The Brothers Boswell Read online

  “They’ve gone for gin and oysters,” he said and crooked a finger. “Come, Johnny.”

  And without another word, we walked down the hall to my father’s consultation room, and James opened the door and walked me over to my father’s desk. On the desk lay the folio.

  James drew it closer to us, fingered the unmarked leather cover without opening it. He toyed with the raised edges.

  “Did you know the man with Lord Kames?” he whispered.

  I said I didn’t, but that I’d guessed he was an architect.

  James looked at me with surprise, and a complimentary nod of his head. “He is Mr. James Craig,” James went on, “and he is in fact an architect. Can you guess what plans he brought to show father?”

  “The new house at Auchinleck,” I whispered. My father had been talking about a new house on the family estate for years, but recently his talk had been edged with decision.

  James tapped the cover with his finger, and his smile blossomed into genuine self-satisfaction. His fifteen-year-old face was all but illuminated with the sense of knowing.

  “He has another architect for the new house. This plan,” he lifted the cover, “is for Edinburgh, another Edinburgh. A new companion city, to the north. To be built from scratch.”

  It was an architect’s early outline, but sharp enough in detail. At the bottom of the parchment was the North Loch, the present boundary of the city. Clearly the Loch was to be drained, dredged, and regularized and landscaped. And beyond that vast, hypothetical feat of engineering lay a perfect theoretical grid of streets, these linking and enclosing two large imaginary public squares. The streets were already labeled, grand names like Queen’s and Castle. Tiny but discernible rows of trees lined the pavements. It was mathematically precise and yet fantastic, otherworldly.

  James watched my face as I puzzled over the details. “There is to be a proposal floated next year for the building of a bridge here,” he touched the paper carefully, experimentally, “coupled with some general discussion of extending the city’s Royalty to here,” he stroked an area far to the north, an area of farms and meadows and swampland. “In a few years, when public discussion allows, there will be a contest announced for designs for the New Town. And this design, with some alterations, will be selected. Mr. Craig, the man you saw tonight, will be given a gold medal and the freedom of the city.”

  James turned full to me, again with the air of a schoolmaster. It was the air I could ever least forgive him. “And why, would you suppose, does father show me this? Introduce me to the men who will build it? Let me in on the secret of the rigged competition, a secret that even most of his friends don’t know he has broken?”

  I remember wondering if he were goading me, forcing me to say it so that he could revel in the obvious.

  “Why would you suppose?” he urged.

  I brought it out then, the pebble of resentment in the dress shoe of our relationship: “Because you are eldest.”

  Now his look of self-satisfaction ripened into delight. “Yes, I am eldest. And Father would like me to join with Lord Kames and the rest of the eldest sons of the oldest families in Scotland in a longstanding war they have running. It is a war against the second-and third- and fourth-eldest sons of the oldest families in Scotland. It is a club, and he admits me tonight. He shows me that he trusts me never to reveal these plans, plans that will undoubtedly make the Lords and the magistrates rich. Filthy rich. Far, far filthier richer than any of them are today.”

  “And you break his trust.”

  James nodded, his well-fed cheeks dimpling. He seemed about to giggle. “Exactly. Without even half an hour intervening, I break his trust.”

  “Why, though? For what reason?”

  “You do me the credit of assuming I have a reason. It is much appreciated.”

  “Seriously, now. Why are you so throng about telling what you’ve promised not to tell?”

  “Mind your English. Say ‘why are you so very concerned with’.”

  “Why are you so very concerned with telling, then?”

  “To show my trust in you.”

  This stopped me. “Thanks, then, Jemmie.”

  “And why else?” he prodded.

  I looked back down at the plans, shrugged my shoulders.

  He prodded again. “Guess.”

  “I can’t. There’s nothing to be guessed.”

  Here was the thing he had risked my father’s strap to say. And these are the exact words he used to say it. I remember them with an unnatural clarity, in the way that a childhood prayer unspools from memory, every word of equal gravity and every word somehow palpably in its place.

