James cannot restrain himself. “John! For the love of God. If that piece misfires, you may kill him before you know it. You may kill him.”
“Be silent, James. One of us has spent a great deal of time learning to use firearms, and that one of us is not you. This pistol will fire precisely where and when I wish it to fire.” I close an eye, slowly. And I allow myself to imagine what it might feel like to fire the piece. I allow my finger to test the very slight play in the trigger.
I realize that I could do this. I could pull the trigger, in fact. A part of me wants to do it, even now, before the man has finished his trial.
And the moment I know that fact about myself, the two men opposite know it about me. The effect is magical, instantaneous: Johnson shrinks back down into himself visibly, bows his head, brings his temper immediately back under cover. There is a story told in London of Johnson threatening to thrash a little mimic who planned to mock him from the stage, one Samuel Foote. Johnson apparently showed up with a cudgel and sat in the front row, glaring throughout the performance. And he frightened the man out of his bit of comedy.
But Johnson has no cudgel now, and it is he who faces the threat. And he is predictably malleable. Something glistens in the very corners of his bloodshot eyes, tears of frustration perhaps.
“Do you know the derivation, then?”
“Derivation? Of what?”
“Derivation of the term dag. You know it, or you do not.”
“It is a corruption of the word dagger.”
“Country of origin?”
He clears his throat, eyes on mine. The tone, finally, is deadly dry. “I believe it is from the French.”
I lower the pistol and rest the hand holding it again on the table. “Just so. A corruption of the French word. And your definition runs thusly, ‘A handgun or pistol, so called from serving the purposes of a dagger, being carried secretly and doing mischief suddenly.’ It is one of your better entries, I must say. Evocative, yet crisp and admirably to the point.”
“Thank you,” Johnson says after a pause, and then allows himself a small, ironic smile. And I find myself smiling back.
It is the first bit of decent acting he has managed. He would take me off my guard, perhaps move the conversation onto lighter topics, our shared love of words, possibly allow James to soothe me with some talk of our parents or our childhood.
But, despite the smile, Johnson’s eyes remain watchful and livid behind it all.
James too has picked up on Johnson’s attempt to lighten the mood, and he makes his own timid gambit. “John, please listen. Mr. Johnson does not know you as I do, and he has no way of knowing your sense of humor. But I think he begins to see, as do I, that you cannot be serious. You cannot be, John. You are paying me back for not welcoming you properly to London.” He reaches for the bottle I had Mrs. Parry bring them. “Let us do so now. And we will continue your conversation wherever it leads. You have my word as a gentleman. But you must put up your weapon, John. You must.”
“I must do nothing of the kind. It is all very much by the book, by definition: I have carried this dag here secretly, and I will do mischief suddenly if my questions are not answered. You say we have never met, Mr. Johnson.”
Johnson meets my eye, remains silent.
“I say we have. I say we have met often in the last handful of weeks. Do you still deny it? Will you put me to the task of telling my brother how and where we have met?”
Now Johnson’s expression falters, much as James’s did earlier, guilt and disbelief chasing by turns across his face. He seems horrified, hunted. He can no longer tell himself that our secret will remain so. He knows now that I will have it out in the light, no matter what may come of it, no matter whom it may injure.
“You are genuinely mad,” he whispers, sneaking a glance at James, only to find that James is anxiously watching him now, rather than me.
James clearly senses something beyond his grasp, and his head is cocked slightly, in bafflement.
“We met on London Bridge, Mr. Johnson. Some six weeks ago. You remember it as well as I. And you came to my room that evening, and you remember that as well. And James at least will know it all, if not the rest of the world.”
Johnson is shaking, physically, with rage or fear it is impossible to tell. But his hand comes down on the table hard. “You lie—I have no idea why, but this is a desperate, unaccountable lie.”
“It is you who lie, sir, and you will admit it. It may be that I can produce witnesses, but there is no need for that this evening. You will admit it, or you will die right there as you sit, atop your plush little bench, square in the middle of your own favorite back room in this benighted, godforsaken little coffeehouse. This is where the much-celebrated life of Samuel Johnson will end. Here and now.”
There is humming silence again. That is when it becomes clear that Johnson would rather risk death than own me to my brother. For he turns slowly to James, and says in a low voice, though more than loud enough for us all to hear, “He has but one shot, Boswell. There are two of us, after all.”
And I see James begin to work those dearer calculations in his own mind.
Only then do I draw out the second dag.
And the sight of it is more than James can bear. Actual tears start in his eyes, and he breaks suddenly into something like confession.
His voice is thick, but anguished, honestly so. “Johnny, I am so very sorry for what I have done to you. God knows that I am. I have regretted a thousand times the argument we had this past winter, because you were right, I was intent on hiding my life, my friends, my new acquaintances from you. I was unutterably selfish. London was new to me, and I feared that any false move might cause it to be snatched away from me. But that is no excuse. It was unlike a brother. And I am sorry for it, deeply, deeply sorry for it, and you must believe me.”
