ONE MORNING WHEN I was eight, I happened to be in the kitchen when the water caddie shuffled in with the first of the day’s two buckets of potable water. It was an event that happened like clockwork, each day about eleven, but for some reason that morning it struck me as a brilliant adventure, this quest for water. I took it into my head to follow the water caddie out to the pump below Parliament Square, and I begged my father’s servant William to ask her if I might.
So William asked this tired woman if I might go along, and she picked up the bucket of foul water he had standing by the door for her, and she smiled and said, “Ay, lad. For a bittock.”
But tagging along was not enough—to help was what I was mad after, and William rummaged in the pantry and found the smaller water barrel he used on holidays when the caddies stayed at home. There were straps for my arms, but before handing it to me, William looked at the dust collected on the slats and told me I’d best change into my oldest clothes, and leave off my waistcoat.
When I had changed, the squat older woman and I walked down to the street, where she emptied the bucket of our foul water into the gutter. We continued along the south wall of the Square, past the goldsmiths and the dressmaker’s shop, and then we descended the long Parliament Stair, what the woman called the Old Back Stair.
At the stone well, she stretched up to pull the small handle, while I steadied first her large tapered bucket, and then my own cask. But she let go the switch when the cask was little more than half full. “More than enough for you to carry, mannie,” she said.
Still, the cask was heavy enough to allow me the illusion that this woman and I were caddies hauling water together, workers. People in their flats would slake their thirsts because of my work. I imagined this process repeated a thousand times around the city, buckets and casks of water rising methodically into the air, to the very tops of the tallest tenements, a rainshower in reverse, an all but invisible daily miracle.
The caddie told me that I’d make a fine soldier one day, I carried so well and so uncomplainingly. And every woman loved a soldier, she added, showing her bad teeth and the pretty smile they could manage.
As we finished the climb of seventy-six steps, each of which I counted aloud to her, someone took me by the meaty part of my arm and spun me around. With the cask strapped to my back, it threw me off balance, and I nearly fell to the cobblestones. But the hand held me, and I found my feet.
It was my father, standing beside the tenement at the head of the stairs, staring in amazement at what he had in his grip. His forehead was creased in a way that meant not simply thunder, but lightning as well.
“What are ye doing, ye two?” he whispered incredulously. “What do ye think ye’re doing?” The caddie and I simply stared back, neither of us, I think, able to comprehend the crime.
Ignoring the woman altogether, my father took hold of my arm and marched me quickly toward Blair’s Land, berating me in a low whisper for dressing like a caddie to perform work well beneath the dignity of a common house servant. He’d been appointed Sheriff of Wigtownshire the year before, my father, and he was greasing already for appointment to the High Court. None of these plans included having his middle child seen tipping the waste-water bucket into the gutter or jabbering with water caddies.
Needless to say, from that day to this I have never again asked to carry water to the flat, and although the water caddie and I recognize one another from time to time in the Land’s staircase or on the High Street, we never speak a word. We each understand well enough that water and society both run downhill, and there is always something in her face that says making one of the two do otherwise is as much labor as she can spare.
ONE THING YOU will notice as I write this account is that my father’s simplest actions often require pages of explanation. His most complex, of course, require books. No one understands this better than my father, given as he is to seeing his own actions as formal decisions, decisions that beget interpretation.
So when my father orders me to haul the day’s water—to carry away the foul and return with the drinkable—it says many things to me. It says that he has already communicated this wish to William, hours before, so that William might turn away the water caddie for the day. This in turn means that my father anticipated my perjuring myself. He knew I would lie, and prepared a proper disgrace well beforehand.
It says also that William understands the disgrace, if not the reasons for it. This explains his uncomfortable look when I go back into the kitchen to ask for the same small watercask my father once stripped disgustedly off my back.
“There will be lines at the well,” William says apologetically, as though the lines will be of his own making.
My father is also saying this: What stands between carrying water and having it carried is not my birth, but his continuing good will.
Having lived through this same scene once before, however, I find myself strangely unruffled by it. In fact, I know just what to do: change my clothes, and leave off my waistcoat. And I know exactly into which clothes I should change.
Stuffed into the darkest rear corner of our shared wardrobe is a sack of clothing that James calls his See-Everything Suit. It is an assemblage of old caddie’s clothing he has put together from who knows where; but every once in a while when my parents are out, he will take off his modest everyday finery and put on the moleskin breeches and the rough linen shirt, wind the soiled white apron about his thick waist. He’ll slip on the battered blue wool bonnet, the shune with the dinged buckles. And then James will vanish into the city for an afternoon. He moves around the areas where he is not known, the Lawnmarket and Cowfeeder Row and the piers, venturing sometimes as far away as Leith or Blaw-Weary.
