The Brothers Boswell (36 page)

As Davies goes to him and makes to shake his hand, Johnson catches the movement from the corner of his eye and rears back slightly, bringing his weak vision to bear as best he can, before smiling thinly. He hulks over Davies somehow, although the bookseller is himself of more than average height; the large hand not engaged in greeting his host curls instead into a fist, which bobs slowly in the air, altogether of its own accord.

Eventually Davies says something, Johnson lowers his head to hear, and then swivels to pick out Boswell by the fireplace, standing stupidly, empty teacup in hand. Johnson squints across the distance, an unintentional scowl printed over his fleshy face.

And that is when Boswell’s early disappointment suddenly leaves him, to be replaced by a powerful feeling very much its opposite: the feeling that here is another order of being entirely, something preternatural, greater even than he has allowed himself to imagine, almost biblical in intensity.

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.

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.

T
HE 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.