lunch Uncle Theo made a speech about family, obedience and trust. After the blessing, he thanked God for sending him a wife and nephew in whom these Christian virtues blossomed. The Sisters den Otter chimed their brandy glasses with their apostle-spoons and said, “Hear hear!” Uncle Theo gave me a pouch of Guineas and invited me to go and enjoy all the pleasures the Tavern of the Two Seas could offer for two or three days…’
Below, a man leaves from a brothel’s side-door. He is me, Jacob thinks.
‘… but I’d rather have broken a bone than be separated from Gloria. I begged my donor leave to return his Guineas, asking only to keep the empty pouch to encourage me to fill it, and ten thousand more, with the fruits of my own acumen. All Cape Town’s tinsel and baubles, I claimed, were not worth an hour of my uncle’s company, and, time allowing, perhaps a game of chess? My uncle was silent, and I feared I’d over-sugared the tea, but then he declared that, whilst most young men were rascally popinjays who considered it their birthright to spend their fathers’ hard-won fortunes in dissipation, Heaven had sent him an exception for a nephew. He toasted the finest nephew in Christendom and, forgetting to conceal his clumsy test of marital fidelity, “a true little wife”. He enjoined Gloria to raise his future sons with my image in mind, and his true little wife said, “May they be in our nephew’s image, Husband.” Theo and I then played chess, and it taxed my ingenuity, de Zoet, to let the clod outmanoeuvre me.’
A bee hovers around Jacob’s face, and goes.
‘Gloria’s and my loyalties now proven, my uncle felt at liberty to enter Cape Town society himself. These pursuits took him out of the villa for most of the day, and sometimes he even slept down in the town. Me, he set to the task of copying paperwork in the library. “I’d invite you along,” he said, “but I want the Kaffirs hereabouts to know there’s a White man in the villa who can use a flintlock.” Gloria was left to her books, diary, the garden and the “improving stories” of the sisters: a spring that ran dry by three o’clock daily, when their lunchtime brandy plunged them into bottomless siestas…’
Van Cleef’s flagon rolls down the tiles, falls through the Wistaria frames, and smashes in the courtyard. ‘My uncle’s bridal suite lay down a windowless corridor from the library. Concentrating on correspondence, I’ll admit, was harder than usual that afternoon… The library clock, in my memory, is silent. Perhaps it is wound down. Orioles are singing like the choirs of Bedlam, and I hear the click of a key… that pregnant silence, when someone is waiting… and here she is in silhouette at the far end. She…’ Van Cleef rubs his sunburnt face ‘… I was afraid Aagje would find us, and she says, “Haven’t you noticed, Aagje’s in love with the eldest son of the next farm?” and it’s the most natural thing in the world to tell her I love her, and she kisses me, and she tells me she makes my uncle bearable by imagining he is me, and his is mine, and I ask, “What if there’s a child?” and she says Shush…’
Mud-brown dogs race up the mud-brown street.
‘Our unlucky number was four. The fourth time Gloria and I lay together, Uncle Theo’s horse threw him on his way down to Cape Town. He walked back to the villa so we didn’t hear the horse. One moment I was deep inside Gloria, as naked as silk. The next, I was still as naked as silk but lying amongst shards of the mirror my uncle had hurled me against. He told me he’d snap my neck and throw my carcass to the beasts. He told me to go to town, withdraw fifty guilders from his agent and make sure I was too ill to board the Enkhuizen when she sailed on to Batavia. Last, he swore that whatever I’d put inside that whore, his wife, he would be digging out with a spoon. To my shame – or not, I don’t know – I went away without saying goodbye to Gloria.’ Van Cleef rubs his beard. ‘Two weeks later I watched the Enkhuizen embark. Five weeks later I shipped on a maggoty brig, the Huis Marquette, whose pilot spoke with dead spirits and whose captain suspected even the ship’s dog of plotting mutiny. Well, you’ve crossed the Indian Ocean so I shan’t describe it: eternal, sinister, obsidian, mountainous, monotonous… After a seven-week crossing we weighed anchor in Batavia by the grace of God, with little thanks due to the pilot or the captain. I walked along the stinking canal, steeling myself for a thrashing from Father, a duel with Theo, lately arrived on the Enkhuizen, disinheritance. I saw no familiar faces and none saw me – ten years is a long time – and knocked on the shrunken door of my boyhood home. My old nurse, wrinkled, now, like a walnut, opened the door and screamed. I remember Mother hurrying through from the kitchen. She held a vase of orchids. Next thing I knew, the vase had turned into a thousand broken pieces, and Mother was slumped against the wall. I assumed that Uncle Theo had made a persona non grata of me… but then noticed that Mother was in mourning. I asked if my father was dead. She answered, “You are, Melchior: you drowned.” Then there was a sobbing embrace, and I learnt that the Enkhuizen had been wrecked on a reef just a mile from the Straits of Sunda, in a bright and savage sea, with all hands lost…’
‘I’m sorry, Chief,’ says Jacob.
‘The happiest ending is Aagje’s. She married that farmer’s boy and now owns three thousand head of cattle. Each time I’m in the Cape I mean to go and pay my compliments, but never do.’
Excited shouts ring out nearby. The two foreigners have been spotted by a gang of carpenters at work on a nearby building. ‘Gaijin-sama!’ calls one, with a grin wider than his face. He holds up a measuring-rule and offers a service that makes his colleagues howl with laughter. ‘I didn’t catch all of that,’ says van Cleef.
‘He volunteered to measure the length of your manhood, sir.’
‘Oh? Tell the rogue he’d need three of those rules.’
In the jaws of the bay Jacob sees a fluttering rectangle of red, white and blue.
No, thinks the head clerk. It’s a mirage… or a Chinese junk, or…
‘What’s wrong, de Zoet? You look like your breeches are beshatten.’
‘Sir – there’s a merchantman entering the bay or… a frigate?’
‘A frigate? Who’s sending a frigate? Whose flag is it, man?’
‘Ours, sir.’ Jacob grips the roof and blesses his far-sightedness. ‘It’s Dutch.’
The Second Day of the Ninth Month
Lord Abbot Enomoto of Kyôga Domain places a white stone on the board.
A way-station, sees Magistrate Shiroyama, between his northern flank…
Shadows of slender maples stripe the board of gold kaya wood.
… and his eastern groups… or else a diversionary attack? Both…
Shiroyama believed he was gaining control, but he was losing it.
Where is the hidden way, he wonders, to reverse my reverses?
‘Nobody can refute,’ comments Enomoto, ‘we live in straitened times.’
One may refute, thinks Shiroyama, that your times are straitened.
‘A minor daimyo of the Aso Plateau who sought my assistance -’
Yes, yes, thinks the Magistrate, your discretion is impeccable…
‘- observed that what grandfathers called “debt” is now called “credit”.’
‘Meaning,’ Shiroyama extends his north-south group with a black stone, ‘that debts no longer have to be repaid?’
With a polite smile, Enomoto removes his next stone from his rosewood bowl. ‘Repayments remain a tiresome necessity, alas, but the Aso noble’s case illustrates the point. Two years ago he borrowed a sizeable sum from Numa here,’ Numa, one of the Abbot’s pet money-lenders bows in his corner, ‘to drain a marsh: in the Seventh Month of this year, his smallholders harvested their first rice crop. So in an age when Edo’s stipends are tardy and dwindling, Numa’s client has well-fed, grateful peasants fattening his storehouses. His account with Numa shall be settled in full… when?’
Numa bows again. ‘A full two years early, Your Grace.’
‘That same daimyo’s lofty neighbour, who swore never to owe a grain of rice to anyone, despatches ever-more frantic begging letters to the Council of Elders…’ Enomoto places an island stone between his two eastern groups ‘… whose servants use them for kindling. Credit is the seed of wealth. The finest minds of Europe study credit and money within a discipline they call,’ Enomoto uses a foreign phrase, ‘ “Political Economy”.’
This merely confirms, thinks Shiroyama, my view of Europeans.
‘A young friend at the Academy was translating a remarkable text, The Wealth of Nations. His death was a tragedy for us scholars, but also, I believe, for Japan.’
‘Ogawa Uzaemon?’ Shiroyama remembers. ‘A distressing affair.’
‘Had he but told me he was using the Ariake Road, I would have provided an escort through my domain. But on a pilgrimage for his ailing father, the modest young man wanted to eschew comfort…’ Enomoto runs a thumbnail to and fro along his lifeline. The Magistrate has been told the story by several sources, but does not interrupt. ‘My men rounded up the bandits responsible. I beheaded the one who confessed, and hung the others by iron spikes through the feet until wolves and crows had done their work. Then,’ he sighs, ‘Ogawa the Elder died, before an heir was chosen.’
‘The death of a family line,’ Shiroyama concurs, ‘is a terrible thing.’
‘A cousin from a lesser branch is rebuilding the house – I made a donation – but he’s a common cutler, and the Ogawa name is gone from Dejima forever.’
Shiroyama has nothing to add, but to change the subject is disrespectful.
Doors are slid open to reveal a veranda. Bright clouds bloom to the south.
Over the hilly headland, smoke uncoils from a burning field.
One is here and one is gone, thinks Shiroyama. Platitudes are profundities.
The game of Go reasserts itself. Starched silk sleeves rustle. ‘It is customary,’ observes Enomoto, ‘to flatter a magistrate’s skill at Go, but truly you are the best player I have met these last five years. I detect the influence of the Honinbo School.’
‘My father’ – the Magistrate sees the old man’s ghost scowling at Enomoto’s money-lender – ‘reached the Second Ryu of the Honinbo. I am an unworthy disciple…’ Shiroyama attacks an isolated stone of Enomoto’s ‘… when time permits.’ He lifts the teapot, but it is empty. He claps, once, and Chamberlain Tomine appears in person. ‘Tea,’ says the Magistrate. Tomine turns around and claps for another servant, who glides to the table, retrieves the tray in perfect silence and vanishes, with a bow in the doorway. The Magistrate imagines the tray descending the ladder of servitude to the toothless crone in the furthest kitchen who warms the water to the perfect heat before pouring it over perfect leaves.
Chamberlain Tomine has gone nowhere: this is his mild protest.
‘So, Tomine: the place is infested with landowners in boundary disputes, petty officials needing positions for errant nephews, bruised wives begging for divorces, all of whom assail you with offers of coins and daughters, chorusing and imploring, “Please, Chamberlain-sama, speak with the Magistrate on my behalf.” ’
Tomine makes an awkward mmf noise in his crushed nose.
A magistrate is the slave, Shiroyama thinks, of that many-headed wanting…
‘Watch the goldfish,’ he tells Tomine. ‘Fetch me in a few minutes.’
The circumspect chamberlain withdraws to the Courtyard.
‘Our game is unfair,’ says Enomoto. ‘You are distracted by duty.’
A jade-and-ash dragonfly lands on the edge of the board.
‘High office,’ replies the Magistrate, ‘is distractions, of all sizes.’ He has heard that the Abbot can remove the ki of insects and small creatures through the palm of his hand, and he half hopes for a demonstration, but the dragonfly is already gone. ‘Lord Enomoto, too, has a domain to govern, a Shrine to maintain, scholarly interests and…’ to accuse him of commercial interests would be an insult ‘… other matters.’
‘My days, to be certain, are never idle,’ Enomoto places a stone in the heart of the board, ‘but Mount Shiranui rejuvenates me.’
An autumn breeze drags its invisible robes around the fine room.
I am powerful enough, the casual reference reminds the Magistrate, to oblige the Aibagawa girl, a favourite of yours, to take vows in my Shrine, and you could not intercede.
Shiroyama tries to concentrate on the game’s present and future.
Once, Shiroyama’s father taught him, nobility and samurai ruled Japan…
The kneeling servant parts the doors, bows, and brings in the tray.
… but now it is Deception, Greed, Corruption and Lust who govern.
The servant brings two new cups and a teapot.
‘Lord Abbot,’ says Shiroyama, ‘would you care for some tea?’
‘You shan’t be insulted,’ he states, ‘by my preference for my own drink.’
‘Your…’ what is the tactful word? ‘… your reticence no longer surprises.’
Enomoto’s indigo-clad aspirant is already there. The shaven-headed youth uncorks a gourd and leaves it with his master.
‘Has your host ever…’ Once again, the Magistrate hunts for the right words.
‘Been angered by an implicit accusation that he meant to poison me? Yes, upon occasion. But then I pacify him with the story of how an enemy’s servant – a woman – obtained a post at the residence of a famous Miyako family. She worked there as a trusted maid for two years until my next visit. She embellished my meal with a few grains of an odourless poison. Had my Order’s doctor, Master Suzaku, not been on hand to administer an antidote, I would have died, and my friend’s family would have been disgraced.’
‘You have some unscrupulous enemies, Lord Abbot.’
He lifts the neck of the gourd to his mouth, tilts his head and drinks. ‘Enemies flock to power,’ he wipes his lips, ‘like wasps to split figs.’
Shiroyama threatens Enomoto’s isolated stone by placing it in atari.
An earth tremor animates the stones; they blur and buzz…
… but are not dislocated, and the tremor passes.
‘Pardon my vulgarity,’ says Enomoto, ‘for referring to the business of Numa once again, but that I keep a Shogun’s magistrate from his duties troubles my conscience. How much credit would it be helpful for Numa to supply in the first instance?’
Shiroyama feels acid in his stomach. ‘Perhaps… twenty?’
‘Twenty thousand ryo? Certainly.’ Enomoto does not blink. ‘Half can be in your Nagasaki storehouse in two nights, and half delivered to your Edo residence by the end of the Tenth Month. Would these times be satisfactory?’
Shiroyama hides his gaze in the board. ‘Yes.’ He forces himself to add, ‘There is a question of guarantees.’
‘An unnecessary slur,’ avows Enomoto, ‘on so illustrious a name…’
My illustrious name, thinks its owner, brings me only costly obligations.
‘When the next Dutch ship arrives, money will flow uphill from Dejima through Nagasaki once again, with the largest tributary passing through the Magistracy’s Exchequer. I am honoured to guarantee the loan personally.’
Mention of my Edo residence, Shiroyama thinks, is a faint threat.
‘Interest, Your Honour,’ Numa bows again, ‘would amount to one quarter of the total sum paid annually over three years.’
Shiroyama is unable to look at the money-lender. ‘Accepted.’
‘Excellent.’ The Lord Abbot sups from his gourd. ‘Our host is busy, Numa.’
The money-lender bows all the way to the door, bumps into it and is gone.
‘Forgive me…’ Enomoto fortifies his north-south wall with his next stone ‘… for bringing such a creature into your sanctuary, Magistrate. Papers must now be prepared for the loan, but these can be delivered to Your Honour tomorrow.’
‘There’s nothing to forgive, Lord Abbot. Your… assistance is… timely.’
An understatement, Shiroyama admits, and studies the board for inspiration. Retainers on half-pay; desertions imminent; daughters needing dowries; the roof of my Edo residence leaking and walls crumbling; and if my entourage at Edo slips below thirty, jokes about my poverty shall surely begin… and when the jokes reach the ears of my other creditors… His father’s ghost may hiss Shame! but his father inherited land to sell; nothing remained for Shiroyama but a costly rank and the position of Nagasaki Magistrate. Once, the trading port was a silver mine, but in recent years the trade has been haphazard. Graft and wages, meanwhile, must be paid regardless. If only, Shiroyama dreams, human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.
He wonders, Why hasn’t Tomine come back to haunt me?
Shiroyama senses a change in the Magistracy’s inner weather.
It is not quite audible… but it is audible: a low, low rumble of agitation.
Footsteps hurry down the corridor. There is a breathless exchange of whispers outside.
Jubilant, Chamberlain Tomine enters. ‘A ship is sighted, Your Honour!’
‘Ships are entering and leaving all the- The Dutch ship?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s flying the Dutch flag, clear as day.’
‘But…’ A ship arriving in the Ninth Month is unheard of. ‘Are you-’
The bells of every temple in Nagasaki begin to ring out in thanks.
‘Nagasaki,’ observes the Lord Abbot, ‘is in no doubt at all.’
Sugar, sandalwood, worsted, thinks Shiroyama, rayskins, lead, cotton…
The pot of commerce will bubble and the longest ladle is his.
Taxes on the Dutch, ‘gifts’ from the Chief, ‘patriotic’ exchange rates…
‘May I be the very first,’ asks Enomoto, ‘to offer my congratulations?’
How well you hide your disappointment that I slip through your net, Shiroyama thinks, breathing properly, it feels, for the first time in weeks. ‘Thank you, Lord Abbot.’
‘I shall, of course, tell Numa to darken your halls no longer.’
My temporary reverses, Shiroyama dares to believe, are reversed.
Ten o’clock sharp on the 18th October, 1800
‘I have the Dutch factory.’ Penhaligon sharpens the image in his telescope, estimating the distance at two English miles. ‘Warehouses, a look-out post, so we shall assume they know we are here… It is a poke-hole. Some twenty or thirty junks at anchor, the Chinese factory… fishing-boats… a few grand roofs… but where a fat, laden Dutch Indiaman ought to be anchored, gentlemen, I see a stretch of empty blue water. Tell me I am wrong, Mr Hovell.’
Hovell sweeps the bay with his own telescope. ‘Would that I could, sir.’
Major Cutlip whistles between his teeth in lieu of a filthy oath.
‘Mr Wren, do Clovelly’s famous eyes spy what ours do not?’
Wren’s question: ‘Do you find our Indiaman?’ is relayed up the foremast.
The answer descends to Wren, who repeats: ‘No Indiaman sighted, sir.’
Then there is no quick killing to be made at Holland’s expense. Penhaligon lowers his telescope as the bad news circulates from trestle trees to orlop deck in seconds. In the gun deck below a Liverpudlian bellows the bad news to a deaf comrade, ‘No effin’ ship is what’s what, Davy, an’ no effin’ ship equals no effin’ prize money an’ no effin’ prize money means we go home as piss-effin’-poor as we was when the effin’ Navy nabbed us!’
Daniel Snitker, under his wide-brimmed hat, needs no translation.
Wren is first to vent his anger at the Dutchman. ‘Are we too late? Did it sail?’
‘Our misfortune is his, too, Lieutenant,’ Penhaligon warns.
Snitker addresses Hovell in Dutch, whilst pointing towards the city. ‘He says, Captain,’ begins the First Lieutenant, ‘that if our approach was sighted yesterday evening, then the Dutch may be concealing their Indiaman in an inlet behind that high wooded hill with the pagoda atop, east of the river-mouth…’
Penhaligon senses the crew’s hopes revive a little.
Then he wonders whether the Phoebus is being lured into a trap.
Snitker’s yarn of a daring escape at Macao fooled Governor Cornwallis…
‘Shall we take her in further, sir?’ Wren asks. ‘Or cast off in the boat?’
Could such a small-minded lout truly execute such a complex plot?
Master Wetz calls from the wheel: ‘Am I to drop the anchors, Captain?’
Penhaligon lines up the questions. ‘Hold her steady for a minute, Mr Wetz. Mr Hovell, pray ask Mr Snitker why the Dutch would hide their ship from us despite our Dutch colours. Might there be a code signal we have failed to fly?’
Snitker sounds uncertain at first, but speaks with increasing confidence. Hovell nods. ‘He says, sir, that there was no code-signal arrangement when the Shenandoah departed last autumn, and he doubts there is one in place now. He says that Chief van Cleef may have hidden the vessel as a precautionary measure.’
Penhaligon glances at the sails to gauge the breeze. ‘The Phoebus could reach the inlet in a few minutes, but tacking our way out again would be much slower.’ Spinach-green waves slurp at cracks between kelp-matted rocks. ‘Lieutenant Hovell, ask Mr Snitker this: suppose no ship arrived from Batavia this year, due to shipwreck or the war, would the copper intended for her hold be stored on Dejima?’
Hovell translates the questions: Snitker’s ‘Ja, ja’ is firm enough.
‘And would that copper be Japanese property or Dutch?’
Snitker’s reply is less committal: the answer, Hovell translates, is that the transfer of ownership of the copper depends upon the Chief Resident’s negotiations, which vary year on year.
Deep bells begin ringing in the city and around the bay, and Snitker explains the noise to Hovell. ‘The bells are to thank the local gods for the safe arrival of the Dutch ship and the money it brings to Nagasaki. We may assume our disguise is working, sir.’
A cormorant dives from steep black rocks a hundred yards away.
‘Verify once again the procedure that a Dutch ship might observe at this point.’
Snitker’s reply is accompanied by gestures and pointed fingers.
‘A Dutch Company ship, sir,’ says Hovell, ‘would sail in another half-mile past the fortifications, which are saluted by a round from both bows. The longboat is then rowed out to meet the greeting party, consisting of two Company sampans. Then all three boats return to the ship for the customary formalities.’
‘Exactly when may we expect our greeting party to embark from Dejima?’
The answer, accompanied by a shrug, is ‘Perhaps a quarter-hour, sir.’
‘To be clear: the party is composed of Japanese and Dutch officials?’
Snitker answers in English: ‘Japanese and Dutch, ja.’
‘Ask how many swordsmen accompany the greeting party, Mr Hovell.’
The answer is involved, and the First Lieutenant must clarify a couple of points. ‘All the officials on the boat carry swords, but primarily to denote their rank. For the most part, they resemble a country squire at home who talks tough but wouldn’t know a sword from a darning needle.’
‘If you’d like us to bag you a few hostages, sir,’ Major Cutlip has no inhibitions, ‘we’d have those jabbering monkeys for a second breakfast.’
Curse Cornwallis, thinks the Captain, for encumbering me with this ass.
‘Dutch hostages,’ Hovell addresses him, ‘may strengthen our hand, but-’
‘One bloodied Japanese nose,’ agrees Penhaligon, ‘may dash any hopes of a treaty for years, yes, I know: Kaempfer’s book has impressed upon me the pride of this race, if nothing else. But I judge the risk worthwhile. Our disguise is a short-term expediency, and without better and less partial intelligence,’ he glances at Daniel Snitker, who is studying the city through his telescope, ‘about conditions ashore, we are blind men trying to outwit the sighted.’
‘And the possibility of a concealed Indiaman, sir?’ asks Lieutenant Wren.
‘If there is one, let it wait. She shan’t slip past us without our knowledge. Mr Talbot, bid the coxswain ready the longboat, but not to lower her yet.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘Mr Malouf,’ Penhaligon turns to a midshipman, ‘bid Mr Wetz take us in past those toy fortifications by a half-mile, but bid him take his time…’
‘Aye, sir: in by a half-mile, sir.’ Malouf hurries to Wetz at the wheel, leaping over a coil of crusty rope.
The sooner I can have the deck scrubbed, thinks the Captain, the better.
‘Mr Waldron.’ He turns to the bovine Master Gunner. ‘Our guns are ready?’
‘On both bows, Captain, aye: tampions out, charge in but no shot.’
‘Customarily, the Dutch salute the guard-posts as they pass those bluffs – see?’
‘That I do, sir. Shall I have the lads below do the same?’
‘Aye, Mr Waldron, and though I neither want nor desire action today…’
Waldron waits patiently whilst his captain chooses his words with care.
‘Keep your key to the shot-lockers to hand. Fortune favours the prepared.’
‘Aye, sir, we’ll be ready.’ Waldron goes below to the gun deck.
Aloft, the top-men shout to one another as a topgallant is lowered.
Wetz is firing off a volley of orders in all directions.
Canvas stiffens, the Phoebus moves forwards; her timbers and cordage creak.
A cormorant preens its gleaming feathers on the frigate’s dolphin-spiker.
The leadsman calls, ‘By the mark nine!’ The number is conveyed to Wetz.
Penhaligon studies the shore through his telescope, noting the lack of a castle keep or donjon in Nagasaki. ‘Mr Hovell, pray ask Mr Snitker this: were we to bring the Phoebus as close as we dared to Dejima, land forty men in two boats and occupy the factory, would the Japanese consider Dutch soil to be taken or their own?’
Snitker’s brief answer has a matter-of-fact tone. ‘He says he declines,’ translates Hovell, ‘to guess the mind of Japanese authority.’
‘Ask whether he’d be willing to join such a raid.’
Snitker’s interpreter translates his reply directly, ‘ “I am a diplomat and merchant, not a soldier”, sir.’ His reticence assuages Penhaligon’s fears that Snitker is hurrying them into an elaborate trap.
‘By the deep ten and a half!’ calls the leadsman.
The Phoebus is almost level with the guard-posts on either shore, upon which the Captain now trains his telescope. The walls are thin, the stockades low, and the cannons more dangerous to their gunmen than their targets.
‘Mr Malouf, pray ask Mr Waldron to give the order to fire our salute.’
‘Aye, sir: telling Mr Waldron the order to fire the salute.’ Malouf goes below.
Penhaligon has his first clear sightings of the Japanese. They are as short as Malays, facially indistinguishable from the Chinese, and their armour brings to mind Major Cutlip’s remarks about medieval jousters.
The guns fire through the ports, the noise ricocheting off the steep shores…
… and the acrid smoke blows over the crew, disinterring memories of battle.
‘By the mark nine,’ calls the leadsman, ‘and a half nine…’
‘Two boats embarking from the city,’ reports the watch in the trestle tree.
Through his telescope, Penhaligon finds blurry images of the two sampans.
‘Mr Cutlip, I want the marines to row the longboat, dressed in landsmen’s slops, with cutlasses hidden below the thwarts in sackcloth.’ The Major salutes and goes below. The Captain proceeds to the waist to address the coxswain, a cunning Scillies smuggler pressed from the shadow of the Penzance gallows. ‘Mr Flowers, lower the longboat but tangle the ropes, so as to buy time. I want the greeting party to meet our longboat closer to the Phoebus than to shore.’
‘A proper Frenchman’s fanny l’ll make of it, Captain.’
Walking back to the bow, Hovell asks permission to air a thought.
‘My esteem for your aired thoughts is why you are here, Mr Hovell.’
‘Thank you, sir. I posit that the Governor-General’s and the Admiralty’s twin orders regarding the present mission – to paraphrase, “Plunder the Dutch and seduce the Japanese” – do not correspond with the scenario we find here. If the Dutch have nothing to plunder and the Japanese prove loyal to their allies, how are we to carry out our orders? A third strategy, however, may yield a more fruitful result.’
‘Describe what you have in mind, Lieutenant.’
‘That the Dutch incumbents of Dejima be viewed not as a barrier to an Anglo-Japanese treaty but, rather, as its key. How? In short, sir, instead of smashing the Dutch engine of trade in Nagasaki, we help them repair it, and then requisition it.’
‘By the mark ten,’ calls out the leadsman, ‘ten and a third…’
‘The Lieutenant,’ Wren heard everything, ‘has not forgotten that we and the Dutch are at war? Why would they co-operate with their national enemy? If you’re still placing your hopes in that scrap of paper from the Dutch King Billy at Kew-’
‘Might the Second Lieutenant be good enough to let the First Lieutenant speak, Mr Wren?’
