The Brothers Boswell (5 page)

I brought out the second dag from its pocket beneath my right arm, and she was immediately silent. I held the two of them in front of her, and we looked at them together. They were lovely things, the pair of them, Doune locks so that they might be half-cocked, ready to fire as they were drawn. Shortened barrels for riding snug in a fitted inside pocket, each no longer than the tip of my finger to the heel of my hand. Balanced in the way that only a brace of Highland flintlocks will balance.

And of gold. Not merely inlaid with gold, not merely gold-mounted, but entirely of gold, though not polished up: the deeper luster of gold gentled into everyday use, like a wedding band or a dark golden comb. They were like something royalty might wear or wield, that massy and that enchanting, without hollow or alloy. Only the shot and the powder itself were black, deep in their chambered hearts. And even those bullets the smith dusted with gold, so intent was he upon completely transforming the brutal into the lovely.

“Bonnie things, aren’t they, Peggy Doig?”

She knew better than to say no. “If ye say so, sir.”

Peggy had never before seen such things, clearly. And neither had I before these came into my possession. Only blue steel is strong enough to bear repeated firing without melting or exploding, everyone knows it. But the maker of these cared nothing for constant use. These were designed to be used once or, in great necessity, twice each. The goldsmith who had them before me told me they were poured for an assassin in King George’s pay: each dag designed to fire one bullet into the head of one target, and then the pair to be melted down and converted into the killer’s reward. George had ordered one bullet for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the other for Flora Macdonald, the Prince’s ally on the island of Skye, she who dressed him as a waiting maid and spirited him to France.

At least this was the goldsmith’s cant. But whatever the truth of their history, the dags have spoken to my heart these last weeks in London, the wonder and the rage, and for that reason I can sit sometimes in my small room near the Bridge and stare down at the pair of them in my hands for an hour or even two together, and never note the ticking of the clock. If envy truly has a color, that color is not green, but gold.

I clinked the barrels one against another, and she flinched.

“Shall I ask my questions, then?”

She drew in a little shudder of breath, laid her head back on the pillow, eyes on the window. Then she nodded. Her hand went to the linen at her thigh, and she drew the garment down further, held it down, hand knotted in the thin material. She didn’t want me to see the move, because she was thinking about how to guard what lay beneath, despite what I’d said. But I looked at the hand, then back into her eyes.

“You needn’t worry about your woman’s honor. I could not be less interested, I assure you. And I think it only fair to point out that your excessive concern comes a bit late in the game. But I am here to do two things, and the first is to satisfy my own curiosity. I must ask you those few things I have no way of knowing for myself. First off, what did James have to say about your own situation today? What said he on that score?”

“My situation, sir?”

“Don’t play the fool. That situation in which you and James searched diligently beneath one another’s clothing and discovered a baby.”

A short pause. “He said I mustn’t ever fall into such a scrape again.”

I laughed, quietly but from deep down. I could not help myself, for the life of me. “I thought as much. That was merely a question to confirm what I knew had to be so. Now my real question, Peggy Doig, that which only you can answer for me.”

She braced for it, and I could see authentic curiosity kindling.

“It is this.” I took in the young, spotless skin, the artless cascade of her hair. Her nose was long and very thin, turned down at the tip, a single element of elegance in an otherwise freckled, rustic face.

“Why do you let him make a nothing of you?”

She brought her gaze back to me, but there was perplexity there. “Sir?”

“A
nothing
,” I whispered at her. “He pushed you or he wheedled you into giving yourself up to him in Edinburgh, and he treated you like a rag doll he kept in a closet above the flat, to play with at his leisure. And when he’d played with you and got you with child, he threw you back into the closet where he found you, with ten pounds for your trouble.”

Someone yelled in the street, and she waited before answering me, as though the voice might belong to someone coming to her aid. But then she spoke. Her own voice was gravelly with swallowed tears, but she defended him—and, I suppose, the child. “He’s taken notice of the lad, sir. He’s said the boy’s to be called Boswell. He’s said he ain’t ashamed if ’tis known.”

