The Brothers Boswell (20 page)

Enterprise the Third: Tomorrow you will at long last meet the great Samuel Johnson. See second note, other pocket, for particular instructions.

Boswell refolds the page, slipping the edges each cunningly inside the other, re-pockets the resulting square. He will check the memorandum six or seven times more during the day, but his satisfaction with it will never be as encompassing and profound as it is just now. Reading it gives him the sensation that someone is watching out for him, actively authoring the Boswell he has determined to be, and that—as good luck would have it—this someone is himself.

Boswell looks out at the chancy winter sky over Downing Street and feels that he is precisely, to the quarter-inch, where he should be. He heaves a contented sigh, and it feels so good that he immediately heaves another.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER
, wearing the Bath coat and grey suit, and walking the stick he has directed himself to carry, Boswell strolls out his landlord’s front door and heads up Downing to Parliament Street. There is always a delicious frisson of
recognition
associated with living out each day as he has pre-planned it, particularly in the early morning, before the day has inserted its own cumulative realities.

After a short two blocks, he hooks sharply left, and the Parade Grounds open up to the west. As always, Boswell feels a martial swelling in his heart when he looks out over the playground of the king’s own Horse Guards.

Boswell paces to the very center of the large packed-earth space and stands erect. Slowly, he closes his eyes and tries his best—for a full twenty or thirty seconds—to seriously consider what it means to soldier. As he has done since childhood, Boswell imagines the violent day in 1513 when his ancestor Thomas Boswell died defending James IV at Flodden. In his imagination, the battle is always engulfed in a driving rain, cannon fire echoes, and Thomas Boswell fights thigh-deep in muck, giving no quarter, never surrendering, a cry torn from his lips, lifeless body falling finally between the enemy and his Sovereign.

Boswell opens his eyes. City life rumbles on about him.

Suddenly Boswell flexes his own stout upper body inside his coat, enjoying the answering tightness of his muscles. The winter air is bracing, and a part of him wants nothing more than to run screaming down a hillside, rain wetting his face. He wants to brandish a sword, charge an enemy, open throats, save a king.

He feels vital enough this morning to tear his stockings by flexing his calves.

L
OUISA’S LIVING SITUATION
has been thoughtfully and delicately put together, and Boswell never fails to appreciate it when he makes his now-daily visits to King Street. Her landlady, a very plump, quiet woman purported to be hard of hearing—but who has seemed in fact to hear perfectly well the several times Boswell has met her—lives up two flights of stairs. Louisa has one small room in this same flat, where she dines and reads, but takes two additional rooms up another small half-flight of stairs to the back of the building, where she sits with company and takes her rest.

Technically, the two ladies live together, protecting one another’s good names; practically speaking, Louisa is a handsome, once-married, now-amicably-separated Covent Garden actress with an independent existence, as Boswell likes to sum it up.

At a little after eleven, he climbs the narrow stairs to the flat, and the maid walks him through the cramped lower floor of the flat to the private back stair. At the top of the stair stands Louisa, and Boswell stares up at her with a momentary helplessness.

She has apparently just come from an appointment, or a walk in the Park of her own: rather than the wadded morning dresses he has become accustomed to seeing, she wears a yellow satin gown, substantially hooped, and a small black cape still hanging from her
hand. Never has she looked more stylish, more of the city of London, and Boswell feels a quick, disquieting flutter of self-doubt.

“Do come up, Mr. Boswell. It is good of you to stop in. You will never guess my news,” she says, when he has reached the top of the stairs. “I’ve just come from the managers of the theater, and they talk of bringing me into the lead this coming year.”

“It is too long in coming,” Boswell says, kissing her hand, “should it happen today, Mrs. Lewis.”

Louisa nods. “A compliment very much appreciated. I knew there was some reason I invited you to tea.” Her fingers brush his arm to punctuate the joke, and the sensation stays with him when the fingers are removed.

She smiles and quickly searches his face, then his eyes, one after the other, as though for flaws. He cannot but examine her own face in return: the very dark brows framing intensely dark eyes, and the fine aquiline nose. Between the snapping eyes and the wry mouth, she gives Boswell the odd impression that she has known and been furious with him in the long-distant past, but has recently begun to exchange the anger for amusement. Her skin is fair and healthy, a girl’s skin still, perhaps twenty-five at the outside. He smells roses and lemons, suspects even the darker hint of jasmine.

And the expanse of pale skin now visible above the satin bodice of her dress—here in the early dead of winter, when London has piled on all of its infinite coats and wraps—hits Boswell like a cudgel-blow.

“I am delighted to hear your news,” Boswell begins, and Louisa’s expression brightens at the mention of it, “and delighted to know that I am taking tea this morning with such a rapidly rising star.”

She waves a hand. “Please do take it with a grain of salt, Mr. Boswell. The managers did not say anything absolutely. Still, I am glad to know they value me enough even to promise by halves.”

“Of course, I am happy both for you, and for myself.”

“Oh? And why so, sir?”

“As it makes me feel your intimate acquaintance, to share in it.”

Louisa nods. “I hope we are intimate in that way, just to share our triumphs and our small troubles alike.”

Boswell smiles but cannot avoid the memory of the previous Monday. He had come to Louisa’s directly after breakfast, only to find her in a transparently bad humor: a tradesman had sent to her for a trifling back debt, and she had applied in turn to a close friend for a loan, only to be shifted. Boswell insisted on knowing the amount she needed and then, when he found to his delight that it was only two guineas, loaned her the money himself.

