The Brothers Boswell Read online

  And the world rushes in my ears. Everything is known, I am instantly certain, all of it, as I’ve known since the first Gentlemanly whisper at my earlobe that it would be: the fifteen minutes Gentleman and I spent suspended in the gilded box; the twenty minutes, the first time, in a damp basement, the only time I’ve seen Gentleman mostly naked; the riskiest, the only nearly lighthearted encounter, the two of us in the dark behind the third of four sets of scenery shutters, the huge shutter sets being pulled apart in sequence to reveal the next backdrop, Gentleman guiding my hand, unable to contain his chortling, as we finished but a minute or two away from the final discovery.

  My father knows all of this, my crashing heart tells me, and not only that but how Gentleman has been unavailable the three times this past month I’ve wandered to the theater on my own initiative, without James, without prior warning. How he’s methodically failed to understand my fumbling attempts to tell him that I would see him oftener than I have, that I would meet him outside the walls of the theater.

  My father sees not only the play with no name, but the way I am held at arm’s length even by the man who taught me of its existence. He sees not only my sins, but my rejection by sinners.

  “I know him,” I hear myself say.

  It is as though two opposing doors have been slammed in an airtight sitting room, as though the pressures inside and outside my eardrums have suddenly and violently parted ways. A veering, high-pitched tone in my ears gains subtly in volume, and I understand, without necessarily struggling against it, that I am about to faint.

  But my father’s mind is elsewhere. He is nodding, evidently having expected my answer. “No doubt you would, he manages the Canongate every now and again, I understand. Your brother would want to show you that he knows the great and powerful there, such as they are.”

  He unrolls the second set of galleys, pointing to what is clearly a dedication page of some sort. “Mr. Gentleman fancies himself a playwright, and he is to bring out an edition of Oronooko sometime in the next several months. His perfectly slavish dedication is to your brother, and from what I understand, James has paid handsomely for this”—he is at a loss for words—“this bit of guilt by association. Unless I’m mistaken, James could only have done so with monies given him specifically to cover the costs of his university expenses.”

  He looks at me, somewhat more mildly than before, expecting me to share in condemning this stunning exhibition of irresponsibility, and I realize that he knows nothing, really, about Francis Gentleman. He does not know that his second-eldest son has done things with this player that a man should do only with a woman he has made his wife, and some few other things that a man should not do even then.

  And so when I lie this time, I do so with a sense of comparative relief.

  “I didn’t know anything about the dedication, Father.”

  He purses his lips, withholding judgment. And then, finally, he pushes the tiny, forty-eightmo edition to the center of the table. He erects a cage around it with his fingers, shielding the two of us and the flat from its influence. I reach for it, but he waves my hand away.

  “A book of Catholic apology, Johnnie, put together in a very cunning manner by a bishop in London. The sort of thing printed and sent out into the world to drift into the hands of the young and the weak-minded, to lead them away from the Kirk and put them on the path to Rome.” He opens it with one finger, to show me the title page: The Grounds of the Old Religion, it reads, and there is a name below, Challoner.

  But having allowed me this glimpse, he closes the bitty book, and pushes it away from us on the table. “I am most worried about this book, John. And I will tell you frankly why. I understand that this Mrs. Cowper has connections to several Roman Catholics in the city, connections of the sort I don’t stoop to understand. She has at least one botched marriage to her account, I do know. But I put all of these things together, son,” he indicates the two bundles of foolscap and the book of apologetic, “and I see your brother engaged in the sort of foolery that can sink a good family in a single generation.”

  He fixes me with his eye. “You understand me, John.”

  “I do understand, sir.” He wants me to know that it is not only James’s own inheritance somehow at stake, but my own. I can’t help but remember the night after my last performance with Gentleman, how James suggested that I might help him hold on to Auchinleck even as a Catholic, both our lives spent dodging the Treason Act so that James might indulge himself in the selection of a woman of middling beauty, the cast-off of a music-master.

  The eye narrows. “And I’ll not allow that. I’ll cut him off and entail the estate away from him before that happens, before I die. When the flame is gone you don’t leave a candle to stink in the socket. You take my meaning?”

  I nod again.

  “Now I shall ask you the most important question of any I have asked thus far. What do you know about this sudden taste for Catholicism your brother’s acquired? Where does it come from? Who’s got his elbow and leading him on this? Best you tell me now what you know.”

  I am angry and resentful at James for placing me in this position, here at this table, at cross-purposes to my father and my own self-interest, and this resentment is simmering inside me. I consider half-truths, hints, ways of remaining faithful to both of them. I consider confirming my father’s suspicions about Mrs. Cowper, which, as I understand my father’s whims and abilities, would lead almost immediately to her disappearance from Edinburgh, possibly from England as well—possibly, just barely possibly, from the world of the living itself.

  And I glimpse, in a way I never quite have before, the corrupt, second-hand magic available to the weak son of a powerful wizard.

  But there is never any question about where my heart lies, the real foundational timbers of my loyalty. There is never any genuine question that I will hold up my end of the deal struck when James was fifteen and I was twelve, the deal witnessed by the map of the infant city just now being scratched into the hayfields to the north.

