The Brothers Boswell (6 page)

She had curled into a small ball on the bed, head in her arms, hairy white legs doubled up beneath the chemise. The irresistible feet were buried miserably beneath the counterpane. She was crying, but so softly and forlornly that I lost the sound when I closed the garret door behind me. Whatever she might think of me, she thought nothing good of her brother-in-law the chandler. She didn’t want to call him out of his little hole full of candles and knick-knacks, even now.

I felt for her, truly I did. Her world was hemmed round by men for whom nothing good might be said, or so it must have seemed to her. She had no way of knowing that I had done her the single greatest kindness of her life.

I remain convinced of it, even today. For in February of 1764, only some six months after our morning’s discussion, James will be desultorily studying law in Utrecht, and he will receive a letter informing him that his illegitimate infant son has died. Without his ever having laid eyes on the boy, the boy will be no more. James will write pained letters to Johnston and a few other of his confidants, and he will actually shed a tear or two—he has that capacity—but in a week the subject will pass forever from his mind.

James will never bestir himself to attend a funeral, he will never see a body, and of course he will never lay eyes on pretty Peggy Doig again. And it sustains me, during these harsher, colder winters at the far end of my life, to imagine little Charles alive somewhere in the Hebrides or deep in the fields of the English countryside, a carpenter or a master printer by now, with no knowledge of his father and with no true understanding of his bliss.

A
S THE RIVER
uncoils to the south, London goes to ground. Over the space of fifteen waterborne minutes, it melts unceremoniously from sight. Clusters of docks and wharves no longer clutch at the current. One outpaces the smoking kilns and the mountains of coal rising from the side of the water, tiny colliers attacking them madly with tiny shovels. Watermen suddenly leave off shouting obscenities, as though the increasingly open countryside were a chapel.

The air cleanses itself of burnt lime-stench and the smoke of brewers and soap-boilers, while the river itself outruns the slag and runoff and sewage. Broad fields of green and tan elbow out the warehouses, then begin to link and stretch away in patchwork as far as the eye can see, gorgeous, tended, verdant. The banks of the river are suddenly lush with grass and reeds, beds of marsh willows, rather than brick and waterlogged lumber. The wind is tamed. Sunshine pours down now on my little green canopy, sweet and heavy as honey. I am sweating through the arms of my coat, but in the relative quiet I welcome the heat. I catch myself dreaming over the water.

Insects are suddenly at play in the canopy with me, but the indolence of the open fields is such that I cannot bring myself to swat them. For long moments, I have the pleasant, forgetful sense that I am on holiday, with a friend.

I recognize the sensation, this sudden extra-London calm, because today’s excursion is my second by river to Greenwich this week. Once I learned that James and Johnson were to take a Saturday afternoon excursion to Greenwich together—and once I had decided to make myself a
de facto
member of their party—it seemed prudent to reconnoiter so the day could not fail to run smoothly. And so I made this same trip this past Wednesday, three days ago, by way of a dry run. That simulation, along with a memorandum James wrote to himself Tuesday night, laying out a number of things the two hoped to see and do come Saturday—these things have made my planning for today a great deal easier.

Rather than following James and Johnson in their second, longer boat all the way to Greenwich, rather than hiding in the river traffic like a thief, I have told the waterman to move out ahead and to take a long comfortable lead. My thought is, let them follow me for a bit. They are content to let their own oarsman dawdle. They have nothing to accomplish today. I have a good, long list.

As we pass, near enough in the water that I might reach out and notch their boat with my sword, Johnson is braying about the canny vulgarity of Methodist preachers. I watch the two of them through a tear in the wool shrouding me. Seeing them that way is a strange thing, a feeling not merely of alienation but of inhabiting different realms altogether, with different relation to the earth and the men and things on it. The dead spying on the quick.

Johnson and James have oranges torn open on their laps, and they are pulling the flesh from the rinds and casting them into the flood. I see trout and shad rising to their leavings, and silver minnow cloudbursts.

In the long, thin craft, Johnson’s size is magnified: he seems vaguely inhuman, a river-troll, a great hunched mass at the center of the boat, hoarding his powers, sucking his fruit. The heavy-lidded, amphibian eyes and the thick lips are in constant terrible motion as
he speaks. He is correcting James, something I expect I might have heard no matter the moment I happened to pass them by.

“
No
, sir, no, no, no,” Johnson is loudly insisting, “preaching of drunkenness as a crime, as something that debases reason—the noblest faculty of man—this sort of preaching will do nothing with the vulgar. They care not a
farthing
for reason. They will spit in your eye. The Methodists know this well. But tell the poor that they might have died dead drunk, and been roasted everlastingly for their sins, roasted until their blackened flesh fell from their bones,” he spits out a seed and thrusts a thick finger at the sky, again and again, “and
then
, sir, you will affect them as you ought. This is the key, and the only key, to the success of an English Methodist.”

And then our boat is past, and off and away. Johnson’s voice becomes only a faint vibration at the margin of my consciousness, and then nothing at all.

The waterman has understood by this point that he is to remain silent, and he does so, staring back toward the city we have left, pulling both sullenly and mightily, the quicker to unload his odd cargo and be off home. Once or twice, children gathered on the banks call out gaily for silver, and when they do, I pitch a bit of change into the reeds. They wade out into the shallows after it like long-limbed monkeys, racing, diving, delirious with joy at the prospect of a copper.

But mostly there is silence, only the sound of water curling about the oars. And there is nothing left but to warm my face in the sun, huddle up in my own mind, and consider—as I am especially wont to do these last several weeks—of the promise James once made me.

