The Brothers Boswell (13 page)

And James told me, like a bedtime story, about the plans for the houses in the New Town, whose eventual kitchens would have each their own deft little taps, from which water would flow at the slightest touch.

I said nothing about what I had seen and heard in the goldsmith’s shop, just before I slipped from consciousness. As best I could, I pushed those moments from my mind; the memory of them was like a dream of something forbidden, accompanied by a lingering residue of shame.

More than anything, I wanted no more doctors. I had no desire to be prodded and poked, as James had been, and floated for weeks in a washtub of sulfur water.

Though my father pressed me for details to identify the man who struck me, there was no official investigation. No account of it appeared in the
Edinburgh Magazine.
My father was clearly disturbed by my dress, my shoeless feet, and he avoided questions by hiring a caddie to search privately. Within a day or two the criminal was declared to have fled the city, most probably for the Highlands, and the incident was made to disappear.

And so, like my time with Gentleman, the truth of the water story turned out to be merely visceral, without any greater or more lasting meaning. I was not yet seventeen, but already I had begun to suspect the worst, that there was something profoundly provisional about my time on this earth, that my own life was a journal whose pages were destined to take no ink.

Kissing the
Consecrated Earth

Saturday 30 July (continued)

When we got to Greenwich, I felt pleasure in being at the place which Mr. Johnson celebrates in his
London: A Poem.
I had the poem in my pocket, and read the passage on the banks of the Thames, and literally “kissed the consecrated earth.”

Mr. Johnson said that the building at Greenwich was too magnificent for a place of charity, and too much detached to make one great whole. …

We walked about and then had a good dinner (which he likes very well), after which he run over the grand scale of human knowledge, advised me to select some particular branch to excel in, but to have a little of every kind.

—From
Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763

Greenwich, England

Saturday, the 30th of July, 1763

1:45 p.m.

A
LTHOUGH
I
HAVE
been to Greenwich only once before, and that as recently as three days ago, putting in at the river stair before the Seamen’s Hospital feels as though I have come home again. Because although the vast complex seems indisputably to be a palace—although in fact it began life as a palace—it is now merely a granite toy box for busted soldiers.

Two toy boxes, in fact: when Queen Mary, the project’s first real benefactor, saw that the original massive design would obstruct the view from her own smaller residence in the distance, she had it quickly and unceremoniously broken in two. Mary was compassionate to a fault, but a view to the water was another matter entirely.

These two white palace complexes now mirror one another, each recapitulating the other’s broad edifice, colonnades, and towering chapel dome in the middle distance. A broad grassy avenue—precisely the width of Mary’s angle of vision—still lies open between them. One Tree Hill and the Royal Observatory rise gently behind.

But they are toy boxes all the same, a tidy location to dispose of sailors busted beyond repair, those who have somehow misplaced arms and legs and eyes, even the occasional human face entire. And those, like myself, who have misplaced something else altogether.
It is a miracle of sympathy, this Hospital, sheltering thousands of pensioners and some few of their families, indicative of a compassion every bit as extravagant as that which produced
L’Hotel Royal des Invalides
, at Paris; and it is an obscenity, indelible proof of a greedy and petulant empire.

As I say, it feels very much like home.

When the sculler nudges up against the stone steps, the waterman stretches up a thick arm to the iron gate and holds the boat snug against the landing. I unfold from beneath the wool canopy, and it is good to stretch and stand in the breeze. Along with the river smell there is a scent of cinnamon, somehow, in the air. I clear my sword from my coat and hold the waterman’s eye, and for all his size and strength, it is he who breaks off the glance, with an almost involuntary bow of his head. I remember the mudlark clucking his tongue at the man, on the man’s own boat, and the stout waterman doing nothing until the smaller lark was safely out of range. Only then did he seize a stone and attack.

And none of this is a surprise: I have invested more than a few hours watching the Temple stair, picking mentally through the daily scrum of watermen, selecting in advance for speed and corruption and a certain bully’s timidity. The perfect waterman to ferry me along on James’s perfect afternoon.

From a pocket in my waistcoat I take not merely a full shilling, but a crown, and I pitch it at him. With one hand anchoring the boat, and the other holding his oar, he can do nothing but flinch, and let it strike his chest. The coin drops into his lap, and he glares before realizing that I have quintupled his fare. The magic of cash: the glare becomes a look of disbelief, then even a wan smile.

“I have restored the pennies I took to stop your mouth, Gil Higgs,” I tell him, “as well as another four shillings. A great deal of money. Easy money for little enough work, I think.”

He begins to mutter his thanks, then realizes that somehow, somewhere, I’ve laid hold of his name.

