The Brothers Boswell (23 page)

As luck would have it, though, Boswell is the only guest to avoid the tables. For a moment he panics, standing nearly frozen a few feet behind the countess, instinctively turning in her radius.

Then Boswell rallies, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes he convinces himself that he can actually turn the spectacle of his own virtue to advantage. Who better to defend the king than a man who does not play, a man in control of his pleasures?

But finally it is clear that those playing cards are involved in playing cards.

Boswell excuses himself to no one in particular and heads a bit
miserably to the gardens for a taste of fresh air, although the night is cold, the gardens facing the river will be blasted and dead, and the air itself will taste of obscurity.

T
HERE, IN THE
hoar-frosted gardens, Boswell faces the river and draws out his small calfskin edition of Johnson, a book he has nearly always about him. The great man’s writing has always spoken to him in an oddly comforting way, from childhood. More than once during an average day, he will haul out the essays and read an appropriate passage, the way a man far more devout than himself might lean on the Bible.

Now, with just moonlight enough, ice vapor trailing from his lips, he thumbs his way to an essay he’s resisted rereading to this point, although he’s gone over the other essays in the volume three or four times in the last weeks. It is Johnson on sorrow, and the first time Boswell read the passage, he pulled back instinctively from its fatalism and lugubrious tone. But now, in this flat moment at the tail end of this day of his own design, he opens himself up to the voice:

The other passions are diseases indeed, but they necessarily direct us to their proper cure. A man at once feels the pain, and knows the medicine. … But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

With this last line, Boswell is again standing on his mark at the Heriot bowling green, the trick bowl heavy in his hand. Then Boswell is moving forward once more in memory, swinging the bowl to the flattened sod, where it leaves his fingers and angles quickly away, striking his brother’s careful set up like nothing so much as a curse.

That is the very worst of it, Boswell realizes, Johnson now forgotten, the wind off the Thames stinging his fingers in dark December 1762: had he allowed his younger brother to take the Moffat waters with him five years ago—as a precaution, if nothing else—John might not be languishing in the Plymouth Hospital tonight.

Boswell hears a distant bell away down the Strand and lifts his head. He turns and finds the gravel path again, slowly weaves the short way back through the evergreen hedge nearest Northumberland House. Just on the other side of the hedge stands a small nondescript man muffled up in a greatcoat, his face nearly hidden beneath a longish wig and an elegant, oversized, fur-lined hat. A clay pipe pokes from beneath the hat brim.

“Good evening, Mr. Boswell,” the man offers as Boswell passes in the dark, and he realizes with a start that the figure is the Duke of Queensberry.

“My Lord,” Boswell manages. He searches for words, finds only the weather. “You are a certainly a brave man to leave the fire. There is a bite of snowfall in the air.”

The wind carries smoke back into the duke’s face, and he repositions himself but mumbles contentedly around the stem, like a man who has waited for his pipe two or three hands of cards beyond his limit. “You were braver still, I see, and went halfway down to the water.” He hums softly over the pipe, then speaks again, a little cunning in his voice: “If I may inquire, what book was it you took up out in the garden there?”

Without thinking, Boswell draws the volume from his pocket. “It is Johnson’s
Rambler
, sir. An old favorite of mine. Excellent in the odd moment here or there.”

The duke actually reaches out a hand and takes the well-thumbed volume, inspects the spine, hands it back. He returns his hands to the folds of the greatcoat, mumbles again at the pipe. “I’ve lost a wager with myself, then. I thought it must certainly be a novel. Richardson at best, and perhaps, for a young man like yourself,”
he narrows an eye at Boswell, taking his measure, “perhaps Mrs. Haywood at the worst.”

In the silence that follows, Boswell can hear the wind cracking frost in the bushes, the muffled scrape of coach wheels on the Strand. And then, almost before he is aware of it, Boswell hears himself broaching the subject of his commission directly.