Wren performs an ironic bow of apology and Penhaligon wants to kick him…
… but for your father-in-law admiral and the damage it would cause my gout.
‘The Netherlanders’ sliver of a republic,’ continues Hovell, ‘didn’t defy the might of Bourbon Spain without a genius for pragmatism. Ten per cent of profits – let us call it the “brokerage fee” – is a sight better than a hundred per cent of nothing. Less than nothing: if no ship arrived from Java this year, then they are ignorant of the Dutch East Indies Company’s bankruptcy…’
‘… and the loss,’ realises the Captain, ‘of their accumulated wages and Private Trade channelled through the Company’s books. Poor Jan, Piet and Klaas are paupers, stranded amongst heathens.’
‘With no means,’ adds Hovell, ‘of seeing home or loved ones again.’
The Captain gazes at the city. ‘Once we have the Dutch officers aboard, we can reveal their orphaned status and present ourselves not as aggressors but godfathers. We can send one ashore both to convert his countrymen and act as an emissary to the Japanese authorities, explaining that future “Dutch sailings” shall come from Prince of Wales Island in Penang rather than Batavia.’
‘To seize the Dutch copper as prize would kill the golden goose of trade. But to trade the silks and sugar in our hold and leave with half as a legal cargo would allow us to return each year – to the ongoing enrichment of Company and Empire.’
How Hovell reminds me, Penhaligon thinks, of my younger, stronger self.
‘The men,’ Wren says, ‘would cry havoc at losing their prize money.’
‘The Phoebus,’ says the Captain, ‘is His Majesty’s Frigate, not their privateer.’ He returns to the coxswain, the pain in his foot now difficult to conceal. ‘Mr Flowers, pray untangle your French fanny. Mr Malouf, ask Major Cutlip to start loading his marines. Lieutenant Hovell, we rely on your skill in the Dutch language to charm a pair of plump Dutch herrings into the longboat without catching a native fish…’
The Phoebus’s anchor is lowered five hundred yards past the guard-posts; the longboat, rowed by marines in sailors’ slops, makes leisurely progress towards the greeting party. Coxswain Flowers has the tiller, and Hovell and Cutlip sit at the prow.
‘This Nagasaki,’ notes Wren, ‘is an anchorage the equal of Port Mahon…’
In clear water a shoal of silver fish changes direction.
‘… and four or five modern placements would make it quite impregnable.’
Long and curving rice paddies stripe the low and laddered mountains.
‘Wasted on a backward race,’ laments Wren, ‘too idle to build a navy.’
Black smoke rises from the hunchbacked headland. Penhaligon tries to ask Daniel Snitker if the smoke could be a signal, but Snitker fails to make his answer comprehensible so the Captain sends for Smeyers, a carpenter’s mate who speaks Dutch.
The forests of pines might yield masts and spars.
‘The bay presents a beautiful prospect,’ ventures Lieutenant Talbot.
The womanly adjective irritates Penhaligon, and he wonders at the wisdom of Talbot’s appointment, necessitated by the death of Sam Smythe at Penang. Then he recalls the loneliness of his own Third Lieutenancy, caught between the resentment of a frosty captain’s cabin and his former comrades in the midshipmen’s cockpit. ‘A fair sight, yes, Mr Talbot.’
A man in the heads, a few feet down and a few feet forwards, groans wantonly.
‘The Japanese, I read,’ says Talbot, ‘give florid names to their kingdom…’
The unseen sailor issues an almighty orgasmic bellow of relief…
‘… “The Land of a Thousand Autumns” or “The Root of the Sun”.’
… and a turd hits the water like a cannonball. Wetz rings three bells.
‘Upon glimpsing Japan,’ says Talbot, ‘such poetic names sound precise.’
‘What I see,’ says Wren, ‘is a sheltered harbour for an entire squadron.’
Never mind a squadron, the Captain thinks, this bay would shelter a fleet.
His heart quickens as the vision grows. A British Pacific fleet.
The Captain imagines a floating city of British men-of-war and frigates…
Penhaligon pictures his chart of North East Asia, with a British base in Japan…
China herself, he dares to think, could follow India into our sphere…
Midshipman Malouf returns with Smeyers.
… and the Philippines, too, would be ours for the taking.
‘Mr Smeyers, be so good as to ask Mr Snitker about that smoke -’
The toothless Amsterdammer squints at the smoke from the galley stove.
‘- that black smoke, there, above that hunchbacked headland.’
‘Aye, sir.’ Smeyers points as he translates. Snitker’s reply is unworried.
‘No bad, he says,’ translates Smeyers. ‘Farmers burn fields every autumn.’
Penhaligon nods. ‘Thank you. Stay nearby, in case I need you.’
He notices that the flag – the Dutch tricolour – is tangled around the jib-boom.
He looks for someone to right it and sees a half-caste boy with a wiry pigtail picking oakum under the steam grating. ‘Hartlepool!’
The youth puts down his rope and comes over. ‘Yessir.’
Hartlepool’s face speaks of fatherlessness, name-calling and resilience.
‘Pray disentangle that flag for me, Hartlepool.’
‘Sir.’ The barefoot boy slips over the mainrail, balances on the bowsprit…
How many years, wonders Penhaligon, since I was so nimble?
… and darts up the round timber angled at nearly forty-five degrees.
The bereaved Captain’s thumb finds Tristram’s crucifix.
At the spritsail yard, forty yards out and thirty yards up, Hartlepool stops. Gripping the boom between his thighs, he untangles the flag.
‘Can he swim, I wonder?’ Lieutenant Talbot asks himself aloud.
‘I’d not know,’ says Midshipman Malouf, ‘but one doubts it…’
Hartlepool makes the return trip with the same lithe grace.
‘If his mother was a Blackamoor,’ comments Wren, ‘his father was a cat.’
When Hartlepool jumps on to the deck in front of him, the Captain gives him a new farthing. ‘Ably done, boy.’ Hartlepool’s eyes widen at the unexpected generosity. He thanks Penhaligon and returns to his oakum-picking.
A look-out shouts: ‘Greeting party nearly at the longboat!’
Through his telescope, Penhaligon sees the two sampans approaching the longboat. The foremost carries three Japanese officials, two in grey and a younger colleague in black. Three servants sit at the back. The rearmost sampan conveys the two Dutchmen. Their features lack much detail at this range, but Penhaligon can make out that one is tanned, bearded and rotund, the other is stick-like and pale as chalk.
Penhaligon hands the telescope to Snitker who reports to Smeyers. ‘Grey-coats is officials, he says, Captain. Black-coat is translator. The big Dutchman is Melchior van Cleef, Chief of Dejima. The thin one is a Prussian. His name is Fischer. Fischer is second in command.’
Van Cleef cups his hands to his mouth and hails Hovell, a hundred yards off.
Snitker keeps talking. Smeyers says, ‘Van Cleef is human rat, he says, sir, a true… a damned coat-turn? And Fischer is a sneak, a liar, a cheat whoreson, he says, sir, with big ambition. I don’t think Mr Snitker like them, sir.’
‘But both men,’ opines Wren, ‘sound amenable to our proposal. The last thing we need are incorruptible men-of-principle types.’
Penhaligon takes his telescope from Snitker. ‘Not many of them hereabouts.’
Cutlip’s marines stop rowing. The longboat glides to a dead stop.
The boat of the three Japanese officials touches the longboat’s prow.
‘Don’t let any of them board,’ murmurs Penhaligon, to his first lieutenant.
The prows of the two boats nudge one another. Hovell salutes and bows.
The inspectors bow and salute. Via the interpreter, introductions are made.
One inspector and the interpreter now half stand, as if preparing to transfer.
Delay them, Penhaligon urges Hovell, silently, delay them…
Hovell is bent over with a coughing fit; he presents one hand in apology.
The second sampan arrives, pulling up to the longboat’s port-side.
‘A disadvantageous position,’ mutters Wren, ‘wedged in from both sides.’
Hovell recovers from his cough; he doffs his hat at van Cleef.
Van Cleef stands, and leans over the prow to take Hovell’s hand.
The spurned inspector and interpreter, meanwhile, half sit back down.
Deputy Fischer now stands, clumsily, and the boat rocks.
Hovell swings the large van Cleef over on to the longboat.
‘One in the bag, Mr Hovell,’ mutters the Captain. ‘Deftly done.’
Faintly comes the rumble of Chief van Cleef’s thunderous laughter.
Deputy Fischer takes a step towards the longboat, wobbly as a foal…
… but to Penhaligon’s dismay, the interpreter now grips the longboat’s lip.
The nearest marine calls to Major Cutlip. Cutlip grapples his way over…
‘Not yet,’ mumbles the Captain, impotently, ‘don’t let him aboard.’
Lieutenant Hovell, meanwhile, is beckoning the Deputy over.
Cutlip grips the hand of the unwanted interpreter…
Wait wait wait, the Captain wants to yell, wait for our second Dutchman!
… and Cutlip lets the interpreter go, waving his hand as if it is brutally mangled.
Now, at long last, Hovell has hold of the unsteady Deputy’s hand.
Penhaligon mumbles, ‘Land the man, Hovell, for Christ’s sake!’
The interpreter decides not to wait for further assistance, and plants one foot on the longboat’s port bulwark just as Hovell swings the Prussian Deputy over the starboard…
… and half of the marines take up their cutlasses, some flashing in sunlight.
The other marines take up their oars and push the sampans away.
The black-coated interpreter flops, like a Pierrot, into the water.
The Phoebus’s longboat lunges back towards the ship.
Chief van Cleef, realising that he is being abducted, attacks Lieutenant Hovell.
Major Cutlip intercepts and falls on top of him. The boat rocks dangerously.
Let it not capsize, dear God, prays Penhaligon, let it not capsize now…
Van Cleef is subdued and the longboat settles. The Prussian is sitting meekly.
Back at the sampans, already three lengths away, the first Japanese to act is an oarsman, who leaps into the water to save the interpreter. The grey-coated inspectors sit and stare in shock at the foreigners’ longboat, as it retreats to the Phoebus.
Penhaligon lowers his telescope. ‘The first engagement is won. Strike that Dutch rag, Mr Wren, and fly the Union Jack, topmast and prow.’
‘Yes, sir, with the greatest of pleasure.’
‘Mr Talbot, have your landsmen rinse the filth from my decks.’
The Dutchman van Cleef seizes the rope-ladder and clambers up it with an agility belying his bulk. Penhaligon glances up at the quarterdeck, where Snitker remains out of sight, for now, under his floppy-brimmed hat. Batting away proffered hands, van Cleef leaps on to the Phoebus like a Moorish boarder, glares along the line of officers, singles out Penhaligon, points a finger so wrathfully that a pair of marines take a step closer in case of attack, and declares, through his curly, close-cropped beard and tea-brown teeth, ‘Kapitein!’
‘Welcome aboard His Majesty’s Frigate Phoebus, Mr van Cleef. I am-’
The irate Chief’s molten invective needs no translation.
‘I am Captain John Penhaligon,’ he says, when van Cleef next draws breath, ‘and this is my second officer, Lieutenant Wren. First Lieutenant Hovell and Major Cutlip’ – they arrive on deck now – ‘you have already met.’
Chief van Cleef takes a step towards the Captain and spits at his feet.
An oyster of phlegm shines on his second-best Jermyn Street shoe.
‘That’s Dutch officers for you,’ declares Wren. ‘Bereft of breeding.’
Penhaligon hands his handkerchief to Malouf. ‘For the ship’s honour…’
‘Aye, sir.’ The Midshipman kneels by the Captain and wipes the shoe.
The firm pressure makes his gouty foot glow with pain. ‘Lieutenant Hovell. Inform Chief van Cleef that whilst he behaves like a gentleman, our hospitality shall be accordingly civil, but should he comport himself like an Irish navvy, then that is how he shall be treated.’
‘Taming Irish navvies,’ boasts Cutlip, as Hovell translates the warning, ‘is a labour I am fond of, sir.’
‘Let us appeal to reason in the first instance, Major.’
A high bell is being rung: Penhaligon assumes it is an alarm.
Without looking at van Cleef, he now extends his greeting to the lesser second hostage. ‘Welcome aboard His Majesty’s Frigate Phoebus, Deputy Fischer.’
Chief van Cleef forbids his deputy to speak.
Penhaligon orders Hovell to ask Fischer about this season’s Indiaman.
Chief van Cleef claps twice to earn the Captain’s attention, and issues a statement that Hovell translates as, ‘I’m afraid he said, “I hid it up my arse, you English Nancy”, sir.’
‘A man once spoke to me so in Sydney Cove,’ recalls Cutlip, ‘so I searched said hidey-hole with a bayonet and he never came cocky with an officer again.’
‘Tell our guests this, Mr Hovell,’ Penhaligon says. ‘Tell them we know a vessel sailed from Batavia, because I heard from the harbourmaster of Macao that she weighed anchor in that port on the twenty-eighth of May.’
Hearing this, van Cleef’s anger cools and Fischer looks grave. They consult with one another, and Hovell eavesdrops. ‘The Chief is saying, “Unless this is English sneakery, another ship is lost…” ’
A bird in the woods along the shore sounds very like a cuckoo.
‘Warn them, Lieutenant, that we shall be searching the bay, and that if we discover their Indiaman in any of the coves they shall both be hanged.’
Hovell translates the threat. Fischer rubs his head. Van Cleef spits. The saliva misses the Captain’s foot, but Penhaligon cannot have his authority eroded in front of the onlooking crew. ‘Major Cutlip, accommodate Chief van Cleef in the aft rope store: no lamp, no refreshments. Deputy Fischer meanwhile’ – the Prussian blinks like a frightened hen – ‘may rest awhile in my cabin. Have two of my best men watch him, and tell Chigwin to bring him a half-bottle of claret.’
Before Cutlip can carry out the order, van Cleef asks Hovell a question.
Penhaligon is curious about the Dutchman’s altered tone. ‘What was that?’
‘He wanted to know how we know his and his deputy’s names, sir.’
It shall profit us, thinks Penhaligon, to establish that they cannot bluff us.
‘Mr Talbot, pray ask our informant to come and greet his old friends.’
His revenge complete, Daniel Snitker strides up and removes his hat.
Drop-jawed and wide-eyed, van Cleef and Fischer stare.
Snitker regales the pair with a long-planned speech.
‘Some blood-chilling language he’s issuing, sir,’ mutters Hovell.
‘Well, this dish is best served cold, as Milton says.’
Hovell opens his mouth, closes it again, listens, and translates: ‘The gist is, “You thought I’d be rotting in a Batavia gaol, didn’t you?” ’
Daniel Snitker parades up to Fischer and pokes his throat.
‘He’s telling them he’s “Captain-in-Chief” of Dejima’s “Restoration”.’
When Snitker leers into the bearded face of Melchior van Cleef, Penhaligon expects the Chief to spit, or hit out, or curse. He certainly does not expect the smile of pleasure that overspills into genuine, generous laughter. Snitker is as surprised as the English spectators. Jubilantly, van Cleef clasps the shoulders of his one-time superior. Cutlip and the marines step forward to intervene, expecting mischief, but van Cleef speaks, incredulous, delighted and shaking his head. Hovell reports, ‘Sir, he’s saying that Chief Snitker’s appearance is proof that God is just and God is good; that the men ashore want nothing more than to have their old chief back where he belongs… that “Vorstenbosch the viper and his toad Jacob de Zoet” perpetrated a gross travesty…’
Van Cleef turns to Deputy Fischer and appears to demand, ‘Isn’t that so?’
Dazed, Deputy Fischer nods and blinks. Van Cleef continues. Hovell follows the next part with difficulty: ‘There’s a lad ashore, it seems, named Oost, who misses Snitker like a son misses a father…’
Snitker, at first caught between disbelief and wonder, now begins to soften.
With his giant’s hands, van Cleef indicates Penhaligon.
‘He’s saying encouraging things for our mission, sir. He’s saying… that if a man of Mr Snitker’s integrity finds common cause with this gentleman – he means you, sir – then he’ll gladly clean your shoes himself to apologise for his rudeness.’
‘Can this about-face be genuine, Lieutenant?’
‘I…’ Hovell looks on as van Cleef enfolds Snitker in a laughing bear-hug and says something to Penhaligon. ‘He’s thanking you, sir, from the bottom of his heart… for restoring a beloved comrade… and hopes that the Phoebus may herald the restoration of Anglo-Dutch accord.’
‘Minor miracles,’ Penhaligon looks on, ‘do occur. Ask whether-’
Van Cleef drives a fist into Snitker’s belly.
Snitker bends over like a folded jack-knife.
Van Cleef seizes his choking victim and flings him over the side.
There is no yell, just an almighty boom of falling body on water.
‘Man overboard!’ Wren shouts. ‘Move, then, you lazy dogs! Fish him out!’
‘Get him out my sight, Major,’ Penhaligon snarls at Cutlip.
As van Cleef is led to the companionway he fires back a statement.
‘He expressed surprise, Captain,’ Hovell translates, ‘that a British captain allows dog-shit on his quarterdeck.’
A quarter past ten o’clock on the morning of 18th October, 1800
When the Union Jack appears on the frigate’s jack-staff, Jacob de Zoet knows, The war is here. The transactions between the longboat and the greeting party puzzled him, but now the strange behaviour is explained. Chief van Cleef and Peter Fischer have been kidnapped. Below the Watchtower, Dejima is still in sweet ignorance of the turbulent events being played out across the placid water. A gang of merchants enters Arie Grote’s house and cheerful guards are opening up the long-shuttered Customs House at the Sea-Gate. Jacob looks through his telescope one last time. The greeting party is rowing back to Nagasaki as if their lives depend on it. We must steal this march, Jacob realises, on the Magistracy. He clatters down the zigzag wooden steps, dashes down the alley to Long Street, unties the rope of the fire bell and rings it with all his strength.
Around the oval table in the State Room sit Dejima’s remaining eight Europeans: the officers, Jacob de Zoet, Ponke Ouwehand, Dr Marinus and Con Twomey; and the hands, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Wybo Gerritszoon and young Ivo Oost. Eelattu is seated beneath the engraving of the Brothers de Witt. In the last quarter-hour the men have passed from celebration through disbelief to bafflement and gloom. ‘Until we can secure the release of Chief van Cleef and Deputy Fischer,’ Jacob says, ‘I mean to assume command of Dejima. This self-appointment is most irregular, and I shall record objections in the factory’s Day Journal without resentment. But our hosts will want to deal with one officer, not all eight of us, and my rank is now the highest.’
‘Ibant qui poterant,’ pronounces Marinus, ‘qui non potuere cadebant.’
‘Acting-Chief de Zoet,’ Grote clears his throat, ‘has a pleasin’ ’nough ring.’
‘Thank you, Mr Grote. And the ring of “Acting-Deputy Ouwehand”?’
Glances and nods from around the table confirm the appointment.
‘It’s the oddest promotion of my life,’ says Ouwehand, ‘but I accept.’
‘We must pray that these posts are temporary, but for now, before the Magistrate’s inspectors come pounding up those stairs, I wish to establish one guiding principle: namely, that we resist the occupation of Dejima.’
The Europeans nod, some defiantly, others more conditionally.
‘Is it for to seize the factory,’ Ivo Oost asks, ‘they’ve come here?’
‘We can only speculate, Mr Oost. Perhaps they expected a merchantman full of copper. Perhaps they aim to ransack our warehouses. Perhaps they want a fat ransom for their hostages. We suffer from a shortage of hard facts.’
‘It’s our shortage of arms,’ says Arie Grote, ‘what worries me. To say “resist the occupation o’ Dejima” is well an’ good, but how? My kitchen knives? The doctor’s lancets? What’s our weapons?’
Jacob looks at the cook. ‘Dutch guile.’
Con Twomey raises his hand in objection.
‘I beg your pardon. Dutch and Irish guile – and preparedness. And so, Mr Twomey, please ensure the fire-engines are working properly. Mr Ouwehand, please draw up an hourly roster for the Watchtower during the-’
Urgent footsteps can be heard on the main stairs.
Interpreter Kobayashi enters the State Room and glares at the assembly.
A corpulent inspector stands behind him in the doorway.
‘Magistrate Shiroyama sends inspector,’ says Kobayashi, unsure who to address, ‘on business of serious thing… happen in bay: Magistrate must discuss this thing, no delay. Magistrate sends to higher-ranking foreigner, now.’ The interpreter swallows. ‘So inspector need know, who is higher-ranking foreigner?’
Six Dutchmen and one Irishman look in Jacob’s direction.
Tea is cool lush green in a smooth pale bowl. Interpreters Kobayashi and Yonekizu, Acting-Chief Resident Jacob de Zoet’s escorts to the Magistracy this morning, left him in the vestibule to be watched by a pair of officials. Not realising that the Dutchman can understand, the officials speculate that the foreigner’s eyes are green because his pregnant mother ate too many vegetables. The dignified atmosphere Jacob remembers from last year’s visit to the Magistracy with Vorstenbosch is overturned by the morning’s events: soldiers shout from the barracks wing; blades are being sharpened on fly-wheels; and servants hurry by, whispering about what might happen. Interpreter Yonekizu appears. ‘Magistrate is ready, Mr de Zoet.’
‘As am I, Mr Yonekizu, but has any fresh news arrived?’
The interpreter shakes his head ambiguously, and leads de Zoet into the Hall of Sixty Mats. A council of around thirty advisers sits in a horseshoe shape, two or three rows deep, around Magistrate Shiroyama, who occupies a one-mat-high dais. Jacob is ushered into the centre. Chamberlain Kôda, Inspector Suruga and Iwase Banri – the three sent to accompany van Cleef and Fischer to the Dutch ship – kneel in a row to one side. All three look pale and worried.
A sergeant-at-arms announces, ‘Dejima no Dazûto-sama.’ Jacob bows.
Shiroyama says, in Japanese, ‘Thank you for attending us so quickly.’
Jacob meets the clear eyes of the grim man and bows once more.
‘I am told,’ says the Magistrate, ‘that you now understand some Japanese.’
To acknowledge the remark would advertise his clandestine studies, and may forfeit a tactical advantage. But to pretend not to understand, Jacob thinks, would be deceitful. ‘Somehow I understand a little of the Magistrate’s mother tongue, yes.’
The horseshoe of advisers murmurs in surprise at hearing a foreigner speak.
‘Moreover,’ the Magistrate continues, ‘I am told you are an honest man.’
Jacob receives the compliment with a noncommittal bow.
‘I enjoyed dealings,’ says a voice that chills Jacob’s neck, ‘with the Acting-Chief Resident during last year’s trading season…’
Jacob does not want to look at Enomoto, but his eyes are drawn.
‘… and believe that no better leader could be found on Dejima.’
Gaoler, Jacob swallows as he bows, murderer, liar, madman…
Enomoto tilts his head in apparent amusement.
‘The opinion of the Lord of Kyôga carries much weight,’ says Magistrate Shiroyama. ‘And we make a solemn oath to Acting-Chief de Zoet: your countrymen shall be saved from your enemies…’
This unconditional support surpasses Jacob’s hopes. ‘Thank you, Your-’
‘… or the chamberlain, inspector and interpreter shall die in the attempt.’ Shiroyama looks at the three disgraced men. ‘Men of honour,’ the Magistrate states, ‘do not permit their charges to be stolen. To make amends, they shall be rowed to the intruders’ ship. Iwase will win permission for the three men to board and pay a’ – Shiroyama’s next word must mean ‘ransom’ – ‘to release the two…’ the word must be ‘hostages’. ‘Once aboard, they will cut the English Captain down with concealed knives. This is not the Way of the Bushidô, but these pirates deserve to die like dogs.’
‘But Kôda-sama, Suruga-sama and Iwase-sama shall be killed, and-’
‘Death shall cleanse them of -’ The next word may be ‘cowardice’.
How shall the de facto suicides of these three men, Jacob groans inwardly, resolve anything? He turns to Yonekizu and asks, ‘Please tell His Honour that the English are a vicious race. Inform him that they would kill not only Your Honour’s three servants, but also Chief van Cleef and Deputy Fischer.’
The Hall of Sixty Mats hears this in gravid silence, suggesting that the Magistrate’s advisers raised this objection, or else were too afraid to.
Shiroyama looks displeased. ‘What action would the Acting-Chief propose?’
Jacob feels like a distrusted defendant. ‘The best action, for now, is no action.’
There is some surprise; an adviser leans towards Shiroyama’s ear…
Jacob needs Yonekizu again: ‘Tell the Magistrate that the English Captain is testing us. He is waiting to see whether the Japanese or the Dutch respond, and whether we use force or diplomacy.’ Yonekizu frowns at the last word. ‘Words, parleying, negotiation. But by not acting, we will make the English impatient. Their impatience will cause them to reveal their intentions.’
The Magistrate listens, nods slowly, and orders Jacob: ‘Guess their intentions.’
Jacob obeys his instinct to answer truthfully. ‘First,’ he begins in Japanese, ‘they came to take the Batavia ship and its cargo of copper. Because they found no ship, they took hostages. They…’ he hopes this makes sense ‘… they want to harvest knowledge.’
Shiroyama’s fingers entwine. ‘Knowledge about Dutch forces on Dejima?’
‘No, Your Honour: knowledge about Japan and its empire.’
The ranks of advisers mutter. Enomoto stares. Jacob sees a skull wrapped in skin.
‘All men of honour,’ the Magistrate raises his fan, ‘prefer death by torture over giving information to an enemy.’ All present, Chamberlain Kôda, Inspector Suruga and Interpreter Iwase excepted, nod with indignant agreement.
None of you, Jacob thinks, has been within fifteen decades of a real war.
‘But why,’ Shiroyama asks, ‘are the English hungry to learn about Japan?’
I am taking a thing apart, Jacob fears, which I cannot put back together.
‘The English may wish to trade in Nagasaki again, Your Honour.’
My move is made, the Acting-Chief thinks, and I cannot take it back.
‘Why you use the word,’ asks the Magistrate, ‘ “again”?’
Lord Abbot Enomoto clears his throat. ‘Acting-Chief de Zoet’s statement is accurate, Your Honour. Englishmen traded in Nagasaki long ago, during the time of the First Shogun, when silver was exported. One doesn’t doubt that the memory of those profits lingers in their land, to this day… though naturally, the Acting-Chief would know more about this than I do.’
Against his will, Jacob imagines Enomoto pinning Orito down.
Wilfully, Jacob imagines bludgeoning Enomoto to death.
‘How does kidnapping our allies,’ Shiroyama asks, ‘win our trust?’
Jacob turns to Yonekizu. ‘Tell His Honour the English don’t want your trust. The English want fear and obedience. They build their empire by sailing into foreign harbours, firing cannons and buying local magistrates. They expect His Honour to behave like a corrupt Chinaman or a Negro king, happy to trade the well-being of your own people for an English-style house and a bagful of glass beads.’