  I know I will be punished for it before I speak, and yet I look my father in the face as I do so. “James has never mentioned the Romish Church to me, Father. I know he goes to Episcopal services some Sundays, when the service at the New Kirk is finished. The Episcopal Church in Carrubber’s Close. He says he likes the organ music. They’re allowed to play the organ there. But I have never heard him speak of Catholicism. I swear it.”

  It is as good a lie as I’m capable of lying at age sixteen, a bit of truth seasoning the outright falsehood, all of it topped finally with the purely decorative sin of an oath.

  My father presses his lips together again, his gestural subtotal to any series of small inner conclusions, and then he nods carefully. “I misjudged you when I said you were an apprentice liar earlier, John.”

  He stands with his hand on the table, and then quickly knocks his knuckles against it, putting a period to the discussion. “You are every bit the journeyman.”

  His steps sound the length of the trance, growing gradually faint and then I hear him gathering his court paraphernalia in the room he shares with my mother. I pretend to work with Aristotle, listening, waiting. Finally, the footsteps make their way back up the trance, and he stops beside my chair, a satchel of briefs in one hand, the white and red satin robes he wears to hear criminal cases hanging magnificently, falling just to the floor. We regard one another.

  It is the current custom for Lords and advocates living near the Court of Session to parade there each day in full state, and so the freshly powdered full-bottomed wig hangs about his long jowls like the ears of a massive and disapproving spaniel. In a moment he will be gone, gone about the business of ordering the hanging of men accused of not much more than what I have just committed at his own dining room table, and I pray that he will go without saying anything more.

  But it is a prayer with no real faith behind it, and he clears his throat.

  “Since you are home today, with nothing pressin
g to do,” suggests my father casually, “I wonder if you might fetch us all some water, John.”

  7

  ONE MORNING WHEN I was eight, I happened to be in the kitchen when the water caddie shuffled in with the first of the day’s two buckets of potable water. It was an event that happened like clockwork, each day about eleven, but for some reason that morning it struck me as a brilliant adventure, this quest for water. I took it into my head to follow the water caddie out to the pump below Parliament Square, and I begged my father’s servant William to ask her if I might.

  So William asked this tired woman if I might go along, and she picked up the bucket of foul water he had standing by the door for her, and she smiled and said, “Ay, lad. For a bittock.”

  But tagging along was not enough—to help was what I was mad after, and William rummaged in the pantry and found the smaller water barrel he used on holidays when the caddies stayed at home. There were straps for my arms, but before handing it to me, William looked at the dust collected on the slats and told me I’d best change into my oldest clothes, and leave off my waistcoat.

  When I had changed, the squat older woman and I walked down to the street, where she emptied the bucket of our foul water into the gutter. We continued along the south wall of the Square, past the goldsmiths and the dressmaker’s shop, and then we descended the long Parliament Stair, what the woman called the Old Back Stair.

  At the stone well, she stretched up to pull the small handle, while I steadied first her large tapered bucket, and then my own cask. But she let go the switch when the cask was little more than half full. “More than enough for you to carry, mannie,” she said.

  Still, the cask was heavy enough to allow me the illusion that this woman and I were caddies hauling water together, workers. People in their flats would slake their thirsts because of my work. I imagined this process repeated a thousand times around the city, buckets and casks of water rising methodically into the air, to the very tops of the tallest tenements, a rainshower in reverse, an all but invisible daily miracle.

  The caddie told me that I’d make a fine soldier one day, I carried so well and so uncomplainingly. And every woman loved a soldier, she added, showing her bad teeth and the pretty smile they could manage.

  As we finished the climb of seventy-six steps, each of which I counted aloud to her, someone took me by the meaty part of my arm and spun me around. With the cask strapped to my back, it threw me off balance, and I nearly fell to the cobblestones. But the hand held me, and I found my feet.

  It was my father, standing beside the tenement at the head of the stairs, staring in amazement at what he had in his grip. His forehead was creased in a way that meant not simply thunder, but lightning as well.

  “What are ye doing, ye two?” he whispered incredulously. “What do ye think ye’re doing?” The caddie and I simply stared back, neither of us, I think, able to comprehend the crime.

  Ignoring the woman altogether, my father took hold of my arm and marched me quickly toward Blair’s Land, berating me in a low whisper for dressing like a caddie to perform work well beneath the dignity of a common house servant. He’d been appointed Sheriff of Wigtownshire the year before, my father, and he was greasing already for appointment to the High Court. None of these plans included having his middle child seen tipping the waste-water bucket into the gutter or jabbering with water caddies.

  Needless to say, from that day to this I have never again asked to carry water to the flat, and although the water caddie and I recognize one another from time to time in the Land’s staircase or on the High Street, we never speak a word. We each understand well enough that water and society both run downhill, and there is always something in her face that says making one of the two do otherwise is as much labor as she can spare.