“Of
course
it is to be called Boswell. Do you not see? Everything must bear his name, like a knock-off pamphlet. This is hack publication, not fatherhood.”

“He’s set us up a nurse for him. The boy’s to be schooled when he’s of an age.”

“It means
nothing
, you silly
hamely
Scots fool. Nothing in kindness, nothing in law. The boy will inherit nothing, and James will do little for him but encourage his dissatisfactions. But that is beside the point. My question pertains to you. Why do you allow James
yourself
, here, now, after what has passed? Why do you seek him out, when he has cast you off and left you to litter on your own down some cold little Edinburgh wynd?”

It was a question she couldn’t answer, for modesty, or shame, or self-loathing.

“Is it that he’s had you, and you think yourself without value to anyone else? God grant it is not that you
love
him, Peggy Doig, or that you believe that you’ve taken over some small portion of James’s heart. Because there is only room for one in that desiccated heart of his, and he is himself already lodged there.”

I held the golden pistol-butt to her cheek again. She twisted away from it. “Why, Peggy Doig? Enlighten me. Why do you suffer him? Why do you defend his smutty hands on you? What could there possibly be to draw you back to him? It can’t be money, because he offered money only when you’d agreed to take the child and leave him in peace.”

She said nothing, moved not a muscle.

“God’s plague on you, girl! Answer me! Why?” I spat the question at her, bringing my face down much closer to hers. But she closed her eyes tightly again, rolled to her side.

We stayed that way for a few seconds. I could see in her breathing that she’d mastered the tears. She was still shocked, but now looking to live through this strangeness. Beneath the new London linen and the tears, she was a hardened little Canongate
deemie
, and, when all was said and done, she trusted my country and the cut of my coat. Edinburgh gentlemen don’t murder girls in garrets. They may beat them, they may starve them, or both, over and over again, but the girls live to tell the tale.

And then she answered. “I’m sorry—I can’t say, sir. I don’t
know
why, sir, truly I don’t. I don’t know, I don’t.”

“You know why. You sent him a letter telling him how to find you, and when the way would be clear, you waited here for him like a little pussy in the sun. Don’t tell me you don’t know why, Peggy Doig. Don’t insult me that way. I won’t have it.”

“You think me a hizzie, but it ain’t so.” Her voice was pleading, as much with herself as with me. “I don’t know why, but still he’s father to my boy, sir. It’s wrong what we done today, I know’t. But he’s my lad’s only hope in the world.”

“Then in fact the lad is hopeless. You must see that. You must
sense
that, if you have any sense or any heart at all.”

And then she brought out some small part of the whole, before she could stop herself, something I might have expected and that I’m sure she believed. Whether or not she thought saying it would help her leave the garret alive, or whether she thought it was her last word before dying, she blurted it out and it was as sincere as a child’s prayer in a hurricane: “Mr. Boswell’s a lovely man. He’s a lovely happy man to be with, whatever else. You know it yourself, sir.”

I held my breath, and I uncocked the dags, because I could not trust myself not to shoot her by impulse alone. The anger was awake now, entirely awake and livid, pouring through my chest, down my arms. I could feel it heating my cheeks. But it wasn’t her, I realized that even in the midst of it, so much as it was him and what he’d done to the inside of her little black head. A thing that only James could manage: he’d made her genuinely grateful for his whoring her out to himself.

But I’d expected something similar before I entered the room. And I had laid my own plans as well. So I told her the very least of what she should know. “Listen well, fool. I followed your lovely happy man this morning, you know, every step of the way before he came to you, and I can tell you that you weren’t the first he had before his cup of tea.”

She threw her arm over her face, twisted on the bed.

“He was with the nymphs in St. James’s Park, Peggy Doig, and by my count you were number three this day. Three as in one more than two, and one less than four. And you may very well not be the last. And don’t think for an instant that your Charles will be the last of his kind either. He likes his housemaids, James does, and waiting maids and laundry maids and charwomen, and if you’re wondering why he’s a happy man it’s because the Kingdom’s packed to the rafters with them.”

