The Brothers Boswell Read online

  In the lower end of town, farmers are selling water hauled in from the country. A half-penny for each four pints, William will tell me tomorrow. It is a price he has paid more than once to avoid the crowds.

  William will also tell me that it is not unusual to wait an hour or more to fill your buckets, partially because the stronger and larger often don’t wait their turn, and that in this way the line itself is only a partial indication of how long one must idle there. Sentries have been posted, every now and again, in response to outbursts of violence.

  Everyone in the crowd now standing and talking and smoking and shuffling to the spout knows all of these things.

  But I am sixteen years old, and I have been paying attention to my studies. I’ve been making my first fumbling attempts to reconcile love and affection with lust and rejection. I have been oblivious. As I step onto the cobblestones, I know only that my feet are cold through, and that before I make my second trip to the well I plan to put on a pair of thick stockings and my good heavy leather boots.

  When my cask is two places from the spout, a middle-aged chairman makes his way to the well. He is not a large man, an inch or two shorter than me, but he has a big pair of arms and wears an old patched Highlander’s regiment coat over his apron. I will be asked many times to describe him in detail, but other than these things there isn’t much. Cropped hair beneath his large slouch bonnet. He is not the first to break the line, but he is the first to do so without any pretense of fidelity to it. He does not insist that he is bringing water to a sick child, or any of the other half-hearted dodges.

  He merely shoulders through to the spout as a charity school boy vacates it, muttering “Through, through,” as he comes.

  By now I’ve learned enough to stand over my cask and make it as hard as I can to pass me by. But he boxes me neatly aside with his shoulder and bends down with his bucket. When I don’t move back, he looks up to fix me with a sudden, mad look.

  “Through,” he says, with the air of saying it one last time, and it is a Highland accent. An instant passes, and then he drops his gaze again to the thin fall of water wetting his jug.

  Regardless of how I am dressed, I am not used to being shoved by chairmen. And it is at that point I take another half-step forward and make as though to tap him on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I say.

  THE FACT is that I will not remember actually being struck, not tomorrow or ever after, though the bruise that surfaces on my chest will say a great deal. Never will I forget, however, my head hitting one of the granite blocks of the well, and then the fall backward to the cobblestone. The dull crashing impact at the back of my skull, and the wash of nausea.

  On my back, I turn my head slightly and see bright blood puddled in the dirty cobblestone cracks beside me. I turn back because holding my head to one side is suddenly too much to manage.

  Those waiting for water have pulled back into a loose ring around me. The chairman has vanished. Everyone is frozen, no one seems to be moving to help, and I feel myself pulling in slow, feathery breaths that don’t refresh my lungs.

  In the distance I catch sight of something beginning to drift down the Parliament Stairs, something bright red and shapeless. It moves down the staircase like a heavy ground animal, low to the earth like a badger or a sable, quick humping movements.

  Just as it drops out of sight below the ring of faces, I see that it is not a beast but a man, brushing rapidly along in the scarlet cloak and black cocked cap of a goldsmith. He is a small, stout man, but not tiny; it was the cloak that made him seem hunched to the ground. There is a cane in his hand, and he works it sharply as he walks. He has a shop in the Close, no doubt, and glimpsed the commotion from the top of the Stairs. The circle about me opens, and the man kneels beside me, his face abruptly close to mine.

  But I cannot meet his eyes. A black sleep is coming for me.

  He begins to speak with a chairman standing behind me, asking if anyone has run yet for a surgeon, and I lose the sense of his words, resting my gaze on the gold head of his cane, which now dangles in his hand.

  The red line of my blood scurries away from me, shaping angles around the cobblestones. My consciousness thins. The last thing I see is the goldsmith waving his stick at two of the caddies standing by. And then, as though he were a wizard and the stick charged with some true ancient Scots glamour, everything vanishes.

  I AM IN a small dark room, a warm room, lying on a broad bench. Staring at a stone wall, upon which play the shadows of a small fire popping somewhere out of sight. My eyes open, close. Squinting, I manage to hold them open, but just a slit. Daylight struggles in through the thick glass of a single window.

