The Brothers Boswell Read online

  Someone yelled in the street, and she waited before answering me, as though the voice might belong to someone coming to her aid. But then she spoke. Her own voice was gravelly with swallowed tears, but she defended him—and, I suppose, the child. “He’s taken notice of the lad, sir. He’s said the boy’s to be called Boswell. He’s said he ain’t ashamed if ’tis known.”

  “Of course it is to be called Boswell. Do you not see? Everything must bear his name, like a knock-off pamphlet. This is hack publication, not fatherhood.”

  “He’s set us up a nurse for him. The boy’s to be schooled when he’s of an age.”

  “It means nothing, you silly hamely Scots fool. Nothing in kindness, nothing in law. The boy will inherit nothing, and James will do little for him but encourage his dissatisfactions. But that is beside the point. My question pertains to you. Why do you allow James yourself, here, now, after what has passed? Why do you seek him out, when he has cast you off and left you to litter on your own down some cold little Edinburgh wynd?”

  It was a question she couldn’t answer, for modesty, or shame, or self-loathing.

  “Is it that he’s had you, and you think yourself without value to anyone else? God grant it is not that you love him, Peggy Doig, or that you believe that you’ve taken over some small portion of James’s heart. Because there is only room for one in that desiccated heart of his, and he is himself already lodged there.”

  I held the golden pistol-butt to her cheek again. She twisted away from it. “Why, Peggy Doig? Enlighten me. Why do you suffer him? Why do you defend his smutty hands on you? What could there possibly be to draw you back to him? It can’t be money, because he offered money only when you’d agreed to take the child and leave him in peace.”

  She said nothing, moved not a muscle.

  “God’s plague on you, girl! Answer me! Why?” I spat the question at her, bringing my face down much closer to hers. But she closed her eyes tightly again, rolled to her side.

  We stayed that way for a few seconds. I could see in her breathing that she’d mastered the tears. She was still shocked, but now looking to live through this strangeness. Beneath the new London linen and the tears, she was a hardened little Canongate deemie, and, when all was said and done, she trusted my country and the cut of my coat. Edinburgh gentlemen don’t murder girls in garrets. They may beat them, they may starve them, or both, over and over again, but the girls live to tell the tale.

  And then she answered. “I’m sorry—I can’t say, sir. I don’t know why, sir, truly I don’t. I don’t know, I don’t.”

  “You know why. You sent him a letter telling him how to find you, and when the way would be clear, you waited here for him like a little pussy in the sun. Don’t tell me you don’t know why, Peggy Doig. Don’t insult me that way. I won’t have it.”

  “You think me a hizzie, but it ain’t so.” Her voice was pleading, as much with herself as with me. “I don’t know why, but still he’s father to my boy, sir. It’s wrong what we done today, I know’t. But he’s my lad’s only hope in the world.”

  “Then in fact the lad is hopeless. You must see that. You must sense that, if you have any sense or any heart at all.”

  And then she brought out some small part of the whole, before she could stop herself, something I might have expected and that I’m sure she believed. Whether or not she thought saying it would help her leave the garret alive, or whether she thought it was her last word before dying, she blurted it out and it was as sincere as a child’s prayer in a hurricane: “Mr. Boswell’s a lovely man. He’s a lovely happy man to be with, whatever else. You know it yourself, sir.”

  I held my breath, and I uncocked the dags, because I could not trust myself not to shoot her by impulse alone. The anger was awake now, entirely awake and livid, pouring through my chest, down my arms. I could feel it heating my cheeks. But it wasn’t her, I realized that even in the midst of it, so much as it was him and what he’d done to the inside of her little black head. A thing that only James could manage: he’d made her genuinely grateful for his whoring her out to himself.

  But I’d expected something similar before I entered the room. And I had laid my own plans as well. So I told her the very least of what she should know. “Listen well, fool. I followed your lovely happy man this morning, you know, every step of the way before he came to you, and I can tell you that you weren’t the first he had before his cup of tea.”

