Among Mr. Blandy’s grand acquaintances was General Lord Mark Kerr, uncle of Lady Jane Douglas, the famous heroine of the great Douglas Cause.  His lordship had taken at Henley a place named “The Paradise,” probably through the agency of the obsequious attorney, whose family appear to have had the entree to that patrician abode.  Dining with her parents at Lord Mark’s house in the summer of 1746, Mary Blandy encountered her fate.  That fate from the first bore but a sinister aspect.  Among the guests was one Captain the Hon. William Henry Cranstoun, a soldier and a Scot, whose appearance, according to a diurnal writer, was unprepossessing.  “In his person he is remarkably ordinary, his stature is low, his face freckled and pitted with the smallpox, his eyes small and weak, his eyebrows sandy, and his shape no ways genteel; his legs are clumsy, and he has nothing in the least elegant in his manner.”  The moral attributes of this ugly little fellow were only less attractive than his physical imperfections.  “He has a turn for gallantry, but Nature has denied him the proper gifts; he is fond of play, but his cunning always renders him suspected.”  He was at this time thirty-two years of age, and, as the phrase goes, a man of pleasure, but his militant prowess had hitherto been more conspicuous in the courts of Venus than in the field of Mars.  The man was typical of his day and generation:  should you desire his closer acquaintance you will find a lively sketch of him in Joseph Andrews, under the name of Beau Didapper.

If Mary was the Eve of this Henley “Paradise,” the captain clearly possessed many characteristics of the serpent.  As First-Lieutenant of Sir Andrew Agnew’s regiment of marines, he had been “out”—­on the wrong side, for a Scot—­in the ’45, and the butcher Cumberland having finally killed the cause at Culloden on 16th April, this warrior was now in Henley beating up recruits to fill the vacancies in the Hanoverian lines caused by the valour of the “rebels.”  Such a figure was a commonplace of the time, and Mr. Blandy would not have looked twice at him but for the fact that it appeared Lord Mark was his grand-uncle.  The old lawyer, following up this aristocratic scent, found to his surprise and joy that the little lieutenant, with his courtesy style of captain, was no less a person than the fifth son of a Scots peer, William, fifth Lord Cranstoun, and his wife, Lady Jane Kerr, eldest daughter of William, second Marquis of Lothian.  True, he learned the noble union had been blessed with seven sons and five daughters; my Lord Cranstoun had died in 1727, and his eldest son, James, reigned in his stead.  The captain, a very much “younger” son, probably had little more than his pay and a fine assortment of debts; still, one cannot have everything.  The rights of absent Captain D——­ were forgotten, now that there was a chance to marry his daughter to a man who called the daughter of an Earl grandmother, and could claim kinship with half the aristocracy of Scotland; and Mr. Blandy frowned as he called to mind the presumption of the Bath apothecary.