At the very time—so inconsistent was this singular woman—that Lord Crawford, at her request, was breaking the news of her marriage to her brother, she was repudiating it indignantly to every person she met. To Lady Wigton, she declared with tears that it was an "infamous story raised by Miss Molly Kerr, her cousin, in order to prejudice her brother against her, and that it had been so effectual that he had stopped her pension"; and she begged Lady Wigton "when she went to England to contradict it."
But this nomadic, hand-to-mouth life could not go on indefinitely. The supply of dupes began to show signs of failing, and in her extremity she wrote urgent letters to friends in England and Scotland for supplies; she even borrowed from a poor Scottish minister almost the last penny he had. A crisis was rapidly approaching which there was no way of escaping—unless the birth of a child might soften her brother's heart, and, perchance, re-open the vista of a great inheritance in the years to come. Such speculations must have occurred to Lady Jean at this critical stage of her fortunes; but whether what quickly followed was a coincidence, or, as so many asserted, a fraudulent plot to give effect to her ambition, it would need a much cleverer and more confident man than I to say. At any rate, from this failure of her purse and of her hopes of propitiating the Duke began all those mysterious suggestions and circumstances, of which so much was made in the trial of future years, and which heralded the birth of the desired heir—or "to make assurance doubly sure," in Lady Jean's case—heirs.
As the expected event drew near it became important to go to Paris in order to have the advantage of the best medical assistance, especially since Lady Jean was assured that the doctors of Rheims, where she was then living, were "as ignorant as brutes." And so to the French capital she journeyed with her retinue, through three sultry July days, in a public diligence devoid of springs. How trying such a journey must have been to a lady in her condition is evidenced by the fact that, during the three days, she spent forty-one hours on the road, reaching Paris on the 4th of July. Just six days later her ladyship, to quote a letter written by Mrs Hewit, "produced two lovely boys," one of whom was so weak and puny that the doctor "begged it might be sent to the country as soon as possible."
So far the story seems clear and plausible, assuming that a lady, in such a delicate state of health, could bear the fatigues of so long and trying a journey as that from Rheims to Paris. But from this stage the mystery, which it took so many wise heads to penetrate in future years, begins to thicken. Although the children were said to have been born on the 10th of July it was not until eleven days later that Mrs Hewit imparted the news to the two maids who had been left behind at Rheims, in the letter from which I have quoted. Further, although the Colonel wrote to six different people on the 10th not one of his letters contains any reference to such an interesting event, which should, one would think, have excluded all other topics from a father's pen.
Moreover, although the Colonel and his wife were, as the house-books proved, staying on the 10th of July at the hotel of a M. Godefroi, neither the landlord nor his wife had any knowledge that a birth had taken place, or was even expected; and it was beyond question that the lady left the house on the 13th, three days after the alleged event, without exciting any suspicion as to what had so mysteriously taken place.
On the 13th, the Colonel and his lady, accompanied by Mrs Hewit, declared that they went for a few days to the house of a Madame la Brune, a nurse—but no child, M. and Mme. Godefroi swore, accompanied them; and on the 18th of July, eight days after the accouchement, they made their appearance at Michele's Hotel (still without a solitary infant to show), where Madame was already so far recovered that she spent the days in jaunting about Paris and making trips to Versailles.
At Michele's the story they told was that the infants were so delicate that they had been sent into the country to nurse; and yet none had seen them go. But before the parents had been a day in their new quarters the Colonel, after hours of absence, appeared with a child—a puny infant, but still unmistakably genuine. Thus one of the twins was accounted for. The other, they declared, was still more delicate and must be left in the country.
It was quite certain that the children had not been born either at Godefroi's or Michele's Hotel. As for the intermediate place of lodging, the most diligent later enquiries failed to discover either Madame la Brune or the house in which she was supposed to live in the Faubourg St Germain. Moreover, was it a coincidence that on the very day on which the Colonel at Michele's with one of the alleged children, it was proved that a "foreign gentleman," exactly answering his description, had purchased, for three gold louis, a fortnight-old baby from its peasant-parents, called Mignon, in a Paris slum?
To add further to the confusion, both Colonel Stewart and Mrs Hewit, in later years, declared in the most positive manner, first that the children had been born at Michele's, and secondly at Madame la Brune's, in defiance of the facts that on the 10th of July, the alleged date of birth, the mother was beyond any doubt staying at Godefroi's hotel, that no such person as Madame la Brune apparently existed, and that the only visible child at Michele's was a fortnight old.
On the 7th of August Lady Jean wrote to inform her brother, the Duke, that she had been blessed with "two boys," one of which she begged his permission to call by his name—a letter which only had the effect of rousing His Grace's "high passion and displeasure," with a threat to stop her annuity. For sixteen months the second and more delicate infant was left with his country nurse, the mother never once taking the trouble to visit it; and then the Colonel and his wife made a mysterious journey to Paris, returning with another child, who, they alleged, was the weakling of the twins. Was it again a coincidence that, at the very time when the second child made his appearance, another infant was purchased from its parents in Paris by a "strange monsieur" who, if not the Colonel, was at least his double? And was it not strange that this late arrival should appear to be several months older than his more robust brother, as the purchased child was?