I drank tea at Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr. Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr. Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, “Don’t tell him where I come from.” However, he said, “From Scotland.” “Mr. Johnson,” said I, “indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” “Sir,” replied he, “that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” Mr. Johnson is a man of a most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king’s evil. He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has great humour and is a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness of manners is disagreeable. I shall mark what I remember of his conversation.
Late that night, Boswell finishes penning the entry with the distinct sense that his life has changed unalterably. Already in his mind is the idea of marking down Johnson’s conversation over time, of visiting Johnson’s rooms to secure more of it. Already he has an inkling that the list of quotes he has managed to smuggle home to his diary will need to be set in a more fully rendered scene some day. Still, Boswell is proud of the entry for May 16, and he takes care to write out a clean copy before turning in for the night. And because he has reason to be newly infatuated with his journal, he is especially careful in putting it away: he ties a neat bow with the twine he uses to bind it, locks up the tea chest he uses to store it, and places the key under the fruit dish, as is his habit.
The next day is a blur of social engagements, and at each one Boswell casually retails his fresh recollections of Johnson. He is delighted to find that when speaking of Johnson, he acquires some of the man’s authority, even with the most exalted listener. The effect is intoxicating, and he experiments with it until he can find no more drawing rooms to haunt. Only well past midnight does Boswell round the corner of Downing Street, there to find an agreeable young girl loitering in the dark, as though she were waiting for James Boswell and James Boswell alone.
Alice Gibbs is her name, it turns out. She is new to the trade this month, with an incongruously brilliant smile, and in seconds they have come to terms.
Even as Boswell is squiring her to a snug alcove nearer the Park, stroking her hip, he is marveling at his own recklessness. It is passing strange: even as he pulls up her skirt and petticoats, he is reviewing all of his weeks of resolutions; as she swears that she is safe, he is telling himself that she lies, yet pressing his lips to the nape of her neck; and through it all, he is warning himself to draw back, even as he wraps his arms tightly about her narrow waist and thrusts into her again and again, like a mongrel, in the dark open air of a street less than a block from his own doorstep.
Within moments, it is over, and Boswell drifts back to his rooms on a curling wave of genuine panic. As soon as he has locked the door behind him, he goes immediately to the tea chest, thinking to read Johnson’s words again, by way of penance.
There in the chest are his manuscript pages, but he has the distinct sense that something is wrong somehow. For the twine securing them has been quickly knotted, rather than done up in a careful bow. And the stacking of the pages hasn’t the precision Boswell ordinarily insists upon before locking them away. Tiny details, but enough to send him first to the fruit plate, to find the key exactly where he left it, and then to his landlord, to ask about visitors. Mr. Terrie remembers none, however, and Boswell returns to his rooms convinced not only that his mind is playing tricks, but tricks that he deserves to have played.
It is as though the sordid act on the street has changed not merely his memory of the Johnson entry, but the manuscript itself. As though following Johnson’s path will produce one sort of reality, and straying from it another sort of physical life altogether. The disordered feel to his manuscript is a sign and a warning.
But even there, in the deepest reaches of his self-loathing, Boswell finally manages to take heart: signs, after all, are never vouchsafed to the unforgiven.
PART SEVEN
Last, Least
Bastard World
Saturday 16 July
He advised me to keep a journal of my life, fair and undisguised. He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me infinite satisfaction when the ideas were faded from my remembrance. I told him that I had done so ever since I left Scotland. He said he was very happy that I pursued so good a plan. And now, O my journal! Art thou not highly dignified? Shalt thou not flourish tenfold? No former solicitations or censures could tempt me to lay thee aside; and now is there any argument which can outweight the sanction of Mr. Samuel Johnson? He said indeed that I should keep it private, and that I might surely have a friend who would burn it in case of my death. For my own part, I have at present such an affection for this my journal that it shocks me to think of burning it. I rather encourage the idea of having it carefully laid up among the archives of Auchinleck. However, I cannot judge fairly of it now. Some years hence I may. I told Mr. Johnson that I put down all sorts of little incidents in it. “Sir,” said he, “there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”
—From Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763
London, England
Saturday, the 30th of July, 1763
9:24 P.M.
20
THE REAR STAIRWELL is black, but for a spill of lamplight where the door has been battered away above, and a wash of moonlight where the door to the street now stands open to the wind below. The two flights of steps between are lightless, though, and I take them two, three, then four at a time, vaulting out into the nothingness, the railing clutched in my burnt right hand, the second dag snug in my left.
I have no fear at all of falling, somehow; it is as though the world is illuminated by instinct. Very thinly illuminated, but illuminated still.
Beyond instinct, there is the animal sort of cunning, and that tells me a good deal as well. A soldier really only ever learns two things, and they are obedience and cunning, which is to say, the hunting of men little different from himself. And while the officers of my regiment found me deficient in the former, the latter came easily. Once I had got beyond my shyness, in fact, cunning seemed to come back to me, like a language learned and loved and lost in childhood.
