The Brothers Boswell (41 page)

James half-stands himself. His voice is sharper, harder now. “Mr. Johnson, please! He is
ill.
He is not himself, and cannot be held accountable for his actions. You must remember that. You must find the self-control that he cannot.”

Johnson turns on him, and James actually averts his face from the direct blast of the man’s anger. “Hold your tongue as well, Boswell! He will know what he is, I tell you! He will know what he is!” Johnson wheels back, and takes a heavy step toward me, daring me almost. His arms are held out at his sides, and he is a great physical presence in the small space. He comes forward swaying very slightly, like a bear nearly too heavy to move on its hind legs.

“
That
is why you have been locked away, John Boswell, because you would
force
yourself on a society that has made the decision to dispose of you. And dispose of you we must, because you corrupt what you touch.
Love
you, sir?
Love
you? I could sooner love a maggot curling in my porridge. You would match wits with me? You would attempt to convince your brother that it is I who deals in lies and delusions and trickery?”

He takes another half-step. He realizes that he is skirting the line where I must defend myself, but he is determined to push me, to push his way out of this situation entirely if he can.

“For the love of God, look no further than your own two hands! Look at the objects in your two hands. Do you not find it at all strange that a young man such as yourself, busted from the Army, with no claim to inheritance, without work and apparently without a father’s allowance, should be in possession of two pistols cast in solid gold? Even
plated
in gold? Truly, how could you come by such weapons?”

Of the thousand different ways James or Johnson might have taken the conversation, this I could not have predicted. He might have settled as easily on my boots, and how I came by them. I cannot fathom his meaning for a moment.

But then I have it: he means to imply that I have stolen them. And that therefore I am no better than a common criminal, no agent of justice, but a petty thief.

And while I don’t owe him an answer, I cannot help myself. “I told you I had them from a goldsmith in Parliament Close. They cost nearly every guinea I had. And every guinea I could secure from my father. Money that was meant to last out this year.”

Johnson has balled his white hands into fists, each as big as a cannonball. He is still standing in front of me, nearly over me, and I am tallying each move of his muscles.

He points his finger at me, his long fat finger, points it directly in my face.

“You are deluded, I tell you. Can you not see that? Your weapons are precisely the sort a man such as yourself would be expected to carry. Two hunks of cheap metal. You might buy both for ten pounds, and have the case thrown into the bargain.”

He thrusts his finger down toward my hand now, his entire arm shaking as he does so. “Your brother will say nothing because he would not rouse you from your sleepwalking. He is afraid you might be injured somehow in the waking. That is because your brother knows what it
is
to love, sir. That is because your brother is twice the man you will ever be. Not because he is eldest. Not because he stands to inherit, but because he
deserves
to inherit. That is why he cannot bring himself to tell you.”

I will not look down, for it is a trick, no more. I remember purchasing the guns at the goldsmith’s shop in Edinburgh, haggling over price. In the last months, I have sat for hours in my rooms, cleaning and polishing them, fitting them for the purpose I had in mind.

A trick, and a child’s trick, at that. Johnson is just close enough to rush me if I shift my attention, and he has fooled me once tonight already.

But in the end, it is not really a matter of choice. His taunting has pulled a thread now hanging loose in my mind, and finally I steal a glance down at the dags in my fists. Only to find them gone.

And in their place, two plain pistols of scratched gun-metal black. Guns without decoration, carving or style. Leaden, mere things. They give back none of the lamplight.

I hear Johnson give a short bark of triumph.

And that is something the thing inside of me will not bear, and it takes what it wants. My right arm snaps up, perfectly level with Johnson’s big chest, and before I can complete a single thought, it has pulled the trigger.

But Johnson is no longer standing before me.

He is careening away, just as the hammer falls, and in the muzzle
flash I see that it is James who has slammed him aside at the last instant, James whose improbably rushing body now occupies the space before the gun’s barrel. James who will die. He has saved his King, after all.

None of this matters, however, because the gun does not fire.

It explodes in my hand instead.

A
ND THEN
I am lying on the floor of the shanty, looking up at the ceiling. James and Johnson are gone away, and there is a horrible ringing silence. I cannot feel my right hand, but my chest is on fire. Sulfur smoke hangs still in the air. I manage to bring up my left hand, then to swipe the tips of my fingers lightly over the flames in my chest. And they come away vivid bloody red.

But the cause and the effect of it escape me. I cannot seem to piece together what has happened, for some reason. My mind is dull. It is as though, rather than some shard of the pistol exploding into my chest, my heart itself has exploded out of it.

S
OMEONE IS TOUCHING
my face, carefully cradling my head. I open my eyes. It is the lark, down on his knees next to me. The black cloth he was wearing is gone, and his eyes are bright with tears. His dusty skin is pale in the lamplight. He never left, even when I insisted upon it, but waited and kept watch somewhere out in the dark timber-yard, in the wet and the miserable cold, all this time.

He brings his face close to mine, looking into my eyes, and then he presses his lips quickly to mine. And suddenly I know why he could not bring himself to leave.

