The Island's Only Road

• Chapter 1 The Drebbel Blueprint
• Chapter 2 A Map from Middelburg
• Chapter 3 The Single Asphalt Vein
• Chapter 4 Fog Over the Causeway
• Chapter 5 The 1620 Journal
• Chapter 6 Echoes in the Salt Marsh
• Chapter 7 The First Mile
• Chapter 8 The Engineer's Ledger
• Chapter 9 Ghost on the Tides
• Chapter 10 Roadblock at Mile Nine
• Chapter 11 Submerged Secrets
• Chapter 12 The Vanishing Convoy
• Chapter 13 The Iron Vessel
• Chapter 14 Dead End at the Northern Cliffs
• Chapter 15 Waterlogged Parchment
• Chapter 16 Tides of the Estuary
• Chapter 17 Shadows on the Highway
• Chapter 18 The Depth Gauge
• Chapter 19 A Severed Line
• Chapter 20 The Wreck of the Guilder
• Chapter 21 Midnight Run
• Chapter 22 The Pressure Chamber
• Chapter 23 Receding Waters
• Chapter 24 The Final Retrieval
• Chapter 25 Burning the Papers
• Chapter 26 The Last Turn

The rain in Delft did not fall so much as it hung in the air, a cold, greasy mist that coated the cobblestones and smelled faintly of stagnant canal water and coal smoke. Inside the cramped archives of the Old Church, the air was hardly dry, but it smelled of old vellum, vinegar, and centuries of dried oak gall ink.

Jan van der Meer wiped his spectacles with the hem of his damp woolen coat and leaned lower over the trestle table. Across from him, Pieter Ryckaert was picking at a hangnail with a pair of brass calipers. Pieter was twenty-four, half Jan’s age, and possessed the restless, twitchy energy of a man who believed the world was moving too fast while he was stuck sitting down.

"It’s a hoax, Jan," Pieter said, not looking up from his thumbs. "Cornelis Drebbel was a charlatan. A brilliant charlatan, fine, but a magician nonetheless. He turned glass into fake diamonds for James I. He built

The train south from Delft to Zeeland ran through a landscape constructed entirely of wet earth, low sky, and water that refused to stay where it was told. Jan van der Meer sat with his back to the locomotive, his knees almost touching Pieter’s across the narrow wooden compartment. On the seat beside him lay a oilcloth sleeve containing three sheets of heavy rag paper—the fruit of six months of petitioning the archives in Delft and two very uncomfortable hours spent bargaining with a retired notary in Dordrecht who smelled of gin.

Pieter was staring out the window at a line of black-and-white cows standing ankle-deep in submerged pasture. "If Drebbel built the thing in London, on the Thames, why are we going to an island off the coast of Zeeland?"

"Because Drebbel was born in Alkmaar, but his money came from the Merchants of Middelburg," Jan said, tapping his fingers against his knee. He adjusted his spectacles, which had taken to slipping down his nose whenever the air grew humid, which in the Netherlands was always. "King James paid for the spectacle. The spectacle was a rowboat wrapped in greased pigskin with twelve oarsmen pulling submerged from Westminster to Greenwich. It was theater for the Stuarts. But the men who understood what a vessel that moves beneath the tide could actually do were the admiralty directors in Zeeland. They weren't interested in frightening the King's court. They were interested in Spanish blockades."

"And they bought the drawings?"

"They bought the prototype," Jan corrected. "Or what was left of it after Drebbel moved to England to chase royal pensions. He left a second set of sea-trials notes with a cartographer named Joost van Geel in Middelburg. 1620. The year the Dutch East India Company began consolidating its trade routes. Think about the timing, Pieter. If you can navigate an estuary without showing a single mast above the waterline, you control the scheldt."

The train slowed with a long, metallic screech that set Jan’s teeth on edge. The steam from the engine blew past the windows in thick white clouds, mixing with the coastal fog. Outside, the station sign for Middelburg emerged from the haze like a marker in a graveyard.

They found the office of the Zeeland Historical Foundation on a narrow street behind the old abbey. The building was narrow, leaning forward at an alarming angle as if trying to eavesdrop on the conversation of pedestrians below. Inside, the floorboards groaned underfoot, and the air was thick with the scent of roasted chicory and damp wool.

Mynheer Jacob Vrolik sat behind a desk piled so high with ledger books that only his bald head and a pair of thick eyebrow brushes were visible above the paper horizon. He did not rise when they entered. He merely looked up, blew a flake of tobacco off his coat, and motioned toward two ladder-back chairs against the wall.

"You're late," Vrolik said. His voice sounded like two dry tiles being rubbed together. "The tide doesn't wait for the Delft train, and neither do the tide-tables."

"The line was delayed near Schiedam," Jan said, setting his leather satchel on the corner of the crowded desk. "A culvert collapsed."

"Culverts are always collapsing," Vrolik grunted. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small iron key, and unlocked the middle drawer of his desk. From it, he produced a square package wrapped in oiled silk and tied with red hemp twine. "This came out of the chest from the Oost-Indisch Huis three weeks ago. It was cataloged in 1704 as 'Navigational Charts of the Outer Banks, Unusable.' Nobody looked at it because the outer banks move every fifty years anyway. But the notes on the margin aren't in Dutch."

Pieter leaned forward, his earlier skepticism momentarily forgotten. "Latin?"

