THE REAR STAIRWELL is black, but for a spill of lamplight where the door has been battered away above, and a wash of moonlight where the door to the street now stands open to the wind below. The two flights of steps between are lightless, though, and I take them two, three, then four at a time, vaulting out into the nothingness, the railing clutched in my burnt right hand, the second dag snug in my left.
I have no fear at all of falling, somehow; it is as though the world is illuminated by instinct. Very thinly illuminated, but illuminated still.
Beyond instinct, there is the animal sort of cunning, and that tells me a good deal as well. A soldier really only ever learns two things, and they are obedience and cunning, which is to say, the hunting of men little different from himself. And while the officers of my regiment found me deficient in the former, the latter came easily. Once I had got beyond my shyness, in fact, cunning seemed to come back to me, like a language learned and loved and lost in childhood.
Cunning says that James and Johnson are not lying in wait for me at the bottom of the stair, or just outside the rear door. Of that I am all but certain, for James is a coward, and Johnson is a poor man who has spent the bulk of his life leveraging himself into sudden parity with London’s wealthy and powerful. He is a genuine literary celebrity now, and no man guards his life as blindly as the newly celebrated. The two of them will run as far and as fast as their fat legs will take them.
Still, they are not far ahead of me, maybe a stone’s throw, for all their head start. Under normal circumstances, that lead would allow them to circle to the front of the building and run for the Catherine Street watch stand. Or they might reach the soldiers at the gate of Somerset House, or even, if they both were to scream at the top of their lungs, rouse those billeted in the Savoy Barracks.
But circumstances are not, of course, normal. I have spent a good part of the last several weeks making sure of that fact.
There was a Lieutenant Garraway in my regiment, himself a second son of a nobleman, and perhaps for that reason of a philosophical turn of mind. And it was his habit to speak of each major contingency in war as creating a world separate and distinct from our own. A bastard world was his phrase for a military situation upended by the worst imaginable turn of events.
But even a bastard world, Garraway believed, could be redeemed by forethought. The best officer imagined the most potential worlds. It was as simple as that.
It took very little of imagination to suppose that if James and his hero were to escape the locked box in which I’d placed them, the rear door was the likeliest possibility. And so in fact this bastard world—the one in which my bootheels strike the ground floor of the stairwell and send a jolt of pain across my left side—has received the bulk of my attention.
So much so that when I have run out into the light rain and jogged quickly around the row of darkened Somerset coach houses, I know almost precisely what I will see: three men standing at the unlit far end of the estate’s stable yard, barely visible, almost huddled up together against the north wall of the Old Somerset friary.
Other than these three, there is no one in sight, for the weather is more early March than late July, and although there are likely a hundred servants and guards within a stone’s throw of where I stand, they are none of them fools, and each prefers his fire and his bottle.
The air is cold, but not fresh. One could almost choke on the smell of wet stable, drenched horses, and slovenly stalls.
The three men stand confidentially close to one another, water dripping from them, as though sharing a secret. And of course they do: the man with his back to me has his hand held down low at his hip—casually enough to escape notice should a coachman glance over on his way across the upper part of the yard—and the hand holds a pistol.
His pistol is not in a league with my own dags, but it is a serviceable piece. Having purchased it this past week, having cleaned and oiled and loaded it, I know it to be reliable enough. Johnson and Boswell stand before the man in the frozen, slump-shouldered attitudes of the genuinely terrified; only their eyes are wide and alive, and as I slow and come up on them, James suddenly opens his mouth to call out my name.
His instinct is still to call to me for help, even now.
But James stops short when I bring out my own dag, and hold my finger to my lips. Very quietly, I whisper to the two of them: “I’m afraid we must insist that you remain silent. Make a sound, and you die.”
Again, as in the Turk’s Head, James’s eyes seem suddenly to be swimming with tears, though whether it is rain washing his face is impossible to say.
Johnson does not move or speak, but his hulking form seems to strain almost visibly against motionlessness, as though a turn of the head or the swing of a pistol tip will release him from a spell, and he will suddenly bellow and surge at me. His rage is there in his eyes, though he holds them half-closed. The gaze is unflinching, and it sweeps back and forth between my face and the face of the man who took the two of them up halfway through their dramatic escape. It could not be clearer that Johnson is watching for an opportunity, but more than that he is studying our features, committing us to memory. Again, he is a celebrity, this man. He is already preparing—when this ordeal is finished and the world bends its knee once again—to have us crushed by the bailiffs and the courts and his powerful friends into a very fine powder indeed.
His instinct is still to assume that any loss of his own power is momentary, even now.
But Johnson is checked in his attempt to memorize the man’s features, as they are carefully and discreetly covered. A black cloth shields his face, his nose, even his smallish ears from sight, and a slouch hat disguises his head, the glossy seal-brown hair. Only his eyes and his dark brows are visible.
Again, I cannot help but be reassured by my own handiwork. The only thing I have left to chance in the case of this man is his own courage, his own heart.
The eyes above the cloth reveal the struggle, without a doubt. This third man looks over at me, and his expression is impressed with the enormity of what he has done, painfully impressed. He has waylaid two gentlemen, using a pistol and a mask, and even though he has not picked a penny from their pockets, and will not, he could very easily hang for his actions of the last ten minutes. And he well knows it. He kept his glance stony until I arrived, but now that I’ve come, his pretense has all but collapsed. Beneath the mask, his breathing sounds thin and rapid; above it, the eyes hold a pleading look, as though he would have me somehow take back what I have had him do.
It is the mudlark, of course. Or riverlark, I should better say.
If I am surprised to find him here, pistol in hand, to find him my confederate, it is only for a brief instant, because a part of me has known all along that this was the case, that our two earlier meetings today were no accident. That our existences have become somehow intermingled over the last weeks or months.
That wave of knowledge now reaches the forefront of my awareness with hardly a ripple.
This effect too I’ve become familiar with since Plymouth: a moment when two parallel sets of memories can no longer be held in mutual exclusion, for whatever reason, and the thing inside me must let go a part of its hold. And once it does so, the recollections then come washing together. In a moment’s time it is all but impossible to say how or even why they were ever distinct.
I understand now that if James and Johnson and I had finished our business in the Turk’s Head—if we had none of us come running down the back staircase—the mudlark would have remained more or less a random London figure to me, a stranger.
But that realization seems unimportant, hardly worth considering. I am here now, and the mudlark has performed his function well.
And I am glad to see him, not simply because he helped to form one side of a larger invisible box into which James and Johnson managed to escape, but because he is himself and I think well of him. I haven’t time to reassure him at length, and so I do so as quickly and efficiently as I am able, with a clap on the shoulder.
It has the proper effect. He seems to take heart, and the stony look comes back over his face.
Almost as if he cannot help himself, James moves a half-step toward me, a soft moan strangled in his throat. The words remain at a whisper, though, for, as I have said, my brother is a coward. “Johnny, for the love of God, tell me why you’re doing this. Please, Johnny.”
