The Brothers Boswell (38 page)

At the front of our line, the lark pushes James sharply to the right, and the two of them suddenly vanish.

Then, with Johnson stepping slowly and carefully in front of me, we accomplish the same trick: squeezing between two pallet walls
into a small alley that opens up quickly into a makeshift courtyard. All around us are squared-off stacks of timber and pallets, walls of them reaching up fifteen feet here, twenty feet there.

Up and to the right, a sawpit yawns, the wood dust heaped up in great piles. This open interior is like a makeshift amphitheater, with the moon barely visible in the darkling sky.

Wood scraps and chips are scattered everywhere, some of them jagged, and again the going is difficult; Johnson stumbles once and seems to hurt his leg. But he curses softly and moves on. A barely audible skittering noise seems to travel with us as we move deeper: wharf rats, giving us a comfortable berth, though not fleeing, for they are bold enough. They know that even in daylight they have very little to fear from men limited to the aisles between the stacks.

It is the watchman’s area, his tiny riverside fiefdom, and ahead on the right, nearly indistinguishable from the lumber towering over it, is the watchman’s own shanty. Through the shanty’s one narrow slit of a window, a lantern glows faintly.

No watchman comes out to challenge us, however, because he has been paid decently well to be elsewhere. It mattered not at all that he and the lark have been more than once at odds over lumber and chips filched from the yard. For a half crown, the watchman was more than willing to take the lark at his word, that it was only the shanty itself that was wanted, and privacy.

When we come up to the small door, I break the silence, my voice very low. “Inside are two chairs against the back wall. You will enter one by one and seat yourselves in those chairs. Rest your hands, palms up, in your laps. When you have done so, I will enter, and not before. I will mark you through the window here.”

The lark motions James inside, then roughly pushes my brother’s head down below the crossbeam as James ducks to enter. Johnson turns and casts one look back at me, and in the darkness his bulging eyes look white and wild. The lark allows Johnson to
duck his own head, because even a man with a gun would hesitate to do it for him. And then they are both inside, and I see through the window slit that they have taken their chairs, grudgingly turned their palms up.

With the lark watching the two of them through the open doorway, I take the moment to reload the pistol fired in the Turk’s Head. There is no moon to speak of, and only a hint of lantern-light reaches my hands as I begin, but it is no matter. I have handled guns all my life, and handled these dags more than enough to do so blind. I tear open the paper packet with my teeth, half-cock the piece with my thumb, and prime it.

I glance up to see the lark watching me work, and I jerk my head toward the shack, giving him a look. A bit sullenly, he goes back to his task.

I close the frizzen and pour the rest of the powder into the barrel. Press the ball and the paper wrapper down into the barrel, and ram the charge very carefully home with a thin rod set cunningly into the dag’s underside. Again, I can’t help but be taken with the things: even the bitty ramrod has been cast in gold.

Not thirty seconds have passed. “That’s done it, then,” I whisper to the lark.

And then something unexpected happens.

The lark looks at me and, although he is clearly still overwhelmed, he asks to come inside, to stay with me, and I see that he is in earnest. “Makes no sense handlin’ ’em yourself,” he whispers, almost pleading. “I’m in to the ears now as it is. Let me come along, help you get it done. Whatever it is.”

“You have done enough,” I tell him.

“Let me stay outside here and keep an eye. They give you the slip before. You needed me back there.”

“Your part is finished.”

“You needed me,” he repeats stubbornly. “Just to keep an eye out.”

I say nothing, but I look at him, his brows like rain-soaked slate,
and he can see enough to know that I will not change my mind. He shakes his head, the black cloth covering his look of disgust, and then stares off toward the water. He has no idea what I have planned, exactly, but it’s clear that he’s more frightened of leaving us and loping off home than he is of whatever may happen in the watchman’s shack.

He makes one last attempt, holding my eye.

“It’s to be like that, is it?” he asks, a hint of heat in his voice, as if somehow I’ve betrayed him, am betraying him even now.

When I say nothing, he bends down into the low door to give James and Johnson a last savage look, and then the hand with the pistol vanishes into his long coat pocket and he is gone without another word, vanished through the tall black divide in the towering walls of lumber. Gone back to the river, where sky is inevitably up, and water inevitably down, the current fixed and trustworthy, more or less.

I take a dag in each of my hands, and remind myself that I have only two shots left, no matter what may happen. And on the heels of that reminder, a thought pops into my head out of nowhere, a strange thought, of the sort that comes to me every now and again. It is a thought about Mrs. Parry, of all people.

I realize now that while I took great pains to force Gil Higgs to remain silent, I made no attempt to do so with Mrs. Parry. On the contrary, I met with her several times, more than enough for her to recognize me and identify me after the fact if things at the Turk’s Head were to go very poorly.

It dawns on me now that the third golden bullet—the extra bullet now lodged in the wall or the ceiling of her rearmost upstairs room—was for her.

That was how she was to be kept silent. Her life was to be ended.

And I was to end it myself. Or at least my finger was to have pulled the trigger. Had Johnson not forced me to fire accidentally, that plan would have moved forward and the evidence of it would
have been held out of my awareness. It would have been just another secret kept by what is inside of me. It is only the fact that the number of bullets no longer matches the number of targets that leaves a thread hanging somehow, visible and telling. And that thread I have just pulled.

But this revelation refuses to settle in my mind, refuses to take on the air of normalcy, for it is more than I can believe. Mrs. Parry is guilty of nothing, guilty of nothing but gluttony and ugliness and a fawning submission. She is a fat spaniel without the capacity for sin. And yet the thing inside of me would have put a bullet in her head without a thought, without even a memory to anchor the act in time.

