Smiling graciously, Mrs Thrale strove to be pleasant. She was curious to discover in the daughter something of the departed wife, the better to understand the attraction Sam had once felt. Save for Garrick, she knew no one who had been well acquainted with Tetty; there was Mrs Desmoulins, it was true, her companion for many years, but she, still smarting under the delusion that the Thrales had robbed her of Johnson, could scarcely be persuaded to be civil, let alone forthcoming.
Queeney was astonished at the antics of Miss Porter. From what Mr Johnson had led her to believe, there was fondness between them, yet here she was, for the benefit of her Lichfield cronies, back turned to him, rolling her eyes and grimacing to indicate how odd she thought him – Harry couldn’t have behaved worse. Fortunately Mr Johnson was too busy bowing and kissing hands to notice.
The introductions over with, he gave his attention solely to his stepdaughter and the one-eyed gentleman, who, it transpired, he had known in his youth and who had travelled from Birmingham to renew their acquaintance. New people he never loved to be in company with, except young and fair ladies, in which category the sisters could not by any stretch of the imagination be said to belong.
The conversation that ensued had to do with changes in the town since Johnson’s last visit, Miss Porter’s aches and pains and the continuing scandal surrounding the widow Mearns, who was widely suspected, though it could not be proved, of poisoning her husband by means of honey cakes.
Mr Johnson became animated; he said the first classical description of honey death was to be found in Xenophon’s Anabasis, Book IV, Chapter VIII. On the march to Trebizond the soldiers found a large number of beehives … all who had eaten a little of the plundered syrup resembled drunken men; those who had eaten a lot were like madmen and died mouthing obscenities.
‘How unsettling,’ said Miss Porter, handing round the biscuit barrel.
Queeney found some of the talk difficult to follow, as did Papa, who was considerably foxed by the broad vowels of the company. Mamma was smiling away and nodding, but she was surely putting up a pretence. They were familiar with Johnson’s speech, the way he pronounced ‘once’ as ‘wōonce’ and ‘there’ to rhyme with ‘fear’, but the gentleman with the eye-patch had a language of his own. When offered a third glass of wine, he said something like, ‘I dare’st not, for I may then becoom joongle-brained and later an admiral of the High Seas.’
Papa said, ‘I do not follow. Are you an admiral, Sir?’
‘Nay,’ came the reply, ‘do I look it?’ at which one of the old ladies said, ‘He means, Sir, that if he drinks overmuch he will likely vomit into your lap.’ Papa thought this funny and laughed out loud. Mr Johnson looked gratified; he hadn’t heard the exchange, but was delighted that Papa was enjoying himself.
The rain having stopped and, as she comically expressed it, the sun come out to play, Miss Porter suggested Queeney might like to see the little garden behind the house. ‘Mrs Scase will go with you,’ she said. Queeney would rather have gone on her own, although Mrs Scase did not seem as decrepit as her sisters; the hair drifting from her cap was red in parts and she walked without tottering.
The way into the garden was through a kitchen upon whose shelves, amid a clutter of pots and pans, was propped a glass case containing a fish, its shiny scales and bulging eye shimmering in a beam of sunlight. Mrs Scase said, ‘At last we have found something here that makes you smile,’ and led her outside, where she was encouraged to sit on a bench made from a length of gnarled wood laid across two barrels, the one smaller than the other. Queeney perched herself on the higher end, legs dangling.
It was an unusual form of seating, but then, neither was the garden of the usual kind, being without flowers and its beds entirely filled with giant cabbages, their leaves much disfigured from some seasonal blight. Beside a drooping pot plant on the path lay a dead bird eaten about the breast.
Mrs Scase was also not usual, in that she treated Queeney as an equal, seeking her opinion, without condescension, of the town, the people she had met and of Mr Johnson. While waiting for a reply the old woman leant forward and looked at her lips rather than into her eyes, as though she needed to be sure where the words came from. Queeney told her that she found the town pleasant enough and as yet had not truly met anyone. As for Mr Johnson, why, he was so much a portion of her life that opinions had long since been replaced by feelings, at which Mrs Scase slapped her knee and cried out, ‘Well done, little Miss.’
