The Brothers Boswell Read online

  In this way, James had what he most desired: their need for his money, expressed as need for James himself, and brought to its most powerful expression again and again at each invisible boundary.

  When he eventually selected, he selected not one but two, a tall and a short, black hair and blonde, and he took them to a segment of the wall past the Old Horse Guards building. I could smell the metallic tang of the ceruse, they passed so close to my own blind. He took them to a kind of shallow brick alcove where the women unhooked and unlaced and set ajar the fronts of their gowns, and slouched casually against him as he moved his hands over them. He dropped his face into the common mass of their hair, inundating himself with their smell, their reality. The taller woman used the flat of her hand to burnish the front of his breeches, with as much care and passion as she might use to whitewash spit from a tavern wall.

  He stood and fondled them and bartered lies with them, those two Shropshire innocents new to the trade. A veteran of the wars in the Havana, he whispered, a peer of the Realm cruelly cheated of my inheritance. But it went no further, no further than what James innocently calls toying. It went no further because James did not come to the Park in search of consummation, but merely to have his passion tuned for his real tryst of the morning. A young Edinburgh girl, actually, come up to Town just two days ago. A girl James knows quite well.

  One Peggy Doig. A housemaid, and mother of his eight-month-old natural son.

  Fortunately, dear Peggy’s lodgings lay up the Strand, on a perfect bee-line between the Park and Johnson’s rooms in the Temple, and so once James had settled his double reckoning, and then fastidiously splashed his hands at a street well near Charing Cross, there was no need for him to take even a step out of his way.

  FROM HER FAMILY’S dingy tenement on the south back of the Canongate in Edinburgh, Peggy Doig has traveled to London and landed finally in a flat above a disheveled chandler’s shop up the Strand. Still, it must seem awfully grand to her. The building rubs shoulders uncomfortably with an iron-monger on one side and a coffin-maker on the other. From her bitty garret window, she can no doubt take in both the stench of the smelting fire and the sweet pine-shavings smell of new death. The shop is owned by her brother-in-law, the candle-maker.

  Her older sister keeps house here and works on-again-off-again as a parish midwife. Twice has the parish sent a different young girl to clean house for the couple, to allow Peggy’s sister to devote herself entirely to wrestling infants from the growing number of parishioners out of whom they must be wrestled. Twice has the couple found fault with the young mop-squeezers in question and sent them away. One was beaten—badly, I take it—and then sent packing, though she is agreed to have been so provoking as to have asked for it.

  Eventually it was decided within the larger Doig family that rather than clean house for an aging widow in Edinburgh, at poor wages, Peggy might just as well serve her sister in London for none. If the family knew that the father of her bastard had also been in London for a year, they seem not to have cared a whit.

  The girl wrote James a short, inarticulate note two days ago, explaining and all but apologizing for her sudden presence in London, and finally offering—should he have a moment free some afternoon—to meet and pass on tidings of his child.

  This letter of Peggy’s I have now, this moment, in my coat pocket.

  I found it nestled in the lining of James’s tea-chest last night, alongside a small packet of letters to John Johnston, a childhood friend who has managed the whole awkward affair of the birth this year that James has been in England. It was Johnston who attended the mother following the birth, held the infant, and saw to it that the boy was named Charles, in accordance with the wishes of the father, who happened that night to be attending a rout thrown by the Countess of Northumberland, some four hundred miles away. It was Johnston who passed on the money to set the child up with a wet-nurse, and to keep the Doigs from noising the business about.

  This whole packet of letters I have in my pocket, in fact, the stiff paper rasping against the cloth. It rides there like a hornets’ nest, fragile, intricate, almost entirely defined by its potential for pain.

  James wrote back that he’d love to see her, and see her for more than a moment, but that she must arrange something private for them.

  And so yesterday Peggy wrote James a second letter, much more to the point. It told him the number of the house, how to enter by the doorway of the coffin-maker next door, which served her staircase just as well, how to reach the room she now had of her own, the garret four flights up. The garret itself had no lock—this by design, one must imagine, to make the watching and the beating of housemaids that little bit easier on the chandler’s wife. The letter hinted that the chandler would be occupied by his early customers— it was all but unheard of for him to leave his shop before the noon meal—and that the midwife would be sitting with a woman in the last hours of her confinement. Peggy might steal an hour or more before she began her work for the day, she said, by working twice as fast in the afternoon. James was to rap thrice at the garret door.

  She said that it would be sweet to see him again, after such an absence. Sweet, that was the very word she used.

  I could have told her that James would not be content with an hour. But she didn’t need anyone to tell her about James and his particular appetites, after all.

  For the record, I was right: it was more than two and a half hours from the time he entered to the time James exited the coffin-maker’s door and stood again on the street. He couldn’t have looked any more self-satisfied. Rather than attract attention by dashing away, he made a point of pausing and seeming to examine a small dark mahogany coffin standing erect in the window. He studied it from several angles, playing the grieving father. Then, to complete the effect, he called the carpenter over and dickered with him over the child’s box for a moment or two, before cheerfully giving it up and heading on up the Strand.