Cunning says that James and Johnson are not lying in wait for me at the bottom of the stair, or just outside the rear door. Of that I am all but certain, for James is a coward, and Johnson is a poor man who has spent the bulk of his life leveraging himself into sudden parity with London’s wealthy and powerful. He is a genuine literary celebrity now, and no man guards his life as blindly as the newly celebrated. The two of them will run as far and as fast as their fat legs will take them.
Still, they are not far ahead of me, maybe a stone’s throw, for all their head start. Under normal circumstances, that lead would allow them to circle to the front of the building and run for the Catherine Street watch stand. Or they might reach the soldiers at the gate of Somerset House, or even, if they both were to scream at the top of their lungs, rouse those billeted in the Savoy Barracks.
But circumstances are not, of course, normal. I have spent a good part of the last several weeks making sure of that fact.
There was a Lieutenant Garraway in my regiment, himself a second son of a nobleman, and perhaps for that reason of a philosophical turn of mind. And it was his habit to speak of each major contingency in war as creating a world separate and distinct from our own. A bastard world was his phrase for a military situation upended by the worst imaginable turn of events.
But even a bastard world, Garraway believed, could be redeemed by forethought. The best officer imagined the most potential worlds. It was as simple as that.
It took very little of imagination to suppose that
if James and his hero were to escape the locked box in which I’d placed them, the rear door was the likeliest possibility. And so in fact this bastard world—the one in which my bootheels strike the ground floor of the stairwell and send a jolt of pain across my left side—has received the bulk of my attention.
So much so that when I have run out into the light rain and jogged quickly around the row of darkened Somerset coach houses, I know almost precisely what I will see: three men standing at the unlit far end of the estate’s stable yard, barely visible, almost huddled up together against the north wall of the Old Somerset friary.
Other than these three, there is no one in sight, for the weather is more early March than late July, and although there are likely a hundred servants and guards within a stone’s throw of where I stand, they are none of them fools, and each prefers his fire and his bottle.
The air is cold, but not fresh. One could almost choke on the smell of wet stable, drenched horses, and slovenly stalls.
The three men stand confidentially close to one another, water dripping from them, as though sharing a secret. And of course they do: the man with his back to me has his hand held down low at his hip—casually enough to escape notice should a coachman glance over on his way across the upper part of the yard—and the hand holds a pistol.
His pistol is not in a league with my own dags, but it is a serviceable piece. Having purchased it this past week, having cleaned and oiled and loaded it, I know it to be reliable enough. Johnson and Boswell stand before the man in the frozen, slump-shouldered attitudes of the genuinely terrified; only their eyes are wide and alive, and as I slow and come up on them, James suddenly opens his mouth to call out my name.
His instinct is still to call to me for help, even now.
But James stops short when I bring out my own dag, and hold my finger to my lips. Very quietly, I whisper to the two of them: “I’m afraid we must insist that you remain silent. Make a sound, and you die.”
Again, as in the Turk’s Head, James’s eyes seem suddenly to be swimming with tears, though whether it is rain washing his face is impossible to say.
Johnson does not move or speak, but his hulking form seems to strain almost visibly against motionlessness, as though a turn of the head or the swing of a pistol tip will release him from a spell, and he will suddenly bellow and surge at me. His rage is there in his eyes, though he holds them half-closed. The gaze is unflinching, and it sweeps back and forth between my face and the face of the man who took the two of them up halfway through their dramatic escape. It could not be clearer that Johnson is watching for an opportunity, but more than that he is studying our features, committing us to memory. Again, he is a celebrity, this man. He is already preparing—when this ordeal is finished and the world bends its knee once again—to have us crushed by the bailiffs and the courts and his powerful friends into a very fine powder indeed.
His instinct is still to assume that any loss of his own power is momentary, even now.
But Johnson is checked in his attempt to memorize the man’s features, as they are carefully and discreetly covered. A black cloth shields his face, his nose, even his smallish ears from sight, and a slouch hat disguises his head, the glossy seal-brown hair. Only his eyes and his dark brows are visible.
Again, I cannot help but be reassured by my own handiwork. The only thing I have left to chance in the case of this man is his own courage, his own heart.
The eyes above the cloth reveal the struggle, without a doubt. This third man looks over at me, and his expression is impressed with the enormity of what he has done, painfully impressed. He has waylaid two gentlemen, using a pistol and a mask, and even though he has not picked a penny from their pockets, and will not, he could very easily hang for his actions of the last ten minutes. And he well knows it. He kept his glance stony until I arrived, but now that I’ve come, his pretense has all but collapsed. Beneath the mask, his breathing sounds thin and rapid; above it, the eyes hold a pleading look, as though he would have me somehow take back what I have had him do.
It is the mudlark, of course. Or riverlark, I should better say.
