He nodded.
“What about your wife?” Gage demanded, impatient for answers. I couldn’t blame him. No matter how relaxed he pretended to be, I could see the lines of pain radiating from the corners of his mouth whenever he inhaled deeply.
“Evie was the daughter of General Vladimir Romejko-Hurko. I met her in Vitebsk in 1811 when I was in the employ of Prince Alexander of Wurttemberg. The Tsarina had arranged for Evie to marry another of her generals, and I was to marry Evie’s sister Marianna, but . . .” he shrugged “. . . we fell in love.” He shook his head. “We knew it was useless to protest, so we fled to London.
“I didn’t have much,” he admitted, his face flushing in embarrassment. “You see, by that time I’d discovered my Russian banker had gone bankrupt, and the firm in London where I’d invested the other half of my inheritance had also failed several years earlier. When I reached London, I learned that one of the bank’s members had absconded to America with the rest of my funds. I was quite angry. And as a result, I was somewhat indiscreet.”
“How indiscreet?” Gage asked.
Mr. Stuart grimaced. “I sent a hostile article to The Sunday Review and accused the then Prince Regent of authoritarianism, and . . . reminded him that ‘thrones can be taken away by man, just as happened to that race which by birth had a stronger claim to the British scepter than any of his own family.’”
I winced. That could not have gone over well with the Hanoverian Prince Regent.
“You’re speaking of the Stuart kings, of course, and your grandfather, Bonnie Prince Charlie, who should have been one,” Gage deduced.
Mr. Stuart nodded and tilted his head to the side. “Needless to say, I thought it best to leave London.”
That was an understatement if I ever heard one.
“Scotland seemed a logical choice, and here we could be wed at the Border without questions and without a license. By that time Evie was expecting our first child, and I thought it best to live simply for a time, but my wife was proud of my heritage. She told everyone about my ancestry, and for a while it seemed to work in our favor.”
“Most Scotsmen would be thrilled to meet a descendant of the Stuart kings,” Trevor guessed, kneeling to stoke the fire. “And there are more than a few closet Jacobites living north of the Border.”
“Exactly.”
“But you have no real claim to the throne.” Gage’s eyes narrowed as he studied the middle-aged Frenchman. “Even if your grandfather had wed his mistress, Clementina Walkinshaw, and legitimized your mother, you are still a bastard.”
I was surprised to hear Gage lay it out so baldly, but perhaps he had a right to after all he’d been through tonight.
Mr. Stuart inhaled as if to protest, but then deflated as if realizing it was useless. “You’re correct. My parents never wed. But I have never made a claim to the English or Scottish thrones. I’ve made no pretension to such a thing.” He scowled, staring at the floor in front of him. “Unfortunately, not everyone understood that.”
He looked upward, as if what he had to say next was particularly painful. “I became friends with some particularly influential Scotsmen. Or, at least, I thought they were friends.” His brow furrowed. “But apparently they were only interested in monitoring my movements. And when they saw their chance, they had me press-ganged on a ship setting sail for America.”
I pressed a hand to my stomach. “But your wife and child?”
He nodded, pushing a hand through his hair. “I could accept their zeal to protect their country if they truly believed I was there to cause trouble, but what I could not forgive was their treatment of my wife and child.” His voice hardened. “We’d been renting a home from one of them, but after they disposed of me, they evicted my enceinte wife, leaving her to wander the streets of Edinburgh with no food, no money, and no way to support herself. And they told her . . .” He swallowed. “They told her I’d left her for another woman.”
His eyes were haunted. “By the time I was finally able to return, I discovered she was buried in a pauper’s grave. She and my son.”
I covered my mouth in shock and horror. I couldn’t imagine the pain and the anger he must feel. How could those men, those gentlemen, have done such a thing to an innocent woman?
But, of course, I already knew the answer. No male descendant of the Stuart line of kings could be allowed to live. The fact that Evie was carrying Mr. Stuart’s child had made her just as dangerous to them. Perhaps more, because of her noble birth. And so they had hardened their hearts to her and cast her out, monstrous as that was.