The Brothers Boswell (34 page)

It is all Boswell can do to name the same day a week hence.

“Done! And then, Mr. Boswell,” Garrick says, turning on his heel and calling the last words brightly over his shoulder, “the cups shall dance and the saucers skip!”

* * *

Boswell is so exceedingly delighted when he walks out into the thin sunlight again that it is all he can do to restrain himself from hailing another hackney coach. It is a good long walk in the cold back to Downing Street, but he comes quickly to his senses: the fact is that he’s already pledged himself to skip several meals in order to cover the cost of the room at the Black Lion last night, as well as the coach to it and from it.

Still, the walk is colder even than he expected, and by the time Whitehall dwindles into Parliament Street, he has given up replaying the Garrick incident and is concentrating entirely on covering distance and warming his fingers. So bent is he on reaching his lodgings that Boswell nearly brushes past his brother John idling on the corner of Downing Street before he recognizes him.

Although John is bent forward looking into an apothecary’s window, finger brushing against the glass, there is no mistaking the head and ears rising up out of the drab brown surtout. He takes John gently by the shoulder, startling him still.

“Johnny!” Boswell says, more genuine concern creeping into his voice than he suspects John will bear. “Had we arranged to meet today? Am I late again? I
am
sorry if so. You look frozen solid.”

John chafes his hands together, and Boswell sees he has no gloves. It suddenly strikes him that John’s entire appearance today has something slightly haphazard to it, from his hat, which he has jammed down over his forehead, to his breeches and stockings, which are spattered with street dirt, as though he dressed in the dark and began walking before the sun was up. There is something wild in his appearance that is more than the sum of its various details.

But John smiles easily. “No, Jemmie, we had no plan. You can be sure that if we had, I wouldn’t have waited so long for you as I’ve done. But I thought I might drop by and entice you away from your writing. Your landlord said you might be back soon.”

“But has not Mr. Terrie offered you a warm place to sit indoors? Or offered to let you into my rooms? I will speak to him if he has not. I will
berate
him, in fact.”

John jams his fists into the pockets of his overcoat, and Boswell can see that sitting under the eye of Mr. Terrie for twenty minutes or a half an hour would be torture, and worse than torture should Mr. Terrie decide to make conversation.

He stops John before he can answer: “We shall take it out of Mr. Terrie’s hands entirely by having a set of keys made for you. And I shall tell Mr. Terrie that he must accept your presence as he would my own. What say you to that?”

John’s face brightens, but as it does Boswell’s own heart is suddenly freighted with guilt. He has shown his brother so little of the City, has offered so little of himself, and his meditations of last night come back to him.

It could hardly be helped, Boswell thinks, given John’s surprise arrival just at the point where Boswell’s plans were moving into their most demanding phases. Yet the fact remains that he has seen John almost not at all, and when he has, Boswell has generally reduced their hours together to a line or two in his journal, as though shielding even its pages from the sudden fact of John’s presence. He strikes a bargain instantly with himself that he will make this day John’s most memorable yet in London, and his heart buoys up immediately.

But when the evening is through—after an admirably silly performance of Brome’s
Jovial Crew
, after John has said good night and trudged off toward his own anonymous rooms—Boswell finds himself bent over his journal, rereading the entry for the day that he has just penned.

I dined nowhere, but drank tea at Love’s, and at night went to Covent Garden gallery and saw The Jovial Crew. My frame still thrilled with pleasure, and my want of so much rest last night gave
me an agreeable languor. The songs revived in my mind many gay ideas, and recalled in the most lively colors to my imagination the time when I was first in London, when all was new to me, when I felt the warm glow of youthful feeling and was full of curiosity and wonder. I then had at times a degree of ecstasy of feeling that the experience which I have since had has in some measure cooled and abated. But then my ignorance at that time is infinitely excelled by the knowledge and moderation and government of myself which I have now acquired. After the play I came home, eat a Bath cake and a sweet orange, and went comfortably to bed.