Mrs Scase knew all about Mr Johnson, or rather about the boy he had once been. An aunt, she said, long dead, was cousin to a woman who boasted of being on calling terms with Mr Johnson’s mother. Much of what she related was not new to Queeney, but Mrs Scase had a singular way of painting pictures in the head. The scars on his neck and the side of his face, she explained, came from a tubular disease, an infection, according to Dr Swinfen, caught from the babe’s wet nurse, whose milk was tainted and whose own infant had been similarly afflicted. As she talked she stabbed the air with one plump finger by way of emphasis; at her side the blighted cabbages whimpered in the breeze.
Mrs Johnson, in spite of pride in her exalted Ford relations – they were a cut above those of the bookseller, Michael Johnson – put it about that it was an inherited condition, to lessen the guilt she felt at having farmed him out so perilously. The marks on the child’s face stuck out more when his skin was new and if that wasn’t enough he was partially deaf, all but blind in one eye and deficient of vision in the other. His Aunt Ford, seeing him for the first time, said she would not have picked up such a poor creature in the street.
‘It is a wonder he did not die,’ Queeney murmured, looking at the bird putrefying on the path. In the sunlight its black feathers shone blue. She thought of Lucy, who had merely suffered from a running of the ears, and of the dead Penelope in the cradle, who had expired from nothing at all.
‘His mother took him to London to be touched by the Queen,’ Mrs Scase told her, and Queeney said she knew that and had often fingered the medal Mr Johnson wore round his neck.
‘Mrs Johnson thought the touching had saved him, but Dr Swinfen, being cautious, insisted an issue should be cut in the boy’s arm to let out the infection, a wound which remained open until he was six years old.’
Poor little arm, thought Queeney, ashamed of the fuss she had made of her scraped heel.
‘He was clever even then,’ said Mrs Scase, ‘forever learning things off by rote and scribbling verses and the like. Not that it raised much gaiety in him, for his home circumstances were blighted by reason of his father suffering under a sensation of gloomy despair, which mood was habitual to him. Nor was his mother, by all accounts, of much relief, for she had not the nous to understand either the child or the husband.’
How common that is, mused Queeney, gazing at the mottled cabbages.
‘As a child he was remarkable for a violence of temper, no doubt due to his brain being too large.’
‘He has a temper now,’ Queeney said, ‘though afterwards he often says how sorry he is.’
‘There was one time in particular,’ continued Mrs Scase, ‘when he was but three years old. My aunt’s cousin’s neighbour was a witness to it, having set off to sell a piglet. The child attended a dame’s school not a hundred yards from Breadmarket Street, taken and fetched each noon by a servant girl. One May morning, placing the pot to boil, she burnt her finger on the coals and spent too long jumping up and down to cool it. Samuel set off home alone, closely followed by the dame, who was anxious for his safety … she was a widow woman who had lost five children of her own to the small-pox and ever after laboured under an impediment of speech. At the junction of the road, unable to see clearly, Samuel got down on all fours and, feeling his way by means of the kennel running along the middle of the street, began to crawl towards his father’s bookshop. The blue jacket he wore was stained black above the elbow … from the blood seeping out of the cut in his arm. “S-S-Sam,” called the dame. “S-s-stop.” A speckled
hen, escaped from a market pen, strutted ahead of him, head jerking from left to right … my aunt’s cousin’s neighbour remembered the hen to her dying day—’
‘Some hens are more memorable than others,’ said Queeney. ‘Mr Johnson had a pet one called Socrates.’
‘The dame, fearful he would be run over by carts, ran to haul him upright, at which he kicked out at her in a fury. When his mother took him to task for treating the dame so shamefully, do you know what the little creature replied?’
Queeney shook her head.
‘That it was difficult for someone sick not to behave like a scoundrel. There were tears in his eyes, even before his whipping.’
‘And the hen?’ enquired Queeney. ‘What of the hen?’
‘Nothing is known,’ said Mrs Scase, ‘though I expect someone boiled it for dinner,’ and she licked her lips as though tasting chicken meat. This amused Queeney; joining in the mime she jumped up and flapped her elbows. Her sudden movement unbalanced the seating – the plank of wood slid sideways, depositing Mrs Scase beneath the cabbage leaves.