  She threw her arm over her face, twisted on the bed.

  “He was with the nymphs in St. James’s Park, Peggy Doig, and by my count you were number three this day. Three as in one more than two, and one less than four. And you may very well not be the last. And don’t think for an instant that your Charles will be the last of his kind either. He likes his housemaids, James does, and waiting maids and laundry maids and charwomen, and if you’re wondering why he’s a happy man it’s because the Kingdom’s packed to the rafters with them.”

  A whisper, barely audible: “Don’t say sich things. Please, sir. Just leave me be.”

  “But I said there were two things I’ve come to do. The second is to give you this.” From my coat I took a small heavy leather purse, and I threw it onto the mat next to her. It bounced and clinked and settled, and she knew it was full of guineas without once touching it. Her hands stayed where they were, but she looked at it, and the hand went back to her smicket, holding it down against her leg.

  “There are fifteen guineas there. As much, I should imagine, as you would make in two years of trundling your mop. With the ten James has given you, you have now twenty-five in total, a small fortune for a girl such as yourself. It is yours upon one condition only, and that is that you never see James again. Never for a moment, even.”

  She was still covering her face, but she was listening, searching the sky beyond the window, breath coming in small slow gasps. A part of her had begun to hope against hope, even amid the horrors of the morning, that she might somehow be bailed from the confinement of her own life. She had no way of knowing that the guineas, like the letters, had been taken from James’s rooms last night, while he was sitting up late with Johnson and his stone-blind charity-case Miss Williams.

  I went on, letting her mind work. “Now that he knows where to find you, now that he knows this room, and the trick of the coffin-maker’s stair, he will be back, and soon. His talk about many months was a fit of post-coital responsibility. And when he comes back it won’t be for anything but finally to consume you, like a left-over pudding, for which he has a half-hearted late-night craving. That is the long and short of it. And in so doing he’ll ensure that you destroy even what little security you have here, which is little indeed, and it will all be lovely and happy until you are cast out onto the street, and in the end he will be not a particle the worse for wear.

  “And that is why I insist that you leave London, and take up Charles again from whatever Edinburgh foster-mother you’ve found for him, and make yourself a new nest somewhere far from James Boswell and his grimy doings.”

  She rolled over, lifted herself on an arm, swiped at her damp, blotchy cheek. Her tone was tinged with an unmistakable outrage, something of which I wouldn’t have imagined her capable, in her position.

  “How can you say these things of him? How can ye? You of all people, who know the man best, sir? He is your brother, after all, i’nt he? In’t he now?”

  I cocked the dag audibly in my right hand, and I shuffled closer to her on the bed, so that the barrel came to rest against the skin of her throat. And then, because I truly could not prevent myself, I felt myself surge forward and the barrel sank deeper still into the sinews of her neck. Panic flooded back into her eyes, and she gave a little involuntary cry, face crushed down into the pillow.

  I held it there for a long instant, my hand actually shaking with rage, until I had my voice again. “Here it is, girl. If I catch you with James again, I will kill you, and I will kill your son Charles. I’ll slaughter you both—listen well to me, n
ow—and no one will protect you, no one will keep you safe. Not the watch, not James, not an army of brothers-in-law. Better that you should both be dead, and pennies rusting on both your eyes, than that he should unravel the stuff of your lives like a nasty child savaging a rag doll. Believe me, Peggy Doig, when I say this, for I am genuinely mad. The fact has been proven, and the best doctors at Plymouth have washed their hands of me. So you will take this money, and you will make a life for yourself in which James has no part, because whatever part he makes up will go rotten sooner rather than later, and no one knows it better, as you say, than I myself.”

  I drew back the pistol, and her breath came in a coughing rush, as did fresh tears. But I had no more time to argue, and without another word I withdrew from the bed and stepped to the door.

