The Brothers Boswell Read online

  “I am not laughing. You insist that I’m laughing and scoring points. I am not. I’m rooting for you, Jemmie. Because I have a feeling you’ve passed a point of no return. And I would help you, now that you’re helpless.”

  He draws in a long lungful of evening air, sorting his thoughts before speaking. Our two pairs of boots make a comforting clacking on the stones, occasionally portioning out into something that resembles the sound of a single horse being led along. Then the sounds diverge, become again the differentiated walks of two Boswells, dragging their way home.

  “But, Johnny,” he says after a pause, hand buffing his sword hilt absently, “there is something else. Another reason for asking me to her dressing rooms, it turns out. Something she wanted to tell me. To confess. She is a Catholic.”

  I have to reorder my expectations, and even then I can do nothing but repeat his words. “A Catholic.”

  “Yes. Devout. Very earnest about the doctrine. Very well read in it.”

  We begin to walk again. It takes only a moment for me to rework the day’s half-joking calculations in my mind and come up with a new bottom line.

  “But then she cannot be mistress at Auchinleck. Even supposing you were serious about marrying her. Even supposing father would allow it. You must give that fantasy up.”

  But James, of course, has come to his own new bottom line.

  “Ay, give that up, or give up Auchinleck itself,” he says.

  I should have expected it, but I didn’t, and I swing my head to see how serious he seems to be. If he were joking, he’d meet my eye and wink, but he doesn’t meet my eye. He’s scanning the lighted windows in the Tolbooth, and at some level this contemplation of the incarcerated he intends as a sign of the gravity of his thoughts.

  “James, don’t let your mind play down that road. I know you. You’ll get lost and not be able to find your way back.”

  “Suppose it weren’t play. Suppose I told you that I’ve read the doctrine and found much there to like. And, of course, the ceremony of the Romish Church, the pomp and the magnificence of it—truly first-rate.”

  “It would mean giving up a career in Parliament. You’ve wanted to be in Parliament since you were nine years old.”

  “I can live without it.”

  “No, you cannot. Take it from me, you cannot. I’m the one’s had to lay in the bed next to you listening to you fantasize endlessly about it, listening to you make a speech on one side of a cause, and then rubbish yourself from the other side of it, back and forth, back and forth. And Auchinleck is the foundation of your entire future. You absolutely covet it, you’ve told me so. We’ve lain awake a hundred nights while you’ve told me all the things you plan to rip up or put down once you come to it. And it is yours by every rule and law and custom you claim to care about.”

  Again, he squints off into the smoke layered above the tenements, the oily, ever-present smudge that has always seemed to compromise all choices available to those beneath it. Then he turns frankly to me again. “A Catholic laird is not an impossibility, John. It’s been done. There are ways to manage it.”

  With a start I realize that he’s thinking of me, of my connivance in conveying control of the estate to him should he, in his romantic imaginings, be stripped of it. And I feel my sympathy begin suddenly to thin.

  But before I can protest, he has tossed that notion away as well. “And besides, a writer doesn’t need an estate or a career in government. A writer needs only two things. He needs to know where his heart directs him, and he needs to obey it.”

  “This is rot, James. Pure rot.” I can feel myself almost getting angry now, which is absurd. This is the whim of a moment. James will want a thousand and one potential wives before he’s actually wed. It’s just that he’s so vulnerable to exactly this sort of manipulation, by others and more dangerously by himself. “Five minutes ago you were telling me that your happiness depended on being a hundred men. Now you’re killing them off twenty at a time. You’d be miserable, no title, no estate, no career in the law or anything else. A foolish little man who chose poorly. You despise men like that, you pity them.”

  “Alexander Pope was no foolish little man. He was a devout Catholic, and they tried to take everything from him. They forced him to live twenty miles outside London. They made a bungler like Cibber the Laureate instead. But he’s still the greatest poet of the modern age. Ask any man if he pities Pope. Pope is revered.”

