to the last possessor; but, a generation before, there was a still
nearer relation, who had never been accounted for, nor his existence
ever discovered by the lawyers, I venture to think, till I routed him
out from the memory of some of the old dependants of the family.
What had become of him? I travelled backwards and forwards; I
crossed over to France, and came back again with a slight clue, which
ended in my discovering that, wild and dissipated himself, he had
left one child, a son, of yet worse character than his father; that
this same Hugh Fitzgerald had married a very beautiful serving-woman
of the Byrnes--a person below him in hereditary rank, but above him
in character; that he had died soon after his marriage, leaving one
child, whether a boy or a girl I could not learn, and that the mother
had returned to live in the family of the Byrnes. Now, the chief of
this latter family was serving in the Duke of Berwick's regiment, and
it was long before I could hear from him; it was more than a year
before I got a short, haughty letter--I fancy he had a soldier's
contempt for a civilian, an Irishman's hatred for an Englishman, an
exiled Jacobite's jealousy of one who prospered and lived tranquilly
under the government he looked upon as an usurpation. "Bridget
Fitzgerald," he said, "had been faithful to the fortunes of his
sister--had followed her abroad, and to England when Mrs. Starkey had
thought fit to return. Both his sister and her husband were dead, he
knew nothing of Bridget Fitzgerald at the present time: probably Sir
Philip Tempest, his nephew's guardian, might be able to give me some
information." I have not given the little contemptuous terms; the
way in which faithful service was meant to imply more than it said--
all that has nothing to do with my story. Sir Philip, when applied
to, told me that he paid an annuity regularly to an old woman named
Fitzgerald, living at Coldholme (the village near Starkey Manor-
house). Whether she had any descendants he could not say.