  Before opening it, I said, “Your letters are in my pocket now, and I shall keep them. Think of that when you think about telling your sister or anyone else of what’s happened between us this morning. I can find you anywhere in the Kingdom, should you and James see one another again, because I know everything that James knows, and always will. If I were you, I’d let it be said that your boy died of the smallpox, or by pitching off the back of a fishing boat, and I’d smuggle him off somewhere else, somewhere fresh. But whatever I did, I would separate my life and my line from the Boswells, for once and for good. If I loved my little bairn. If I wanted what was indeed best.”

  She had curled into a small ball on the bed, head in her arms, hairy white legs doubled up beneath the chemise. The irresistible feet were buried miserably beneath the counterpane. She was crying, but so softly and forlornly that I lost the sound when I closed the garret door behind me. Whatever she might think of me, she thought nothing good of her brother-in-law the chandler. She didn’t want to call him out of his little hole full of candles and knick-knacks, even now.

  I felt for her, truly I did. Her world was hemmed round by men for whom nothing good might be said, or so it must have seemed to her. She had no way of knowing that I had done her the single greatest kindness of her life.

  I remain convinced of it, even today. For in February of 1764, only some six months after our morning’s discussion, James will be desultorily studying law in Utrecht, and he will receive a letter informing him that his illegitimate infant son has died. Without his ever having laid eyes on the boy, the boy will be no more. James will write pained letters to Johnston and a few other of his confidants, and he will actually shed a tear or two—he has that capacity—but in a week the subject will pass forever from his mind.

  James will never bestir himself to attend a funeral, he will never see a body, and of course he will never lay eyes on pretty Peggy Doig again. And it sustains me, during these harsher, colder winters at the far end of my life, to imagine little Charles alive somewhere in the Hebrides or deep in the fields of the English countryside, a carpenter or a master printer by now, with no knowledge of his father and with no true understanding of his bliss.

  3

  AS THE RIVER uncoils to the south, London goes to ground. Over the space of fifteen waterborne minutes, it melts unceremoniously from sight. Clusters of docks and wharves no longer clutch at the current. One outpaces the smoking kilns and the mountains of coal rising from the side of the water, tiny colliers attacking them madly with tiny shovels. Watermen suddenly leave off shouting obscenities, as though the increasingly open countryside were a chapel.

  The air cleanses itself of burnt lime-stench and the smoke of brewers and soap-boilers, while the river itself outruns the slag and runoff and sewage. Broad fields of green and tan elbow out the warehouses, then begin to link and stretch away in patchwork as far as the eye can see, gorgeous, tended, verdant. The banks of the river are suddenly lush with grass and reeds, beds of marsh willows, rather than brick and waterlogged lumber. The wind is tamed. Sunshine pours down now on my little green canopy, sweet and heavy as honey. I am sweating through the arms of my coat, but in the relative quiet I welcome the heat. I catch myself dreaming over the water.

  Insects are suddenly at play in the canopy with me, but the indolence of the open fields is such that I cannot bring myself to swat them. For long moments, I have the pleasant, forgetful sense that I am on holiday, with a friend.

  I recognize the sensation, this sudden extra-London calm, because today’s excursion is my second by river to Greenwich this week. Once I learned that James and Johnson were to take a Saturday afternoon excursion to Greenwich together—and once I had decided to make myself a de facto member of their party—it seemed prudent to reconnoiter so the day could not fail to run smoothly. And so I made this same trip this past Wednesday, three days ago, by way of a dry run. That simulation, along with a memorandum James wrote to himself Tuesday night, laying out a number of things the two hoped to see and do come Saturday—these things have made my planning for today a great deal easier.

  Rather than following James and Johnson in their second, longer boat all the way to Greenwich, rather than hiding in the river traffic like a thief, I have told the waterman to move out ahead and to take a long comfortable lead. My thought is, let them follow me for a bit. They are content to let their own oarsman dawdle. They have nothing to accomplish today. I have a good, long list.

