The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (87 page)

'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?'