The writing is passable, Boswell allows, but one thing about the entry is inescapable, even in his fatigue: John is nowhere to be seen.

It is Boswell’s last thought before snuffing his candle, that he has methodically created two lives, one that John may share, and one closed and hidden away from his brother. He has made of his life a series of nested boxes, and allowed John access only to the outermost, the plainest and shabbiest—the least Boswell, in short, of all the boxes.

Still, as he lies in the dark, winter keening quietly outside the window, Boswell tells himself that it simply isn’t to be helped. For the moment, it is all he can do to wedge the door to London society open far enough to force his own shoulder inside.

Later, John may follow with far less trouble, and he should be content with that prospect. Boswell even allows himself a bit of manufactured annoyance with his brother’s unspoken demands.
For when all is said and done
, he thinks just as sleep begins to move over him,
I am eldest.

W
ITHIN A WEEK
, as though his fleeting thought has closed a pending enchantment of some sort, Boswell’s life is in ruins.

Every noble prospect before him has been overthrown, completely and methodically smashed; and what is worse, it couldn’t be any
clearer that completely and methodically smashed is what God Himself now fully intends Boswell’s various plans to be. For each of Boswell’s three Grand Enterprises the Lord has carefully matched with a stunning disappointment, one per day for three days running.

It began Tuesday, the 18th of January. Boswell was invited to the Sheridans’, to speak with Mrs. Sheridan about the prologue he had written for her new comedy. Although he would detest himself for it later that evening, Boswell literally sang in the street as he went, so ecstatic was he with the idea of hearing his lines spoken in Drury Lane on opening night. And having heard Garrick praise them only days before, Boswell could only congratulate himself on the prospect of hearing that all was settled.

But before Boswell had taken more than a sip or two of his tea, Thomas Sheridan leaned over to tap him on the knee, a bit roughly. The man’s long, pale face hovered uncomfortably close, the faint bite of brandy there on his breath. “Why, sir, don’t you ask about your prologue?” Sheridan prompted.

“Indeed, sir, I am too indifferent,” Boswell replied with a smile, after an awkward moment’s pause.

Sheridan put on a sober look, but deep in the eyes was a twinkle of malice. “Well, but prepare your utmost philosophy.”

Boswell felt his stomach tilt. “How so?”

“It is weighed in the balances and found light.”

“What, it is not good?”

“Indeed,” Sheridan replied, shooting a glance at his wife, “I think it is very bad.”

The next hour was one long pedantic nightmare: Sheridan pointing out supposed flaws in Boswell’s lines, one by one, and shouting him down whenever Boswell made bold to defend them. Yet the connection was too valuable to throw away in an argument, and Boswell managed to smile and take it.

He slept very poorly and awoke the next morning, Wednesday
the 19th, to the odd sensation of heat in his groin, an intense heat at that: reaching down, he found his left testicle had swollen in the night to the size of a ripe plum.

Boswell sat up suddenly in his bed, the bedclothes scattered about him, and he could feel a cold sweat break at his hairline, then work its way quickly over his entire body. He clung to the faint hope that perhaps he had simply strained himself somehow during his various rendezvous with Louisa over the last several days.

But as the afternoon wore on, even that scant hope dwindled. He tried his best to make light—“Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhea,” he quipped in his journal—but a weight bore down on his chest, and having spent Tuesday night despising Sheridan, he lay awake deep into Wednesday night hating Louisa, and then himself.

By the next morning, Thursday the 20th—when Molly walked into his dining room during breakfast with an elaborately sealed letter—Boswell knew enough to let the letter lie a moment. There was an Old Testament quality to his days suddenly, and he had the eerie sense that he could hope for nothing but retribution in the post.

However there was no escaping it, finally.

