The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  “It is a letter from the physician who laid me; and I have several from him.” Lady Jane felt convinced that these reports against her were circulated by the Hamilton faction, with a view to keep open the breach that separated her from her brother.

  “But I hope very soon to vindicate myself,” she told her man of business, “for I am determined to go to Douglas myself with the children, and make way to my brother, and represent and let him know the fact as it stands.”

  William Loch, a cautious Scot, took the liberty of asking to know the fact as it stood. When was she delivered of the twins? Where? And in whose presence?

  Lady Jane told him. It was the 10th of July, 1748, at Paris; and she named the man-midwife, and listed the witnesses. Some time later Mr. Loch jotted down these important names.

  Lady Jane girded herself for her final gamble. With a modest entourage she went down to Douglas Town and lodged at the Scribe Tree. There she dressed the little boys with care; she thought they looked meltingly pretty. She took the wide-eyed youngsters by the hand, and made her way to the old gray keep that was the home of her childhood. The gates were closed.

  As she stood there in doubt, she saw through the little foot-door the Duke’s butler crossing the inner court. She called to him, and he came.

  “I am come to wait on my brother the Duke,” she said simply, “with my children.”

  “Welcome, my Lady,” said the honest old fellow. “I’ll open the gates and carry in your Ladyship.”

  But Lady Jane had too much pride to cross her brother’s threshold without his express invitation.

  “I’ll not go in,” said she, “until you acquaint his Grace I am here.”

  “Then pray walk a turn on the terrace,” replied the butler, “and I’ll return to you directly.”

  So the thin, erect woman walked on the terrace with the two little boys, the blond and the dark, while abovestairs her fate was decided. At first it hung in the balance. Her brother was almost inclined to receive her. But the Duke was in the hands of an all-powerful retainer, one Stockbriggs, who led him by the nose as a man leads a bear. Stockbriggs was suborned in the Hamilton interest, and had no mind to let my Lady get at her brother with her pathetic eyes and her pretty boys. It is said that he locked the Duke up bodily. Soon the message came down:

  “My Lady Jane can get no access here.”

  My Lady on the terrace took this message like a blow on the face. She gathered the little boys again by the hand, their finery but ammunition wasted, and back she went in grief to the inn.

  There she composed an eloquent last appeal to her brother. The minister of Douglas heard the draft.

  “That,” said he, “is the most moving letter that ever I heard; all the tragedies that ever I have read, or seen acted, never moved me so much; for it has forced tears from my eyes. But,” he had to add in honesty, “I am afraid it will never move his Grace. I am surprised that your Ladyship should have offered a visit to the Duke, unless you had been invited.”

  “I was advised to do it,” she replied, “by my best friends at Edinburgh. They could not imagine the Duke could be so cruel as to shut his gates upon us.”

  “Those you call your best friends do not know the Duke as well as I do, otherwise they would not have given you that advice.”

  “I thought I had known my brother,” remarked Lady Jane, “as well as anybody; but it seems he is to know every day.”

  “So he is,” said the minister.

  Nevertheless, Lady Jane sent the letter; and Stockbriggs burked it.

  The egregious Stockbriggs talked far otherwise to the minister.

  “I said to the Duke,” said he, “though you will not see Lady Jane, I would earnestly beg of your Grace to give her a purse of gold; but his Grace absolutely refused.”

  The minister believed him, reckoning him an honest man at the time. He reversed this opinion some time later, when he found that all the time this honest man was undermining him with the Duke, representing him as a sinner who thought nothing of reading the newspapers on the Sabbath day and lying in adultery with his cook’s wife. The Duke, who held his inveterate enmity to his only sister for a virtue, was horrified at these pleasurable vices, and Stockbriggs was rid of still another friend to Lady Jane.

  Lady Jane went back to Edinburgh very close to despair. It had been a heart-breaking winter. The fall pension had not come to hand until March. She had been scraping for pennies for months. Borrowing of the Scotch had defeated all her charm and address. “This is the hardest place I ever was in,” she wailed. “I can’t for my heart get any money to borrow. The people mostly here are very poor, and those that are rich, their friendships are very cold.”

