The Brothers Boswell Read Free

the anger, a large dog awakened by a small noise.
    He clucks his tongue. “Your clothes are too swell for a footpad, my fine friend. There ain’t no lady in the sculler there to follow. And you don’t strike me as bein’ in a joking mood, you don’t mind me saying.” He spits over the gunwale. “And so I’m curious, now, nothing but that. A hint of why we’re running behind these two? I’ll be close as the grave, trust me, sir.”
    Again, I say nothing for a moment, and then reach into my pocket and bring up a pair of coppers, holding them out on my palm for an instant. And then I pitch them over the side and into the water. Almost immediately, a young mudlark near the boat dives to catch the coins before they can touch silt. “Your fare is tuppence lighter, man,” I say. “The full shilling was for quiet, and following my instructions.”
    He holds up a hand to signal enough, attends to his oars, swinging his head up and about to avoid other boats, and to keep James and Johnson’s red sculler in sight. Although the woolen canopy keeps off the sun, it blocks the wind, and without that breath of air the day is hottish, a creeping late July heat. And the wool traps the light stench of the waterman’s little boat itself, fish and sweat and damp wood and river slime. But it is the sight of the two of them on theirexcursion, the bigger and the slightly less big, sitting in their merry little boat out there in the very center of the Thames, never quiet but always talking, talking, talking that saps the pleasure from the ride.
    After only five minutes or so on the river, I see their red skiff abruptly angle through the cluttered forest of masts toward the Old Swan Stairs. I have already told the waterman to expect as much, and he draws quickly across the flow of traffic to allow me to watch them come in for their landing. Predictable, to a fault. Greenwich is another long pull down the river, so why are they rowing in at the Swan, disembarking, walking the seven crowded blocks around London Bridge to the rank fish-market at Billingsgate and then re-embarking for Greenwich?
    Because, my friends, James is nobody’s hero: he has not got the heart for the bit of white water under the spans, or the way the boat drops away from you suddenly when you shoot the bridge. And why else? Because they are both of them cheap. They’ll both squeeze a crown until King George weeps, and the fare doubles at the bridge.
    But as I watch them re-bobble their way heavily back out of the sculler, I have a thought. A mudlark is treading water not so far from us, and I wave him over.
    “Hey there you, lark,” I call, as softly as one can.
    He swims to me at a leisurely pace, his strong arms dipping and flashing in the water. Once beside the boat, he keeps himself suspended in the water with slow, easy movements of his thick legs and cupped hands. Mudlarks spend hours a day in the current, carrying and finding and ferreting out things that are awkward for men on a boat or on shore to come at. No doubt this waterman and this mudlark have worked together at some point in the past, to move some package of something off the river before it could be stamped and taxed, but they ignore one another now.
    “See that red sculler there,” I say, “putting off passengers at the Stair now?”
    The mudlark looks, turns back. He has sharp features, good teeth, and the articulate shoulders of a man who swims for his living. A penny pouch hangs dripping from his neck, a rusted knife from his belt. He narrows an eye at me, trying to figure out what my game might be. “Aye. I see ’em right enough.”
    “There’s a half-penny for you if you pull the coat of that boy rowing them, and ask him what the two gentlemen talked about. There’s a penny, though, if you remember it when you get back here to me, remember it all exactly.”
    “Penny, eh? There’s a generous man.”
    “A penny if you have the details exact.”
    The mudlark nods his head slowly,