“Sir, you will excuse me, I pray, for speaking to something so near my own interests, but I cannot see you without being put in mind of my great desire to serve the king in his Guards. Since we last discussed it, I have spoken at length with my Lady Northumberland, and she has confirmed me in my sense that I must hold out for nothing less than this from Fate—and from you, sir. Pray excuse my mentioning it.”

The duke purses his lips about his pipe, but not—as far as Boswell can see—out of annoyance. His sense is that the duke has been expecting this subject since he left the House and first recognized Boswell standing on the lawn. The pursed lips and the drawn eyebrows, he sees, are meant to conceal what is actually a distinct form of pleasure—the pleasure of deliberating over a young man’s future to the young man’s face.

With an almost imperceptible shake of the head, the duke says finally, “It is a difficult thing—I tell you this honestly, when a man is not to purchase. It is a system of each man dipping his cup, after all, is the Army.”

“Of course, my Lord.”

“Others must be satisfied, on down a long line. This makes it a vastly difficult thing to manage, sir. I tell you nothing, I am sure, that you don’t already know.”

Boswell relies heavily on his intuitions, and he has developed an almost limitless faith in them. When he so chooses, he can render himself agreeable simply by receiving the acute impressions of need that underlie conversation, any conversation—he does this a hundred times a day without effort. And when he must, Boswell
can focus these intuitions more actively, to the limits of his own perception and understanding. But more rarely still, when pressed to the utmost, when his own inner needs take complete possession of him, Boswell’s intuitions will urge him out well beyond the calculable, beyond any recognizable social logic. With very little warning, he will hear himself begin to say things that should not, properly speaking, be said. These things will be dictated entirely by intuition, and framed in language almost before Boswell himself— his waking, calculating self—can censor or suppress them.

It is always a sensation mingling wonder and threat. When he addresses the duke again, then, it is with just this sort of blind urgency, a juggler tossing china plates in a suddenly lightless room.

“Of course it is difficult, my Lord,” he hears himself begin, a bit sharply. “It is as difficult a thing as may be imagined. It is asking the world. And yet I should think your Grace’s interest might do it, if any interest in London might.”

“My good Boswell, such—”

“Please, let us not toy with one another, sir, but speak as two men. I ask you to allow me that favor, that dignity. You have it in your power to do this thing. That, neither one of us should deny. That is reality.”

Beneath the hat, the duke’s untended brows have dropped by way of warning, but Boswell continues. “My Lord, a state of suspense and hanging on is a most disagreeable thing. I have heard people talk of it, and I have read in the poets of it, but now I feel it. And I despise it, with all my soul.”

“I can understand this, sir. No man enjoys it. I enjoy it even less, I assure you.”

“I despise it,” Boswell repeats distinctly. “It just comes to this, my Lord. If Your Grace is so generous as to make a push for me, I believe the thing may do. It is true I offer no money, but I would serve George the Third. And I would serve him in London, because under this king the arts will flourish, merit will flourish,
and I feel—God forgive me for saying it of myself, sir—but I feel that I have a touch of genius in me.”

The duke lets a smile play openly on his lips, then murmurs, “Genius! Oh, my dear sir, really. Are we now to speak of
genius
in this thing?” He chortles softly around his pipe stem, shifting his weight in the cold.

Boswell hesitates, then pushes stubbornly past the little mockery. “Yes, indeed I think one should speak of genius, my Lord. One might better ask why anyone speaks above a whisper of anything else.”

This last remark seems to have flicked the duke on the raw, and he says nothing in return. Boswell quickly drops the little volume of Johnson he has been holding into the pocket of his coat, and bows his head. He can feel it all going wrong somehow, feel the china plates slipping past his fingertips in the dark.

But he speaks a last time in any event. “I desire to use that genius to elevate my king, and my country. And my patrons, sir. I truly believe I shall have it in my power one day to repay the favor, the great favor, I now ask. To celebrate your name in a way that will make you remember this evening—this very conversation, tonight, this moment now—with a most genuine satisfaction. But I cannot pay for that favor. I ask for your faith, my Lord.”

