Free The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell Page A

ladies!”
    “Especial,” gasps Hori, as the gin burns his gullet, “to Mr. Ogawa here. Mr. Ogawa, he marry this year a beauty wife.” Hori’s elbow is covered with rhubarb mousse. “Each night”—he mimes riding a horse—“three, four, five gallopings!”
    The laughter is raucous, but Ogawa’s smile is weak.
    “You ask a starved man,” Gerritszoon says, “to drink to a glutton.”
    “Mr. Gerritszoon want girl?” Hori is solicitude personified. “My servant fetch. Say you want. Fat? Tight? Tiger? Gentle sister?”
    “We’d
all
like a gentle sister,” complains Arie Grote, “but what o’ the money, eh? A man could buy a brothel in Siam for a tumble with a Nagasaki doxy. Is there no case, Mr. Vorstenbosch, for the companyprovidin’ a subsidy, eh, in this quarter? Consider poor Oost: on his
official
wages, sir, a little … feminine consolation, eh, would cost him a year’s wages.”
    “A diet of abstinence,” replies Vorstenbosch, “never hurt anyone.”
    “But, sir, what vices might a red-blooded Dutchman be pushed to without a conduit for the, eh, unloosin’ o’ Nature’s urges?”
    “You miss your wife, Mr. Grote,” Hori asks, “at home in Holland?”
    “‘South of Gibraltar,’” quotes Captain Lacy, “‘all men are bachelors.’”
    “Nagasaki’s latitude,” says Fischer, “is, of course, well
north
of Gibraltar.”
    “I never knew,” says Vorstenbosch, “you were a married man, Grote.”
    “He’d as soon not,” Ouwehand explains, “hear the subject raised.”
    “A mooing West Frieslander slut, sir.” The cook licks his brown incisors. “When I consider her at
all
, Mr. Hori, ’tis to pray the Ottomans’ll storm West Friesland an’ make off with the bitch.”
    “If not like wife,” asks Interpreter Yonekizu, “why do not divorce?”
    “Easier said than done, sir,” Grote sighs, “in the so-called Christian lands.”
    “So why marry,” Hori coughs out tobacco smoke, “at first place?”
    “Oh, ’tis a long an’ sorry saga, Mr. Hori, what’d not be of interest to—”
    “On Mr. Grote’s last trip home,” obliges Ouwehand, “he wooed a promising young heiress at her town house in Roomolenstraat who told him how her heirless, ailing papa yearned to see his dairy farm in the hands of a gentleman son-in-law, yet everywhere, she lamented, were thieving rascals
posing
as eligible bachelors. Mr. Grote agreed that the Sea of Courtship seethes with sharks and spoke of the prejudice endured by the young colonial parvenu, as if the annual fortunes yielded by his plantations in Sumatra were less worthy than old monies. The turtledoves were wedded within a week. The day after their nuptials, the taverner presented the bill and each says to the other, ‘Settle the account, my heart’s music.’ But to their genuine horror, neither
could
, for bride and groom alike had spent their last beans on wooing the other! Mr. Grote’s Sumatran plantations evaporated; the Roomolenstraat house reverted to a co-conspirator’s stage prop; the ailing father-in-law turned out to be a beer porter in rude health, not heirless but hairless, and—”
    A belch erupts from Lacy. “Pardon: ’twas the deviled eggs.”
    “Deputy van Cleef?” Goto is alarmed. “Do Ottomans invade Holland? This news is not in recentest
fusetsuki
report …”
    “Mr. Grote”—Van Cleef brushes his napkin—“spoke in jest, sir.”
    “‘In jest’?” The earnest young interpreter frowns and blinks. “‘In jest …’”
    Cupido and Philander are playing a languid air by Boccherini.
    “One grows despondent,” ruminates Vorstenbosch, “to think that, unless Edo authorizes an increase in the copper quota, these rooms shall fall forever silent.”
    Yonekizu and Hori grimace; Goto and Ogawa wear blank faces.
    Most of the Dutchmen have asked Jacob whether the extraordinary ultimatum is a bluff. He told each to ask the chief resident, knowing that none of them would. Having lost last season’s