As Yonekizu translates, the Hall of Sixty Mats crackles with anger.
Belatedly, Jacob notices a pair of scribes in the corner recording every word.
The Shogun himself, he thinks, will be poring over your words in ten days.
A chamberlain approaches the Magistrate from one side with a message.
The announcement, in Japanese too formal for Jacob to understand, seems to heighten the tension. To save Shiroyama the trouble of dismissing him, Jacob turns again to Yonekizu: ‘Give my government’s thanks to the Magistrate for his support, and beg his permission for me to return to Dejima and oversee preparations.’
Yonekizu provides a suitably formal translation.
The Shogun’s representative dismisses Jacob with a curt nod.
After Acting-Chief de Zoet’s departure on the Second Day of the Ninth Month
‘The Dutchman may look like a goblin from a child’s nightmare,’ says Shiroyama, noticing his advisers’ sycophantic sneers, ‘but he is no fool.’ The sneers quickly turn into wise nods of agreement.
‘His manners are polished,’ approves one city elder, ‘and his reasoning clear.’
‘His Japanese was odd,’ says another, ‘but I understood most of it.’
‘One of my spies on Dejima,’ says a third, ‘says he studies incessantly.’
‘But his accent,’ complains an inspector, Wada, ‘was like a crow’s!’
‘And you, Wada, speak Dazûto’s tongue,’ asks Shiroyama, ‘like a nightingale?’
Wada, who speaks no Dutch at all, is wise enough to say nothing.
‘And the three of you,’ Shiroyama waves his fan at the men held responsible for the kidnap of the two Dutch hostages, ‘you owe your lives to his clemency.’
The nervous men respond with humble bows.
‘Interpreter Iwase, my report to Edo shall note that you, at least, tried to engage the abductors, however ineptly. You are needed at your Guild and may go.’
Iwase bows deeply and hurries from the Hall.
‘You two,’ Shiroyama stares at the hapless inspector and official, ‘brought disrepute to your rank, and taught the Englishmen that Japan is populated by cowards.’ Few of your peers, the Magistrate admits to himself, would have acquitted themselves any better. ‘Stay confined to your houses until further notice.’
The two disgraced men crawl backwards to the door.
Shiroyama finds Tomine. ‘Summon the Captain of the Coastal Guards.’
The swarthy Captain is ushered on to the very mat vacated by de Zoet. He bows before the Magistrate. ‘My name’s Doi, Your Honour.’
‘How soon, with what force, and how best may we retaliate?’
Instead of replying, the man stares at the floor in front of his knees.
Shiroyama looks at Chamberlain Tomine, who is as puzzled as his master.
A half-mute incompetent, Shiroyama wonders, promoted by a relative?
Wada clears his throat. ‘The Hall is waiting for your answer, Captain Doi.’
‘I inspected…’ the soldier glances up like a rabbit in a snare ‘… the battle-readiness of both guard-posts, north and south of the bay, and consulted with the highest-ranking officers available.’
‘I want strategies for counterattacks, Doi, not regurgitated orders!’
‘It was… intimated to me, sir, that – that troop strength is currently…’
Shiroyama notices the better-informed courtiers fanning themselves anxiously.
‘… a lower number than the thousand men stipulated by Edo, Your Honour.’
‘Are you telling me that the garrisons of Nagasaki Bay are under-manned?’
Doi’s cringing bow affirms that this is so. Advisers murmur in alarm.
A small shortage shan’t damage me, thinks the Magistrate. ‘By how many?’
‘The exact number,’ Captain Doi swallows, ‘is sixty-seven, Your Honour.’
Shiroyama’s guts untwist themselves: not even his most vitriolic rival Ômatsu, with whom he shares the post of Magistrate, could portray a lack of sixty-seven men out of one thousand as Dereliction. It could be written off as sickness. But a glance at the faces around the room tells the Magistrate he is missing something…
… until a fearful thought uproots all things.
‘Not – surely not -’ he masters his voice ‘- sixty-seven men in total?’
The weatherbeaten Captain is too nervous to reply.
Chamberlain Tomine barks: ‘The Magistrate asked you a question!’
‘There-’ Doi disintegrates and must begin again. ‘There are thirty guards at the North Garrison, and thirty-seven at the South. That is the total, Your Honour.’
Now the advisers study Magistrate Shiroyama…
Sixty-seven soldiers, he holds the damning numbers, in lieu of one thousand.
… the cynical, the ambitious, his appalled allies, Ômatsu’s place-men…
Some of you leeches knew this, Shiroyama thinks, and said nothing.
Doi is still crouching like a prisoner waiting for the sword to fall.
Ômatsu would blame the messenger… and Shiroyama, too, is tempted to lash out. ‘Wait outside, Captain. Thank you for despatching your duty with such speed and… accuracy.’
Doi glances at Tomine to check he heard correctly, bows and leaves.
None of the advisers dares be first to violate the awed hush.
Blame the Lord of Hizen, Shiroyama thinks. He supplies the men.
No: the Magistrate’s enemies would depict him as a cowardly shirker.
Plead that the coastal garrisons have been undermanned for years.
To say so implies that he knew of the shortages yet did nothing.
Plead that no Japanese subject has been harmed by the shortage.
The dictate of the First Shogun, deified at Nikko, has been ignored. This crime alone is unpardonable. ‘Chamberlain Tomine,’ says Shiroyama, ‘you are acquainted with the Standing Orders concerning the Defence of the Closed Empire.’
‘It is my duty to be so informed, Your Honour.’
‘In the case of foreigners arriving at a city without permission, its highest official is commanded to do what?’
‘To decline all overtures, Your Honour, and send the foreigners away. If the latter request provisions, a minimal quantity may be supplied, but no payment must be received so that the foreigners cannot later claim a trading precedent.’
‘But in the case that the foreigners commit acts of aggression?’
The advisers’ fans in the Hall of Sixty Mats have all stopped moving.
‘The Magistrate or daimyo in authority must seize the foreigners, Your Honour, and detain them until orders are received from Edo.’
Seize a fully armed warship, Shiroyama thinks, with sixty-seven men?
In this room the Magistrate has sentenced smugglers, robbers, rapists…
… murderers, pickpockets, and a Hidden Christian from the Goto Islands.
Now Fate, adopting the chamberlain’s dense nasal voice, is sentencing him.
The Shogun will imprison me for wanton neglect of my duties.
His family in Edo will be stripped of his name and samurai rank.
Kawasemi, my precious Kawasemi, will have to go back to the tea-houses…
He thinks of his son, his miraculous son, eking out a living as a pimp’s servant.
Unless I apologise for my crime and preserve my family honour…
He looks up at the advisers but none dares hold a condemned man’s gaze.
… by ritually disembowelling myself before Edo orders my arrest.
A throat behind him is softly cleared. ‘May I speak, Magistrate?’
‘Better that someone says something, Lord Abbot.’
‘Kyôga Domain is more a spiritual stronghold than a military one, but it is very close. By despatching a messenger now, I can raise two hundred and fifty men from Kashima and Isahaya to Nagasaki within three days.’
This strange man, Shiroyama thinks, is part of my life and my death. ‘Summon them, Lord Abbot, in the Shogun’s name.’ The Magistrate senses a glimmer of hope. The greater glory of seizing a foreign aggressor’s warship may, may, eclipse lesser crimes. He turns to the commander-at-arms. ‘Send riders to the Lords of Hizen, Chikugo and Higo with orders in the Shogun’s name to despatch five hundred armed men apiece. No delay, no excuses. The Empire is at war.’
Around dawn on the 19th October, 1800
John Penhaligon awakes from a dream of mildewed drapes and lunar forests to find his son at his bedside. ‘Tristingle, my dear boy! Such horrid dreams I had! I dreamt you’d been killed on the Blenheim and…’ Penhaligon sighs ‘… and I even dreamt I’d forgotten what you looked like. Not your hair-’
‘Never my hair, Pa,’ the handsome lad smiles, ‘not this burning bush!’
‘In my dream, I sometimes dreamt you were still alive… Waking was a – a bitterness.’
‘Come!’ He laughs like Meredith laughed. ‘Is this a phantom’s hand?’
John Penhaligon grips his son’s warm hand and notices his captain’s epaulettes.
‘My Phaeton is sent to help your Phoebus crack this walnut, Father.’
‘Ships-of-the-line hog the glory,’ Penhaligon’s mentor Captain Golding would say, ‘but frigates bag the prizes!’
‘There’s no prize on Earth,’ agrees Tristram, ‘like the ports and markets of the Orient.’
‘Black pudding, eggs and fried bread would be… heavenly, my lad.’
Why, Penhaligon wonders, did I answer an unasked question?
‘I’ll tell Jones,’ Tristram withdraws, ‘and bring your Times of London, too.’
Penhaligon listens to the gentle clatter of cutlery and plates…
… and sloughs off wasted years of unnecessary grief, like a snake’s skin.
How can Tristram, he wonders, obtain The Times in Nagasaki Bay?
A malign cat watches him from the foot of his bed; or perhaps a bat…
With a deaf and dumb hum, the beast opens its mouth; a pouch of needles.
It means to bite, thinks Penhaligon, and his thought is the Devil’s cue.
Agony scalds his right foot; an Aaaaaaaaagh! escapes like steam.
Wide awake in closeted dark, dead Tristram’s father bites on a scream.
The gentle clatter of cutlery and plates ceases and anxious steps hurry to his cabin door. Chigwin’s voice calls out, ‘Is all well, sir?’
‘All well.’ The Captain swallows. ‘A nightmare ambushed me, is all.’
‘I suffer them myself, sir. We’ll have breakfast served by first bell.’
‘Very good, Chigwin. Wait: are the native boats still circling us?’
‘Just the two guard-boats, sir, but the marines watched them all night and they never came within two hundred yards or I’d’ve woken you, sir. Aside from them, nothing bigger than a duck is afloat this morning. We scared everything off.’
‘I shall shake my leg shortly, Chigwin. Carry on.’ But as Penhaligon shifts his swollen foot, thorns of pain lacerate his flesh. ‘Chigwin, pray invite Surgeon Nash to call on the nonce: my podagra is troubling me, a little.’
Surgeon Nash examines the ankle, swollen to twice its usual size. ‘Steeplechases and mazurkas are, more than like, behind you now, Captain. May I recommend a stick to help you walk? I shall have Rafferty fetch one.’
A cripple with a stick, Penhaligon hesitates, at forty-two.
Young and agile feet pound to and fro above-decks.
‘Yes. Better to advertise my infirmity with a stick than a fall down stairs.’
‘Quite so, sir. Now, if I may examine this tophus. This may…’
The lancet probes the rupture: a violet agony explodes behind Penhaligon’s eyeballs.
‘… hurt just a little, sir… but it’s weeping nicely – a good abundance of pus.’
The Captain peers at the frothing discharge. ‘That is good?’
‘Pus,’ Surgeon Nash unscrews a corked pot, ‘is how the body purges itself of excessive blue bile, and blue bile is the root of gout. By widening the wound, applying a scraping of murine faecal matter,’ he uncorks the pot and extracts a mouse dropping with a pair of tweezers, ‘we can stimulate the discharge, and expect an improvement within seven days. Moreover I took the liberty of bringing a phial of Dover’s Remedy so-’
‘I’ll drink it now, Surgeon. The next two days are crucial to our fut-’
The lancet sinks in: the stifled scream makes his entire body turn rigid.
‘Damn it, Nash,’ the Captain gasps finally. ‘Will you not at least warn me?’
Major Cutlip looks askance at the sauerkraut on Penhaligon’s spoon.
‘Might your resistance,’ asks the Captain, ‘be weakening, Major?’
‘Twice-rotted cabbage shall never conquer this soldier, Captain.’
Membranous sunlight lends the breakfast table the air of a painting.
‘It was Admiral Jervis who first recommended sauerkraut to me.’ The Captain crunches his fermented mouthful. ‘But I told you that story before.’
‘Never,’ says Wren, ‘in my hearing, sir.’ He looks at the others, who concur. Penhaligon suspects them of dainty manners, but summarises the anecdote: ‘Jervis had sauerkraut from William Bligh, and Bligh had it from Captain Cook himself. “The difference between La Pérouse ’s tragedy and Cook’s glory,” Bligh was fond of saying, “was thirty barrels of sauerkraut.” But when Cook embarked on the First Voyage, neither exhortation nor threat would induce the Endeavours to eat it. Thereupon Cook designated the “twice-rotted cabbage” as Officers’ Food and forbade common Tars from touching the stuff. The result? Sauerkraut began to be filched from its own poorly guarded storeroom until six months later not a single man was buckling under scurvy, and the conversion was complete.’
‘Low cunning,’ Lieutenant Talbot observes, ‘in the service of genius.’
‘Cook is a great hero of mine,’ avows Wren, ‘and an inspiration.’
Wren’s ‘of mine’ irritates Penhaligon like a tiny seed wedged between molars.
Chigwin fills the Captain’s bowl: a drop splashes on the tablecloth’s lovingly-embroidered Forget-Me-Nots. Now is not the time, thinks the widower, to remember Meredith. ‘And so, gentlemen, to the day’s business, and our Dutch guests.’
‘Van Cleef,’ says Hovell, ‘passed an uncommunicative night in his cell.’
‘Aside,’ sneers Cutlip, ‘from demanding to know why his supper was boiled rope.’
‘News of the VOC’s demise,’ the Captain asks, ‘makes him no less obdurate?’
Hovell shakes his head. ‘Admission of weakness is a weakness, perhaps.’
‘As for Fischer,’ says Wren, ‘the wretch spent all night in his cabin, despite our entreaties to join us in the wardroom.’
‘How are relations between Fischer and his former chief, Snitker?’
‘They act like perfect strangers,’ replies Hovell. ‘Snitker is nursing a head-cold this morning: he wants van Cleef court-martialled for the crime, if you please, of “Battery against a ‘Friend of the Court of Saint James’.” ’
‘I am sick,’ says Penhaligon, ‘heartily sick, of that conceited coxcomb.’
‘I’d agree, Captain,’ says Wren, ‘that Snitker’s usefulness has run its course.’
‘We need a persuasive leader to win the Dutch,’ says the Captain, ‘and an -’ above-deck, three bells are rung, ‘- and an envoy of gravitas and poise to persuade the Japanese.’
‘Deputy Fischer wins my vote,’ says Major Cutlip, ‘as the more pliable man.’
‘Chief van Cleef,’ argues Hovell, ‘would be the natural leader.’
‘Let us interview,’ Penhaligon brushes crumbs away, ‘our two candidates.’
‘Mr van Cleef.’ Penhaligon stands, disguising his grimace of pain as an insincere smile. ‘I hope you slept well?’
Van Cleef helps himself to burgoo, Seville preserve and a hailstorm of sugar before replying to Hovell’s translation. ‘He says you can threaten him all you please, sir, but Dejima still has not one nail of copper for you to rob.’
Penhaligon ignores this. ‘Tell him I’m pleased his appetite is robust.’
Hovell translates and van Cleef speaks through a mouthful of food.
‘He asks, sir, if we have decided what to do with our hostages yet.’
‘Tell him that we don’t consider him a hostage, but a guest.’
Van Cleef’s response to the assertion is a burgoo-spattering ‘Ha!’.
‘Ask if he has digested the VOC’s bankruptcy.’
Van Cleef pours himself a bowl of coffee as he listens to Hovell. He shrugs.
‘Tell him that the British East India Company wishes to trade with Japan.’
Van Cleef sprinkles raisins on his burgoo as he gives his response.
‘His reply, sir, is “Why else would you hire Snitker to bring you here?” ’
He is no novice at this, thinks Penhaligon, but then neither am I.
‘Tell him we are seeking an old Japan hand to represent our interests.’
Van Cleef listens, nods, stirs sugar into his coffee, and says, ‘Nee.’
‘Ask whether he ever heard of the Kew Memorandum, signed by his own monarch-in-exile, ordering Dutch overseas officers to hand their nations’ assets to the safekeeping of the British?’
Van Cleef listens, nods, stands and lifts his shirt to show a deep, wide scar.
He sits down, tears a bread roll in two and gives Hovell a calm explanation.
‘Mr van Cleef says he earned that wound at the hands of Scotch and Swiss mercenaries hired by that same monarch-in-exile. They poured boiling oil down his father’s throat, he said. On behalf of the Batavian Republic, he begs us to keep both the “Chinless Tyrant” and “British safekeeping”, and says that the Kew Memorandum is useful for the privy, but nothing else.’
‘Plainly, sir,’ declares Wren, ‘we are dealing with an incurable Jacobin.’
‘Tell him we’d prefer to achieve our goals diplomatically, but -’
Van Cleef sniffs the sauerkraut and recoils as at boiling sulphur.
‘- failing that we shall seize the factory by force, and any loss of Japanese and Dutch life shall be on his account.’
Van Cleef drinks his coffee, turns to Penhaligon and insists on Hovell translating his reply line by line so that nothing is missed.
‘He says, Captain, that whatever Daniel Snitker has told us, Dejima is sovereign Japanese territory, leased to the Company. It is not a Dutch possession.
‘He says that if we try to storm it, the Japanese will defend it.
‘He says our marines may fire off one round before being cut down.
‘He urges us, sir, not to throw our lives away, for our families’ sakes.’
‘The man is trying to scare us away,’ remarks Cutlip.
‘More probably,’ suspects Penhaligon, ‘he is driving up the price of his help.’
But van Cleef issues a final statement and stands.
‘He thanks you for breakfast, Captain, and says that Melchior van Cleef is not for sale to any monarch. Peter Fischer, however, shall be only too delighted to hammer out terms with you.’
‘My esteem for Prussians,’ says Penhaligon, ‘began in my midshipman days…’
Hovell translates: Peter Fischer nods, not quite able to believe this wonderful twist of fortune.
‘HMS Audacious had a Brunswick-born lieutenant named Plessner…’
Fischer corrects the pronunciation of ‘Plessner’ and adds a remark.
‘Chief Fischer,’ translates Hovell, ‘is also a native son of Brunswick.’
‘Is that so now?’ Penhaligon feigns astonishment. ‘From Brunswick?’
Peter Fischer nods, says ‘Ja, ja,’ and drains his small beer.
With a glance, Penhaligon orders Chigwin to fill his tankard and keep it filled.
‘Mr Plessner was firm and fair; a superb seaman; brave, resourceful…’
Fischer’s thoughtful expression signifies, As one would expect, of course…
‘… and I am overjoyed,’ the Captain continues, ‘that the first British Consul of Nagasaki shall be a gentleman of Germanic stock and values.’
Fischer raises his tankard in salute, and puts a question to Hovell.
‘He’s asking, sir, what role Mr Snitker may have in our future plans.’
Penhaligon aspirates a tragic sigh, thinks, I could have walked the boards at Drury Lane, and says, ‘To be truthful with you, Envoy Fischer…’ Hovell translates the snatch, and Fischer leans in closer ‘… to be truthful, Daniel Snitker disappoints us as gravely as Mr van Cleef.’
The Prussian nods with co-conspirator’s eyes.
‘Dutchmen talk large, yet in action they are all piss and vinegar.’
Hovell struggles with the idioms but elicits a run of ja-ja-jas.
‘They are too rooted in their Golden Age to notice the changing world.’
‘This is the… waarheid.’ Fischer turns to Hovell. ‘How to say, waarheid?’
‘ “Truth”,’ says Hovell, and Penhaligon tries to make his foot more comfortable as he expounds. ‘This is why the VOC collapsed, and why their much-vaunted Dutch Republic looks set to join Poland in History’s dustbin of extinct nations. The British Crown needs Fischers, not Snitkers: men of talent, of vision…’
Fischer’s nostrils widen as he listens to Hovell’s rendition, the better to smell his future of wealth and power.
‘… and moral rectitude. In short, we need ambassadors, not whoring merchants.’
Fischer completes his metamorphosis from hostage to plenipotentiary with a laborious tale of Dutch lassitude, which Hovell shortens. ‘Envoy Fischer says that a fire levelled the Sea-Gate quarter of Dejima last year. Whilst the two biggest Dutch warehouses were burning to the ground, van Cleef and Snitker were disporting themselves in a brothel at the Company’s expense.’
‘Disgraceful dereliction,’ declares Wren, a connoisseur of bagnios.
‘Gross abandonment,’ agrees Cutlip, Wren’s companion of choice.
Seven bells ring, and Envoy Fischer shares a new thought with Hovell.
‘He says, Captain, that with van Cleef removed from Dejima, Mr Fischer is now the Acting-Chief – meaning that the men on Dejima are duty-bound to carry out his instructions. To disobey his orders is a corporal offence.’
May his powers of persuasion, thinks the Captain, match his confidence. ‘Snitker shall receive a pilot’s fee for guiding us here and a gratis berth to Bengal, but in a hammock, not a cabin.’
Fischer’s nod agrees, That is quite sufficient, and issues a pronouncement.
‘He says,’ translates Hovell, ‘ “the Almighty forged this morning’s pact.” ’
The Prussian drinks from his tankard and finds it empty.
The Captain sends Chigwin a tiny shake of his head. ‘The Almighty,’ Penhaligon smiles, ‘and His Majesty’s Navy, for whom Envoy Fischer agrees to undertake the following…’ Penhaligon takes up the Memorandum of Understanding. ‘ “Article One: Envoy Fischer is to gain the acquiescence of Dejima’s men to British patronage.” ’
Hovell translates. Major Cutlip rolls a boiled egg on a saucer.
‘ “Article Two: Envoy Fischer is to broker negotiations with the Nagasaki Magistrate to secure a Treaty of Amity and Trade between the British Crown and the Shogun of Japan. Annual trading seasons are to commence from June of 1801.” ’
Hovell translates. Cutlip picks eggshell from the rubbery white.
‘ “Article Three: Envoy Fischer shall facilitate the transfer of all Dutch-owned copper to His Majesty’s Frigate Phoebus and a limited trading season in Private Goods between crew and officers and Japanese merchants.” ’
Hovell translates. Cutlip bites into the truffle-soft yolk.
‘ “As remuneration for these services, Envoy Fischer is to receive a one-tenth share of all profits from the British Dejima factory for the first three years of his office, which may be renewed in 1802 subject to the consent of both parties.” ’
As Hovell translates the final clause, Penhaligon signs the Memorandum.
The Captain then passes the quill to Peter Fischer. Fischer pauses.
He senses the gaze, the Captain guesses, of his future self, watching him.
‘You shall return to Brunswick,’ Wren assures him, ‘as rich as its duke.’
Hovell translates, Fischer smiles and signs, and Cutlip sprinkles a little salt on to the remains of his egg.
Today being Sunday, Church is rigged and eight bells summons the ship’s company. The officers and marines stand beneath an awning strung between the mizzen and mainmast. All the Phoebus’s Christian sailors are expected to toe the line in their best clothes: Hebrews, Mussulmans, Asiatics and other heathens are excused prayers and the hymn, but often they watch from the margins. Van Cleef is locked in the sailcloth store for fear of mischief, Daniel Snitker is with the lesser warrant officers and Peter Fischer stands between Captain Penhaligon – conscious that his walking-stick will already be the subject of speculation amongst the ratings – and Lieutenant Hovell, from whom the newly appointed envoy has borrowed a fresh cotton shirt. Chaplain Wily, a gnarled oboe of a Kentishman, reads from his battered Bible standing on a makeshift pulpit set before the wheel. He reads line by slow line, allowing the unschooled men time to chew and digest every verse, and giving the Captain’s thoughts some room to wander: ‘ “We being exceedingly tossed with a tempest…” ’
Penhaligon tests his right ankle: Nash’s potion is numbing the pain.
‘ “… the next day they lightened the ship; And the third day…” ’
The Captain spies the Japanese guard-boat, keeping its distance.
‘ “… we cast out with our own hands the tackling of the ship.” ’
The seamen grunt in surprise and pay the chaplain close attention.
‘ “And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared…” ’
The common run of chaplains is either too meek for so unruly a flock…
‘ “… and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved…” ’
… or else, so zealous that the sailors ignore, scorn or vilify them.
‘ “… was then taken away. But after long abstinence Paul stood forth…” ’
Chaplain Wily, an oysterman’s son from Whitstable, is a welcome exception.
‘ “… in the midst of them and said, Sirs, ye should have hearkened unto me…” ’
Hands who know the Mediterranean in winter mutter and nod.
‘ “… and not have loosed from Crete, and to have gained this harm and loss.” ’
Wily teaches the boys their three Rs and writes illiterate men’s letters.
‘ “And now I exhort you to be of good cheer: for there shall be no loss…” ’
The chaplain has a mercantile streak, too, and fifty bolts of Bengali chintz in the hold.
‘ “… of any man’s life among you but of the ship. For there stood by me this night…” ’
Best of all, Wily keeps his readings briny and his sermons pithy.
‘ “… the angel of God, whose I am,” ’ Wily looks up, ‘ “and whom I serve, Saying…” ’
Penhaligon lets his gaze wander up and down the lines of his Phoebusians.
‘ “Fear not, Paul; lo, God hath given them all them that sail with thee.” ’
There are fellow Cornishmen, Bristolians, Manxmen, Hebrideans…
‘ “About midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country…” ’
A quartet of Faroe Islanders; some Yankees from Connecticut.
‘ “… And sounded; and found it twenty fathoms: and when they had gone…” ’
Freed slaves from the Caribbean, a courteous Tartar, a Gibraltese Jew.
‘ “… a little further, they sounded again, and found it fifteen fathoms…” ’
Penhaligon considers how land naturally divides itself into nations.
‘ “… Then fearing lest we should have fallen upon rocks, they cast…” ’
He considers how the seas dissolve human boundaries.
‘ “… four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day.” ’
He looks at the mestizos and doubloons: men fathered by Europeans…
‘ “And as the shipmen were about to flee out of the ship…” ’
… on native women: female slaves; girls sold by fathers for iron nails…
‘ “Paul said, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved.” ’
Penhaligon locates Hartlepool the half-breed, and remembers his own youthful fornications, and wonders whether any resulted in a coffee-skinned or almond-eyed son who also obeyed the voice of the sea, who thinks the thoughts of the fatherless. The Captain remembers this morning’s dream, and he hopes so.
‘ “Then the soldiers cut off the ropes of the boat, and let her fall off.” ’
The men gasp at the recklessness. One exclaims, ‘Madness!’
‘Stops deserters,’ answers another, and Wren calls out: ‘Hear the Chaplain!’
