The Covenant (40 page)

“And my grandfather died in war, fighting for our religion. And as a little girl my mother used to gather with her family like this and do something that would have caused her execution …”

“What do you mean?” Louis de Pré asked.

“She would have been hanged if they had caught her.”

“What did she do?”

“Blow out the candles,” Willem said, and when only one flickered he produced from the next room the old Bible, which he opened at random, and when the children were quiet he read a few verses in Dutch. Then, with his hand spread out upon the pages, he told them, “In those days your grandfathers died if they were caught reading like this.” Closing the heavy cover, he told the children, “But because we persisted, God came to comfort us. He gave us this land. These good houses. These vines.”

Young Hendrik van Doorn had heard these tales before, but they
had made no impression on him. Now, with the Frenchman telling comparable stories, he understood that tremendous things had happened in France and Holland, and that he was the recipient of a powerful tradition. From that night on, whenever the Dutch Reformed Church was mentioned, he would visualize a young boy creeping through the forest, a man chained to a galley bench, one of his ancestors hanged, and especially a group of people huddled over a Bible at night.

“Light the candles!” old Willem cried. “And we’ll have the surprise!”

“Hooray!” the Huguenot boys shouted as Annatjie left the room, to reappear bearing a brown-gold crock with no handles. As she came to the table she looked momentarily at her father-in-law, who nodded slightly toward Louis. Going to him, she placed the crock before him, and he looked in to see the golden brown crust with the raisins and lemon peel and cherries peeking through.

“Oh!” he cried. “Can I have some?”

“You can have it all,” Willem said. “I made it for you.”

The three Huguenots stared at him, unable to conceive that this wrinkled old farmer could also cook, but when the crock was passed to Paul, so that he could serve, he jabbed his spoon into the crust and they applauded.

While the others ate, Paul studied the old Dutchman and was confused. Willem had proved the most generous of neighbors, lending slaves whenever needed; he laughed with the children and now proved himself an able cook. He was in no way the dour and heavy Dutchman Paul had expected, but he did have one mortal failing: he could not make good wine. In a way, this was not surprising, for none of his countrymen could, either. For a thousand years Frenchmen to the south of Holland and Germans to the east had made fine wine, but the Dutch had never mastered it.

“Van Doorn,” Paul said one day in exasperation, “to make good wine requires fifteen proper steps. And you’ve done all of them wrong except one.”

Willem chuckled. “What one?”

“The direction of your vines. They don’t fight the wind and the sun.” De Pré studied the lines and asked, “How did you get that right?”

And then an inexplicable thing happened. The old man stood among his vines, and dropped his hands, and tears came to his eyes.
His shoulders shook, and after a long time he said, “A girl instructed me a long time ago. And they branded her on the face, here and here. And she fled into the wilderness with my sons. And by the grace of God she may still be alive … somewhere out there.” He placed his hands over his face and bowed his head. “I pray to God she’s still alive.”

So many things were implied in what the old man said that Paul concluded it was wisest to ask nothing, so he returned to the making of wine: “Really, Mijnheer, you’ve done everything wrong, but because your vines know you love them, they have stayed alive, and when my good grapes join them, I do believe we can blend the musts into something good.”

“You mean, we can make wine they won’t laugh at in Java?”

“That’s why I came,” De Pré said, and his jaw jutted out. “In two years they’ll be begging for our wine in Java.”

Inadvertently he brought dilemmas into the Van Doorn household. One day, while listening to his sons at play, he realized to his dismay that they had shouted at one another for upwards of half an hour without once having used a French word. They had begun to conduct their lives wholly in Dutch, and no matter how carefully he spoke to them in French at mealtime or at prayers, they preferred to respond in Dutch. He recalled the farewell sermon of the clergyman at the Huguenot church in Amsterdam: “Above all, cling to your language … It is the soul of France, the song of freedom.”

When it became apparent that no discipline from him was going to make his sons retain their language, he appealed to the Van Doorns for help, but they were aghast at his effrontery. “You’re in a Dutch colony,” Katje said bluntly. “Speak Dutch.”