  “Because if there are to be new cities,” James said to me, “even secret new cities, then eldest and second-eldest brothers must always enter together. One can’t be shut up in the reek of the close, while the other crosses over into fresh air and new-built homes. I despise the idea. It is an offense against one’s own blood, for the sake of other firstborn of other families.

  “Our father’s sons should be united. And that shall always be the case with the Boswells, Johnny, you have my word on it.”

  I cannot express the profundity of the effect these words had on me at that moment. I was transported. It was the sort of magic my brother James has always been able to work, all the years of his life, the iridescence of unexpected sincerity, the audacity of emotional revelation, the ability to transmute the maudlin into the genuine. You may begin listening to him in skepticism but more often than not you finish in sympathy, more genuine even than you will allow yourself to admit.

  You tell yourself that all of this is by way of humoring him, but it is not. It is the authentic force of his personality, working on you.

  He actually took my hand then. “Father will imagine and construct distinctions between us, distinctions of a million kinds. And he will expect that they will endure after his own life is over, but you and I will never honor them, never once. We shall be better and closer than that.”

  For that, I forgave him even his schoolmaster’s air.

  For that, I forgave him everything: the self-blindness and the lust for attention and the unbridled egocentrism and the later buffoonery. For that, I loved him without reserve, as his younger brother and unashamed of it. From the age of twelve, I defended him and protected him, from himself quite as much as from others. It wasn’t so much that he earned my devotion on that night but that he conjured it and then took it, with his shocking promise of common cause.

  And I loved James in that way, unreservedly, until such time as his explicit promise was explicitly broken, and he did what he said he would never do: he kept a city secret and hidden from me. Not merely a city, but a city poised at the archway of an entire universe. And I saw that for all of his talk, the ancient war between brothers was very much under way.

  From which time I loved him reservedly.

  And in those newly scoured spaces of my heart, I began to resent him—just a bit at first, then later with great energy and imagination. I am every bit his brother in power of imagination, I assure you.

  Finally, in the very blindest corners of the closes and wynds of this heart I have been describing to you, I came to something not unlike hate. It was unfamiliar to me at first, but eventually I began to excel at it, this something not unlike hate. And as with any unexpected talent—like painting landscapes on the blanched shell of an egg or shooting hummingbirds with a pistol—I came to cultivate it for its own sake.

  PART TWO

  This Play

  with No Name

  Sunday 9 January

  I dined at home and drank tea with my brother. We were very merry talking over the days when we were boys, the characters of Mr. Dun, Mr. Fergusson, Mr. McQuhae, and Mr. Gordon and the servants who were then in the family. In short, an infinite number of little circumstances which to ourselves were vastly entertaining.

  —From Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763

  Edinburgh, Scotland

/>   July 1759

  4

  IT IS DIFFICULT to conceive how pathetic and naïve I am in middle July of 1759, at just sixteen years of age, but here is a bright case in point: I am race-walking down the High Street to the Cross, occasionally even breaking into a dogtrot, dodging caddies and chairmen and slow-moving carts because I am to meet James there at half past noon, and I am afraid to be late. The sun is bright, opulently so, but I am all but unaware of it, this pleasant day of only a handful or so a year we have in this wretchedly dark country.

  The music bells are playing from the tower of St. Giles, some careless popular air that I half-recognize but cannot name, but in my hurry they sound like warning bells, fire in the city, approaching armies.

  Why am I afraid to be late?

  True, it is not often that James takes me to the theater, and I don’t want to begin the day badly. He is good about taking me to tea or to a chophouse, places where we concentrate on our meat or our hot water and leaves. But the theater, for the last several years, has been his ruling passion, his obsession, and when he is there he is very sensitive to his own social performance, and my own—preternaturally sensitive, you might say.