But Wily closes his Bible. ‘Aye, with the tempest howling, with Death a near-certainty, Paul says, “Abandon ship and you’ll drown: stay aboard with me and you’ll survive.” Would you believe him? Would I?’ The chaplain shrugs and puffs. ‘This wasn’t Paul the Apostle speaking with a halo round his head. This was a prisoner in chains, a heretic from a backward ditch of Rome’s Empire. Yet he persuaded the guards to cut away the boats, and the Book of Acts tells that two hundred and seventy-six were saved by God’s mercy. Why did that raggle-taggle crew of Cypriots, Lebanese and Palestinians heed Paul? Was it his voice, or his face, or… something else? Ah, with that secret, I’d be Archbishop Wily by now! Instead, I’m stuck here, with you.’ Some of the men laugh. ‘I shan’t claim, men, that Faith always saves a man from drowning – enough devout Christians have died at sea to make a liar of me. But this I do swear: Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn’t fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of this voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the captaincy of our Creator…’
The cordage creaks as the climbing sun warms the morning dew.
‘That’s all I have to say this Sunday, men. Our own captain has a few words.’
Penhaligon steps up, relying on his stick more than he would like. ‘So, men, there’s no fat Dutch goose waiting to be plucked in Nagasaki. You are disappointed, your officers are disappointed, and I am disappointed.’ The Captain speaks slowly, to allow his words to trickle into other languages. ‘Console yourselves with the thought of all the unsuspecting French prizes to be netted on our long, long voyage back to Plymouth.’ Gannets call. The oars of the guard-boats drag and splash. ‘Our mission here, men, is to bring the Nineteenth Century to these benighted shores. By the “Nineteenth Century” I mean the British Nineteenth Century: not the French, nor Russian nor Dutch. Shall doing so make rich men of us all? In and of itself, No. Shall it make our Phoebus the most famous ship in Japan, and the toast of the Service at home? The answer shall be a resounding Yes. This is not a legacy you can spend in port. It is a legacy that can never, ever be squandered, stolen or lost.’ The men prefer cash to posterity, Penhaligon thinks, but they listen, at least. ‘A last word, before – and about – the hymn. The last time a song of praise was heard in Nagasaki was as native Christians were slung off the cliff we passed yesterday for their belief in the True Faith. I desire you send a message to the Magistrate of Nagasaki, on this historic day, that Britons, unlike the Dutch, shall never trample on Our Saviour for the sake of profit. So sing not like shy schoolboys, men. Sing like warriors. One, and two, and three, and-’
Morning on the 19th October, 1800
‘Who so beset him round, with dismal stories…’
Jacob de Zoet, studying the stock inventory by the viewing window, at first doubts his ears…
‘Do but themselves confound, His strength the more is.’
… but, however improbable, a hymn is being sung in Nagasaki Bay.
‘No foes shall stay his might; tho’ he with giants fight…’
Jacob steps out on to the veranda and stares at the frigate.
‘He will make good his right to be a pilgrim.’
The hymn’s odd-numbered lines breathe in: its even-numbered, out.
‘Since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy Spirit,’
Jacob closes his eyes, the better to catch the floating English phrases…
‘We know we at the end shall life inherit.’
… and lift away each new line from its predecessor’s echo.
‘Then fancies, flee away! I’ll fear not what men say,’
The hymn is water and sunlight, and Jacob wishes he had married Anna.
‘I’ll labour night and day to be a pilgrim.’
The pastor’s nephew waits for the next verse, but it never comes.
‘A pleasing ditty,’ remarks Marinus, from the doorway of the Sea Room.
Jacob turns. ‘You called hymns “songs for children afraid of the dark”.’
‘Did I? Well, one grows less judgemental in one’s dotage.’
‘This was less than a month ago, Marinus.’
‘Oh. Well, as my friend the Dean observes,’ Marinus leans on the rail, ‘we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love. Your new habitus suits you very well, if I may say so.’
‘It’s Chief van Cleef’s habitus, and I pray he’ll be back in it by tonight. I mean it. In my less charitable minutes, I might consider paying the English a ransom to keep Fischer, but Melchior van Cleef is a fair-minded man, by the Company’s standards – and a Dejima of only four officers is less undermanned than unmanned.’
Marinus squints at the sky. ‘Come and eat. Eelattu and I brought you some poached fish from the Kitchen…’
They walk through to the Dining Room where Jacob makes a point of occupying his usual chair. He asks whether Marinus has had dealings with British naval officers in the past.
‘Fewer than you may imagine. I’ve corresponded with Joseph Banks and some of the English and Scottish philosophers, but I’ve yet to master their language. Their nation is rather young. You must have met some officers during your London sojourn. Two or three years, was it not?’
‘Four years, in total. My employer’s principal warehouse was a short walk downriver from the East India Docks, so I watched hundreds of ships-of-the-line come and go: the finest ships in the Royal Navy – that is, in the world. But my circle of English acquaintances was confined to warehouse-men, scriveners and bookkeepers. To the Grand and the Uniformed, a junior clerk from Zeeland with a thick Dutch accent would have been invisible.’
The servant d’Orsaiy appears at the door. ‘Interpreter Goto here, Chief.’
Jacob looks around for van Cleef and remembers. ‘Show him in, d’Orsaiy.’
Goto enters, looking as grave as the situation warrants. ‘Good morning, Acting-Chief,’ the interpreter bows, ‘and Dr Marinus. I disturb breakfast, sorry. But inspector at Guild send me urgently to discover about war song from English ship. Do English sing such song previous to attack?’
‘An attack?’ Jacob hurries back to the Sea Room. He looks at the frigate through his telescope, but its position is the same, and belatedly he sees the misunderstanding. ‘No, it wasn’t a war song that the English were singing, Mr Goto, it was a hymn.’
Goto is puzzled: ‘What is “hymn” or who is “hymn”?’
‘A hymn is a song sung by Christians to our God. It is an act of worship.’
The Acting-Chief continues to watch the frigate: there is activity at the bow.
‘Within hailing distance of the Papenburg Rock,’ observes Marinus. ‘Whoever claimed that History has no sense of humour died too soon.’
Goto does not catch everything, but he understands the Shogun’s sacrosanct edict against Christianity has been violated. ‘Very serious and bad,’ he mutters. ‘Very…’ he searches for another word ‘… very serious and bad.’
‘Unless I’m mistaken…’ Jacob is still watching ‘… something is afoot.’
The congregation has disbanded and the church awning lowered.
‘Someone in an oat-coloured jacket is climbing down the rope-ladder…’
He is helped into the frigate’s boat, moored at her starboard bow.
One of the Japanese guard-boats circling the vessel is being called over.
‘It appears that Deputy Fischer is being given back his freedom…’
Jacob has not set foot on the Sea-Ramp in the fifteen months since his arrival. Soon the sampan shall be in hailing distance. Jacob recognises Interpreter Sagara next to Peter Fischer in the prow of the boat. Ponke Ouwehand breaks off the tune he is humming. ‘Being out here whets your appetite for the day when we’ll put this gaol behind us, doesn’t it?’
Jacob thinks about Orito, flinches, and says, ‘Yes.’
Marinus is filling a sack with slimy handfuls of seaweed. ‘Porphyra umbilicalis. The pumpkins shall be delighted.’
Twenty yards away, Peter Fischer cups his hands and calls out to his welcoming party: ‘So I turn my back for twenty-four hours, and “Acting-Chief de Zoet” stages a coup d’état!’ His levity is stiff and prickly. ‘Will you be as quick into my coffin, I wonder?’
‘We had no notion,’ Ouwehand calls back, ‘how long we might be left headless.’
‘The head is back, “Acting-Deputy Ouwehand“! What a flurry of promotions! Is the monkey now the cook?’
‘Good to see you back, Peter,’ Jacob says, ‘whatever our titles.’
‘Fine to be back, Head Clerk!’ The boat scrapes the ramp and Fischer leaps ashore like a conquering hero. He lands awkwardly and slips on the stones.
Jacob tries to help him up. ‘How is Chief van Cleef?’
Fischer stands. ‘Van Cleef is well, yes. Very well indeed. He sends his warm regards.’
‘Mr de Zoet.’ Interpreter Sagara is helped out by his servant and a guard. ‘We have letter from English Captain to Magistrate. I take now, so no delay. Magistrate summon you later, I think, and he want speak to Mr Fischer also.’
‘Oh yes, indeed,’ declares Fischer. ‘Tell Shiroyama I shall be available after luncheon.’
Sagara bows vaguely to Fischer, firmly to de Zoet, and turns away.
‘Interpreter,’ calls Fischer after him. ‘Interpreter Sagara!’
Sagara turns around at the Sea-Gate, a mild Yes? on his face.
‘Remember who is the highest-ranking officer on Dejima.’
Sagara’s humble bow is not quite sincere. He goes.
‘I don’t trust that one,’ says Fischer. ‘He lacks manners.’
‘We hope the English treated yourself and the Chief well,’ says Jacob.
‘ “Well”? Better than well, Head Clerk. I have extraordinary news.’
‘I am touched by your concern,’ Fischer tells the company assembled in the State Room, ‘and you will be eager to learn about my sojourn aboard the Phoebus. However, protocol must be respected. Therefore: Grote, Gerritszoon, Baert and Oost – and you too, Twomey – you are excused, and may return to work for this morning. I have matters of state to discuss with Dr Marinus, Mr Ouwehand and Mr de Zoet, and decisions to make with careful thought and clear heads. When these matters are settled, you shall be informed.’
‘Yer wrong,’ states Gerritszoon. ‘We’re stayin’, see.’
The grandfather clock calibrates time. Piet Baert scratches his crotch.
‘So while the cat’s away,’ Fischer pretends to be charmed, ‘the mice will set up a National Convention of the People. Very well, then, I shall keep things as easy to understand as possible. Mr van Cleef and I spent the night aboard the HMS Phoebus as guests of the English Captain. His name is John Penhaligon. He is here on the orders of the British Governor-General at Fort William in Bengal. Fort William is the principal base of the English East India Company, which-’
‘We all know what Fort William is,’ interjects Marinus.
Fischer smiles for a long second. ‘Captain Penhaligon’s orders are to negotiate a trade treaty with the Japanese.’
‘Jan Compagnie trades in Japan,’ says Ouwehand. ‘Not John Company.’
Fischer picks his teeth. ‘Ah, yes, some more news. Jan Compagnie is dead as a doornail. Yes. At midnight on the last day of the eighteenth century, whilst some of you -’ he happens to glance at Gerritszoon and Baert ‘- were singing rude songs about your Germanic ancestors on Long Street, the Ancient Honourable Company ceased to exist. Our employer and paymaster is bankrupt.’
The men are dumbstruck. ‘Similar rumours,’ says Jacob, ‘have-’
‘I read it in the Amsterdamsche Courant in Captain Penhaligon’s cabin. There: in black and white and plain Dutch. Since January the first we’ve been working for a phantom.’
‘Our back-wages?’ Baert, horrified, bites his hand. ‘My seven years’ wages?’
‘It was clever of you,’ nods Fischer, ‘to piss, whore and gamble most of it away, with hindsight. At least you enjoyed it.’
‘But our pay’s our pay,’ insists Oost. ‘Our pay’s safe, isn’t it, Mr de Zoet?’
‘Legally, yes. But “legally” implies courts, compensation, lawyers and time. Mr Fischer-’
‘I believe the Chief Resident’s books record my promotion to “Deputy”?’
‘Deputy Fischer, did the Courant article mention compensation and debt?’
‘For the dear Dutch Motherland’s shareholders, yes, but about the pawns out in the Asian factories, there was not one peep. On the subject of the dear Dutch Motherland, I have more news. A Corsican general, Bonaparte, has made himself First Consul of the French Republic. This Bonaparte doen’t lack ambition! He conquered Italy, mastered Austria, looted Venice, subdued Egypt, and intends to turn the Low Countries into a département of France. I am sorry to report, gentlemen, that your Motherland is to be married off and shall lose her name.’
‘The English are lying!’ exclaims Ouwehand. ‘That’s impossible!’
‘Yes, the Poles said much the same words before their country vanished.’
Jacob imagines a garrison of French troops in Domburg.
‘My brother Joris,’ says Baert, ‘served under that Frenchman, that Bonaparte. They said he’d done a deal with the Devil at the Bridge of Arcole, an’ that’s how he crushes whole armies. The deal din’t cover Boney’s men, mind. Joris was last seen on a spike at the Battle o’ the Pirrymids, minus his body.’
‘My sincere condolences, Baert,’ says Peter Fischer, ‘but Bonaparte is now your Head of State and cares not a tinker’s fart about your back-wages. So. We have two surprises so far. No more Company and no more independent Netherlands. Here is a third surprise, especially interesting for Head Clerk de Zoet, I think. The pilot and adviser who guided the Phoebus to Nagasaki Bay is Daniel Snitker.’
‘But he’s in Java,’ Ouwehand finds his tongue first, ‘on trial.’
‘Such twists,’ Fischer inspects a thumbnail, ‘make life much richer.’
Aghast, Jacob clears his throat. ‘You spoke with Snitker? Face to face?’ He glances at Ivo Oost, who looks pale and perplexed.
‘I ate supper with the man. The Shenandoah never reached Java, you see. Vorstenbosch – that famous surgeon of the cancer of corruption – and trusty Captain Lacy sold the Company’s copper – that same copper you, Mr de Zoet, won with such dedication! – to the English East India Company in Bengal for their own personal profit. The irony. The irony!’
This can’t be true, thinks Jacob. Jacob thinks, But, yes, it can.
‘Wait wait wait’ – Arie Grote is turning pink – ‘waity waity waity. What about our private cargoes? What about my lacquerware? What about the Arita figurines?’
‘Daniel Snitker does not know their next destination: he escaped at Macao…’
‘If those swine,’ Arie Grote is turning purple, ‘those thieving mongrels-’
‘… and didn’t ask, but your goods would fetch a handsome price in Carolina.’
‘Never mind the damn cargoes,’ protests Twomey. ‘How are we to get home?’
Even Arie Grote falls silent as the truth sinks in.
‘Mr Fischer,’ notes Marinus, ‘looks immune to the general dismay.’
‘What ain’t y’ tellin’ us,’ Gerritszoon looks dangerous, ‘Mister Fischer?’
‘I can speak only as fast as your noble democracy allows! The Doctor is right: all is not lost. Captain Penhaligon is authorised to propose an Anglo-Dutch Entente in these waters. He promises to pay every last penning the Company owes us, and give us passage, gratis, in a comfy side-berth, to Penang, Bengal, Ceylon or the Cape.’
‘All this,’ asks Con Twomey, ‘from the sweetness of an Englishman’s heart?’
‘In return, we work here for two more trading seasons. For wages.’
‘Meaning,’ Jacob intuits, ‘the English want Dejima and its profits.’
‘What use is Dejima to you, Mr de Zoet? Where are your ships, your capital?’
‘But…’ Ivo Oost frowns ‘… if the English want to trade out of Dejima…’
‘The interpreters,’ Arie Grote is nodding, ‘only speak Dutch.’
Fischer claps his hands. ‘Captain Penhaligon needs you. You need him. A blissful marriage.’
‘So it’d be the same work,’ Baert asks, ‘only with a new employer?’
‘One who won’t vanish to Carolina with your private cargoes, yes.’
‘The day I catch up with Vorstenbosch,’ vows Gerritszoon, ‘is the day his brains’ll get yanked out of his aristocratic arse.’
‘Whose flag would fly over Dejima?’ asks Jacob. ‘Dutch or English?’
‘Who cares,’ demands Fischer, ‘so long as our wages are paid?’
‘What does Chief van Cleef,’ Marinus asks, ‘make of the Captain’s offer?’
‘He is negotiating the finer details as we speak.’
‘And he didn’t think,’ asks Jacob, ‘to send any written orders to us?’
‘I am his written orders, Head Clerk! But, look, don’t accept my word. Captain Penhaligon has invited you – and the doctor, and Mr Ouwehand – to the Phoebus for supper this evening. His lieutenants are a splendid circle. One, named Hovell, speaks fluent Dutch. The leader of his marines, Major Cutlip, has travelled far and wide, and has even lived in New South Wales.’
The hands start laughing. ‘Cutlip?’ asks Grote. ‘That’s never a real name!’
‘If we reject their proposal,’ asks Jacob, ‘will the English sail peacefully away?’
Fischer tuts. ‘The proposal is not yours to accept or reject, is it, Head Clerk? Now Chief van Cleef and I are back, the Republic of Dejima can return to its box of toys and-’
‘Nah, ain’t so simple,’ says Grote. ‘We voted Mr de Zoet as President.’
‘President?’ Fischer lifts his eyebrows in mock amazement. ‘My!’
‘We need a man of his word,’ declares Arie Grote, ‘lookin’ out for us.’
‘You imply,’ Peter Fischer’s lips smile, ‘I am not a man of my word?’
‘Surely you ain’t f’gotten a certain Bill of Lading,’ says Grote, ‘what Mr de Z. would not sign but what you was all too happy?’
‘Vorstenbosch pokered him,’ says Piet Baert, ‘but he’d not poker us.’
Jacob is as surprised as Fischer at the strength of the hands’ support.
Fischer’s voice stiffens. ‘The Company oath is clear about obedience.’
‘The Company oath became legally void,’ notes Marinus, ‘on January the first.’
‘But we are all on the same side, men, are we not?’ Fischer realises his miscalculation. ‘Concerns about flags can be met. What is a flag but a rectangle of cloth? I’ll be speaking to the Magistrate later – and your “president” can join me, to show my good faith. In the meantime, your “Republic of Dejima” -’
Naming, thinks Jacob, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance.
‘- can debate to its heart’s desire. When Jacob and I return to the Phoebus, he can tell Captain Penhaligon how things stand ashore. But don’t forget, home is twelve thousand miles away. Don’t forget, Dejima is a trading post with no trade. Don’t forget, the Japanese want us to persuade them to work with the English. By making the right choice, we earn money and protect our families against poverty. Who, in God’s name, could object to that?’
‘So how translate “Stadholder”?’ Tired-eyed Interpreter Goto tests the unshaven shadow around his jaw. ‘Dutch William Five is king or not king?’ The Almelo Clock in the Chief’s Bureau chimes once. Titles, titles, thinks Jacob. So stupid, so important. ‘He is not the king.’
‘So why William Five use title “Prince of Orange-Nassau”?’
‘Orange-Nassau is – or was – the name of his ancestors’ fiefdom, like a Japanese domain. But he was also the head of the Netherlands Army.’
‘So he is same as Japanese Shogun?’ ventures Iwase.
The Venetian Doge is a better comparison, but that would not help. ‘The Stadholder was an elected post, but one in the pocket of the House of Orange. Then, after Stadholder William -’ he gestures at the signature on the document ‘- married the Prussian King’s niece, he took on the airs of a monarch, appointed by God. Five years ago, however, we,’ the French invasion is still a secret, ‘the Dutch people changed our government…’
The three interpreters look at one another with apprehension.
‘… and Stadholder William was… oh, how to say “exiled” in Japanese?’
Goto can supply the missing word and the sentence makes sense to Iwase.
‘So with William in London,’ concludes Jacob, ‘his old post was abolished.’
‘So William Five’ – Namura must be clear – ‘has no power in Holland?’
‘No, none. All his properties were confiscated.’
‘Do Dutch people still… obey, or respect, Stadholder?’
‘Orangists, do, yes, but Patriots – men of the new government – do not.’
‘Many Dutch people are either “Orangists” or “Patriots”?’
‘Yes, but most care more about food in their bellies and peace in the land.’
‘So this document we translate, this “Kew Memorandum”,’ Goto frowns, ‘is order from William Five to Dutchmen to give Dutch possessions to English for safe protection?’
‘Yes, but the question is, do we Dutchmen recognise William’s authority?’
‘English Captain write, “All Dutch colonies obey Kew Memorandum.” ’
‘That’s what he writes, yes, but he is probably lying.’
There is a hesitant knock. Jacob calls out: ‘Yes?’
Con Twomey opens the door, removes his hat and looks at Jacob in an urgent manner. Twomey wouldn’t disturb us now, Jacob reasons, with any trifling matter, ‘Gentlemen, continue without me. Mr Twomey and I must speak in the Sea Room.’
‘This is about’ – the Irishman balances his hat on his thigh – ‘what we’d call, at home, a “skeleton in the cupboard”.’
‘On Walcheren we say, “a body in the vegetable patch”.’
‘Monster turnips, then, on Walcheren. May I speak in English?’
‘Do so. If I need your help, I’ll ask.’
The carpenter takes a deep breath. ‘My name is not Con Twomey.’
Jacob digests this. ‘You’re not the first pressed man to give a false name.’
‘My true name is Fiacre Muntervary, and I wasn’t pressed. How I left Ireland’s a stranger story altogether. One icy St Martin’s Day, a block of stone slipped from its harness and crushed my Da like a beetle. I did my best to fill his boots, like, but this world’s not a merciful place, and when the harvest failed and men came to Cork from all over Munster, our landlord trebled our rent. We pawn Da’s tools, but soon enough me, Ma, five sisters, and one little brother, Pádraig, were living in a crumbling barn where Pádraig caught a chill and that’s one less mouth to feed. Back in the city I tried the docks, the breweries, I tried feckin’ everything, but no luck. So back I went to the pawnbroker and asked for Da’s tools back. Yer man says, “They’re sold, Handsome, but it’s winter and folks need coats. I pay shiny shillings for good coats. You understand me?” ’ Twomey pauses to gauge Jacob’s reaction.
Jacob knows not to hesitate. ‘You had a family to feed.’
‘One lady’s gown, I stole from the theatre. Pawnbroker says, “Gentlemen’s coats, my Handsome,” an’ gives me a clipped threep’nny. Next time I stole a man’s coat from a lawyer’s office. “A scarecrow’d not be seen in that,” says yer man. “Try harder!” Third time, I’m bagged like a partridge. After a fortnight in Cork Gaol, I appeared in the courthouse where the one friendly face was the pawnbroker’s. He told the English judge, “Yes, Your Honour, that’s the urchin who kept offering me coats.” So I says the pawnbroker’s a feckin’ liar who deals in stolen coats. The judge told me how God forgives everyone who truly repents an’ handed down seven years in New South Wales. Five minutes from entry to gavel, like. Now a convict hulk, the Queen, was moored in Cork Harbour an’ it needed filling, an’ I helped. Neither Ma nor my sisters can bribe their way aboard to say farewell, so come April – the year ’ninety-one, this is – the Queen joined the Third Fleet out…’
Jacob follows Twomey’s gaze over the blue water to the Phoebus.
‘Hundreds of us there were, in that dark an’ stifling hold; cockroaches, puke, fleas, piss; rats gnawing the quick an’ the dead alike, rats as big as feckin’ badgers. In cold waters we shuddered. In the tropics pitch’d drip through the seams an’ burn us, an’ every waking and sleeping minute our one thought was Water, water, Mother of God, water… our ration was a half-pint a day an’ it tastes like sailor’s piss, which no doubt much of it was. One in eight died on that passage, by my reck’ning. “New South Wales” – three dreaded little words back home – changed their meaning to “Deliverance” an’ one old Galway man told us about Virginia, with its wide beaches an’ green fields an’ Indian girls who’d swap a screw for a nail, an’ we’re all thinking, Botany Bay is Virginia, just a little further…’
Constable Kosugi’s guards pass beneath the Sea Room, down Sea Wall Lane.
‘Sydney Cove wasn’t Virginia. Sydney Cove was a few dozen patches of hack-an’-peck hoe-rows where the seedlings’d wither if they sprouted at all. Sydney Cove was a dry an’ buzzing pit of sting-flies an’ fire-ants an’ a thousand starving convicts in torn tents. The marines had the rifles, so the marines had the power, the food, the ’roo meat an’ the women. As a carpenter I was put to work building the marines’ huts, furniture, doors and suchlike. Four years went by, Yankee traders began to call an’, if life never got soft, convicts were no longer dying like flies. Half my sentence was up an’ I began to dream of seeing Ireland again one day. Then, in ’ninety-five, a new squadron of marines arrived. My new Major wanted a grand new barracks an’ house up in Parramatta so he claimed me an’ six or seven others. He’d been garrisoned in Kinsale for a year, so he fancied himself an expert on the Irish Race. “The lassitude of the Gael,” he’d boast, “is best cured by Dr Lash,” an’ he was liberal with his medicine. You saw the welts on my back?’
Jacob nods. ‘Even Gerritszoon was impressed.’
‘For meeting his eye, he’d lash us for insolence. For avoiding his eye, he’d lash us for shiftiness. For crying out, he’d lash us for play-acting. For not crying out, he’d lash us for stubbornness. Yer man was in Paradise. Now, there were six of us Corkmen who looked out for each another an’ one was Brophy, the wheelwright. One day the Major goaded Brophy into hitting him back. Brophy was slapped in irons an’ the Major sentenced him to hang. The Major told me, “High time Parramatta had its own gallows, Muntervary, an’ you’ll build it.” Well, I refused. Brophy was strung up from a tree an’ I was sentenced to a week in the Sty an’ a hundred lashes. The Sty was a cell, four by four by four, so its inmate couldn’t stand nor stretch an’ you’ll imagine the stink an’ flies an’ maggots. On my last night, the Major visited an’ told me he’d be wielding the lash himself and promised I’d be in Hell with Brophy by the fiftieth stroke.’
Jacob asks, ‘There was no higher authority to appeal to?’
Twomey’s answer is a bitter laugh. ‘After midnight, I heard a noise. I said, “Who’s there?” an’ my reply was a cold chisel, slid beneath the gap under the door, and loaves in a square of sailcloth an’ a water-bag. Footsteps ran off. Well, with the chisel I made short work of prising away a couple of planks. Off I ran. The moon was full an’ bright as the sun. The encampment has no walls, you understand, ’cause the emptiness is the walls. Convicts ran off all the time. Many crawled back, beggin’ for water. Some were brought back by Blacks who were paid in grog. The rest died, I doubt not, now… but the convicts were mostly unschooled an’ when word spread that by walking north-by-north-west across the red desert you’d reach China – aye, China – hope made it true, so it was China I was bound that night. I’d not gone six hundred yards when I heard the rifle click. It was him. The Major. He had slipped me the chisel and bread, you see. “You’re a runaway now,” he said, “so I can shoot you dead, no questions asked, you stinking Irish vermin.” He came as close as we are now an’ his eyes were shining an’ I thought, This is it, an’ he pulled the trigger an’ nothing happened. We looked at each other, surprised, like. He lunged the bayonet at my eye socket. I swerved but not fast enough’ – the carpenter shows Jacob his torn earlobe – ‘an’ then it all went slow, an’ stupid, an’ we were pulling at the gun, like two boys arguin’ over a toy… an’ he tripped over an’… the rifle swung around an’ its butt whacked his skull an’ the fecker didn’t get up.’
Jacob notices Twomey’s trembling hands. ‘Self-defence isn’t murder, in either the eyes of God or of the law.’