Before I can speak, the lark takes a step forward himself and jabs James in the sternum with the barrel of his pistol, hard enough to drive him backward. The metal thunks audibly against the bone.
“You’ll shut your filthy fucking mouth,” the lark hisses, and I’m surprised for an instant at the heat in his voice, the authentic anger.
But then I have spent several weeks constructing for him a long, detailed, painful fiction involving James Boswell and the Great Dictionary Johnson.
In this fiction, I am brother to a luckless young maid come up to town from Edinburgh, one Peggy Doig. Here she was tempted, and fell into the habit of meeting the two gentlemen nights at the Turk’s Head. They shared her between them like a one-shilling whore. By them she was ruined, got with child, and later savagely beaten when she let it be known. And now—most ominously of all—she has vanished without a word, and I have questions that must be answered.
It is a fiction, yes, but built out of the dirty flotsam of truth. And while the lark’s anger is based on that convenient fiction, it is not misplaced ultimately, not really. He knows these are bad men, and bad men they are.
“You’re lucky you haven’t had your throat slit for you already, wi’ what you’ve done,” the lark spits once more at James, and then he lapses back into silence.
James has his hand over the injured spot at his breastbone, more than a bit of the whipped dog in his manner. But now Johnson offers to speak. He too keeps his voice low, as instructed. His manner has changed substantially: two men with guns are an entirely different proposition than one. Here there is no oak table with which to beat us. And so he is determined now to find his way out of this madness through compliance and persuasion.
“You must stop a moment and consider, John,” Johnson says, and it is odd, hearing my Christian name fall from his lips, “before it is too late. You are no highwayman, though you make use of them.” Here Johnson flicks his gaze down at the lark, making it clear that the man is an inferior species altogether. “You have prospects even now. This is beneath you. You have yet to commit any capital crime. You have yet to rob, or kill. And much is forgiven upon repentance, especially in one who has suffered as you have suffered.”
He is speaking gingerly of my time in the Plymouth Hospital, of course, but the mudlark seems to take it as a confession of all the worst he has been told.
It is a good reminder, however, that I must separate the lark out from the discussion as soon as possible. And we have been too long out in the open, whatever the weather.
I answer Johnson politely, and quietly. “I suggest you take your own advice, Mr. Johnson. You have also yet to commit any capital crime, though you have much to repent.”
I bring up the dag and, as before, I let them know what will be expected of them. “Now we will walk slowly together, the four of us, down toward the river, and we will do so in this fashion: James in front; you, Mr. Johnson, a pace behind him; and we two will walk a few paces off to the right. The high wall surrounding the Somerset estate will be to your left almost the entire way, and I will ask you to walk as near to it as you may, just in its shadow. Remember, not a sound. Ignore any passersby. We will shoot only if we are forced to do so. And you have still my word. Answer my questions honestly, and you will sleep in your own beds tonight.”
And then we are moving, in an uneasy little knot, down to the water: James, then the lark off in the gloom to his right, followed by Johnson, and I bringing up the rear.
Somerset Water-Gate, the lane bordering the Somerset estate to the west, ends in a public stair at the waterline of the Thames. And much is made of the fact that the Crown has opened the estate’s river gardens to the public during daylight hours, as well. But the truth is that the Water-Gate itself is no gift to the rabble. It is less a cobbled lane, and more a drainage sluice on a massive scale, running from the Strand directly down through the estate’s large stables and coachyard and dingy garbage sheds.
That Londoners use the thoroughfare and the steps to the river is incidental, for the point has always been to move the waste of Somerset residents away from the delicate noses of Somerset residents.
And so when our small party moves awkwardly down the Water-Gate in the drizzling rain, hugging the estate’s long dark brick wall, we are just four more random nasty urban bits running down to the river, and from there to the sea.
With one exception: rather than continuing down into the water itself, the lark urges James to the right, down to the damp walk that fronts the river, and we all execute the turn, not smartly but well enough.
The going is slower now, as Johnson and James must watch their feet as well as our guns. Other than the damp shuffling sound of our boots, only Johnson’s labored breathing marks our passage. He is a large man, and strong, but not used to the ongoing demands of an evening such as this. And that is fine. The less strength he has when we reach our destination, the better. I will not underestimate him again.
In the moonlight, one can just barely make out a series of tiny wooden docks, stretching out into the deeper dark to our left, raking the water like long, thin fingers. Each dock is surrounded by a broad fan of tiny craft, skiffs and fish-smacks, and all of these are empty, deserted due to the weather.
Only once, as we move over rotting wooden slats and treacherous Thames mud, do we pass another living soul: it is a fisherman, and his son, most likely, working beneath a cheap canopy on their flat-bottomed boat. So silently are they sewing at their lines that I am not aware of them until suddenly one of them tosses a bit of garbage out into the water, and it splashes into the river only a few feet off to James’s left.
They glance at us idly as we pass, this grizzled older man and his son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Even in the dark, they know we are somehow of a higher quality than themselves; even in the dark, they leave us to our business, because nothing good can come of interrupting us.
And I have chosen well with the lark. As we come up on the pair of them, without any signal from me and without hesitation he presses closer to James, leaning in prohibitively, and I can only imagine he has brushed the tip of his pistol against my brother’s shoulder, or perhaps his side, and then the moment where either of our guests might call for help is past.
James’s face is a study in misery. Occasionally he glances up from his trudging, the mud sucking at his shoes, up and away from the river, out in the direction of the Strand only five or six blocks to the north. Garrick’s townhouse waits quietly just up Cecil Street, if James could only find his way free to run the short length of it. But he cannot, and I’ve taken extra pains to impress upon him that he cannot, because I grew up with James and understand that if he is to be told no, he must be told no firmly or not at all.
At one point, Johnson, whose sight is poor and who has been lumbering along as best he can in the dark, spins unexpectedly about to face me. It is obvious that he does not mean to confront me, for his hands come up immediately in a gesture of supplication. But there is in his manner a strange combination of exasperation and surrender, and he hisses at me, there in the dark by the water: “You wish me to admit that we have met before and have spent time together. I will do so! I will admit it. I should have done so before now. I will give you what you demand. But you must stop this madness while there is time, John.”
James and the lark have stopped in front of us. For all of Johnson’s frustration, and in spite of his admission, his whisper remains low enough to all but escape James’s hearing. He still believes he can extricate himself from this situation without admitting all, openly.
I take one step back and fully extend my arm, bringing the pistol up even with his face, and Johnson gives a snort of frustration. He turns, but before taking another step, he suddenly claps his hand to his head and tears off his unpowdered little wig, which is now soaked through with the rain, and pitches it out into the Thames. And then he trudges on again as before.
It is a small moment of defiance—to be expected in a man of his temperament—but of course it is also a clue thrown out to whoever may follow behind us, whatever authorities may eventually come to his aid. The man is nothing if not wily.