A whisper, barely audible: “Don’t say sich things. Please, sir. Just leave me be.”

“But I said there were two things I’ve come to do. The second is to give you this.” From my coat I took a small heavy leather purse, and I threw it onto the mat next to her. It bounced and clinked and settled, and she knew it was full of guineas without once touching it. Her hands stayed where they were, but she looked at it, and the hand went back to her smicket, holding it down against her leg.

“There are fifteen guineas there. As much, I should imagine, as you would make in two years of trundling your mop. With the ten James has given you, you have now twenty-five in total, a small fortune for a girl such as yourself. It is yours upon one condition only, and that is that you never see James again. Never for a moment, even.”

She was still covering her face, but she was listening, searching the sky beyond the window, breath coming in small slow gasps. A part of her had begun to hope against hope, even amid the horrors of the morning, that she might somehow be bailed from the confinement of her own life. She had no way of knowing that the guineas, like the letters, had been taken from James’s rooms last night, while he was sitting up late with Johnson and his stone-blind charity-case Miss Williams.

I went on, letting her mind work. “Now that he knows where to find you, now that he knows this room, and the trick of the coffin-maker’s stair, he will be back, and soon. His talk about many months was a fit of post-coital responsibility. And when he comes back it won’t be for anything but finally to consume you, like a left-over pudding, for which he has a half-hearted late-night craving. That is the long and short of it. And in so doing he’ll ensure that you destroy even what little security you have here, which is little indeed, and it will all be lovely and happy until you are cast out onto the street, and in the end he will be not a particle the worse for wear.

“And that is why I insist that you leave London, and take up Charles again from whatever Edinburgh foster-mother you’ve found for him, and make yourself a new nest somewhere far from James Boswell and his grimy doings.”

She rolled over, lifted herself on an arm, swiped at her damp, blotchy cheek. Her tone was tinged with an unmistakable outrage, something of which I wouldn’t have imagined her capable, in her position.

“How can you say these things of him? How
can
ye? You of all people, who know the man
best
, sir? He is your brother, after all, i’nt he?
In’t
he now?”

I cocked the dag audibly in my right hand, and I shuffled closer to her on the bed, so that the barrel came to rest against the skin of her throat. And then, because I truly could not prevent myself, I felt myself surge forward and the barrel sank deeper still into the sinews of her neck. Panic flooded back into her eyes, and she gave a little involuntary cry, face crushed down into the pillow.

I held it there for a long instant, my hand actually shaking with rage, until I had my voice again. “Here it is, girl. If I catch you with James again, I will kill you, and I will kill your son Charles. I’ll slaughter you both—listen well to me, now—and no one will protect you, no one will keep you safe. Not the watch, not James, not an army of brothers-in-law. Better that you should both be dead, and pennies rusting on both your eyes, than that he should unravel the stuff of your lives like a nasty child savaging a rag doll. Believe me, Peggy Doig, when I say this, for I am genuinely mad. The fact has been proven, and the best doctors at Plymouth have washed their hands of me. So you will take this money, and you will make a life for yourself in which James has no part, because whatever part he makes up will go rotten sooner rather than later, and no one knows it better, as you say, than I myself.”

I drew back the pistol, and her breath came in a coughing rush,
as did fresh tears. But I had no more time to argue, and without another word I withdrew from the bed and stepped to the door.

Before opening it, I said, “Your letters are in my pocket now, and I shall keep them. Think of that when you think about telling your sister or anyone else of what’s happened between us this morning. I can find you anywhere in the Kingdom, should you and James see one another again, because I know everything that James knows, and always will. If I were you, I’d let it be said that your boy died of the smallpox, or by pitching off the back of a fishing boat, and I’d smuggle him off somewhere else, somewhere fresh. But whatever I did, I would separate my life and my line from the Boswells, for once and for good. If I loved my little bairn. If I wanted what was indeed best.”