The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (64 page)

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 checkered 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.”

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 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 homespun—‘… 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 greenhorns!”

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 onto 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.”

“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 lamplit 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 onto 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-martialed
.

A cockchafer twitches its twin whiskers in the shadow of his inkpot.

He looks at the old man in his shaving mirror and reads an imaginary article buried deep in the next year’s
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.

… 
damn his cheese-weaned health, damn his mastery of
my
tongue
.

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 realizes,
or shit my breeches
.

The pain, as he hobbles into the next-door privy, is violent …

… 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 agonizing 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 three years ago. 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-derol, 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.
Hemorrhoids 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 location: 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 masterly
.

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
.

He 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,”
he 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 sheep, two goats, and half dozen chickens are asleep.

The nocturnal rats are probably at work in the provisions holds.

Chigwin, in his cubbyhole shy of the captain’s door, is asleep.

Surgeon Nash is asleep, down in his warm snug bunk on the orlop.

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.