He’d been ecstatic at first to come in some small way to her rescue, but in the days following he has found himself wondering, replaying the situation in his mind. Was the whole scene manufactured, merely an artful way for money to change hands? To have the income of a courtesan without necessarily admitting it, even to herself?

“Our triumphs and our troubles—exactly,” Boswell continues. “London has held everything for me but that since I arrived, that sense of having a place to share one’s thoughts with an understanding woman. You take my meaning, I hope.”

He sees that she is listening complacently, and instinctively he tries another, deeper key. “I look forward to the married state for that reason perhaps above all.”

Louisa—who has been, and remains married in law—gives a small laugh and shakes her head sharply. She is suddenly animated. “You must be careful there, Mr. Boswell. You show your naïveté there, I’m afraid. Not all marriages consist of tea and genteel conversation. Or agreeable companionship.”

“Surely many do.”

“Surely most do not,” she says without hesitation, and then tries deliberately to strike a sunnier note. “However, where marriage and good tempers chance to come together, man and woman may do very well. I think, however, that meeting just as you and I do now—as two persons, rather than as two who have had lawyers
draw settlements—is the key to easiness. We know that we have license to leave one another at a moment’s notice. And so we study one another’s happiness.”

Boswell fixes her with an eye, finds that she does not shrink from the scrutiny. “Nay, I know this must be a pose. You cannot be such an enemy of marriage.”

“Not an enemy of marriage, sir,” Louisa replies, “but once a victim. And so forevermore a skeptic, until such time as I may be proven wrong.”

“You have never told me how you and Mr. Lewis came to— part ways.”

She cocks her head at Boswell and narrows an eye. “Do we know one another well enough for that, I wonder?”

“I hope we know one another well enough for anything.” With that, Boswell moves to the end of the settee closest her chair. He is within easy distance of her hand, but he restrains himself, his own folded carefully on his knee. “I have told you that my affections are engaged to you. And you have told me you are no Platonist. I have hopes—you have encouraged me to hope—that you will allow us to put aside the arbitrary rules of the public. Allow us to do so, even this morning. This morning like no other.”

“Mr. Boswell, you know that I have said the thing is fraught with more trouble than it may be worth, for you as well as for myself.”

“I like my pleasures fraught. The more fraught, the better.”

“Do not make light.”

“I have never been more in earnest.”

Boswell finally gets the grudging smile he’s been probing for, and he reaches out only now to take her hand. Louisa watches as he does so—the two of them watch him take it—but seems more than agreeable. And once he has her hand, Boswell holds it in both his own, clasping it, saying nothing for a moment.

Finally, he speaks. “But truly, madam, you must allow our feelings for one another to take their most intense expression. It is
impossible otherwise to know the destiny of a passion such as ours. You will make me blessed, Mrs. Lewis.”

“It may be known, sir.”

“Or it may remain a tender secret between careful lovers.”

“A thousand circumstances may be troublesome.”

“Or none in the least.”

There is a considered pause, as Louisa smiles softly to herself. She lifts her eyes to him, and the smile deepens, takes on what seems at first to be an outright coyness.

And then, almost as readily as he might pick up a scent entering the air, Boswell understands that it would be a serious mistake to treat the smile as encouragement. It is, in point of emerging fact, much nearer the opposite. He can see that his appeals have brought him as close to this woman beside him as he may come under his own power; the next single hint of entreaty will move her two steps away, or ten, he is suddenly certain. Not only that, but she will rebuke him—out of nowhere; harshly, perhaps—should he pursue the matter another inch.

He has a sharp intuitive sense that Louisa would like to say yes, but can only say yes to the question as put by herself, and that this all connects somehow to the deep reservoir of anger he can sense in her occasionally, when the conversation drifts over certain topics. She must be the pursuer for the last five steps out of a hundred, while he remains passive. Nothing could be clearer.

It is nearly always this way with Boswell and people. Since childhood, he has experienced the signature of their emotions with an uncanny directness, and when he cares enough to do so, he can react reflexively to these signatures, long before bringing their logic to consciousness. In this case, only an instant passes between Louisa’s coy smile and Boswell’s turning the conversation in a gentle but complete circle.

“I shall say not a word more, madam. I suspect I grow tiresome—”

“Not at all, sir.”

“—and I would be anything with you save that, truly. But come, let us know one another better as two friends. I asked about your husband and how you came to part ways. I would be most honored to share that history with you.”

Louisa straightens, and then counter-offers: “Well, it is a very personal history, even a secret. But I am touched that you desire to share it. So I will share my own deep secret, sir, in exchange for one of your own. That must be the bargain.”

“Done.”

“It must be a thing of which you are
properly
ashamed. You must swear it.”

“As shameful as you could hope, you have my word. I swear it on my life.”

She pulls her head back, considering how to begin. “You should know, then, that Mr. Lewis was an actor in a small strolling company with which I enrolled when I was sixteen, fresh from a dancing academy. He was thirty-two, a quite dashing thirty-two, and he had in mind almost from the start that we would raise a stage family together. Strolling companies are best run by men of large families, you know, as all the children may be brought in for an equal share of the day’s profits. He had other schemes, of course, but this was his principal notion.

“And to trim a long story short, we were together for three years, with no sign of little tragedians whatsoever. There were other problems, more common problems, but this became the nub of his discontent.”

“I see,” Boswell says.

“Mr. Lewis would have an heir, and there was the end of all discussion. And if that were all of it, it might have been another thing altogether. But—here I must demand your utmost discretion, Mr. Boswell.”

Boswell places a hand over his heart.

She seems satisfied, and lowers her voice just a touch. “He
more than once in the last two years of our marriage tried his luck elsewhere, so to speak. More than twice.”