by Alan Gold
Having spent the entire afternoon declaiming on all sorts of matters, Mr. Clarke, a bailiff with the court of Assize in Oyer, and Terminer, was bemused as he sat beside his wife and they listened to Mrs. Macpherson talk at length about the importance of her Reverend husband’s living and the compliments that had been paid to him by none other than the Bishop of Aldgate himself.
They didn’t particularly like Mrs. Macpherson, who spoke a little too freely for their minds on matters about which she really should have been more circumspect—matters concerning the church and other Ministers and their wives. Were it not unchristian and inappropriate for the wife of a Dean to be so described, Mrs. Macpherson could have been considered a gossip.
Mr. Clarke, on the other hand, was exceptionally circumspect when it came to matters pertaining to the court of which he was bailiff. Whether or not he had his tipstaff in his hand, he was a bailiff every minute of the day, and what was confidential concerning the judges and the barristers-at-law and even the prison guards, remained at all times confidential. Hot irons wouldn’t have forced him to divulge one single shred of information to which he was privy if that information had to remain confidential.
Which was why he was surprised, once Mrs. Macpherson had pushed the last bit of the Bath bun into her exploding cheeks and washed it down with a gulp of tea, that she told them what she had done.
She begged them to respect her confidentiality and maintain her secret, but she informed them that a few evenings ago, she had taken part in a coronation. When Mr. Clarke’s face showed both disbelief and bewilderment, Mrs. Macpherson assured him that everything she said was the gospel truth and that she had been one of only a handful of witnesses to the coronation of the sole remaining heir of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Mistress Flora Macdonald. Even the renowned Dr. Johnson was there, which showed how important and historical the occasion was, she assured them. But the more Mr. Clarke’s face registered disbelief, the more details Mrs. Macpherson was forced to provide until the entire story had come out.
Once satisfied that they now knew in what high matters of state she had involved herself, Mrs. Macpherson went on to another important matter concerning a wealthy gentleman patron of St. Clair’s in Cricklegate and a fifteen-year-old female parishioner who had suddenly disappeared and was last heard of on the continent where, no doubt, the child was taking delivery of what Mrs. Macpherson described as “a certain unwanted and unwelcome gift of the Lord.”
Mr. Clarke looked at his pocket watch and stood suddenly. “Ma’am, it’s been delightful, but duty calls. I’m wanted at the courthouse in ten minutes, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”
To the surprise of both his wife and Mrs. Macpherson, Mr. Clarke left the house and walked hastily toward the Old Bailey where he asked to speak to the chief justice in chambers, Mr. Justice Alston.
Annoyed by the unexpected intrusion when he should have been reviewing a case appearing before him in the morning, Justice Alston allowed the bailiff ten minutes of his time. He barely knew the fussy little man but had seen the bailiff from time to time walking with great self-importance about the court and didn’t particularly like him. He was a bumptious and officious little man with no breeding or education. But the matter on which he’d requested an interview was said to be very important, and so the door to Justice Alston’s chamber opened, and Bailiff Clarke walked in.
“Begging your pardon, my lord, I have received information from an impeccable source regarding a matter of the greatest urgency. A matter of treason against the king and the realm,” he said, sounding very pompous and conceited.
Barely able to resist a smile, Justice Alston asked him to reveal the matter. By the time he’d done so, Alston’s jaw had sagged with the enormity of the news.
“And is this woman to be believed?” he asked.
“She is very free with her information, but I am convinced beyond doubt her account to be accurate, my lord. Nobody could have made up those details unless they were true. My good lady wife and I had visited the Abbey only last month, and the details she described accorded with my own personal knowledge of the place.”
Justice Alston nodded. “Wait here,” he said. “Don’t return to your home. I’ll send a note to your wife saying that you’re delayed on urgent court business. This is a matter which must be dealt with immediately and at the very highest levels. I shall try to seek a meeting with the prime minister this evening. You will come with me.”
