The Brothers Boswell (27 page)

As I say, she does not like this particular aspect of the surprise party—has not since I mentioned it in passing last week—but for all her protestations of moral rectitude, Mrs. Parry understands that in addition to paying her well last week, I will pay a good deal more this evening, and Johnson will pay well over the long term.

And no doubt these women of ill repute would not be the first in her private rooms, if we were in fact to entertain any this evening.

In any event, she nods, lips a little tight. So much for the decency that Johnson lauds in her. But then, if she has been lowered in my eyes, Johnson has been lowered in hers. We are all in good company, then.

“Excellent. To review, as you serve the gentlemen their meal, I shall come up the stairs behind you and slip into the empty room beside their own. Once you’ve satisfied them and they have no further commands, you will exit, leaving the key with me, and I will lock the oak door to the stair as you go down. My guests will be
coming up the back stair, which you showed me and which seems entirely private and suited to the purpose.

“Should we need anything more than the food and drink already upon the table, I will come downstairs personally to request it. Otherwise, we are to be left strictly to ourselves. No prying eyes or peeping toms. Mr. Johnson will be highly displeased if his very uncharacteristic night of revelry becomes the subject of public sport.”

She is shaking her head, eyes on the floor. “Never, sir. Not in my house. I’ve told my other waiter, and young Michael, that they mustn’t venture up the stair. Private party, I’ve told ’em both. Private is private, I’ve told ’em.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, and I can feel the heat of the big body beneath it, like the lathered flank of a Shire workhorse. “But think, Mrs. Parry,” I go on, in the most soothing voice I can manage, “do think how grateful Mr. Johnson will be when I tell him tonight, on our walk home, the clever way you managed the details of the affair with me. Nothing so moves a man as an attention paid upon his birthday. You shall have his heart forever.”

She is pleased enough to forget the nymphs up the back stair, and a genuinely lovely rose blush steals over her features. “We do try our best here, sir. And thank you for your kindness to him. God love you for it, sir, truly.”

She reaches out very hesitantly, to touch my sleeve, which I allow.

“Not at all, Mrs. Parry. After all, a man is fifty but once.”

Which is true, with the notable exception of Samuel Johnson, who actually turned fifty just shy of four years ago, but who—in the mind of Mrs. Parry, and the Lord God willing—will turn that momentous corner once again tonight.

As I a m closing the door to the stair behind her, Mrs. Parry spins unexpectedly about and looks up at me, in order to exchange
one last secret wink, and it is all I can manage to wink back at her. But then she is gone, her big hams and feet working the flaking staircase like a concertina as she goes.

I turn the key in the lock and place it in my vest pocket. And in the sudden quiet I can hear them, talking. Or, rather, it is Johnson I can hear, the insistent bass vibrations of the voice working their way through the thin walls.

Wrapping my fist about the door’s knob, I give it a silent experimental pull. I have already tested it earlier in the week, when I inspected the upstairs rooms with Mrs. Parry, but there is no shame in reassuring oneself. It is a good door, this, solid oak, newly fitted up. A man might batter his way through it with the proper tools, but it is thick enough to defeat even the largest and most determined shoulder.

Treading lightly, I turn and make my way along the narrow passage. It is decently lit by a single lamp midway down. A thread-bare green carpet snakes down the heart of the passage, tacked pragmatically to the floor, and I can move all but noiselessly.

Not that I worry overly much about noise. For all James and his guest know, the other chambers on this floor will be occupied with other drinkers, as are they ordinarily. They have no idea that I’ve taken possession of the rooms surrounding them, of the entire floor. It is a surprise party, after all.

Before me lie four doors. First on my right, the door to my own empty chamber; then on my left, a smaller, colder room for which I have no use this evening; and then, finally, the room containing James and Johnson, their bottles of port, their fire, their beefsteaks, the culmination of their lovely day’s excursion together.

And away beyond their chamber—directly opposite me—the door leading to the house’s back staircase. This door gives me not nearly the satisfaction of the first: it is a paneled door, thinner, and rattles a bit in its frame. Still, it has a lock, and I have the key, and once I’ve used it I retrace my steps down the passage with decent confidence.

My own chamber is prepared as specified: the meal sits cooling upon the board, a bottle of wine stands open, a second unopened but at the ready, and a pretty range of glasses has been laid out for my guests. A tidy fire plays in the grate.

It would be an admirable little welcome for guests, if any were expected; but even so, here are all my needs of the next half hour very adequately met. I have not eaten for hours, and only the Lord knows how long it will be before I have the chance again. So I must sup. And of course the curiosity to hear their conversation as I do so is overwhelming. Fortunately, no amanuensis is necessary here—I have had the table placed near the wall connecting this chamber to James’s. And as I sit down to my meal, I can hear their voices clearly enough to follow their conversation.

James is speaking of our family—bragging of it, that is to say, and of the family seat at Auchinleck, the newly built house and the Old. His voice is a bit higher in pitch and lower in volume than Johnson’s, and so I merely manage to follow the drift. But I have heard him speak at length many times of those he invariably refers to as our “venerable ancestors,” and I would guess that he has been speaking now for the better part of half an hour on the subject.

But when Johnson’s voice booms, I hear every word.

“I must be there, sir,” Johnson insists, “and we will live in the Old Castle; and if there is no room remaining, why then we will build one.” And then the two of them go about the business of planning the inconceivable: a trip together to Scotland, which Johnson claims to detest, and particularly the family’s Auchinleck estate, which James claims to love.