My brother at least will spill his secrets, confess his sins to his god—half of what I want from this evening. And that is something. So I usher James along in his revelations, and in his self-condemnation, bit by bitter little bit.
“And so you kept me in the back rooms, and the bakeries, and the unfashionable chophouses. And you never once hinted that you were leaving me to wait upon the great and the mighty, did you?”
“It was wrong. I have admitted it. I have asked your forgiveness.”
“And when you were laid up with the case of clap you had courted so long, you told me you were being denied to all visitors, including me. When the truth is that Garrick visited you, and Eglinton, and all the fashionable world. You made it an absolute standing policy to lie to me.”
“I did, Johnny. I am not proud of it, as I told you in March.” He turns to Johnson, unable to meet the man’s gaze. “John found my journal, and saw that I had told him, told him a series of untruths in order to—”
“Told him lies, James, in order to keep your routs and masquerades and actors and countesses all to yourself, like a greedy evil little boy with a strawberry tart who must sicken himself rather than break off a piece for another who is starving.”
James now has tears wetting his face. His hair, which he had so cleverly dressed this morning, has gotten the better of its ties and hangs wildly about his face. He is broken, clearly. The pretensions of social poise and maturity are all in tatters.
But there is a difference in his instinctive priorities now, even in his presence across the table from me. There is a distinct change, and I can feel it now.
He is pleading directly with me, the brother he has known and mostly loved since childhood, rather than with Johnson, who can be nothing by comparison, nothing but James’s own narcissistic ambition given human form.
It is no act: James would not lose his life, but he would not lose me either. And I realize that that is something I came here to reclaim tonight as well.
“Jemmy,” I say to him. And then I tip up the muzzle of the piece in my left hand, to show him that his life is safe with me, as always.
; “You have done nothing that cannot be undone, James,” I reassure him. “For I forgive you.”
I can feel some of the anger subside within me even as I say the words, and I cannot help but remember a conversation we had long ago, about his Catholic actress in Edinburgh, when he wanted my connivance in a plot against everything he was raised to hold dear. I hear myself saying now what I said then: “I would help you, now that you are helpless, Jemmy.”
And the entire massive oak table between us rises up suddenly into the air, impossibly, looming.
Plates and wine bottles and glasses shower over me, crash behind me. Silverware flashes by my face.
And then the table itself comes rushing at me, before the edge of it strikes my rib cage, and the weight of it topples over onto me, knocking me bodily to the floor.
I smell the stench of powder, and my ears are ringing.
The gun in my right hand is suddenly scalding hot. It slips from my fingers as I fall, clatters across the floor and strikes the wall. I can see it, gleaming in the low light.
But the world has gone truly mad, for the table—which must weigh twenty stone or more—continues to hover over me for an instant and does not complete its fall.
Rather, amid what I realize are James’s terrified shouts, one corner of it rises somehow again, so that the whole pivots heavily on one corner alone. And the free edge of it then comes down like a blade, hard enough to snap my forearm.
I snatch the arm back, and the wood batters only plank flooring.
Then it rises again, the table edge, like a thing with a mind and a hunger of its own. The massive table spins slowly in the air, seeking me.
Johnson has hold of the other end, I realize too late, and I hear him straining with the effort to maneuver the thing, to crush me with it. His breathing is deep and frantic.
Again, the sharp edge comes down. But the table is too heavy finally, and it slips from his grasp, striking the floor hard just beside my shoulder.
Then, with a low cry, he simply drives the now cockeyed table forward with all of his strength, battering me once against the wall with the heavy leading leg of it.
It is my ribs that take the worst of it, again, and the pain lights up the entire right half of my body, an incandescent pain, like burning phosphorus.
I scream, only to hear the table slowly dragged back across the planks for another driving blow. But the second dag is somehow still in my hand. And in an instant Johnson and James have both seen it. And they have seen as well that with the table drawn away, I have only to raise my arm to have them in my line of fire again.
Which ends our conversation. In a rushing, almost tumbling movement, Johnson turns and bolts, following James through the open door out to the corridor.
Out and into what amounts to a long locked room. For I have the keys to the exits in my vest pocket.
But although I have only a moment to set things right again, I have the presence of mind to snatch the still-hot pistol from the floor and thrust it into my outer coat pocket. Midway I stop for an instant to stare at the thing: a small black halo now marks the gold barrel, as though the heat of the last shot has come half-way to bubbling the metal there. And I can hear the goldsmith again, as he turned the things teasingly in his long-fingered hands, telling me that these were designed for use by King George’s own trained assassin, a man who would need no second shot.
Heaving with my legs, I force enough space between the table and the wall to stand upright, but as I do so there is a stab of pain across the lower half of my chest. A cracked rib or two, at the least.
I hear them drumming on the heavy oak door to the front stair, then boots crashing against it. And then, because there is no other choice, footsteps come pounding back down the long hallway to the rear exit.
I come around the end of the table and make as quickly as I can for the corridor. But Johnson has fallen against the lighter door, and bashed his way through it apparently, for the only thing I see when I reach the hall is a single flash of violet, disappearing without a trace into the black of the rear stairwell. Then they are gone.
