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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780618382675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2003 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Winter Queen
A NovelBy Jane Stevenson
Houghton Mifflin
Copyright © 2001 Jane StevensonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0618149120
NIGREDO
I
10 February 1639 A woman is sitting in a great chair under a cloth of estate, in a room hung with black velvet. She is dumpy, deep-bosomed and straight-backed as a trooper. Her cheeks are doughy with adversity and time, but her hazel eyes are clear. Dusk is falling outside in the Voorhout, and in the dim, candle-lit velvet cavern of the presence chamber her face, breast and hands shine dimly pale against the black behind her and the black of her dress. Of the tall man standing before her, clad in scholars black broadcloth, nothing can be seen but the chaste, starched-linen gleam of his collar and cuffs. The hand which holds his black beaver hat is invisible: as she peers into the gloom, she can barely discern his face, let alone his expression. Only a sudden liquid shifting in the gloom makes her realize, with a sudden qualm, that she has been staring straight into his eyes. She turns her head away, settling the black silk scarf around her shoulders against the creeping chill of the Dutch winter, adjusting her rings.
Tell me a story, she says, her eyes downcast. Her voice is a strangely youthful one to come from so still and matronly a figure.
What story do you wish, your majesty? he responds. His voice is deep and resonant, but husky, like the sound of abell made of wood.
Still she does not look at him, and when she speaks her tone is wistful. Are there truly men in Africa whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders?
I have not seen one, he says gravely.
Oh, I hoped it might be true. There is a phrase, is there not - "ex Africa semper aliquid novi"?
It was Pliny, I believe, who said that. And perhaps it is true. There are many things I saw in Africa which would seem strange here and, doubtless, many strange things there which I have not seen at all. I have seen Oyo Ile, where I was born, Igboho, Ifa´, the city of the oracles, and El Mina, the great fortress of the Portugals. I have seen Bornu and Gao of the Songhai Mussulmans, where I went to buy Barbary horses for my father the king. I have seen the jungle and the desert, the plains, and the sea, and animals of many kinds. But all the men I saw in Africa were shaped like men anywhere else.
What is the strangest thing which you have seen, Dr Pelagius?
If anyone had told me, when I was in my fathers house, that he had seen water solid like crystal, burning to the touch, with men walking upon it, I would have called him a liar. That is the strangest thing.
27 June 1634. A great day for Amsterdam, daughter of the sea. For it was on that day that the spring sailing from the East Indies finally arrived in Holland. The gulls were screaming cheerfully overhead and light dazzled on the waters of the harbour, broken into a million sparkling diamonds. The herring fishermen had spotted the tall ships soon after they entered the Narrow Seas and alerted the port authorities, so an expectant city was standing on the quays to greet them. They came into the great harbour at Amsterdam one after another, great ocean-going vessels, three-masters fitted to fly before the endless winds that girdle the earth in the Roaring Forties, manoeuvring in that narrow space with all the grace of an albatross in a duckpond, clawing their way to haven amid a throng of small boats come out to escort them. As the anchors finally rattled down, a cheer went up from the thronged docksides and a salute was fired from the Admiralty Depot. The wealth of the Indies was coming to the city: the journalists from the courants were there, jostling shoulder to shoulder with wharfingers, investors waiting impatiently to speak with the captains, and pickpockets, merchants, wives, whores and simple bystanders.