  In a recess beneath the window stands the goldsmith. He has cast his red cloak and hat aside. He is a short, stout man, with a bit of a paunch. Beside him stands a small bench, and upon the bench are several dull gold and silver objects, an array of tools, work to be done, but the man’s eyes remain on the street. And I remember hearing someone say the word surgeon. The goldsmith is waiting for the surgeon to arrive.

  He goes then to his small fire, out of my sight, and I hear the quick gasp of a bellows. The fire leaps up, I can feel it. He means to warm me, and the heat is welcome, because my feet and my ankles are still bare and chilled through. But my head is still far too heavy to lift.

  The shelves on the wall before me contain almost nothing of his trade. Goldsmiths do not like to house their stock, but work to order. Still, there are a few things, things he must lock up at the end of the night, when he has cleaned his tools and caught the day’s last live embers in a stone urn. A fan of spoons in gold, a fan of spoons in silver. A cup that sits upon three delicate legs.

  And on the highest shelf, in a wooden case lined with red velvet, a pair of golden pistols. Snubbed barrels, heart-shaped handles. Brilliant things. These must be his twin prizes, his single best advertisement in a country where guns are a kind of gospel.

  It is an oddly hushed moment. I feel no urgency, although I understand that my blood is seeping even now into the cloth I feel knotted tightly about my head.

  And I understand that the surgeon may not, in fact, be on his way. He may have stepped out for a dish of oysters, and I may die for want of his knife, my body cast away like so much refuse. The goldsmith has no idea whose child lies here on his bench, after all. As far as he knows, I am a caddie with a cloven skull, that and nothing more.

  And in that strange hush, a voice is suddenly murmuring somewhere. As though the words begin abruptly in another room, and then drift closer, near enough finally to pick out and distinguish them one from another. The voice itself is low, and clearly distressed or even angry in tone.

  The words roll and dip like a poem, or a ballad. This is your father’s fault, runs the song’s complaint, and this is your brother’s fault. They crush you between them. Bust you open. They bust you and they break you. And all for a bit of land. The land is all their passion. It is the only thing they love. And the only thing about this wee bit of land upon which they will ever agree is that it must never ever be allowed to fall into your two filthy hands, Johnny. Anything but that, you see. Anything but that.

  My lids weigh heavy again, but the sense of the words continues. The phrases are slow and methodical, like tableaux in a street pageant, each being dragged deliberately along in sequence. My heart has begun to thrum again in my chest. Part of me wants to answer: But I am not crushed. The surgeon will arrive in a moment. And James was nowhere in sight. A wudden chairman did this to me. I cannot, though. There is no volition left, anywhere in me.

  But the words continue, from somewhere very near. Not the goldsmith’s words, for he goes on staring fixedly out the window into the close. For a single horrible moment, I am convinced that the voice is issuing from a ghost, an angry spirit hovering in the stillness of the room.

  And for the span of that instant, I am convinced that I have gone truly mad.

  It is only eventually, and with great relief, that I recognize t
he voice as my own. It is inside me after all, and I am not mad. It is the play of my own thoughts, my own ambient outrage, and nothing more. As the murmur goes on, I listen with less concern, simply registering the cadences.

  You know ’tis true, Johnny. They use you as a stick to strike one another, and now look at this, their stick is broken. Pieces, that is all, left lying heaped on the street. But you are safe now. For now you know the truth. And now you are in a fair way to make them leave you be.

  My eyelids fall closed again.

  When I open them, the goldsmith is seated on a creepie at my side, his face drawn worriedly to mine. He expected the surgeon well before now, and he fears, no doubt, that there will be questions and procedures to satisfy should I die here at his table. His eyes are small dark beads, with a hint of a squint, and framed by sharp, black brows.