But it is nothing to worry over, not really. By first light all will be decided, all City business concluded.
Only when we pass within sight of the darkened hulk of the German Church, and then over the base of the Savoy Stairs, do I hold my breath. A small crowd at the bottom of the Stairs would be difficult, if not impossible to navigate.
But although I can hear men shouting somewhere away up the Stairs toward the Savoy, there is no one about at the waterline. The pattering rain has sent each London creature to his own little den.
And then I can relax a bit. For on our right suddenly rises a small tower of lumber, stacked in pallets some fifteen, twenty feet high. And that tower is followed by another even higher, and another, and another. We have reached the Beauford Timber Yard, though the lark says it is known on the river as Dirty Lane, for the alley that bounds it to the west.
Whatever the name, the stench of river muck and rot and fish gives way to the oddly pleasing scent of freshly cut wood. It is a country smell somehow. Even in the rain, it smells like a place where a man might build a house out of sight of his neighbors, rather than packed in together as they are all here in London, like vermin gathered just above a flood.
Soon we have our charges moving through what amounts to a very narrow passage, bounded on the one side by the lapping Thames and hard on the other by a massive wall of timber ready for shipping.
At the front of our line, the lark pushes James sharply to the right, and the two of them suddenly vanish.
Then, with Johnson stepping slowly and carefully in front of me, we accomplish the same trick: squeezing between two pallet walls into a small alley that opens up quickly into a makeshift courtyard. All around us are squared-off stacks of timber and pallets, walls of them reaching up fifteen feet here, twenty feet there.
Up and to the right, a sawpit yawns, the wood dust heaped up in great piles. This open interior is like a makeshift amphitheater, with the moon barely visible in the darkling sky.
Wood scraps and chips are scattered everywhere, some of them jagged, and again the going is difficult; Johnson stumbles once and seems to hurt his leg. But he curses softly and moves on. A barely audible skittering noise seems to travel with us as we move deeper: wharf rats, giving us a comfortable berth, though not fleeing, for they are bold enough. They know that even in daylight they have very little to fear from men limited to the aisles between the stacks.
It is the watchman’s area, his tiny riverside fiefdom, and ahead on the right, nearly indistinguishable from the lumber towering over it, is the watchman’s own shanty. Through the shanty’s one narrow slit of a window, a lantern glows faintly.
No watchman comes out to challenge us, however, because he has been paid decently well to be elsewhere. It mattered not at all that he and the lark have been more than once at odds over lumber and chips filched from the yard. For a half crown, the watchman was more than willing to take the lark at his word, that it was only the shanty itself that was wanted, and privacy.
When we come up to the small door, I break the silence, my voice very low. “Inside are two chairs against the back wall. You will enter one by one and seat yourselves in those chairs. Rest your hands, palms up, in your laps. When you have done so, I will enter, and not before. I will mark you through the window here.”
The lark motions James inside, then roughly pushes my brother’s head down below the crossbeam as James ducks to enter. Johnson turns and casts one look back at me, and in the darkness his bulging eyes look white and wild. The lark allows Johnson to duck his own head, because even a man with a gun would hesitate to do it for him. And then they are both inside, and I see through the window slit that they have taken their chairs, grudgingly turned their palms up.
With the lark watching the two of them through the open doorway, I take the moment to reload the pistol fired in the Turk’s Head. There is no moon to speak of, and only a hint of lantern-light reaches my hands as I begin, but it is no matter. I have handled guns all my life, and handled these dags more than enough to do so blind. I tear open the paper packet with my teeth, half-cock the piece with my thumb, and prime it.
I glance up to see the lark watching me work, and I jerk my head toward the shack, giving him a look. A bit sullenly, he goes back to his task.
I close the frizzen and pour the rest of the powder into the barrel. Press the ball and the paper wrapper down into the barrel, and ram the charge very carefully home with a thin rod set cunningly into the dag’s underside. Again, I can’t help but be taken with the things: even the bitty ramrod has been cast in gold.
Not thirty seconds have passed. “That’s done it, then,” I whisper to the lark.
And then something unexpected happens.
The lark looks at me and, although he is clearly still overwhelmed, he asks to come inside, to stay with me, and I see that he is in earnest. “Makes no sense handlin’ ’em yourself,” he whispers, almost pleading. “I’m in to the ears now as it is. Let me come along, help you get it done. Whatever it is.”
“You have done enough,” I tell him.
“Let me stay outside here and keep an eye. They give you the slip before. You needed me back there.”
“Your part is finished.”
“You needed me,” he repeats stubbornly. “Just to keep an eye out.”
I say nothing, but I look at him, his brows like rain-soaked slate, and he can see enough to know that I will not change my mind. He shakes his head, the black cloth covering his look of disgust, and then stares off toward the water. He has no idea what I have planned, exactly, but it’s clear that he’s more frightened of leaving us and loping off home than he is of whatever may happen in the watchman’s shack.
He makes one last attempt, holding my eye.
“It’s to be like that, is it?” he asks, a hint of heat in his voice, as if somehow I’ve betrayed him, am betraying him even now.
When I say nothing, he bends down into the low door to give James and Johnson a last savage look, and then the hand with the pistol vanishes into his long coat pocket and he is gone without another word, vanished through the tall black divide in the towering walls of lumber. Gone back to the river, where sky is inevitably up, and water inevitably down, the current fixed and trustworthy, more or less.
I take a dag in each of my hands, and remind myself that I have only two shots left, no matter what may happen. And on the heels of that reminder, a thought pops into my head out of nowhere, a strange thought, of the sort that comes to me every now and again.
It is a thought about Mrs. Parry, of all people.
I realize now that while I took great pains to force Gil Higgs to remain silent, I made no attempt to do so with Mrs. Parry. On the contrary, I met with her several times, more than enough for her to recognize me and identify me after the fact if things at the Turk’s Head were to go very poorly.
It dawns on me now that the third golden bullet—the extra bullet now lodged in the wall or the ceiling of her rearmost upstairs room—was for her.
That was how she was to be kept silent. Her life was to be ended.
And I was to end it myself. Or at least my finger was to have pulled the trigger. Had Johnson not forced me to fire accidentally, that plan would have moved forward and the evidence of it would have been held out of my awareness. It would have been just another secret kept by what is inside of me. It is only the fact that the number of bullets no longer matches the number of targets that leaves a thread hanging somehow, visible and telling. And that thread I have just pulled.
But this revelation refuses to settle in my mind, refuses to take on the air of normalcy, for it is more than I can believe. Mrs. Parry is guilty of nothing, guilty of nothing but gluttony and ugliness and a fawning submission. She is a fat spaniel without the capacity for sin. And yet the thing inside of me would have put a bullet in her head without a thought, without even a memory to anchor the act in time.
And for the first time in a long time, I am more than just afraid: I feel a bodily, yearning ache to be rid of it. If I could take a scalpel to my chest and slice it out somehow, I would do it gladly. But I cannot, and I know I cannot. There is no way to be rid of it—that was all I learned of any consequence at Plymouth.