“I tried to tell you,” he is saying, berating me softly, for he believes me dead or too near death to matter. “Tried to hammer it into your bony skull. But you wouldn’t have me stay, couldn’t have us seen together even by those two. Not by the great and powerful, even knowing what they are and what they’ve done to you. Stubborn,
hard-hearted, stuck-up bastard, you are. Can never be troubled to listen, not for a minute. ’Tis always done your way, isn’t it?”

He runs a fingernail along my cheek, traces the curl of my ear. “I was welcome at night, and come daylight what was I then? Bit of trash bobbing out in the flood. Wouldn’t notice me on the street. Pretend we was strangers. But you needed me, and I told you all along. All along.”

He taps me on the forehead with his neat fingernail, for all the world as though he means to remind me, for the next time round. “You needed me all the way from dawn to dark, too, and that’s the truth of it.”

And I remember it all now, this man and how I know him, and it has indeed been the saving of my life. I remember again the alcove on London Bridge, and in it, there in the gloom, sits this young man, offering no harm of any sort, hesitant himself even to say hello.

The lark was not the only man I met in those first weeks walking London Bridge, but he was the last, that I know now. He was the last because he turned out to be what I needed, what I had been looking for on the Bridge all along.

In the weeks since, he has come to me nights straight from the water, come padding up Fish Street Hill, smelling faintly of salt, his legs and feet cold as river ice. More than once have I chafed the life back into those feet, those legs. We have talked late into the night.

And it has not been chaste, not even the first night we met out over the water. Mostly it has not because I haven’t ever wanted it to be so.

But that hunger has been no failing. Just the reverse. As I glimpse it now—as an entire set of memories washing in all at once—it seems almost another sort of fidelity entirely, a chastity shared by two rather than endured by one.

I can see all of this now because the thing inside me is dead. For all of the things I have never known about it, will never know about
it, I have known every minute of the last several years that it was
there.
Even in Plymouth, as I was telling my doctors I was come back to myself again, I knew it was there, in me. I could always feel it, listening.

And now I know it is not. It is dead by its own hand.

All of this I would tell the lark, but I cannot. Dragging breath through the flames in my chest is all that I can manage. And then there is the sound of men tramping heavily up the river’s edge toward the timber-yard, and he presses his thin lips once tightly to my forehead, and I hear his boots scuffing across the floor of the shanty. And he is gone. Back to the flood, forever this time.

Leaving me alone. In this last, least bastard world.

J
AMES AND
J
OHNSON
ran together as far as the Somerset Water-Gate before James could bring himself to run no farther. They had run past the Savoy Stairs, past the German Church, because as far as they knew an armed accomplice was still at large, and he had shadowed them and prevented their escape once before. And so Johnson’s plan was to reach the Somerset Estate, run up the lawn to the main house itself, and secure a party of guards there. Then they would all return in force, hunt up the other gunman and render me such help as they were able.

But finally James found that he could not leave me for dead. And Johnson, for his part, found that he could not bring himself to let James return alone.

And so they reached a hurried compromise: in Dutchy Lane, just at hand, lived a surgeon with whom Johnson had some passing acquaintance, a man named Watkins, and they ran directly to his home, to find the doctor sitting at whist with two other gentlemen. Within moments, all five were pounding down the river way to the timber-yard.

They found me unconscious, blood staining the floor about me, and Watkins at first gave me over for dead. But whatever his fingers felt as he searched the wound in my chest gave him hope enough to have me carried on a pallet to a rooming house just three doors down from his own.

It was there that he removed the dag’s shorn firing pin from my chest; there that I would remain for the next several weeks, never entirely out of danger, never fully conscious. And it was there that James was to weave one of his most successful fictions, in which he and his younger brother and Doctor Johnson had all three been accosted by a masked footpad and taken to the timber-yard, there to be robbed and murdered. In this version of the story, I struggled with the masked man, the man’s cheap weapon exploded, and he was able to flee the scene, never to be heard from again.

Certainly Doctor Watkins had no reason to disbelieve this tale, nor the elderly woman hired to nurse me. And it may be that the glamour of it even secured me more solicitous care than I might otherwise have received.

What is worth noting, however, is that Johnson himself was never to contradict this story, not then and never after. Perhaps at first he thought I was all but certain to die, and therefore it mattered little how the events themselves were represented. And as I gained strength, James made it clear that he planned to transfer me back to Plymouth when I could be moved.

But more importantly, the night at the Turk’s Head had fundamentally changed Johnson’s relationship with my brother. While it had always been curiously strong, particularly for an acquaintance of seven weeks’ duration, now it was granite.

Would they have been so joined without my efforts to wedge them apart?

No one can say, and I have ever after been more than diligent in my efforts to avoid considering the ironies.

But one thing is certain: Johnson had seen that James was willing to die for him, finally, and no man can see such a thing and remain unmoved. Wherever they two might find themselves in the world, divided even by countries or whole continents, they were now emotionally inseparable, and that for life.

And they would look out for one another, legalities be damned,
ethics be damned. Only two weeks earlier, Johnson had counseled James to keep a daily journal “fair and undisguised,” and James had admitted that he had been doing so since coming up to London. Johnson lavished praise on him for being so far advanced in such a project.