  As we pass, near enough in the water that I might reach out and notch their boat with my sword, Johnson is braying about the canny vulgarity of Methodist preachers. I watch the two of them through a tear in the wool shrouding me. Seeing them that way is a strange thing, a feeling not merely of alienation but of inhabiting different realms altogether, with different relation to the earth and the men and things on it. The dead spying on the quick.

  Johnson and James have oranges torn open on their laps, and they are pulling the flesh from the rinds and casting them into the flood. I see trout and shad rising to their leavings, and silver minnow cloudbursts.

  In the long, thin craft, Johnson’s size is magnified: he seems vaguely inhuman, a river-troll, a great hunched mass at the center of the boat, hoarding his powers, sucking his fruit. The heavy-lidded, amphibian eyes and the thick lips are in constant terrible motion as he speaks. He is correcting James, something I expect I might have heard no matter the moment I happened to pass them by.

  “No, sir, no, no, no,” Johnson is loudly insisting, “preaching of drunkenness as a crime, as something that debases reason—the noblest faculty of man—this sort of preaching will do nothing with the vulgar. They care not a farthing for reason. They will spit in your eye. The Methodists know this well. But tell the poor that they might have died dead drunk, and been roasted everlastingly for their sins, roasted until their blackened flesh fell from their bones,” he spits out a seed and thrusts a thick finger at the sky, again and again, “and then, sir, you will affect them as you ought. This is the key, and the only key, to the success of an English Methodist.”

  And then our boat is past, and off and away. Johnson’s voice becomes only a faint vibration at the margin of my consciousness, and then nothing at all.

  The waterman has understood by this point that he is to remain silent, and he does so, staring back toward the city we have left, pulling both sullenly and mightily, the quicker to unload his odd cargo and be off home. Once or twice, children gathered on the banks call out gaily for silver, and when they do, I pitch a bit of change into the reeds. They wade out into the shallows after it like long-limbed monkeys, racing, diving, delirious with joy at the prospect of a copper.

  But mostly there is silence, only the sound of water curling about the oars. And there is nothing left but to warm my face in the sun, huddle up in my own mind, and consider—as I am especially wont to do these last several weeks—of the promise James once made me.

  ONE NOVEMBER NIGHT when James was fifteen and I was twelve, two men visited our family flat in Edinburgh’s Parliament Close. This would be the tail end of 1755. These men had climbed the four stories to speak with my father, and when they’d stripped off their coats, he took them down the narrow hallwa
y to the room where he had always received clients before clawing his way onto the bench of the High Court the year before.

  As they passed the room James and I shared, I recognized the taller of the men to be Lord Kames, one of my father’s most powerful colleagues on the Court.

  The other man wore the upturned silk nightcap of an artist or a scholar, a particular oddity in our flat. My father had few acquaintances outside the legal universe, very much by choice. He’d once told James, who had smuggled a small book of poems to the table with him, “A gentleman does not come to the table, Jemmie, with shite on his boots or rhymes in his hands.”

  But this little man was no lawyer. He carried a folio under his arm, and he carried it not as though it contained watercolors or poems but as though it contained preliminary designs for the Afterlife itself. And so I guessed, architect.

  I was right, as it turned out. After the men had been shut up in the consultation room for upwards of an hour, my father knocked on our door. “James,” he said to my older brother, and the two of them left the room without another word, according to some previous understanding. I realized once they were gone that James hadn’t changed into his robe and slippers after supper; he’d remained fully dressed in one of his best dark velvet suits, cravat tied, propped in a chair, reading his Longinus. I saw then that he’d simply been prepping his role: classical son, learning his Latin, getting his Greek.

  Another twenty minutes or so went by, and then the four of them emerged. In the hallway, the two men shook my brother’s hand, and then they and my father put on their greatcoats and hats and left the flat.

  James came back into our room, and we worked in silence for a moment, and then he cocked his head to listen. My mother was in her room with Davie, my little brother, who had a croup. There was no sound but the distant sound of singing from the street. Satisfied, James put down his text and walked over to the chair where I sat.