It will have its angry way, here and there, now and again. And the best I can manage is to keep it focused as strictly as possible on the application of justice.
WHICH IS HOW I find myself seated, once again, in a straight chair opposite Johnson and James. It might almost be thirty minutes ago, at the Turk’s Head, but for a few small alterations. This watch stand is a low-ceilinged structure barely large enough to house the three of us, fashioned quickly, no doubt, out of the least salable odds and ends the yard had to offer. The small lamp stands on an upturned box to our left, throwing our thin shadows against the facing wall. And that is all, in the way of furnishings.
Johnson has no table to toss. There is no clientele downstairs, a hallo away, because here there is neither downstairs nor anyone within shouting distance. Johnson and James might call to their hearts’ delight, and no one—even if anyone were to hear them— would be able to place the sounds. We are seated at the center of what amounts to a vast timber labyrinth, and it would take someone standing at the very entrance to the watchman’s courtyard to understand that the noise they hear is coming from the heart of the stacks of lumber themselves.
Johnson’s wig is at the bottom of the Thames, of course, and his ill-shorn head looks particularly large and jowly without it. His eyes are doubly underscored: they sit in their piggy folds of skin, and those folds sit themselves in pronounced black bags, so exhausted does he look, from the wine, the long day, the unexpected tumult.
His skin was flushed earlier to a ruddy red, with the heat and the confrontation in the coffeehouse; but it has cooled, apparently. If anything, Johnson’s face is now pallid, all but drained of blood.
The rusty suit looks like a dead skin about to be sloughed off. He has lost another button from his shirt, so that now, in addition to the gap exposing his large belly, his neck is open to the dingy linen beneath. Wet through with the rain is the good lexicographer, and spattered everywhere with dirt.
Likewise, James’s snowy stockings are soiled, and his violet suit has darkened over with the wet. In his haste to leave the Turk’s Head, he has left his sword behind, the only piece of his wardrobe that might have been any use to him. This tells you all you need to know about my brother’s highly publicized desire for a commission in His Majesty’s Guard: he ran higgledy-piggledy down a back staircase and left his sword dangling on a nail behind him.
James’s hair has long ago escaped its silken tie, and it straggles mostly to one side of his face, where he has deposited it with an unthinking swipe of his hand. While the events of the last hour or so have added ten years to Johnson’s looks, James seems more and more a boy every moment, stripped of his London manners and well out of his depth.
I have my dags in my hands, and my two hands resting lightly on my two knees.
And so we begin.
“Gentlemen, I must remind you that we were in the midst of a conversation.” The way they watch my mouth form words is deeply satisfying. I have their most perfect attention. “I had pledged to leave you in peace once you had answered my questions truthfully. And I made it clear that you would not leave if you failed to do so. You see now that I was very much in earnest.”
Johnson responds by immediately taking his hands off his lap and crossing his arms over his chest. Like casting his wig into the Thames, this refusal to leave his hands where I may see them is carefully calibrated resistance: little enough, so as to live through this ordeal, yet just enough to live with himself afterward.
And so a quick reminder about the guns themselves is probably in order. I brandish them just a bit, letting their showy barrels catch the light. “We spoke earlier of the linguistic history of these dags. But you might be interested to know their physical provenance. If we may believe the goldsmith in Parliament Close, these were poured at the command of King George II himself, and meant to equip an assassin. This assassin had orders to kill Bonnie Prince Charlie and his accomplice, Flora Macdonald. It was Flora Macdonald, you will remember, who had dressed the Prince as a waiting maid and spirited him away from the King’s men on the Island of Skye.”
I buff the dag in my right hand against the damp material of my breeches and bring it to bear once more. “In spite of himself, King George had a deep respect for his nemesis and the Stuart line. And so he caused the guns to be poured of almost solid gold. Even the bullets were dusted with the metal. Death fit for royalty. I think it a very thoughtful compromise, actually.”
When I have finished this history, Johnson and James exchange a look, and it is a significant glance, mixing confusion and alarm and mutual resolve. One would think they had known one another all their lives, for the communication they seem to manage in a glance.
“Put your questions,” Johnson barks, then purses his lips, breathing loudly through his nose. He stares at me for a moment, breathing, simmering, utterly unamused by the goldsmith’s tale. “Put your questions. Allow us to answer them. Put your questions and end this nightmare.”
“I fully intend to do so, sir.”
He purses his thick lips again, wind whistling through the big nostrils, then brings himself to go on. His body is motionless, but his expression itself is an attack of sorts. The softer look he had at first in the Turk’s Head, the familiar look that begged me to keep his secret, is entirely gone. He hates me for exposing him. Nothing could be clearer. But the truth will out, and he has no one to thank but himself.
He is still going on. “Put your questions, and then keep your word and allow us each to go about our business. You insist upon honesty. It is an insult that you should stress it so. We are men of honor. This is your own eldest brother, your own flesh, for God’s sake. He has shown you nothing but affection. A more open and plain-dealing man I have never met.”
I cannot resist a smile at that. “Plain-dealing, you say. But then you should know, of course, having spent several full weeks in his company.”
“Your sarcasm does not change my assessment of his character, I can assure you, sir.” There is open contempt in Johnson’s look now. He has all but curled his lip. “Quite the contrary, in fact. Quite the contrary. If your brother fails to reach your standards, that seems to me excellent reason to believe that he well exceeds my own.”
The anger struggles in my chest, but I put it down. He is baiting me, nothing more. He and James must still believe that the lark is keeping watch outside the door somewhere, a useful misperception.
“I find your parallel intriguing, Mr. Johnson. You would draw a clear distinction between us, with James cast as the plain-dealer. James, why not tell Mr. Johnson where you took your constitutional this morning, before walking over to the Temple? And where you stopped off after that? It seems a year ago, but your memories on this point are surely more vivid than my own.”
James says nothing, head hung like a dog.
“James had several meetings this morning before keeping his rendezvous with you, Mr. Johnson. He was a very busy plain-dealer indeed. There was the meeting in St. James’s Park, first, with several women of exemplary moral character who happened to be up and taking the air just before dawn. And then there was an even more touching scene with the mother of his natural son Charles. I assume James has mentioned Peggy Doig and the child he had named for the Stuart martyr. No? In any event, James wished to be certain that little Peggy was quite recovered from the hazards of childbirth, and so apparently he examined her quite thoroughly—”
James can contain himself no longer. “You said you had forgiven me, Johnnie! Why must you—why must you torture me, and attempt to tear me down as—”
“I have forgiven you, James. Truly, I have. But Mr. Johnson must know enough to be able to forgive you in his own turn. And so another question, James, and this one I will have answered, not avoided. What have you this moment in your right waistcoat pocket, brother?”
James looks startled, even amidst the startling elements of the moment. He flicks his glance over at Johnson.