And for the first time in a long time, I am more than just afraid: I feel a bodily, yearning ache to be rid of it. If I could take a scalpel to my chest and slice it out somehow, I would do it gladly. But I cannot, and I know I cannot. There is no way to be rid of it—that was all I learned of any consequence at Plymouth.

It will have its angry way, here and there, now and again. And the best I can manage is to keep it focused as strictly as possible on the application of justice.

W
HICH IS HOW
I find myself seated, once again, in a straight chair opposite Johnson and James. It might almost be thirty minutes ago, at the Turk’s Head, but for a few small alterations. This watch stand is a low-ceilinged structure barely large enough to house the three of us, fashioned quickly, no doubt, out of the least salable odds and ends the yard had to offer. The small lamp stands on an upturned box to our left, throwing our thin shadows against the facing wall. And that is all, in the way of furnishings.

Johnson has no table to toss. There is no clientele downstairs, a hallo away, because here there is neither downstairs nor anyone within shouting distance. Johnson and James might call to their
hearts’ delight, and no one—even if anyone were to hear them— would be able to place the sounds. We are seated at the center of what amounts to a vast timber labyrinth, and it would take someone standing at the very entrance to the watchman’s courtyard to understand that the noise they hear is coming from the heart of the stacks of lumber themselves.

Johnson’s wig is at the bottom of the Thames, of course, and his ill-shorn head looks particularly large and jowly without it. His eyes are doubly underscored: they sit in their piggy folds of skin, and those folds sit themselves in pronounced black bags, so exhausted does he look, from the wine, the long day, the unexpected tumult.

His skin was flushed earlier to a ruddy red, with the heat and the confrontation in the coffeehouse; but it has cooled, apparently. If anything, Johnson’s face is now pallid, all but drained of blood.

The rusty suit looks like a dead skin about to be sloughed off. He has lost another button from his shirt, so that now, in addition to the gap exposing his large belly, his neck is open to the dingy linen beneath. Wet through with the rain is the good lexicographer, and spattered everywhere with dirt.

Likewise, James’s snowy stockings are soiled, and his violet suit has darkened over with the wet. In his haste to leave the Turk’s Head, he has left his sword behind, the only piece of his wardrobe that might have been any use to him. This tells you all you need to know about my brother’s highly publicized desire for a commission in His Majesty’s Guard: he ran higgledy-piggledy down a back staircase and left his sword dangling on a nail behind him.

James’s hair has long ago escaped its silken tie, and it straggles mostly to one side of his face, where he has deposited it with an unthinking swipe of his hand. While the events of the last hour or so have added ten years to Johnson’s looks, James seems more and more a boy every moment, stripped of his London manners and well out of his depth.

I have my dags in my hands, and my two hands resting lightly on my two knees.

And so we begin.

“Gentlemen, I must remind you that we were in the midst of a conversation.” The way they watch my mouth form words is deeply satisfying. I have their most perfect attention. “I had pledged to leave you in peace once you had answered my questions truthfully. And I made it clear that you would not leave if you failed to do so. You see now that I was very much in earnest.”

Johnson responds by immediately taking his hands off his lap and crossing his arms over his chest. Like casting his wig into the Thames, this refusal to leave his hands where I may see them is carefully calibrated resistance: little enough, so as to live through this ordeal, yet just enough to live with himself afterward.

And so a quick reminder about the guns themselves is probably in order. I brandish them just a bit, letting their showy barrels catch the light. “We spoke earlier of the linguistic history of these dags. But you might be interested to know their physical provenance. If we may believe the goldsmith in Parliament Close, these were poured at the command of King George II himself, and meant to equip an assassin. This assassin had orders to kill Bonnie Prince Charlie and his accomplice, Flora Macdonald. It was Flora Macdonald, you will remember, who had dressed the Prince as a waiting maid and spirited him away from the King’s men on the Island of Skye.”

I buff the dag in my right hand against the damp material of my breeches and bring it to bear once more. “In spite of himself, King George had a deep respect for his nemesis and the Stuart line. And so he caused the guns to be poured of almost solid gold. Even the bullets were dusted with the metal. Death fit for royalty. I think it a very thoughtful compromise, actually.”

When I have finished this history, Johnson and James exchange a look, and it is a significant glance, mixing confusion and alarm and mutual resolve. One would think they had known one another
all their lives, for the communication they seem to manage in a glance.

“Put your questions,” Johnson barks, then purses his lips, breathing loudly through his nose. He stares at me for a moment, breathing, simmering, utterly unamused by the goldsmith’s tale. “Put your questions. Allow us to answer them. Put your questions and end this nightmare.”

“I fully intend to do so, sir.”

He purses his thick lips again, wind whistling through the big nostrils, then brings himself to go on. His body is motionless, but his expression itself is an attack of sorts. The softer look he had at first in the Turk’s Head, the familiar look that begged me to keep his secret, is entirely gone. He hates me for exposing him. Nothing could be clearer. But the truth will out, and he has no one to thank but himself.

He is still going on. “Put your questions, and then keep your word and allow us each to go about our business. You insist upon honesty. It is an insult that you should stress it so. We are men of honor. This is your own eldest brother, your own
flesh
, for God’s sake. He has shown you nothing but
affection.
A more open and plain-dealing man I have never met.”

I cannot resist a smile at that. “Plain-dealing, you say. But then you should know, of course, having spent several full weeks in his company.”

“Your sarcasm does not change my assessment of his character, I can assure you, sir.” There is open contempt in Johnson’s look now. He has all but curled his lip. “Quite the contrary, in fact. Quite the contrary. If your brother fails to reach your standards, that seems to me excellent reason to believe that he well exceeds my own.”

The anger struggles in my chest, but I put it down. He is baiting me, nothing more. He and James must still believe that the lark is keeping watch outside the door somewhere, a useful misperception.