HAVING GOTTEN BY with cheese and apples at midday, Boswell can now—at just twenty-five minutes past seven in the evening—allow himself a delicious extravagance: a bit over a half-shilling for a sedan to carry him the handful of blocks to Nor-thumberland House. With only 100£ from his father for the year in London, sedan rides are generally out of the question, given that he would sooner slit his own throat than be forced to write to Edinburgh begging for more.
But the memorandum in his pocket calls specifically for him to take a chair. In order to look a Lord or a Colonel dead in the eye and ask to be handed a commission that would otherwise be purchased, a man must believe he deserves that commission in the first place. He must feel his own worth, falling like lantern-light all around him.
And his last-night self knew that nothing would light Boswell’s lantern tonight like being carried, every step of the way.
In the new pink suit with the gold button, then, he strolls over toward the Privy Garden Stair and begins glancing over chairs. There is no moon, and the wind off the Thames is icy, but he passes deliberately over a few battered chairs before settling on a newer sedan, glossy black, attended by two milder-looking men in clean livery.
At his signal, the men draw open both its door and its hinged top, and Boswell walks up and in, turns, and settles himself down as top and door swing shut. To Boswell’s delight, there is a foot-warmer tucked beneath his bench, and he rubs the chair’s padded-satin wall and feels ten years old as the chair rises into the air.
It quickly picks up speed as the bearers hit their stride—he hears one of them calling “By y’r leave there!” to clear pedestrians from the path—and now Boswell has leisure to sit back among the cushions and consider what the note asks him to consider: the privilege of being one of only twenty-five invited to the Countess’s Friday night party, the chance that his commission will be secured tonight.
But somehow he finds that he cannot. Something else has been gnawing at him, beneath the surface of his elation, ever since he left Louisa’s flat. It is his brother John.
Boswell has known for the last two months that his younger brother, newly a lieutenant in a Regiment of Foot, has fallen ill, ill in his mind. Although the family has not been able to piece together the exact sequence of events, Boswell’s father was able to recount for Boswell the basic facts: John was on watch duty one black evening in mid-October when he began suddenly to rave, to shout at invisible men and things, and then to accuse his fellow soldiers of plotting against him when they rushed to his side.
For the last eight weeks, he has been confined to a mental hospital in Plymouth.
Although his father has reassured him several times that John is in capable hands and that he need not worry, Boswell does worry. He imagines horrific scenes, imagines his brother sprawled in a dirty cell, on filthy straw even, with Saturday thrill-seekers passing and leering in at him. Boswell knows that this isn’t the case; his father has had the hospital at Plymouth inspected by an associate, and John’s care there is of good quality. Still, Boswell feels—whenever he allows himself to reach for it—a deep, moldering guilt for not altering his London plan to go immediately to John’s side. His father in fact offered a month ago to pay Boswell’s expenses to Plymouth and back, but Boswell bristled at the assumption that his campaign for a commission might be so easily broken off, and he immediately declined.
So it comes to him now as a simple emotional equation, impossible to reduce or solve in any other way: John needs him, but he, James, has chosen to go about his business.
For some reason, since his visit earlier with Louisa, it is not the lurid vision of John at Plymouth that hovers at the edge of his mind, but a memory, something that actually happened: a game they played once, the only time that Boswell has gone beyond brotherly bickering and competition and one-upmanship, gone as far as outright deceit.
BOSWELL’S SECOND NERVOUS breakdown, at age seventeen, was in fact no nervous breakdown at all. The truth was that he’d been sitting in a stifling classroom at the University of Edinburgh, wishing for diversion, when it hit him like a thunder stroke that he didn’t need his father to conceive of a holiday for him. His five-year-old illness had been lying there in front of him all the while, dusty but serviceable. All he had to do was fail to get out of bed again. That and lie about the reason for not getting out of bed.
So the next morning Boswell kept his bed. The surgeon brushed and scrutinized the skin at his ankles like Egyptian papyrus. And then, with even less fuss than before, arrangements were made with Dr. Hunter in Moffat, and a room reserved again on the High Street there for a six-week course.