‘I was a convict with a dead marine at my feet. I scarpered north, along the shore, an’ twelve or thirteen miles later, as day broke, I found a marshy creek to slake my thirst an’ slept till the afternoon, ate one loaf, an’ carried on walkin’, an’ so it went for five more days. Seventy, eighty miles, perhaps, I covered, like. But the sun burnt me black as toast, an’ that land sucks your vigour away, an’ some berries made me sick, an’ soon I was wishin’ the Major’s rifle had gone off ’cause it was a lingering death I was in for. That evening the ocean changed colour as the sun went down, an’ I prayed to St Jude of Thaddeus to end my suffering however he thought fit. You Calvinists may deny saints, but I know you’ll agree that all prayers are heard,’ Jacob nods, ‘an’ when I woke at dawn, on that forsaken coast, uninhabited an’ hundreds of miles long, it was to the sound of a rowing-shanty. Out in the bay was a scaly-looking whaler flying the Stars an’ Stripes. Her boat was coming ashore for water. So I was there to meet the Captain an’ bade him a pleasant morning. Says he, “Escaped convict, ain’t you?” Says I, “That I am, sir.” Says he, “Pray give me a solitary reason why I should kick the balls of the best customer in the Pacific Ocean – the British Governor of New South Wales – by shipping one his runaways?” Says I, “I am a carpenter who’ll work aboard your ship for landsman’s pay for one year.” Says he, “We Americans hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and that’ll be three years, not one, and your wages are life and liberty, not dollars.” ’ The carpenter’s pipe has gone out. He rekindles the bowl and takes a deep draught. ‘Now to why I’m telling you this. Earlier, in the State Room, Fischer mentioned a certain major who’s there, on the British frigate.’
‘Major Cutlip? Not the luckiest of names in our language, as you know.’
‘It sticks in this runaway convict’s memory for another reason.’ Twomey looks at the Phoebus and waits.
Jacob lowers his pipe. ‘The marine? Your tormentor? Cutlip?’
‘You’d think these coincidences’d not happen, not off the stage, not in life…’
Repercussions fill the air. Jacob hears them, almost.
‘… yet time and again, the world plays this – this same – feckin’ game. It’s him! George Cutlip of the marines, late of New South Wales, washes up at Bengal, a hunting chum of the Governor’s. Fischer let slip the Christian name at lunch, so there’s no doubt. Not a shadow.’ Twomey utters a dry bark in lieu of a laugh. ‘Your decision about the Captain’s proposal an’ all, it’ll be hard enough as it is, but if you do a deal, Jacob… if you do a deal, Major Cutlip’d see me an’ know me an’, by God, he’d settle my outstanding balance, an’ unless I killed him first, I’d be feedin’ the fish or feedin’ the worms.’
The autumn sun is an incandescent marigold.
‘I would demand guarantees, the protection of the British Crown.’
‘We Irish know about the protection of the British Crown.’
Alone, Jacob watches the troublesome Phoebus. He employs a method of moral bookkeeping: the costs of co-operation with the English would be exposing his friend to Cutlip’s revenge, and possible charges of collaboration, if a Dutch court ever assembles again. The costs of rejecting the English are years of destitution and abandonment until the war ends, and someone thinks to come and relieve them. Might they be forgotten, quite literally, grow sick, grow old and die here, one by one?
‘Knock-knock, eh?’ It is Arie Grote, in his stained chef’s apron.
‘Mr Grote, please come in. I was just… I was just…’
‘Cogitatin’, eh? Lot o’ cogitatin’ afoot on Dejima today, Chief de Z. -’
This born trader, Jacob suspects, is here to urge me to collaborate.
‘- but here’s a word to the wise.’ Grote glances around. ‘Fischer’s lyin’.’
Eyes of sunlight from waves blink and blink on the papered ceiling.
‘You have my very closest attention, Mr Grote.’
‘Specifickly, he lied ’bout van Cleef bein’ keen on the deal. Now, I’d not jeopardise our card-games by revealin’ all, so to speak, but there’s a method called the Art of Lips. Folks reck’n yer know a liar by his eyes but ’tain’t so: ’tis lips what gives a man away. Different liars’ve diff’rent tellers, but for Fischer when, say, he’s bluffin’ at cards, he does this -’ Grote sucks in his lower lip a fraction ‘- and the beauty is, he don’t know he does it. When he spoke o’ van Cleef earlier, he did it: he’s lyin’, plain as it’s writ on his face. Which it is. An’ if Fischer’s lyin’ ’bout specificks, he’s bendin’ the generalities too, eh?’
A stray breeze brushes the bedraggled chandelier.
‘If Chief van Cleef is not working with the English…’
‘He’s locked up in a hold: which s’plains why Fischer, an’ not the Chief, comes ashore.’
Jacob looks at the Phoebus. ‘Suppose I’m the British Captain, hoping to earn the glory of capturing the only European factory in Japan… but the locals are known to be prickly in their dealings with foreigners…’
‘All what’s known of ’em is they ’ave no dealin’s with foreigners.’
‘The English Captain needs us to effect a transition, that’s plain, but…’
‘… but give it a year, Chief de Z.: two trading seasons in the bag…’
‘Nice fat profits; an embassy to Edo; Union Jack fluttering on the pole…’
‘Interpreters learnin’ English: sudd’nwise your Dutch workers… well… “Hang on, these Dutch Butterboys’re Prisoners of War!” Why’d they pay us a shillin’ of our back-wages, eh? I’d not, if I was this Penhaligon, but oh, I’d give the Butterboys their free passage right ’nough…’
‘The officers to a gaol in Penang, and you hands, you’d be pressed.’
‘ “Pressed” bein’ English for “enslaved by His Majesty’s Navy”.’
Jacob tests each joint of the reasoning for weaknesses, but there are none. Van Cleef’s lack of written orders, Jacob understands, was his order. ‘Have you spoken about this matter with the other hands, Mr Grote?’
The cook bends his bald, clever head. ‘All mornin’ long, Chief de Z. If you smell this same stinky rat as we do, our vote’s to fold up this Anglo-Dutch Entente, eh, into pretty little squares for use as privy paper.’
Jacon sees two dolphins out in the bay. ‘What’s my “teller” in the Art of Lips, Mr Grote?’
‘My ma’d never forgive me f’corruptin’ a young gent with card-sharkery…’
‘We could play Backgammon, during future Quiet Seasons.’
‘A proper gentl’man’s game is Gammon. I’ll supply the dice…’
Tea is cool lush green in a smooth pale bowl. ‘I’ll never know,’ says Peter Fischer, ‘how you stomach that spinach-water.’ He flexes and rubs his legs, stiff after twenty minutes of sitting on the floor. ‘I wish these people would get around to inventing proper chairs.’ Jacob has little to say to Fischer, who is here to urge the Magistrate to allow trade with the British behind a Dutch veneer. Fischer refuses to countenance any opposition from the hands and officers on Dejima, so Jacob has not yet declared it. Ouwehand gave Jacob permission to act in his name, and Marinus quoted Greek. Interpreters Yonekizu and Kobayashi are consulting one another across the anteroom in anxious mutters, conscious now that Jacob might understand. Officials and inspectors enter and leave the Hall of Sixty Mats. The place smells of beeswax, paper, sandalwood, and, Jacob inhales, fear?
‘Democracy,’ Fischer speaks up, ‘is a quaint diversion for the hands, de Zoet.’
‘If you’re implying,’ Jacob puts down the tea-bowl, ‘that I somehow-’
‘No, no, I admire your cunning: the easiest way to control others is to give them the illusion of free-will. You shan’t, of course,’ Fischer tests the lining of his hat, ‘upset our Yellow friends with talk of presidents, et cetera? Shiroyama shall be expecting to parley with the Deputy-Chief.’
‘You have made up your mind to recommend Penhaligon’s proposal?’
‘One must be a scoundrel and a fool to do otherwise. We disagree on trivial matters, de Zoet, as friends may. But you, I know, are neither scoundrel nor fool.’
‘The entire matter,’ equivocates Jacob, ‘is in your hands, it appears.’
‘Yes.’ Fischer takes Jacob’s compliance at face value. ‘Of course.’
The two men look out over walls and roofs, down to the bay.
‘When the English are here,’ says Fischer, ‘my influence will rise…’
This is counting chickens, thinks Jacob, before the eggs are even laid.
‘… and I will remember old friends and old enemies.’
Chamberlain Tomine passes, his eyes acknowledging Jacob.
He turns left, through a modest door decorated with a chrysanthemum.
‘A face like his,’ observes Fischer, ‘belongs on cathedral gutters.’
A gruff official appears and talks to Kobayashi and Yonekizu.
‘You can understand,’ Fischer asks, ‘what they are saying, de Zoet?’
The register is formal, but Jacob gathers that the Magistrate is unwell. Deputy Fischer is to consult with his highest advisers in the Hall of Sixty Mats. Moments later, Interpreter Kobayashi confirms the message. Fischer pronounces, ‘This is acceptable,’ and tells Jacob, ‘Oriental satraps are figureheads with no idea of political realities. It is better to speak directly with the marionette masters.’
The gruff official adds that, owing to the confusion created by the British warship, one Dutch voice is deemed to be better than two: the head clerk may wait in a quieter area of the Magistracy.
Fischer is doubly pleased. ‘A logical measure. Head Clerk de Zoet,’ he claps the Dutchman’s shoulder, ‘may drink spinach-water to his heart’s content.’
Hour of the Ox on the Third Day of the Ninth Month
‘Good afternoon, Magistrate.’ De Zoet kneels, bows and with a nod acknowledges Interpreter Iwase, Chamberlain Tomine and the two scribes in the corner.
‘Good afternoon, Acting-Chief,’ replies the Magistrate. ‘Iwase shall join us.’
‘I will need his talents. Your injury is better, Iwase-san?’
‘It was a crack, not a fracture.’ Iwase pats his torso. ‘Thank you.’
De Zoet notices the Go table, where the game with Enomoto waits.
The Magistrate asks the Dutchman, ‘Is this game known in Holland?’
‘No. Interpreter Ogawa taught me the -’ he consults with Iwase ‘- the “rudiments” during my first weeks on Dejima. We intended to continue playing after the trading season… but unfortunate events occurred…’
Doves trill, a peaceful sound on this frightened afternoon.
A gardener rakes the white stones by the bronze pond.
‘It is irregular,’ Shiroyama turns to business, ‘to hold Council in this room, but when every adviser, sage and geomancer in Nagasaki is crowded into the Hall of Sixty Mats, it becomes the Hall of Six Mats and Six Hundred Voices. One cannot think.’
‘Deputy Fischer will be delighted with his audience.’
Shiroyama notes de Zoet’s courteous distancing. ‘First, then,’ he nods at his scribes to begin, ‘the warship’s name, Fîbasu. No interpreter knows the word.’
‘Phoebus is not a Dutch word but a Greek name, Your Honour. Phoebus was the sun-god. His son was Phaeton.’ De Zoet helps the scribes with the strange word. ‘Phaeton boasted about his famous father, but his friends said, “Your mother just claims your father is the sun-god, because she has no real husband.” This made Phaeton unhappy, so his father promised to help his son prove that he was indeed a son of Heaven. Phaeton asked, “Let me drive the Chariot of the Sun across the sky.” ’
De Zoet pauses for the benefit of the scribes.
‘Phoebus tried to change his son’s mind. “The horses are wild,” he said, “and the chariot flies too high. Ask for something else.” But no: Phaeton insisted, and so Phoebus had to agree: a promise is a promise, even in a myth – especially in a myth. So the following dawn, up, up, up the chariot climbed, from the east, driven by the young man. Too late, he regretted his stubbornness. The horses were wild. First, the chariot drove too high, too far, so all the rivers and waterfalls of Earth turned to ice. So Phaeton drove closer to Earth, but too low, and burnt Africa, and burnt black the skins of the Ethiopians and set alight the cities of the ancient world. So in the end the god Zeus, the King of Heaven, had to act.’
‘Scribes: stop.’ Shiroyama asks, ‘This Zeus is not a Christian?’
‘A Greek, Your Honour,’ says Iwase, ‘akin to Ame-no-Minaka-nushi.’
The Magistrate indicates that de Zoet may continue.
‘Zeus shot lightning at the Chariot of the Sun. The chariot exploded and Phaeton fell to earth. He drowned in the River Eridanos. Phaeton’s sisters, the Heliades, wept so much they became trees – in Dutch we call them “poplars” but I do not know whether they grow in Japan. When the sisters were trees, the Heliades wept -’ De Zoet consults with Iwase ‘- amber. This is the origin of amber and the end of the story. Forgive my poor Japanese.’
‘Do you believe there is any truth in this story?’
‘There is no truth at all in the story, Your Honour.’
‘So the English name their warships after falsehoods?’
‘The truth of a myth, Your Honour, is not its words but its patterns.’
Shiroyama stores the remark away. ‘This morning,’ he turns to the pressing matter, ‘Deputy Fischer delivered letters from the English Captain. They bring greetings, in Dutch, from the English King George. The letter claims that the Dutch Company is bankrupt, that Holland no longer exists and that a British governor-general now sits in Batavia. The letter ends with a warning that the French, Russian and Chinese are planning an invasion of our islands. King George refers to Japan as “The Great Britain of the Pacific Ocean” and urges us to sign a treaty of amity and commerce. Please tell me your thoughts.’
Drained by his myth-telling, de Zoet directs his answer to Iwase in Dutch.
‘Chief de Zoet,’ Iwase translates, ‘believes the English wanted to intimidate his countrymen.’
‘How do his countrymen regard the English proposal?’
This question de Zoet answers directly: ‘We are at war, Your Honour. The English break promises very easily. None of us wishes to co-operate with them, except one…’ His gaze strays to the passageway leading to the Hall of Sixty Mats ‘… who is now in the pay of the English.’
‘Is it not your duty,’ Shiroyama asks de Zoet, ‘to obey Fischer?’
Kawasemi’s kitten skitters after a dragonfly across the polished veranda.
A servant looks at his master who shakes his head: Let it play…
De Zoet considers his answer. ‘One man has several duties, and…’
Struggling, he enlists Iwase’s help. ‘Mr de Zoet says, Your Honour, that his third duty is to obey his superior officers. His second duty is to protect his flag. But his first duty is to obey his conscience, because god – the god he believes in – gave him his conscience.’
Foreign honour, thinks Shiroyama, and orders the scribes to omit the remark. ‘Is Deputy Fischer aware of your opposition?’
A maple leaf, fiery and fingered, is blown to the Magistrate’s side.
‘Deputy Fischer sees what he wishes to see, Your Honour.’
‘And has Chief van Cleef communicated any instructions to you?’
‘We have heard nothing. We draw the obvious conclusions.’
Shiroyama compares the veins in the leaf to the veins in his hands. ‘If we wished to prevent the frigate escaping Nagasaki Bay, what strategies would you propose?’
De Zoet is surprised by the question, but gives a considered answer to Iwase. ‘Chief de Zoet proposes two strategies: Deception and Force. Deception would involve embarking upon protracted negotiations for a false treaty. The merit of this plan is lack of bloodshed. Its demerits are that the English will want to work quickly, to avoid the North Pacific winter, and that they have seen the stratagem in India and Sumatra.’
‘Force, then,’ says Shiroyama. ‘How may one capture a frigate without a frigate?’
De Zoet asks, ‘How many soldiers does Your Honour have?’
The Magistrate first tells the scribes to stop writing. Then he tells them to leave. ‘One hundred,’ he confides to de Zoet. ‘Tomorrow, four hundred; soon, a thousand.’
De Zoet nods. ‘How many boats?’
‘Eight guard-boats,’ says Tomine, ‘used for harbour and coastal duty.’
De Zoet next asks whether the Magistrate could requisition the fishing-boats and cargo ships in the harbour and around the bay.
‘The Shogun’s representative,’ says Shiroyama, ‘can requisition anything.’
De Zoet delivers a verdict to Iwase, who translates: ‘It is the Acting-Chief’s opinion that whilst a thousand well-trained samurai would easily subdue the enemy on land or aboard the frigate, the problems of transport are insuperable. The frigate’s cannonry would demolish a flotilla before the swordsmen could come close enough to board. The Phoebus’s marines, moreover, are armed with the newest’ – Iwase uses the Dutch word “rifles” – ‘a musket, but with three times the power, and much faster to reload.’
‘So there is no hope,’ Shiroyama’s fingers have dismembered the maple leaf, ‘of detaining the ship by force?’
‘The ship cannot be captured,’ says de Zoet, ‘but the bay may be shut.’
Shiroyama glances at Iwase, assuming the Dutchman has made a mistake with his Japanese, but de Zoet speaks to his interpreter at some length. His hands mime at various points a chain, a wall and a bow and arrow. Iwase verifies a few terms, and turns to the Magistrate. ‘Your Honour, the Acting-Chief proposes the erection of what the Dutch call a “pontoon bridge”: a bridge made of boats bound together. Two hundred, he thinks, would suffice. The boats should be requisitioned from villages outside the bay, rowed or sailed to the narrowest point of the bay’s mouth, and fastened, from shore to shore, to make a floating wall.’
Shiroyama pictures the scene. ‘What stops the warship cutting through?’
The Acting-Chief understands and speaks to Iwase in Dutch. ‘De Zoet-sama says, Your Honour, that to ram through the pontoon bridge, the warship would need to lower her sails. Sailcloth is woven from hemp, and often oiled to make it rainproof. Especially in a season of warm weather, like the present one, oiled hemp is combustible.’
‘Fire arrows, yes,’ Shiroyama realises. ‘We can hide archers in the boats…’
De Zoet looks uncertain. ‘Your Honour, if the Phoebus is burnt…’
Shiroyama recalls the myth: ‘Like the Chariot of the Sun!’
If such a daring plan succeeds, he thinks, the lack of guards shall be forgotten.
‘Many sailors,’ de Zoet is saying, ‘aboard the Phoebus are not Englishmen.’
This victory, Shiroyama foresees, could win me a seat on the Council of Elders.
‘The captives,’ de Zoet is anxious, ‘must be allowed to surrender with honour.’
‘Surrender with honour.’ Shiroyama frowns. ‘We are in Japan, Acting-Chief.’
Around six o’clock in the evening of the 19th October, 1800
Dark clouds clot and the dusk is silted with insects and bats. The Captain recognises the European sitting in the prow of the guard-boat and lowers his telescope. ‘Envoy Fischer is being rowed back to us, Mr Talbot.’
The Third Lieutenant searches for the right reply. ‘Good news, sir.’
The evening breeze, rain-scented, rustles the pages of the Pay Book.
‘ “Good news” is what I hope Envoy Fischer brings us.’
A mile over calm water, Nagasaki lights its candles and closes its shutters.
Midshipman Malouf knocks and puts his head around the door. ‘Lieutenant Hovell’s compliments, sir, and Mr Fischer is being ferried back to us.’
‘Yes, I know. Tell Lieutenant Hovell to bring Mr Fischer to my cabin once he is safe on board. Mr Talbot, send word to Major Cutlip: I want a clutch of marines ready with guns primed, just in case…’
‘Aye, sir.’ Talbot and Malouf leave on their agile young feet.
The Captain is left alone with his gout, his telescope and the fading light.
Torches are lit at the guard-posts on shore, a quarter-mile astern.
After a minute or two, Surgeon Nash knocks his particular knock.
‘Come, Surgeon,’ says the Captain, ‘and not before time.’
Nash enters, wheezing tonight like broken bellows. ‘Podagra is an ingravescent cross for sufferers to bear, Captain.’
‘ “Ingravescent”? Deal in plain English in this cabin, Mr Nash.’
Nash sits by the window-bench and helps Penhaligon’s leg up. ‘Gout grows worse before it grows better, sir.’ His fingers are gentle but their touch still scalds.
‘You think I don’t know that? Double the dosage of the remedy.’
‘The wisdom of doubling the quantity of opiates so soon after-’
‘Until our treaty is won, double my damned Dover’s!’
Surgeon Nash unwraps the bandages and puffs out his cheeks at what he finds. ‘Yes, Captain, but I shall add henna and aloes before all traffic in your alimentary canal comes to a dead stop…’
Fischer greets the Captain in English, shakes his hand, and nods around the table at Hovell, Wren, Talbot and Cutlip. Penhaligon clears his throat. ‘Well, be seated, Envoy. We all know why we are here.’
‘Sir, one small preliminary matter,’ says Hovell. ‘Mr Snitker has just accosted us, as drunk as Old Noah, demanding to attend our meeting with Envoy Fischer, and vowing he’d never allow an interloper to “siphon off what’s rightfully mine”.’
‘What’s rightfully his,’ interjects Wren, ‘is a sharp clog up his arse.’
‘I told him he’d be called when needed, Captain, and trust I did right.’
‘You did. It is Envoy Fischer -’ he makes a gracious gesture ‘- who is the man of this hour. Please ask our friend to distil his day’s work.’
Penhaligon studies the tone of Fischer’s replies as Hovell takes notes. The Dutch sentences sound polished. ‘Well, as per his orders, sir, Envoy Fischer spent the day in consultation with the Dutchmen on Dejima and Japanese officials at the Magistracy. He reminds us that Rome was not built in a day, but believes the foundation stones of British Dejima are in place.’
‘We are pleased to learn it – “British Dejima” is a fine phrase.’
Jones the servant brings in a brass lamp. Chigwin provides beer and tankards.
‘Begin with the Dutch: do they, in principle, agree to co-operate?’
Hovell translates Fischer’s reply as, ‘ “Dejima is as good as ours.” ’
This ‘as good as’, thinks the Captain, is the first sour note.
‘Do they recognise the legitimacy of the Kew Memorandum?’
The long reply makes Penhaligon wonder about Fischer’s ‘foundation stones’. Hovell makes further notes as Fischer speaks. ‘Envoy Fischer reports that news of the VOC’s collapse caused dismay amongst Dutch and Japanese alike, and without the edition of the Courant, the Dutch would not have believed it. He used this dismay to present the Phoebus as the Dutchmen’s only hope of a profitable homecoming, but one dissenter, a clerk by the name of -’ Hovell checks the name with Fischer, who repeats it with distaste ‘- Jacob de Zoet, dubbed the British Race to be “the cockroaches of Europe” and swore to cut down any “vermin collaborators”. Objecting to this language, Mr Fischer challenged him to a duel. De Zoet retreated to his rat-hole.’
Fischer wipes his mouth and adds a coda for Hovell to translate.
‘De Zoet was a lackey of both Chief Vorstenbosch and ex-Chief van Cleef, whose murder he accuses you of, sir. Envoy Fischer recommends his removal, in chains.’
Some settling of old scores, Penhaligon nods, is to be expected. ‘Very well.’
The Prussian next produces a sealed envelope and a chequered box. These he slides across the table with a lengthy explanation. ‘Mr Fischer says, sir,’ explains Hovell, ‘that thoroughness demanded he tell you of de Zoet’s opposition, but assures us that the clerk is “neutered”. Whilst on Dejima, Mr Fischer was visited by Dr Marinus, the physician. Marinus had been deputised by all ashore, saving the blackguard de Zoet, to tell Mr Fischer that the merits of the British olive-branch were plain as day, and to entrust him with this sealed letter addressed to you. It contains “the unified will of Dejima’s Europeans.” ’
‘Please congratulate our envoy, Lieutenant. We are pleased.’
Peter Fischer’s slight smile replies, Of course you are pleased…
‘Now ask Mr Fischer about his tête-à-tête with the Magistrate?’
Fischer and Hovell exchange several sentences.
‘The Dutch tongue,’ Cutlip tells Wren, ‘is the noise of mating pigs.’
Insects encrust the cabin’s window, drawn by the bright lamp.
Hovell is ready. ‘Before his return to the Phoebus this evening, Envoy Fischer enjoyed a long audience with Magistrate Shiroyama’s highest adviser, one Chamberlain Tomine.’
‘What about his warm relationship with Magistrate Shiroyama?’ asks Wren.
Hovell explains, ‘Envoy Fischer says that Shiroyama is, in fact, a “lofty castrato” – a figurehead – and that real power lies with this chamberlain.’
I prefer a fibbing underling, Penhaligon worries, to fib consistently.
‘According to Envoy Fischer,’ Hovell continues, ‘this powerful chamberlain viewed our proposal for a commercial treaty with great sympathy. Edo is frustrated by Batavia’s unreliability as a trading partner. Chamberlain Tomine was astonished at the dismemberment of the Dutch Empire, and Envoy Fischer sowed many seeds of doubt in his mind.’
Penhaligon touches the chequered box. ‘This is the chamberlain’s message?’
Fischer understands and speaks to Hovell. He says, sir, that this historic letter was dictated by Chamberlain Tomine, approved by Magistrate Shiroyama, and translated into Dutch by an Interpreter of the First Rank. He was not shown its contents, but has every confidence that it shall please.’
Penhaligon examines the box. ‘Fine workmanship, but how to get inside?’
‘There’ll be a hidden spring, sir,’ says Wren. ‘May I?’ The Second Lieutenant wastes a minute failing. ‘How damnably Asiatic.’
‘It would be no match,’ Cutlip snorts snuff, ‘for a good English hammer.’
Wren passes it to Hovell. ‘Picking Oriental locks is your forte, Lieutenant.’
Hovell slides one end panel and a lid slips off. Inside is a sheet of parchment, folded twice and sealed at the front.
A man’s life is made, Penhaligon thinks, by such letters… or unmade.
The Captain slices the seal with his paper-knife and unfolds the page.
The script inside is Dutch. ‘I impose once again, Lieutenant Hovell.’
‘Not at all, sir.’ Hovell uses a taper to light a second lamp.
‘ “To the Captain of the English vessel, Phoebus. Magistrate Shiroyama informs the ‘Englanders’ that changes…” ’ Hovell pauses, frowning ‘… pardon, sir, the grammar is home-spun “… changes to the rules governing trade with foreigners lie not within the remit of the Magistrate of Nagasaki. These matters are the preserve of the Shogun’s Council of Elders in Edo. The English Captain is therefore -” the word is ”commanded” “- commanded to remain at anchor for sixty days whilst the possibility of a treaty with Great Britain is discussed by the proper authorities in Edo.” ’
Hostile silence settles over the table.
‘The jaundiced pygmies,’ declares Wren, ‘take us for a gaggle of heyducks!’
Fischer, sensing something badly amiss, asks to see the chamberlain’s letter.
Hovell’s palm tells him, Wait. ‘There is worse, sir. “The English Captain is commanded to send ashore all gunpowder -” ’
‘They’ll have our lives, by all that’s Holy,’ swears Cutlip, ‘before our powder!’
I was a fool, thinks Penhaligon, to forget that diplomacy is never simple.
Hovell continues: ‘ “- all gunpowder and admit inspectors on to his ship to ensure compliancy. The English must not attempt a landing.” That was underlined, sir. “Doing so without the Magistrate’s written permission shall be an act of war. Finally, the English Captain is warned that the Shogun’s laws punish smugglers with crucifixion.” The letter is signed by Magistrate Shiroyama.’
