The Brothers Boswell Read online

“What d’you want with the folk we’re pacin’ is what I mean, sir.”

  I say nothing.

  He keeps his head down, eyes on the mucky bit of bilge rolling back and forth across the little hull. He could look back into the shade under the thin green woolen canopy, but he does not. He does not want to push too hard, does not want to risk the shilling I have promised him. When I offered him three times the standard fare, as long as he would shadow another boat, keep mum, and take my lead on the water, the waterman didn’t bat an eye. “Glad to be of service, sir,” he had said, pumped full of sudden courtesy.

  But now he cannot leave it alone.

  “Nothing but curious, sir,” he drawls. “A man likes to know why he goes where, don’t he?” He scratches at his leg, then the slick crown of his scalp. A pair of rowers passing the other way yell a sudden, friendly volley of obscenities at him, but he shows no sign of hearing or recognition. He continues to pull the oars and to watch the roll of bilge water. “For a jest or to come at a shilling, is why people usually follow people,” he continues. “Or to catch a girl’s sneakin’ about. Always struck me there’s the couple ways of it.”

  I have my eyes on the river.

  The waterman is jovial now, enjoying the sound of his own voice in the open air, and the anger gathers slowly in my chest, not for the first time this morning. I can feel it stirring abruptly inside me, the anger, a large dog awakened by a small noise.

  He clucks his tongue. “Your clothes are too swell for a footpad, my fine friend. There ain’t no lady in the sculler there to follow. And you don’t strike me as bein’ in a joking mood, you don’t mind me saying.” He spits over the gunwale. “And so I’m curious, now, nothing but that. A hint of why we’re running behind these two? I’ll be close as the grave, trust me, sir.”

  Again, I say nothing for a moment, and then reach into my pocket and bring up a pair of coppers, holding them out on my palm for an instant. And then I pitch them over the side and into the water. Almost immediately, a young mudlark near the boat dives to catch the coins before they can touch silt. “Your fare is tuppence lighter, man,” I say. “The full shilling was for quiet, and following my instructions.”

  He holds up a hand to signal enough, attends to his oars, swinging his head up and about to avoid other boats, and to keep James and Johnson’s red sculler in sight. Although the woolen canopy keeps off the sun, it blocks the wind, and without that breath of air the day is hottish, a creeping late July heat. And the wool traps the light stench of the waterman’s little boat itself, fish and sweat and damp wood and river slime. But it is the sight of the two of them on their excursion, the bigger and the slightly less big, sitting in their merry little boat out there in the very center of the Thames, never quiet but always talking, talking, talking that saps the pleasure from the ride.

  After only five minutes or so on the river, I see their red skiff abruptly angle through the cluttered forest of masts toward the Old Swan Stairs. I have already told the waterman to expect as much, and he draws quickly across the flow of traffic to allow me to watch them come in for their landing. Predictable, to a fault. Greenwich is another long pull down the river, so why are they rowing in at the Swan, disembarking, walking the seven crowded blocks around London Bridge to the rank fish-market at Billingsgate and then re-embarking for Greenwich?

  Because, my friends, James is nobody’s hero: he has not got the heart for the bit of white water under the spans, or the way the boat drops away from you suddenly when you shoot the bridge. And why else? Because they are both of them cheap. They’ll both squeeze a crown until King George weeps, and the fare doubles at the bridge.

  But as I watch them re-bobble their way heavily back out of the sculler, I have a thought. A mudlark is treading water not so far from us, and I wave him over.

  “Hey there you, lark,” I call, as softly as one can.

  He swims to me at a leisurely pace, his strong arms dipping and flashing in the water. Once beside the boat, he keeps himself suspended in the water with slow, easy movements of his thick legs and cupped hands. Mudlarks spend hours a day in the current, carrying and finding and ferreting out things that are awkward for men on a boat or on shore to come at. No doubt this waterman and this mudlark have worked together at some point in the past, to move some package of something off the river before it could be stamped and taxed, but they ignore one another now.