Boswell was beside himself with delight. But suddenly there was an unexpected fly in the ointment. No sooner had the doctors convinced Lord Auchinleck that Moffat was the cure for Boswell than his little brother John conceived the idea that he would tag along as well. John cried and argued that what one brother suffered now, another brother might well suffer later. Finally Boswell began to sense to his horror that John was making his case, inch by inch.
And so, two days before he was to leave for Moffat, Boswell casually suggested a bowling match to settle the question.
He and John had been lawn-bowling with and against one another for years, since they were children. When they were very small, they’d served as bowl-caddies for their father, fighting for the honor of lugging his stray shots back across the fresh-mown grass.
John in particular loved the game, and had gradually overcome his older brother’s longstanding advantage by devoting himself single-mindedly to his play. Boswell, for his part, still played mostly because the game had become the rage among Edinburgh’s lawyers and judges. When the brothers went to bowl, they were treated like princes by the advocates at the green, all of whom pleaded regularly before their father.
So between Boswell giving the actual bowling only half his mind, and John practicing mornings by himself on another green near the Tolbooth, they had wound up all but perfectly matched. Perhaps that was why the loaded set of bowls had so struck Boswell a few weeks earlier when he’d seen them in a novelty shop down the Cowgate. Half the bowls in the set were regulation; the other half were secretly weighted. Boswell bought them for two shillings, and then the bowls had sat in their wooden box at the back of his wardrobe for the past few weeks, like a brace of loaded pistols.
Once they reached the Heriot green, Boswell almost relented. It was early evening in mid-June, and the air was neither too hot nor too cold, full of the scent of the Hospital’s large gardens. It was that last hour before the fading of the day, and the six-o’clock bells could be heard softly tolling from the Gray Friars Church. Everyone and everything seemed to share a lovely indolence.
But he couldn’t abide the possibility that having John along in Moffat would hobble him or force him to play nanny. So he opened up the box of doctored bowls and handed John the jack. “Throw away, John,” he offered.
John winked at Boswell and then kissed the closed fist holding the jack. And then he gave the tiny target ball a nice, distant toss, the sort favored by better players, those with more control. Boswell saw with a start that John had gained more skill in the last few months than he’d realized.
“You understand, James,” John said, standing back from the canvas, “that if I win, I go to Moffat with you. If you win, I simply don’t go to Moffat with you. I play for something, you play for nothing. Unless denying me is something to you.”
It was a tough argument to refute, without laying out his actual hopes for the six weeks in the country. But Boswell answered, “I play for something too, John. I play for your agreement not to sulk, while I take the advice of my doctors.”
“You’re not old enough to have doctors, James. What you have are father’s doctors, and even they think you’re odd. So don’t put on airs. You a’nt a laird yet.”
It was strange, having the power to alter the game when he would, and Boswell played the first few throws tentatively. But midway through the first game of the match, almost before he was aware of the pieces falling into place, Boswell found that John had surrounded the jack with a very deftly placed trio of bowls, the last knocking out Boswell’s only counter.
Of course, it was also precisely the sort of configuration the loaded bowls had been designed to rake through, and Boswell did just that, chucking two of John’s bowls out of play, even blasting one all the way to the facing ditch. It was as though the world had been upended.
They played the remaining game with John in an increasing funk. As his mood deteriorated, so did his accuracy. When they’d finished, John cursed and kicked the canvas. And then he turned to give Boswell an utterly hopeless look, the look that younger brothers give when the conspiracy against them is revealed to be more far-reaching even than they’d imagined.
They walked home along the Cowgate in silence, passing the very novelty store itself. This last was too much for Boswell, and he tried to salve his conscience by buying the two of them fruit-filled Bath buns, a new treat in town and one of his brother’s current favorites. But John wouldn’t have it. He pitched the thick bun at the gutter and trudged on in silence.
Two mornings later, as the chaise containing Boswell and his tutor rolled away from Parliament Square for Moffat, neither Boswell’s father nor John was there to see him off. Only his mother and his youngest brother David waved good-bye, and Boswell couldn’t help but wonder if a man had to continue throughout his life to cast family members away like ballast, in order to keep his own new self above the waves.