The resulting cries of distress brought her sisters hobbling into the garden. It had not been much of a fall, but Mrs Scase made the most of it and moaned pitifully as she was helped upright. She was a well-nourished woman and by the time her sisters had got her indoors both trembled from their exertions. Miss Porter was talking to Mr Johnson and barely looked up, and Papa and the old gentleman with the eye-patch now dozed, so it was left to Mamma to fuss over Mrs Scase.
‘Is it your ankle?’ she cried, endeavouring to sound concerned.
‘I have damaged my fundament,’ Mrs Scase wailed, at which the old gentleman chortled. It was possible he was dreaming, for his eyes remained closed.
Mamma tried to break into Miss Porter’s monologue. ‘It would perhaps be advisable’, she said, ‘to send for a surgeon to check there are no bones broken.’ Miss Porter replied, ‘To the best of my knowledge there are no bones in the fundament,’ and continued to address Mr Johnson. She was telling him about the cathedral and how the Brethren of the Corporation were threatening to censure the Dean for allowing the roof to fall into disrepair. Mr Johnson looked grave and made tut-tutting noises. All at once he rose from his chair and announced that they were to dine with Peter Garrick at four o’clock and must now take their leave. Mamma prodded Papa quite roughly on the shoulder; waking, he helped himself to the remaining crumbs in the biscuit barrel.
Miss Porter accompanied them to the door. Halfway there Mr Johnson turned round, murmuring that he had neglected to say goodbye to the sisters. Queeney, looking back as he opened the parlour door, clearly saw Mrs Scase sitting bolt upright, head swinging like a bull about to charge, feet scraping the carpet. It was a passable imitation, albeit exaggerated, of the mannerisms exhibited by the visitor who had supposedly departed. Caught in the act, Mrs Scase covered her face with her hands.
She need not have worried; Mr Johnson, having taken one foot over the threshold, came under his sometime compulsion of having to spin in a circle before continuing and observed nothing. Kissing the hand of each disconcerted sister, he bowed his way out.
Once in the street he expressed his disapproval of Miss Porter. Mrs Thrale, eager to learn the cause, hastened to keep pace with him. She had hoped it might be a personal objection and was disappointed, for his vexation was apparently due to her criticism of the Dean. ‘If indeed lead is being removed from the roof,’ he said, ‘I do not doubt that it is a transaction undertaken for the benefit of the dispossessed.’
Mrs Thrale made no reply to this, having often remarked that Johnson had more regard for the poor than any man alive. Once, while walking with him past the cheap cook-shops lining a particular alleyway in Covent Garden – they were to take tea with Davy Garrick – she had referred to the area as Porridge Island, at which he had snapped that she should not make light of what was serious to many. She had retorted that he misunderstood her intention and, stung by his tone, wondered aloud if it was not an affectation on his part, seeing his own circumstances were now so improved, that he should identify to such an extent with those less fortunate than himself. At this distance she could not remember his response, beyond his cheeks had glowed purple.
‘I admired Miss Porter,’ she told him, not altogether insincerely, ‘though perhaps the more so when she checked my suggestion that a surgeon should be called.’
‘She has little of Tetty in her,’ said Johnson, ‘if that is your meaning.’
Arriving at Dam Street, he pointed out the infant school he had attended. He added nothing more, save for remarking that it was here he had learnt his letters. Upon reaching the steps of a house some doors further, he stopped, and indicating the porch with his stick urged his companions to bow their heads and give thanks to God for a certain deaf mute named Dyott. A monument, he said, should be erected to the man, for in the Civil War it was he who had caused the death of Lord Brooke, leader of the Parliamentary forces, a stray bullet from his musket entering Brooke’s visor and displacing his brain as he stood on that very step.
Queeney paid particular attention to the porch, even going so far as to rub a licked finger across the woodwork, as though hoping to bring it away bloodstained. Mrs Thrale rebuked her sharply, but Johnson said he had performed the selfsame gesture as a boy and that imagination must never be crushed.
Mrs Thrale could not let that pass. ‘By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed,’ she quoted. ‘Then fictions begin to operate as realities. They grow first imperious, and in time despotic. False opinions fasten on the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or anguish.’
‘You have it in the wrong order, Madam,’ he said, but could not help looking pleased that she remembered what he had once written.
