It is a mere conjecture, suggested by more than one inquirer, as by Mr. Steuart, that the words ‘Signora D. Maria Stuardo della famiglia delli Baroni di S. Marzo,’ refer to the Lennox family, which would naturally be spoken of as Lennox, or as d’Aubigny. About the marquisate of Juvigny (which cannot mean the dukedom of d’Aubigny) we have said enough. In short, the whole will is absurd, and it is all but inconceivable that the real de la Cloche could have been so ignorant as to compose it.
So the matter stands; one of two hypotheses must be correct—the Naples man was de la Cloche or he was not—yet either hypothesis is almost impossible.*
*I was at first inclined to suppose that the de la Cloche papers in
the Gesu—the letters of Charles II. and the note of the Queen of
Sweden—were forgeries, part of an impostor’s apparatus, seized at
Naples and sent to Oliva for inspection. But the letters—handwriting
and royal seal apart—show too much knowledge of Charles’s secret policy
to have been feigned. We are not told that the certificates of de la
Cloche’s birth were taken from James Stuart in prison, and, even if he
possessed them, as Armanni says he did, he may have stolen them, and
they may have been restored by the Viceroy of Naples, as we said, to the
Jesuits. As to whether Charles II. paid his promised subscription to
the Jesuit building fund, Father Boero says: ‘We possess a royal letter,
proving that it was abundant’ (Boero, Istoria etc., p. 56, note 1),
but he does not print the letter; and Mr. Brady speaks now of extant
documents proving the donation, and now of ‘a traditional belief that
Charles was a benefactor of the Jesuit College.’
It may be added that, on December 27, 1668, Charles wrote to his sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans: ‘I assure you that nobody does, nor shall, know anything of it here’ (of his intended conversion and secret dealings with France) ‘but my selfe, and that one person more, till it be fitte to be publique...’ ‘That one person more’ is not elsewhere referred to in Charles’s known letters to his sister, unless he be ‘he that came last, and delivered me your letter of the 9th December; he has given me a full account of what he was charged with, and I am very well pleased with what he tells me’ (Whitehall, December 14, 1668).
This mysterious person, the one sharer of the King’s secret, may be de la Cloche, if he could have left England by November 18, visited Rome, and returned to Paris by December 9. If so, de la Cloche may have fulfilled his mission. Did he return to Italy, and appear in Naples in January or February 1669? (See Madame, by Julia Cartwright, pp. 274, 275, London, 1894.)
IX. THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘FISHER’S GHOST’
Everybody has heard about ‘Fisher’s Ghost.’ It is one of the stock ‘yarns’ of the world, and reappears now and again in magazines, books like ‘The Night Side of Nature,’ newspapers, and general conversation. As usually told, the story runs thus: One Fisher, an Australian settler of unknown date, dwelling not far from Sydney, disappeared. His overseer, like himself an ex-convict, gave out that Fisher had returned to England, leaving him as plenipotentiary. One evening a neighbour (one Farley), returning from market, saw Fisher sitting on the fence of his paddock, walked up to speak to him, and marked him leave the fence and retreat into the field, where he was lost to sight. The neighbour reported Fisher’s return, and, as Fisher could nowhere be found, made a deposition before magistrates. A native tracker was taken to the fence where the pseudo Fisher sat, discovered ‘white man’s blood’ on it, detected ‘white man’s fat’ on the scum of a pool hard by, and, finally, found ‘white man’s body’ buried in a brake. The overseer was tried, condemned, and hanged after confession.
Such is the yarn: occasionally the ghost of Fisher is said to have been viewed several times on the fence.
Now, if the yarn were true, it would be no proof of a ghost. The person sitting on the fence might be mistaken for Fisher by a confusion of identity, or might be a mere subjective hallucination of a sort recognised even by official science as not uncommon. On the other hand, that such an illusion should perch exactly on the rail where ‘white man’s blood’ was later found, would be a very remarkable coincidence. Finally, the story of the appearance might be explained as an excuse for laying information against the overseer, already suspected on other grounds. But while this motive might act among a Celtic population, naturally credulous of ghosts, and honourably averse to assisting the law (as in Glenclunie in 1749), it is not a probable motive in an English Crown colony, as Sydney then was. Nor did the seer inform against anybody.