In the next few days, as the courants triumphantly reported, 326,733 Amsterdam pounds of Malacca pepper, 297,466 pounds of cloves, 292,623 pounds of saltpetre, 141,278 pounds of indigo, 483,082 pounds of sappan wood; 219,027 pieces of blue Ming ware from China; 52 further chests of Korean and Japanese porcelain; 75 large vases and pots containing preserved confections; 600 pounds of Japanese copper; 241 pieces of fine Japanese lacquer work; 3,989 rough diamonds of large carat; 93 boxes of pearls and rubies (of miscellaneous weight and water); 603 bales of dressed Persian silks and grosgrains; 1,155 pounds of raw Chinese silk; 199,800 pounds of unrefined sugar from Kandy; an elephant and a tiger were all disgorged into the long, waterfront warehouses of the East India Company. This fabulous hoard, as the papers reported, was put on display; and the fashionable, the merely wealthy and the dealers descended like vultures. This is a matter of public record: clearly established, abundantly corroborated fact - recorded, for example, in the Amsterdam Courante uyt Italien en Duytschland for 27-8 June 1634, which, since it spoke only to the readers of its day, can have had no interest in deceiving us.
The activities of Pelagius van Overmeer at this time, on the other hand, are attested only by a personal chronicle which he wrote almost thirty years later. His primary concern in this document is to explore the providence of God as it was manifested in his own life. He records no dates and material facts are referred to only indirectly, insofar as they illustrate the subtle directions of God in his affairs. But as far as it can be reconstructed, this is what must have happened. The precise date can be established by juxtaposing two facts: that there was only one sailing from Batavia which could have brought him and that he refers to the curious coincidence that he arrived in Holland in the year of the Elector Palatines death, which would take place on the morning of 19 November 1634, five months in the future.
Therefore, along with the fabled luxuries of the mysterious East, an unregarded piece of supercargo must have made his own way, not without difficulty, down the great wall of a ships side on a dangling rope ladder and into a rowing boat. If he had looked up from the uncertain little skiff, deadly dangerous in its near invisibility among those ighty ships, he would have seen the quay walls ringed with broad, fair Dutch faces, avid with an interest which in no way included him. But perhaps his strongest emotion was relief. For the first time in his life, he will have travelled in the relative comfort enjoyed by a passenger rather than chained in the reeking hell of a slave deck, but all the same, after months at sea, he will have been glad to have land under his feet. Once on the dockside, he will have attracted little attention. A tall, soberly dressed, middle-aged black man was no unusual sight in Amsterdam, where the rich had already begun to regard black servants as fashionable accessories: there were too many for one to be interesting and not enough to provoke hostility.
It is even possible, though unlikely, that Elizabeth was on the dockside. The arrival of the fleet was an event, and she was as interested in orient pearls and silks as any other lady of rank: the news would have reached her palace in The Hague long before the fleet actually landed. By June the Elector Frederick had already been away on campaign in Germany for six long months: she may have welcomed an opportunity for a little excursion to break the gentle monotony of her days.
Pelagius, then, landed in Europe without attracting public attention of any kind. He had a little gold in an inner pocket and, sewn into his belt, a few precious stones, pearls and sapphires; the two sailors he had paid to act as his porters were carrying his books and his few clothes. He had a letter of introduction, nearly as precious as the sapphires, and no idea where he was going.
His narrative is a blank about these first days, though Holland must have seemed very strange to him after twenty or more years in the East Indies. It was early summer, so he would not yet have been shivering, and the style of architecture, the tall, flat-fronted houses with their big windows and crowstep gables, would have been broadly familiar to him, since the principal houses of Batavia, the East India Companys headquarters in Indonesia, were built in the Dutch style. The town had even acquired a canal system in 1621, which brought the waters of the Ciliwang through the city in true Dutch fashion, so this would also have been a familiar element in the townscape before him. Amsterdams Prinsengracht was bigger than the Tijgersgracht, of course, the houses which lined it grander than those of colonial Batavia, but they were essentially similar.
All the same, apart from these meagre points of congruence, the differences must have been inescapable, crowding relentlessly upon him: the relative dryness of the air, the tang of tar, coal smoke, drains, horses, and alien sweat which it carried; the refusal of even the most obviously menial to carry burdens on their heads; the white faces verywhere. The background noises: harsh mewing of gulls, the liquid whistle of starlings, the complacent roo-coo-coo of pigeons, sounds which for some time he did not even associate with birds, and everywhere harsh Dutch voices, unmixed with Chinese, Javanese or Malayan.
