The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  Then they go down to where a hackney-coach awaits them. The gentleman holds the child while the woman gets in, and then hands the child to her. Then he mounts himself, bidding the coachman drive softly for the child’s sake. The coachman whips up his beast, and the child is whisked away while the mother watches.

  But Mignon is a man of action. He does not mean to lose sight of his child so easily. He whips off his wig and dark vest, dons a cap from his pocket, and thus attired in white undervest and cap, looking a very different man, he sprints after the coach. He follows it across the Pont Neuf to the faubourg Saint-Germain, and there to his great relief it stops. He dodges into a dram-shop and drinks half a pint at the counter, watching all the time. He sees the foreign pair alight; he sees the coach, dismissed, clatter off at a great rate; he sees his child carried around the side of a hotel on the corner. He goes home satisfied that there are more ways than one of learning a man’s address.

  The next day, just as the gentleman has foreseen, the Mignons go back to the faubourg Saint-Germain to have a sight of their child. But there are more ways than one of concealing a man’s address. The distraught parents learn that around the side of the hotel is an alley leading into the next street; and by that route their child has vanished from their ken.…

  Such was the story that was told to the Hamilton agents, at second hand by Marie Guynette, stolidly by Mignon, with tears by the mother. Andrew Stuart heard it with elation. Here again was Colonel John Steuart to the life, lifting a child and talking about twins, with windy promises he never meant to keep.

  “Your child,” he put it to Madame Mignon, “had brown eyes?”

  “No, Monsieur, he had blue eyes; but with us that changes with age. You may look at my young son there, his eyes are now brown; but when he was a baby, his eyes were blue.”

  “After this time,” said Mignon to the gentlemen crowded into his squalid little room, “we scoured all the streets of the faubourg Saint-Germain, and asked at the midwives for a foreign lady who had borne twins; but to no avail.”

  “I would stand on the Pont Neuf,” said Madame Mignon, “where all the world goes by, to see if the stranger would pass; but he never did. I caused say masses at Saint-Esprit. I kept myself fit to have my child back, by giving suck to the child of a neighbour; but he did not come back, and I was obliged to desist. Still I hoped to have him back, on account of the Twelfth Day Cake.”

  “The Twelfth Day Cake?”

  “On the Feast of the Three Kings, when the custom is to draw the cake, I have always drawn a piece for my lost boy, and this is wrapped in paper and kept. If the cake should mould, my boy would be dead or dying; but to this day it has never moulded; it is well with my child.”

  At twelve thousand a year or more, it is well indeed, reflected Andrew Stuart; but he said nothing as to that. The opening door created a diversion, and in walked a youth who electrified the British visitors. It was another Mignon son, eighteen months younger than the lost Jacques Louis, and very like him. The British gentlemen thought he was very like Archie Douglas.

  “You must have his portrait painted,” cried Dempster, M.P.

  “We are sorry,” said Andrew Stuart with cold correctness, settling his snowy ruffles as he rose, “that the laws of France do not permit us to give you any gratuity or to do you good;” and so departed without leaving a sou behind. The Mignons took this disappointment with stolid countenances.

  The gentlemen came down the rickety stair, and if they held a laced kerchief to an offended nose, they had cause enough. They came gratefully into the fresh air, and started out to find Madame Charlan, who had kept her child.

  There was a milling crowd at the currier’s door a little way along. Marie Guynette was there, and all the neighbours were enjoying this neighbourhood sensation réchauffée. They all remembered it very well, because it had been a nine-days’ wonder and a great scandal. The Mignons had laid out their three louis on new clothes readymade; they had flaunted their new attire at the patron feast of the glass-makers, St. Clair, commonly celebrated on July 18. Their neighbours had taunted them, calling them sellers of human flesh, who had sold their child to clothe their backs. They were all agreed that the boy was no more than twelve or fourteen days old when he vanished.

  When the Britishers stepped up to this group and asked for Madame Charlan, she was propelled forth and presented as by acclamation. They took her into the currier’s backward room, and as many neighbours as could squeeze in followed after. In the sharp odour of leather they asked her about her part in the affair. She told of presenting her child before the stranger, a tall strong-built man in a plain coat and a gold-laced vest.