  I have gone with him to the Canongate just four times in the last year, including today, and each of those times he was both with me and not, present corporeally and yet diffused as a kind of turbulent energy throughout the playhouse. He shimmies like a spaniel in his seat.

  And this infatuation has lately come to a head: James spent all of last summer in the playhouse, making copious but nervous love to a second-rate actress named Mrs. Cowper, known for the role of Sylvia in Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer. Not actual love, mind you, but high-flown talk of love.

  Let’s be clear about that. This is 1759, and James is still almost entirely inexperienced in matters of the body.

  How do I know this? James is not shy about divulging such things. Never in his life, believe me, but never less than at eighteen. He has begun to write poetry and to consort with players and secretly to publish gloomy graveyard verse in the style of Thomas Gray, but only an eighth of an inch beneath the surface he is still an anxious, quite regular churchgoing virgin. The theater is his alchemical agent.

  And so by taking me today he brings me into his dearest circle. Still, why in such a rush, as I run to the Cross? James is himself often late, sometimes abominably so. And when he is, he’s then tragicomically contrite for a moment, and there’s an end on’t. Today the play doesn’t begin until six, doors don’t open until five, and the early rehearsal we are privileged to attend won’t begin until half past one. So we will have thirty minutes for a twelve-minute walk, in order to wait twenty minutes or so to be let through the door. I could show up at the Cross dead late, and not one lick of this, not one tittle, would be changed.

  What is your hurry then, Johnny? It is a mystery.

  JAMES IS WAITING for me, almost precisely in the spot once occupied by the octagonal monument that used to mark the Cross. It has been three years since the city magistrates pulled down and re-located the small decorative building, topped with a high stone pillar, itself topped with a magnificent fighting unicorn. It is there in my earliest memories of the High Street, that dourly clever little obstacle to traffic.

  Sometime in the dim past, James told me a story about how the unicorn had helped Scottish forces crush the English at Bannockburn, before being imprisoned in stone by a wizard named Union. It was a story I loved immediately, and he told it to me regularly for a few months until, inexplicably, it began to give him dramatic, screaming nightmares and my mother barred the story from the flat.

  And now the building and the pillar are no more, three years since the Cross has truly been the Cross. But James continues to insist that we meet there, out of loyalty to the unicorn—Charlie, as one of us named him some forgotten afternoon.

  James is there when I arrive, miraculously, and he is alone, miraculously. There is a sort of overstuffed magnificence to him as he stands there in the space of the absent unicorn, in full sunlight, in his second-best suit. Matching coat, waistcoat, and breeches of blue corded velvet, the elephant-ear sleeves falling magnificently from his wrists, the short, tight breeches pinched precisely above his knees, lace ruffles rampant, sword hilt poking pugnaciously from the coat, hair freshly powdered and well buckled at the temples, he clearly wants to look as dressed as humanly possible in Edinburgh without quite overdressing.

  But the magnificence lies not in the dressing or the powdering, but in James’s own person and in the way he wears it. Sleek and dark as a stage hero, bright and winning as a spring pig, eyes black and nose just overly large, he is handsome and faintly comical. The combination is devastating in its way.

  And James is the son of a Justice of the High Court in a city that worships the Law. In addition to an air of size beyond his girth, he wears an aura of importance well beyond his achievements. He cuts a figure, as my uncle Doctor John Boswell once said to me: He cuts a very quick figure, does your brother Jemmie.

  James turns and sees me slowing to a stop beside him. He smiles absently, and I guess that he is lost in his long-running fantasy of the theater. But I am wrong.

  “I miss Charlie,” he says. “He was a good unicorn.”

  “Yes, he was that.”

  “He wore his horn lightly, Charlie did.”

  “Am I late?”

  He shakes himself out of his pleasurable little melancholy, hauls up a small pretty bunch of wildflowers he has been concealing behind his hip. He smiles down at the flowers, and I can see that for James, today is a very special day indeed, more special even than I have understood. “Is not a man always late to the theater, Johnny, no matter how soon soever he may come?”