But the question itself sits poorly with Johnson. He leans forward, scowling down the impossibly long troll’s nose, even waving a thick hand at me. “Put your questions, damn you! You have threatened our lives—you continue to threaten us, and you may wound us either through your malice or your incompetence—and we have said we will answer and have done with you, sir. But do not insult us with absurdities. Do not trifle with things in pockets, or else you may go to the Devil, pistols or no. I assume you have, even in your gross obvious madness, some grievance, something that we can address—”
I bring the dags into the air, and he stops speaking. As always, the effect on their two postures is striking. They cannot look directly at the barrel, but must avert their eyes slightly. They have seen these guns fire once tonight, of course. They know they are loaded. They know the guns are altogether real.
“I will decide what is absurd, Mr. Johnson. My purpose tonight is to expose each of us for what we truly are. James was good enough to begin that process at the Turk’s Head. I insist now that he continue it. What have you in your waistcoat, Jemmie?”
“A memorandum,” James admits. He dips a finger into the pocket, touching the thing absently, but makes no move to draw it out.
“Bring it out.”
He does so, but with great reluctance. And now we have Johnson’s attention, his curiosity engaged, without a doubt. He watches the tiny folded square come into the light as if it were a living creature. He is a writer, after all, and here is writing for him to read. Johnson is struggling so visibly for mastery of the situation, and now it has moved suddenly and unexpectedly into his own realm of expertise. He cannot wish it otherwise.
“Open it,” I say.
“John, you know it is nothing, some scribbled notes for myself. Nothing more.”
“I know nothing of the sort. I know that you spent upwards of an hour on this little note, in all likelihood. And I know it has a great deal more to say about you than you have to say for yourself. Open it.”
The thing springs open in James’s hand, and it is clear immediately that it contains more than a few scribbles. It is long and detailed. I have seen James construct these memoranda for himself over the years, and it was a good bet that today, of all days, he would come armed with comprehensive self-direction.
“Read it,” I tell him.
“John,” James pleads.
“It is a man’s private correspondence,” Johnson puts in, but weakly. Again, he would know what is on this page as well as I.
“Mr. Johnson,” James says to him, “the note was meant only as a way of making the greatest use of the time you are good enough to spend with me.”
“Read it, James. I will not tell you again to do so.”
And in a faltering, deliberately mechanical voice, James reads.
“Today is the day,” he begins, “to which you have long looked forward, your riverine excursion to Greenwich with Mr. Samuel Johnson. It will be the most glorious of all your year in London. You are to be congratulated for bringing it about. The weather promises fine, and you are to have his company for the entire day. You must make the most of these hours; let them mark you the way ink seeps into the page as the pen scratches along. Above all, mark his language exactly, that you may frame his remarks justly in your journal tomorrow evening. Steal a stray moment here or there, as you may, to jot down notes of particular remarks. Do not let him observe you doing so. It may inhibit his talk. He may think you rude.”
Here James pauses, and his eyes seem to skip down the page.
“Leave nothing out, Jemmie. I will read it myself when you are done.”
James looks up at me, and again he is merely my older brother, and a part of me feels for him. He has spent a year, nearly enough, preparing the ground for this relationship, and now he is being made to display the dirty tools he used cultivate it.
“Johnson is a man of learning, and moral precept, and conversation. He is a didactic being, with a need to instruct, and you attach yourself to him insofar as you agree to be instructed. Make this clear. He has promised to direct your education, and you may hold him to this directly. He can only be flattered at your persistence there.”
Again, James breaks off. “That is—that is the tenor of it. Notes on how to conduct myself. Nothing of which to be proud, perhaps.” His glance goes again to Johnson. “But nothing of which to be ashamed.”
Johnson, however, is staring at me. His attitude has grown almost visibly more contemptuous. His voice drips disdain. “Your brother has found a means to regulate his conduct, by means of notation. Am I to be shocked?”
Johnson throws up his hands, then barks, “I applaud him for it, I tell you. Perhaps he has been less than moral in his conduct; he would not be the last young dog of whom it might be said. But your second example outweighs your first. Your brother has found a means to regulate his conduct. He cares to do so, to perfect himself. You sit here, however, guilty of kidnapping and threatening murder, and lying, everything that is base—and I tell you, sir, you had been better off with a note or two in your own pocket. It might have saved you a trip to the madhouse, for all we know.”
I know James well enough to know that this is not all. His memoranda, for a day like today, always run deeper. “Come, there is more. Continue to the end, James.”
James’s eyes are threatening to well up again, with embarrassment now as much as anything else. But the fight has gone out of him almost entirely, and he continues to the end this time. He keeps his eyes on his own words.
“Do not be afraid to flatter him. Flattery may be made a very fine thing. When you come to Greenwich, have a copy of his London in your pocket, and when you reach the line about ‘kissing the consecrated earth,’ actually do so. Mind no one passing by. Show him that you risk scorn on his behalf. He will be delighted, though he may protest. Study his happiness constantly. And show him how his words shaped your boyhood. Tell him the story of the secret language. Secure his correspondence, above all. Your commission has failed to make your fortune; but here is another way to rise. Here is another king whom you may serve.”
When he has finished, James thrusts the note out to me, but I wave it away with the dag in my left hand. He doesn’t bother to restore its more intricate folds, but creases it once carelessly down the middle and slides it into his outer coat pocket, its secrets now spent. He does not look at either of us now.
“Well done, Jemmie,” I tell him.
“You may go straight to the Devil, John,” he snaps, but that is all.
I turn to Johnson, and I smile again. For the smile seems to pierce the big man’s thick hide like nothing else. “Here is your plain-dealing young Scot, Mr. Johnson. He has planned to meet you for months, if not years. He has hounded his acquaintances for an introduction. He has written your lines, and his own.”
“He would meet an author by whom he has been inspired,” Johnson counters petulantly. “If that is a crime, every man of any learning would wear chains.”
“Then, when once he has got your ear, this plain-dealer, he walks about with little scripts in his pocket, scripts full of flattery and greasy little courtier’s tricks.”
“If all courtiers were genuinely moved to kiss the earth at Greenwich, I tell you I should be better pleased with the state of the Court.”
I cannot help but raise my own voice. “There was nothing genuine in the case. That is the very point. It was written out the night before, like an actor crying on cue. It was deeply planned. There is nothing heartfelt here. It is all rank ambition. He thinks you particularly susceptible to flattery, and he exhorts himself to lay it on even thicker than a young man like himself might ordinarily risk.”
“He was taking vows, sir.” Johnson’s eyes are flashing, the cords of his neck now stretched taut. He looks as though he might spit across the four feet that separate us. “Vows of which you would know nothing. To be humble, before the Monarchy, before a mentor. To accept learning and instruction. To serve in humility, sir. You see weakness of character, but this is a man who would serve before he attempts to command.”
“And you are to be his new king, this note tells us. That is grand indeed, for a boy come up from Lichfield.”