“When you want to register your land,” Willem said, “you’ll have to do it in Dutch. This isn’t some French settlement.”

“It’s quite proper that church services should be in Dutch,” Marthinus continued. “Ours is a Dutch church,” and when De Pré pointed out that in Amsterdam the Dutch had not only permitted a French church to operate but had also paid the salary of the foreign minister, Marthinus growled, “They must have been idiots.”

Despite their arguments, Paul still felt that the Compagnie should duplicate the Dutch government’s generosity and provide the Huguenots with a church of their own, and he started looking about for
fellow Frenchmen, but found none, and for good reason. The Lords XVII, afraid that the immigrants might coalesce, just as De Pré was now proposing, and form an indigestible mass within the settlement, speaking an alien language and demanding extraterritorial rights, had issued an edict to prevent this error:

The threat of a divided colony was not trivial, for although the number of Huguenots was small—only one hundred and seventy-six in the main wave of immigration—so was the number of Dutch, for in 1688 when De Pré and his first group landed, the entire Compagnie roster listed only six hundred and ten white people, counting infants, and a frightening portion of these were of German descent. At times it seemed that the Germans must ultimately submerge the Dutch, except for two interesting factors: on the rare occasion that a German found a marriageable woman, she was invariably Dutch; and the Germans tended to be ill-educated peasants who readily accepted the Dutch language.

Not so the Huguenots. They were both well educated and devoted to their language, and if left to cluster in xenophobic groups, might form an intractable minority. Since the Dutch did not propose to let this happen, the French were scattered, some to Stellenbosch, some higher up in a place called Fransch Hoek, and others in a choice valley well to the north. But no matter where they found refuge, they encountered this driving effort to eradicate their language, which De Pré was determined to resist. In the letters he dispatched to the other settlements he wrote:

This was such open subversion that Cape officials felt obligated to send investigators to Stellenbosch, and after brief questioning, these men proposed throwing De Pré into jail, but the Van Doorns protested that he was a good neighbor, needed for the making of wine. The latter point impressed the officials, who lectured De Pré at a public hearing: “Only because your friends have defended you do you escape imprisonment. You must remember that your sole duty is to be loyal to the Compagnie. Forget your French. Speak Dutch. And if you circulate another inflammatory petition, you will be ejected from the colony.”

Despite this censure, De Pré did gain one of his objectives: the refugees were given permission to build a small church for the minister who had sailed in one of the ships from Amsterdam, and behind its whitewashed walls only French was heard. But the children, and especially Henri and Louis de Pré, continued to speak mainly in Dutch, and it became apparent that the Compagnie’s efforts to stamp out French would in the end succeed.

It was agreed between the Van Doorns and the De Prés that the question of language would be discussed no further; each side had made its position clear and only animosity could ensue if the arguing continued. Of course, no one supposed that any peace treaty would be honored by old Katje, and whenever she gave the De Pré boys a goodie she would tell them, “Say thank you like a good Dutch boy,” and the boys would say, “Hartelijck bedanckt, Ouma!”

One night she asked Paul, “Why did you come to a Dutch land if you don’t like it?”

“I do like it,” Paul said. “Look at my fields.”

“But how did you get here?”

“Your husband’s brother sent me to steal the grapevines, as I told you.”

“How is the old thief?”

“Katje!” Willem protested.

“Well, he is an old thief, isn’t he?” she demanded of De Pré.

“If he is, he’s a smart one,” Paul said. “He married one of the richest widows in Amsterdam.”

“I’m sure of that,” Katje snapped, and when De Pré revealed the clever manner in which the Widows Bosbeecq had outmaneuvered Karel in the matter of their seven ships, she chortled.

“Nine cheers for the widows!” she cried, then grabbing her granddaughter Petronella, she said solemnly, “If you ever become a widow,
outsmart them, Petra. Keep your wits about you and outsmart them.”