Bailiff Clarke’s eyes opened like organ stops. “Yes, my lord. Of course, my lord.” He could barely conceal his excitement. Wait until he told the lads at the Crown and Anchor tomorrow night, he thought.
It took less than a day for news of the interview between the judge, the bailiff, and the prime minister to come to Dr. Johnson’s attention. He immediately penned a letter to Flora.
You are undone, Mistress Macdonald. We have been betrayed. Flee London immediately. The Prime Minister knows about the ceremony concerning young Jamie, and is making the most detailed enquiries. Flee, ma’am. Flee London and these isles for your safety and that of your beloved son.
Flora looked at the note from Dr. Johnson’s servant and read it for the third time. Its urgency was indisputable, but from what was she fleeing? And to where? She certainly couldn’t go to America from a London port because doubtless the authorities would be looking for her even now. Perhaps she could flee from Liverpool, but again, she had no friends or protectors there.
No, she had to travel urgently up to Scotland, and like Prince Charles three decades before, she had to hide in the heather and in crofts and use her name and reputation with loyal Scotsmen and women in order to evade capture for herself and her son.
She would leave London with Jamie within the hour. Perhaps if she could meet with the right people, and if he was recognized as the crowned king of Scotland, enthroned on the Stone of Scone, then everything might come good. But if that was the case, why had almost nobody responded to her letters? What should she do?
Dear God, she thought as she hurried up the stairs to Jamie’s room to alert him, am I a fugitive again? Am I doing once more what I did all those years ago, but this time not with Bonnie Prince Charlie, but with his son? How had it come to pass?
Chapter Eighteen
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND
FEBRUARY 15, 1775
There should have been a feeling of exultation at walking down the roads of Edinburgh again, looking into the shop windows, smelling the sweet cloying aroma of hot honey biscuits roasting over the red coals of a brazier on street corners. The weather was bitterly cold, but the sky was a clear blue and Edinburgh Castle, sitting squat and dominant above the city, looked as though it was encased in an ethereal glow.
So much of her time had been spent in America, with its single story wooden buildings, its makeshift appearance, dirt roads rutted with the tracks of wagon wheels, and men and women whose appearance showed that they would never be more than dirt-poor farmers, that she truly appreciated the permanence of ancient cities like London and Edinburgh. She looked in admiration as ladies in the very finest of satin dresses, bonnets, and fur hand muffs walked alongside gentlemen dressed in black silk top hats, waistcoats, frock coats, and shoes that shone so much they reflected the buildings.
Now, for the first time in the two weeks—it had taken the two of them to travel by carriage and then by horse to Scotland—she felt she could relax. There was a surreal aspect to her journey. When they left the confines of London and traveled the twenty miles north to the city of Luton, she still cast her eyes downwards, not daring to stare anybody in the face in case she was pointed out to the authorities and exposed as a traitor to King George. But people in Luton and Derby and Manchester and further north had either ignored her completely or had smiled at her and her son and bid them good day.
Now that she felt much safer in Scotland, she began to wonder why she had been forced to escape from London. Why had Dr. Johnson been so insistent that she leave immediately? She had seen no sig
ns of panic or alarm or an England militating to catch and imprison her.
And what had she done that was criminal? Why was she being pursued by the authorities? Treason surely was an assault on the monarch or the nation, yet all she’d done was to have Jamie claim his inheritance as Charlie had tried to do all those years before. But unlike the Young Pretender, his very own son Jamie had been crowned King James IX on the Stone of Scone in Westminster Abbey, where he was enthroned as monarch of his land. Why was this treason against the king of England? Scotland should not be part of England. It was an independent nation and now had its own independent king.
