The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  “The Lord of Misrule!” the guests throw out on cue.

  Davies raises a long finger in the air. “The Lord of Misrule, indeed! This Lord should be a young man, that his back can carry children too young to dance. He should be merry, that he may teach the melancholy among us to laugh. Women should burst helplessly into song when he enters a room, and he himself should have the well-turned leg of a roasted guinea hen.”

  Through peals of laughter, the guests manage another mostly coordinated response: “The Lord of Misrule!”

  Goldsmith stage-whispers, into the relative silence, “Brace yourself, my friend.”

  But before Boswell can turn and ask what he means, Davies is going on with the ritual. “And for all of these excellent reasons, my dear, dear friends, I ask that you join me in summoning our young Scottish nobleman, our own excellent young friend Mr. James Boswell, Esquire, to his rightful Christmas duties!”

  Boswell is genuinely stunned. A hot sweat breaks out at his hairline, and he looks quickly round to Goldsmith, but Goldsmith only raises a fist and joins the standing crowd in shouting again, “The Lord of Misrule!”

  Davies pats the air for silence. When he has it, he asks solemnly, “Will you accept your charge, Mr. Boswell? It is an office of great moment, and we must be satisfied immediately as to your willingness and fitness to occupy it.”

  Everyone standing has now turned to pick him out at the far reach of the room, dropped down in the refuge of the battered armchair, and Boswell has no idea what to say or do. But then his ear picks out Goldsmith’s low whisper, coaxing him along: “Tell them it is an honor too great to be accepted. Tell them you are unworthy it.”

  “It is too great an honor, truly,” Boswell repeats slowly, after a pause. “I must confess I feel utterly unworthy it.”

  The shouts of the crowd tell him that his answer is precisely what it should be. Davies too looks delighted, and presses him according to custom. “Only the true Lord of Misrule believes himself unworthy of his office. All hail the one true Lord of Misrule!”

  “I accept your charge, then, with all my heart,” Goldsmith whispers, and Boswell dutifully repeats the words aloud.

  Davies applauds with the rest, and then finishes the set piece by asking, with a long low sweep of his hand, “And please, how shall we begin the revels, O Lord? What sport would please your Lordship best?”

  “Let it be snapdragons, tell them,” Goldsmith prompts again.

  Boswell stands heavily and surveys the company, their faces held in a suspense closer to childish delight than any of them would readily admit. Already Boswell senses the last of his own disappointment over Johnson’s absence lifting, dissolving in the giddy delight he feels occupying the precise center of attention.

  He raises a hand in a benediction, and as with so many moments since coming to London, he lets this one stretch languorously out. The company holds its breath.

  “Let it be snapdragons, my loyal subjects!” Boswell commands, without any clear idea whether he has directed Davies to produce a flower, or a dance, or a batch of Christmas candies. But the excitement the word produces is impressive, and Davies jogs out of the room briefly, only to return with a large blue dish in one hand and a bottle of brandy in the other. He holds both up triumphantly, and the crowd gives a little roar.

  At various points about the room, guests and Davies family members snuff candles, and the room takes on an expectant gloom.

  Boswell watches as his host sets the dish down on the long dining table and pours brandy carefully into it. With a flourish, Davies goes then to the fireplace and sets fire to a long stick clearly placed there for the purpose.

  Finally, after carrying the flame gaily through the crowd, Davies sets the dish alight. It is an eerie blue green flame, crawling and dipping like a living thing. “The bowl is full of raisins, Mr. Boswell,” Goldsmith offers, leaning toward him. “And the object, you see, is to snatch the plump little bits from the fire and swallow them down without burning either one’s fingers or one’s gullet. A secondary object is to down enough brandy to dull the pain.”

  Boswell is enchanted, and he watches in wonder as grown men and women line up to thrust their fingers into the fire and then gobble the raisins down, squealing and gasping all the while. There is a wild abandon in the game that mesmerizes him.

  “The name derives from the German, if I’m not mistaken, schnapps for spirit, and drache, dragon. But then London speaks the tongue of the world entire, it is said.”