  “When he refused to tell me his name and dwelling,” said she, “I refused to lend my child, and left him.”

  “Go, go,” interrupted Marie Guynette rudely from the doorway, “you would have given him, if he had suited the gentleman; my mother always told me he did not suit the gentleman.”

  Madame Charlan shrugged; at least she still had her child. The Hamilton investigators took their leave.

  Andrew Stuart lost no time in getting a record of Jacques Louis’s baptism, and putting it next to a calendar for the year 1748. Jacques Louis was born on June 28, and he was twelve or fourteen days old when, on the Thursday before St. Clair, he vanished. The Thursday before St. Clair that year was July 11. The correspondence was absolute. Once more the Hamilton agent wrote home in triumph:

  “The other party had not got any idea of it yesterday morning,” he wrote on August 11, “it must come to their ears in a day or two as the story begins to make a noise in the Fauxbourg St. Antoine.”

  Then caballing with Papists, with monks, and with friars,

  With tumblers, and strumpets, and blackguards, and liars;

  They botched up law-libels, so frothy and rare,

  That the horn of our judges blew all in the air.

  (The Douglas Garland)

  Chapter X

  The Duchess of Douglas was in Scotland, raising a hullabaloo before the court over the iniquity of Andrew Stuart’s French suit, when the news of his new discovery hit her like a thunderbolt. She hurried back to France.

  She brought with her a new recruit to her forces, a shrewd little lawyer in his forties, James Burnet (later Lord Monboddo). James Burnet was one of the most remarkable men of his age. He combined in one spacious mind cranky crochets, wide learning, and the most daring and prophetic speculation. He liked to give Roman banquets, crowning the flagons with roses. He absolutely declined to ride in a coach, holding that man was born to mount his horse, not to be “dragged at his tail in a box.” He held out for a mixed diet among a nation of beef-eaters, and for fresh air in an age that feared it. Ahead of his time he recognized the kinship of the languages of Europe, and traced them to a common parent language which he dubbed the Pelasgian. He perceived that man was kin to the ape. For these progressive theories he got loud laughter and no credit; but he was allowed to be an able and eloquent lawyer, and his colleagues enjoyed the ironies he would toss off with an impassive look on his hatchet face. With his learning, penetration, and imagination, he was a valuable recruit to the Douglas forces.

  The man they needed most, the only man alive who could identify Madame Garnier and confute Madame Mignon, did not come along. The Mignons were boasting that they could pick him out of ten thousand, the thief of their child. Madame Mignon offered to do so blindfolded, by the voice alone. Sir John Steuart never offered himself for the test.

  The Duchess was not one to flinch from any test in her power. Britishers who knew Archie were saying that the Mignons were like him. This did not stop her from bringing Archie to France. Archie was now a well-bred schoolboy of fifteen, of impassively correct deportment and a comfortable even temper. He was no beauty, with his low forehead and dark colouring, and he had marred his nose by breaking it. Still, in his rich brocades he must have looked very different from the French apprentices who claimed him for kin. When he arrayed himself in sp
lendour and went to the play-house, policeman Buhot, scanning him narrowly in the crowd, nevertheless thought he saw a resemblance.

  The Duchess ventured a bold stroke. She sent Archie to call upon Madame Mignon. Madame Mignon was from home, but it gave the neighbours a thrill. Archie never called again, and soon he left France to go back to school. Madame Mignon never saw him.

  Andrew Stuart thought the family resemblance striking, and he took Dempster’s advice. He got Madame Mignon to sit for her portrait. When the portrait was shipped to England, the Duke of Hamilton paid the freight. Arrived in England, it was forgotten. It was never used as evidence, and if Andrew Stuart kept it among the Hamilton records, it has since disappeared. It seems as if, whether or not Madame Mignon resembled Archie, the portrait did not.

  The Mignons became a headache to Andrew Stuart. With all his correctness he could not keep them in order. The oldest son ran a little bistro, at the sign of la Nouvelle France, and he got to thinking the Duke of Hamilton ought to pay his expenses. To the Nouvelle France flocked Douglas agents and curiosity-seekers to ply the family with drams and set them talking.