Once she was given a chance to explain it to them, and when it was accepted by the lairds of Scotland, it would be clear to everybody that her son was the lawful claimant and owner of the Throne of Scotland! By rights, he should have been welcomed by the king of England himself as a fellow monarch, the successor to the House of Stuart. Yet Flora was fleeing from the English king’s authority as she had done thirty years earlier, accused of lese majesty, in danger of imprisonment in the Tower of London for the second time in her life. And today there was nobody like the long-dead Prince of Wales who would ensure her safety and comfort. Today’s Prince of Wales was only thirteen years old, and the talk in London was that already the boy was little more than a wastrel, and as seemed to be the curse of the Hanoverians, the father was already showing signs of detesting his precocious son.
Yet flee she knew she had to, because Dr. Johnson’s letter was so full of tension and drama. He was a considered man, not the sort to spread discontent and panic, so if he gave her a warning that her own and her son’s liberty was imperiled, she knew that she had to act upon it immediately. She must establish the extent of the danger to herself and Jamie, which she could do in Edinburgh, and then make passage for America from Liverpool. Going directly to Liverpool would have been the most sensible plan, had she known the exact nature of the danger that faced her. But even though it was tempting, it was impossible, as the last thing she wanted to do was to book passage and then find the authorities waiting for her on the gangplank when the ship was due to sail. The alternative was to find her way to Glasgow on the River Clyde, where trading ships carrying coal, cotton, and iron left regularly for America; but she didn’t know whether they carried passengers, whereas she knew that most people leaving England and Scotland to live in America left either from London or from Liverpool.
So first, she had to establish who was seeking her and what would be the consequences were she to be caught. Then she had to plan evasive tactics. Then she had to somehow take a ship to the New World. There were plenty of ships into and out of Liverpool, so she knew that she wouldn’t be more than three or four days in the town before she found two berths. Most of the shipping came into Liverpool carrying black African slaves or cotton, tobacco, sugar, or grain. Their masters and owners often sought paying passengers to the New World to ensure some additional income from a ship sailing westwards.
But before she could feel safe in Liverpool, she had to determine the full extent of the reason for Dr. Johnson’s fears. And Edinburgh, where she could easily loose herself, was the ideal vantage point. She had known many people in Edinburgh before she left to live in America. Some would still be alive; some would welcome her into their homes. But she was loath to endanger them if she was truly being outlawed by King George and Prime Minister Lord North.
So she and Jamie, having spent the night in a lodging house, breakfasted and took themselves toward a place in the center of Edinburgh where she hadn’t been since 1745. She wondered if it would still be there, thirty years on. And more especially, she wondered whether the venerable Mr. David Hume who had been so kind and generous to a naïve young woman asking impertinent questions about the landing of the Young Pretender, would still be sipping bitter coffee at the same table, possibly surrounded by his friends Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Thomas Reid. She had often told Jamie about her meeting with the three members of the Philosophical School of Common Sense, but she never for one moment thought that she’d accompany him to the place . . . if it still existed.
She could smell the roasted coffee even before she turned the corner of Albemarle Street. It hung in the cold air and insisted itself upon her senses. It was sweeter than the coffee that she drank in America, possibly smelling of cloves or some other herb. And as she approached, she saw the name on the hoarding and beamed a smile, squeezing Jamie’s hand and nodding toward it. The shop was bigger than she remembered, and then she realized that Mr. Casaubon had obviously done sufficiently well in business to purchase the adjoining house.
Emblazoned across the double entry, in gold letters upon a black lacquer background was the name:
Casaubon’s Coffee Emporium and Cigar Caravan
followed by the legend:
Proudly serving coffee to the citizenry of Edinburgh since A.D. 1737
As she did when she was a naïve girl, full of hope and expectation all those years ago, Flora stood outside the window and peered in to watch the mid-morning coffee drinkers imbibe their nectar. She had become used to coffee while in America and wondered whether English coffee would taste the same. She looked carefully at the faces of the customers, recognizing nobody. And then her eyes alighted on a table in the middle of the room, at which sat a large and solitary gentleman. All the other tables were crowded, yet he was the sole patron at his. Much older, much fatter, and with far less hair, she nonetheless recognized Mr. David Hume, sitting and reading from a book. It was his eyes. For all the dissolution of his sagging body, his now enormous girth, his eyes were still sharp and full of wisdom as he took in all his surroundings, even while reading.