  Still my Lady kept struggling breathlessly to keep her head above water. Everybody was dunning her, and she was trying to still the loudest duns with a little bit here and a little bit there on account.

  The gaoled debtor in London had another way with duns; he proposed to apply butter. “I shall certainly acquaint him,” wrote Lady Jane about one pressing creditor, “with your willingness to have the bond renewed; and likeways, I shall tell him part of the kind things you express concerning him, but not the full extent of all the mighty friendships you are to do for him. Why should we talk of doing great and generous actions, when we’re so little capacitated to relieve even ourselves, which we ought to look to in the first place?”

  Colonel John was making himself another of my Lady’s pressing problems. He was down to his last shifts, even eating at his friends’ expense. This did not prevent him from being very bustling about a grandiose project for acquiring unlimited wealth. All he needed to do was raise two hundred pounds and make his way to Scotland. More he could not divulge, even to my Lady, the nature of the enterprise being highly secret. It sounds uncommonly like smuggling. The fifties saw the height of the smuggling trade, in which Frenchmen and Jacobites combined to make fortunes by running French luxuries tax-free into remote Scotch inlets. Colonel John might have made a very good smuggler, if he could have raised the two hundred pounds.

  Whether or not my Lady guessed his project, the Colonel’s proceedings filled her with alarm. He was on the loose somewhere in the country, having slipped his tether in pursuit of money to borrow. My Lady wrote him in a panic. She begged him to stay out of Edinburgh, where her creditors and his enemies were just lying in wait to “lay him up” in the Tolbooth. With equal earnestness she begged him to go back to the liberties of his prison and be on hand to profit by the Parliamentary act of grace she still hoped for. She promised to send him a little cash as soon as her pension quarter was paid.

  Instead of the spring payment, she got a letter from her agent. He wrote in strong terms his intention never more to meddle in Lady Jane’s affairs, declaring that her conduct deserved his Majesty’s withdrawing his bounty, and predicting that he would.

  It was the last straw. My Lady dared not stop where she was, so many miles from London. She prepared in the greatest haste to set out. She borrowed a trifle to sustain the family till she came back. She commended the children to the care of Isabel Walker. Under the interesting nom de voyage of “Mrs. Brown,” she took seats for herself and Mrs. Hewit in the public coach for London.

  They were twelve days on the road. When the coach put up at its London inn, there were Scotch letters waiting. Lady Jane broke the seals. In a moment she rose to her feet pale as death, and then sank back speechless. Mrs. Hewit ran for wine and water.

  “’Tis Sholto,” Lady Jane whispered when she could speak. “He is fallen ill; and the account they give me is so bad, that I am afraid the next will be of his death.”

  They put the distraught lady into a coach and carried her off to her husband in the liberties of the Fleet. There they lodged meanly under another alias: “Mr. and Mrs. Thompson.”

  Lady Jane was only too fatally right. Hardly had she left Scotland when the delicate boy sickened with an intermittent fever, and seventeen days later he lay dead. Archie survived, having been
promptly snatched from the infected house.

  The blow prostrated Lady Jane. When her friend the milliner came to call, she found her given in to invalidism as far as her pride would ever let her. She was fully dressed. Until the day she died she never bated her dignity so far as to spend a day in her night-rail, but she was lying at full length upon the bed, outside the covers. The milliner murmured something tentative. Lady Jane smiled sadly.

  “Did the Colonel and Mrs. Hewit,” she guessed, “desire you not to mention Sholto’s name?”

  “They did; but I did not promise.”

  “You were in the right,” replied the bereaved woman. “Will you not indulge me to speak of my son?”

  As her husband had anticipated, the very words brought on a fresh access of grief, and she burst out: “Oh! Sholto, Sholto, my son Sholto!”

  “What would the enemies of me and my children say,” she asked, “if they saw me lying in the dust of death upon account of the death of my son Sholto? Would they have any stronger proof of their being my children than my dying for them? For the shock I have met with by the death of Sholto, added to my other griefs, is so severe upon me, that I am perfectly persuaded that I shall never recover.”

