The Brothers Boswell (33 page)

Louisa closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them again, she fixes her gaze on Boswell’s face. She looks deeply into his eyes, face impassive. They watch one another for five full seconds, then ten. Only slowly does her expression sadden, and for an instant he thinks she has simply failed to remember the answering speech.

But the eyes seem gradually to gather the candlelight, and he realizes with a start that the shimmer there is the first hint of tears. Louisa continues to look at him with open, authentic hurt, as though she has somehow seen beyond the walls of the Black Lion, seen him for the worst that he is capable of doing, the very worst that he is capable of being.

“O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” she begins softly, a catch in the voice, and Boswell must remind himself several times as the speech continues that she is not in fact speaking to him, at least not directly.

I
T IS NEARLY
one the next afternoon before Boswell and Louisa leave the Black Lion and step into a hackney coach Mr. Hayward has himself personally fetched. It is a later start than what they had planned, but having promised his select readers an extraordinarily voluptuous night, Boswell has hardly been in any mood to see it finished prematurely.

Only well after three in the morning—when the extent of the voluptuousness could no longer be in any doubt—was he content to sleep.

And this morning too he has given Louisa a good hour to rise and dress, during which time Boswell patrolled languorously up and down Fleet Street, finally ducking into the Somerset Coffee-House, where he called for a dish of chocolate and wrote up a pleasingly thick little packet of notes for himself.

Those notes are now in Boswell’s breast pocket, and as Mr. Hayward closes the coach door behind them, Boswell relishes the feel of them there, almost as much as he savors the presence of Louisa on the seat beside him. She is bundled once again in her gown, her boots, green coat, sable cap, feather muff. Only her pretty face is visible, the pale cheeks and red lips, but when he catches her eye, Louisa gives a sly smile, and then turns to look out the window again.

They are headed for Soho Square, where she has errands to run and where no one she knows will see her alight from the coach. As the coach clatters past the Temple, Boswell catches a quick glimpse of the door to Samuel Johnson’s Inner Temple apartments. In spite of his promise to bring Boswell and Johnson together, Dilly has said nothing about the possibility since Christmas Day, almost two weeks ago, and Boswell is suddenly mildly disappointed all over again.

Yet, if he
had
met Johnson on Christmas Day, Boswell has no doubt that he would now be celibate and dedicated to a virtuous Johnsonian existence. The events of last night would never have occurred. There would be no delicious ache in his muscles. The notes in his pocket would not exist.

And these considerations lead him back to a place his thoughts have taken him more than once before: the suspicion that God himself is ordering Boswell’s year in London, that He has delayed Johnson’s influence for a reason, quite possibly because He too could not resist seeing the Louisa story brought to its sweet, natural conclusion.

As they reach Holborn Street, Louisa puts the feather muff aside and reaches over to take Boswell’s right hand firmly in both of hers. “Mr. Boswell,” she begins, “I have but one favor to ask of you before we part.”

“You may ask anything of me. I can deny you nothing now, you must know.”

She smiles again, presses his hand, but her expression is no longer playful. In spite of fresh powder, he can read the long night in her face, in the tiny lines here or there, the very slight puffiness beneath her eyes.

She hesitates, then brings it abruptly out. “Whenever you may cease to regard me, or to care for me, pray don’t use me ill, nor treat me coldly.”

“Madam, come, let us not talk of such a thing!”

“Please, for that I could not abide. Truly I could not. That sort
of calculated coldness designed only to bring on a separation, it is inhuman. Just inform me by a letter or any other way that it is over. Be kind in that way. That is the only favor I ask.”

Boswell feels his heart go out to her, instantly and unreservedly. He cannot resist taking her in his arms for a moment, whispering to her, consoling her. “Madam, have you forgotten last night so soon? How intimate we have become? Indeed, we cannot answer for our affections. No man or woman can do so. But you may always depend on my behaving with
civility.
You must trust me for that, if for nothing else.”

With that, they roll into the Square, and the coach driver pulls up short, leans down to rap softly on the side of the carriage. Louisa comes quickly out of Boswell’s arms, begins to gather herself to alight, but before she can say or do anything more, he suddenly hugs her tightly again, so tightly that she can only laugh in delighted surprise.

“I suspect I love you, Mrs. Digges,” he whispers as they come apart.

And Louisa strokes his cheek and then kisses him quickly and matter-of-factly on the lips, as though she understands very well that he has just confessed far less than he might otherwise have done.

B
OSWELL WATCHES
L
OUISA
go until her fashionable green-and-sable outline is lost irretrievably in the Soho crowd. And then he watches just another moment more, to see the world press on without her, and to test his own response to her vanishing. When the coachman finally calls down for directions, Boswell gives him Louisa’s own address on King Street, and the hackney lurches into motion again.

By the time they’ve navigated the Square, Boswell’s sense of direction has been upended, any trace of Louisa’s path erased. And although he misses her already, a small, reasonable voice inside says that tomorrow will be soon enough.

For the last several years, Boswell has had the romantic but unshakable idea that he will know his soul mate because she, and
she alone, will discover the tiny letters inked at the hollow of his ankle. There is a children’s-fairytale quality to the idea, of course, but that is precisely why he clings to it.

Still, the fact that Louisa is apparently not his soul mate causes Boswell’s spirits to rise in any event. Finding a soul mate, like meeting Samuel Johnson, could easily ruin everything were it to happen a month or a year too soon, after all.

When the coach reaches King Street, Boswell tells the driver to wait, then goes to the door of Louisa’s flat. There he asks for Louisa, and expresses some visible surprise when told that she is not at home. That accomplished, Boswell returns to the coach and for lack of any better idea gives his own Downing Street address. The night with Louisa has left him with the tingling feeling that he can cajole the city into giving him whatever he desires.

