The Brothers Boswell (16 page)
* * *
T
HERE IS ONE
other significant advantage to employing a canary: it is possible to sit atop One Tree Hill, overlooking the town and the river, and follow the pair’s progress—from the Old Ship, up through the Park’s long scenic tunnel of elm and Spanish chestnut, up to the Royal Observatory—simply by tracking the mote of yellow trailing brilliantly behind. Occasionally, my old man doffs his hat and fans himself briefly, as though he finds the heat oppressive; this bit of semaphore prevents me from confusing him, at a distance, with the handful of other Hospital reprobates in mustard. I am truly impressed with him this day. He is performing flawlessly in his various roles.
At the foot of the Giant’s Steps, the canary wheels slowly off and begins the labored process of climbing One Tree Hill, on one good leg, to deliver me his report.
By the time my amanuensis struggles up to me, I am seated on the wooden bench encircling the gnarled trunk that gives the Hill its name. Other than myself, the crown of the hill is deserted, though voices and laughter sift though the trees of the Park below. A small knot of deer are cropping at the edge of the woods behind me, paying me no mind. Town deer, they have been raised to fear no man.
I have my eyes closed, letting the sun bathe my face.
And so I hear the old man clear his throat without seeing him. A smile touches up the corners of my mouth, but this without opening my eyes. It is pleasant to refuse the headlong movement of the day, at least for a few moments, more pleasant than I care to think about. After all, our two quarries will be occupied for a good while with the sextants and quadrants and clocks and the
Domus Obscurata
in the Observatory’s garden pavilion. I could almost doze here, almost dream.
I feel the same lethargy I felt on the sculler, the slow fingers of fugue. Finally, the old man scratches carefully at my shoulder, and then again. He has gone too far with things to have me suddenly turn whimsical on him.
“They are a strange pair, are they not,” I ask him, eyes still shut. But even as I speak the words, I find myself thinking:
Devonshire junket.
The cinnamon smell in the Greenwich air today puts me in mind of Devonshire junket, covered in a whipped cream touched with rosewater. James and I ate it once, as boys, at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Only once, yet it remains today our common touchstone for both an elegant and a greedy dessert.
“They are that, sir,” says the canary. “The big one has his ideas, true enough.”
I open my eyes, and he hands me a series of half-sheets, neatly ordered together.
“And this is the stuff of their conversation?”
“The meat of it. With as much of the words themselves as I could put down as they came running. Been a while since I was called to scratch down so much so quick. But I believe I done a neat enough job of it.”
“It is the best way to come to know a man, Grandfather. To sample his conversation when he is unaware that it is being sampled. You do not hear truth, but you hear the particular range of fictions he tells his particular listener. And from this you may take your measure of them both.”
He is searching my coat with his glance now, for the bulge of the second flask, no doubt. But he realizes that something is expected of him by way of response. And he rises to the occasion.
“So, belike, I have heard say,” he puts in sagely, after a moment.
The Old Ship
Saturday 30 July
Just after 1 in the afternoon
Below lie the subjects they covered. The hooks are saved for their very words, as spoke.
First thing, they called for their lunch, fish and potatoes, bread. Sat at the table furthest to the back. And the littler one said shall we drink wine, and the bigger one said
Missed something here as I was obliged to call for my own meal. It was but a minute.
The big one remarked as to how he don’t like the buildings of the hospital. Not to his taste, because
The littler one asked,
Bigger: And, said he, it makes for dependency as well. Turns pensioners almost into children.
Littler:
Bigger: Grew peevish at that, loud in his talk, and swung about in chair.
Littler:
Here they fell to their meal, and said nothing for a good while. Bigger one ate as if starved. Didn’t take pause to chew, but forked in a new bite while the old was still underway. Veins stood on his forehead as he did so.
Bigger one:
Littler:
The undercroft is farther across than I had imagined, closer to one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet. I have a sharp moment of uncertainty, as a man might have swimming in the sea at night, when he expects to feel sand grind beneath his toes, yet does not—and then, a moment later, still does not. But it is not much farther, for all of that.