  This opinion was shared by the physicians who attended her. People died of broken hearts in the eighteenth century.

  “I consider myself as a dying woman,” cried Lady Jane passionately, “and one soon to appear in the presence of Almighty God, to whom I must answer; and in His Presence I declare, that these children Archie and Sholto were born of my body. There is one blessing that my enemies cannot deprive me of, which is my innocency, which entitles me to pray for the life of my other son.”

  “I advise you,” said the sympathetic milliner, “not to indulge your grief too much, for it will hurt you.”

  It was good advice, but hard to follow. They had letters from lawyer Loch that must have wrung their hearts. When told by an understrapper that Sholto was dead, the Duke of Douglas had replied callously: “He has nothing to do with me. I wish both the brothers were dead, for I do not believe they are my sister’s children; and I will not give a penny to bury him.”

  Loch had to pay it himself. He had a hard time finding a tomb to lay the little body in; they buried him at last with strangers.

  Archie was safely settled in the country. He had taken his brother’s death with a stolid calm which was to mark him through life. When the servants all looked sorrowful, he drew one of them aside.

  “I know,” said the solemn child of five, “that my brother Sholto is dead.”

  The man assented. For a moment the tears came. From then on Archie never mentioned his brother’s name.

  There was other bad news from Mr. Loch. He had cornered the Duke’s doer in a tavern and plied him with a full collation of wine, on purpose to plead my Lady’s cause. The man of business defended the Duke.

  “The Duke of Douglas,” said he, “has very good reason never to countenance Lady Jane, because she wants to impose on him children not her own.”

  “That is a story,” replied Mr. Loch, “spread by the Hamilton family and their friends, to keep the Duke at variance with Lady Jane.”

  This answer put the other into a passion.

  “Count Douglas in Germany,” he swore, “has wrote a full account of the story to the Duke, how my Lady bought the children sur le pavé in Paris; and therefore the Duke has taken care that they never shall have a shilling of his fortune.”

  This letter certainly existed; from a retainer my Lady obtained a copy of it. But it was not from the Count whose name was signed to it; he had died before the children were born. Who did write it remained a mystery.

  Meanwhile Lady Jane at London wrote an eloquent, pathetic letter to her agent, and once more the pension money come in. It somewhat alleviated the incessant gnawing pain in my Lady’s stomach. She was in haste to get back to Archie. She busied herself with preparations. At last she took up her things out of pawn. To her horror she found that every time the landlord carried a ring or a cloak to the money-lender, he obtained twice as much money as he gave her; she must pay double to get them back. In great anger she did so. She must have her watch; it was all she had to leave Archie.

  When all was ordered, she had barely seven pounds over and above her journey-money. She gave three pounds to the Colonel, who nobly resolved to make it last out the month of August.

  On the first of that month, Lady Jane and Mrs. Hewit set out. Lady Jane went with that gnawing at her stomach, a nauseous taste in her mouth, and pain in her heart. She arrived exhausted and ill. She was so wasted and fragile that her friends were shocked to see her.

  She found that in her absence her litigious brother had got a judgement against her in the matter of the disputed papers. She was ordered to give up to the Duke any of his papers she still held; and, to point up the joke, she was ordered to pay the Duke fifty pounds costs and damages.

  Fifty pounds was an unattainable fortune to the Duke’s sister. She could not find as many shillings for the Colonel in London, stranded in the liberties of the Fleet without money or credit, although that philosophic adventurer kept up a devout faith in dear Lady Jane’s surprising talent of doing wonders, and the ultimate arrival of the “plate fleet.” The only thing he was worried about was his wife’s health.

  Lady Jane was failing fast. Her sight, always somewhat tender, so that the Colonel had to read her letters aloud, now became precarious. The Colonel tried to remember to make his writing, which was small and hard to read, large and clear; and Mrs. Hewit indited such letters as Lady Jane had to write.

  The Colonel fancied himself as an amateur physician, and prescribed for my Lady by mail. He thought she should give up her settled habit of eating but one meal a day, and eat oftener, though sparingly. He recommended the waters of Aberbrothick for her stomach.

