ONE OF THOSE piddling details even James would decline to include about the most perfect day of his life: what he did prior to showing up on Johnson’s doorstep this morning.
He left Downing Street an hour before daybreak, whistling a silky air in the quiet street. It is difficult to shadow a man at that hour; there are few enough about to make any single shape stand out after a block or more. And I cannot risk even a single close glance, as there is not a man alive who knows my clothing, my walk, my air so well as James. But the difficulty was more apparent than real: in turn, I know James well enough to predict where he was most likely headed.
And so I waited for him a block and a half away, in St. James’s Park. During the day the Park is drill-ground for the Footguard, and playground for ladies and gentlemen of the Court, and of course at ten o’clock in the evening, the Park’s many doors are all closed and locked with a great show of punctuality. And it all means absolutely nothing: there are seven thousand official keys scattered about the city, and ten thousand counterfeits taken in wax from these original seven.
As a result, the Park is a very different place after dark and before the dawn. This difference is what James continually craves and must have.
At that hour, with the moon down and the sun still skulking below the horizon, the forest in the center of the Ring remains an impenetrable black. The endless winding brick wall surrounding the Park is likewise invisible in the darkness. But within this gloom, the vast empty dirt-packed space of the Ring itself takes on a dull luminosity, picks up the leavings of the moon and gives back a quarter-light, just enough to perceive the outline of figures moving at one slowly from the trees.
And they come, these figures, these women, at the first hint of movement. Stepping out from the oaks, rising from dark prone humps on the dirt. Country girls in chip hats and red cloaks, middle-aged jades simulating country girls in chip hats and red cloaks. Faces pallid with ceruse. And in snagged yarn stockings and leather shoes. Home-spun gowns and gypsy hats. Greasy cotton dresses topped by small natty capes, these coqueluchons thrown open with a butcher’s matter-of-factness, should you rest your gaze at the bodice, even for a moment.
These women are gifted, more than most, with the predatory intuitions of the city. They came toward me when I entered the park, but after three or four steps they stopped, rested on their scraped leather heels, sensing. They marked the value of my suit, the angle of my hat, the drop of my lace. But even in the quarter-light there was something off-putting in my air, and they slowly moved off again. They saw in my stride that my purpose here in the Park was not complementary to their own. That I was somehow, just perceptibly, working at cross-purposes.
There is a large stair that drops down in stages from a set of townhouses in the southeast corner of the Park wall, and they allowed me to step unmolested into the shadow of that stair and lean against the damp brick.
But when James sauntered through a small archway away off to my left, the woman nearest him picked up his trajectory immediately, because there was nothing at all in his air that bespoke caution, or prudence. Far from it, in fact. The violet suit managed to pierce even the dark at the wall, and when he moved to the Ring, it was nothing like the furtive movements these women must see so often. No, he approached them with a clear relish, like a fond country squire come to rough-house with his pack of hunting dogs.
James knows very well the codes and the jealousies of these women, and he played with their need. The small young tart who picked him up as he entered wore a long blue hooded cloak, and James received her with a delicate bow. They began to walk the Ring together. No doubt he was asking price, name, any fictitious scrap of personal history—born in Shropshire, married young, widowed, new to the trade this night—because he collects these mendacious little wisps for his journal, the way other men collect porcelain or statuary.
In his turn, James is always a highwayman, or a black-listed actor, or a half-pay officer, a bit deaf from cannon fire. His assumed characters are always plucky but impoverished, and nearly always will James try to wheedle his way out of paying for what crude pleasures he takes. Very occasionally he saves a shilling or two this way, but it is the pretense itself that always delights James. As much as they are about having sex, these expeditions into the park are always also about having other selves, silly childish romanticized selves, and it is impossible to say which particle of his need I find the more pitiable.
This morning he was careful not to take the first woman’s hand, nor did he allow his own arm to be taken. Instead, he strolled along, with the nymph strolling beside him, until—at some line invisible to him and to me—the nymph grew a bit more frantic and tried to halt his progress, tried to jolly him and pull at his coat, hook it with her nails. But James did not halt. He ambled just past the invisible line, saying what would amount to his good-byes, until the next woman drifted out from the trees, to cover her own sixteenth of the Ring. He repeated this process again and again, with drab after disposable drab.