  But there is genuine kindness there as well, even I can see that. For when he sees that my eyes have managed to focus, he smiles, pats my shoulder very gently, and says something reassuring which I do not catch. And then he turns, to discern the object upon which my gaze has come to rest. In order to make small-talk, to kill time.

  “Spotted my brace of show dags, have you, lad,” whispers the goldsmith. The pride in his voice is unmistakable. “Lovely speeshal things, those particular pieces. Quite dear, though, quite dear indeed. A prince’s ransom. But a wonderful history goes along with those guns, and a true history into the bargain. And they do say that a true history is the very best sort of history money can buy.”

  THE EVENTS OF the day had a serviceably happy ending. The surgeon, as I might have expected, turned out to be an acquaintance of my father; and within a few moments more I was carried across the Square and laid in my own bed, where I came to not long after. I was the son of a Judge again, worth hurrying through the streets, and my concussion was pronounced only mildly threatening.

  When the doctor left, James came to my bedside ravenous for details, and he became so incensed listening to them that he swore he would strap on his sword and go searching the howfs and the oyster cellars for the caddie. He didn’t, of course, because no one in the world was ever less likely to fight than my older brother. But he grew convincingly angry, and I appreciated the gesture.

  And James told me, like a bedtime story, about the plans for the houses in the New Town, whose eventual kitchens would have each their own deft little taps, from which water would flow at the slightest touch.

  I said nothing about what I had seen and heard in the goldsmith’s shop, just before I slipped from consciousness. As best I could, I pushed those moments from my mind; the memory of them was like a dream of something forbidden, accompanied by a lingering residue of shame.

  More than anything, I wanted no more doctors. I had no desire to be prodded and poked, as James had been, and floated for weeks in a washtub of sulfur water.

  Though my father pressed me for details to identify the man who struck me, there was no official investigation. No account of it appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine. My father was clearly disturbed by my dress, my shoeless feet, and he avoided questions by hiring a caddie to search privately. Within a day or two the criminal was declared to have fled the city, most probably for the Highlands, and the incident was made to disappear.

  And so, like my time with Gentleman, the truth of the water story turned out to be merely visceral, without any greater or more lasting meaning. I was not yet seventeen, but already I had begun to suspect the worst, that there was something profoundly provisional about my time on this earth, that my own life was a journal whose pages were destined to take no ink.

  PART THREE

  Kissing the

  Consecrated Earth

  Saturday 30 July (continued)

  When we got to Greenwich, I felt pleasure in being at the place which Mr. Johnson celebrates in his London: A Poem. I had the poem in my pocket, and read the passage on the banks of the Thames, and literally “kissed the consecrated earth.”

  Mr. Johnson said that the building at Greenwich was too magnificent for a place of charity, and too much detached to make one great whole. …

  We walked about and then had a good dinner (which he likes very well), after which he run over the grand scale of human knowledge, advised me to select some particular branch to excel in, but to have a little of every kind.

  —From Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763

  Greenwich, England

  Saturday, the 30th of July, 1763

  1:45 p.m.

  8

  ALTHOUGH I HAVE been to Greenwich only once before, and that as recently as three days ago, putting in at the river stair before the Seamen’s Hospital feels as though I have come home again. Because although the vast complex seems indisputably to be a palace—although in fact it began life as a palace—it is now merely a granite toy box for busted soldiers.

  Two toy boxes, in fact: when Queen Mary, the project’s first real benefactor, saw that the original massive design would obstruct the view from her own smaller residence in the distance, she had it quickly and unceremoniously broken in two. Mary was compassionate to a fault, but a view to the water was another matter entirely.

  These two white palace complexes now mirror one another, each recapitulating the other’s broad edifice, colonnades, and towering chapel dome in the middle distance. A broad grassy avenue—precisely the width of Mary’s angle of vision—still lies open between them. One Tree Hill and the Royal Observatory rise gently behind.