  I stayed with him until he finally rang for Johnson, and I watched the two of them walk arm in arm to Child’s, where they took their seats and called for their coffee. And then I turned back to the coffin-maker’s shop, and Peggy’s garret.

  I had about forty-five minutes, as near as I could reckon it. The coffee would take them at least half an hour, and you could bet your soul the two wouldn’t be leaving before James had had his dish of chocolate as well.

  BEFORE SHE MET James, Peggy was housemaid to Mrs. MacKenna, who still owns the floor above the Boswell flat in Parliament Square. By chance James saw the girl one morning, sprawled in the staircase, scrubbing the steps with a pail of damp sand.

  Her hands were brown from rottenstoning the widow’s risp and doorknob. But her small feet were bare and white, and James was immediately entranced by them.

  He wrote later to Johnston that they were more temptation than any man could stand, these two dainty lumps of muscle and toenail. “My father,” he wrote, “had always insisted that stockings and shoes be worn in the tenement’s common staircase, and given that this was the express wish not simply of a fellow tenant, but of a High Court Justice, it was obeyed by all the building’s inhabitants as a very commandment. And yet here was this girl, and here were her pretty naked feet, lying like opals cast among the sand.”

  I thought of these words because the feet were the first part of her I saw when I rapped thrice, then turned the handle very quietly, and opened the door an inch or two. They lay there on the counterpane before me, the very feet themselves. And to me they seemed like the feet of a young housemaid, just as much as would support her in wielding a broom, nothing more nor less. A bit dustier at the sole than one might wish them. Nothing to covet. Nothing to make a man risk an inheritance.

  She’d obviously decided to have a well-deserved catnap before setting about the cleaning her sister had assigned her for the day. The morning light was falling on her from the garret window, and she was curled in it, a drowsy dark-haired creature, with her back to me.

  B
ut she was not yet asleep. “Mr. Boswell,” she murmured, without raising her tousled head. Instead, she moved a strand of hair from her face, clearing her pretty profile, and then lay the arm down again, quiescent.

  I made a humming noise in my throat that might be taken for assent. Not an intelligible word, hence not a lie, but a sound.

  And in this case, of course, even a yes would not have been entirely amiss.

  At the sound, a hint of mischief touched up the corner of her mouth. She was enjoying London, it seems. I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. My boots on the floorboards, I imagine, sounded no different than the oh-so-careful step of her child’s sire.

  “You said I shouldn’t see you for many months,” she murmured, her voice thick with half-sleep. The voice was also playful and pleased, pleased that Mr. Boswell had not refused to see her altogether in London but had in fact come all the way to her room and broken his passion to her again, after so many months of silence; pleased that he had deigned to speak with her about their child, almost as though they were parents, man and wife even, they two together, rather than merely two dumb creatures who had come together in a rut to multiply; pleased that he could not resist returning this morning for more of her; pleased with the world, suddenly; pleased as punch with herself.

  She stretched on the bed, in nothing but a rumpled white smicket, unbending the white leg with its tracery of black down, languidly flexing the foot, no doubt bracing for the grip of James’s hands on her thigh, her shoulders, her hip. As I say, she needed no one to tell her of his appetites.

  It was a quiet, warm little room, although I could hear horses’ hooves and ostlers’ curses drifting up from the Strand. Other than the small bed, the garret was devoid of furnishings. Almost entirely devoid: her battered travel trunk she had covered with a strip of cheap lace, and on this strip she had placed her pins, a brush, her mob cap. A tiny, pretend dressing table.

  I went to the bed and sat at the bottom of it. My weight caused her body to dip toward me slightly on the straw-filled matt. She did nothing to counter the movement, but rested almost coyly in mid-motion, so that a simple nudge at her hip would have brought her rolling over to me. This is how ready to hand she was for him. I took one of the dags from its holster in the lining of my coat, and I laid it across my knee.

  “Good Mr. Boswell,” she cooed, eyes still closed, still facing the wall, still waiting. So passive was she in this foolery with James that she could not initiate even a look. She must wait to be rolled to her back, she must wait to be gazed upon.

  I reached out a hand and took the hem of the smicket in my fingers, tugged it down sharply where it had ridden up on her leg.

  “Cover yourself and be a woman, Peggy Doig,” I whispered back at her.

  Her head jerked around, and in that instant I had my left hand over her mouth, and her head pushed back into the tan sack she’d been allowed as a pillow. Before she could struggle more than a bit, I brought the pistol up from my knee and touched the fat gold heart-shaped butt to her flushed cheek, held it there, the snubbed barrel an inch from her eye.

  The kiss of the gold had its effect: she slumped back, limp as milktoast, breath coming in strained little hitches, but the eyes as open and seeing, no doubt, as they had ever been during her eighteen dun years of life.

  Even before I could speak, the eyes began to swim.

  I held her mouth, but I tipped the dag back from her face. “Peggy Doig, I want you to know that everything James knows, I know as well. I know that the chandler is below-stairs, and that you fear him only slightly less than you fear death itself. And so I know what will happen in the next ten minutes.”