Penhaligon rubs his eyes. His gout hurts. ‘Show our “Envoy” the fruits of his cleverness.’
Peter Fischer reads the letter with rising incredulity, and stammers high-pitched protests at Hovell. ‘Fischer denies, Captain, that the chamberlain mentioned these sixty days, or the gunpowder.’
‘One doesn’t doubt,’ says the Captain, ‘Fischer was told what was expedient.’ Penhaligon slits open the envelope containing the letter from the doctor. He is expecting Dutch, but finds neatly written English. ‘There is a capable linguist ashore. “To Captain Penhaligon of the Royal Navy: Sir, I, Jacob de Zoet, elected on this day President of the Provisional Dejima Republic -” ’
‘A “Republic”!’ Wren snorts. ‘That walled-in hamlet of warehouses?’
‘ “- beg to inform you that we, the undersigned, reject the Kew Memorandum; oppose your goal of illegitimately seizing Dutch trading interests in Nagasaki; reject your bait of gain under the English East India Company; demand the return of Chief Resident van Cleef; and inform Mr Peter Fischer of Brunswick that he is henceforth exiled from our territory.” ’
The four officers look at ex-Envoy Fischer, who swallows and asks for a translation.
‘To continue: “Howsoever Messrs Snitker, Fischer et al assure you otherwise, yesterday’s kidnappings are seen by Japan’s authorities as a breach of sovereignty. Swift retaliation is to be expected, which I am powerless to prevent. Consider not only your ship’s company, innocents in these machinations of states, but also their wives, parents and children. One appreciates that a captain of the Royal Navy has orders to follow, but à l’impossible nul n’est tenu. Your respectful servant, Jacob de Zoet.” It is signed by all the Dutchmen.’
Laughter, rakish and rookish, fills the wardroom below.
‘Pray share the bones of the matter with Fischer, Mr Hovell.’
As Hovell translates the letter into Dutch, Major Cutlip lights his pipe. ‘Why did this Marinus feed our Prussian all that donkey manure?’
‘To cast him,’ sighs Penhaligon, ‘in the role of a prize jackass.’
‘What was that frog-croak,’ asks Wren, ‘at the end of the letter, sir?’
Talbot clears his throat. ‘ “No one is bound to do the impossible.” ’
‘How I hate a man,’ says Wren, ‘who farts in French and expects applause.’
‘And what is this -’ Cutlip snorts ‘- “Republic” buffoonery about?’
‘Morale. Fellow-citizens make braver fighters than jumpy underlings. This de Zoet is not the fool that Fischer would have us believe.’
The Prussian is subjecting Hovell to a volley of outraged denials. ‘He claims, Captain, that de Zoet and Marinus cooked up the mischief between them – that the signatures must be forged. He says that Gerritszoon and Baert can’t even write.’
‘Hence they inked in their thumbprints!’ Penhaligon resists an urge to hurl his whale’s-tooth paperweight at Fischer’s pasty, sweaty, desperate face. ‘Show him, Hovell! Show him the thumbprints! Thumbprints, Fischer! Thumbprints!’
Timbers creak, men snore, rats chew, lamps hiss. Sitting at the fold-down desk in the lamp-lit wooden womb of his sleeping cabin, Penhaligon scratches an itch between the knuckles of his left hand and listens to the twelve sentries relaying the message ‘Three bells, all well,’ around the bulwarks. No, it is not, by damn, thinks the Captain. Two blank sheets of paper are waiting to be turned into letters: one to Mr – never, he thinks, ‘President’ – Jacob de Zoet of Dejima, and the other to His August Personage, Magistrate Shiroyama of Nagasaki. The uninspired correspondent scratches his scalp, but dandruff and lice, not words, fall on to the blotter.
A wait of sixty days, he tips the detritus into the lamp, may be justifiable…
Crossing the China Sea in December, Wetz worried, would be a battering voyage.
… but to surrender our gunpowder would see me court-martialled.
A cockchafer twitches its twin whiskers in the shadow of his inkwell.
He looks at the old man in his shaving mirror and reads an imaginary article buried deep in the next year’s The Times of London.
‘John Penhaligon, former captain of HM Frigate Phoebus, returned from the first British mission to Japan since the reign of James I. He was relieved of his post and retired without pension, having achieved no military, commercial or diplomatic success.’
‘It’ll be the Impressment Service for you,’ warns his reflection, ‘braving outraged mobs in Bristol and Liverpool. There are too many Hovells and Wrens waiting in the wings…’
Damn the Dutch eyes, thinks the Englishman, of Jacob de Zoet…
Penhaligon decrees that the cockchafer has no right to exist.
… and damn his cheese-weaned health, damn his mastery of my language.
The cockchafer escapes the Homo sapiens’ slammed fist.
A disturbance breaks out in his guts; no quarter shall be given.
I must brave the fangs in my foot, Penhaligon realises, or shit my breeches.
The pain, as he drags himself into the next-door privy, is excruciating…
… and in the black nook, he unbuttons himself and flops on the seat.
My foot, the torture ebbs and flows, is becoming a calcified potato.
The agonising ten-pace journey, however, has quelled his bowels.
Master of a frigate, he ponders, but not of his own intestines.
Wavelets lap and nudge the hull, twenty feet below.
Young women, they hide, he hums his shitty ditty, like birds in the bushes…
Penhaligon twists the wedding ring, embedded in middle-aged plumpness.
Young women, they hide, like birds in the bushes…
Meredith died only three years ago, but his memory of her face is eroded.
… and were I but a young man I’d go bang them bushes…
Penhaligon wishes he had paid that portraitist his fifteen pounds…
To my right fol-diddle-dero, to my right fol-diddle-dee.
… but there were his brother’s debts to settle, and his own pay was late, again.
He scratches a fiery itch between the knuckles of his left hand.
A familiar acidity burns his sphincter. Haemorrhoids, he thinks, as well?
‘No time for self-pity,’ he tells himself. ‘Letters of state must be written.’
The Captain listens to the sentries call out, ‘Five bells, all well…’ The oil in the lamp is low, but replenishing it will wake his gout, and he is too embarrassed to call Chigwin for so simple a task. His indecision is recorded on the blank sheets of paper. He summons his thoughts but they scatter like sheep. Every great captain or admiral, he considers, possesses a celebratory toponym: Nelson has the Nile; Rodney has Martinique et al; Jervis has Cape St Vincent. ‘So why mayn’t John Penhaligon have Nagasaki?’ One Dutch clerk named Jacob de Zoet, he thinks, is why; damn the wind that blew him this way…
The warning in de Zoet’s letter, the Captain concedes, was a masterstroke.
He watches a teardrop of ink fall from his quill back into the bottle.
To heed the warning would place me in his debt.
Unexpected rain smatters the sea and spatters the deck.
But to ignore the warning could prove reckless…
Wetz has the larboard watch tonight: he orders out the awnings and barrels to catch the rain.
… and lead not to an Anglo-Japanese Accord but an Anglo-Japanese War.
He thinks of Hovell’s scenario of Siamese traders in the Bristol Channel.
Sixty days would be required for Parliament to send an answer, yes.
Penhaligon has rubbed a mosquito bite on his knuckle into an angry lump.
He looks into his shaving mirror: his grandfather looks back.
There are ‘known foreigners’, Penhaligon thinks, and ‘foreign foreigners’.
Against the French, Spaniards or Dutch, one buys intelligence from spies.
The lamp spits, falters and snuffs out. The cabin is hooded by night.
De Zoet, he sees, has deployed one of his best weapons.
‘A short sleep,’ the Captain advises himself, ‘may dispel the fog…’
The sentries call, ‘Two bells, two bells, all well…’ Penhaligon’s sweat-sodden sheet is twisted around him like a spider’s cocoon. Down on the berth deck the larboard watch will be asleep, their hammocks strung shoulder-to shoulder, with their dogs, cats and monkeys.
The last cow and sheep, two goats, and half-dozen chickens are asleep.
The nocturnal rats are probably at work in the provisions holds.
Chigwin, in his cubby-hole shy of the Captain’s door, is asleep.
Surgeon Nash is asleep, down in his warm snug on the orlop deck.
Lieutenant Hovell, who has the starboard watch tonight, will be alert, but Wren, Talbot and Cutlip may sleep through to the morning.
Jacob de Zoet, the Captain imagines, is being pleasured by a courtesan: Peter Fischer swears he keeps a harem at the Company’s expense.
‘Hatred eats haters,’ Meredith told an infant Tristram, ‘like ogres eat boys.’
May Meredith be in Heaven now, embroidering cushions…
The rhythmic crank of the Phoebus’s chain-pump starts up.
Wetz must have told Hovell to keep an eye on the bilge.
Heaven is a thorny proposition, he thinks, best enjoyed at a distance.
Chaplain Wily is evasive about whether Heaven’s seas are like Earth’s.
Would Meredith not be happier, he asks, with a little cottage of her own?
Sleep kisses his eyelids. The dreamlight is dappled. He trots up his old mistress’s stairs on Brewer Street. The girl’s voice shimmers. ‘You’re in the newspaper, Johnny.’ He takes up today’s Times and reads,
‘Admiral Sir John Penhaligon, late of the HM Frigate Phoebus, told their lordships how, upon receiving the Nagasaki Magistrate’s order to surrender his gunpowder, he suspected foul play. “There being no prize to seize from Dejima,” Admiral Penhaligon avowed, “and Dutch and Japanese alike preventing us trading via Dejima, it became necessary to turn our guns on Dejima.” In the Commons, Mr Pitt praised the admiral’s bold actions for “ministering the coup de grâce on Dutch mercantilism in the Far East” ’.
Penhaligon sits up in his cabin, bangs his head and laughs aloud.
The Captain struggles on to the spar deck with Talbot’s assistance. His stick is no longer an aid but a necessity: the gout is a tight bandage of gorse and nettles. The morning is dry but damp: fat-hulled, bar-nacled clouds are overladen with rain. Three Chinese ships slip along the opposite shore, bound for the city. You’re in for a pretty spectacle, he promises the Chinamen, as like as not…
Two dozen landsmen sit along the waist under the sail-maker’s orders. They salute their captain, noticing his bandaged foot, too swollen and painful to tolerate a boot or shoe. He hobbles to the watch-officer’s station at the wheel where Wetz is balancing a bowl of coffee against the Phoebus’s gentle rocking. ‘Good morning, Mr Wetz. Anything to report?’
‘We filled ten butts with rainwater, sir, and the wind’s swung north.’
Greasy steam and a cloud of obscenities escape the galley vent.
Penhaligon peers at the guard-boats. ‘And our tireless sentinels?’
‘Circling us the whole night through, sir, as they are now.’
‘I would hear your thoughts, Mr Wetz, on a speculative manoeuvre.’
‘Oh, sir? Then perhaps Lieutenant Talbot might take the wheel.’
Wetz walks and Penhaligon limps to the quarterdeck taffrail for privacy.
‘Could you bring us in to within three hundred yards of Dejima?’
Wetz gestures towards the Chinese junks. ‘If they can, sir, we can.’
‘Could you hold us steady for three minutes without anchors?’
Wetz assesses the wind’s strength and direction. ‘Child’s play.’
‘And how soon could we beat down the bay to the open sea?’
‘Would we be…’ the Sailing Master squints at the distances in both directions ‘… fighting our way out, sir, tacking unimpaired?’
‘My pet sybil has a head-cold: I can’t prise a word from her.’
Master Wetz clicks at the panorama like a ploughman to a mare. ‘Conditions unchanged, Captain… I’d have us out in fifty minutes.’
‘Robert.’ Penhaligon speaks around his pipe. ‘I disturb your rest. Come in.’
The unshaven First Lieutenant rolled from his bunk seconds ago. ‘Sir.’ Hovell closes the cabin door against the din of a hundred and fifty sailors eating ship’s biscuit dipped in ghee. ‘They do say, “A well-rested first officer is a neglectful first officer. May I enquire after your…’ He looks at Penhaligon’s bandaged foot.
‘Swollen as a puffball, but Mr Nash has filled me to my gills with his remedy, so I shall stay afloat for today, which may well be time enough.’
‘Oh, sir? How so?’
‘I authored a couple of missives overnight. Might you peruse them for me? The letters are weighty, for all their brevity. I’d not want them marred by misspellings, and you are the closest to a man of letters the Phoebus can offer.’
‘Honoured to oblige, sir, though the chaplain is a better-read-’
‘Read them aloud, please, so I may hear how they carry.’
Hovell begins: ‘ “To Jacob de Zoet, Esquire: Firstly, Dejima is not a ‘Provisional Republic’ but a remote factory whose former owner, the Dutch East Indies Company, is defunct. Secondly, you are not a president but a shopkeeper who, by promoting himself over Deputy-Chief Peter Fischer, during his brief absence violates the constitution of the said Company.” A strong point, Captain. “Thirdly, whilst my orders are to occupy Dejima by diplomatic or military means, should these prove impossible, I am obliged to place the trading post beyond use.” ’ Hovell looks up in surprise.
‘We are almost finished, Lieutenant Hovell.’
‘ “Strike your flag upon receipt of this letter and have yourself transferred to the Phoebus by noon, where you shall enjoy the privileges of a gentleman prisoner-of-war. Ignore this demand, however and you sentence Dejima to…” ’ Hovell pauses ‘ “… to total demolition. Faithfully, et cetera…” ’
Sailors with swabs pound dry the quarterdeck over the Captain’s cabin.
Hovell returns the letter. ‘There are no errors of grammar or diction, sir.’
‘We are alone, Robert, so you need not be coy.’
‘Some may consider such a bluff to be a touch too… bold?’
‘There is no bluff. If Dejima is not to be British, it is to be nobody’s.’
‘Were these our original orders from the Governor in Bengal, sir?’
‘ “Plunder or trade as circumstances permit and your initiative advises.” Circumstances conspire against both plunder and trade. Beating a retreat with our tail between our legs is not an agreeable prospect, so I fall back on my initiative.’
Somewhere nearby a dog barks and a monkey screeches.
‘Captain – you will have considered the repercussions?’
‘It is a day for Jacob de Zoet to learn about repercussions.’
‘Sir, as I am invited to speak my mind, I must say that an unprovoked attack on Dejima shall taint Japan’s view of Great Britain for two generations.’
‘Taint’ and ‘unprovoked’, notes Penhaligon, are incautious words. ‘Were you insensible to the deliberate offence in the Magistrate’s letter yesterday?’
‘It fell short of our hopes, but the Japanese did not invite us to Nagasaki.’
One must be wary of understanding one’s enemy, Penhaligon thinks, lest that one becomes him.
‘The second letter, sir, is to Magistrate Shiroyama, I presume.’
‘You presume right.’ The Captain hands over the page.
‘ “To Magistrate Shiroyama. Sir: Mr Fischer extended to you the hand of friendship from the Crown and Government of Great Britain. This hand was slapped away. No British captain surrenders his gunpowder, nor tolerates foreign inspectors in his holds. Your proposed quarantine for HMS Phoebus violates common practice between civilised nations. I am, however, willing to overlook the offence, provided that Your Honour meets the following conditions: deliver, by noon, the Dutchman Jacob de Zoet to the Phoebus; install Envoy Fischer as the Chief Resident of Dejima; retract your unacceptable demands regarding our gunpowder and inspections. Without all three conditions are met, the Dutch shall be punished for their intransigence, as the rules of war permit, and incidental damage to property or persons shall be to Your Honour’s account. Regretfully, et cetera, Captain Penhaligon of the Royal Navy of the British Crown.” Well, sir, this is…’
A throbbing vein in Penhaligon’s foot hurts almost exquisitely.
‘… this is as unambiguous,’ says the Lieutenant, ‘as the first letter, sir.’
Where, thinks the Captain, with anger and sorrow, is my grateful young protégé? ‘Translate the Magistrate’s letter into Dutch, in all haste, then have Peter Fischer rowed to one of the guard-boats so he may deliver them.’
‘ “Soon afterward,” ’ Lieutenant Talbot, sitting on the window-seat of the Captain’s cabin, reads aloud from Kaempfer’s book whilst Rafferty, the Surgeon’s Mate, scrapes a razor over the Captain’s jowls, ‘ “in 1638, this heathen court had no qualms in inflicting upon the Dutch a cursed test to find out whether the orders of the Shogun or the love of their fellow Christians had greater power over them. It was a matter of us serving the Empire by helping to destroy the native Christians, of whom those remaining, some forty thousand people, in desperation over their martyrdom had moved into an old fortress in the province of…” ’ Talbot hesitates over the word ‘ “… of Shimabara and made preparations to defend themselves. The head of the Dutch…” ’ Talbot falters again ‘ “… Koekebacker, himself went to the location and in fourteen days treated the beleaguered Christians to four hundred and twenty-six rough cannon salvoes both from land and sea.” ’
‘I knew as how the Dutch’re niggardly bastards,’ Rafferty tweaks Penhaligon’s nasal hair with his surgeon’s scissors, ‘but that they’d slaughter Christians for trading rights nigh on beggars belief, Captain. Why not sell your old mum to a vivisectionist at the same time?’
‘They are Europe’s most unprincipled race. Mr Talbot?’
‘Aye, sir: “This assistance resulted neither in surrender nor complete defeat, but broke the strength of the besieged. And because the Japanese had the pleasure to order it, the Dutch factor stripped the vessel of a further six cannons – regardless of the fact that she still had to navigate dangerous seas – so the Japanese might carry out their cruel designs…” One wonders whether these cannons could be those same toys adorning the bay’s gun placements, sir?’
‘Possibly so, Mr Talbot. Possibly so.’
Rafferty rubs Pears soap around the Captain’s cheekbone.
Major Cutlip enters. ‘The new guard-boat is approaching no closer than the old, Captain, and there’s no sign of de Zoet. Their flag on Dejima is still flying, cocky as a thumbed nose.’
‘We shall chop off that thumb,’ promises Penhaligon, ‘and slice that nose.’
‘They’re evacuating Dejima, too, carting away what can be carted.’
Then they have made their decision, he thinks. ‘The hour, Mr Talbot?’
‘The hour, sir… a sliver after half past ten, Captain.’
‘Lieutenant Wren, tell Mr Waldron that unless we hear from shore-’
A loud commotion in Dutch breaks out in the passageway.
‘Not without,’ Banes or Panes is shouting, ‘the Captain’s say-so!’
Fischer’s voice shouts a line of angry Dutch ending in ‘Envoy!’
‘The Hanoverian lads may have told him,’ muses Cutlip, ‘what’s afoot.’
‘Shall I fetch Lieutenant Hovell, sir?’ asks Talbot. ‘Or find Smeyers?’
‘If the Japanese refuse our overtures, what need have we of Dutch?’
Fischer’s voice reaches them: ‘Captain Penhaligon! We talk! Captain!’
‘Sauerkraut may stave off scurvy,’ says the Captain, ‘but a sour Kraut-’
Rafferty chuckles noxious fumes through his nose.
‘- is more a hindrance than help. Tell him I’m busy, Major. If he doesn’t understand “busy”, then make him understand.’
At five minutes to noon, bedecked in his dress coat with gold braiding and tricorn hat, Penhaligon addresses the company on the spar deck. ‘As in War, men, events move quickly in foreign parts. This morning shall see an engagement. There’s no call for a grand Eve of Battle speech, men. I foresee a short, noisy, one-sided affair. Yesterday we extended to the Japanese the hand of friendship. They spat at it. Ungallant? Yes. Unwise? I think so. Punishable under the laws of civilised nations? Alas, no. No, this morning’s business is to punish the Dutch -’ a ragged cheer comes from some of the older men ‘- that band of castaways, to whom we offered work and free passage. They responded with an insolence no Englishman can overlook.’
Sheets of drizzle tumble through the air down the mountains.
‘Were we anchored off Hispaniola or the Malabar coast, we would reward the Dutch by seizing compensation and naming this deep-water bay King George Harbour. The Dutch reckon that I shan’t hazard the best crew of my career by raiding Dejima at one o’clock just to yield it by five o’clock, and to this extent they are right: Japan has more warriors, ultimately, than the Phoebus has balls of shot.’
One of the two guard-boats is sculling back towards Nagasaki.
Row as fast as you might, the Captain tells it, you’ll not outrun my Phoebus.
‘But by reducing Dejima to rubble, we reduce the myth of Dutch potency to rubble. Once the dust is settled, and lessons drawn, a future British mission to Nagasaki, perhaps as soon as next year, shall not be rebuffed so brusquely again.’
‘If, Captain,’ asks Major Cutlip, ‘the natives attempt to board us?’
‘Fire warning shots, but should these be ignored, you may demonstrate the power and precision of British rifles. Kill as few as possible.’
‘Sir,’ Gunner Waldron raises his hand, ‘it’s likely some shots’ll overshoot.’
‘Our target is Dejima, but should any shots, by accident, fall on Nagasaki-’
Penhaligon senses Hovell at his side, bristling with disapproval.
‘- then the Japanese will choose allies more prudently. So let’s give this despotic backwater a taste of the coming century.’ Amongst the faces in the rigging Penhaligon sees Hartlepool’s, looking down on him like a brown-skinned angel. ‘Show this pox-blasted pagan port what ruin a British dog of War can inflict upon an enemy when its righteous ire is roused!’
Nearly three hundred men gaze at their captain with fierce respect.
He glances at Hovell, but Hovell is looking towards Nagasaki.
‘Gun-crews to your posts! Take us in, Mr Wetz, if you please.’
Twenty men turn the windlass; the cable groans; the anchor rises.
Wetz shouts orders at the ratings as they swarm up the shrouds.
‘A well-run ship’, Captain Golding used to say, ‘is a floating opera…’
The spritsails and jibsails drop open: the jib-boom enjoys the stretch.
‘… whose Director is the Captain yet whose Conductor is the Sailing Master.’
Down come the foremast and main courses; now the topsails…
The Phoebus’s bones tauten and her joints creak as the strain is taken.
Wetz works the wheel until the Phoebus is set to port tack.
Ledbetter, the well-named leadsman, plumbs the depth, clinging to the clewline.
Halfway to the dripping sky, men straddle the topgallant yards…
The prow describes an arc of one hundred and forty degrees…
… and with a tight lurch, the frigate veers towards Nagasaki.
A smoke-dried Dane makes a Finn’s Cock of a tangled Vang.
‘Might you excuse me for a moment, sir?’ Hovell indicates the Dane.
‘Go,’ says Penhaligon. His curtness signifies, And don’t hurry back.
‘In fact,’ he tells Wren, ‘let us take in the view from the prow.’
‘An excellent idea, sir,’ agrees the Second Lieutenant.
Penhaligon proceeds at a gouty hobble as far as the foremast shrouds. Cutlip and a dozen marines watch the remaining guard-boat, just a hundred yards dead ahead: a meagre twenty-footer with a small deck-house, clumsier-looking than a dhow. Its half-dozen swordsmen and two inspectors appear to be arguing about the correct response.
‘Stand your ground, pretties,’ murmurs Wren. ‘We’ll slice you in two.’
‘A gentle peppering,’ suggests Cutlip, ‘might clarify their senses, sir.’
‘Agreed, but,’ Penhaligon addresses the marines, ‘don’t kill them, men.’
‘Aye, sir,’ reply the marines, as they prepare their rifles.
Cutlip waits until the gap is closed to fifty yards. ‘Fire, lads!’
Splinters fly off the guard-boat’s stanchion; the sea shatters into spray.
One inspector crouches; his colleague dives into the deck-house. Two oarsmen jump to their positions and haul the boat out of the Phoebus’s path – and not before time. The prow affords a fine view of the soldiers: they stare up at the Europeans, unflinching and unafraid, but make no move to attack with arrows or spears or to give chase. Their boat lists clumsily in the Phoebus’s wake, and is lost astern in little time.
‘Steady-handed work, men,’ Penhaligon compliments the marines.
‘Load your next round, boys,’ says Cutlip. ‘Mind the rain doesn’t dampen your powder.’
Nagasaki, spilling down the mountainside, is growing closer.
The Phoebus’s bowsprit points eight or ten degrees east of Dejima: the Union Jack flies stiff as a board from the jackstaff.
Hovell rejoins the Captain’s intimates without a word.
Penhaligon glimpses a wretched hamlet shat out by a muddy creek.
‘You seem pensive, Lieutenant Hovell,’ says Wren. ‘Upset stomach?’
‘Your concern, Lieutenant Wren,’ Hovell stares ahead, ‘is un-warranted.’
Spring-heeled Malouf shimmies down the fish-davit. ‘About a hundred native troops are assembled, sir, in a plaza just ashore of Dejima.’
‘But no boats putting out to meet us?’
‘Not a one so far, Captain: Clovelly’s watching from the fore-top. The factory appears to be abandoned – even the trees have legged it.’
‘Excellent. I desire the Dutchmen to be seen to be cowards. Back aloft with you, Mr Malouf.’
Ledbetter’s soundings, relayed to Wetz, remain comfortable.
The drizzle is heavier, but the wind stays pushy and brisk.
After two or three terse minutes, Dejima’s urgent bell can be heard ringing.
Gunner Waldron shouts in the gun deck below: ‘Open starboard hatches, men!’
The gun-port hatches crack like bones against the bows.
‘Sir.’ Talbot has his telescope. ‘Two Europeans on the Watchtower.’
‘Oh?’ The Captain finds the pair through his own telescope and eight hundred yards of rainy air. The thinner of the two wears a wide-brimmed hat like a Spanish brigand’s. The other is bulkier, and appears to wave at the Phoebus with a stick as he leans on the railing. A monkey sits on the corner post. ‘Mr Talbot, rouse me out Daniel Snitker.’
‘They fancy,’ mocks Wren, ‘we shan’t fire so long as they stand there.’
‘Dejima is their ship,’ says Hovell. ‘They are on their quarterdeck.’
‘They’ll scurry away,’ predicts Cutlip, ‘when they know we’re in earnest.’
The Phoebus is seven hundred yards shy of the eastern bend of the bay. Wetz bellows, ‘Hard a-port!’ and the frigate rotates through eighty degrees, bringing her starboard bow running parallel to the shorefront, two rifle-shots away. They pass a rectangular compound of warehouses: on the roofs, huddling under umbrellas and straw cloaks, are men dressed like the Chinese merchants Penhaligon encountered at Macao.
‘Fischer spoke of a Chinese Dejima,’ recalls Wren. ‘That must be it.’
Gunner Waldron appears. ‘The starboard guns are to be primed now, sir?’
‘All twelve to fire in three or four minutes, Mr Waldron. Go to it.’
‘Aye, sir!’ Below, he shouts at his men, ‘Feed the fat boys!’
Talbot arrives with Snitker, who is unsure what attitude to strike.
