The covenant - James A. Michener [79]
The fleet sailed and Willem was left behind; his essay was kept in chests, both in Amsterdam and Batavia; and the man who as much as any had spurred the establishment of this new station was barred from joining it. The months passed, and Willem ran down to each incoming fleet to inquire as to affairs at the Cape, and then one day a message reached the council that Commander van Riebeeck was wondering if he might have permission to obtain a few slaves from Java for his personal use in growing vegetables, and the same aide who had dashed Willem's hopes previously now offered a dazzling proposal: 'Van Riebeeck's buying a few slaves for the Cape. And since you drafted that report ... I mean, since you know the land there, we thought you might be the man to handle this courtesy.'
Willem bowed, then bowed again. 'I would be honored to have such confidence placed in me.' And when the aide was gone, he dashed to see his mother, shouting, 'I'm going to the Cape.'
'When?' she asked quietly.
'With the Christmas fleet.'
'So soon!' She had longed for the day when her son would announce that he was returning to Holland, 'to save himself,' as she put it, and was distraught that he was sentencing himself to a place even more demeaning than Java. Now he would never attain a Compagnie position, and only God knew what might happen to him. But even the Cape was better than lingering here in Java and marrying some local slut. So be it.
On the eve of departure she sat with him in her spacious reception room and said, 'When you think of me, I'll be here in this house. I'll never sell it. If I went back to Holland, I'd be tormented by memories of my musicians playing in the garden.'
She seemed so completely the epitome of those Dutch stalwarts who controlled the worldJava, Brazil, Manhattan Island, Formosathat Willem knew she needed no cosseting from him, but when she took down her Dutch Bible and said, 'I memorized passages at night when it was death at Spanish hands to own a Bible,' he was overcome with love and confided: 'When our ship was breaking apart I crept back and found this great Bible abandoned to the sea. And when I saw that it was the same as yours, I knew I had been sent to save it, and that if I showed it to anyone, it would be taken from me. So I buried it in a cave, and it calls me to return.'
'I've never heard a better reason to sail, anywhere,' his mother said, and when the Christmas fleet departed, on December 20, she was at the wharf to bid him farewell. That night, back in her big house, she began her preparations for what she termed 'the feast of the dying year.' She borrowed the musicians, supervised the roasting of the pigs, and nodded approvingly when servants dragged in the liquor. As the year ebbed she and her Dutch equals roared old songs and wassailed and fell in stupors and slept them off. Java would always be Queen of the East and Batavia her golden capital.
The council had agreed that Van Riebeeck's slaves must come not from Java, whose natives were intractable, but from Malacca, where the gentler Malayans adjusted more easily to servitude, so when the fleet transited the Straits, Willem's ship put in to that fine harbor and he went ashore to inform the commandant of the fort that four slaves were to be delivered, whereupon a sergeant and three men went off to the forests back of town, returning shortly with two brown-skinned men and two women. Before nightfall Willem's ship had overtaken the fleet, and the long journey to the Cape was under way.
One of the slaves was a girl named Ateh, seventeen years old and beautiful in the tawny manner of most Malayan women. She pouted when the sailors confined her and the others in a caged-off section belowdecks, and she protested when food was thrown at them. She demanded water for washing, and the sailors heard her commanding the others to behave. And at some point in each day, no matter how dismal it had been, she broke into song, whispering words she had learned as a child in her sunlit