At the mention of his boyhood village, Johnson leans forward, looking down the crooked nose. He drops his voice almost to a whisper, a taunt. “And what of it, sir? If we are not to have a Stuart on the throne, but merely choose a likely man among several? Your brother would serve a king of learning. Why should it be a crime for him to say so? Why should that merit taunting from the likes of you?”
Even knowing what I know about Johnson, and James, the response feels like something just this side of blasphemy. But before I can answer, James suddenly comes to life. He sits up straighter in his chair, and I can see that our discussion has set off some train of thought in his mind, something that has nudged him out of his fatalism. It is almost as though he has a plan of some sort.
He begins to speak, but his voice catches on tears or regret, and he must clear his throat first. “I mentioned in my note the story of the secret language John and I shared when we were boys,” James goes on. He is addressing Johnson, but with his eye on me. It is amusing to see, as he begins his storytelling, the way he also begins to put himself back together, one small fragment at a time: he straightens the set of his waistcoat, brushes a bit of dust thoughtlessly from his knee. Narration begins to set him right again. James continues. “When we were boys, our father bought a copy of your dictionary, Mr. Johnson. And for a while it was displayed prominently in his library, and he was wont to check it every so often, for usage. We were amazed, as boys, that it had cost ten shillings.”
But in the midst of this opening, Johnson turns savagely on him, bullying him into silence. “You begin to rave as well as your brother, Boswell! This is no time for reminiscences. Remain silent, sir, and let him come out with it, and have it over.”
James pulls back as if stung. But I clarify the situation again. “You are the one who would do well to remain silent, Mr. Johnson. I will decide when we have sufficiently canvassed the matters at hand.”
“I have understood your threats, sir!”
“And you, sir, have already confessed to part of what you were earlier concealing. That is a confession I would have my brother hear from your own lips.”
Johnson glares, but the mention of his earlier confession silences him.
“But first I should like to hear James finish his story. It would be a shame if his artful memorandum should have no effect on the reality our conversation. And I suggest you listen carefully, if you would learn why we three are sitting here, as we are. If you would know something about the Boswells.”
I tip up the dag in my right hand. The fluctuations in the lamplight give the pistols a curious appearance. The play of light makes them seem almost molten, liquid gold, and occasionally the effect catches my eye.
James would sooner slit his own throat than displease his hero, and he steals a glance over at Johnson. But then, with the air of one who believes his story will secure its own pardon, James steels himself to continue with it.
“Our father would consult the dictionary every so often, as I’ve said. But then one afternoon, having been informed of something by a man at court, he came home and went straight to the library and searched the book for a single word.”
Johnson waits, anger still suffusing his countenance. When he does not inquire, James moves the story forward himself. “That word was oats.”
“My father was livid,” I cannot help but add.
“I will never forget your definition,” James goes on, his voice sounding a bit stronger now. “It ran, A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland supports the people. And while I know you meant it as a jest, one in good nature, my father took it as an intentional insult. He knew that you had no love for Scotland; that was well known even in Edinburgh. He brooded on the supposed slight all through our dinner, and when we had finished, he walked into the library and tore the page from the book. No fire was burning, or he would certainly have burned it. Instead he crumpled it and threw it on the scrap heap.”
Johnson sits blackly with this for a moment, then snorts, adding only, “And this man is a High Judge in your country. Taking his pique out on an inanimate object.”
I have no idea why James has chosen to tell this story, but it is one I like well enough, and always have. At some level, James has steered the conversation here to involve me, to make me nostalgic for the days when we conspired together against my father.
But even understanding the purpose behind his introducing it, I cannot help but add little bits to the story. “And there James found it, and stole away with it back to our room. Where we smoothed it out, and pressed it flat beneath a stack of books. And over the next several days, we studied that definition.”
James takes over almost immediately, as he has done all our lives. “We studied the entire page, in fact. It was a page of writing our father had forbidden. The words on it were stricken from the language, in effect. But we were beginning, then, to see that our father did not control the world, not entirely. And so we made a copy of the page—”
“I made a copy of the page,” I correct him, “for the simple reason that James would not share the sacred original.”
James looks over at me, and then nods, or bows his head rather. “That is true. I would not share it. It was my own page of Johnson’s dictionary, and it was my prized possession. But I allowed John to copy it. And we made a game of it. The idea was that twice each day, we had to use one of the forbidden words in a sentence while speaking to Father, and we had to do so when the other of us was present. Given that all of the words began with the letter O, it was no simple trick.”
Outside the shack, perhaps as far away as the Savoy Stair, there is the sound of shouting, voices raising an alarm. We all sit frozen for a moment, suddenly painfully aware of the guns in my hand again, and then the noise dies away.
After another instant, the silence of the timber-yard re-establishes itself. I wait an instant longer, by way of insurance, and then continue the story myself. “Of course, one can only use good Johnsonian vocabulary for so long before it becomes . . . noticeable, shall we say. A word like oberration will begin to stand out in conversation at the breakfast table. And so finally my father recognized the pattern, and had the truth out of James.”
James has his eyes down on the dag in my left hand, seems in fact to have his gaze focused on the very mouth of the snubbed barrel, the blackness there, as though it were a magic lantern showing the Edinburgh flat and my father’s rage.
“He found the page of the dictionary I had saved, and he made me confess that John had copied it out as well,” says James.
“In other words, James implicated me to save himself. No hero, even then.”
“This time the scrapheap was insufficient. He burned both copies, and stood watching until they were both ashes. And he did not spare the rod that day.” James looks up and into my eyes, and although I know he has his own skin in mind, I cannot help but feel the kinship there. “We were both soundly beaten for playing that game.”
“My father,” I say, turning now directly to Johnson, “wished to impress upon us the way that the English shape the world to their own advantage, using any tool that may come to hand.”
Maintaining an impotent rage seems finally to have become too much for Johnson. He has slumped back in his chair, and there is as much injury as anger in his air. His breathing, always labored, now seems to be occupying more of his attention, and there is an audible rattle when he inhales; his back too seems to be troubling him, and he works a shoulder to ease a muscle pinching there.
“Had your father truly felt that way,” Johnson counters, “he would have cast out the book in its entirety. But he understood it to be indeed a tool, and one of superior English workmanship. One he could not do without. Yet he would posture before his sons.”
It is at moments such as this when I feel that killing him would be merited. He reveals so very smug a view of the universe, in which England naturally occupies the center, and the English tongue the center of that center, with Samuel Johnson the center-most pin anchoring the English language entire.
I cannot keep the sarcasm from my tone. “Yes, quite. Your book has had its effect, Mr. Johnson, and you must take responsibility for us, James and myself. We have been shaped by your grammar and syntax, even in the provinces. Your vocabulary has made up our world even as far away as Scotland. We have grown up accenting our words as you would have it done. We are your handiwork, for good or for ill.”