  “You are mad.”

  “I am a writer, sir. And I am in love.”

  “Twice mad.”

  “And if that is madness, then I am not afraid of it. I welcome it.”

  “Thrice, then.”

  “I embrace it, I tell you.”

  “Quadruple Bethlehem-Hospital mad, then. Stark-staring, spittle-flecked, pissing-your-own-shoebuckles Bedlam mad.”

  We walk in silence for a few moments then, the joking suddenly turned sour. Given that my father’s younger brother James took to his bed years ago, and left it only to be fitted for a strait-waistcoat, madness has never been a jest in our house. This is especially true for my father and for his son James, whose screaming nightmares about the wizard Union were only one of several shadows cast across his childhood. Only seven years ago, then twelve years old, James woke one morning to find himself without the will to leave his bed. Almost parenthetically the doctors found a delicate red rash, a nervous scurf, snaking around his thick ankles.

  For the scurf and the lassitude—and in a general knock-on-wood against the specter of insanity—James spent nearly two months in a rude little inn at Moffat, drinking from the sulfur springs and being doused with buckets of hot sulfur water in an apparatus like an oversized wine cask. He had a relapse two years ago and was sent to be dunked again.

  But to this day James cannot eat hardboiled eggs for the smell of the yolks.

  And so suddenly, for all of these reasons, I want to take my words back, especially the part about pissing his own shoebuckles; but I tell myself that what James is proposing is social suicide, and so I leave them in play.

  We cross the Lawnmarket, and after another moment skirt the Weigh-House, jutting out into the dark street. Two of the Town-guard stroll by us, hauling their axes along, beating their eight o’clock curfew again, now, at nearly nine. Caddies hauling home the early drunk, gangs of neighborhood boys at their bickers, heaving cabbage stalks at one another over chimney-tops. A covey of lawyers drifting from one oyster-cellar to another, loud and bad after a day drudging over briefs.

  In and out of it all floats the shit-and-piss smell of unchambered human waste, flung out of windows back in the wynds or poured direct into gutters. The magistrates have banned this communal excretion, and their latest ban has held, more or less, during daylight hours. But evening is another story.

  All of this has the feel of full-to-bursting tonight, the air of a city penned in with its own variegated excesses. Edinburgh is a lunatic, strapped down tight to a stony crag, endlessly fouling its own sheets.

  And as we pass Bank Street I can see out over Market Street to the North Loch, which they’ve begun to drain and survey in preparation for the New Town. There is more than enough water left in the Loch for the moon to lend it a greasy shine. But that will change by autumn’s end.

  I can sense the city preparing to subdivide, to multiply. Like water spreading to the edge of a table, pooling, tensing against some invisible barrier until such time as that barrier is removed by the hand of God.

  Suddenly James resumes the subject, but his voice is not unkind. “I’m only thinking of possibilities, John. I’ve not decided anything. It’s just that I can’t bear to think her forbidden me, because I was raised in the Kirk and she was not. I must be allowed to canvass the possibilities of a wife. I must. It’s good of you to worry about me, it is.”

  Now he stops and turns on me. “But the truth is that if I know little of passion, you know nothing at all, John, nothing outside of novels. That’s the hard truth of it. I have at le
ast some experience, and that experience must be worth something. You should not pretend to know how a man driven by passion must act.”

  To that I can say nothing, nothing without causing the world to end.

  At St. Giles Church, we take a small alleyway into Parliament Close, the vast secret square of it hidden behind the bulk of the church. At night it is always much quieter than the High Street, and we cross it nearly alone. It is like an outdoor arena, somehow, this cobbled square formed by lines of twelve-story tenements and the massive, crowned church and Goldsmith’s Hall and all of the other buildings making up the walls and passageways of my early life, like something at once deeply Scottish and deeply Roman, gladiatorial.