‘Mr Hovell, lend Snitker your telescope. Bid him identify the men on the Watchtower.’ Snitker’s response, when it comes, contains the name de Zoet. ‘He says that the one with the stick is Marinus the physician, the one in the grotesque hat is Jacob de Zoet. The monkey is named William Pitt.’ Snitker, unprompted, says a few sentences to Hovell.
Penhaligon estimates the distance to be five hundred yards.
Hovell continues: ‘Mr Snitker asked me to say, Captain, that had you chosen him as your envoy, the outcome would have been very different, but that had he known you were a Vandal bent on destruction, he’d never have guided you into these waters.’
How useful, Hovell, thinks Penhaligon, to have Snitker utter what you dare not. ‘Ask Snitker how the Japanese would treat him were he to be thrown overboard here.’
Hovell translates, and Snitker withdraws like a whipped dog.
Penhaligon turns his attention back to the Dutchmen on the Watchtower.
At closer range Marinus, the scholar-physician, looks lumpen and uncouth.
De Zoet, by contrast, is younger and better turned out than expected.
Let’s pit your Dutch courage, Penhaligon thinks, against English munitions.
Waldron’s torso appears above the hatch. ‘Ready for your word, Captain.’
The Oriental rain is fine as lace on the sailors’ leathern faces.
‘Give it them, Mr Waldron, straight in the teeth…’
‘Aye, sir.’ Waldron announces the order below: ‘Starboard crews, fire!’
Major Cutlip, at his side, hums, ‘Three blind mice, three blind mice…’
Out of the gun-ports, over the bulwarks, fly the flintmen’s cries of Clear!
The Captain watches the Dutchmen staring down the mouths of his guns.
Lapwings fly over stone water: their wingtips kiss, drip and ripple.
Work for a soldier or madman, Penhaligon thinks, not a doctor and shopkeeper.
The first of the guns erupts with a skull-cracking ferocity; Penhaligon’s middle-aged heart pulsates as it did in his first fight with an American privateer a quarter-century ago; eleven guns follow, over seven or eight seconds.
One warehouse collapses; the seaward wall is smashed in two places; roof-tiles spray upwards and, most gratifyingly, the Captain is confident as he squints through the smoke and destruction, de Zoet and Marinus are scuttled to Earth with their tails firmly between their Netherlander shanks…
… she chopped off their tails, Cutlip hums, with a carving knife…
The wind blows the gun-smoke back over the deck, bathing the officers.
Talbot sees them first: ‘They’re still on the Watchtower, sir.’
Penhaligon hurries over to the waist-hatch, his foot howling for mercy and his stick striking the deck: damn you, damn you, damn you…
The lieutenants follow like nervous Spaniels, expecting him to topple.
‘Ready the guns for a second round,’ he bellows down the hatch to Waldron. ‘Ten guineas for the gun-crew who cut down the Watchtower!’
Waldron’s voice shouts back, ‘Aye aye, sir! You heard the Captain, crews!’
Furious, Penhaligon drags himself back to the quarterdeck; his officers follow.
‘Hold her steady, Mr Wetz,’ he tells the Sailing Master.
Wetz is engaged in an instinctive algebraic sum, involving wind speed, sail yardage and rudder angle. ‘Holding her steady, Captain.’
‘Captain,’ Cutlip is speaking, ‘at a hundred and twenty yards my lads could embroider that brassy duo with our Brown Besses.’
Tristram, the Captain was told by HMS Blenheim’s Captain Frederick, was minced by chain shot on the quarterdeck: he could have thrown himself against the deck and possibly lived, like his lesser warrant officers, but not Tristram, who never blinked at danger…
‘I’d not risk grounding us, Major. The day would not have a happy ending.’
Remember Charlie’s bulldog, Penhaligon sighs, and the cricket bat?
‘The smoke,’ the Captain blinks and mutters, ‘is wringing out my eyes.’
Cowards, like crows, he believes, consume the courageous dead.
‘This all brings to mind,’ Wren tells Talbot and the midshipmen, ‘my Mauritius campaign aboard the Swiftsure: three French frigates had the legs of us and, like a pack of baying fox-hounds…’
‘Sir,’ Hovell says quietly, ‘might I offer you my cape? The rain…’
Penhaligon chooses to bridle. ‘Am I in my dotage already, Lieutenant?’
Robert Hovell retreats into Lieutenant Hovell. ‘No offence meant, sir.’
Wetz shouts; topmen reply; ropes strain; blocks squeak; rain glistens.
A tall, thin warehouse on Dejima belatedly collapses with a shriek and clatter.
‘… so finding myself stranded on the enemy ship,’ Wren is saying, ‘in the dusk, smoke and pell-mell, I pulled down my cap, took a lantern, followed a monkey down to the powder locker – ’twas black as night – slipped into the adjacent cordage locker where I played the fire-bug…’
Waldron reappears. ‘Sir, the guns’re primed for the second round.’
Strike the pose of naval officers, Penhaligon watches de Zoet and Marinus…
… then you may die as naval officers. ‘Ten guineas, remember, Mr Waldron.’
Waldron disappears. His bedlamite’s yell orders, ‘Let ’em have it, men!’
Small cogs of time meet and mesh. The flintmen cry, ‘Clear!’
Explosions hurl the shots in beautiful, terrible, screaming arcs…
… into a warehouse roof; a wall; and one ball passes within a yard of de Zoet and Marinus. They drop to the platform, but all the other balls fly over Dejima…
Damp smoke obscures the view; the wind lifts the damp smoke.
A noise comes like a shrieking trombone, or a great tree, falling…
… it comes from behind Dejima: an appalling crash of timber and masonry.
De Zoet helps Marinus stand; his stick is gone; they look landwards.
Courage in a vilified enemy, Penhaligon thinks, is a distasteful discovery.
‘Nobody can accuse you, sir,’ says Wren, ‘of failing to give due warning.’
Power is a man’s means, thinks the Captain, of composing the future…
‘These medieval Asiatic pygmies,’ Cutlip assures him, ‘shan’t forget today.’
… but the composition, he removes his hat, has a way of composing itself.
Unearthly screaming boils up through the hatches from the gun deck.
Penhaligon guesses, Someone caught by the recoil, with nauseous certainty.
Hovell hurries to investigate, just as Waldron’s head emerges.
The Gunner’s eyes bear a hideous after-image. ‘ ’Nother round, sir?’
John Penhaligon asks, ‘Who was hit, Mr Waldron?’
‘Michael Tozer – the breech-rope snapped clean through, sir, and…’
Stabbed sobs and rasped screams sound in the background.
‘Is his leg to come off, do you suppose?’
‘It’s already off, sir, aye. Poor bastard’s bein’ taken to Mr Nash now.’
‘Sir-’
Hovell, Penhaligon knows, wants permission to go with Tozer.
‘Go, Lieutenant. Might I have the loan of your cape, after all?’
‘Aye, sir.’ Robert Hovell gives his captain his cape and goes below.
A midshipman helps him into the garment: it has Hovell’s scent.
The Captain turns to the Watchtower, drunk with venom.
The Watchtower still stands, as do the men; and the Dutch flag flies.
‘Demonstrate our carronades. Four crews, Mr Waldron.’
The midshipmen look at one another. Major Cutlip hisses with pleasure.
Malouf asks Talbot in a low voice: ‘Won’t carronades lack kick, sir?’
Penhaligon replies: ‘They are built for closer-range smashing, yes, but…’
De Zoet, he sees, is watching him through his telescope.
The Captain announces, ‘I want that damned Dutch flag torn to rags.’
A house on the hill spews oily smoke in the wet and falling air.
The Captain thinks, I want those damned Dutchmen torn to rags.
The gun-crews clamber up from below, grim-faced from Tozer’s accident. They remove panels from the quarterdeck’s bulwarks and manoeuvre the short-bore wheeled carronades into position.
Penhaligon orders, ‘Load up with chain-shot, Mr Waldron.’
‘If we’re aiming at the flag, sir, then…’ Gunner Waldron indicates the Watchtower, just five yards below the top of the flagpole.
‘Four cones of whistling, spinning, jagged, broken chains,’ Major Cutlip shines like an aroused lecher, ‘and jagged links of metal will wipe the smiles off their Netherland faces…’
‘… and their faces off their heads,’ adds Wren, ‘and their heads off their bodies.’
The powder-monkeys appear from the hatch with their bags of explosives.
The Captain recognises Moff the Penzance urchin. Moff is pale and pink.
Gunpowder is packed into the short, fat muzzle by a bung of rags.
Chain-shot rattles from rusted scuttles tipped inside the carronades’ barrels.
‘Aim at the flag, crews,’ Waldron is saying. ‘Not so high, Hal Yeovil.’
Penhaligon’s right leg is become a pole of scalding pain.
My gout is winning, Penhaligon knows. I shall be bedbound within the hour.
Dr Marinus appears to be remonstrating with his countryman.
But de Zoet, the Captain consoles himself, shall be dead within the minute.
‘Double-tie those breech ropes,’ orders Waldron. ‘You saw why below.’
Might Hovell be right? the Captain wonders. Has my pain been thinking for me these last three days?
‘Carronades ready to fire, sir,’ Waldron is saying, ‘at your word.’
The Captain fills his lungs to pass the death sentence on the two Dutchmen.
They know. Marinus grips the rail, looking away, flinching, but staying put.
De Zoet removes his hat; his hair is as copper, untameable, bedraggled…
… and Penhaligon sees Tristram, his beautiful, one-and-only red-haired son, waiting for death…
Noon on the 20th October, 1800
William Pitt snorts at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Jacob de Zoet keeps his telescope trained on the Phoebus: the frigate is a thousand yards out, tacking adroitly against the wet north-westerly on a course to bring her past the Chinese factory – some inhabitants are sitting on their roofs to watch the spectacle – and alongside Dejima.
‘So Arie Grote finally gave you his alleged Boa Constrictor hat?’
‘I ordered all hands to the Magistracy, Doctor. Even yours.’
‘Stay here, Domburger, and you’ll be needing a physician.’
The frigate opens her gun-ports, clack, clack, clack, like hammers on nails.
‘Or else,’ Marinus blows his nose, ‘a gravedigger. The rain is in for the day. Look,’ he rustles something, ‘Kobayashi sends you a raincoat.’
Jacob lowers his telescope. ‘Did its previous owner die of pox?’
‘A little kindness for a dead enemy, so your ghost won’t haunt him.’
Jacob puts the straw raincoat on his shoulders. ‘Where’s Eelattu?’
‘Where all sane men are, at our Magistracy Quarters.’
‘Was your harpsichord transported without mishap?’
‘Harpsichord and pharmacopoeia alike; come and join them.’
Filaments of rain brush Jacob’s face. ‘Dejima is my station.’
‘If you’re supposing the English shan’t fire because a jumped-up clerk-’
‘I suppose nothing of the sort, Doctor, but-’ He notices twenty or more scarlet-coated marines climbing up the shrouds. ‘They’re to repel boarders… probably. To take pot-shots, she’d have to come within… a hundred and twenty yards. There’d be too much risk of grounding the ship in waters hostile to British hulls.’
‘I’d rather a swarm of musket-balls than a volley of broadsides.’
Grant me courage, Jacob prays. ‘My life is in the hands of God.’
‘Oh, the grief,’ Marinus heaves, ‘those few, pious words can bring about.’
‘Repair to the Magistracy, then, so you won’t have to suffer them.’
Marinus leans on the railing. ‘Young Oost was thinking you must have some secret defence up your sleeve, something to reverse our reverses.’
‘My defence,’ Jacob removes his Psalter from his breast pocket, ‘is my faith.’
In the shelter of his greatcoat, Marinus examines the old, thick volume and fingers the musket ball, fast in its crater. ‘Whose heart was this boring into?’
‘My great-grandfather’s, but it’s been in my family since Calvin’s day.’
Marinus reads the title page. ‘Psalms? Domburger, you are a two-legged cabinet of wonders! How did you smuggle ashore this rattle-bag of uneven translations from the Aramaic?’
‘Ogawa Uzaemon turned a blind eye at a crucial moment.’
‘ “It is he that giveth salvation unto kings:” ’ reads Marinus, ‘ “who delivereth David his servant from the hurtful sword.” ’
The wind carries the sound of orders being relayed about the Phoebus.
In Edo Square, an officer shouts at his men; a chorus replies.
A few yards through the air behind them, the Dutch flag flaps and rustles.
‘That tricoloured tablecloth wouldn’t die for you, Domburger.’
The Phoebus bears down: she is sleek, beautiful and malign.
‘Nobody ever died for a flag, only what the flag symbolises.’
‘I’m agog to learn what you are risking your life for.’ Marinus thrusts his hands into his eccentric greatcoat. ‘It can’t just be because the English Captain dubbed you a “shopkeeper”.’
‘For all we know, that flag is the last Dutch flag in the world.’
‘For all we know, it is. But it still wouldn’t die for you.’
‘He…’ Jacob notices the English Captain watching them through his telescope ‘… believes we Dutch are cowards. But starting with Spain, every power in our rowdy neighbourhood has tried to extinguish our nation. Every power failed. Not even the North Sea has dislodged us from our muddy fringe of the continent, and why?’
‘Here’s why, Domburger: because you have nowhere else to go!’
‘It’s because we are stubborn sons-of-guns, Doctor.’
‘Would your uncle want you to demonstrate Dutch manliness by dying in a crush of roof-tiles and masonry?’
‘My uncle would quote Luther: “Whilst friends show us what we can do, it is our enemies who show us what we must.” Jacob distracts himself by studying the ship’s figurehead of the frigate – a mere six hundred yards away now – through his telescope. Its carver endowed Phoebus with a diabolic determination. ‘Doctor, you must go now.’
‘But consider Dejima post-de Zoet! We’d be reduced to Chief Ouwehand and Deputy Grote. Lend me your telescope.’
‘Grote is our best merchant: he could sell sheep-shit to shepherds.’
William Pitt snorts at the Phoebus with a very human defiance.
Jacob takes off Kobayashi’s straw coat and puts it on the ape.
‘Please, Doctor.’ Rain wets wooden boards. ‘Don’t add to my debt of guilt.’
Gulls vacate the roof-ridge of the boarded-up Interpreters’ Guild.
‘You’re absolved! I’m indestructible, like a serial Wandering Jew. I’ll wake up tomorrow – after a few months – and start all over again. Behold: Daniel Snitker is on the quarterdeck. It’s his hominid walk that betrays him…’
Jacob’s fingers touch his kinked nose. Was it only last year?
The Phoebus’s Master shouts orders. Sailors on the yards furl the topsails…
… and the warship drifts to a dead halt, three hundred yards out.
Jacob’s fear is the size of a new internal organ, between his heart and his liver.
A gang of the top-men cup their mouths and shout at the Acting-Chief, ‘Scrub, little Dutch boy, scrub scrub scrub!’ and wave the reverse of their index and middle fingers.
‘Why…’ Jacob’s voice is taut and high ‘… why do the English do that?’
‘I believe it goes back to archers at the Battle of Agincourt.’
A cannon is run through the aft-most port; then another; then all twelve.
Lapwings fly low over the stony water; their wingtips drip with seawater.
‘They’re going to do it.’ Jacob’s voice is not his own. ‘Marinus! Go!’
‘As a matter of fact, Piet Baert told me that one winter – near Palermo, I believe – Grote actually did sell sheep-shit to shepherds.’
Jacob sees the English Captain open his mouth and bellow…
‘Fire!’ Jacob’s eyes clench tight: he puts his hand on the Psalter.
Rain baptises each second until the cannons explode.
Staccato thunder bludgeoned Jacob’s senses. The sky swung sideways. One tardy cannon fired after the others. He has no memory of throwing himself on to the Watchtower’s decking, but here is where he finds himself. He checks his limbs. They are still there. His knuckles are grazed and, mysteriously, his left testicle is aching, but he is otherwise unharmed.
All the dogs are barking and the crows are crazed.
Marinus is leaning on the railing. ‘Warehouse Number Six needs re-building; there’s a big hole in the Sea Wall behind the Guild; Constable Kosugi shall probably -’ from Sea Wall Lane comes an almighty sigh and crash ‘- shall certainly be lodging elsewhere tonight, and I pissed my thigh from fear. Our glorious flag, as you see, is unhurt. Half of their shots flew over us…’ the doctor looks landwards ‘… and caused damage ashore. Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames.’
The frigate’s smoke-shroud is being torn by the breeze.
Jacob stands up and tries to breathe normally. ‘Where’s William Pitt?’
‘Ran off: one Macaca fuscata is cleverer than two Homines sapientes.’
‘I didn’t know you were a veteran of battle, Doctor.’
Marinus blows out a mouthful of air. ‘Did close-range artillery knock any sense into you, or are we staying?’
I can’t abandon Dejima, Jacob knows, and I am terrified of dying.
‘Staying, then.’ Marinus clicks his tongue. ‘We have a short interval before the British resume their performance.’
Ryûgaji Temple intones the Hour of the Horse, as on any other day.
Jacob watches the Land-Gate. A few uncertain guards venture out.
A group run from Edo Square, over Holland Bridge.
He remembers Orito being led away into the palanquin.
He wonders how she is surviving and prays a wordless prayer.
Ogawa’s dogwood scroll-tube is snug in his jacket pocket.
If I am killed, let it be found and read by somebody in authority…
Some of the Chinese merchants are pointing and waving from their roofs.
Activity in the Phoebus’s gun-ports promises another round.
If I don’t keep talking, Jacob realises, I shall crack like a dropped dish.
‘I know what you don’t believe in, Doctor: what do you believe?’
‘Oh, Descartes’ methodology, Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas, the efficacy of Jesuits’ bark… So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove…’
Clouds spill over the mountain ridges; rain drips off Arie Grote’s hat.
‘Northern Europe is a place of cold light and clear lines…’ Jacob knows he is spouting nonsense but cannot stop ‘… and so is Protestantism. The Mediterranean world is indomitable sunshine and impenetrable shade. So is Catholicism. Then this…’ Jacob sweeps his hand inland ‘… this… numinous… Orient… its bells, its dragons, its millions… Here, notions of transmigrations, of karma, which are heresies at home, possess a – a-’ The Dutchman sneezes.
‘Bless you.’ Marinus splashes rainwater on his face. ‘A plausibility?’
Jacob sneezes again. ‘I am making little sense.’
‘One may make most sense of all when one makes no sense at all.’
Up a slope of crowded roofs, smoke haemorrhages from a cleft house.
Jacob tries to find the House of Wistaria, but Nagasaki is a labyrinth. ‘Do believers in karma, Doctor, believe that one’s… one’s unintentional sins come back to haunt one not in the next life but within this one, within a single lifetime?’
‘Whatever your putative crime, Domburger,’ Marinus produces an apple for them each, ‘I doubt it can be so bad that our current situation is a measured and justified punishment.’ He puts his apple to his mouth-
The artillery blast this time knocks both men over.
Jacob comes to, curled up like a boy under blankets in a haunted room.
Fragments of tile smash on the ground. I lost my apple, he thinks.
‘By Christ, Mahomet and Fhu Tsi Weh,’ says Marinus, ‘that was close.’
I survived twice, thinks Jacob, but troubles come in threes.
The Dutchmen help one another up like a pair of invalids.
The Land-Gate’s doors are blown away and the tidy ranks and files of guards in Edo Square are no longer tidy. Two shots tore through the soldiers in two different places: like marbles, Jacob recalls a boyhood game, through wooden men.
Five or six or seven flesh-and-blood men are down, twitching and screaming.
There is chaos and shouting and running and places of bright red.
More fruits of your principles, mocks an inner voice, President de Zoet.
The Phoebus’s sailors have stopped taunting them now.
‘Look below.’ The doctor points to the roof underneath. A shot passed first through one side, then out through the other. Half the stairs going down to Flag Square were knocked away. As they watch, the roof ridge collapses into the upper room. ‘Poor Fischer,’ remarks Marinus. ‘His new friends have broken all his toys. Look, Domburger, you’ve made your stand and there’s no dishonour in-’
Timber sings and the Watchtower stairs crash to the ground.
‘Well,’ says Marinus, ‘we could jump into Fischer’s room… possibly…’
Damn me, Jacob trains his telescope on Penhaligon, if I run now.
He sees gunners up on the quarterdeck. ‘Doctor, the carronades…’
He sees Penhaligon training his telescope on him.
Damn you, watch and learn, Jacob thinks, about Dutch shopkeepers.
One of the English officers appears to be remonstrating with the Captain.
The Captain ignores him. Barrels are lifted to the mouths of the ship’s deadliest close-range guns. ‘Chain-shot, Doctor,’ says Jacob. ‘Hazard that leap.’
He lowers his telescope: there is no gain in looking further.
Marinus throws his apple at the Phoebus. ‘Cras Ingens Iterabimus Aequor.’
Jacob imagines the dense cones of shrapnel hurtling towards them…
… about forty feet wide by the time they reach the platform.
The shrapnel will tear through his clothes, skin and viscera and out again…
Don’t let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.
He tries to map, backwards, the tortuous paths that led to this present…
Vorstenbosch, Zwaardecroone, Anna’s father, Anna’s kiss, Napoleon…
‘You have no objection if I say the Twenty-third Psalm, Doctor?’
‘Provided you have no objection if I join you, Jacob.’
Side by side, they grip the platform’s rail in the slippery rain.
The pastor’s son removes Grote’s hat to address his Creator.
‘ “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” ’
Marinus’s voice is a seasoned cello’s; Jacob’s is shaking.
‘ “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me…” ’
Jacob closes his eyes and imagines his uncle’s church.
‘ “… in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” ’
Geertje is at his side. Jacob wishes she had met Orito…
‘ “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” ’
… and Jacob still has the scroll, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry…
‘ “I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff…” ’
Jacob waits for the explosion and the swarm and the tearing.
‘ “… they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me…” ’
Jacob waits for the explosion and the swarm and the tearing.
‘ “… in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil…” ’
Marinus’s voice has fallen away: his memory must have failed him.
‘ “… my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me…” ’
Jacob hears Marinus shake with quiet laughter.
He opens his eyes to see the Phoebus tacking away.
Her mainsails are falling, catching the wet wind and billowing…
Jacob sleeps fitfully in Chief van Cleef’s bed. An habitual maker of lists, he lists the reasons for his fitful sleep: first, the fleas in Chief van Cleef’s bed; second, Baert’s celebratory ‘Dejima Gin’ so-named because gin is the only drink it doesn’t taste of; third, the oysters sent from Magistrate Shiroyama; fourth, Con Twomey’s ruinous inventory of damage inflicted to the Dutch-owned properties; fifth, tomorrow’s meetings with Shiroyama and Magistracy officials; and sixth, his mental record of what History shall call the Phoebus Incident, and its ledger of outcomes. In the profit column, the English failed to extract one clove from the Dutch or crystal of camphor from the Japanese. Any Anglo-Japanese accord shall be unthinkable for two or three generations. In the debit column, the factory’s complement is now reduced to eight Europeans and a handful of slaves, a roster too lean even to be called ‘skeletal’ and unless a ship arrives next June – unlikely if Java is in British hands and the VOC is no longer extant – Dejima must rely on loans from the Japanese to meet its running costs. How welcome a guest the ‘Ancient Ally’ will be when reduced to rags remains to be seen, especially if the Japanese view the Dutch as partly responsible for conjuring up the Phoebus. Interpreter Hori brought news of damage ashore: six soldiers dead in Edo Square, and another six injured; and several townspeople burnt in a fire begun when a ball struck a kitchen in Shinmachi Ward. The political consequences, he intimated, were even farther-reaching.
I never heard, Jacob thinks, of a twenty-six-year-old Chief Resident…
… or, he tosses and turns, of a factory so beset by crises as Dejima.
He misses Tall House, but the Chief must sleep near the safe-boxes.
Early the following morning, Jacob is met at the Magistracy by Interpreter Goto and Chamberlain Tomine. Tomine apologises for asking Jacob to perform a distasteful service before meeting the Magistrate: the body of a foreign sailor was retrieved yesterday evening by a fishing-boat, near the Papenburg Rock. Would Chief de Zoet examine the corpse and assess the likelihood of it being from the Phoebus?
Jacob is not afraid of corpses, having helped his uncle at every funeral in Domburg.
The chamberlain leads him across a courtyard to an empty storehouse.
He says a word unknown to Jacob; Goto says, ‘Place dead body wait.’
A mortuary, Jacob realises. Goto asks Jacob to teach him the word.
Outside, an elderly Buddhist priest is waiting with a pail of water.
‘To make pure,’ Goto explains, ‘when leave… “mortuary”.’
They enter. There is one small window and the smell of death.
The single inmate is a young, wiry-pigtailed mestizo sailor on a pallet.
He wears nothing but a sailor’s duck trousers and a lizard tattoo.
A cold, strong draught is sucked from the window through the open door.
It tousles the boy’s hair, accentuating his motionlessness.
Alive, the boy’s slack, grey skin must have been bruised gold.
‘Were any items,’ Jacob asks in Japanese, ‘found in his possession?’
The chamberlain produces a tray from a shelf; on it is a British farthing.
‘georgivs iii rex’ reads the obverse; Britannia sits on the reverse.
‘I am in no doubt,’ says Jacob, ‘he was a sailor from the Phoebus.’
‘Sa,’ responds Chamberlain Tomine. ‘But is he an Englishman?’
Only his mother and his Creator could answer, Jacob thinks. He tells Goto, ‘Please inform Tomine-sama that his father was probably European. His mother was probably Negro. Such is my best guess.’
The chamberlain is still not satisfied. ‘But is he English?’
Jacob exchanges a look with Goto: interpreters often have to provide both the answer and the tools to understand it. ‘If I had a son with a Japanese woman,’ Jacob asks Tomine, ‘would he be Dutch or Japanese?’
Involuntarily, Tomine winces at the tasteless question. ‘A half.’
Then so, says Jacob’s gesture over the corpse, is he…
‘But,’ the chamberlain persists, ‘does Chief de Zoet say he is English?’
Trilling of doves from under the eaves ruffles the still morning.
Jacob misses Ogawa. He asks Goto in Dutch: ‘What don’t I understand?’
‘If foreigner is English,’ replies the interpreter, ‘body shall throw in ditch.’
Thank you, thinks Jacob. ‘Otherwise he rests in the foreigners’ cemetery?’
The intelligent Goto nods. ‘Chief de Zoet is correct.’
‘Chamberlain.’ Jacob addresses Tomine. ‘This youth is not English. His skin is too dark. It is my wish that he is buried’ – like a Christian – ‘in the cemetery of Mount Inasa. Please place the coin in his grave.’
Halfway down the corridor to the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum is a little-visited courtyard where a maple stands over a small pond. Jacob and Goto are asked to wait on the veranda while Chamberlain Tomine consults with Magistrate Shiroyama prior to their audience.