  “If you are the mother of that child,” they reproached Madame Mignon, “you are a hard, barbarous mother, a step-mother, to want to claim him and turn him out of his inheritance!”

  “He came from my womb,” cried Madame Mignon, “and nothing shall prevent me from reclaiming him. If they will give me back my child naked, I will be contented. He will not starve; he has fingers, and can scramble like the rest. Five sols well gained is better than ten sols ill-gained; and moreover I did not bring him into the world to do wrong to any family!”

  Spies were constantly at her. A begging friar came to her, a meeching creature with his hair combed flat and no buckles to his shoes, and tried her with tricks. He told her Archie had a mark on his body as large as a hand (which was not true), and tried to get her to say that her child had such a mark. She would not say so.

  “Perhaps they have given you money,” he changed his tune, “and if they have, even twelve francs, you have but to say so, and your fortune is made!”

  Madame eluded this trap as well.

  “The King of England,” threatened the baffled spy angrily, “will take hold of this affair, and you had best be careful what you do, for it may happen that you and your husband will be thrown in a dungeon, where you will see neither earth nor sky!”

  Madame Mignon heard that this disagreeable fate had already overtaken the family Sanry.

  Nevertheless, the Mignons were taking a generally optimistic view of the whole matter; they expected that somehow there would be profit in it. It exasperated Andrew Stuart to have them broadcasting their unsuitable expectations. He warned Madame Mignon solemnly that there was danger in the drams she drank. She might, he said, get a poisoned potion. Madame Mignon told everybody, drinking up the drams they bought her, how careful she had to be to avoid being poisoned. She did not stop hoping aloud for profit to come. They had been made many promises, said she; but added in a burst of realism: “—none of which are fulfilled; I should like better to have my child.”

  In Scotland the tide was turning against Hamilton. The Lords of Session regarded the French proceedings with a very jaundiced eye, and decreed that they had to be stopped before any proofs could be taken in the reduction suit. They cared no more than the Douglas faction if this was an impossible condition. That was Andrew Stuart’s look-out. They prepared to look on as spectators, with their arms across, while the Hamilton agent struggled.

  It took seven months to adjust the matter, seven months of petitions and memorials, of cooling his heels in anterooms, of appeals to the French King’s council and to the British King’s peers, before Andrew Stuart could set things right and proceed with the Scotch suit.

  The French suit could not be stopped, but somehow it got forgotten. When it burned Andrew Stuart’s fingers, and he dropped it, there was nobody to pick it up and carry it on. The hearing was never finished. There was no indictment. No record of it remains among the archives.

  It was May 25, 1764, a whole year after the Sanry discovery, when Andrew Stuart at Paris finally put himself, his friends, and his papers into a coach and set off for Scotland. His friends were a young man named Scott and William Nairne, advocate (later Lord Dunsinnan). William Nairne had come out to France to help. In the opinion of an observant young friend at Utrecht, he was an honest, upright fellow, somewhat stiff in his manner, but not without parts in a moderate degree. He looked on the world quizzically, with half-dropped lids and raised eyebrows.

  Mr. Nairne’s friend at Utrecht was named James Boswell. He was there, at the behest of his father Lord Auchinleck, one of the Scotch judges, to fit himself for the law. The volatile youth had only consented to embrace the law after contemplating other objects more worth embracing. At twenty-one he had seriously considered embracing the just-widowed Duchess of Douglas. That informal noblewoman upon their first meeting had made him easy, merry, and at home by broad hints how she’d do with a young fellow, et cetera. Young Boswell resolved to propose. “If it succeeds,” he said to himself, “Bravo! Independence! If not, a good adventure.” He was only deflected from the scheme by the superior lure of a Guardsman’s life. Now the Guards scheme had collapsed, and there was nothing for it but the law.

  The law was a dreary mistress. Young Boswell at Utrecht was enjoying a grand fit of pre-Byronic gloom when he received a letter from Rotterdam. It was from Nairne. Nairne wanted his friend to come to The Hague for a merry meeting. Still uncertain and dreary, Boswell went. In the morning he arrived at his friend’s inn. There he found Andrew Stuart, very impressive at his table, with piles of papers before him, which he was turning over, Boswell thought, with the air of a Duke. Andrew Stuart was a connection by marriage, as his brother-in-law roaring Major Cochrane was Boswell’s great-uncle. Boswell was highly gratified to be in company with so distinguished a relation.