When I reach the far wall, I inspect the moist stone and find precisely what the canary has told me to expect: two short alcoves built into the wall, for wine or coal but empty today, and broom-clean. They are each deep enough for a man to take three paces into them, and I do so, leaving my lantern sitting on the clay tiles of the one farthest from the door.
Then I turn back to the darkness and retrace my steps. Once outside the alcove, and nearer the center of the floor, I turn back:
the alcove looks miraculous, glowing from some indirect source, as though it contained a particle of the Divine.
From One Tree Hill, I watched James and Johnson leave the Observatory and begin their slow saunter back down through the Park. According to James’s notes, they plan to tour the undercroft next. Johnson seems to have deliberately designed this part of the tour for later in the afternoon, with evening coming on.
I have perhaps fifteen minutes, then, before the two come clamoring down the stairs behind me, and I use this time to familiarize myself with the vast space of the chamber.
There was a time when, like James, I was deathly afraid of the dark. Growing up together, we were both petrified if a sudden wind snuffed the candles in our flat. It seemed then the breath of something monstrous, something biding its time just outside the corona of light and family. And it was not uncommon for the winds curling up the Edinburgh High Street to wreak their little bit of havoc.
But somehow, in the Plymouth Hospital last year, I shed that fear completely. Now I could spend the day in this lightless chamber and fear nothing. When a man has been disturbed—so that his very sense of himself is laid jaggedly open—and then that man returns abruptly to his senses, he knows forever after that there are worse things than a room without a candle.
The undercroft’s five great stone pillars, each the terminus for eight brick ribs spilling elaborately down from the ceiling, are precisely placed. The pattern is the four points of a square, with a fifth pier dropped right into the center of the figure. Otherwise the space is empty. It is so very silent that I can hear my blood course in my ears, and I rehearse the mathematics of the pillars, first walking deliberately with my arms stretched in front of me, and then, when I have my bearings, striding faster and more surely.
If I slip back all the way to the south wall, and rest there with my back against it, the glow of the distant alcove silhouettes the pillars just enough to allow me to run nearly as fast as I am able. The south
wall, like the north, has its storage alcove. I remove my shoes and place them snug against the rear wall of it.
This is where I will stand, when the moment comes. As James and Johnson enter the undercroft proper, their lamplight will not reach me here. After an instant, they will mark the glow from the far wall, and they will do what insects and humans in dark places cannot help but do: they will gravitate toward it, across the long tiled floor. Another tourist party, they will imagine, or a guide of some sort. Someone, anyone, with whom they may talk, talk, talk.
When they are far enough across the floor, I will circle behind them, back up the steps, to lock the door from the inside. In my stockings alone I can move very quietly. And then, when they reach the far alcove, they will find the orphaned lantern; they will stand before it, thinking, pondering. And in that instant, I will pad forward into the light and the two parallel branches of the riverine excursion will converge and become one.
I transfer the dags from their fitted pockets beneath my arms to the long outer pockets of my coat. There, if need be, I can keep them in my hands without announcing them. Giving the pillars and brickwork now little more than a cursory thought, I walk back toward the alcove, glowing faintly in the distance. Perhaps ten minutes remain, more than enough time to advance in my reading.
They talked of the possibility of rain in the evening, even during their trip back up the Thames. The littler one seemed put out at the idea, but the bigger one bade him never mind rain should it come. Littler one:
Here they had finished their meal, and sat back with tea cups. Big one put his legs up on the counterpane of the window, as at his ease.
Then the littler began to speak of his own father. Comparing the father to his friend, after a fashion.
Bigger one seemed pleased at that, nodded head, tapped foot.
Littler:
Bigger:
Littler said that he was afraid his father might force him to pursue a career in the Law. Did not take the exact words, but somehow he feared trickery of some kind on the father’s part.
Bigger:
Littler: ,
truly. It has been a dream of mine since I was a child, marveling over your Dictionary.>
Bigger:
Here they discharged their reckoning. Bigger one cleared a path for them through the traffic in the Old Ship, swinging his stick just a bit to left and right, nudging people out of the way, like a goose girl touching up her flock. No particular mention throughout the meal of the suit at law you spoke of, unless it may possibly be with the gentleman’s own father.