"Cipher," Vrolik said plainly. "Drebbel’s personal shorthand. A mix of trade-guild symbols, Alchemical notation, and phonetic High German. But the map—the map is clear enough."

Vrolik untied the red twine with slow, deliberate fingers. He folded back the oiled silk to reveal a sheet of heavy vellum, darkened to the color of tea around the edges. It was not a decorative map; there were no sea monsters drawn in the corners, no billowing cherubs blowing winds from the margins. It was a precise, cold draft of an estuary, marked with soundings in fathoms and feet.

Jan leaned over the desk, his breath catching in his throat. Across the top of the vellum, written in a firm, tilted script, ran the title: Vliegent Hert - Proeve op de Oosterschelde, 1620.

"The Flying Hart," Pieter muttered. "That was Drebbel’s name for the second hull. The one he claimed sank during the autumn gales."

"It didn't sink," Jan said, pointing a calloused finger at a cluster of small islands drawn off the northern tip of Walcheren. "Look at the soundings here. These aren't depth measurements for a surface vessel. Look at the double lines. He was recording bottom contours. He was mapping the trench."

"Not just the trench," Vrolik said, using a horn-handled letter opener to point to a narrow strip of land that connected the mainland to an isolated, kidney-shaped island marked simply as Noord-Beveland Outpost. "Look at the road."

Jan frowned. The island on the map was surrounded by mudflats and shifting sandbars, but running straight through the center of the marsh was a single, dark line, drawn with a straight-edge and marked with iron-gall ink that had eaten slightly into the paper.

"That's not a shipping channel," Pieter observed, squinting. "That's a causeway."

"It was an embankment built by the Romans, rebuilt by the monks of Middelburg in the fifteenth century, and drowned in the flood of 1530," Vrolik said. "In 1620, it was only exposed for two hours at low water. But Drebbel didn't care about the water above it. He used the stone foundation of the old road as his submerged marker. He ran his test along the wall. If he lost his depth, he knew he was off course because his keelson would hit the old masonry."

Jan’s hand shook slightly as he pulled a magnifying lens from his pocket. He brought it down close to the surface of the parchment. Near the northern terminus of the drawn line, right where the old road plunged off the edge of the shelf into deep water, someone had made three small pricks with a pair of compasses. Surrounding the tiny holes was a faint circle of red wax.

"The recovery site," Jan whispered.

"Or the grave site," Vrolik corrected dryly. "That was four hundred years ago, van der Meer. The salt water in the Scheldt eats iron like soft cheese. If there’s anything left of Drebbel’s machine out there, it’s a grease stain on the clay."

"The hull was oak," Jan said, his voice quiet but sharp. "Three-inch English oak, covered in boiled tallow, wrapped in double hides of ox-leather, and soaked in Stockholm tar. If it sank into the anaerobic mud off that bank, the air wouldn't reach it. The wood would be as sound today as the day it was felled."

Pieter stood up and walked to the window, looking out over the grey slate roofs of Middelburg toward the western horizon where the sea lay hidden behind the dikes. "And the road? Does it still exist?"

Vrolik spat into a small brass spittoon beside his desk. "They paved over the old embankment six years ago. The provincial works department ran an asphalt strip right along the crest of the old sea-wall to connect the lightkeeper's station. It’s the only way onto the spit now. One lane of blacktop, six feet above the high-water line at one end, and four feet under the silt at the other."

Jan didn't look up from the vellum. "Then that’s where we go."

"You can't just drive out there with a shovel and a pair of waders, Jan," Pieter said, turning round. "The ministry has been surveying the north coast for the new coastal defense works. If the military engineers catch us digging around the foundations of the causeway, they'll confiscate everything we have before we can even check the soundings."

"Then we don't let them catch us," Jan said. He looked at Vrolik. "Is the map for sale?"

The old archivist gave a dry, rattling laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across pavement. "The map stays here, van der Meer. But I can make you a tracing. For twenty guilders. And you take young Ryckaert with you so if you drown in the salt-marsh, I only lose one engineer instead of two."

Jan took two ten-guilder notes from his wallet and laid them flat on the desk. "Make the tracing, Jacob. And make sure you get the soundings along the masonry right. If we're off by fifty yards, we'll be searching five hundred acres of quicksand."

Vrolik picked up the bills, held them up to the dim grey light from the window to check the watermark, and tucked them into his waistcoat. "The tide drops at five tomorrow morning," he said, drawing a sheet of oiled drafting paper toward him. "If you aren't past the three-mile marker on that road by six, you won't be going anywhere until the afternoon. And when the fog comes off the Roompot, you won't even see the radiator of your motor-car."

Jan walked over to where Pieter was standing by the window. Outside, the rain had started again, striking the dirty glass with small, sharp clicks.

"Do you really think it’s still down there?" Pieter asked softly. "A underwater boat from the reign of King James?"

"Drebbel wrote to his son-in-law in 1622 that he had left his 'great engine' secured in the sea-cradle off the spit because the King had run out of money to pay the crew," Jan said, watching a drop of water trace a slow, jagged path down the pane. "He never went back for it. He died in London running a alehouse."

"A sad end for a wizard," Pieter remarked.

"He wasn't a wizard," Jan said, leaning his forehead against the cool glass. "He was an engineer who was three centuries too early. Now come on. We need to hire an automobile, three oil lamps, and sixty meters of braided hemp line."