The Covenant by James A. Michener
On Tuesday morning at nine o’clock, after De Pré had put in his usual four hours of hard work, the Bosbeecq women suggested that he accompany them to the stately Herengracht (Gentlemen’s Canal), along which his new employer lived, and there they knocked at the door of a house much grander than theirs. A maid dressed in blue admitted them to a parlor filled with furniture from China and bade them sit upon the heavy brocades. After a wait long enough to allow Paul time to admire the richness of the room, a gentleman appeared, clad in a most expensive Chinese robe decorated with gold and blue dragons.
He was tall and thin, with a white mustache and goatee. He had piercing eyes that showed no film of age, and although he was past seventy, he moved alertly, going directly to De Pré and bowing slightly. ‘I am Karel van Doorn, and I understand from these good women that you wish to work for me.’
‘They said you could have me three hours a day.’
‘If you really work, that would be enough. Can you really work?’
De Pré sensed that he was in the hands of someone much harsher than the widows, but he was so captivated by the idea of Java that he did not want to antagonize anyone who might be associated with that wonderland. ‘I can tend your garden,’ he said.
With no apologies to the Bosbeecqs, Van Doorn took Paul by the arm, hurried him through a chain of corridors to a big room, and threw open a window overlooking a garden in sad repair. ‘Can you marshal that into some kind of order?’
‘I could fix that within a week.’
‘Get to it!’ And he shoved Paul out the back door and toward a shed where some tools waited.
‘I must explain to the—’
‘I’ll tell them you’re already at work.’ Van Doorn started to leave, then stopped abruptly and cried, ‘Remember! You said you could do it in a week.’
‘And what do I do after that?’ Paul asked.
‘Do? You could work three hours a day for ten years and not finish all the things I have in mind.’
When De Pré returned to the Bosbeecq house, where the widows were preparing a gigantic meal because they knew he would be hungry, the two women suggested that he sit with them in the front room, and there, in forthright terms, they warned him about his new employer, speaking alternately, as usual, like two angels reporting to St. Peter regarding their earthly investigations.
‘Karel van Doorn will pay you every stuiver you earn. He’s fiercely honest.’
‘Within limits.’
‘And he can afford to pay you. He’s very wealthy.’
‘He is that. The Compagnie in Java had an iron-clad rule. No official to buy and sell for himself. Only for the Compagnie.’
‘But his family bought and sold like madmen. And grew very rich.’
‘And the Compagnie had another iron-clad rule. No one in Java to bring money earned there back to Holland.’
‘She knows, because her uncle was one of the Lords XVII.’
‘But when Karel’s mother died in the big house along the canal in Batavia, he hurried out to Java, and by some trick which only he could explain, managed to smuggle all the Van Doorn money back to Amsterdam.’
‘And he should have shared half with his brother at the Cape—’
‘Where’s that?’ Paul interrupted. It was the first time in his life he had heard mention of this place.
‘It’s nothing. A few miserable wretches stuck away at the end of Africa, trying to grow vegetables.’
‘Is Mijnheer van Doorn’s brother there?’ Paul asked quickly.
‘Yes. Not too bright a lad. Born in Java, you know.’
‘And Van Doorn should have shared the family money with his brother.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘He smuggled it into Amsterdam, and with it bought himself membership in the Lords XVII.’
‘He took my uncle’s place.’
‘He’s one of the leading citizens of Amsterdam. You’re lucky to be working for him.’
‘But watch him.’
‘At the Compagnie, you’ll see his portrait painted by Frans Hals.’
‘And at the Great Hall of the Arquebusiers, you’ll see him in Rembrandt’s painting of the civic guard. He’s there with my husband, standing beside him.’
‘And you’ll notice that her husband has his right hand closely guarding his pocket, which is a good thing to do when Karel van Doorn’s about.’
‘But for a young man like you, he’s an influential person to know.’
‘If you guard your pocket.’
The relationship was a profitable one, even though Karel van Doorn expected his gardener to work at such a speed that at the end of three hours he was on the verge of collapse. Anything less than signs of total exhaustion indicated laziness, and Van Doorn was apt toward the end of the third hour to slip away from his desk at the Compagnie and watch through the back wall, hoping to catch his workman resting. When he did, he would rush in and berate Paul as an idle, good-for-nothing Frenchman who was, if the facts were known, probably a Papist at heart.
But a hard-nosed French farmer was an adequate match for any avaricious Dutch merchant, and De Pré devised a score of ways to defeat his employer and end the daily three-hour stint in moderately rested condition. In fact, he rather liked the game, for he found Van Doorn meticulously honest in his payments, and when occasionally De Pré returned to the gardens on his own time to finish a job, his employer noticed this and paid extra.
‘The one thing that perplexes me,’ Paul told the widows one afternoon, ‘is that during all the time I’ve worked for him, he’s never once offered me anything to eat or drink.’
‘He’s a miserly man,’ one of the women said. ‘Anyone who steals from the Compagnie in Java and from the government in Amsterdam and from his own brother …’
‘He never steals from me.’