And even as I pursue them down into what looks like nothing so much as a vast black hole in the ground—the broken door listing uselessly to one side—I am kicking myself for underestimating the man’s strength. For no one knows it better than I.
HE WOULD LEAVE in the morning before the sun was up. He would pat my hair, carefully, and then leave me, stooping to avoid the low plaster roof above the bed. From the mat, I would watch him haul on his trousers, his large white shirt, the stockings, and the stolid shoes with their dull, conservative buckles.
Only once did I ask if I might follow him out into the City again, follow him to where he needed to go. Before the light, before we might be seen.
And he looked at me, lying there, and pursed his lips thoughtfully, and said I might.
Fish Street Hill was slick with the last night’s rain, bringing up the smell of fish but mixed with the cleaner hint of open ocean. The Monument was only barely visible against the sky, brooding there in the dark, tinged with purple. Down we went, to the Bridge, and then together down the ranks of slick, unlit steps beneath, and then out among the little docks and clusters of moored vessels and warehouses making up the north bank.
Dark ships large and small splashed softly out in the current, like living things, like dolphins, eyes yellow with candlelight.
At last we reached a small dock not unlike the others, but this one he knew well, and he crouched down and placed his shoes and his stockings in a small wooden trap fixed beneath it. Then, in the first glimmer of morning, he stripped off his coat and his shirt and these he folded carefully and placed them also in the box, out of sight and up out of the current.
God be with ye, John, he said to me, and began to walk out into the water, the muscled, articulate arms spreading to embrace the Thames.
He fell slowly forward, taking the water on his deep chest, thick fingers paddling. And then the muscles ceased to play and began to work, effortlessly. He stroked at the water, three, four, five times very quickly, hands knifing through it. The power there was striking. And when he had nearly reached the shipping lane, the big shorn head came up once, for a last long breath, then plunged beneath the surface. A kick of his bare feet, and he was gone. Somewhere out in the deep current, moving swiftly.
A thing of the river.
PART SIX
At P resent a Genius
Wednesday 9 February
How easily and cleverly do I write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffat Hill; and I turn my periods smoothly and imperceptibly like a skillful wheelwright turning tops in a turning-loom. There’s fancy! There’s simile! In short, I am at present a genius: in that does my opulence consist, and not in base metal.
My brother drank tea with me and took a cordial farewell, being to set out for Scotland the next day. We parted on excellent terms. He is as fond of being at home as I am of ranging freely at a distance. My friend Erskine came and supped with me. I am excellently lodged. I get anything dressed vastly well. We had a very good evening of it.
—From Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763
London, England
Wednesday, the 12th of January, 1763
10:30 P.M.
18
IF THERE IS any satisfaction more profound than strolling into a respectable inn just off Fleet Street with a Covent Garden actress on one’s arm, a false name on one’s lips, and a sack half full of almond macaroons dangling from one’s fingers, then James Boswell has never experienced it. Never has he come close, in fact.
He and Louisa had prepared their roles well, of course—complete with hackney coach and luggage and the macaroons to simulate a married couple fresh from the road—but still the reaction of the people at the Black Lion exceeded Boswell’s expectations. And their earnest use of his pseudonym, given that it actually belonged to Boswell’s favorite Edinburgh leading man, sen
t shivers of delight through him, each and every time.
In this happy blur of falsehoods, the travelers were ushered into the parlor and then up to the room reserved for them. And when Louisa coyly refused to undress in front of him, Boswell had tromped down the stairs and gravely desired the girl to go back up and see to Mrs. Digges.
Now, as he waits for Louisa to be unlaced and unhooked, brushed, powdered, and scented, Boswell stands in the little courtyard behind the inn, holding a candle. The night is very dark, and it is bitterly cold, but then that is the point of standing in the courtyard in the first place: Boswell’s notion is that the more miserable he makes himself while he waits, the more pleasurable will be the transition to Louisa’s arms.
And the plan is working perfectly. He has come down without his greatcoat, and feels himself being quickly chilled to the bone. Even in the closed courtyard, there is a wind, and the candle flame darts entrancingly back and forth inside the glass flute, holding Boswell’s eye.
Finally, to make himself more miserable still, Boswell touches a few of the mental keys that he ordinarily takes great care to avoid: the faint possibility that he may be pacing a battlefield this time next year, stepping over bodies pouring blood; his infant child Charles, somewhere in Edinburgh, five weeks old, more or less fatherless and as yet unaware of it; and finally his brother John, whose appearance in London a week ago had first filled Boswell with pleasant surprise, then given way almost immediately to a train of niggling worries.
John had looked healthy enough, and he sounded remarkably like himself, Boswell thought. There was nothing of the inmate in his demeanor, nothing out of the ordinary in his talk. Other than his obvious relief at being released from Plymouth, John seemed very much John: a tall, inward, occasionally moody young man of nineteen, though now in a red coat and with more than a hint of the military in his bearing.
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