  Most of all, they agreed upon the efficacy of riding. My Lady rode horseback assiduously, nine or ten miles a day. As her last winter came on, the doctor, the husband, and the lady gave anxious thought to finding a substitute for this sovereign remedy, which bad weather would interrupt. Lady Jane proposed to contine her rides, in a coach. Colonel John’s fertile invention first suggested shuttlecock: “… or if that is too violent, as you are not yet strong enough I fear, have a deal board laid, the two ends on two chairs, and sit down on the middle of it, and with the smallest effort, you will have the advantage of the most easy trot of a horse, and the same motion as that of a trot, without fatigue, or danger of taking cold.… Archie will sit with you, and share of the ride.”

  It is a laughable picture, the thin elegant woman in her faded blue paduasoy solemnly oscillating on a deal board set between two chairs, with the obstreperous dark child bouncing noisily in front and the melancholy Edinburgh wind howling without. It is well if she had some of her ready laughter for it; for there was little laughter left for her.

  One of those early November days, she drafted a last despairing appeal to her stony-hearted brother.

  I am become so ill [she wrote with difficulty], that I am now truly an object of compassion, a violent pain in my stomach, to nothing but skin and bone, and withal so weak and feeble, that I am unable to walk up my own stair; so that each time I go out to ride, which my physician orders me to do frequently, I am obliged to be carried up stairs in a chair by two people; I’m still able to walk down, tho’ with great pain and difficulty.

  After this description of my melancholy situation, I flatter myself, dear brother, you won’t refuse my ardent, earnest request, of being permitted to come and pay you my last visit, which I shall only employ in giving you my blessing and best wishes, and to ask your pardon for what has appeared to you wrong in my conduct; and shall not, I do assure your Grace, trouble or take up your time with asking any favour, or making any request.…

  The original draft of this letter, in Lady Jane’s own hand-writing, still lies among the Hamilton papers. It is impossible to look at the faded ink and not pity her. It is the
letter of a woman half blind and in unendurable pain. The words straggle out of line, the letters waver; and time after time the pen has started into a wild scratch as a new spasm of agony contracted her whole body. She was dying of cancer of the stomach, and the time left to her was to be counted in days.

  On Sunday, November 11, she crept down the stair for the last time, and went to the new Greyfriars Church to take the Sacrament. They carried her up again. She was too spent to keep up her regimen of riding for health after that. Still she would not give up. Every morning she rose from her bed, and her women girded on her the thick petticoats, laced on the unneeded stays, and put the heavy gown about her shoulders. She still might sit in a chair and hold her head high when her few friends came to call.

  On the Monday she sent for Mr. Loch, and made her will. She had pitifully little to leave—her clothes to her women, and a few little trinkets to Archie—the watch, with a steel chain; seals, pictures, and a locket; rings, a buckle, three snuff-boxes, a tweezer, and a dividing-spoon.

  All her thoughts centered on Archie. When she died, what would become of the child? Every night before laying aside her quilted stuff and whalebone, she took leave of the awed little boy, as one who might not see the morning. On the Tuesday she laid her wasted hand on the little dark head, and blessed him for the last time.

  “God bless you, my child,” she whispered. “God make you a good and an honest man, for riches I despise. Take a sword in your hand, and you may one day be as great a hero as some of your predecessors.”

  They were the last words she spoke. In the morning she did not awake.

  Distracted Mrs. Hewit did what had to be done. She sent messages to the marble-hearted relations. She busied herself with mourning-weeds. There must be a miniature set for the chief mourner; crape hat-band, white weepers on the tiny arms, black gloves, and all. The solemn child in desolation submitted to be measured.

  The Duke of Douglas was exasperated by this new demand, and peremptorily declined to spend a penny to bury Jeanie. This was going too far. His understrappers persuaded him to reconsider. Grudgingly he consented. They might bury Jeanie, in the decentest but at the same time in the most frugal way, in their mother’s grave in the Abbey of Holyrood House.