On their return to the inn Mrs Thrale hurried upstairs to change her gown, its feathers bedraggled from the rain.
‘Queeney,’ she sighed, peering into the looking glass on the dressing table, ‘it is a misfortune to belong to the weaker sex. We do not see either Papa or Mr Johnson hastening to repair his clothes or attend to his complexion.’
‘Why is Miss Porter so old?’ asked Queeney. ‘Mrs Strickland has a daughter from a previous marriage and she is not yet seventeen.’
Mr Johnson’s wife, Tetty, Mrs Thrale explained, was twenty years older than he and no longer young when they married, to which Queeney, studying her mother’s reflection, said, ‘It is kind of him to like old women, is it not, for most grow cruel with the years?’
In the glass Mrs Thrale’s eyes became sad. The child told herself she did not care; her heel had begun to throb.
Johnson changed his wig for his visit to the Close. At Streatham it was customary of an evening, on Thrale’s instructions, for a footman to waylay him as he left his room and replace his everyday wig, much charred about the top-piece, with one more fit for dining in company. The night well advanced and Johnson at last persuaded to retire, the same footman was waiting to whisk it off his head lest he should hold the candle too close during his small hours’ reading. For the rest, he had on his brown suit with the horse-hair buttons and his shoes with the silver buckles.
Mrs Thrale wore grey and dared anyone to utter a word of dissent. Her husband, mindful of her temper, had her carried to Peter Garrick’s in a chair, Queeney perched on her lap. Though the rain had stopped, a fierce wind tossed the chestnut trees in the stable yard. Thrale himself complained of feeling unwell, an indisposition Johnson held would be easily rectified by a brisk walk to the Close.
The market now over and the square deserted save for scavengers, Thrale biliously opined that Lichfield lacked industry. Johnson retorted that while Birmingham worked with its hands, Lichfield folk used their brains. Henry Thrale was amused at this, seeing their champion had found it necessary to desert his native town so early in life.
In Johnson’s honour, Peter Garrick had assembled a lively collection of learned old friends, among them Erasmus Darwin, scientist and inventor, and Dr James, for
whose Medical Dictionary Johnson had written the preface. There was an atmosphere of accord in the house which Mrs Thrale found relaxing. She was fond of her host, who had many times sat at her table in Southwark. He was not, it was true, as diverting as his brother, but that was all to the good; Davy could often be tiring, particularly after triumphing in some production at Drury Lane. The second Mrs Garrick was also likeable, being somewhat simple in the correct sense of the word.
It was she who brought up the subject of Johnson’s recent journey to Scotland. She said she had met Mr Boswell two years previously and found him curiously affecting. He had told her, in detail, of his first case as an advocate in the Edinburgh courts, when he was required to defend a man accused of stealing a sheep. By his diligent efforts he secured an acquittal, thus saving his client from the hangman’s noose. Eight years on the very same man committed a similar offence and was this time found guilty. ‘Mr Boswell’, Mrs Garrick said, ‘spent hours in the condemned man’s cell, trying to give comfort to its occupant. He devised a plan to cut down the poor wretch immediately after the drop and arranged for a physician to be on hand to revive him. Alas, it was to no avail. He was much disturbed by the event, for he said the dead man’s eyes remained open in death and that in them he fancied he saw his own reflection.’
There was a moment’s silence around the table, broken by Thrale proclaiming that stealers of sheep must be punished, else there would be no mutton left in the land. A female cousin of Dr James chirruped with laughter and went so far as to tap the table with her spoon.
‘Mr Boswell has no side,’ Mrs Garrick said, and added somewhat quaintly, ‘All his sentiments come from a heart open to the heavens.’
At this, first Garrick, then Thrale, then Dr James opposed her; tripping over themselves to drag Boswell earthwards, they stressed his vanity, his absence of intellect, his desire to shine. Mrs Thrale was surprised they left out his drunkenness, but then, save for Johnson, there was not one among them who was not a sot. Johnson took no part in the discussion. It was never his habit to butt in unless addressed directly. Mrs Thrale, knowing how he valued Boswell’s friendship, and having had recent reason to be grateful for the attachment, turned to him and asked, ‘It is true, is it not, that you found him an entertaining companion and would gladly travel with him again?’
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