  ONE THING YOU will notice as I write this account is that my father’s simplest actions often require pages of explanation. His most complex, of course, require books. No one understands this better than my father, given as he is to seeing his own actions as formal decisions, decisions that beget interpretation.

  So when my father orders me to haul the day’s water—to carry away the foul and return with the drinkable—it says many things to me. It says that he has already communicated this wish to William, hours before, so that William might turn away the water caddie for the day. This in turn means that my father anticipated my perjuring myself. He knew I would lie, and prepared a proper disgrace well beforehand.

  It says also that William understands the disgrace, if not the reasons for it. This explains his uncomfortable look when I go back into the kitchen to ask for the same small watercask my father once stripped disgustedly off my back.

  “There will be lines at the well,” William says apologetically, as though the lines will be of his own making.

  My father is also saying this: What stands between carrying water and having it carried is not my birth, but his continuing good will.

  Having lived through this same scene once before, however, I find myself strangely unruffled by it. In fact, I know just what to do: change my clothes, and leave off my waistcoat. And I know exactly into which clothes I should change.

  Stuffed into the darkest rear corner of our shared wardrobe is a sack of clothing that James calls his See-Everything Suit. It is an assemblage of old caddie’s clothing he has put together from who knows where; but every once in a while when my parents are out, he will take off his modest everyday finery and put on the moleskin breeches and the rough linen shirt, wind the soiled white apron about his thick waist. He’ll slip on the battered blue wool bonnet, the shune with the dinged buckles. And then James will vanish into the city for an afternoon. He moves around the areas where he is not known, the Lawnmarket and Cowfeeder Row and the piers, venturing sometimes as far away as Leith or Blaw-Weary.

  “A man sees everything this way,” he will maintain, when I can’t stop myself from mocking the whole charade. “Because if your silk suit clears the way in the playhouse, it blocks your way in all of the worlds adjoining it. No man wants the son of a judge watching him dead-weight his fish in the market, or whip his horse, or parade his mistress. But dress the part and you see the naked world itself. It is magic, Johnnie.”

  I am laughing as quietly as I can as I pull on the various pieces of the See-Everything Suit. It looks better on me even than on James; because I am just that much taller, the pants look as though I outgrew them years ago. My wrists dangle out of the dirty sleeves, and I am just a skinnymalink, a nobody. But as far as I can figure it, there is not a single blessed thing my father can say should he see me shouldering my cask along dressed this way. Would he have me haul water in the clothes he has paid good money to have tailored for me? It is a brassy move, of course, but I have begun to feel the brass in me, as has James. We are growing up, we two.

  Then I begin to laugh so hard that I actually have to sit down on my bed, because I’ve realized that the shoes don’t fit me, not nearly, and that my own new boots would give away the whole show. And that consequently there is nothing to be done except to go in my bare feet, which is done by a great many in this city, but, needless to say, never by a Boswell.

  Never, ever. It is just shy of a hanging offense in our household.

  I pull the bonnet down over my head and deliberate about it. But after only another second, I think of something that is simply too tempting to be resisted. If I go barefoot, I can tell James later that not only did I wear his secret suit, but that until he himself wears it without shoes, he hasn’t seen anything.

  THE JOKE GOES cold by the time I am halfway down the Parliament Stairs, quite literally. A nirly breeze is rushing through the Closes, an early taste of what the fishermen in the autumn call the shrinking wind. A tricky wind, the kind that dies and roars at precisely the right moments to upend tables in the market, hats and skirts, and occasionally to strip a sedan chair clean away from its chairmen.

  But mostly what sours the joke is what I see as I descend the long line
of stone stairs: a small crowd of people, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, grouped around the gray granite well, which looks like an eight-foot sentry-box but for the fact that it has no windows. The vessels these people have brought are spread out over the cobblestones in a long, ragged snaking line.

  It is mostly women, maid-servants and caddies and fishwives, and the men are mostly boys a good deal younger than myself. The few grown men are on the oldish side, smoking pipes or seated in the windbreak where the stairs empty out into the Cowgate.

  Most of the crowd stands together in small knots of talk, only their casks and buckets holding their places in line. Some turn their faces up to look as I draw down nearer, but they turn immediately away as the suit works its magic.

  I can hear the pump water itself now and again, not rushing into the bucket as it should, but pulsing slowly, weakly and then a bit stronger and then weakly again, like blood pumped through a sickish heart. I will be most of the afternoon at this, I think.

  There are, however, a number of interesting things about this scene below me that I will only come to know tomorrow afternoon. Not only the surgeon, but several friends of the family will drop by to look in on me then, to see how I’m faring and to try to raise my spirits. They will bring me Spanish figs and cluck their tongues and provide me with facts I can have no way of knowing now, yet things my father knows very well and from many sources.

  This year’s drought is no ordinary harvest drought. The Castle reservoir, ordinarily topped off by water piped from Pentland Hills, has fallen dangerously low, low enough to cut the flow to wells down the Royal Mile by something like three-quarters. Some of the old lead piping carrying the water has also chosen this past summer to decay. Gangs of workmen are still digging it up here and there in the city, searching for the phantom drain on the system.