“Grandmother!” Annatjie said sharply. “Don’t talk like that to a child.”

“And you too!” the old lady said. “If you become a widow, which God forbid, watch yourself. Women are smarter than men, much smarter, but in times of emotion—”

“But you see,” Paul broke in, “the Widows Bosbeecq were forewarned about Karel. They knew he was a tricky man.”

Suddenly Katje leaned forward, and reaching out to grasp the Huguenot by his arm, she asked, “How did they know that?”

“They warned me about him when I went to work at his big house. They were ready to marry him, you understand, either of them, but they knew he was a thief … because of what he had done to you.” At this point he addressed Willem.

Katje tugged at his arm: “What do you mean?”

“The way he stole from your husband.”

Sharp tug: “Stole what?”

“When he sold your mother’s house in Batavia. Everyone knew that half the money was for Willem, but he kept it for himself … all of it.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” the old woman shouted, jumping from her chair, and rampaging back and forth from table to door. “I told you he was a thief.” Halfway back to the table she stopped, remembered old days, and cried, “I told him to his face. ‘You’re stealing from us.’ ” On and on she recalled scenes of that last confrontation when she had divined what the couple was up to. At the end she fell into her chair, dropped her head on the table and wept.

“There, there,” Willem whispered.

“But we could have had that money. We could have gone back to Holland in style. We didn’t have to work like slaves …”

“I would never have gone,” Willem said, and his wife looked up at him in astonishment, then with slow understanding as he asked, “Would you have missed this valley for a smelly house on a smelly canal?”

But as the De Prés started to walk home they could still hear the old woman haranguing her family: “Always remember, your uncle was a thief. He stole what was rightfully yours.” On and on, until they could hear no more, she lectured on how she had been right, back in 1664.

•  •  •

It annoyed Paul that his sons used Dutch to refer to Katje. It was “Ouma gave us a cookie.” “Ouma said we could sleep over there.” It meant
old mother
, hence
grandmother
, and was a term of endearment, for if Ouma gave her husband a bad time over the various mistakes he made in his life, she compensated by her love for children. She knew they needed discipline and she was the one to dispense it, but she also knew they needed love, and she was as indulgent with the De Pré children as with the Van Doorn.

One morning, when Henri and Louis had gone to the big house to beg sweets from the old lady, they ran home in tears. “Ouma’s dead! Ouma died last night!” Three days later she was buried at the foot of a hill, and on the way back from the grave Marthinus said, “She’s had time to get to heaven, and right now she’s advising St. Peter, sternly.”

Her death had a curious aftermath. Old Willem, recalling how often she had badgered him to enlarge the farmhouse—seeking by this means to finally compensate for the cramped hut at the Cape—decided that he would at last accede to her wishes. When he announced that he was riding to the Cape to buy a Malay carpenter, his son asked why, and he replied to Annatjie, as if she were old Katje’s surrogate, “It’s about time I made this house the way she wanted it.”

By starting early and riding hard through the heat of the day, the old man reached the Cape before dusk, and what he saw always delighted him. The bay now had a quay at which ships could tie, a handsome new fort of gray stone, streets with solid houses and spacious orchards growing pears and lemons and oranges and plums and apples. More than half the white people in the colony lived in the town, which had every aspect of a thriving community—except one: the entire place contained not a single formal store; the Compagnie felt that the duty of the Cape was to refresh its fleets and collect goods for use in Java. What local buying and selling might be necessary would be done by the Compagnie, from its offices, and no merchant class would be allowed in the Cape.

But Amsterdam was a world away from the raw settlement in Table Valley, and its restrictions had the opposite effect from those intended: practically everyone at the Cape became a secret huckster, dealing directly with passing ships, hoarding clandestine stores in their homes, selling, bartering, smuggling until they became so skilled
that they earned their entire living at the business. Corruption was also rife among Compagnie officials, as poorly paid as they were resentful of service at this insignificant and forsaken outpost; venality reached to the top, as proved by the vast private estates operated by some Compagnie men.