But after a quick moment, he can think of no good way to advance his two other Grand Enterprises, for Dilly will take his own sweet time producing Johnson, and Boswell is not to breakfast with the Duke of Queensberry until the following week, to discuss his commission. Then he has a wonderful idea.

Drury Lane Theater is only another block or so back through the Market, and if he cannot call on Johnson, to whom he has never been introduced, he can certainly call on Garrick, to whom he has, at least technically. Of course the chances of catching the great man in the theater and unoccupied are slim indeed, and slimmer still that he will consent to see a young man with no appointment whom he does not remember.

But the truth is that Boswell could not give a fig for the odds this afternoon, and he has the carriage brought immediately around.

I
N THE SAME
way that Johnson has always been an icon of morality and Englishness for Boswell, David Garrick—the Kingdom’s most celebrated actor—has always signified culture and manliness and style. Boswell actually met Garrick very briefly two years ago,
on his mad first excursion to London to convert to Roman Catholicism.

Since coming back up to London two months ago, though, Boswell has tried several times to cultivate the acquaintance by calling for the great actor at his house, but his cards have all gone unanswered. The thought of simply dropping by the theater itself has never seemed a possibility before now.

Having conspicuously dismissed the coach just outside the theater’s Russell Street entrance, Boswell breezes through the stone arch and up into the foyer. He knows that the theater’s offices are somewhere up off the gallery stairs to the left, but on a whim Boswell simply stops the first person he encounters, a middle-aged man with the look of a bookkeeper, and asks him to tell Mr. Garrick that Mr. Boswell would be delighted to speak with him, if he has a moment free. The man seems startled, but then simply nods and disappears. And when Boswell hears footsteps less than a moment later, he turns around fully expecting to see the bookkeeper once again, shaking his head and offering to take a message.

Instead it is Garrick himself, hand thrust out and his gravelly bass overwhelming the small foyer. “Mr. Boswell, what a genuinely delightful surprise! I was speaking of you just the other day with Mr. Sheridan, who says you have got a prologue for his wife’s comedy that shows great promise. He said you were come up to Town, but I said he must be mistaken. You could not be in London without giving us the pleasure of your company at tea, I said. But Sheridan seemed quite sure, and here you are after all.”

It is more than Boswell can well answer at once. As Garrick pumps his hand, he manages, “Indeed, I have called once or twice for you, sir, and left a card—”

“A
card.
Ah, there’s the trouble,” Garrick says, beaming. He is burly, but surprisingly short for an actor, Boswell remembers now. His suit—matching coat, breeches, and waistcoat of red corded velvet—is fashionably out of fashion, and it immediately makes
Boswell think less of his own figured vest. The face is dark by London standards, almost swarthy, the shadow of his beard clearly visible although Boswell would be willing to wager that Garrick was neatly shaved just this morning. “My wife has been known to order the day’s cards cast to the four winds, if she feels our home is in danger of becoming a branch of Drury Lane. But in my defense, I must report that I bowed to you some weeks back in the House of Lords, but you did not observe me. My feelings were quite hurt, I assure you.”

“Indeed! I am sorry for it. Of course, had I known—”

“Had you known, I could not have taxed you with it, and I should have had no defense for missing your calling card not once, but twice. And we should have no end of recrimination. I consider us well off. Have you seen the paintings of Mr. Zoffany in the Piazzas? Ah, these you must see, although, truth to tell, they are most of them of me.”

And they are, of course: Garrick as Macbeth, Garrick as Lord Chalkstone, Garrick in a host of roles, as well as a series of sketches showing multiple Garrick prototypes, in a range of different attitudes.

Boswell is absolutely enchanted: it is like the Northumberland Picture Gallery, but with every other one of the paintings modeled after oneself. He looks over at Garrick, who is himself busy looking his various likenesses over, and speaks the first words that come to his mind. “Mr. Garrick, I would dearly love to know your secret.”

“What secret is that, pray?”

“
This
, sir. All of
this
about us,” Boswell says, waving a hand at the theater and the gallery, laughing.

Garrick looks back at the wall and nods once before steering Boswell away. “My secret? There is no secret. But shall I invent one for you?” He walks a moment in thought, then lowers his voice to a stage whisper. “As much as possible, strive to be someone other than yourself. Not as a whim, but as a deliberate mode of life.” Garrick waits a beat, then adds, “I have found it a useful pursuit.”

Boswell searches the man’s face to see whether, and precisely how much, he is being kidded. “But suppose, in doing so, a man should lose himself altogether, never to find himself—his real self, that is—ever again?”

“You say such a man is lost. I say he is free. Indisputably free.”

By the time they reach the foyer again, Boswell has sketched his plan for the Guards, which is to say his plan to remain in London, as well as his father’s standing opposition. But Sheridan has backed him to the hilt.

“To be sure,” Garrick maintains, “it is a most genteel thing, and I think, sir, you
ought
to be a soldier. As well as whatever suits your genius. The law requires a sad deal of plodding.”

With a start, Boswell realizes that the man has moved him back precisely into the spot where they shook hands fifteen minutes previously, down to the direction each is facing and the approximate amount of space between them. He has the distinct sense now that Garrick, while still physically present, has already begun removing his attention elsewhere. It is as though the large spirit is emptying gradually out of the small stout body, a few particles at a time, and regathering itself somewhere in the theater, or in the city, or in the world at large.

But at the very last he manages to capture Boswell’s heart forever.

“Sir,” Garrick says, taking his hand in parting, and looking him sternly in the eye, “you will be a very great man. I have an aptitude for knowing these things, you understand. And when you are so, remember the year 1763. I want to contribute my part toward saving you. You must therefore fix a day when I shall have the pleasure of treating you with tea. We must plan this campaign at much greater length, that is certain.”