  She watched me, and there was recognition in that gaze, as I knew there would be. I went on, softening my tone.

  “I will put away my pistol, you will lie still. And we will talk together. And then I shall leave, good as my word. But should you scream, I will scream louder, I will absolutely raise the house, and I will inform your brother-in-law of the details of your morning, or at least the last two and a half hours of it. I will show him your letters to James, and James’s by way of return. And he will need to leave off peddling his candles and bad beer and soap. You are not kind to him, or to your sister, in these little missives, you know. And so when he’s read them, you will suffer the fate of the previous mop-squeezers in this house, that is, to be beaten until you cannot walk, and then to be pitched out into the gutter like so much dirty tallow.”

  I slowly pulled my hand from her mouth, and drew back.

  “It’s you,” she managed to whisper. There was bewilderment in the word, and some faint whiff of something like betrayal.

  “Me,” I said. She has seen me with James, seen me loafing at the Cross in Edinburgh, something half-glimpsed a hundred times but never brought into focus.

  From my pocket, I drew the packet of letters, her last of yesterday on top and visible beneath the green silk ribbon. The swimming eyes closed tightly, and her face was suddenly wet, shining in the stray rays from the window.

  “Open your eyes, Peggy Doig.”

  She did so, managing a few strained, miserable words as well. I saw that her hands were clenching and unclenching mindlessly on the counterpane. “But what is it ye want, sir? I’ve not done anything to—”

  I brought out the second dag from its pocket beneath my right arm, and she was immediately silent. I held the two of them in front of her, and we looked at them together. They were lovely things, the pair of them, Doune locks so that they might be half-cocked, ready to fire as they were drawn. Shortened barrels for riding snug in a fitted inside pocket, each no longer than the tip of my finger to the heel of my hand. Balanced in the way that only a brace of Highland flintlocks will balance.

  And of gold. Not merely inlaid with gold, not merely gold-mounted, but entirely of gold, though not polished up: the deeper luster of gold gentled into everyday use, like a wedding band or a dark golden comb. They were like something royalty might wear or wield, that massy and that enchanting, without hollow or alloy. Only the shot and the powder itself were black, deep in their chambered hearts. And even those bullets the smith dusted with gold, so intent was he upon completely transforming the brutal into the lovely.

  “Bonnie things, aren’t they, Peggy Doig?”

  She knew better than to say no. “If ye say so, sir.”

  Peggy had never before seen such things, clearly. And neither had I before these came into my possession. Only blue steel is strong enough to bear repeated firing without melting or exploding, everyone knows it. But the maker of these cared nothing for constant use. These were designed to be used once or, in great necessity, twice each. The goldsmith who had them before me told me they were poured for an assassin in King George’s pay: each dag designed to fire one bullet into the head of one target, and then the pair to be melted down and converted into the killer’s reward. George had ordered one bullet for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the other for Flora Macdonald, the Prince’s ally on the island of Skye, she who dressed him as a waiting maid and spirited him to France.

  At least this was the goldsmith’s cant. But whatever the truth of their history, the dags have spoken to my heart these last weeks in London, the wonder and the rage, and for that reason I can sit sometimes in my small room near the Bridge and stare down at the pair of them in my hands for an hour or even two together, and never note the ticking of the clock. If envy truly has a color, that color is not green, but gold.

  I clinked the barrels one against another, and she flinched.

  “Shall I ask my questions, then?”

  She drew in a little shudder of breath, laid her head back on the pillow, eyes on the window. Then she nodded. Her hand went to the linen at her thigh, and she drew the garment down further, held it down, hand knotted in the thin material. She didn’t want me to see the move, because she was thinking about how to guard what lay beneath, despite what I’d said. But I looked at the hand, then back into her eyes.

&nb
sp; “You needn’t worry about your woman’s honor. I could not be less interested, I assure you. And I think it only fair to point out that your excessive concern comes a bit late in the game. But I am here to do two things, and the first is to satisfy my own curiosity. I must ask you those few things I have no way of knowing for myself. First off, what did James have to say about your own situation today? What said he on that score?”

  “My situation, sir?”

  “Don’t play the fool. That situation in which you and James searched diligently beneath one another’s clothing and discovered a baby.”

  A short pause. “He said I mustn’t ever fall into such a scrape again.”

  I laughed, quietly but from deep down. I could not help myself, for the life of me. “I thought as much. That was merely a question to confirm what I knew had to be so. Now my real question, Peggy Doig, that which only you can answer for me.”

  She braced for it, and I could see authentic curiosity kindling.

  “It is this.” I took in the young, spotless skin, the artless cascade of her hair. Her nose was long and very thin, turned down at the tip, a single element of elegance in an otherwise freckled, rustic face.

  “Why do you let him make a nothing of you?”

  She brought her gaze back to me, but there was perplexity there. “Sir?”

  “A nothing,” I whispered at her. “He pushed you or he wheedled you into giving yourself up to him in Edinburgh, and he treated you like a rag doll he kept in a closet above the flat, to play with at his leisure. And when he’d played with you and got you with child, he threw you back into the closet where he found you, with ten pounds for your trouble.”