‘Ah! But don’t you see? The Bible says that you must treat your servants justly. If word got out that he maltreated you, his entire position might crumble. He would no longer be among the elect, and all would know it.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Paul said.
‘It’s very simple. A man can steal millions from the government, because the Bible says nothing about that. But he dare not steal a stuiver from a servant, because on that both the Bible and John Calvin are very strict.’
‘But doesn’t the Bible say anything about a little food and drink?’
‘Not that I can recall.’
And then, on the very next day, Karel van Doorn offered his gardener Paul de Pré a drink, not at his house but in the Compagnie offices. He had come home at the beginning of the third hour and said abruptly, ‘De Pré, let’s go to my offices. I need your advice.’
So they walked across town to where a new batch of German mercenaries waited, imploring Karel as he passed, for they knew him to be one of the Lords XVII, but Van Doorn ignored them. When he was seated behind his desk he said without amenities, ‘They tell me that in France you made wine.’
‘I did.’
‘What do you think of this?’ From a drawer in his desk Karel produced a bottle of white wine and encouraged the Frenchman to taste it.
‘How is it?’ Van Doorn asked.
Pursing his lip and spitting onto the floor, De Pré said, ‘The man who made that ought to be executed.’
Van Doorn smiled thinly, then broke into a laugh. ‘My brother made it.’
‘I’m sorry. But it’s a very bad wine. It shouldn’t be called wine.’
‘My own opinion.’
‘They told me your brother’s in Africa?’
‘This comes from his vineyard. He’s been working it for thirty years.’
‘He must have a very poor vineyard.’
‘I wonder if he mixes in something beside grapes?’
‘He wouldn’t dare.’
‘Then how can it be so bad?’
‘In making wine, there are many tricks.’
‘Could this wine be saved?’
Gingerly De Pré took anoth
‘I have a report here. It says the vines are still healthy.’
‘But are they the right kind of vine?’
‘What do you think should be done?’
De Pré sat with his hands in his lap, staring at the floor. Desperately he wanted to get back to the soil, in Java preferably, where gold proliferated, but his heart beat fast at the possibility of once more raising grapes and making good wine. Since he did not know what to say that might further his plans, he sat dumb.
‘If the Compagnie were to send out some men who knew wine,’ Van Doorn was saying as if from another room. ‘And if those men took with them new strains of grape. Couldn’t something be done?’
Ideas of wonderful challenge were coming at him so fast that De Pré could not absorb them, and after a while Van Doorn said, ‘Let’s look at the map,’ and he led the way to a council chamber decorated with a Rembrandt group portrait and a large map done by Willem Blaeu of Leiden. On it four spots showed conspicuously: Amsterdam, Batavia, the Cape of Good Hope, Surinam in South America.
‘We’re concerned with these three,’ Karel said, jabbing at the Cape, which stood midway between Amsterdam and Java. ‘If our ships sailing south could stop at the Cape and load casks of good red wine and strong vinegar, they could maintain the health of their men all the way to Java. And we’d save the freightage we now spend on bottles from France and Italy.’ Suddenly the spot representing the Cape assumed considerable importance.
‘But the soil—will good vines grow there?’ De Pré asked.
‘That’s what we intend to find out,’ Van Doorn said. ‘That’s why I’ve been watching you so closely.’
De Pré stepped back. So the watching had been spying—and since his experiences with the Catholics of France, this fact troubled him deeply.
‘You didn’t think that I hired you to clean up my garden?’ Van Doorn laughed. ‘I could have hired a hundred Germans to do that, good gardeners some of them.’ He actually placed his arm about De Pré’s shoulders, leading him back to the first office. ‘What I sought, De Pré, was an estimate of you Huguenots. What kind of people you were. How you worked. How dependable you were religiously.’
‘Did you find out?’ De Pré was angered with this man, but his own canny approach to life made him respect the Dutchman’s caution.
‘I did. And your honest reaction to my brother’s wine has made up my mind.’ He rose and strode nervously about the room, galvanized by the prospects of new engagements, new opportunities to snaffle a florin here or there.
Resuming his seat, he said softly, ‘De Pré, I must swear you to secrecy.’
‘Sworn.’
‘The Lords XVII are going to send three shiploads of Huguenots to the Cape. We like you people—your stubborn honesty, your devotion to Calvinism. Your family is going to be aboard one of those ships, and you’—he reached over and slapped De Pré on the knee—‘you will take with you a bundle of first-class grape vines.’
‘Where will I get them?’
‘In France. From some area whose vines you can trust.’
‘They won’t send vines to Amsterdam. Forbidden.’
‘No one sends the vines, De Pré. You go get them.’
‘I’d be shot.’
‘Not if you’re careful.’
‘The risk …’
‘Will be well paid for.’ Again he rose, storming about the room, tossing his white head this way and that. ‘Well paid, De Pré. I hand you this first bag of coins now. I hand you this second bag when you return to Amsterdam with the grapevines. And if you get them to the Cape, you and I will sell them to the Compagnie and share the profits.’