In this way, James had what he most desired: their need for his money, expressed as need for James himself, and brought to its most powerful expression again and again at each invisible boundary.
When he eventually selected, he selected not one but two, a tall and a short, black hair and blonde, and he took them to a segment of the wall past the Old Horse Guards building. I could smell the metallic tang of the ceruse, they passed so close to my own blind. He took them to a kind of shallow brick alcove where the women unhooked and unlaced and set ajar the fronts of their gowns, and slouched casually against him as he moved his hands over them. He dropped his face into the common mass of their hair, inundating himself with their smell, their reality. The taller woman used the flat of her hand to burnish the front of his breeches, with as much care and passion as she might use to whitewash spit from a tavern wall.
He stood and fondled them and bartered lies with them, those two Shropshire innocents new to the trade. A veteran of the wars in the Havana, he whispered, a peer of the Realm cruelly cheated of my inheritance. But it went no further, no further than what James innocently calls toying. It went no further because James did not come to the Park in search of consummation, but merely to have his passion tuned for his real tryst of the morning. A young Edinburgh girl, actually, come up to Town just two days ago. A girl James knows quite well.
One Peggy Doig. A housemaid, and mother of his eight-month-old natural son.
Fortunately, dear Peggy’s lodgings lay up the Strand, on a perfect bee-line between the Park and Johnson’s rooms in the Temple, and so once James had settled his double reckoning, and then fastidiously splashed his hands at a street well near Charing Cross, there was no need for him to take even a step out of his way.
FROM HER FAMILY ’S dingy tenement on the south back of the Canongate in Edinburgh, Peggy Doig has traveled to London and landed finally in a flat above a disheveled chandler’s shop up the Strand. Still, it must seem awfully grand to her. The building rubs shoulders uncomfortably with an iron-monger on one side and a coffin-maker on the other. From her bitty garret window, she can no doubt take in both the stench of the smelting fire and the sweet pine-shavings smell of new death. The shop is owned by her brother-in-law, the candle-maker.
Her older sister keeps house here and works on-again-off-again as a parish midwife. Twice has the parish sent a different young girl to clean house for the couple, to allow Peggy’s sister to devote herself entirely to wrestling infants from the growing number of parishioners out of whom they must be wrestled. Twice has the couple found fault with the young mop-squeezers in question and sent them away. One was beaten—badly, I take it—and then sent packing, though she is agreed to have been so provoking as to have asked for it.
Eventually it was decided within the larger Doig family that rather than clean house for an aging widow in Edinburgh, at poor wages, Peggy might just as well serve her sister in London for none. If the family knew that the father of her bastard had also been in London for a year, they seem not to have cared a whit.
The girl wrote James a short, inarticulate note two days ago, explaining and all but apologizing for her sudden presence in London, and finally offering—should he have a moment free some afternoon—to meet and pass on tidings of his child.
This letter of Peggy’s I have now, this moment, in my coat pocket.
I found it nestled in the lining of James’s tea-chest last night, alongside a small packet of letters to John Johnston, a childhood friend who has managed the whole awkward affair of the birth this year that James has been in England. It was Johnston who attended the mother following the birth, held the infant, and saw to it that the boy was named Charles, in accordance with the wishes of the father, who happened that night to be attending a rout thrown by the Countess of Northumberland, some four hundred miles away. It was Johnston who passed on the money to set the child up with a wet-nurse, and to keep the Doigs from noising the business about.
This whole packet of letters I have in my pocket, in fact, the stiff paper rasping against the cloth. It rides there like a hornets’ nest, fragile, intricate, almost entirely defined by its potential for pain.
James wrote back that he’d love to see her, and see her for more than a moment, but that she must arrange something private for them.
And so yesterday Peggy wrote James a second letter, much more to the point. It told him the number of the house, how to enter by the doorway of the coffin-maker next door, which served her staircase just as well, how to reach the room she now had of her own, the garret four flights up. The garret itself had no lock—this by design, one must imagine, to make the watching and the beating of housemaids that little bit easier on the chandler’s wife. The letter hinted that the chandler would be occupied by his early customers— it was all but unheard of for him to leave his shop before the noon meal—and that the midwife would be sitting with a woman in the last hours of her confinement. Peggy might steal an hour or more before she began her work for the day, she said, by working twice as fast in the afternoon. James was to rap thrice at the garret door.