  “See that red sculler there,” I say, “putting off passengers at the Stair now?”

  The mudlark looks, turns back. He has sharp features, good teeth, and the articulate shoulders of a man who swims for his living. A penny pouch hangs dripping from his neck, a rusted knife from his belt. He narrows an eye at me, trying to figure out what my game might be. “Aye. I see ’em right enough.”

  “There’s a half-penny for you if you pull the coat of that boy rowing them, and ask him what the two gentlemen talked about. There’s a penny, though, if you remember it when you get back here to me, remember it all exactly.”

  “Penny, eh? There’s a generous man.”

  “A penny if you have the details exact.”

  The mudlark nods his head slowly, and then gives a wink and rolls over in the water. His milky outline glimmers, darkens, and then vanishes, before he sounds, like a dolphin, a good thirty feet from the boat. In a moment his hand reaches out of the water near the Stair, and halts the boy’s sculler.

  They talk for a moment, and then the mudlark slips back into the water and makes his way back to where the waterman holds us still in the river.

  Instead of treading water this time, the mudlark hauls himself directly up onto the small gunwale of the boat and perches there, bringing his feet over the edge and sliding them into the warm bilge at the boat’s bottom. His body has long ago become a thing of the river, sleek and beach-white, nipples dark wet sand-dollars. His hair is slick and brown as an otter’s coat. He clucks his tongue at the waterman, who continues to ignore him, continues to fail to recognize him.

  “Well, then,” I say. “What said he?”

  The lark seems to have all the time in the world, and he examines his water-wrinkled hands and dirty fingernails before speaking. Then he rubs the muscles of his left arm, as though it is sore, before meeting my eye. The look is direct, a bit defiant, a bit provoking.

  And then he says, “It’s to be like that, is it?”

  By definition, to traffic with the mudlarks is to traffic in nonsense, but I have no time for it this morning. I rest my hand on the hilt of my sword and lean out of the canopy’s shade. “If you have anything to report, friend, I have what I promised. Good as my word.”

  The waterman clears his throat loudly, nudging it along, and the lark finally purses his lips and nods. He rubs his hands together briskly. “Good as your word, then. Well, sir, the boy says the two men talked about speakin’ in old languages. All the way from Temple Stair.”

  I wait, but nothing more is forthcoming. “Old languages, you say?”

  “That’s it. Like Greek or Roman. What a man should learn o’ that, and how much, and if, and so on. Like that.”

  I reach into my pocket, letting the music of the coins work. “Anything else the boy said?”

  He thinks for a second, eyes on the small change now sifting in my hand. Then he’s got it. “The big one asked the boy what he’d give to know about the Argo Knights. The first sailors in the world, the big one said.”

  “The Argonauts, you mean.”

  “That’s it, sir.”

  “And the boy replied?”

  “The boy replied he’d give whatever he had.”

  I’m amazed again at the ability of the river to teach every man on it, no matter how young, to cant so flawlessly. “My, what a simple, artless thing to have said. And the big one liked that, I imagine.”

  The lark gives a canny look, nods, blows water from his nose out over the gunwale. He turns back, smirking at his own crassness. “Boy said the big one give him a double fare for that.” There’s a
silence, and then the mudlark brushes his wet hair from his brow. He is searching my face again, scrutinizing it. I realize he’s waiting for his coin, and I fish it out of my pocket. He takes the penny, works it into the small leather bag about his neck, gives the cord a tug to seal it up.

  And then, as though lost in an afterthought, he looks up at me solemnly and says, “I’d give all I’ve got to know them Argonauts as well, sir.”

  “Fine, then. Give me the penny pouch there on your neck, and I’ll teach you.”

  He snorts at that and slides back into the water, leaving the damp mark of his arms on the gunwale. As his churning legs take him away from us, he says, very distinctly, “Well, and if you’ll kiss my arse, sir, I’ll teach you somethin’ as well.”