The duke snorts, shakes his head a bit, then begins the process of tamping out his pipe and replacing it deliberately in his right coat pocket. Boswell can only take the silence as a prolonged snub, and he stands awkwardly as the man stows his pipe and then gestures formally toward the light spilling from Northumberland House.

Together they grind down the frozen gravel path in silence.

The evening is suddenly in shambles, and, as he picks his way through the ice, Boswell could almost burst out laughing at his own idiocy. Has he really just now been speaking seriously of his own genius, he wonders, staring past the trim of the duke’s hat to the starless sky beyond. Has he actually just been menacing the
Duke of Queensberry with his own future prominence? It seems impossible to believe.

And then the duke stops and turns, with what seems like a hint of truculence. “And what does the Great Johnson say of genius, might I ask?”

Boswell halts himself, again looks the duke in the face. He thinks for a moment, sensing an opportunity, but his mind remains entirely blank, and he can come up with nothing. “I have no good idea, sir. But I dine with him tomorrow. With your leave I will put the question to him directly then.”

The duke looks startled, then snorts again and turns away, as though his point has been proven.

I
T IS SOME
ten minutes later, as Boswell is retracing his listless way through the great vestibule to the entrance onto the Strand, that he hears heels tapping behind him on the marble floor. Clearly fluent in the language of these particular heels, the servant leading him pricks up his ears.

Boswell turns, and it is in fact the Countess, sweeping up behind him as quickly as her Friday-night dignity allows. She grips the satin flounces of her dress carefully in one hand, but she does not stop before him, coming instead directly to his side, and then to his ear, so that Boswell can feel her short little breaths for an oddly intimate moment.

“I have come away to tell you, Mr. Boswell, to save myself the trouble of a letter. Oh, I’ve tousled my cap so! But can you guess what the duke has said to me just this moment, as he passed behind my chair on his return from the garden? Can you guess, my dear sir? ‘Well, madam,’ said he, ‘it seems as though this Boswell of yours may have merit indeed.’ And then he quite patted my shoulder, as though to reassure me. Oh, is it not propitious, Mr. Boswell? Is it not as I said earlier?”

Here she grasps his arm, more tightly perhaps than might strictly
be allowed, but not a great deal more. “We shall do it together, you and I, though it take the full year your father has allotted you, Mr. Boswell! Have faith, sir. We will win him to it yet.”

And then—almost before he realizes it—Boswell finds himself out on the ice-hushed street, moving into the thin crowds collected in the Square without perceiving the motion of his legs and feet beneath him. He hears singing from the Golden Cross across the street, a wash of ragged voices, and he is buoyant, airborne.

This dreamy flight lasts some four slow blocks, before a small woman in a dirty yellow bonnet steps up alongside him in the dark. She matches his pace for five or six strides and then, when Boswell doesn’t shy, casually takes his arm.

Boswell’s mood being what it is, he pats her arm in his and walks this way for another five or six strides—smiling down at her, and she smiling back with clear dark eyes and good white teeth— before stopping finally to detach himself.

But as he does so, the woman executes a deft, practiced little figure, taking his hand at the turn and drawing it firmly alongside her own, up into the bodice of her dress, so that in a heartbeat Boswell’s four cold fingers are nestled along the warm smooth side of her breast, the nipple frank against his palm. The woman presses her own hand tightly to the outside of the dress, holding this arrangement steady.

Only then does she speak, in a whisper. “Please, but my legs are frozen, sir. Just as cold as two slips of ice. They need warming, truly.”

Boswell begins to draw his hand back, but the woman presses harder against the side of her bodice, holding him steady. Boswell lowers his own voice to a whisper. “Take yourself inside where it’s warm. The Golden Cross is not so far away.”