“I will be needing return passage, and I will pay you for the day complete.” I have waited until now to tell him this, quite deliberately. I point to another, smaller stair down the public walk fronting the river. “You will wait for me there, hard by that step, and be ready to row out quickly. With luck, I shall be back in an hour or two. But if night should fall, I’ll expect you there still. Be ready, I say. And there will be another crown in it for you when we put in at the Temple again. A very profitable day for you, I should think.”

His confusion is deepening, but he seems to know that whatever else, he had best be quit of this fare, and the strangeness that comes attached to it. His gut is telling him to push off. It is a contingency not terribly difficult to foresee: his early curiosity has dwindled into apprehension, and the sense that my day’s affairs are a deep, twisty hole into which his nose should not be stuck.

Oar now racked, he has the crown cupped in his hand, suspended between returning it and bringing it to his own pocket. He sneaks a glance back toward the hanging smoke of the City.

“Well, to say truth, sir,” he manages.

But before he can say more, or begin to dig in his big heels, I draw something out of my waistcoat. A book. A miniature, three inches by an inch.

I hold it out to him. “You bargain well. And I cannot have no for an answer. Let me throw a final sweetener into the pot, then.”

He accepts the book, and it sits delicately in his heavy, callused hand. He prods it with a fat finger. There is nothing in the world, it seems, he was less prepared to receive:
Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book
, with watercolor illustrations cleverly tipped-in, bound in weathered calf. An odd charming little treasure, even for a man who no doubt cannot read or write his own name.

He looks up at me. The coarse, unkempt brows knit together. He does not understand.

“Not for you, of course. For your Maggie, Higgs.”

Now I truly have his attention, for the first time today. I set my
hat on my head, cock it forward a touch, to the left a touch, the particular style of my regiment. Or what was, until recently, my regiment. “She has no brothers or sisters to help her beguile the hours, has she? She must spend a good part of her day very much alone. And St. Giles is certainly not the most cheerful place in which to be alone. It can be a dangerous place, I understand. But no longer. Now Maggie will always have Tom Thumb, there to look out for her when you cannot. When your wife cannot. There is not a child living can resist General Tom Thumb. To amuse her and make her feel protected, from anyone who might wish to do her harm.”

Now he begins to understand.

I point to the secondary stair again, no question whatsoever in my voice. “I will expect you to wait there until I return, or near enough to that spot. Do not make me hunt for you. We may need to draw away on very short notice. And about our journey today, I will expect you to say nothing, ever, to anyone. You promised earlier to keep close as the grave. If you keep that promise then today will be the last we see of one another, Higgs. We understand one another, then.”

He wishes to say something, no doubt more than one thing, but I step out of the boat and then take the steps up to the public walkway at a dogtrot. From the upper railing, I see him sitting stunned in his little green boat, scalp shining in the midday sun, still holding out the crown and the doll-sized book before him.

On another day and from another source, these would be river booty—unexpected and odd, but booty all the same. He’d have spent the rest of the afternoon slumped in a dram shop, then swaggered home with these objects to his flat in the St. Giles slum, home to his battered-looking wife and ill-nourished six-year-old.

But it is today, and they are from me, and although Gil Higgs now finds that he keenly does not want these things, he really has very little choice in the matter.

* * *

I
N THE EVENT
, I realize, much of my design for this afternoon has come to rest on the slender backs of birds. The mudlark who brought back the tale of the Argonauts was the first. Only a quick afterthought, yet he turned out to be a bold little stroke: that particle of conversation—passing between two inveterate talkers determined to cram an entire, lovely July day with nonstop talk—that snippet would otherwise have evanesced, passed off into nothingness.

Of course, if I were in my right mind, I would have let it pass off. The world needs many things, but Johnson’s thoughts on the centrality of his own labors and preoccupations are not among them.

Still, I am sentimental, and what I can capture of their day, I will keep.

And so the lark was only the first of his kind. More time and preparation by far has gone into finding and training my venerable old Greenwich canary, and from him I expect a great deal more. That is who I seek as I stroll past the Hospital’s marble statue of George II, who oversees the slow stream of tired and maimed sailors as it empties off the river, year after long year.

It is a Saturday, sun-kissed, and Greenwich is a popular place for a frolic, especially the Park and the grassy slopes of One Tree Hill. The Grand Square pulses with Londoners, rich and poor, but their gowns and frocks are never quite gay enough to overcome the dull blue omnipresence of the pensioners themselves.

They are all about you in Greenwich, these superannuated sailors, no matter where on the extensive grounds you stand, slow-moving beings still got up in their naval uniforms, empty pant legs and shirtsleeves pinned up smartly, some with large chunks of skull left behind on the floors of distant oceans, reiteration after blue reiteration of the same banal, horrific theme. Some few of these, their wounds disturbingly fresh, shuffle along in an opium haze.