The Brothers Boswell (19 page)

“Molly, you may rest assured I will tell no one about this morning,” Boswell pauses delicately, “your coming into my bedchamber. It shall remain just an amusing story between ourselves. Never a word to Mr. Terrie on the subject. You have my Christmas Eve morning promise, Molly.”

The maid pulls the door quickly closed without so much as a parting look, and Boswell falls back to savor his favorite slice of the day. But this morning, before sinking back into the pillows, he is moved to throw back the covers and haul out the leg in question again. He takes his thick ankle in his hand and brings it up into the morning light falling through the window.

There, in the tender skin just above his heel, just below the hollow at his outer ankle-bone and just inside his Achilles’ tendon, placed with remarkable precision, are the tiny black strokes, now more than seven years old. The wounds themselves healed long ago, and the dark marks have taken on a dull muted look, as his body has gradually come to terms with the ink.

In the tender hollow at the outer ankle-bone of his left leg, Boswell carries one word of two letters: NO.

In a roundabout way, the word inked onto Boswell’s ankle is the fruit of his first nervous breakdown, ten years ago, when he was twelve. He awoke in his Edinburgh bed that morning to find that he hadn’t the energy to rise—neither the physical energy nor the spiritual. He felt as though he would prefer to die, and said so. His younger brother John finally burst into tears and ran for their parents.

The doctors found a rash around both his ankles. Boswell was diagnosed with an overtaxed constitution and packed off to the spa town of Moffat to take the waters for six weeks.

Moffat proved to be a border town of 1,500 inhabitants, the size of a watch fob to an Edinburgh boy, its primary spring housed in a tiny stone hut surrounded by a great lot of rural nothing. Visitors had to walk the long dirty Well Road up into the hills, and then scramble up and down the steep banks of the Hindsgill to take the waters.

But the boy James was too enervated to scramble. He spent his first afternoon in town lying across a stiff narrow bed, head throbbing, while the Reverend John Dun, his tutor, saw to his own carefree business about town.

The dull weight in his head was enough, over the course of two days, to make James flirt with the idea of suicide. In his darkened room, he made God a series of desperate offers, to join the clergy, to eat a meatless diet, to build a showy new chapel when he should
inherit his father’s estate. He offered finally, on his third night there in Moffat, just before collapsing into sleep, his chastity.

And the next morning something miraculous occurred: for the first time, he felt strong enough to hike to the well, and within two days his depression had lifted and melted entirely away. The scurf vanished magically from his ankles.

His relief gave him a sunny social energy he had never known, and within a week Boswell had become the pampered favorite of the young married set in Moffat, with an open invitation to their high teas and low whist tables. Several of the men had made their new money in coal, and their wives were well dressed and bored. Boswell, with his Edinburgh manners, became their prodigy. It didn’t matter that he was a child by comparison; he could make these fashionable adults laugh out loud, and occasionally nudge an angry husband back to a sulking wife. He found that he could read all of their interwoven emotions for him and for one another like a penny pamphlet.

Only later, during the ensuing years, did it dawn on him that not everyone could read these sorts of penny pamphlets, that he was somehow emotionally literate in ways that others were not. That this quality made it easy for him to step through the scrim of people’s words into the actualities of their feelings. And that this in turn could make some genuine brand of intimacy available in hours, rather than years.

That he had a gift, a gift to counteract the family curse of hypochondria.

And so when the chaise finally rolled out of Moffat, the six-week cure an astounding success, he understood with perfect clarity that God had upheld His end of the bargain. Boswell returned to Parliament Square and set about upholding his own vow, but by his sixteenth birthday he was doing so with greater and greater effort.

He wrote himself increasingly long, stern letters—furious exhortations—but by almost inverse proportions the documents seemed less and less effective. And then, just as the stern notes
threatened to become completely useless, he discovered a new form of writing altogether.