She said that it would be sweet to see him again, after such an absence. Sweet, that was the very word she used.
I could have told her that James would not be content with an hour. But she didn’t need anyone to tell her about James and his particular appetites, after all.
For the record, I was right: it was more than two and a half hours from the time he entered to the time James exited the coffin-maker’s door and stood again on the street. He couldn’t have looked any more self-satisfied. Rather than attract attention by dashing away, he made a point of pausing and seeming to examine a small dark mahogany coffin standing erect in the window. He studied it from several angles, playing the grieving father. Then, to complete the effect, he called the carpenter over and dickered with him over the child’s box for a moment or two, before cheerfully giving it up and heading on up the Strand.
I stayed with him until he finally rang for Johnson, and I watched the two of them walk arm in arm to Child’s, where they took their seats and called for their coffee. And then I turned back to the coffin-maker’s shop, and Peggy’s garret.
I had about forty-five minutes, as near as I could reckon it. The coffee would take them at least half an hour, and you could bet your soul the two wouldn’t be leaving before James had had his dish of chocolate as well.
BEFORE SHE MET James, Peggy was housemaid to Mrs. MacKenna, who still owns the floor above the Boswell flat in Parliament Square. By chance James saw the girl one morning, sprawled in the staircase, scrubbing the steps with a pail of damp sand.
Her hands were brown from rottenstoning the widow’s risp and doorknob. But her small feet were bare and white, and James was immediately entranced by them.
He wrote later to Johnston that they were more temptation than any man could stand, these two dainty lumps of muscle and toenail. “My father,” he wrote, “had always insisted that stockings and shoes be worn in the tenement’s common staircase, and given that this was the express wish not simply of a fellow tenant, but of a High Court Justice, it was obeyed by all the building’s inhabitants as a very commandment. And yet here was this girl, and here were her pretty naked feet, lying like opals cast among the sand.”
I thought of these words because the feet were the first part of her I saw when I rapped thrice, then turned the handle very quietly, and opened the door an inch or two. They lay there on the counterpane before me, the very feet themselves. And to me they seemed like the feet of a young housemaid, just as much as would support her in wielding a broom, nothing more nor less. A bit dustier at the sole than one might wish them. Nothing to covet. Nothing to make a man risk an inheritance.
She’d obviously decided to have a well-deserved catnap before setting about the cleaning her sister had assigned her for the day. The morning light was falling on her from the garret window, and she was curled in it, a drowsy dark-haired creature, with her back to me.
But she was not yet asleep. “Mr. Boswell,” she murmured, without raising her tousled head. Instead, she moved a strand of hair from her face, clearing her pretty profile, and then lay the arm down again, quiescent.
I made a humming noise in my throat that might be taken for assent. Not an intelligible word, hence not a lie, but a sound.
And in this case, of course, even a yes would not have been entirely amiss.
At the sound, a hint of mischief touched up the corner of her mouth. She was enjoying London, it seems. I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. My boots on the floorboards, I imagine, sounded no different than the oh-so-careful step of her child’s sire.
“You said I shouldn’t see you for many months,” she murmured, her voice thick with half-sleep. The voice was also playful and pleased, pleased that Mr. Boswell had not refused to see her altogether in London but had in fact come all the way to her room and broken his passion to her again, after so many months of silence; pleased that he had deigned to speak with her about their child, almost as though they were parents, man and wife even, they two together, rather than merely two dumb creatures who had come together in a rut to multiply; pleased that he could not resist returning this morning for more of her; pleased with the world, suddenly; pleased as punch with herself.
She stretched on the bed, in nothing but a rumpled white smicket, unbending the white leg with its tracery of black down, languidly flexing the foot, no doubt bracing for the grip of James’s hands on her thigh, her shoulders, her hip. As I say, she needed no one to tell her of his appetites.
It was a quiet, warm little room, although I could hear horses’ hooves and ostlers’ curses drifting up from the Strand. Other than the small bed, the garret was devoid of furnishings. Almost entirely devoid: her battered travel trunk she had covered with a strip of cheap lace, and on this strip she had placed her pins, a brush, her mob cap. A tiny, pretend dressing table.