If I am surprised to find him here, pistol in hand, to find him my confederate, it is only for a brief instant, because a part of me has known all along that this was the case, that our two earlier meetings today were no accident. That our existences have become somehow intermingled over the last weeks or months.
That wave of knowledge now reaches the forefront of my awareness with hardly a ripple.
This effect too I’ve become familiar with since Plymouth: a moment when two parallel sets of memories can no longer be held in mutual exclusion, for whatever reason, and the thing inside me must let go a part of its hold. And once it does so, the recollections then come washing together. In a moment’s time it is all but impossible to say how or even why they were ever distinct.
I understand now that if James and Johnson and I had finished our business in the Turk’s Head—if we had none of us come running down the back staircase—the mudlark would have remained more or less a random London figure to me, a stranger.
But that realization seems unimportant, hardly worth considering. I am here now, and the mudlark has performed his function well.
And I am glad to see him, not simply because he helped to form one side of a larger invisible box into which James and Johnson managed to escape, but because he is himself and I think well of him. I haven’t time to reassure him at length, and so I do so as quickly and efficiently as I am able, with a clap on the shoulder.
It has the proper effect. He seems to take heart, and the stony look comes back over his face.
Almost as if he cannot help himself, James moves a half-step toward me, a soft moan strangled in his throat. The words remain at a whisper, though, for, as I have said, my brother is a coward. “Johnny, for the love of God, tell me why you’re doing this. Please, Johnny.”
Before I can speak, the lark takes a step forward himself and jabs James in the sternum with the barrel of his pistol, hard enough to drive him backward. The metal thunks audibly against the bone.
“You’ll shut your filthy fucking mouth,” the lark hisses, and I’m surprised for an instant at the heat in his voice, the authentic anger.
But then I have spent several weeks constructing for him a long, detailed, painful fiction involving James Boswell and the Great Dictionary Johnson.
In this fiction, I am brother to a luckless young maid come up to town from Edinburgh, one Peggy Doig. Here she was tempted, and fell into the habit of meeting the two gentlemen nights at the Turk’s Head. They shared her between them like a one-shilling whore. By them she was ruined, got with child, and later savagely beaten when she let it be known. And now—most ominously of all—she has vanished without a word, and I have questions that must be answered.
It is a fiction, yes, but built out of the dirty flotsam of truth. And while the lark’s anger is based on that convenient fiction, it is not misplaced ultimately, not really. He knows these are bad men, and bad men they are.
“You’re lucky you haven’t had your throat slit for you already, wi’ what you’ve done,” the lark spits once more at James, and then he lapses back into silence.
James has his hand over the injured spot at his breastbone, more than a bit of the whipped dog in his manner. But now Johnson offers to speak. He too keeps his voice low, as instructed. His manner has changed substantially: two men with guns are an entirely different proposition than one. Here there is no oak table with which to beat us. And so he is determined now to find his way out of this madness through compliance and persuasion.
“You must stop a moment and consider, John,” Johnson says, and it is odd, hearing my Christian name fall from his lips, “before it is too late. You are no highwayman, though you make use of them.” Here Johnson flicks his gaze down at the lark, making it clear that the man is an inferior species altogether. “You have prospects even now. This is beneath you. You have yet to commit any capital
crime. You have yet to rob, or kill. And much is forgiven upon repentance, especially in one who has suffered as you have suffered.”
He is speaking gingerly of my time in the Plymouth Hospital, of course, but the mudlark seems to take it as a confession of all the worst he has been told.
It is a good reminder, however, that I must separate the lark out from the discussion as soon as possible. And we have been too long out in the open, whatever the weather.
I answer Johnson politely, and quietly. “I suggest you take your own advice, Mr. Johnson. You have also yet to commit any capital crime, though you have much to repent.”
I bring up the dag and, as before, I let them know what will be expected of them. “Now we will walk slowly together, the four of us, down toward the river, and we will do so in this fashion: James in front; you, Mr. Johnson, a pace behind him; and we two will walk a few paces off to the right. The high wall surrounding the Somerset estate will be to your left almost the entire way, and I will ask you to walk as near to it as you may, just in its shadow. Remember, not a sound. Ignore any passersby. We will shoot only if we are forced to do so. And you have still my word. Answer my questions honestly, and you will sleep in your own beds tonight.”
And then we are moving, in an uneasy little knot, down to the water: James, then the lark off in the gloom to his right, followed by Johnson, and I bringing up the rear.
Somerset Water-Gate, the lane bordering the Somerset estate to the west, ends in a public stair at the waterline of the Thames. And much is made of the fact that the Crown has opened the estate’s river gardens to the public during daylight hours, as well. But the truth is that the Water-Gate itself is no gift to the rabble. It is less a cobbled lane, and more a drainage sluice on a massive scale, running from the Strand directly down through the estate’s large stables and coachyard and dingy garbage sheds.
The Brothers Boswell Page 26