  And since Blair’s Land sits spectator on the south wall of the square, it seems not merely an arena, but our home arena. Crossing it with my older brother, I am moved to vow inwardly, as he is wont to vow outwardly, that I will struggle and make a mark in the world, that I will fight and I will win and I will be remembered.

  We pass goldsmith after goldsmith, the little nest of them gathered in the gloom, most of them still open late into the evening, each tending his own tiny incandescent inferno. Their lights take on a startling beauty in the deep open dusk of the Close, and suddenly their labors strike me as fine and holy, turning out plate for kings and an infinite supply of simple spoons for the dowries of common brides.

  Edinburgh is a lunatic; but lunacy, of course, doesn’t preclude beauty. In extremely rare cases, in fact, these qualities strengthen and flatter one another. And while it’s true that Hamlet’s Ophelia and the city of my birth are the only two such instances I know, then again they are each in and of themselves more than enough to make one believe.

  We climb the four stories to the flat and let ourselves in. Our father is sitting before the open window in the black ladder-backed chair, with a sheaf of papers, the meat of some legal cause or other. He marks us as we enter the room, then returns to the brief.

  “Where have ye two been?” he inquires.

  “We have been to see a play,” says James, a little loudly to my ear.

  Father flicks his glance up again and manages to condense an entire Presbyterian Sunday service, with a two-hour-and-ten-minute sermon, down into two syllables.

  “Lovely,” he says, in his own bleak sort of poetry.

  6

  YOU NEED TO understand that our father was not simply a man, not merely or exclusively human. In his one nondescript body were combined a hereditary Laird, a Lord of Session, and a Lord Commissioner of Justiciary, mind. He sat at the windy apex of the country’s civil and criminal court systems. And when he dressed himself for Court, when he had seated the smoky, full-bottomed wig and donned the deep blue juridical robes—those billowing robes, their burgundy facings and crimson florets trailing down his breast and whispering boldly back and forth with each stride—he was a mythical figure of all but limitless power.

  He could cause a tavern to be shuttered if the stink of its taps offended him as he strolled past. He could cause the very boundaries of the city itself to expand by means of certain dark rituals we could only dimly glimpse.

  The one pocket of his robes overflowed with mercy, the other with destruction. He freed men from the Tolbooth, wretches who had lost all other hope. Yet he caused ropes to be knotted around the necks of other men, and those men—James and I had watched this spectacle many, many times—those men were hauled to the Gallows Stone at the end of the Grassmarket and shoved roughly from a stool, and they jerked at the end of their tethers sometimes for twenty minutes before being cut down and carted to the anatomists at the Medical College.

  After these executions, James would always push his way into my bed for comfort, shivering not only at the memory of the bulging eyes, but at the realization that the killer himself slept soundly but two rooms away.

  But the primal magic he worked had smudged his spirit somehow, caused my father’s heart to shrink and wither and gizzen. He was capable of the odd joke here or there, and the odd loving gesture, but generally speaking he was short-tempered and disapproving, prim and pedantic and strict, and he held a grudge—for decades, if need be.

  And so I think it goes without saying that, when I am sixteen and this man emerges from the oratory door set into one wall of the flat’s dining room, fresh from his morning devotions, our father is, in some very effectual sense, Our Father. Our Father of the Gizzent Heart.

  All of the flats in Blair’s Land have an oratory like ours—a diminutive door off the dining room, or, in a few cases, the kitchen, that leads to a small room beneath the staircase. They were designed as prayer-cells for heads of households, although the widowed Mrs. MacKenna above us uses hers for brooms and rubbish and a place to lock her calicoe when it comes in heat. Each has a narrow slit window that allows light to filter over a chamber just large enough for a small deal table, a chair, a lamp, and a bible.

  For some reason, the door of our oratory is shorter and narrower than that of others I’ve seen, and so when my father enters and exits he must stoop down and use the ponderous, bent-kneed steps of a giant. To me, seated at the dining room table, pecking away at Aristotle for the difficult course in Logic I’ll begin in just a few weeks, there is something distinctly unsettling about the head thrust suddenly into the room, a head seemingly half the size of the door itself. I feel my stomach begin to pinch, in a way that I associate with my father’s presence.