  Boswell says nothing in return, because he is thinking as he stares into the brandy flame, reconsidering his embrace of the chaste Johnsonian life. If Johnson’s presence today was to mark the Lord’s wish that he, Boswell, fall at once into the moral wake of the great man, then Johnson’s absence might well be interpreted as the reverse: temporary dispensation to match his own sizable appetites against the banquet that is London.

  “I must say that Davies knew what he was about,” Goldsmith goes on. The large lips are turned up in a slight, discerning smile. “One would think you were quite pleased with your new role.”

  “Indeed, I begin to suspect that I am spectacularly well cast,” Boswell replies, with a confidential smile of his own.

  He is thinking of Louisa and her whispered promise. In a matter of days, he will lock the door to an ordinary room, turn around, and everything will have fundamentally changed: she will offer him not only every part of her body, but a leisurely taste of all of the selves with which an actress animates it.

  But even before that fantasy has fully unwound itself, he remembers the girl in the smudged yellow bonnet from the night before, the girl who trapped and held his hand so desperately. His mind brings the sensation back into his right hand with wonderful clarity, and Boswell actually sneaks a look down at the fingers, flexing them once before returning them to the armrest.

  Such girls move back and forth in surprisingly tight territories, usually no more than a block square, and he feels certain that if he were to walk that bight of the Strand once or twice at most this evening, she would appear and take hold of his arm again. In an instant he has made the promise to himself.

  And another: once she has his arm, he will hesitate and then refuse, as he did last night, but this time only as a way of increasing the girl’s level of insistence. Only as a way of stretching her desperation to its most erotic application. Only as sweet play.

  The Lord of Misrule it shall be, then, Boswell thinks, and then— with a civil nod to Goldsmith—excuses himself to take his own turn snapping dragons from the flame.

  IT IS JUST eleven mornings later, as Boswell hums contentedly over his toast and his day’s memoranda and social calendar, that he hears boots banging up the narrow stair, well ahead of the maid. He has barely time to wipe his mouth and push back his chair before the door falls open, and in rushes a gaunt figure in a stained soldier’s coat. It is his younger brother John, hat in hand, his hair and pants and boots testifying to a two-day journey on horseback.

  Later that night, Boswell will reproach himself for it, but the truth is that his attention focuses first not on the tears already starting in his brother’s eyes, but on a last key element of fashion: John wears his saber buckled at his side, a privilege Boswell knows has been expressly forbidden him for most of the last three months.

  PART FIVE

  Inside the

  Turk’s Head

  Saturday 30 July (continued)

  We supped at the Turk’s Head. Mr. Johnson said, “I must see thee go; I will go down with you to Harwich.” This prodigious mark of his affection filled me with gratitude and vanity. I gave him an account of the family of Auchinleck, and of the Place. He said, “I must be there, and we will live in the Old Castle; and if there is no room remaining, we will build one.” This was the most pleasing idea that I could possibly have: to think of seeing this great man at the venerable seat of my ancestors. I had been up all night yet was not sleepy.

  —From Boswell’s London Journal, 1
762–1763

  London, England

  Saturday, the 30th of July, 1763

  7:48 P.M.

  16

  ONCE HE IS fairly out in the current again—having pushed off the moment my heel touched the slick Billingsgate Stair—Gil Higgs draws his big arm back and pitches something far away out into the current. It is the edition of Tom Thumb, no doubt, for the tiny pages flutter like a moth in the river glow. Before it can sink of its own accord, a passing smack drives the book beneath the water, and then its pretty pages are lost.

  I cannot hold this little spasm of rudeness against the man. After all, Higgs has spent the day cooling his heels in Greenwich more than a touch against his will, and he is the sort to make the brassy gesture once out of reach. Still, it is worth reminding him that he is not, in fact, out of reach. Nor will be.

  “Ask your Maggie, Higgs,” I call to him, over the late noise of the market. “Ask your Maggie to show you her lucky charm. It will be snug in her pocket, or under her pillow, should she deny having it about her.”