It is a thing I could not have imagined. As I listen, I can feel the anger suddenly stirring its limbs inside me again. It makes my breath come short and the blood suddenly charge in my veins.

I have an impulse to pick up the chair next to me and dash it against the wall, to throw the two of them into a panic, to let them know their words have immediate consequences.

Still, it won’t do to approach the most delicate part of the evening in a rage. Too much planning has gone into the day, and too much may still be gained.

I take off my coat and force myself instead to begin eating the meal laid out for me, tearing into the chicken and wolfing it silently down, but without a trace of satisfaction as I do so. The meat seems to drop into my stomach and away from me somehow, without ever lessening or reaching the hunger. Of the wine I drink little, a sip here or there, nothing to dull the senses or the reflexes.

And I cannot help but brood and simmer. It is not enough that they would claim the Town as their own and publicly deny me any share in its more exquisite pleasures. It is not enough that the two of them have thrown me only private scraps of friendship, never acknowledging me in the light of day to one another, or to their host of powerful friends. Not enough that of the entire city of London, they have left me the run of a single room beside a damp, stinking stable.

Now they are laying plans to work the same neat trick at Auchinleck, my own home. To make me a stranger there as well.

I listen to Johnson’s voice filling the room next door, and I cannot help but wonder: Can there be two Samuel Johnsons, in fact, stalking the streets, haunting the coffeehouses? Two rough citizens, twins for all the world, yet one so ferocious and unreachable, the other so very present and kind and near?

W
E MET FIRST
on London Bridge, yes, but after that he knew where to find me, and that he might find me, when he would.

Up Fish Street Hill, through the disheveled courtyard of the Starr Inn, and past the stable he would come, every week or so, late at night, once he had laid his own domestic menagerie to sleep, salved his conscience with a visit to the blind Mrs. Williams—then would Johnson come and knock softly.

And I would open the door to him, for reasons not so different
from those motivating my brother: Johnson and I were also necessary to one another. We were also two fractions who had somehow stumbled onto the secret of the whole number, though another number entirely, of course.

He needed to come at night, when his presence would pass unremarked; he needed secrecy. And I needed him any which way I might have him, if only to feel as though secrets might exist for the purpose of including as well as excluding me.

Always we drank a glass of wine or two at my small table, and never was the wine the reason for his presence. Always we lay and fell together to sleep, and never was there more or less to it than a deep, abiding togetherness. A sense that sleep might come now because trouble could not.

And yet that is not the entire truth. There was something more.

Some nights I would wake in the smallest hours to find him no longer beside me, candlelight falling from the table across the room. His heavy body eclipsing the candle before him, he would be stretched across the table top, head cradled on his left arm, sleeves open and dangling, his right hand moving slowly but tirelessly back and forth across the page. I would lie there and watch him as he watched the pen twitching in his own hand, puzzled over it himself like a mouse he’d surprised foraging in the dark.

I padded over to him one night and stood just behind him in my bare feet.

What are you writing
, I asked, as softly as I could.

He started at the sound of my voice, then sat upright, turning to face me in his seat. He had no wig, and his hair was shorn very close to the scalp. Here and there were scars visible beneath the short fringe. A faint rumble sounded in his throat as he stretched, and righted himself, and considered the question. He looked exhausted.

It is a fable
, he answered finally.
A silly, small thing.

What is it called?

It is called nothing. I shan’t name it until I am certain it will survive its birth.

Read it to me, please
, I asked.

But he shook his head without hesitation.
It is far from complete. It is a nothing, nothing more than a trifle now.

Then I shall keep watch for it in the bookseller’s stall, and buy it as soon as ever it appears.

He cocked his head at me, finally gave an exhausted little laugh.
You will never find it, then. This will never appear under my name. I intend another pen name entirely, for even a trifle may tell on one.

Tell it to me, then
, I demanded.
At least tell me some stray bit of it.

He seemed to consider the possibility, a finger outstretched to brush the final words he’d written, to test the ink there. He turned the finger over to reveal a small letter
e
inked with perfect legibility across the pad.

It seemed to decide him, somehow, and he told me the story in its entirety.

It is the story of a girl named Floretta
, Johnson began.
Floretta rescues a goldfinch from certain death, only to discover that the tiny bird is in reality a pisky queen, Lady Lilinet. This queen has wondrous magical powers. And she offers Floretta the use of two fountains, one sweet, to grant her wishes, and the other bitter, to rescind them when they prove unwise.

For what does she wish?
I asked.

What you might imagine. For beauty, for love, for gold, even wit and imagination. Each is a curse, and each time Floretta must then drink the bitter water of the second fountain, to return her life to a semblance of its original form. Finally she asks the first fountain for eternal life. And that too is a curse, worse than the rest. She grows old, peevish and diseased in her body, and she lives in terrible fear of senility, of imbecility. But she cannot die.

Johnson had his eyes down on the paper, and it was clear to me
that he had now gone far beyond what he’d managed to commit to the page. He was describing the thing as it existed in his mind alone, or rather the ache of it in his own breast.

What does she do then?

Again he looked dully down at the paper before him.
She does all that she can do. Floretta drinks of the second fountain and asks that her immortality be taken from her. An act that renders her mortal once again. The pisky stands over her as the life ebbs from her body.

I waited, but there was no more. With the candle obscured behind him, his expression was hidden from view.

Is there no more to the story?
I asked finally.

Only this
, he said, and then slowly brought his lips to mine. Again, it was not like Gentleman’s kiss, not devouring, but warm, and human, and quick with life.