Fallen red leaves drift over a smeared sun held in dark water.
‘Congratulations,’ says a voice in Dutch, ‘on promotion, Chief de Zoet.’
Somehow inevitable. Jacob turns to Ogawa’s killer and Orito’s gaoler. ‘Good morning, Lord Abbot,’ he replies in Dutch, feeling the dogwood scroll-tube pressing against his ribs. A long thin ridge must be visible down his left side.
Enomoto tells Goto, ‘Some paintings in the vestibule would interest you.’
‘Lord Abbot,’ Goto bows, ‘the rules of the Interpreters’ Guild forbid-’
‘You are forgetting who I am. I forgive only once.’
Goto looks at Jacob; Jacob nods consent. He tries to turn a little to the left to hide the scroll-tube.
One of Enomoto’s silent servants accompanies Goto; another stays nearby.
‘Dutch Chief was brave against warship.’ Enomoto practises his Dutch. ‘News is travelling all over Japan, even now.’
Jacob can think only of the Twelve Creeds of the Order of Shiranui. When members of your Order die, Jacob wonders, are the Creeds not exposed as false commandments? Is your Goddess not proven to be lump of lifeless wood? Are all the Sisters’ misery and the drowned infants not shown to be vain?
Enomoto frowns, as if trying to catch a distant voice. ‘At first I saw you, in Hall of Sixty Mats, one year ago, I think…’
A slow white butterfly passes within inches of Jacob’s face.
‘… I think, Strange: he is foreigner, but there is affinity. You know?’
‘I remember that day,’ affirms Jacob, ‘but I felt no affinity at all.’
Enomoto smiles like an adult at a child’s harmless lie. ‘When Mr Grote say, “De Zoet sells mercury,” I think, There: affinity!’
A black-headed bird watches from the core of the flame-red tree.
‘So I buy mercury, but still, I think, Affinity still exist. Strange.’
Jacob wonders how Ogawa Uzaemon suffered before he died.
‘Then I hear, “Mr de Zoet propose to Aibagawa Orito.” I think, Ohooo!’
Jacob cannot hide his shock that Enomoto knew. The leaves on the water spin, very slowly. ‘How did you…’ and he thinks, I am confirming it now.
‘Hanzaburo look very stupid; this is why he very good spy…’
A heaviness presses down on Jacob’s shoulders. His back aches.
He imagines Hanzaburo ripping a page of Orito from his sketchbook…
… and that page, Jacob thinks, passing up a chain of prurient eyes.
‘What do you do to the Sisters at your Shrine? Why must you-’ Jacob stops himself from blurting out proof that he knows what Acolyte Jiritsu knew. ‘Why did you kidnap her, when a man of your position could choose anyone?’
‘She and I also, affinity. You, I, her. A pleasant triangle…’
There is a fourth corner, thinks Jacob, called Ogawa Uzaemon.
‘… but now she is content enough.’ Enomoto is speaking Japanese. ‘Her work in Nagasaki was important, but her mission on Shiranui is deeper. She serves Kyôga Domain. She serves Goddess. She serves my Order.’ He smiles pityingly at Jacob’s impotence. ‘So now I understand. Affinity was not mercury. Affinity was Orito.’
The white butterfly passes within inches of Enomoto’s face.
The Abbot’s hand makes a circular motion over the butterfly…
… and it drops, lifeless as a twist of paper, into the dark pool.
Chamberlain Tomine sees the Dutchman and the Abbot, and stops.
‘Our affinity is ended, Chief de Zoet. Enjoy a long, long life.’
Thin paper screens obscure the fine view of Nagasaki, lending the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum a mournful air like, Jacob thinks, a quiet chapel on a busy city street back home. The pinks and oranges of the flowers in the vase are bleached of half their vigour. Jacob and Goto kneel on the moss-green mat before the Magistrate. You have aged five years, thinks Jacob, in two days.
‘It is courteous of the Dutch Chief to visit at such a… a busy time.’
‘The Honourable Magistrate is equally busy, no doubt.’ The Dutchman instructs Goto to thank the Magistrate in suitably formal language for his support during the recent crisis.
Goto performs his job creditably: Jacob acquires the word for ‘crisis’.
‘Foreign ships,’ the Magistrate responds, ‘visited our waters before. Sooner or later, their guns would speak. The Phoebus was prophet and teacher, and next time,’ he inhales sharply, ‘the Shogun’s servants shall be better prepared. Your “pontoon bridge” is written in my record for Edo. But this time fortune did not favour me.’
Jacob’s starched collar scratches his neck.
‘I was watching you,’ says the Magistrate, ‘on the Watchtower, yesterday.’
‘Thank you for…’ Jacob is unsure how to respond ‘… for your concern.’
‘I thought of Phaeton with lightning and thunderbolts flying around.’
‘Luckily for me, the English do not aim as well as Zeus.’
Shiroyama opens his fan and closes it again. ‘Were you frightened?’
‘I would like to say, “No,” but truthfully… I was never more afraid.’
‘Yet when you could have run, you stayed at your post.’
Not after the second round, he thinks. There was no way down. ‘My uncle, who raised me, always scolded my-’ He asks Goto to translate the word ‘stubbornness’.
Outside, the bamboo winnows the breeze. The sound is ancient and sad.
Shiroyama’s eyes hover on the ridge of the scroll-tube in Jacob’s coat…
… but the Magistrate says, ‘My report to Edo must address a question.’
‘If I am able to answer it, Your Honour, I shall.’
‘Why did the English sail away before Dejima was destroyed?’
‘This same mystery troubled me all night long, Your Honour.’
‘You must have seen how they loaded the cannons on the quarterdeck.’
Jacob has Goto explain how cannons are for punching big holes in ships and walls, whereas carronades are for punching small holes through lots of men.
‘Then why did the English not kill their enemy’s chief with the “carronades”?’
‘Possibly the Captain wanted to limit damage to Nagasaki.’ Jacob shrugs. ‘Possibly it was an…’ He has Goto translate ‘Act of Mercy’.
A child’s voice can be heard, muffled by two or three rooms.
The Magistrate’s celebrated son, Jacob guesses, delivered by Orito.
‘Perhaps,’ Shiroyama examines the joints of his thumb, ‘your courage made your enemy ashamed.’
Jacob, recalling his four years of living with Londoners, doubts the suggestion but bows at the compliment. ‘Will Your Honour be travelling to Edo to submit your report?’
Pain flashes across Shiroyama’s face and Jacob wonders why. The Magistrate addresses his difficult-to-understand answer to Goto. ‘His Honour says…’ Goto hesitates ‘… Edo requires a – the word is a merchant’s word, “settle of accounts”?’
Jacob is being instructed to leave this deliberate vagueness alone.
He notices the Go board in its corner; he recognises the same game from his visit two days ago, just a few moves further on.
‘My opponent and I,’ says Shiroyama, ‘can rarely meet.’
Jacob makes a safe guess: ‘The Lord Abbot of Kyôga Domain?’
The Magistrate nods. ‘The Lord Abbot is a master of the game. He discerns his enemy’s weaknesses, and uses them to confound his enemy’s strengths.’ He considers the board ruefully. ‘I fear my position is without hope.’
‘My position on the Watchtower,’ says Jacob, ‘was also without hope.’
Chamberlain Tomine’s nod to Interpreter Goto indicates, It is time.
‘Your Honour.’ Nervously, Jacob produces the scroll from his inner jacket. ‘Humbly, I beg you to read this scroll when you are alone.’
Shiroyama frowns and looks at his chamberlain. ‘Precedent would instruct,’ Tomine tells Jacob, ‘all letters from Dutchmen to be translated by two members of the Interpreters’ Guild of Dejima, and then-’
‘A British warship sailed into Nagasaki and opened fire and what did precedent do about it?’ Shiroyama is irritated out of his melancholy. ‘But if this is a petition for more copper, or any other matter, then Chief de Zoet should know that my star in Edo is not on the rise…’
‘A sincere personal letter, Your Honour. Please forgive its poor Japanese.’
Jacob senses the lie deflate Tomine’s and Goto’s curiosity.
The innocuous-looking scroll-tube passes into the Magistrate’s hands.
The Ninth Day of the Ninth Month
Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers; heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etoliated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men’s wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.
Kawasemi holds up a white under-robe for Shiroyama. She is wearing her kimono decorated with blue Korean morning-glories. The wheel of seasons is broken, says the spring pattern this autumn day, and so am I.
Shiroyama inserts his fifty-year-old arms into the sleeves.
She ducks in front of him, tugging and smoothing the material.
Kawasemi now wraps the obi-sash above his waist.
She chose a rare green and white design: Green for life, white for death?
The expensively trained courtesan ties it in an expert figure-of-ten cross.
‘It always takes me ten times,’ he used to say, ‘to get the knot to stay.’
Kawasemi lifts the thigh-length haori jacket: he takes it and puts it on. The fine black silk is crisp as snow and heavy as air. Its sleeves are embroidered with his family’s crest.
Two rooms away he hears Naozumi’s twenty-month-old footsteps.
Kawasemi passes him his inrô box: it contains nothing, but without it he would feel unprepared. Shiroyama threads its cord through the netsuke toggle: she has chosen him a Buddha carved in hornbill.
Kawasemi’s steady hands pass his tantô dagger in its scabbard.
Would that I could die in your house, he thinks, where I was happiest…
He slides its scabbard through his obi-sash in the prescribed manner.
… but decorum must be seen to be observed.
‘Shush!’ says the maid in the next room. ‘Suss!’ laughs Naozumi.
A chubby hand slides the door open and the boy, who looks like Kawasemi when he smiles and like Shiroyama when he frowns, darts into the room, ahead of the mortified maid.
‘I beg Your Lordship’s pardon,’ she says, kneeling at the threshold.
‘Found you!’ sing-songs the toothy grinning toddler and trips over.
‘Finish packing,’ Kawasemi tells her maid. ‘I’ll summon you when it’s time.’
The maid bows and withdraws. Her eyes are red from crying.
The small human whirlwind stands, rubs his knee, and totters to his father.
‘Today is an important day,’ says the Magistrate of Nagasaki.
Naozumi half sings, half asks, ‘ “Ducky in the duck pond, ichi-ni-san?” ’ With a look, Shiroyama tells his concubine not to fret.
Better for him now, he thinks, to be too young to understand.
‘Come here,’ says Kawasemi, kneeling, ‘come here, Nao-kun…’
The boy sits on his mother’s lap and loses his hand in her hair.
Shiroyama sits a pace away and circles his hands in a conjuror’s flourish…
… and in his palm is an ivory castle sitting on an ivory mountain.
The man turns it around slowly, inches from the boy’s captured eyes.
Tiny steps; cloud motifs; pine trees; masonry grown from rock…
‘Your great-grandfather carved this,’ says Shiroyama, ‘from a unicorn horn.’
… an arched gate; windows; arrow-slits; and at the top, a pagoda.
‘You can’t see him,’ says the Magistrate, ‘but a prince lives in this castle.’
You will forget this story, he knows, but your mother will remember.
‘The prince’s name is the same as ours: Shiro for the castle, yama for the mountain. Prince Shiroyama is very special. You and I must one day go to our ancestors, but the prince in this tower never dies: not for so long as a Shiroyama outside – me, you, your son – is alive, and holds his castle, and looks inside.’
Naozumi takes the ivory carving and holds it against his eye.
Shiroyama does not gather his son into his arms and breathe in his sweet smell.
‘Thank you, Father.’ Kawasemi angles the boy’s head to imitate a bow.
Naozumi leaps away with his prize, jumping from mat to mat to door.
At the door he turns to look at his father, and Shiroyama thinks, Now.
Then the boy’s footfalls carry him away for ever.
Lust tricks babies from their parents, thinks Shiroyama, mishap, duty…
Marigolds in the vase are the precise shade of summer, remembered.
… but perhaps the luckiest are those born from an unthought thought: that the intolerable gulf between lovers can be bridged only by the bones and cartilage of a new being.
The bell of Ryûgaji Temple intones the Hour of the Horse.
Now, he thinks, I have a murder to commit.
‘It is best that you leave,’ Shiroyama tells his concubine.
Kawasemi looks at the ground, determined not to cry.
‘If the boy shows promise at Go, engage a master of the Honinbo School.’
The vestibule outside the Hall of Sixty Mats and the long gallery leading to the Front Courtyard is crammed with kneeling advisers, counsellors, inspectors, headmen, guards, servants, exchequer officials and the staff of his household. Shiroyama stops.
Crows smear rumours across the matted, sticky sky.
‘All of you: raise your faces. I want to see your faces.’
Two or three hundred heads look up: eyes, eyes, eyes…
… dining on a ghost, Shiroyama thinks, not yet dead.
‘Magistrate-sama!’ Elder Wada has appointed himself spokesman.
Shiroyama looks at the irritating, loyal man. ‘Wada-sama.’
‘Serving the Magistrate has been the deepest honour of my life…’
Wada’s face is taut with emotion; his eyes are shining.
‘Each one of us learns from the Magistrate’s wisdom and example…’
All you learnt from me, thinks Shiroyama, is to ensure that one thousand men man the coastal defences at all times.
‘Our memories of you shall dwell in our hearts and minds for ever.’
As my body and my head, thinks Shiroyama, moulder in the ground together.
‘Nagasaki shall never,’ tears stream down his face, ‘ever recover!’
Oh, supposes Shiroyama, by next week things will be back to normal.
‘On behalf of all who were – are – privileged to serve under you…’
Even the untouchable, thinks the Magistrate, who empties the shit-pot?
‘… I, Wada, offer our undying gratitude for your gracious patronage!’
Under the eaves, pigeons coo like grandmothers greeting newborn babies.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Serve my successor as you served me.’
So the stupidest speech I ever heard, he thinks, was the very last.
Chamberlain Tomine opens the door for his final appointment.
The door rumbles shut on the Hall of Sixty Mats. Nobody may enter now until Chamberlain Tomine emerges to announce Magistrate Shiroyama’s honourable death. The near-silent crowd in the gallery is returning to the bright realm of Life. Out of respect for the Magistrate, the entire wing shall remain vacant until nightfall but for the occasional guard.
One high screen is half open, but the Hall is dim and cavernous today.
Lord Abbot Enomoto is studying the state of play on the Go board.
The Abbot turns and bows. His acolyte bows low.
The Magistrate begins the journey to the centre of the room. His body pushes aside drapes of hushed air. His feet swish on the floor. Chamberlain Tomine follows in his master’s wake.
The Hall of Sixty Mats might be six hundred wide or six thousand long.
Shiroyama sits across the Go table from his enemy. ‘It is unpardonably selfish to lay these last two impositions on such a busy man.’
‘Your Honour’s requests,’ replies Enomoto, ‘pay me a singular compliment.’
‘I had heard of Enomoto-sama’s accomplishments as a swordsman, mentioned, in low, awed tones, long before I met you in person.’
‘People exaggerate such stories, but it is true that, down the years, five men have asked me to be a kaishaku second at their deaths. I discharged those duties competently.’
‘Your name came to mind, Lord Abbot. Yours and no other.’ Shiroyama glances down at Enomoto’s sash for his scabbard.
‘My acolyte,’ the Abbot nods at the youth, ‘has brought it.’
The sword, wrapped in black, lies on a square of red velvet.
On a side table are a white tray, four black cups and a red gourd.
A white linen sheet, large enough to enfold a corpse, lies at a tactful distance.
‘Your wish is still,’ Enomoto indicates the game, ‘to end what we began?’
‘One must do something before one dies.’ The Magistrate drapes his haori jacket over his knees and turns his attention to the game. ‘Have you decided your next move?’
Enomoto places a White stone to threaten Black’s eastern outpost.
The cautious click of the stone sounds like a blind man’s cane.
Shiroyama makes a safe play that is both a bridge to and a bridge-head against White’s north.
‘To win,’ his father taught him, ‘one must purify oneself of the desire to win.’
Enomoto secures his northern army by opening an eye in its ranks.
The blind man moves faster now: click goes his cane; click, a stone is placed.
A few moves later, Shiroyama’s Black takes a group of six White prisoners.
‘They were living on borrowed time,’ Enomoto remarks, ‘at crippling interest.’ He plants a spy deep behind Black’s western frontier.
Shiroyama ignores it, and starts a road between his western and central armies.
Enomoto places another strange stone in the south-west of nowhere.
Two moves later, Shiroyama’s bold Black bridge is only three stones from completion. Surely, thinks the Magistrate, he can’t allow me to go unchallenged?
Enomoto places a stone within hailing distance of his western spy…
… and Shiroyama sees the way-stations of a Black cordon, curving in a crescent from south-west to north-east.
If White prevents Black’s main armies conjoining at this late stage…
… my dominant empire, Shiroyama sees, is split into three paltry fiefdoms.
The bridge is just two intersections away: Shiroyama claims one…
… and Enomoto places a White stone on the other: the battle turns.
I go there so he goes there; I go there so he goes there; I go there…
But by the fifth move and counter-move, Shiroyama forgets the first.
Go is a duel between prophets, he thinks. Whoever sees furthest wins.
His divided armies are reduced to praying for a White blunder.
But Enomoto, knows the Magistrate, does not make blunders.
‘Do you ever suspect,’ he asks, ‘we don’t play Go, rather Go plays us?’
‘Your Honour has a monastic mind,’ Enomoto replies.
More moves follow, but the game has passed its point of perfect ripeness.
Discreetly, Shiroyama counts Black’s territories held and the prisoners taken.
Enomoto notices, does the same for White, and waits for the Magistrate.
The Abbot makes it eight points in White’s favour; Shiroyama puts Enomoto’s margin of victory at eight and a half points.
‘The duel,’ remarks the loser, ‘was between my boldness and your subtleties.’
‘My subtleties very nearly undid me,’ concedes Enomoto.
The players return the stones to the bowls.
‘Ensure that this Go goes to my son,’ Shiroyama orders Tomine.
Shiroyama indicates the red gourd. ‘Thank you for providing the sake, Lord Abbot.’
‘Thank you for respecting my precautions, even at the last, Magistrate.’
Shiroyama sifts Enomoto’s tone for glints of irony, but finds none.
The acolyte fills the four black cups from the red gourd.
The Hall of Sixty Mats is now as quiet as a forgotten graveyard.
My final minutes, thinks the Magistrate, watching the careful acolyte.
A black swallowtail butterfly blunders across the table.
The acolyte hands one cup of sake to the Magistrate first, one to his master, one to the chamberlain, and returns to his cushion with the fourth.
So as not to glance at Tomine or Enomoto’s cup, Shiroyama imagines the wronged souls – how many tens, how many hundreds? – watching from the slants of darkness, thirsty for vengeance. He raises his cup. He says, ‘Life and Death are indivisible.’
The other three repeat the well-worn phrase. The Magistrate shuts his eyes.
The volcano-ash glaze of the Sakurajima cup is rough on his lips.
The spirit, thick and astringent, sluices around the Magistrate’s mouth…
… and its aftertaste is perfumed… untainted by the additive.
From inside the dark tent of his eyelids, he hears loyal Tomine drink…
… but neither Enomoto nor the acolyte follows. He waits. Seconds pass.
Despair possesses the Magistrate. Enomoto knew about the poison.
When he opens his eyes he will be greeted by wry mockery.
Our planning, ingenuity and Tomine’s terrible sacrifice are in vain.
He has failed Orito, Ogawa and de Zoet, and all the wronged souls.
Did Tomine’s procurer betray us? Or the Chinese druggist?
Should I try to kill the devil with my ceremonial sword?
He opens his eyes to gauge his chances, as Enomoto drains his cup…
… and the acolyte lowers his own, a moment after his master.
Shiroyama’s despair is gone, replaced in a heart-beat, by a flat fact. They will know in two minutes, and we will be dead in four. ‘Would you spread the cloth, Chamberlain? Just over there…’
Enomoto raises his palm. ‘My acolyte can perform such work.’
They watch the young man unfold the large sheet of white hemp. Its purpose is to absorb blood from the decapitated body and to wrap the corpse afterwards, but its role this morning is to distract Enomoto from the Magistrate’s true end-game whilst the sake is absorbed by their bodies.
‘Shall I recite,’ the Lord Abbot offers, ‘a Mantra of Redemption?’
‘What redemption can be won,’ replies Shiroyama, ‘is mine, now.’
Enomoto makes no comment, but retrieves his sword. ‘Is your hara-kiri to be visceral, Magistrate, with a tantô dagger, or shall it be a symbolic touch with your fan, after the modern fashion?’
Numbness is encrusting the ends of Shiroyama’s fingers and toes. The poison is safe in our veins. ‘First, Lord Abbot, an explanation is owed.’
Enomoto lays his sword across his knees. ‘Regarding what matter?’
‘Regarding why the four of us shall be dead within three minutes.’
The Lord Abbot studies Shiroyama’s face for evidence that he misheard.
The well-trained acolyte rises, crouching, reading the silent hall for threat.
‘Dark emotions,’ Enomoto speaks with indulgence, ‘may cloud one’s heart at such a time, but for the sake of your posthumous name, Magistrate, you must-’
‘Quiet before the Magistrate’s verdict!’ The crushed-nose chamberlain speaks with the full authority of his office.
Enomoto blinks at the older man. ‘Addressing me in that-’
‘Lord Abbot Enomoto-no-kami,’ Shiroyama knows how little time remains, ‘Daimyo of Kyôga Domain, High Priest of the Shrine of Mount Shiranui, by the power vested in me by the August Shogun, you are hereby found guilty of the murder of the sixty-three women buried behind the Harubayashi Inn on the Sea of Ariake Road, of orchestrating the captivity of the Sisters of the Shrine of Mount Shiranui, and of the persistent and unnatural infanticide of the issue fathered upon those women by you and your monks. You shall atone for these crimes with your life.’
The muffled clatter of horses penetrates the closed-off hall.
‘It grieves me,’ Enomoto is impassive, ‘to see a once-noble mind-’
‘Do you deny these charges? Or suppose yourself immune to them?’
‘Your questions are ignoble. Your charges are contemptible. Your assumption that you, a disgraced appointee, could punish me – me! – is a breath-taking vanity. Come, Acolyte, we must leave this pitiable scene and-’
‘Why are your hands and feet so cold on such a warm day?’
Enomoto opens his scornful mouth, and frowns at the red gourd.
‘It never left my sight, Master,’ states the acolyte. ‘Nothing was added.’
‘First,’ says Shiroyama, ‘I offer up my reasons. When, two or three years ago, rumours reached us about bodies being hidden in a bamboo grove behind the Harubayashi Inn, I paid little heed. Rumours are not proof, your friends in Edo are more powerful than mine, and a daimyo’s back garden is no one else’s concern – ordinarily. But when you spirited away the very midwife who saved the lives of my concubine and son, my interest in the Mount Shiranui Shrine grew. The Lord of Hizen produced a spy who told some grotesque tales about your retired nuns. That he was soon killed only confirmed his tales, so when a certain testament in a dogwood scroll-tube-’
‘Apostate Jiritsu was a viper who turned against the Order.’
‘And Ogawa Uzaemon was, of course, killed by mountain bandits?’
‘Ogawa was a spy and a dog who died like a spy and a dog.’ Enomoto sways as he stands, staggers, falls and snarls, ‘What have you – what have you-’
‘The poison attacks the body’s musculature, beginning at the extremities and ending with the heart and diaphragm. It is extracted from the glands of a tree-snake found only in a Siamese delta. This creature is known as the Four Minute Snake. A learned chemist can guess why. It is unsurpassingly lethal, and unsurpassingly difficult to procure, but Tomine is an unsurpassingly well-connected chamberlain. We tested it on a dog, which lasted… how long, Chamberlain?’
‘Less than two minutes, Your Honour.’
‘Whether the dog died of bloodlessness or suffocation, we shall soon discover. I am losing my elbows and knees as we speak.’
Enomoto is helped by his acolyte into a sitting position.
The acolyte tumbles, and lies struggling, like a cut-string puppet.
‘In air,’ the Magistrate continues, ‘the poison hardens into a thin, clear flake. But a liquid – especially a spirit, like sake – dissolves it instantaneously. Hence the coarse Sakurajima cups – to hide the painted-on poison. That you saw through my offensive on the Go board, but overlooked this simple stratagem, amply justifies my death.’
Enomoto, his face distorted by fear and fury, reaches for his sword, but his arm is stiff and wooden and he cannot draw his weapon from its scabbard. He stares at his hand in disbelief and, with a guttural snarl, swings his fist at his sake cup.
It skips across the empty floor, like a pebble skimming dark water.
‘If you knew, Shiroyama, you horse-fly, what you’ve done…’
‘What I know is that the souls of those unmourned women buried behind the Harubayashi Inn -’
‘Those disfigured whores were fated from birth to die in gutters!’
‘- those souls may rest now. Justice is served.’
‘The Order of Shiranui lengthens their lives, not shortens them!’
‘So that “Gifts” can be bred to feed your derangement?’
‘We sow and harvest our crop! Our crop is ours to use as we please!’
‘Your Order sows cruelty in the service of madness and-’
‘The Creeds work, you human termite! Oil of Souls works! How could an Order founded on insanity survive for so many centuries? How could an abbot earn the favour of the Empire’s most cunning men with quackery?’
The purest believers, Shiroyama thinks, are the truest monsters. ‘Your Order dies with you, Lord Abbot. Jiritsu’s testimony is gone to Edo and -’ his breaths grow sparser as the poison numbs his diaphragm ‘- and without you to defend it, Mount Shiranui Shrine will be disestablished.’
The flung-away cup rolls in a wide arc, trundling and whispering.
Shiroyama, sitting cross-legged, tests his arms. They predecease him.
‘Our Order,’ Enomoto gasps, ‘the Goddess, the Ritual harvested souls…’
A guppering noise escapes Chamberlain Tomine. His jaw vibrates.
Enomoto’s eyes fry and shine, ‘I cannot die.’
Tomine falls forward on to the Go board. Both bowls of stones scatter.
‘Senescence undone,’ Enomoto’s face locks, ‘skin unmottled, vigour unstolen.’
‘Master, I’m cold,’ the acolyte’s voice melts, ‘I’m cold, Master.’
‘Across the River Sansho,’ Shiroyama spends his last words, ‘your victims are waiting.’ His tongue and lips no longer co-operate. Some say, Shiroyama’s body turns to stone, that there is no afterlife. Some say that human beings are no more eternal than mice or mayflies. But your eyes, Enomoto, prove that Hell is no invention, for Hell is reflected in them. The floor tilts and becomes the wall.
Above him, Enomoto’s curse is malformed and strangled.
Leave him behind, the Magistrate thinks. Leave everything, now…
Shiroyama’s heart stops beating. The Earth’s pulse beats against his ear.
An inch away is a Go clam-shell stone, perfect and smoothed…
… a black butterfly lands on the White stone, and unfolds its wings.