Flora entered and the bell tinkled her presence. People looked up and stared at an elderly woman and her son. But not Mr. Hume, who was engrossed in his book, peering at the words through his thick spectacles, holding it close to his nose as though smelling it. Yet she knew he’d seen her, judged her, and she felt he’d recognized her. She sighed. He hadn’t seemed a young man when she’d first met him three decades ago, but now he was obviously elderly, fragile, and suffering from failing faculties. She guessed he’d be in his mid-sixties. She wondered whether or not she’d aged as much and as badly as he, even though she was ten years his junior.
Carefully threading her way around the tables, she stood before Mr. Hume’s table and waited for him to acknowledge her presence. Jamie stood beside her, waiting, though with much less patience. But Mr. Hume continued to read his book.
Jamie coughed to capture his attention. Mr. Hume looked up and saw two figures standing there. Was it mischief that caused him to say, “Another cup of coffee, waiter,” before resuming his reading.
Flora smiled. “Might we join you, sir,” she said.
Again, he looked up, this time with a frown of annoyance. “Forgive me, Madame, but this table is reserved for my sole use. There are a number of other tables if you’d . . .”
He peered carefully at Flora and then to her son. He removed his glasses and stared at them again, this time struggling with the memory of a moment of long-passed history. But even though she knew he didn’t remember the details of their first meeting, she knew from his eyes that he recognized her.
Flora smiled. “It was thirty years ago. At this very table. I had longer hair then. It was as black as pitch and not white as it is today. But then, as now, I was very arrogant in my assumption that a man as clever as you would give any time to a silly girl asking silly questions,” she said.
David Hume beamed a smile. “No question is silly if the answer enlightens you, Mistress Macdonald.” He stood, and shook her hand warmly. Flora introduced him to Jamie, and they all sat. They were immediately served coffee by the waiter—one so young that he wouldn’t even have been born when she’d first visited Casaubon’s.
“I’m both surprised and gratified that you remember me,” she said.
“Your fame in Scotland is remarkable. You’re the woman who saved Bonnie Prince Charlie.
People still speak of you with admiration,” he told her. “I heard many times from many different people about your bravery in setting off in a tiny rowing boat on a terrible sea and braving the elements to save a hapless young man. I often wondered what became of you. Now you will have the opportunity of telling me.”
“And tell you I shall, sir, but there are matters which I wish to divulge which can’t be said in public. Might I suggest that we enjoy our coffee together, and I’ll tell you a brief biography of my life since our first meeting; I would be fascinated to hear how the past thirty years have been for you, and then perhaps we could go for a walk in Holyrood Park where I can divulge certain matters which are delicate and for your ears only.”
They drank their coffee and chatted amiably. Flora told Hume about the rescue of the Prince of the House of Stuart, of his escape, of her imprisonment in the Tower and of her years as the wife of a farmer on Skye. She explained how they had decided to transfer their lives to America and that she had returned to visit the old country with her son Jamie.
And for his part, Hume told Flora of his attempts to gain a Professorship at either Glasgow or Edinburgh Universities, and how he was always rebuffed by churchmen who believed him to be an atheist, or worse, a deist like Adam Smith.
Jamie interrupted him by asking what was the difference between an atheist and a deist. Hume gave a bronchial laugh, leaned forward so that none of the other patrons could hear and said, “An atheist believes in no God. A deist believes that a god created this world, but when he saw what man had done to it, he threw up his hands in disgust and left us entirely to our own resources, so that every mistake we make is of our own doing, and we are responsible for clearing up the mess.”
“And you?” asked Jamie. “What do you believe?”