The Brothers Boswell Read Free Page A

and then gives a wink and rolls over in the water. His milky outline glimmers, darkens, and then vanishes, before he sounds, like a dolphin, a good thirty feet from the boat. In a moment his hand reaches out of the water near the Stair, and halts the boy’s sculler.
    They talk for a moment, and then the mudlark slips back into the water and makes his way back to where the waterman holds us still in the river.
    Instead of treading water this time, the mudlark hauls himself directly up onto the small gunwale of the boat and perches there, bringing his feet over the edge and sliding them into the warm bilge at the boat’s bottom. His body has long ago become a thing of the river, sleek and beach-white, nipples dark wet sand-dollars. His hair is slick and brown as an otter’s coat. He clucks his tongue at the waterman, who continues to ignore him, continues to fail to recognize him.
    “Well, then,” I say. “What said he?”
    The lark seems to have all the time in the world, and he examines his water-wrinkled hands and dirty fingernails before speaking. Then he rubs the muscles of his left arm, as though it is sore, before meeting my eye. The look is direct, a bit defiant, a bit provoking.
    And then he says, “It’s to be like that, is it?”
    By definition, to traffic with the mudlarks is to traffic in nonsense, but I have no time for it this morning. I rest my hand on the hilt of my sword and lean out of the canopy’s shade. “If you have anything to report, friend, I have what I promised. Good as my word.”
    The waterman clears his throat loudly, nudging it along, and the lark finally purses his lips and nods. He rubs his hands together briskly. “Good as your word, then. Well, sir, the boy says the two men talked about speakin’ in old languages. All the way from Temple Stair.”
    I wait, but nothing more is forthcoming. “Old languages, you say?”
    “That’s it. Like Greek or Roman. What a man should learn o’ that, and how much, and if, and so on. Like that.”
    I reach into my pocket, letting the music of the coins work. “Anything else the boy said?”
    He thinks for a second, eyes on the small change now sifting in my hand. Then he’s got it. “The big one asked the boy what he’d give to know about the Argo Knights. The first sailors in the world, the big one said.”
    “The Argonauts, you mean.”
    “That’s it, sir.”
    “And the boy replied?”
    “The boy replied he’d give whatever he had.”
    I’m amazed again at the ability of the river to teach every man on it, no matter how young, to cant so flawlessly. “My, what a simple, artless thing to have said. And the big one liked that, I imagine.”
    The lark gives a canny look, nods, blows water from his nose out over the gunwale. He turns back, smirking at his own crassness. “Boy said the big one give him a double fare for that.” There’s a silence, and then the mudlark brushes his wet hair from his brow. He is searching my face again, scrutinizing it. I realize he’s waiting for his coin, and I fish it out of my pocket. He takes the penny, works it into the small leather bag about his neck, gives the cord a tug to seal it up.
    And then, as though lost in an afterthought, he looks up at me solemnly and says, “I’d give all I’ve got to know them Argonauts as well, sir.”
    “Fine, then. Give me the penny pouch there on your neck, and I’ll teach you.”
    He snorts at that and slides back into the water, leaving the damp mark of his arms on the gunwale. As his churning legs take him away from us, he says, very distinctly, “Well, and if you’ll kiss my arse, sir, I’ll teach you somethin’ as well.”
    With that, the waterman is up from his seat, a rock in his hand. He cocks his arm, but the mudlark has already darted beneath the water, so there is no way to tell whether the rock finds its mark when the waterman fires it into the Thames. In a moment the swimmer’s head surfaces several boats away, bobbing in the center of