The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  That Londoners use the thoroughfare and the steps to the river is incidental, for the point has always been to move the waste of Somerset residents away from the delicate noses of Somerset residents.

  And so when our small party moves awkwardly down the Water-Gate in the drizzling rain, hugging the estate’s long dark brick wall, we are just four more random nasty urban bits running down to the river, and from there to the sea.

  With one exception: rather than continuing down into the water itself, the lark urges James to the right, down to the damp walk that fronts the river, and we all execute the turn, not smartly but well enough.

  The going is slower now, as Johnson and James must watch their feet as well as our guns. Other than the damp shuffling sound of our boots, only Johnson’s labored breathing marks our passage. He is a large man, and strong, but not used to the ongoing demands of an evening such as this. And that is fine. The less strength he has when we reach our destination, the better. I will not underestimate him again.

  In the moonlight, one can just barely make out a series of tiny wooden docks, stretching out into the deeper dark to our left, raking the water like long, thin fingers. Each dock is surrounded by a broad fan of tiny craft, skiffs and fish-smacks, and all of these are empty, deserted due to the weather.

  Only once, as we move over rotting wooden slats and treacherous Thames mud, do we pass another living soul: it is a fisherman, and his son, most likely, working beneath a cheap canopy on their flat-bottomed boat. So silently are they sewing at their lines that I am not aware of them until suddenly one of them tosses a bit of garbage out into the water, and it splashes into the river only a few feet off to James’s left.

  They glance at us idly as we pass, this grizzled older man and his son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Even in the dark, they know we are somehow of a higher quality than themselves; even in the dark, they leave us to our business, because nothing good can come of interrupting us.

  And I have chosen well with the lark. As we come up on the pair of them, without any signal from me and without hesitation he presses closer to James, leaning in prohibitively, and I can only imagine he has brushed the tip of his pistol against my brother’s shoulder, or perhaps his side, and then the moment where either of our guests might call for help is past.

  James’s face is a study in misery. Occasionally he glances up from his trudging, the mud sucking at his shoes, up and away from the river, out in the direction of the Strand only five or six blocks to the north. Garrick’s townhouse waits quietly just up Cecil Street, if James could only find his way free to run the short length of it. But he cannot, and I’ve taken extra pains to impress upon him that he cannot, because I grew up with James and understand that if he is to be told no, he must be told no firmly or not at all.

  At one point, Johnson, whose sight is poor and who has been lumbering along as best he can in the dark, spins unexpectedly about to face me. It is obvious that he does not mean to confront me, for his hands come up immediately in a gesture of supplication. But there is in his manner a strange combination of exasperation and surrender, and he hisses at me, there in the dark by the water: “You wish me to admit that we have met before and have spent time together. I will do so! I will admit it. I should have done so before now. I will give you what you demand. But you must stop this madness while there is time, John.”

  James and the lark have stopped in front of us. For all of Johnson’s frustration, and in spite of his admission, his whisper remains low enough to all but escape James’s hearing. He still believes he can extricate himself from this situation without admitting all, openly.

  I take one step back and fully extend my arm, bringing the pistol up even with his face, and Johnson gives a snort of frustration. He turns, but before taking another step, he suddenly claps his hand to his head and tears off his unpowdered little wig, which is now soaked through with the rain, and pitches it out into the Thames. And then he trudges on again as before.

  It is a small moment of defiance—to be expected in a man of his temperament—but of course it is also a clue thrown out to whoever may follow behind us, whatever authorities may eventually come to his aid. The man is nothing if not wily.

  But it is nothing to worry over, not really. By first light all will be decided, all City business concluded.

  Only when we pass within sight of the darkened hulk of the German Church, and then over the base of the Savoy Stairs, do I hold my breath. A small crowd at the bottom of the Stairs would be difficult, if not impossible to navigate.

  But although I can hear men shouting somewhere away up the Stairs toward the Savoy, there is no one about at the waterline. The pattering rain has sent each London creature to his own little den.

  And then I can relax a bit. For on our right suddenly rises a small tower of lumber, stacked in pallets some fifteen, twenty feet high. And that tower is followed by another even higher, and another, and another. We have reached the Beauford Timber Yard, though the lark says it is known on the river as Dirty Lane, for the alley that bounds it to the west.

  Whatever the name, the stench of river muck and rot and fish gives way to the oddly pleasing scent of freshly cut wood. It is a country smell somehow. Even in the rain, it smells like a place where a man might build a house out of sight of his neighbors, rather than packed in together as they are all here in London, like vermin gathered just above a flood.

  Soon we have our charges moving through what amounts to a very narrow passage, bounded on the one side by the lapping Thames and hard on the other by a massive wall of timber ready for shipping.

  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 t
he 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.

  WHICH 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 b
it, 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.