“A man sees everything this way,” he will maintain, when I can’t stop myself from mocking the whole charade. “Because if your silk suit clears the way in the playhouse, it blocks your way in all of the worlds adjoining it. No man wants the son of a judge watching him dead-weight his fish in the market, or whip his horse, or parade his mistress. But dress the part and you see the naked world itself. It is magic, Johnnie.”
I am laughing as quietly as I can as I pull on the various pieces of the See-Everything Suit. It looks better on me even than on James; because I am just that much taller, the pants look as though I outgrew them years ago. My wrists dangle out of the dirty sleeves, and I am just a skinnymalink, a nobody. But as far as I can figure it, there is not a single blessed thing my father can say should he see me shouldering my cask along dressed this way. Would he have me haul water in the clothes he has paid good money to have tailored for me? It is a brassy move, of course, but I have begun to feel the brass in me, as has James. We are growing up, we two.
Then I begin to laugh so hard that I actually have to sit down on my bed, because I’ve realized that the shoes don’t fit me, not nearly, and that my own new boots would give away the whole show. And that consequently there is nothing to be done except to go in my bare feet, which is done by a great many in this city, but, needless to say, never by a Boswell.
Never, ever. It is just shy of a hanging offense in our household.
I pull the bonnet down over my head and deliberate about it. But after only another second, I think of something that is simply too tempting to be resisted. If I go barefoot, I can tell James later that not only did I wear his secret suit, but that until he himself wears it without shoes, he hasn’t seen anything.
THE JOKE GOE S cold by the time I am halfway down the Parliament Stairs, quite literally. A nirly breeze is rushing through the Closes, an early taste of what the fishermen in the autumn call the shrinking wind. A tricky wind, the kind that dies and roars at precisely the right moments to upend tables in the market, hats and skirts, and occasionally to strip a sedan chair clean away from its chairmen.
But mostly what sours the joke is what I see as I descend the long line of stone stairs: a small crowd of people, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, grouped around the gray granite well, which looks like an eight-foot sentry-box but for the fact that it has no windows. The vessels these people have brought are spread out over the cobblestones in a long, ragged snaking line.
It is mostly women, maid-servants and caddies and fishwives, and the men are mostly boys a good deal younger than myself. The few grown men are on the oldish side, smoking pipes or seated in the windbreak where the stairs empty out into the Cowgate.
Most of the crowd stands together in small knots of talk, only their casks and buckets holding their places in line. Some turn their faces up to look as I draw down nearer, but they turn immediately away as the suit works its magic.
I can hear the pump water itself now and again, not rushing into the bucket as it should, but pulsing slowly, weakly and then a bit stronger and then weakly again, like blood pumped through a sickish heart. I will be most of the afternoon at this, I think.
There are, however, a number of interesting things about this scene below me that I will only come to know tomorrow afternoon. Not only the surgeon, but several friends of the family will drop by to look in on me then, to see how I’m faring and to try to raise my spirits. They will bring me Spanish figs and cluck their tongues and provide me with facts I can have no way of knowing now, yet things my father knows very well and from many sources.
This year’s drought is no ordinary harvest drought. The Castle reservoir, ordinarily topped off by water piped from Pentland Hills, has fallen dangerously low, low enough to cut the flow to wells down the Royal Mile by something like three-quarters. Some of the old lead piping carrying the water has also chosen this past summer to decay. Gangs of workmen are still digging it up here and there in the city, searching for the phantom drain on the system.
In the lower end of town, farmers are selling water hauled in from the country. A half-penny for each four pints, William will tell me tomorrow. It is a price he has paid more than once to avoid the crowds.
William will also tell me that it is not unusual to wait an hour or more to fill your buckets, partially because the stronger and larger often don’t wait their turn, and that in this way the line itself is only a partial indication of how long one must idle there. Sentries have been posted, every now and again, in response to outbursts of violence.
Everyone in the crowd now standing and talking and smoking and shuffling to the spout knows all of these things.
But I am sixteen years old, and I have been paying attention to my studies. I’ve been making my first fumbling attempts to reconcile love and affection with lust and rejection. I have been oblivious. As I step onto the cobblestones, I know only that my feet are cold through, and that before I make my second trip to the well I plan to put on a pair of thick stockings and my good heavy leather boots.
