The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (85 page)

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 grace
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 . . ." '