The Covenant (39 page)

“No!” Paul shouted, and the fury with which he embraced his wife, who had accompanied him so far and with so gentle a compliance, made those about him weep.

“Call the sailors,” the sick-comforter said forcefully. “Boys, you must kiss your mother goodbye,” and he edged them toward the pitiful bier.

In due time two German sailors shoved their way through the passengers, took the corpse away, and holding it aloft, pitched it into the sea, after which the sick-comforter indicated that he would lead public prayers for those who were still ambulatory. A stout Dutch merchant who had once served as deacon at Old Church pushed him contemptuously aside as unworthy; he would do the praying, and all on deck bowed their heads.

When the
Java
finally anchored in the lee of Table Mountain, Paul de Pré, thirty pounds lighter than when he sailed, reported to the captain, asking for his final payment for acquiring the grapevines, but instead of handing over any money, the captain informed Paul that Mijnheer van Doorn had arranged for the delivery of some one hundred and twenty acres of land toward the eastern mountains, and he produced a document affirming this: “The Compagnie Commander at De Kaap is directed to give the French emigrant Paul de Pré sixty morgen of the best land, contiguous to the farm of Willem van Doorn in the settlement of Stellenbosch, there to raise grapes and make wine.”

By paying De Pré in Compagnie land rather than his own money, Van Doorn had saved himself ninety florins.

Paul—brooding over the loss of his wife—was halfway across the desolate flats before the immensity of Africa struck him, and he was
suddenly overcome with dread lest this enormous continent reject him, tossing him back into the sea. The land was so bleak, the vast emptiness so foreboding that he began to shiver, feeling himself rebuked for his insolence. Clasping his sons to protect them from the loneliness he felt, he muttered in French, “Our grapes will never grow in this godforsaken soil.”

That night the Dutchman in whose wagon he was riding pitched camp on the loneliest stretch of the flatlands, and Paul stayed awake, listening to the howling wind and testing the harsh, sterile earth with his fingers. Driven with fear, he rose to inspect his grape cuttings, to see if they were still moist, and as he replaced their wrappings he thought: They are doomed.

But toward the end of the second day, when the laden wagon completed its traverse of the badlands, he was allowed a gentler view of Africa, for they now traveled along the bank of a lovely river edged by broad meadows and protected by encompassing hills. He thought: This is finer than anything I knew in France or Holland! A man could make his home here!

Begging the driver to halt, he lifted his sons down so that they could feel the good earth that was to be their home, and when he had filtered it through his fingers he looked up at the Dutchman and shouted in French, “We shall build a vineyard so great …” When the driver looked at him in stolid unconcern, for he understood not a word De Pré was saying, Paul cried in Dutch, “Good, eh?” and the driver pointed ahead with his whip: “Ahead, even better.”

They camped that night beside the river, and by noon next morning they saw something that sealed Paul’s love of his new home. It was a farmhouse, low and wide, built of mud bricks and wattles, and so set down against the hills rising behind it that it seemed always to have been there. He noticed that it stood north to south, so that the west face looked toward Table Mountain, still visible on the far horizon. From this secure house a lawn of grass reached out, with four small huts along each side for tools and chickens and the storage of hay; they were so placed, and at such an angle, that they seemed like arms stretching to invite strangers, and when Paul had seen the entire he whispered to himself, “
Mon Dieu!
I should like to own this farm!”

“Has the master a daughter?” he asked the driver.

“He does.”

“How old?” he asked casually.

“Nine, I think.”

“Oh.” He said this in such a flat, disappointed voice that he added quickly, lest he betray himself, “That’s good. Someone for my boys to play with.”

“He has sons, too. Nine and eight.”

“Interesting.”

“But you understand, the farm really belongs to the old man.”

“Who?”

“Willem van Doorn. And his old wife Katje.”

“Three generations?”

“Working the fields, you live a long time.”

When they reached the farmhouse, walking down the lane between the eight huts, a tall Dutchman, broad of face and open in manner, came out to greet them: “I’m Marthinus van Doorn. Are you the Frenchman?”

“Paul de Pré, and these are my sons Henri and Louis.”