When my cask is two places from the spout, a middle-aged chairman makes his way to the well. He is not a large man, an inch or two shorter than me, but he has a big pair of arms and wears an old patched Highlander’s regiment coat over his apron. I will be asked many times to describe him in detail, but other than these things there isn’t much. Cropped hair beneath his large slouch bonnet. He is not the first to break the line, but he is the first to do so without any pretense of fidelity to it. He does not insist that he is bringing water to a sick child, or any of the other half-hearted dodges.
He merely shoulders through to the spout as a charity school boy vacates it, muttering “Through, through,” as he comes.
By now I’ve learned enough to stand over my cask and make it as hard as I can to pass me by. But he boxes me neatly aside with his shoulder and bends down with his bucket. When I don’t move back, he looks up to fix me with a sudden, mad look.
“Through,” he says, with the air of saying it one last time, and it is a Highland accent. An instant passes, and then he drops his gaze again to the thin fall of water wetting his jug.
Regardless of how I am dressed, I am not used to being shoved by chairmen. And it is at that point I take another half-step forward and make as though to tap him on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I say.
THE FACT IS that I will not remember actually being struck, not tomorrow or ever after, though the bruise that surfaces on my chest will say a great deal. Never will I forget, however, my head hitting one of the granite blocks of the well, and then the fall backward to the cobblestone. The dull crashing impact at the back of my skull, and the wash of nausea.
On my back, I turn my head slightly and see bright blood puddled in the dirty cobblestone cracks beside me. I turn back because holding my head to one side is suddenly too much to manage.
Those waiting for water have pulled back into a loose ring around me. The chairman has vanished. Everyone is frozen, no one seems to be moving to help, and I feel myself pulling in slow, feathery breaths that don’t refresh my lungs.
In the distance I catch sight of something beginning to drift down the Parliament Stairs, something bright red and shapeless. It moves down the staircase like a heavy ground animal, low to the earth like a badger or a sable, quick humping movements.
Just as it drops out of sight below the ring of faces, I see that it is not a beast but a man, brushing rapidly along in the scarlet cloak and black cocked cap of a goldsmith. He is a small, stout man, but not tiny; it was the cloak that made him seem hunched to the ground. There is a cane in his hand, and he works it sharply as he walks. He has a shop in the Close, no doubt, and glimpsed the commotion from the top of the Stairs. The circle about me opens, and the man kneels beside me, his face abruptly close to mine.
But I cannot meet his eyes. A black sleep is coming for me.
He begins to speak with a chairman standing behind me, asking if anyone has run yet for a surgeon, and I lose the sense of his words, resting my gaze on the gold head of his cane, which now dangles in his hand.
The red line of my blood scurries away from me, shaping angles around the cobblestones. My consciousness thins. The last thing I see is the goldsmith waving his stick at two of the caddies standing by. And then, as though he were a wizard and the stick charged with some true ancient Scots glamour, everything vanishes.
I AM IN a small dark room, a warm room, lying on a broad bench. Staring at a stone wall, upon which play the shadows of a small fire popping somewhere out of sight. My eyes open, close. Squinting, I manage to hold them open, but just a slit. Daylight struggles in through the thick glass of a single window.
In a recess beneath the window stands the goldsmith. He has cast his red cloak and hat aside. He is a short, stout man, with a bit of a paunch. Beside him stands a small bench, and upon the bench are several dull gold and silver objects, an array of tools, work to be done, but the man’s eyes remain on the street. And I remember hearing someone say the word surgeon. The goldsmith is waiting for the surgeon to arrive.
He goes then to his small fire, out of my sight, and I hear the quick gasp of a bellows. The fire leaps up, I can feel it. He means to warm me, and the heat is welcome, because my feet and my ankles are still bare and chilled through. But my head is still far too heavy to lift.
The shelves on the wall before me contain almost nothing of his trade. Goldsmiths do not like to house their stock, but work to order. Still, there are a few things, things he must lock up at the end of the night, when he has cleaned his tools and caught the day’s last live embers in a stone urn. A fan of spoons in gold, a fan of spoons in silver. A cup that sits upon three delicate legs.
And on the highest shelf, in a wooden case lined with red velvet, a pair of golden pistols. Snubbed barrels, heart-shaped handles. Brilliant things. These must be his twin prizes, his single best advertisement in a country where guns are a kind of gospel.
It is an oddly hushed moment. I feel no urgency, although I understand that my blood is seeping even now into the cloth I feel knotted tightly about my head.
And I understand that the surgeon may not, in fact, be on his way. He may have stepped out for a dish of oysters, and I may die for want of his knife, my body cast away like so much refuse. The goldsmith has no idea whose child lies here on his bench, after all. As far as he knows, I am a caddie with a cloven skull, that and nothing more.