Johnson is silent a relatively long time, lips again pursed, air whistling through the cavernous nostrils. But when he speaks, the words are uncharacteristically plain and simple. “You are none of my handiwork. And you are not of your father’s making either. He was narrow in his view, and heavy-handed, but clearly he sought to instill respect. And you have none, John Boswell, none for your father, none for your brother, none for your country, none for your self. You are a sadly deluded young man. You have surrendered your reason to gratify your own sickly sense of self.”
“Mr. Johnson,” James nearly takes Johnson’s sleeve, then thinks better of it, “my brother needs rest, and the care of his doctors. But in his heart, he is as decent a man as I have ever known. You must believe that, sir. John is no criminal, no matter what tonight may seem to say of him.”
I ignore James, and repeat Johnson’s barb. “I am deluded, then, am I?”
Johnson sits up, brings his shoulders forward. His eyebrows are thick, and they do not trace a straight line over his eyes but rather slant up at an angle. It gives him an air of perpetual suspicion and doubt and even distaste, an air that now perfectly matches the look on the rest of his face. He has had enough of this night, enough of me.
“Yes, very obviously so.” He looks around the shack, at his own chair, the lamp, the door. “You have made it painfully obvious, and yet you remain willfully blind of the fact. You have some invented grievance, and you would keep us captive indefinitely while you relive it again and again in the warped world of your own mind.
“I have done with you, sir. You are no better than a wounded animal that must be dealt with on its own terms. I defy you. Do you understand me? Must I spell it out for you? I defy your games and your threats and dirty things in pockets.”
He is very near a breaking point of some sort, and I bring both guns to face him. I don’t worry as much about a sudden movement from James; he will remain as passive as he is humanly able. But managing Johnson is a minute-to-minute affair, even when one is holding the weapons.
“Let us speak then about delusions, but let us begin with your own, Mr. Johnson. For James has revealed himself all but entirely. Let us turn to you.”
He meets my eye, lowers his jaw a bit. Beneath the thick lids, his eyes are large and protrude just enough to render them unusual, fish-like. I stare into one until he blinks it, then responds finally. “I have no delusions, sir.”
“As you wish. You said at the Turk’s Head that you and I had never met. You tried your best to bully me out of maintaining that we had.”
His head is bowed a bit now.
“And yet on our walk over here you admitted your own falsehood to me, your own attempt to deceive. You admitted not only that you had concealed the truth, but that you were wrong to do so. And I would put it to you this way: that it is you who are deluded, you who remain alienated from your very deepest self. Because the fact is that you and I have shared—”
Something about the last phrase, or the impassioned way I say it, has both of them staring directly at me, as though I have spoken in another language entirely.
But I push on with it. “You and I have shared a very great affection. And it has been the saving of my life, sir. And I am not ashamed of it. In fact, I have gone to nearly unimaginable lengths to prove it to be genuine, because I will no longer have it denied or rendered invisible.”
James is now examining Johnson with outright perplexity. And for his own part, Johnson’s face is a wash of emotions, anger and outrage and something I can only interpret as regret, even shame.
“Did you not say so on our way over here? Sir, did you not admit it to me?”
And then Johnson can remain silent no longer. “Yes! I did say so,” he blurts out, hands slicing at the air, his heavy body rocking in his chair with frustration. “I said so in the way that a man on the rack confesses to heresy! Because you left me no other choice, but would have it so! I was trying to end this horrific nightmare. That is all. I thought, for a moment, that hearing me say those words might put an end to all of this. And in a moment of weakness I went along with your damnable lie.”
“Do not attempt to deny the truth now, now that someone else may hear. Can you not see, James, what this man would be at?”
Dags or no, Johnson’s voice has risen beyond a bark almost to a shout. “I do deny it! I deny every particle of your twisted and deluded view of the world. We have never met, not once before this evening! You have clearly read my books, and perhaps in some mad way you have construed that—”
“Oh, do not flatter yourself so, Sir. Other than your dictionary, your books are mildly amusing at best. And at worst they are soporific. They will none of them conjure a world. No, you have already admitted our connection, sir, and I hold you to that admission. It is the one moment this evening you have managed to face yourself in the mirror, actually face yourself.”
Here I gather in James with my glance, for in some way this has all been staged for his benefit. He is the intended audience, and has been all along, the lone representative of all the rest of the world, as well as the go-between to the rest of my family. He is the one who must hear what must be said.
“And I will tell James the rest that you will not admit. That you and I met on London Bridge, when you called me to an alcove there. That you came back to my rooms and eventually shared my lodgings, shared my bed. Yes, shared my bed, chastely, as companions, as two who cared for one another, loved one another. That you wrote there, sometimes in the middle of the night. That we—”
Johnson is out of his chair now, up on his big legs. James has him by one arm, trying vainly to pull him back to his chair. Johnson isn’t closing the distance between us, not yet, but he has lost all other rational consideration. He is sputtering with rage. Still, the words find their way out. “You are more than a mere liar or a damnable thief,” he manages, “you are true evil, and, worse, evil with the appearance of decent family and breeding. You have—you have fattened somewhere in the dark on your own poisonous envy, and you slither into London like the Devil himself, to destroy us, to pervert our understandings of one another, of our very selves. You will not be satisfied until we too are mad, or mouldering in a grave.”
“He is ill, Mr. Johnson!” James pleads.
I stay stock-still in my chair while Johnson raves.
“You say you will allow us to leave when I have capitulated, agreed to the twisted version of the world your fantasy has produced. But you lie. I tell you that you lie through your teeth. For that would never be enough. Never! It is not the past you would control, but the present and the future. You would displace your brother in my affections, and nothing less will satisfy you. If you are not stopped this night, he will have your knife in his back by morning.”
I cannot hold my tongue any more. “It is you who would manipulate—”
“Silence!” Johnson thunders.
And then in the sudden quiet, he yells again just as loudly: “Silence, I say!”
He could not raise his voice any louder. We have been talking in whispers and low voices for an hour, but this is a genuine bellow, one that must reach the boats moving far out on the darkness of the Thames.
“You have surrendered your purchase on reality entirely,” Johnson goes on. The blood is up in his face again, and his cheeks are brick-red. “And your greatest delusion is that I would favor you with a single particle of my affection! That I would bring my pen and ink to whatever stinking hole in the earth you have managed to scratch out and line with leaves and twigs and bits of string, and call your rooms! That I would work there, and solicit your opinion! There is an excellent reason you have found yourself in the madhouse, sir, and it is this: you have become a monster. A mad—” Johnson loses his words again in his rage, but then drives on: “—smutty shriveled thing, and no one will associate with you by choice. That is the truth of it.”
James half-stands himself. His voice is sharper, harder now. “Mr.
Johnson, please! He is ill. He is not himself, and cannot be held accountable for his actions. You must remember that. You must find the self-control that he cannot.”
Johnson turns on him, and James actually averts his face from the direct blast of the man’s anger. “Hold your tongue as well, Boswell! He will know what he is, I tell you! He will know what he is!” Johnson wheels back, and takes a heavy step toward me, daring me almost. His arms are held out at his sides, and he is a great physical presence in the small space. He comes forward swaying very slightly, like a bear nearly too heavy to move on its hind legs.