O
NE
N
OVEMBER NIGHT
when James was fifteen and I was twelve, two men visited our family flat in Edinburgh’s Parliament Close. This would be the tail end of 1755. These men had climbed the four stories to speak with my father, and when they’d stripped off their coats, he took them down the narrow hallway to the room
where he had always received clients before clawing his way onto the bench of the High Court the year before.

As they passed the room James and I shared, I recognized the taller of the men to be Lord Kames, one of my father’s most powerful colleagues on the Court.

The other man wore the upturned silk nightcap of an artist or a scholar, a particular oddity in our flat. My father had few acquaintances outside the legal universe, very much by choice. He’d once told James, who had smuggled a small book of poems to the table with him, “A gentleman does not come to the table, Jemmie, with
shite
on his boots or rhymes in his hands.”

But this little man was no lawyer. He carried a folio under his arm, and he carried it not as though it contained watercolors or poems but as though it contained preliminary designs for the Afterlife itself. And so I guessed,
architect.

I was right, as it turned out. After the men had been shut up in the consultation room for upwards of an hour, my father knocked on our door. “James,” he said to my older brother, and the two of them left the room without another word, according to some previous understanding. I realized once they were gone that James hadn’t changed into his robe and slippers after supper; he’d remained fully dressed in one of his best dark velvet suits, cravat tied, propped in a chair, reading his Longinus. I saw then that he’d simply been prepping his role: classical son, learning his Latin, getting his Greek.

Another twenty minutes or so went by, and then the four of them emerged. In the hallway, the two men shook my brother’s hand, and then they and my father put on their greatcoats and hats and left the flat.

James came back into our room, and we worked in silence for a moment, and then he cocked his head to listen. My mother was in her room with Davie, my little brother, who had a croup. There was no sound but the distant sound of singing from the street. Satisfied, James put down his text and walked over to the chair where I sat.

“They’ve gone for gin and oysters,” he said and crooked a finger. “Come, Johnny.”

And without another word, we walked down the hall to my father’s consultation room, and James opened the door and walked me over to my father’s desk. On the desk lay the folio.

James drew it closer to us, fingered the unmarked leather cover without opening it. He toyed with the raised edges.

“Did you know the man with Lord Kames?” he whispered.

I said I didn’t, but that I’d guessed he was an architect.

James looked at me with surprise, and a complimentary nod of his head. “He is Mr. James Craig,” James went on, “and he is in fact an architect. Can you guess what plans he brought to show father?”

“The new house at Auchinleck,” I whispered. My father had been talking about a new house on the family estate for years, but recently his talk had been edged with decision.

James tapped the cover with his finger, and his smile blossomed into genuine self-satisfaction. His fifteen-year-old face was all but illuminated with the sense of
knowing.

“He has another architect for the new house. This plan,” he lifted the cover, “is for Edinburgh, another Edinburgh. A new companion city, to the north. To be built from scratch.”

It was an architect’s early outline, but sharp enough in detail. At the bottom of the parchment was the North Loch, the present boundary of the city. Clearly the Loch was to be drained, dredged, and regularized and landscaped. And beyond that vast, hypothetical feat of engineering lay a perfect theoretical grid of streets, these linking and enclosing two large imaginary public squares. The streets were already labeled, grand names like Queen’s and Castle. Tiny but discernible rows of trees lined the pavements. It was mathematically precise and yet fantastic, otherworldly.

James watched my face as I puzzled over the details. “There is to be a proposal floated next year for the building of a bridge here,”
he touched the paper carefully, experimentally, “coupled with some general discussion of extending the city’s Royalty to here,” he stroked an area far to the north, an area of farms and meadows and swampland. “In a few years, when public discussion allows, there will be a contest announced for designs for the New Town. And this design, with some alterations, will be selected. Mr. Craig, the man you saw tonight, will be given a gold medal and the freedom of the city.”

James turned full to me, again with the air of a schoolmaster. It was the air I could ever least forgive him. “And why, would you suppose, does father show me this? Introduce me to the men who will build it? Let me in on the secret of the rigged competition, a secret that even most of his friends don’t know he has broken?”

I remember wondering if he were goading me, forcing me to say it so that he could revel in the obvious.

“Why would you suppose?” he urged.

I brought it out then, the pebble of resentment in the dress shoe of our relationship: “Because you are eldest.”

Now his look of self-satisfaction ripened into delight. “Yes, I am eldest. And Father would like me to join with Lord Kames and the rest of the eldest sons of the oldest families in Scotland in a longstanding war they have running. It is a war against the second-and third- and fourth-eldest sons of the oldest families in Scotland. It is a club, and he admits me tonight. He shows me that he trusts me never to reveal these plans, plans that will undoubtedly make the Lords and the magistrates rich. Filthy rich. Far, far filthier richer than any of them are today.”

“And you break his trust.”

James nodded, his well-fed cheeks dimpling. He seemed about to giggle. “Exactly. Without even half an hour intervening, I break his trust.”

“Why, though? For what reason?”

“You do me the credit of assuming I have a reason. It is much appreciated.”

“Seriously, now. Why are you so throng about telling what you’ve promised not to tell?”

“Mind your English. Say ‘why are you so very concerned with’.”

“Why are you so very concerned with telling, then?”

“To show my trust in you.”

This stopped me. “Thanks, then, Jemmie.”

“And why else?” he prodded.

I looked back down at the plans, shrugged my shoulders.

He prodded again. “Guess.”

“I can’t. There’s nothing to be guessed.”

Here was the thing he had risked my father’s strap to say. And these are the exact words he used to say it. I remember them with an unnatural clarity, in the way that a childhood prayer unspools from memory, every word of equal gravity and every word somehow palpably in its place.