And in that strange hush, a voice is suddenly murmuring somewhere. As though the words begin abruptly in another room, and then drift closer, near enough finally to pick out and distinguish them one from another. The voice itself is low, and clearly distressed or even angry in tone.
The words roll and dip like a poem, or a ballad. This is your father’s fault, runs the song’s complaint, and this is your brother’s fault. They crush you between them. Bust you open. They bust you and they break you. And all for a bit of land. The land is all their passion. It is the only thing they love. And the only thing about this wee bit of land upon which they will ever agree is that it must never ever be allowed to fall into your two filthy hands, Johnny. Anything but that, you see. Anything but that.
My lids weigh heavy again, but the sense of the words continues. The phrases are slow and methodical, like tableaux in a street pageant, each being dragged deliberately along in sequence. My heart has begun to thrum again in my chest. Part of me wants to answer: But I am not crushed. The surgeon will arrive in a moment. And James was nowhere in sight. A wudden chairman did this to me. I cannot, though. There is no volition left, anywhere in me.
But the words continue, from somewhere very near. Not the goldsmith’s words, for he goes on staring fixedly out the window into the close. For a single horrible moment, I am convinced that the voice is issuing from a ghost, an angry spirit hovering in the stillness of the room.
And for the span of that instant, I am convinced that I have gone truly mad.
It is only eventually, and with great relief, that I recognize the voice as my own. It is inside me after all, and I am not mad. It is the play of my own thoughts, my own ambient outrage, and nothing more. As the murmur goes on, I listen with less concern, simply registering the cadences.
You know ’tis true, Johnny. They use you as a stick to strike one another, and now look at this, their stick is broken. Pieces, that is all, left lying heaped on the street. But you are safe now. For now you know the truth. And now you are in a fair way to make them leave you be.
My eyelids fall closed again.
When I open them, the goldsmith is seated on a creepie at my side, his face drawn worriedly to mine. He expected the surgeon well before now, and he fears, no doubt, that there will be questions and procedures to satisfy should I die here at his table. His eyes are small dark beads, with a hint of a squint, and framed by sharp, black brows.
But there is genuine kindness there as well, even I can see that. For when he sees that my eyes have managed to focus, he smiles, pats my shoulder very gently, and says something reassuring which I do not catch. And then he turns, to discern the object upon which my gaze has come to rest. In order to make small-talk, to kill time.
“Spotted my brace of show dags, have you, lad,” whispers the goldsmith. The pride in his voice is unmistakable. “Lovely speeshal things, those particular pieces. Quite dear, though, quite dear indeed. A prince’s ransom. But a wonderful history goes along with those guns, and a true history into the bargain. And they do say that a true history is the very best sort of history money can buy.”
THE EVENTS OF the day had a serviceably happy ending. The surgeon, as I might have expected, turned out to be an acquaintance of my father; and within a few moments more I was carried across the Square and laid in my own bed, where I came to not long after. I was the son of a Judge again, worth hurrying through the streets, and my concussion was pronounced only mildly threatening.
When the doctor left, James came to my bedside ravenous for details, and he became so incensed listening to them that he swore he would strap on his sword and go searching the howfs and the oyster cellars for the caddie. He didn’t, of course, because no one in the world was ever less likely to fight than my older brother. But he grew convincingly angry, and I appreciated the gesture.
And James told me, like a bedtime story, about the plans for the houses in the New Town, whose eventual kitchens would have each their own deft little taps, from which water would flow at the slightest touch.
I said nothing about what I had seen and heard in the goldsmith’s shop, just before I slipped from consciousness. As best I could, I pushed those moments from my mind; the memory of them was like a dream of something forbidden, accompanied by a lingering residue of shame.
More than anything, I wanted no more doctors. I had no desire to be prodded and poked, as James had been, and floated for weeks in a washtub of sulfur water.
Though my father pressed me for details to identify the man who struck me, there was no official investigation. No account of it appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine. My father was clearly disturbed by my dress, my shoeless feet, and he avoided questions by hiring a caddie to search privately. Within a day or two the criminal was declared to have fled the city, most probably for the Highlands, and the incident was made to disappear.
And so, like my time with Gentleman, the truth of the water story turned out to be merely visceral, without any greater or more lasting meaning. I was not yet seventeen, but already I had begun to suspect the worst, that there was something profoundly provisional about my time on this earth, that my own life was a journal whose pages were destined to take no ink.