“That is why you have been locked away, John Boswell, because you would force yourself on a society that has made the decision to dispose of you. And dispose of you we must, because you corrupt what you touch. Love you, sir? Love you? I could sooner love a maggot curling in my porridge. You would match wits with me? You would attempt to convince your brother that it is I who deals in lies and delusions and trickery?”
He takes another half-step. He realizes that he is skirting the line where I must defend myself, but he is determined to push me, to push his way out of this situation entirely if he can.
“For the love of God, look no further than your own two hands! Look at the objects in your two hands. Do you not find it at all strange that a young man such as yourself, busted from the Army, with no claim to inheritance, without work and apparently without a father’s allowance, should be in possession of two pistols cast in solid gold? Even plated in gold? Truly, how could you come by such weapons?”
Of the thousand different ways James or Johnson might have taken the conversation, this I could not have predicted. He might have settled as easily on my boots, and how I came by them. I cannot fathom his meaning for a moment.
But then I have it: he means to imply that I have stolen them. And that therefore I am no better than a common criminal, no agent of justice, but a petty thief.
And while I don’t owe him an answer, I cannot help myself. “I told you I had them from a goldsmith in Parliament Close. They cost nearly every guinea I had. And every guinea I could secure from my father. Money that was meant to last out this year.”
Johnson has balled his white hands into fists, each as big as a cannonball. He is still standing in front of me, nearly over me, and I am tallying each move of his muscles.
He points his finger at me, his long fat finger, points it directly in my face.
“You are deluded, I tell you. Can you not see that? Your weapons are precisely the sort a man such as yourself would be expected to carry. Two hunks of cheap metal. You might buy both for ten pounds, and have the case thrown into the bargain.”
He thrusts his finger down toward my hand now, his entire arm shaking as he does so. “Your brother will say nothing because he would not rouse you from your sleepwalking. He is afraid you might be injured somehow in the waking. That is because your brother knows what it is to love, sir. That is because your brother is twice the man you will ever be. Not because he is eldest. Not because he stands to inherit, but because he deserves to inherit. That is why he cannot bring himself to tell you.”
I will not look down, for it is a trick, no more. I remember purchasing the guns at the goldsmith’s shop in Edinburgh, haggling over price. In the last months, I have sat for hours in my rooms, cleaning and polishing them, fitting them for the purpose I had in mind.
A trick, and a child’s trick, at that. Johnson is just close enough to rush me if I shift my attention, and he has fooled me once tonight already.
But in the end, it is not really a matter of choice. His taunting has pulled a thread now hanging loose in my mind, and finally I steal a glance down at the dags in my fists. Only to find them gone.
And in their place, two plain pistols of scratched gun-metal black. Guns without decoration, carving or style. Leaden, mere things. They give back none of the lamplight.
I hear Johnson give a short bark of triumph.
And that is something the thing inside of me will not bear, and it takes what it wants. My right arm snaps up, perfectly level with Johnson’s big chest, and before I can complete a single thought, it has pulled the trigger.
But Johnson is no longer standing before me.
He is careening away, just as the hammer falls, and in the muzzle flash I see that it is James who has slammed him aside at the last instant, James whose improbably rushing body now occupies the space before the gun’s barrel. James who will die. He has saved his King, after all.
None of this matters, however, because the gun does not fire.
It explodes in my hand instead.
AND THEN I am lying on the floor of the shanty, looking up at the ceiling. James and Johnson are gone away, and there is a horrible ringing silence. I cannot feel my right hand, but my chest is on fire. Sulfur smoke hangs still in the air. I manage to bring up my left hand, then to swipe the tips of my fingers lightly over the flames in my chest. And they come away vivid bloody red.
But the cause and the effect of it escape me. I cannot seem to piece together what has happened, for some reason. My mind is dull. It is as though, rather than some shard of the pistol exploding into my chest, my heart itself has exploded out of it.
SOMEONE IS TOUCHING my face, carefully cradling my head. I open my eyes. It is the lark, down on his knees next to me. The black cloth he was wearing is gone, and his eyes are bright with tears. His dusty skin is pale in the lamplight. He never left, even when I insisted upon it, but waited and kept watch somewhere out in the dark timber-yard, in the wet and the miserable cold, all this time.
He brings his face close to mine, looking into my eyes, and then he presses his lips quickly to mine. And suddenly I know why he could not bring himself to leave.
“I tried to tell you,” he is saying, berating me softly, for he believes me dead or too near death to matter. “Tried to hammer it into your bony skull. But you wouldn’t have me stay, couldn’t have us seen together even by those two. Not by the great and powerful, even knowing what they are and what they’ve done to you. Stubborn, hard-hearted, stuck-up bastard, you are. Can never be troubled to listen, not for a minute. ’Tis always done your way, isn’t it?”
He runs a fingernail along my cheek, traces the curl of my ear. “I was welcome at night, and come daylight what was I then? Bit of trash bobbing out in the flood. Wouldn’t notice me on the street. Pretend we was strangers. But you needed me, and I told you all along. All along.”
He taps me on the forehead with his neat fingernail, for all the world as though he means to remind me, for the next time round. “You needed me all the way from dawn to dark, too, and that’s the truth of it.”
And I remember it all now, this man and how I know him, and it has indeed been the saving of my life. I remember again the alcove on London Bridge, and in it, there in the gloom, sits this young man, offering no harm of any sort, hesitant himself even to say hello.
The lark was not the only man I met in those first weeks walking London Bridge, but he was the last, that I know now. He was the last because he turned out to be what I needed, what I had been looking for on the Bridge all along.
In the weeks since, he has come to me nights straight from the water, come padding up Fish Street Hill, smelling faintly of salt, his legs and feet cold as river ice. More than once have I chafed the life back into those feet, those legs. We have talked late into the night.
And it has not been chaste, not even the first night we met out over the water. Mostly it has not because I haven’t ever wanted it to be so.
But that hunger has been no failing. Just the reverse. As I glimpse it now—as an entire set of memories washing in all at once—it seems almost another sort of fidelity entirely, a chastity shared by two rather than endured by one.
I can see all of this now because the thing inside me is dead. For all of the things I have never known about it, will never know about it, I have known every minute of the last several years that it was there. Even in Plymouth, as I was telling my doctors I was come back to myself again, I knew it was there, in me. I could always feel it, listening.
And now I know it is not. It is dead by its own hand.
All of this I would tell the lark, but I cannot. Dragging breath through the flames in my chest is all that I can manage. And then there is the sound of men tramping heavily up the river’s edge toward the timber-yard, and he presses his thin lips once tightly to my forehead, and I hear his boots scuffing across the floor of the shanty. And he is gone. Back to the flood, forever this time.
Leaving me alone. In this last, least bastard world.