  At that, Higgs comes partially up off his bench and shouts something unintelligible, except for the curse with which he bites it off.

  But he is already shrinking in the current, and I give him no more mind. He will reach home within the hour, after one or two quick drinks. He will waste not a moment before bullying his daughter out of her lucky charm, and once he has it in his hand he will turn it over in bewilderment and realize that here again is something he does not want, yet cannot throw away.

  And he will never speak of this day to another living soul. And that is all one ever really desires of a Gil Higgs, after all. Very strong back, very tight lip.

  Coming up the stair into Billingsgate is always a bit like entering the Plymouth Hospital again, though without the doctors to shepherd one through the chaos. Even this late in the evening, a soft explosion of noise and smell: fishwomen staggering by under their dead, gamy loads, muttering, cursing, feet splashing along through mud ripe with the accumulated oil and scent of five hundred years; stall-keepers shouting—a genuinely threatening tone to the pleading—and then losing interest utterly the moment you’ve passed their little fiefdom; bare-footed guttersnipes pitching rocks and the odd stolen bit of coal at ships from the embankment, and then running madly through the crowd, knocking fish from the hands of shoppers, fish they then scoop up and smuggle down the lightless hythe.

  I could easily have had Higgs row me to the Temple Stair, or even to Whitefriars, both a stone’s throw from the Turk’s Head. But James and Johnson have almost certainly landed at the Temple Stair and paused at Johnson’s chambers in the Temple before proceeding to the day’s final tête-à-tête.

  No doubt Johnson will want to have a word with his young African servant, Francis Barber, and have an accounting of the day.

  After James made it clear that he had no plans to introduce me to his famous new friend, weeks ago, I took the opportunity of putting myself in this Barber’s way one morning, as he went out to shop for Johnson’s supper down the Strand. And after assuring himself that I was indeed a dear friend of his master, he chatted quite readily about the great man’s household. Johnson attempted once to save Francis himself from the press-gang, though unsuccessfully. Still, he took in the young African on his return to England, and Barber cannot say enough in his praise.

  Apparently there are also in the house a daft old man named Levett, who haunts the upper floors; several dusty garrets full of books; and a stone-blind woman named Miss Williams, who lives nearby and whom Johnson visits without fail before turning in for the night—visits no matter the hour, mind you.

  So it goes without saying that Johnson must land at Temple Stair and stroll by his little domestic menagerie, to assure himself that all of his various charity cases are thriving. And that means that he and James are just now settling down in their private room at the Turk’s Head, just now calling for their bottle and bite to eat.

  And so I will have a leisurely evening stroll, up past the Custom House and down Lower Thames to Fish Street Hill, up to Cornhill, down to Cheapside and Fleet, and then on down the long slender arm of the Strand. The walk will give the two of them time to lose themselves in the fog of mutual congratulation that comes up whenever they are together. And they will have time to drink a bottle or possibly more, always a crucial consideration.

  But as much as anything, I will walk up Fish Street Hill for the long, sloping view of London Bridge at night. It is a cunning thing, this massive new span over the Thames. Seeing it helps me to remember that though James would never willingly have brought me into company with his precious new literary conquest, the world often does not wait for James Boswell, Esquire to approve a meeting between two men.

  Sometimes such a meeting simply happens, and no force in the Empire can either predict or prevent it.

  CORNHILL IS ALL but deserted. The merchants and stock-jobbers have long since trudged home to count their guineas. I might walk down the center of the street if I pleased, so broad is the thoroughfare here and so infrequently does a coach rattle into and then out of sight. It is like a life-sized model of London, every detail faithfully reproduced, but with most of the human figures left on the shelf somewhere to avoid obscuring the workmanship. In particular, the tower of the Royal Exchange—surging fifty feet into the night sky, only to terminate in the polished brass figure of a grasshopper—seems somehow less than real, shy of actual.

