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insist that you leave London, and take up Charles again from whatever Edinburgh foster-mother you’ve found for him, and make yourself a new nest somewhere far from James Boswell and his grimy doings.”
    She rolled over, lifted herself on an arm, swiped at her damp, blotchy cheek. Her tone was tinged with an unmistakable outrage, something of which I wouldn’t have imagined her capable, in her position.
    “How can you say these things of him? How
can
ye? You of all people, who know the man
best
, sir? He is your brother, after all, i’nt he?
In’t
he now?”
    I cocked the dag audibly in my right hand, and I shuffled closer to her on the bed, so that the barrel came to rest against the skin of her throat. And then, because I truly could not prevent myself, I felt myself surge forward and the barrel sank deeper still into the sinews of her neck. Panic flooded back into her eyes, and she gave a little involuntary cry, face crushed down into the pillow.
    I held it there for a long instant, my hand actually shaking with rage, until I had my voice again. “Here it is, girl. If I catch you with James again, I will kill you, and I will kill your son Charles. I’ll slaughter you both—listen well to me, now—and no one will protect you, no one will keep you safe. Not the watch, not James, not an army of brothers-in-law. Better that you should both be dead, and pennies rusting on both your eyes, than that he should unravel the stuff of your lives like a nasty child savaging a rag doll. Believe me, Peggy Doig, when I say this, for I am genuinely mad. The fact has been proven, and the best doctors at Plymouth have washed their hands of me. So you will take this money, and you will make a life for yourself in which James has no part, because whatever part he makes up will go rotten sooner rather than later, and no one knows it better, as you say, than I myself.”
    I drew back the pistol, and her breath came in a coughing rush,as did fresh tears. But I had no more time to argue, and without another word I withdrew from the bed and stepped to the door.
    Before opening it, I said, “Your letters are in my pocket now, and I shall keep them. Think of that when you think about telling your sister or anyone else of what’s happened between us this morning. I can find you anywhere in the Kingdom, should you and James see one another again, because I know everything that James knows, and always will. If I were you, I’d let it be said that your boy died of the smallpox, or by pitching off the back of a fishing boat, and I’d smuggle him off somewhere else, somewhere fresh. But whatever I did, I would separate my life and my line from the Boswells, for once and for good. If I loved my little bairn. If I wanted what was indeed best.”
    She had curled into a small ball on the bed, head in her arms, hairy white legs doubled up beneath the chemise. The irresistible feet were buried miserably beneath the counterpane. She was crying, but so softly and forlornly that I lost the sound when I closed the garret door behind me. Whatever she might think of me, she thought nothing good of her brother-in-law the chandler. She didn’t want to call him out of his little hole full of candles and knick-knacks, even now.
    I felt for her, truly I did. Her world was hemmed round by men for whom nothing good might be said, or so it must have seemed to her. She had no way of knowing that I had done her the single greatest kindness of her life.
    I remain convinced of it, even today. For in February of 1764, only some six months after our morning’s discussion, James will be desultorily studying law in Utrecht, and he will receive a letter informing him that his illegitimate infant son has died. Without his ever having laid eyes on the boy, the boy will be no more. James will write pained letters to Johnston and a few other of his confidants, and he will actually shed a tear or two—he has that capacity—but in a week the subject will pass forever from