  With that, the waterman is up from his seat, a rock in his hand. He cocks his arm, but the mudlark has already darted beneath the water, so there is no way to tell whether the rock finds its mark when the waterman fires it into the Thames. In a moment the swimmer’s head surfaces several boats away, bobbing in the center of a ragged wedge of swans. And there is something ancient and timeless, something Grecian about the sight of him there in the current, the fine wet brow crowned with swans.

  He blows me a kiss.

  The waterman heaves another rock, and the lark’s head vanishes in the chaos of white wings.

  It is good to know the snippet of talk about the Argonauts. No doubt James is already thinking about how to frame this bit of classical chat in his journal. He is keeping a journal of his year in London, oh yes, he certainly is, with entries for every day down to the most insipid. He has become really quite fanatical about keeping it up, and he has read me some of the entries of which he was particularly proud. Once or twice he has given me a handful of pages to read for myself, just a snippet he cannot resist sharing.

  He has never let me read through the thick packet on my own, although I know he has friends who have seen the lot. Friends who receive regular installments through the post, like a serial novel written at a penny a word.

  And I will admit, I envy him that bundle, because this journal of his gives him the chance to take the stuff of his life and spread it all out carefully in his mind and then cherry-pick it, rearrange it, and lay it all calmly together again. What is fine, what is extraordinary, what is brilliant becomes more so; what is ugly and unwanted is cast aside.

  He can make of himself just such a character as he pleases in the romance of his own life. And he can pick his readers as he might his servants.

  This scene today, though, needs no touching up after the fact: the two of them sailing down the Thames, as Johnson instructs his young prodigy in the shape of human history and knowledge—this is just as James would have it, but exactly, to a tittle. Which is to say that James has done all of the important scene-shaping in his own mind, long before he proposed the jaunt to Johnson, long before he prompted the conversation about the usefulness of ancient languages. All so that tonight or tomorrow he may tell his journal an entirely true story about playing Plato to Johnson’s Socrates. He has found a way not merely to write a true romance but to live it as well, and I do envy that.

  And so I imagine him stepping off the sculler now, relentlessly searching the Old Swan Stairs for choice bits with which to flesh out tonight’s entry. He is repeating Johnson’s phrases over and over to himself, no doubt, rehearsing them so he cannot forget, God forbid.

  Above all, he is avidly watching himself live out the most perfect day of his life, which means that the most perfect day of his life has only half his attention in the doing of it, something that strikes me as ironic and sad.

  But the ironies do not end there, of course. Although there is no way for James to know it, the fact is that he may not himself be the one to record today’s outing in his London journal. I may be doing so in his stead, depending on the directions the day’s events take. And so today I am on the lookout for choice bits as well. Everything rests on the outcome of today’s excursion.

  If matters work out favorably, Johnson and James and I may share a pleasant ride together back to London this evening. If not, I may return by water alone, certainly not an outcome to be wished, but a real and unpleasant possibility. In which case, I will use my copy of James’s key to let myself into his Downing Street lodgings. The bundle of manuscript I will pull from the little mahogany tea-chest that James purchased last November to hold it, then unknot the twine binding it. Then I will take a glass of negus and record this day, down to the wash of insignificant details that have given the morning its savor: the extra dish of chocolate, the bit of mercenary chat with the boy rowing the sculler, not excepting the Argo Knights themselves. And in addition I will include even those snippets that James—who includes everything, no matter how seamy or silly— would decline to include.

  The manuscript journal of James’s year in London will never see print, as he now hopes, but it will be complete in every important sense: an artistic whole. And it will be treasured in the archives at Auchinleck for as long as I live, and after. Before I leave London, I will do for James what he will no longer have the power to do for himself: fashion an end to the romance he has woven of his own ephemeral existence.

  And if you knew James as I know him—as only a younger brother can know an older—you would understand that all of this will constitute an act of the utmost kindness.

  2

  ONE OF THOSE piddling details even James would decline to include about the most perfect day of his life: what he did prior to showing up on Johnson’s doorstep this morning.

