The Brothers Boswell (37 page)

Johnson does not move or speak, but his hulking form seems to strain almost visibly against motionlessness, as though a turn of the head or the swing of a pistol tip will release him from a spell, and he will suddenly bellow and surge at me. His rage is there in his eyes, though he holds them half-closed. The gaze is unflinching, and it sweeps back and forth between my face and
the face of the man who took the two of them up halfway through their dramatic escape. It could not be clearer that Johnson is watching for an opportunity, but more than that he is studying our features, committing us to memory. Again, he is a celebrity, this man. He is already preparing—when this ordeal is finished and the world bends its knee once again—to have us crushed by the bailiffs and the courts and his powerful friends into a very fine powder indeed.

His instinct is still to assume that any loss of his own power is momentary, even now.

But Johnson is checked in his attempt to memorize the man’s features, as they are carefully and discreetly covered. A black cloth shields his face, his nose, even his smallish ears from sight, and a slouch hat disguises his head, the glossy seal-brown hair. Only his eyes and his dark brows are visible.

Again, I cannot help but be reassured by my own handiwork. The only thing I have left to chance in the case of this man is his own courage, his own heart.

The eyes above the cloth reveal the struggle, without a doubt. This third man looks over at me, and his expression is impressed with the enormity of what he has done, painfully impressed. He has waylaid two gentlemen, using a pistol and a mask, and even though he has not picked a penny from their pockets, and will not, he could very easily hang for his actions of the last ten minutes. And he well knows it. He kept his glance stony until I arrived, but now that I’ve come, his pretense has all but collapsed. Beneath the mask, his breathing sounds thin and rapid; above it, the eyes hold a pleading look, as though he would have me somehow take back what I have had him do.

It is the mudlark, of course. Or riverlark, I should better say.

If I am surprised to find him here, pistol in hand, to find him my confederate, it is only for a brief instant, because a part of me has known all along that this was the case, that our two earlier meetings
today were no accident. That our existences have become somehow intermingled over the last weeks or months.

That wave of knowledge now reaches the forefront of my awareness with hardly a ripple.

This effect too I’ve become familiar with since Plymouth: a moment when two parallel sets of memories can no longer be held in mutual exclusion, for whatever reason, and the thing inside me must let go a part of its hold. And once it does so, the recollections then come washing together. In a moment’s time it is all but impossible to say how or even why they were ever distinct.

I understand now that if James and Johnson and I had finished our business in the Turk’s Head—if we had none of us come running down the back staircase—the mudlark would have remained more or less a random London figure to me, a stranger.

But that realization seems unimportant, hardly worth considering. I am here now, and the mudlark has performed his function well.

And I am glad to see him, not simply because he helped to form one side of a larger invisible box into which James and Johnson managed to escape, but because he is himself and I think well of him. I haven’t time to reassure him at length, and so I do so as quickly and efficiently as I am able, with a clap on the shoulder.

It has the proper effect. He seems to take heart, and the stony look comes back over his face.

Almost as if he cannot help himself, James moves a half-step toward me, a soft moan strangled in his throat. The words remain at a whisper, though, for, as I have said, my brother is a coward. “Johnny, for the love of
God
, tell me why you’re doing this. Please, Johnny.”

Before I can speak, the lark takes a step forward himself and jabs James in the sternum with the barrel of his pistol, hard enough to drive him backward. The metal thunks audibly against the bone.

“You’ll shut your filthy fucking mouth,” the lark hisses, and I’m surprised for an instant at the heat in his voice, the authentic anger.

But then I have spent several weeks constructing for him a long, detailed, painful fiction involving James Boswell and the Great Dictionary Johnson.

In this fiction, I am brother to a luckless young maid come up to town from Edinburgh, one Peggy Doig. Here she was tempted, and fell into the habit of meeting the two gentlemen nights at the Turk’s Head. They shared her between them like a one-shilling whore. By them she was ruined, got with child, and later savagely beaten when she let it be known. And now—most ominously of all—she has vanished without a word, and I have questions that must be answered.

It is a fiction, yes, but built out of the dirty flotsam of truth. And while the lark’s anger is based on that convenient fiction, it is not misplaced ultimately, not really. He knows these are bad men, and bad men they are.

“You’re lucky you haven’t had your throat slit for you already, wi’ what you’ve done,” the lark spits once more at James, and then he lapses back into silence.

James has his hand over the injured spot at his breastbone, more than a bit of the whipped dog in his manner. But now Johnson offers to speak. He too keeps his voice low, as instructed. His manner has changed substantially: two men with guns are an entirely different proposition than one. Here there is no oak table with which to beat us. And so he is determined now to find his way out of this madness through compliance and persuasion.

“You must stop a moment and consider, John,” Johnson says, and it is odd, hearing my Christian name fall from his lips, “before it is too late. You are no highwayman, though you make use of them.” Here Johnson flicks his gaze down at the lark, making it clear that the man is an inferior species altogether. “You have prospects even now. This is beneath you. You have yet to commit any capital crime. You have yet to rob, or kill. And much is forgiven upon repentance, especially in one who has suffered as you have suffered.”

He is speaking gingerly of my time in the Plymouth Hospital, of course, but the mudlark seems to take it as a confession of all the worst he has been told.

It is a good reminder, however, that I must separate the lark out from the discussion as soon as possible. And we have been too long out in the open, whatever the weather.

I answer Johnson politely, and quietly. “I suggest you take your own advice, Mr. Johnson. You have also yet to commit any capital crime, though you have much to repent.”

I bring up the dag and, as before, I let them know what will be expected of them. “Now we will walk slowly together, the four of us, down toward the river, and we will do so in this fashion: James in front; you, Mr. Johnson, a pace behind him; and we two will walk a few paces off to the right. The high wall surrounding the Somerset estate will be to your left almost the entire way, and I will ask you to walk as near to it as you may, just in its shadow. Remember, not a sound. Ignore any passersby. We will shoot only if we are forced to do so. And you have still my word. Answer my questions honestly, and you will sleep in your own beds tonight.”

And then we are moving, in an uneasy little knot, down to the water: James, then the lark off in the gloom to his right, followed by Johnson, and I bringing up the rear.

Somerset Water-Gate, the lane bordering the Somerset estate to the west, ends in a public stair at the waterline of the Thames. And much is made of the fact that the Crown has opened the estate’s river gardens to the public during daylight hours, as well. But the truth is that the Water-Gate itself is no gift to the rabble. It is less a cobbled lane, and more a drainage sluice on a massive scale, running from the Strand directly down through the estate’s large stables and coachyard and dingy garbage sheds.

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.