“Annatjie!” the farmer cried. “Come meet our neighbors!” And from the house came a tall, gaunt woman with broad shoulders and big hands. She was obviously quite a few years older than her husband, in her late thirties perhaps, and she bore the look of one who had worked extremely hard. She did not smile easily, as her husband had done when greeting the strangers, but she did extend a practical welcome: “We’ve been waiting for your knowledge of grapes.”

“Is it true, you’ve made wine?” her husband asked.

“A great deal,” Paul said, and for the first time the woman smiled.

“The old man is out with the slaves,” Van Doorn said. “Shall we go see him?”

But before they could depart, a high, complaining whine came from the back of the house: “Who’s out there, Annatjie?”

“The Frenchman.”

“What Frenchman?” It was a woman’s voice, conveying irritation that things had not been explained.

“The one from Amsterdam. With new vines.”

“Nobody tells me anything,” and after a bit of shuffling, the door creaked open and a white-haired woman, partially stooped, came protestingly into the sunlight. “Is this the Frenchman?” she asked.

“Yes,” her daughter-in-law said patiently. “We’re taking him into the fields to meet the old man.”

“You won’t find him,” the old woman muttered, retreating to the shadows of the house.

They did find him, a crippled old man in his mid-sixties, walking
sideways as he supervised the slaves in pruning vines. “Father, this is the Frenchman who knows how to make good wine.”

“After thirty years they send someone,” he joked. Since that first joyous pressing decades ago, hundreds of thousands of vines had been planted at the Cape, assuring a local supply of wine, but even the best vintage remained far inferior to those of Europe.

The old man jammed his pruning knife into his belt, walked awkwardly to greet the newcomer, and said, “Now let’s figure out where your land’s to be.”

“I have a map …”

“Well, let’s fetch it, because it’s important that you get started right.”

When the map was spread, the old man was delighted: “Son, they’ve given you the very best land available. Sixty morgen! With water right from the river! Where will you build your house?”

“I haven’t seen the land yet,” Paul said hesitantly.

“Let’s see it!” the old man cried, almost as if the land were his and he was planning his first house. “Annatjie, Katje! Get the boys and we’ll go see the land.”

So the entire Van Doorn establishment—Willem and Katje; Marthinus and Annatjie; and the children Petronella, Hendrik and little Sarel—set off to see the Frenchman’s land, and after they had surveyed it and assessed its strengths, all agreed that he must build his house at the foot of a small mound that would protect it from eastern winds. De Pré, however, said with a certain stubbornness, “I’ll build it down here,” but his reasons for doing so he would not divulge. They were simple: when the Van Doorns indicated the spot they were recommending, he immediately noticed that it did not balance the house they had built, and he wanted his home to be in harmony with theirs, for he was convinced that one day these two farms must be merged, and when that time came he wanted the various buildings to be in balance.

“We’ll put it here,” he said, and when several of the Van Doorns started to protest the obvious unwisdom of such a location, old Willem quieted them: “Look! If the house is put here, it balances ours over there. The valley looks better.”

“Why, so it does,” Paul said, and soon the building commenced. The Van Doorns sent their slaves to work on the walls, as if the house were to be their own, while the three De Prés toiled alongside the swarthy Madagascans.

“De Pré’s a Frenchman,” Willem said approvingly. “He knows how to work for what he wants.” And as the house grew, its mud bricks neatly aligned, the Van Doorns had to concede that it was not only spacious, but also solid and attractive.

“It’s a house that needs a woman,” old Katje said, and on the next evening when the Frenchman ate at her house, she asked him bluntly, “What are your plans for finding a wife?”

“I have none.”

“You better get some. Now, you take Marthinus”—she pointed to her sturdy son—“he was born at the Cape when there were no women, none at all available for young men. So we moved out here to Stellenbosch, except it wasn’t named that in those years, and here I was—the only woman for miles around. So what to do?”

Paul looked at Marthinus and then at Annatjie, and asked, “How did he find her?”

“Simple,” Katje continued. “She was a King’s Niece.”

This news was so startling that Paul stared in a most ungentlemanly manner at the tall, ungainly woman. “Yes,” Katje said, “this one was a King’s Niece, and you’d better be sending for one of them, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Orphans. Amsterdam’s full of girl orphans. No one to give them in marriage, no dowry, so we call them the King’s Nieces, and he gives them a small dowry and ships them out to Java and the Cape.”