De Pré studied the offer, and he was glad that the Bosbeecq women had alerted him to this canny gentleman: he was buying the vines with Compagnie money, then selling them back to the Compagnie for more of its money. He remembered something one of the women had told him: ‘Van Doorn has a mind that never stops working. As a Compagnie official, he imports cloves from Java. And whom does he sell them to? To himself as a private trader. So he earns double, except that he trebles the price of cloves, since he’s the only one who has any, and makes a princely profit.’ Here was a man to be wary of, but he also remembered something else the women had said: ‘But he dare not steal a stuiver from a servant.’
‘Will you pay me the two other times?’ he asked directly.
‘Would I dare do otherwise? A member of the council?’
And then De Pré’s stolid French honesty manifested itself: ‘You didn’t share with your brother.’
Van Doorn ignored the insult. ‘In life,’ he said, ‘accidents occur. My brother was a dolt. He gave me no help in spiriting the family fortune out of Java. He was a man to be forgotten. You’re a man to be remembered.’
When Paul informed his wife that he intended smuggling their eight-year-old son Henri into France with him, she was appalled, but after he explained that this might prove to be the one disguise that would disarm the border guards—‘A father traveling back to the farm with his son’—she consented, for she had long suspected that French families ought not to stay too long in congenial Holland. The boys were beginning to speak only Dutch, and the strict Calvinism of the French was being softened by the easier attitudes of the Dutch. She knew also that her husband longed to get back to the making of wine, and this seemed an opportunity engineered by God Himself. So she packed her son’s clothing, kissed him fondly, and sent him off on the great adventure.
There was no problem as long as the pair remained in Holland: Amsterdam to Leiden to Schiedam and by boat to Zeeland, where another boat skirted Antwerp and set them down in Ghent. But on the approaches to Amiens, spies could be expected, so the pair shifted eastward and slipped by back roads into the country north of Caix, and when Paul saw the fine fields his eyes filled with tears. This was the good land of France, and it was only an error of magnitude that had driven him from it.
When he passed several small villages where Protestants had once worshipped freely and saw the ruined churches, he was desolated, and late one night he tapped lightly at the window of a farm he knew to be occupied by his wife’s family, the Plons.
‘Are you still of the true religion?’ he whispered when an old woman came to the door.
‘It’s Marie’s man!’ the woman cried.
‘Ssssssssh! Are you still of the true religion?’
When no one dared answer, he knew that they had reverted to Catholicism, but it was too late to retreat. He must rely upon these farmers, for they controlled his destiny. ‘This is Marie’s boy,’ he said, thrusting Henri forward to be admired by his kinfolk.
‘If you’re caught,’ an old man said, ‘they’ll burn you.’
‘I must not be caught,’ Paul said. ‘Can we sleep here tonight?’
In the morning he told the cautious Plons that he must have four hundred rootings from grapes which made the finest white wine. ‘You’d not be allowed to take them across the border, even if you were Catholic,’ they warned.
‘I’m taking them to a far country,’ he assured them. ‘Not Holland or Germany, where they would compete.’
He spent four days with the nervous Plons, carefully compacting the vines they brought him, and when he had three hundred and twenty he realized that they formed about as big a bundle as he could reasonably handle on the long journey back to Amsterdam, and the work ended. On the last night he talked openly with the Plons, who by now were satisfied that officials were not going to break down their doors for harboring a Huguenot, and the old people told him, ‘It’s better now that the village is all one faith.’
‘There are no Protestants?’
‘None. Some ran away, like you and Marie. Most converted back to the true religion. And a few were hanged.’
‘Did the priest esc
‘He was hanged.’ Plon’s wife interrupted: ‘He offered to convert, but we couldn’t trust him.’
Then Plon summed up the matter: ‘Frenchmen were supposed to be Catholics. It’s the only right way for us. A village shouldn’t be cut down the middle. Neither should a country.’
‘You’d like it much better here,’ his wife agreed. ‘Now that we’re all one.’
But when Paul went to bed on that last night he realized that he could never turn his back on Calvinism; the cost of his emigration was modest in comparison with what he had gained by remaining steadfast. The quiet rationalism of Amsterdam was something the Plons would not be able to comprehend; he wished he were able to explain how content their daughter Marie was in her new home, but he judged he had better not try. He had come back to Caix for its good grape rootings, and he had them.
When he delivered the vines to Mijnheer van Doorn at the Compagnie offices, Karel paid him promptly, but Paul noticed that the sum was slightly less than promised, and when he started to complain, Van Doorn said crisply, ‘We contracted for four hundred, you remember,’ and Paul said, ‘But it would have been impossible to carry so many,’ and Van Doorn said, ‘Contract’s a contract. The solidity of Holland depends upon that.’ And Paul dropped the subject, pointing to the large black bow resting on Van Doorn’s left arm.
‘A death?’
‘My wife.’ The chairman of the Lords XVII lowered his voice as if to say, ‘That subject’s closed,’ but then he realized that Paul would be interested in what was about to happen as a consequence of his wife’s death. ‘She was a wonderful woman. Sailed to Java with me. Helped arrange matters there.’ Paul wondered why the great man was telling him this, and then came the thunderbolt: ‘I’m marrying Vrouw Bosbeecq next Saturday.’ Lamely he added, ‘At the Old Church. You’ll be invited.’