So: somehow, Pelagius, Mynheer van Overmeer as he was known, the Man from Over the Sea, got himself a place on a coach bound for Leiden. It is probable that he was cheated outrageously and that the colour of his skin drew impertinent comment, but he does not choose to mention it. For as the slow, unsprung, smelly vehicle rumbled towards Leiden, that dull, provincial little manufacturing town just inland from The Hague, he was taking the final steps towards his hearts desire. He was no longer young and he had been a slave for a long time, too long to be still dreaming of a life which involved him in great events. The prospect before him was in itself a hope bigger than he had had since he was taken from Africa. Having presented his letter to the Rector of the University, a large and genial man who vaguely recalled Pelagiuss patron from his own student days, he was successfully matriculated as a student in the Faculty of Theology, the first step to becoming a Protestant minister. He joined the household of Johannes Sambucus, Professor of Theology and author of De Tertio et Quarto Regno in Prophetia Danielis, a lengthy and learned commentary on the Book of Daniel, and began his studies.
His intention was that, having completed a degree in theology and added Greek and Hebrew to the languages he already commanded (Yoruba, Dutch and Latin, with a few words each of Arabic, Bantamese, Portuguese and Scots), he would return to Batavia as a fully fledged Calvinist predikant. He had been converted soon after his arrival in the Dutch colony and his faith was the most precious thing he possessed. But it had become obvious to him that the cause of true religion in the colony was under threat because of the shortage of educated clergy prepared to serve in a tropical climate: to him, therefore, and also to his patron Robert Comrij, ordination seemed a path marked out for him by the finger of God. It also promised him a future, dignity, independence. No small thing for a man who had been a slave for more than twenty years.
He was a good enough student to cause no comment whatsoever. For nearly three years, he appears blamelessly in the laconic notes kept by the University authorities, but in the third year he disappears. For this, and how he felt about it, it is necessary to turn to his own account. In tertio anno meae novitiatis, Dominus me probat, et temptavit oboedientiam meam. Haud voluntate mea, Lugduni exii. Nam patronus meus, subito revertens in Europam, me vocavit ad Hagiam ut eum adjutaverim . . . He does not tell us how he felt about this, but it is easy to imagine from the word haud: scarcely, hardly. It is the sort of word used by a man committed to understatement, or to classical forms of emphasis by understatement. Not exactly at my own desire, I left Leiden. For my patron, suddenly returning to Europe, summoned me to The Hague in order to assist him.
Pelagius, in his neat, bare students room in Sambucuss house on Leidens Herengracht, turned the letter over and over in his hands. It spelt the death of all that he had hoped to be and to achieve in this second half of his life. But Comrij had taken Pelagius up from the living death of slavery, baptized him and brought him to God, made of him something almost like a son, and, as far as the law went, freed him. But the legal aspect was secondary: regardless of his legal status, both the Yoruba morals which had formed him and the European sense of rights and obligation which he had learned in Batavia told him that Comrijs will could not be gainsaid. But. But, Pelagius thought painfully, his mind moving stiffly in unfamiliar channels as the familiar despair of slavery enfolded him once more, what of the will of God? I hoped, I intended, to return to Batavia to do Gods work. Do I have a clear call to disobedience? He laid the letter aside and knelt by his bed, letting his forehead rest on his clasped hands. If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. He knelt for a long time, in silent agony. Were these words of the Lord the words which should guide him? Jesuss warning tormented him: was it his will speaking or his duty? Finally his path seemed clear: if Gods will was that he should return to Batavia, then this would, in the end, be compatible with answering Comrijs call. If not, perhaps some yet inscrutable purpose was laid up in the bosom of time. As soon as this thought entered his mind, he knew he was lost.
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Excerpted from The Winter Queen by Jane Stevenson Copyright © 2001 by Jane Stevenson
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.