“How did …”

“How did Marthinus know that Annatjie was his? When news of the ship reached out here, we supposed all the girls would be gone. But I told Marthinus, ‘Son, there’s always a chance.’ So he rode at a gallop, and when he got to the wharf all the girls were gone.”

She placed her work-worn hands on the table, then smiled at her husband. “I was what you might call a King’s Niece also. My rich uncle shipped me out here to marry this one. Never saw him before I landed. Thirty years ago.”

“But if the girls were all gone, how did your son …”

Old Katje looked at Marthinus and laughed. “Spirit, that’s what he had. Like his father. You’ve heard that Willem chopped down four bitter almond so we could escape from the Cape. I predicted he would be hanged. I said, ‘Willem, you’ll be hanged.’ ”

“What did Marthinus do?”

“Got to the ship, all the girls gone. But before he rode back emptyhanded
he heard that one of the men at the fort didn’t like the girl he got, so he shouted, ‘I’ll take her!’ And one of the other men said, ‘You haven’t seen her!’ But Marthinus shouted again, ‘I’ll take her,’ and the girl was sent for, and there she is.”

Paul could not determine in what spirit the woman pointed to her daughter-in-law, whether in derision for being so much older than her son, or in disgust at her being so ungainly, or in pride for having had the strength to surmount such a poor beginning. “Look at her fine children,” the old woman said, and Paul noticed that the three youngsters were looking at their mother with love. He would never have told his children such a story, but when he got his sons back into their house, he was startled to hear Henri say, “Father, I hope that when you go to the ship, you get someone like Annatjie.”

The Huguenot boys were finding their new home even more exciting than the canals of Amsterdam. The spaciousness enchanted them; they loved the flashing sight of animals moving through the swards of long grass; and playing with the Van Doorn children was a joy. But the Dutchman they loved was old Willem. He moved slowly among his vines, his left leg out of harmony with his right, and he coughed a lot, but he was a reservoir of stories about Java and the Spice Islands and the siege of Malacca.

He took delight in arranging surprises for them: cloves to chew on so their breath would be sweet, and games with string. He let them watch the Van Doorn slaves, great blacks from Angola and Madagascar, and then one afternoon he told them, “Boys, tomorrow night I have the real surprise. You can try to guess what it’s to be, but I shan’t tell you.”

At home they discussed with their father what it might be: perhaps a horse of their own, or a slave boy whom they could keep, or a hunting trip. They could not imagine what the old man had for them, and it was with trembling excitement that they crossed the fields at dusk to join the seven Van Doorns.

The old lady was complaining that too much fuss was being made, but even so, no one told the French boys what the surprise was to be, and with some anxiety they sat down for the evening meal, where the old ones talked endlessly as a slave woman and two Hottentots served them.

“Tell me in simple words,” Marthinus said, “what a Huguenot is.”

“I’m a Huguenot,” Paul said. “These two boys are Huguenots.”

“But what are you?”

“Frenchmen to begin with. Protestants next. Followers of John Calvin.”

“You believe as we do?”

“Of course. You in Dutch, we in French.”

“I hear you Huguenots were badly treated in France.”

“Tormented and thrown in jail and sometimes killed.”

“How did you escape?”

“Through the forests, at night.” No one spoke. “And when we were safely in Holland, your brother, Karel … He’s an important man, you know, in the Lords XVII. He sent me back to fetch the vines I’ve brought you. I took my son Henri with me to confuse the Catholic authorities. This boy crept through the forest with me to steal the grapevines, and if we’d been caught by the soldiers …”

“What would have happened?” young Hendrik asked.

“I’d have been chained to a ship for life. He’d have been put where they turn Huguenot boys into Catholic boys in a jail, and his brother here would never have seen him again.”

“Was it really so cruel?” Marthinus asked.

“It was death to be a Calvinist.”

“It was in our family, too,” Willem suddenly said. “My great-grandfather was hanged.”

“He was?” Louis asked in awe, all thoughts of the surprise buried in this revelation of family courage.