He was strolling down the Leith Walk in Edinburgh, killing time, in what he called his See-Everything Suit: a jumble of discarded caddy’s clothing he’d put together for himself at fifteen, a disguise to allow him to go out into the city and see all of the things that fail to happen when a man of quality happens near. The Leith Walk had been of interest to him for months, with its odd shops and nearby gibbet, the Gallow Lee.

In the doorway of a tiny wonder-shop, beside a window full of stuffed squirrels and a live parrot, stood a bald bronze-skinned man, arms crossed over his chest. Boswell noticed as he passed that one of the hairy hands bore the image of a thistle. It was artfully done, the plant’s stiff leaves shaded like a fine print.

The shop owner begrudged a smile and put out his hand, and it was only then that it occurred to Boswell that the ink was not
on
the hand, but
in
it.

“’Tis very old Scots, this sort o’ pouncing o’ the skin,” the man said, tapping the thistle, “a thing from the
pechts
in the Highlands. There’s folks still know the skeel, where I come frae.”

Boswell had heard stories about painted men, but on faraway islands, or brought like tame animal acts through London, not keeping shop on the Leith.

“How much does it hurt?” he asked.

“Like bein’ roasted alive.”

“Can a man have a word, rather than a thing?”

“Have the Bible itself, ye like.”

“How long will it last?”

“Till the Devil gives ye yer dixie.”

It took three more shilly-shallying visits to the wonder-shop, a Wednesday afternoon and two Saturday mornings, but there was never any chance that Boswell would decide not to do this thing, now that he knew it could be done.

Of course, he worried obsessively over the details—if discovered, this was something that would shock his family and friends—and he narrowed his message,
REMEMBER YOUR VOW OF CHASTITY, TO THE SINGLE WORD CHASTITY
.

When it became clear that even a single word with eight letters would be far too visible for comfort, he’d sweated his entire text down into two letters, maybe six strokes of the pouncing tool. And that was how he finally found himself in the wonder-shop one morning in late September, chilly rain puddling the holes scattered over the Leith, left foot propped on a display case as the shopkeeper briefly scourged his flesh.

It hurt much more than a pinprick, and much less than being burned alive.

It was just enough pain, in fact, to allow Boswell to favor his left leg all the way back up the Edinburgh High Street home to Parliament Square. He favored the foot affectionately, carrying it home in the rain, and he would dress the wound in secret for the next two and a half weeks. Not until May 1791, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of his meeting with Samuel Johnson, when he first held a bound two-quarto set of
The Life of Johnson
in his own hands, would any fragment of his own composition manage to wedge itself closer to his heart.

And yet, set even into his very flesh, the vow had proved shockingly easy to throw over. The shopkeeper’s ink bought him three years, no more.

At nineteen, he’d met an Edinburgh actress named Mrs. Cowper, a Catholic actress, and flirted with the possibility of a secret marriage. His father had somehow sensed the thing brewing, though, and abruptly sent Boswell to finish his schooling in Glasgow, a grimmer city by far, where they took their laws against the theater seriously.

It was only a matter of weeks before he reached his breaking point. On a clear night in early March, he fled to London on horseback, intent on converting to Roman Catholicism. Boswell
saw mass celebrated there for the first time, and the spectacle of it brought actual tears to his eyes. It was a height of devotion such as he had never known.

But just two nights later, as though he had no true conscious control over the legs carrying him along, Boswell found himself contacting a friend of his Edinburgh friend Gentleman: one Samuel Derrick. Derrick was a would-be playwright who knew the subtler twists and turns of London after dark.

And, not incidentally, Derrick also knew where Boswell might try this thing he had worked so assiduously to avoid trying for the past seven and a half years.

That was how Boswell found himself at twenty years of age in a cold room at the Blue Periwig, Southampton Street, Strand, cradled expertly between the legs of a young girl named Sally Forrester, a sweet freckled unhurried sort whose skin was pale but whose hair and brows and nipples were all the color of rain-soaked shale.