  The head says, “I’m glad to’ve found you, John. Stay there for a moment, will you. I’ve some things to ask you.”

  He disappears back into the oratory, and emerges a moment later, again head first but this time with a fist full of documents, foolscap tied up in dirty printer’s ribbon. When he’s straightened up into the dining room, my father holds the fist up and says, “I’d like for you to take a look at these.”

  He sits down across the table from me, and separates the welter of printed material into two small ribbon-tied parcels and an even smaller book, a diminutive chipped little forty-eightmo volume, no larger than a deck of playing cards. This he puts to one side, as though it must be dealt with only eventually and in its own right.

  “Now John, these are,” he hesitates, frowning at the objects before him, “strange daft things, and I’d like to know what you know about them before I talk with your brother.” He places a finger on the first bundle, and then looks up at me. “I want you to be honest with me, John, when I ask you these things. I’ve not brought you up to lie, and I’ll not tolerate it. Understand me, then?”

  I nod, my breath now shorter and quicker because I know that these printed bundles are not merely documents or pamphlets but evidence of some sort, and there is no way for me to deny that we have been transported somehow, unannounced, into what amounts to a courtroom.

  He slips the ribbon from the first parcel and it uncurls to reveal its small secret: slugged a bit carelessly at the top are the words A View of the Edinburgh Theater during the Summer Season, 1759.

  Although the title page lists no author, this is clearly an early proof of the pamphlet James has been working on in secret the entire summer. Some of the reviews have appeared in the Edinburgh Chronicle, but by collecting them and having them hawked in London as well as at home, James is making a very concerted effort to tie himself to the Canongate company in the public mind. I stare at it, his first runtish offspring.

  “Do you know who wrote this sad bit of fluff?”

  I can’t bring my voice to lie, and so I shake my head.

  “Never seen this before, Johnnie?”

  “No, sir, never.” This at least is true. For all of his budding exhibitionism, James has refused again and again to let me see the galley pages, which for all I can determine he hides somewhere outside the walls of the flat. At least I’ve never been able to find them among his things in the room we share.

  I assume that my father has broken the secret somehow and found James’s copy, but he immediately disabuses me of this explanation. “The
se pages come from a bookseller named Morley in London. He tells me he’s contracted with your brother to bring out a little scandal-sheet of James’s thoughts on last year’s summer season.”

  He pokes at the pages, but carefully, prodding a stunned adder. “An ill-disguised series of puffs, is what it is. Your brother waxes rhapsodic over an actress named Mrs. Cowper. She can do no wrong, apparently. So you know nothing of this little adventure in hackery?”

  I shake my head again, and then, with a temerity I find hard to understand in thinking back on it, I hear myself asking my own question. Understand, we did not question our father. But feeling the first faint pinprick of disloyalty, I ask, “Father, why not tell this Morley not to publish it?”

  “That would be a large favor, Johnny. I don’t like the idea of this particular pirate doing me a large favor. And the thing will surface and sink in a month.”

  He pushes the pamphlet proof to one side, and picks up the second roll of pages. This also looks like printer’s foolscap, something else he’s intercepted on its eventual way to the booksellers’ stalls. But he waits before unrolling it.

  “You have answered me no to every question I’ve asked, John. Don’t think I’ve not marked it. An apprentice liar shakes his head and sweats in his chair. My next questions are far more important, and I won’t brook continual shakes of the head.”

  “I haven’t lied to you, Father. I swear I haven’t.”

  “So you maintain. Let us start fresh, then, Johnnie.”

  There is another considered pause, and I can feel myself preparing to admit to something, anything, rather than answer in the negative again, when my father asks me, “Do you know a blackguard actor named Francis Gentleman?”