  At noon they all took coach for Rotterdam. On the journey Andrew Stuart lost his Duke-like dignity and let his suppressed fire burst forth. Fretted at the deliberate jog maintained by the heavy Dutch block-head on the box, he impatiently snatched the reins from him and mended the pace. Along the road Boswell spied a mole.

  “Well!” said Boswell. “When Mr. Andrew Stuart drives a Dutch coach, he drives so hard that the very moles come above ground to look at him!”

  Boswell was in immense spirits. When the next day he left his friends, he reflected that he found real life a relief. It is something of a puzzle what young Boswell thought real life was. He was always talking about it, almost as if by real life he meant other people’s lives, in contrast to his own, which was lived so largely in his head.

  With no such cobwebs in their brains, the two longheaded Scotch lawyers pursued their journey. They wanted to be in Edinburgh when, on June 15, the summer sitting of the court was opened.

  Meanwhile at Murthly, old Sir John Steuart’s quenchless vitality was at last draining out of him. The gout in his stomach was wasting him to a shadow; his thigh was no thicker than his shin used to be. It was bad when the gout rose from the feet to the stomach. If it went on rising, and got into your head, that was the end of you.

  “I am an old infirm man,” said Sir John to his cronies at the dram-house in Sloginhole. “I cannot now travel to courts, and I know not how soon I may be away altogether.”

  He took his pen, and drafted the last of many eloquent screeds:

  “I Sir John Steuart of Grandtully, doe sollemly declare before God, that the forementioned Ladie Jean Douglas, my lawfill spouse, did in the year 1748, bring to the world two sons, Archibald and Sholto, and I firmly belive the children were mine, as I am sure they were hers—of the two sons Archibald is the only in life now;—I make this declaration, as stepping into eternity, befor the witnesses after-mentioned.…”

  The cronies of the tap-house signed. A week later the gout got into the old man’s head, and stilled his tongue forever.

  They told t
he news to Andrew Stuart, who had rather hoped for a death-bed confession. He shrugged.

  “It only shows,” he remarked, “that most people die as they live.”

  Madame Mignon, drinking drams in the family bistro, heard the news and garbled it.

  “Our adversary is dead in Britain,” she told curiosity-seekers as they paid the shot. “He has got a potion that finished his business.”

  She illustrated his fate by quaffing an imaginary poison dose, a gesture which so pleased her that she repeated it three times.

  On September 10, 1764, Andrew Stuart left Edinburgh. In his pocket he had the commission he had finally wrung from the Scotch court for taking evidence in France. At his side was William Nairne. At Harrowgate they stopped and persuaded Alexander Wedderburn to come with them.

  Wedderburn (later Lord Loughborough) was a handsome young Scotsman brilliantly in the ascendant at the English bar. People were still talking about the flourish with which he had renounced Scotland. Insulted at the bar, and rebuked by the bench for resenting it, he then and there stripped off his gown and flung it down, swearing to plead no more in such a court. He rode that night for England.

  “What is this Wedderburn?” asked a lady of the first fashion.

  “Oh, Wedderburn—he is young, well-made, witty, military, and polite.”

  “The devil take him!” cried the lady. “This would turn the head of twenty females—who knows if mine would hold out!”

  In mid-September the three Scotch bachelors arrived in Paris, Nairne just the old man, sensible and worthy, Andrew Stuart cool as a sherbet with his private half-smile, Wedderburn handsome and alert. The Douglas contingent were there before them.

  In the lead was Burnet, the best brain among them. He too had a recruit, David Rae (later Lord Eskgrove). Rae was a poor counter to Wedderburn, being a grotesque figure of fun to look at. His face varied with the weather from a scurfy red to a scurfy blue. A prodigious nose balanced an enormous underlip, which rested on a huge clumsy chin. He walked with a slow stealthy step, something between a walk and a hirple, and helped himself on by short movements of his elbows, backwards and forwards, like fins. When he wagged his long jaw like some wooden dummy, his words came out in a low muttering voice, twisted into new and original shapes. There had to be a brilliant mind behind the scurfy countenance; and there was.