When the frenzy was over and Boswell lay coolly back, Sally Forrester burrowed immediately into his side for sleep with a wife-like intimacy. He lay there with his arm around her, dumb with amazement: he hadn’t thought even once of the chastity vow, from the time Derrick had squired him down the Strand to the moment he’d poured himself helplessly into this creature dozing beside him.

That was what he marveled over, when all was said and done. Not the sheer impact of female nakedness, though that was more powerful even than he had expected. No, what he came back to over and again was this newly revealed capacity of his own mind: to obtain its desires by damping and shaping awareness itself.

It frightened and impressed him simultaneously to think of it. Still, he was certain he had felt the force of the Divine in his desire for Sally. There had been something heartbreaking and holy in the spray of freckles across her chest, the shell of her ear.

And if in fact, this new sensuality was itself somehow a part of
God’s design, then God had proven Himself a far more understanding and loving Father than Boswell had ever dared to hope.

Boswell had returned to Edinburgh that June with a reluctance so great it was only just distinguishable from outright refusal. With him, however, the young man brought a plan of action: to secure a commission in the King’s Guards and spend the rest of his life in a red coat, as a gentleman–soldier and a Londoner, writing and romancing and defending the Capital from nonexistent armies.

B
OSWELL HAS PULLED
on his clothes for the early part of the day—loose and easy, hair not yet tied up, breeches not yet tied down—and has rung the dining-room bell to let Molly know that he is prepared now for his tea and toast. This breakfast Molly delivers, and Boswell thanks her with a nod. The ankle remains unspoken between them.

Alone in the dining room, as he dunks crusts one after the other into his milky tea, Boswell hums to himself and completes a sort of idle self-inventory that marks his first hour of consciousness each morning. Since childhood, James Boswell has come out of sleep the way a wealthy man exits a thick crowd: patting his various pockets of memory, to see if they’ve been picked. This morning he has been thinking of chastity, in part because of the plans already in motion with Louisa for later this morning.

Today is a critical juncture not just in his pursuit of Louisa, but in his pursuit of a commission in the King’s Guards—so critical, in fact, that he has left nothing to chance in the planning. First cup of tea finished, his hand goes instinctively to his waistcoat.

The waistcoat pocket is surprisingly deep, and Boswell’s thickish fingers have to navigate familiar clutter—broken peppermints, a torn concert ticket, a snapped watch fob, itself containing a fragment of a uniform stained with what the schoolmate selling it swore was the blood of Bonnie Prince Charlie himself—before locating the
first of the two memoranda he wrote for himself prior to climbing into bed last night.

He has a habit of scribbling himself quick little instructions each night, to be read the next morning; but as this is no ordinary day, the first memorandum is no quick scribble. The octavo page has been so intricately folded that it feels to his fingers like a small square of pasteboard. He hauls it up through the trifles and unfolds it. And then the note begins to speak to him:

Breakfast alone, and enjoy English jam. These twenty-four hours may well decide the three grand enterprises you set in motion weeks ago. ’Tis now time to carry them smartly to conclusion.

Enterprise the First: After breakfast, dress in Bath coat and old grey suit and stick; to Park, walk the Parade. Think seriously on what it means to soldier. Then sally to Louisa just as a free-spirited blade, but speak calmly, of poetry and the Scriptures. Above all, be warm with her, press her home. Today, today she must make you blessed. Never again in the history of this world will there be another morning such as this, etc.

Enterprise the Second: Take your dinner in Holburn, at cheesemongers, neat and quiet out of public notice. Then return home, dress in new pink suit. Use money saved on victuals to take sedan chair to Northumberland House. Savour this ride; consider that you are borne to the House of the noble Percy, for a private party of but twenty-five picked people to which you are now weekly invited. This marks you as a favourite. Be comfortable, yet genteel. Speak slowly, distinctly, best fine English only. There will be two there who can grease your commission. Push fair with both. You deserve to be a soldier, and you deserve to live in London. The Guards offer you all.