I went to the bed and sat at the bottom of it. My weight caused her body to dip toward me slightly on the straw-filled matt. She did nothing to counter the movement, but rested almost coyly in mid-motion, so that a simple nudge at her hip would have brought her rolling over to me. This is how ready to hand she was for him. I took one of the dags from its holster in the lining of my coat, and I laid it across my knee.
“Good Mr. Boswell,” she cooed, eyes still closed, still facing the wall, still waiting. So passive was she in this foolery with James that she could not initiate even a look. She must wait to be rolled to her back, she must wait to be gazed upon.
I reached out a hand and took the hem of the smicket in my fingers, tugged it down sharply where it had ridden up on her leg.
“Cover yourself and be a woman, Peggy Doig,” I whispered back at her.
Her head jerked around, and in that instant I had my left hand over her mouth, and her head pushed back into the tan sack she’d been allowed as a pillow. Before she could struggle more than a bit, I brought the pistol up from my knee and touched the fat gold heart-shaped butt to her flushed cheek, held it there, the snubbed barrel an inch from her eye.
The kiss of the gold had its effect: she slumped back, limp as milktoast, breath coming in strained little hitches, but the eyes as open and seeing, no doubt, as they had ever been during her eighteen dun years of life.
Even before I could speak, the eyes began to swim.
I held her mouth, but I tipped the dag back from her face. “Peggy Doig, I want you to know that everything James knows, I know as well. I know that the chandler is below-stairs, and that you fear him only slightly less than you fear death itself. And so I know what will happen in the next ten minutes.”
She watched me, and there was recognition in that gaze, as I knew there would be. I went on, softening my tone.
“I will put away my pistol, you will lie still. And we will talk together. And then I shall leave, good as my word. But should you scream, I will scream louder, I will absolutely raise the house, and I will inform your brother-in-law of the details of your morning, or at least the last two and a half hours of it. I will show him your letters to James, and James’s by way of return. And he will need to leave off peddling his candles and bad beer and soap. You are not kind to him, or to your sister, in these little missives, you know. And so when he’s read them, you will suffer the fate of the previous mop-squeezers in this house, that is, to be beaten until you cannot walk, and then to be pitched out into the gutter like so much dirty tallow.”
I slowly pulled my hand from her mouth, and drew back.
“It’s you,” she managed to whisper. There was bewilderment in the word, and some faint whiff of something like betrayal.
“Me,” I said. She has seen me with James, seen me loafing at the Cross in Edinburgh, something half-glimpsed a hundred times but never brought into focus.
From my pocket, I drew the packet of letters, her last of yesterday on top and visible beneath the green silk ribbon. The swimming eyes closed tightly, and her face was suddenly wet, shining in the stray rays from the window.
“Open your eyes, Peggy Doig.”
She did so, managing a few strained, miserable words as well. I saw that her hands were clenching and unclenching mindlessly on the counterpane. “But what is it ye want, sir? I’ve not done anything to—”
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.”
She had curled into a small ball on the bed, head in her arms, hairy white legs doubled up beneath the chemise. The irresistible feet were buried miserably beneath the counterpane. She was crying, but so softly and forlornly that I lost the sound when I closed the garret door behind me. Whatever she might think of me, she thought nothing good of her brother-in-law the chandler. She didn’t want to call him out of his little hole full of candles and knick-knacks, even now.
I felt for her, truly I did. Her world was hemmed round by men for whom nothing good might be said, or so it must have seemed to her. She had no way of knowing that I had done her the single greatest kindness of her life.
I remain convinced of it, even today. For in February of 1764, only some six months after our morning’s discussion, James will be desultorily studying law in Utrecht, and he will receive a letter informing him that his illegitimate infant son has died. Without his ever having laid eyes on the boy, the boy will be no more. James will write pained letters to Johnston and a few other of his confidants, and he will actually shed a tear or two—he has that capacity—but in a week the subject will pass forever from his mind.
James will never bestir himself to attend a funeral, he will never see a body, and of course he will never lay eyes on pretty Peggy Doig again. And it sustains me, during these harsher, colder winters at the far end of my life, to imagine little Charles alive somewhere in the Hebrides or deep in the fields of the English countryside, a carpenter or a master printer by now, with no knowledge of his father and with no true understanding of his bliss.