  Just as I pass the Exchange, a small bareheaded man drifts out from the open arches of the Jamaica walk. It becomes clear after a second or two that his slanting path will bring him directly to my side, if not actually stumbling into me, and I stop suddenly to force him to cross the street first.

  Rather than do so, he stops suddenly as well, five or six feet off to my right, and cocks his head at me. He wears no shoes, and the feet are milk-white beneath his breeches.

  And I find that I recognize him. It is the mudlark, the one I sent swimming after James and Johnson this morning. The one whose vulgarity would have cost him an eye, had Gil Higgs half the ferocity to which he pretends.

  The pattering rain has thoroughly matted down the brown hair, but he is smiling as he stands there. Of course he is a man who spends more time swimming than walking, and so the wet wouldn’t disturb him. And yet there is something uncanny in the smile.

  “Out walking in this rain, are we?” he asks suddenly. The smile gives way to a look of exaggerated curiosity, as though the question is also somehow a joke at my expense. There is no salutation, no bow of the head, no sir to render the question any less provoking.

  There is also no overt threat in his posture. He is a smallish man, but I remember the muscles in his arms and back. And a knife or a razor can always do what muscle cannot. Far too much effort has gone into this evening to allow it to be sidetracked, however, even a bit.

  Watching his face, I put a hand inside my coat pocket, and find the dag there.

  He takes in the movement, but shows no real fear. Only the same mock-surprise. He goes on then: “Might wager Old Greenwich was a bit of a disappointment, day like today. Didn’t get in all the sights you’d planned, have to imagine.”

  “That’s none of your affair,” I say quietly.

  He considers that, then throws back more nonsense: “’Tisn’t my affair? Well, isn’t that a shame, then? Hoardin’ it all up for yourself, this affair here?”

  The challenging smile breaks over his face again, and suddenly it dawns on me: this young man, maybe two or three years older than myself, is himself well down the road of insanity. Now that I’ve placed it, I recognize the behavior from Plymouth and remember it well, for nothing could be more striking. The complete and utter disregard for rank and custom, the sly winks that say everything is a plot and everyone a plotter.

  And I feel myself relax a bit. Here is no cutpurse, no threat. Here is a relatively well-functioning lunatic, a man whose mind fastens on the banal, the meaningless, and forces it to signify. I ha
ve dealt with his sort before.

  “’Twasn’t what you were hoping, Greenwich?” he repeats.

  “Actually, if you must know, it was not.”

  “Shame, shame. Still, more than one way to skin a cat,” he adds, then takes another step toward me.

  “You are out of luck, my friend,” I say, “for we are blocks away from the water, and I haven’t any further errands suited to a mudlark, at least not this evening.”

  He stares at me for a moment. For the first time the smile wavers, and something else shows through, something far less sunny. He squints an eye. “There’s some along the river who don’t take well to bein’ called mud larks, y’understand. If you take my meaning—sir.”

  I could swear that there is offense in his tone, as though he were the gentleman and I the shoeless and hatless wretch who has stumbled up out of the rain, speaking in riddles.

  “And what do those who take offense prefer to be called?”

  “River lark’s got a sweeter sound to it. Much sweeter, most people think.”

  I tip my hat. “I shall remember it. And now you will do me the favor of getting on about your business.” Both he and I continue to ignore my odd posture, right arm held across my chest, hand still thrust into the inner coat pocket there, dag still curled against the palm of my hand.

  He looks at me and then takes a step or two closer. Again, the mark of the truly mad: an instinct for survival so faint that they will cut off their own toes to see if it is possible to walk without them. He certainly must know from my red coat that I can defend myself.

  Yet finally his gaze does come to rest on the hand I have thrust in my pocket. And he stops with still a foot or two between us. Then he shakes his head, almost chuckling to himself, even muttering a word or two under his breath. Finally, in a bid for sarcasm, he answers me as properly as he is able, which suggests more than a bit of schooling at some point in his drifting: “Well, perhaps you will do me the very grand favor of telling me, sir, just what exactly is my business this night, sir?”