  He left Downing Street an hour before daybreak, whistling a silky air in the quiet street. It is difficult to shadow a man at that hour; there are few enough about to make any single shape stand out after a block or more. And I cannot risk even a single close glance, as there is not a man alive who knows my clothing, my walk, my air so well as James. But the difficulty was more apparent than real: in turn, I know James well enough to predict where he was most likely headed.

  And so I waited for him a block and a half away, in St. James’s Park. During the day the Park is drill-ground for the Footguard, and playground for ladies and gentlemen of the Court, and of course at ten o’clock in the evening, the Park’s many doors are all closed and locked with a great show of punctuality. And it all means absolutely nothing: there are seven thousand official keys scattered about the city, and ten thousand counterfeits taken in wax from these original seven.

  As a result, the Park is a very different place after dark and before the dawn. This difference is what James continually craves and must have.

  At that hour, with the moon down and the sun still skulking below the horizon, the forest in the center of the Ring remains an impenetrable black. The endless winding brick wall surrounding the Park is likewise invisible in the darkness. But within this gloom, the vast empty dirt-packed space of the Ring itself takes on a dull luminosity, picks up the leavings of the moon and gives back a quarter-light, just enough to perceive the outline of figures moving at one slowly from the trees.

  And they come, these figures, these women, at the first hint of movement. Stepping out from the oaks, rising from dark prone humps on the dirt. Country girls in chip hats and red cloaks, middle-aged jades simulating country girls in chip hats and red cloaks. Faces pallid with ceruse. And in snagged yarn stockings and leather shoes. Home-spun gowns and gypsy hats. Greasy cotton dresses topped by small natty capes, these coqueluchons thrown open with a butcher’s matter-of-factness, should you rest your gaze at the bodice, even for a moment.

  These women are gifted, more than most, with the predatory intuitions of the city. They came toward me when I entered the park, but after three or four steps they stopped, rested on their scraped leather heels, sensing. They marked the value of my suit, the angle of my hat, the drop of my lace. But even in the quarter-light there was something off-putting in my air, and they slowly moved off again. They saw in my stride that my purpose here in the Park was not complementary to th
eir own. That I was somehow, just perceptibly, working at cross-purposes.

  There is a large stair that drops down in stages from a set of townhouses in the southeast corner of the Park wall, and they allowed me to step unmolested into the shadow of that stair and lean against the damp brick.

  But when James sauntered through a small archway away off to my left, the woman nearest him picked up his trajectory immediately, because there was nothing at all in his air that bespoke caution, or prudence. Far from it, in fact. The violet suit managed to pierce even the dark at the wall, and when he moved to the Ring, it was nothing like the furtive movements these women must see so often. No, he approached them with a clear relish, like a fond country squire come to rough-house with his pack of hunting dogs.

  James knows very well the codes and the jealousies of these women, and he played with their need. The small young tart who picked him up as he entered wore a long blue hooded cloak, and James received her with a delicate bow. They began to walk the Ring together. No doubt he was asking price, name, any fictitious scrap of personal history—born in Shropshire, married young, widowed, new to the trade this night—because he collects these mendacious little wisps for his journal, the way other men collect porcelain or statuary.

  In his turn, James is always a highwayman, or a black-listed actor, or a half-pay officer, a bit deaf from cannon fire. His assumed characters are always plucky but impoverished, and nearly always will James try to wheedle his way out of paying for what crude pleasures he takes. Very occasionally he saves a shilling or two this way, but it is the pretense itself that always delights James. As much as they are about having sex, these expeditions into the park are always also about having other selves, silly childish romanticized selves, and it is impossible to say which particle of his need I find the more pitiable.

  This morning he was careful not to take the first woman’s hand, nor did he allow his own arm to be taken. Instead, he strolled along, with the nymph strolling beside him, until—at some line invisible to him and to me—the nymph grew a bit more frantic and tried to halt his progress, tried to jolly him and pull at his coat, hook it with her nails. But James did not halt. He ambled just past the invisible line, saying what would amount to his good-byes, until the next woman drifted out from the trees, to cover her own sixteenth of the Ring. He repeated this process again and again, with drab after disposable drab.