And indeed, the letter was from the Duke of Queensberry, with whom Boswell had an appointment in several hours, an appointment to which he had looked forward for weeks. Clearly the note was meant to pre-empt the meeting: the duke repeated his high regard and his desire to help, but made it sufficiently clear that a commission in the Guards was a fantasy and no more.

The rest of that Thursday passed in a treacherous haze. Boswell felt nauseous and weak as he moved about the icy streets, boots sliding between the cobbles, clutching his coat about him to fight the chills, and conducting the anxious self-examinations that hypochondriacs have no choice but to conduct.

Other than his rejection by the duke, he could later remember
only two scenes from that very long day when he sat down to record it that evening. His friend Douglas, a surgeon of some reputation, had confirmed that Boswell’s was a very strong infection indeed and might take months to cure.

And then, in a fit of righteous anger, Boswell had gone straight to Louisa’s flat and broken with her, as directly and indignantly and hurtfully as he was able.

She had seemed quite genuinely surprised at first, had Louisa. She’d sworn her innocence, sworn the infection could not have come from her, sworn she loved him and could never hurt him so. Boswell answered her arguments, but in truth he was taken aback by the force of her insistence.

Still, she is an actress, after all
, Boswell told himself harshly,
and most likely a consummate dissembling whore.

He swore in his own turn that he had been with no other woman for the last two months. And his own surgeon had told him that the woman who had given him the infection could not have been ignorant of it. “Madam,” Boswell finished stiffly, “I wish much to believe you. But I own I cannot upon this occasion believe a miracle.”

“Sir,” she said, reaching for his hand, but not before Boswell was able to snatch it back, “I cannot say more to you. But you will leave me in the
greatest
misery. I shall lose your esteem. I shall be hurt in the opinion of everybody, and in my circumstances.”

He left her actually in tears, still begging leave to inquire after his health. “Madam,” Boswell had archly replied, his hand on the doorknob, “I fancy that will be needless for some weeks.”

And while he was proud of the line for most of his walk back to Downing Street, and thought it would look savage and fine in his account of the breakup, by the time he reached his flat Boswell thought worse of himself for it, all the more for insisting that there had been absolutely no women other than she, which was not strictly true. There had been the girl in the yellow bonnet, of course,
though Boswell had been scrupulously careful there and had done nothing more than toy with her a bit, in this way or that, and so had run no risk, to his way of thinking.

Still, his own small inconsistency nagged at him and sapped his vengeance.

And the following morning, when it couldn’t be avoided for another moment, Boswell entered purgatory itself: he was to remain in his rooms, stay warm, eat little, and what little he did eat was to be plain and easily digestible, toast and tea and weak veal broth and the like. Douglas would drop by his medicines—chalky acidic masses slathered with what tasted like spoiled honey—and bleed him in case of swelling.

Company was allowed, if kept to a reasonable minimum, and Boswell clung to it as a lifeline. Seeing from his window a chariot stop at his door did more to cleanse his blood than anything Douglas could prescribe.

After a miserable day or two, his afternoons were tolerably full: Lord Eglinton came to see him, and the Scottish Lord Advocate, as well as his friends Erskine and Dempster.

John too visited him, faithfully, but mornings only. Boswell had told him, with more than a grain of truth, that by afternoon he was exhausted, and it would be best to meet over breakfast, when Boswell was fresh. John was good enough to respect his wishes, and came bearing newspapers and oranges.

But Boswell had no illusions; he knew very well that he was keeping John at arm’s length from the rest of his company, but he could no longer bring himself to care. He was sick, and struggling to hold his own life and fortunes together. John was stout and healthy, and must look after himself.

A
LL IN ALL
, Boswell has been a model patient for the better part of the last two weeks. But tonight, February 3, marks the opening of Mrs. Sheridan’s new comedy,
The Discovery
, the very play from
which his prologue was so brutally snipped. For some perverse reason, he cannot bear the thought of missing the first performance. Something in him rebels at the idea of passing this particular night at home, ill, diseased, forgotten.