  And then he pivots on his heel and we are off, but we are not simply walking to the Canongate. One does not merely walk with James on a bright afternoon.

  No, no, no. One sallies forth.

  Although his legs are moving vigorously beneath him at all times, James has a way of leaning back into the plush frame of his own body like a duke into a coach. Hands always moving, punctuating the chatter he trails in his wake. Right hand draped at his sword hilt, then cutting the air to acknowledge a bookseller my father brought off, reluctantly brought off, on a charge of piracy several years ago. Left hand diving into his coat for a silk handkerchief, then genteelly throttling off a tremendous sneeze without any help whatsoever from the right. “Ah! Rippingly perfect sneeze. Like blowing the top of a mountain away with cannon fire. A man sees the view suddenly unobstructed.”

  We pass a greenwife’s booth, and James is struck by a mound of tea-roses. So struck that he lays hands on a bunch and after buying them presents his suddenly out-of-favor wildflowers to the middle-aged woman behind the till with a flourish. Forget that she sells flowers, that she is sitting in a tiny wooden box filled almost to bursting with herbs and vegetables and flowers—that this woman is in point of fact occupied from first light until dark with trying to disencumber herself of flowers—the truth is that the greenwife is enchanted, and we leave her still perched on her little wooden creepie, but now dimpling with pleasure.

  We sally forth with tea-roses. James thrusts the bulb of his nose into the yellow profusion of the roses, sucking the scent from them hungrily.

  Just at the head of New Street, we turn right, down into Playhouse Close. The alleyway is a canyon two men wide and nine stories high. Tenements and towers brood over the cobblestones. Even in broad daylight, it is always somewhere near dusk in the close. Your heels clatter louder than in the High Street, and you can feel the temperature fall just that palpable little bit.

  On poles far above us, drying linen flaps like falcon wings.

  At the very bottom of the canyon stands the door of the Canongate Theater. And at that door stands—slouches, lists—a middle-aged man in a leather apron. Broken vessels and capillaries stream out over his fat cheeks; white whiskers cover these tributaries like birch. But as we come to a stop, the man s
traightens into something like sentry-readiness, drum stomach stretching his apron warningly in our direction.

  “Doors open at five, gentlemen. No admittance till then, I’m to say.”

  He delivers these lines with obvious relish. My guess is that he is a scenery-maker, happily filling in for the doorman today instead of hauling stage machines. In any event, James might simply inform the man that Mr. Gentleman has asked us to attend the company’s dress rehearsal. But James does not. No, no, no.

  “Sir,” James says, resting his hand on my shoulder, “you see before you two brothers, back in their native country after a stretch of four long years. Our history must speak for us—two whose father forbid their service in the wars against the French, who sneaked away to join a Highland regiment, and who swore a blood oath to the clan leader. At last we fought in Newfoundland, and in Cuba, and our campaigns were brilliantly successful. The French and the Spaniards knew their masters. And then,” he punches one gloved hand suddenly into the other, “we returned to London only to find that we were unwanted, and reviled, and hissed as Scotsmen.

  “And so we’ve come to the theater today, sir, to revel in the performance of a good hamely Scottish company, to feel ourselves men again. And can any countryman blame us for coming sooner rather than later?”

  The substitute doorman is taken aback, to say the least. He doesn’t believe, of course, not really, but there is much here that puts belief to one side of the question. A few seconds tick by, and the old patriot seems about to strike some sort of middle ground when the door behind him bursts open, and Francis Gentleman leans way out, his bagged black hair bobbing.

  “Thomas!” Gentleman shouts at the confused doorman. “Are you keeping the Boswell men, the older and the younger, on the step? Did I not specifically say that all persons Boswell were to be put through straight away? Stand aside, blockhead, stand aside. Let good taste pass. Gentlemen, my apologies. Excuse the ignorant prick. Come in, by all means, come in.”