  But they are toy boxes all the same, a tidy location to dispose of sailors busted beyond repair, those who have somehow misplaced arms and legs and eyes, even the occasional human face entire. And those, like myself, who have misplaced something else altogether. It is a miracle of sympathy, this Hospital, sheltering thousands of pensioners and some few of their families, indicative of a compassion every bit as extravagant as that which produced L’Hotel Royal des Invalides, at Paris; and it is an obscenity, indelible proof of a greedy and petulant empire.

  As I say, it feels very much like home.

  When the sculler nudges up against the stone steps, the waterman stretches up a thick arm to the iron gate and holds the boat snug against the landing. I unfold from beneath the wool canopy, and it is good to stretch and stand in the breeze. Along with the river smell there is a scent of cinnamon, somehow, in the air. I clear my sword from my coat and hold the waterman’s eye, and for all his size and strength, it is he who breaks off the glance, with an almost involuntary bow of his head. I remember the mudlark clucking his tongue at the man, on the man’s own boat, and the stout waterman doing nothing until the smaller lark was safely out of range. Only then did he seize a stone and attack.

  And none of this is a surprise: I have invested more than a few hours watching the Temple stair, picking mentally through the daily scrum of watermen, selecting in advance for speed and corruption and a certain bully’s timidity. The perfect waterman to ferry me along on James’s perfect afternoon.

  From a pocket in my waistcoat I take not merely a full shilling, but a crown, and I pitch it at him. With one hand anchoring the boat, and the other holding his oar, he can do nothing but flinch, and let it strike his chest. The coin drops into his lap, and he glares before realizing that I have quintupled his fare. The magic of cash: the glare becomes a look of disbelief, then even a wan smile.

  “I have restored the pennies I took to stop your mouth, Gil Higgs,” I tell him, “as well as another four shillings. A great deal of money. Easy money for little enough work, I think.”

  He begins to mutter his thanks, then realizes that somehow, somewhere, I’ve laid hold of his name.

  “I will be needing return passage, and I will pay you for the day complete.” I have waited until now to tell him this, quite deliberately. I point to another, smaller stair down the public walk fronting the river. “You will wait for me there, hard by that step, and be ready to row out quickly. With luck, I shall be back in an hour or two. But if night should fall, I’ll
expect you there still. Be ready, I say. And there will be another crown in it for you when we put in at the Temple again. A very profitable day for you, I should think.”

  His confusion is deepening, but he seems to know that whatever else, he had best be quit of this fare, and the strangeness that comes attached to it. His gut is telling him to push off. It is a contingency not terribly difficult to foresee: his early curiosity has dwindled into apprehension, and the sense that my day’s affairs are a deep, twisty hole into which his nose should not be stuck.

  Oar now racked, he has the crown cupped in his hand, suspended between returning it and bringing it to his own pocket. He sneaks a glance back toward the hanging smoke of the City.

  “Well, to say truth, sir,” he manages.

  But before he can say more, or begin to dig in his big heels, I draw something out of my waistcoat. A book. A miniature, three inches by an inch.

  I hold it out to him. “You bargain well. And I cannot have no for an answer. Let me throw a final sweetener into the pot, then.”

  He accepts the book, and it sits delicately in his heavy, callused hand. He prods it with a fat finger. There is nothing in the world, it seems, he was less prepared to receive: Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, with watercolor illustrations cleverly tipped-in, bound in weathered calf. An odd charming little treasure, even for a man who no doubt cannot read or write his own name.

  He looks up at me. The coarse, unkempt brows knit together. He does not understand.

  “Not for you, of course. For your Maggie, Higgs.”

  Now I truly have his attention, for the first time today. I set my hat on my head, cock it forward a touch, to the left a touch, the particular style of my regiment. Or what was, until recently, my regiment. “She has no brothers or sisters to help her beguile the hours, has she? She must spend a good part of her day very much alone. And St. Giles is certainly not the most cheerful place in which to be alone. It can be a dangerous place, I understand. But no longer. Now Maggie will always have Tom Thumb, there to look out for her when you cannot. When your wife cannot. There is not a child living can resist General Tom Thumb. To amuse her and make her feel protected, from anyone who might wish to do her harm.”