Those who credited Charles Dump’s veracity speculated on dozens of great noblemen—­and gentlemen known to be dying in love with Countess Fanny.  And this brings us to another family.

I do not say I know anything; I do but lay before you the evidence we have to fix suspicion upon a notorious character, perfectly capable of trying to thwart a man like Kirby, and with good reason to try, if she had bewitched him to a consuming passion, as we are told.

About eleven miles distant, as the crow flies and a bold huntsman will ride in that heath country, from the Punch-Bowl, right across the mounds and the broad water, lies the estate of the Fakenhams, who intermarried with the Coplestones of the iron mines, and were the wealthiest of the old county families until Curtis Fakenham entered upon his inheritance.  Money with him was like the farm-wife’s dish of grain she tosses in showers to her fowls.  He was more than what you call a lady-killer, he was a woman-eater.  His pride was in it as well as his taste, and when men are like that, indeed they are devourers!

Curtis was the elder brother of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham, whose offspring, like his own, were so strangely mixed up with Captain Kirby’s children by Countess Fanny, as you will hear.  And these two brothers were sons of Geoffrey Fakenham, celebrated for his devotion to the French Countess Jules d’Andreuze, or some such name, a courtly gentleman, who turned Papist on his death-bed in France, in Brittany somewhere, not to be separated from her in the next world, as he solemnly left word; wickedly, many think.

To show the oddness of things and how opposite to one another brothers may be, his elder, the uncle of Curtis, and Baldwin, was the renowned old Admiral Fakenham, better known along our sea-coasts and ports among sailors as ‘Old Showery,’ because of a remark he once made to his flag-captain, when cannon-balls were coming thick on them in a hard-fought action.  ‘Hot work, sir,’ his captain said.  ‘Showery,’ replied the admiral, as his cocked-hat was knocked off by the wind of a cannon-ball.  He lost both legs before the war was over, and said merrily, ‘Stumps for life’’ while they were carrying him below to the cockpit.  In my girlhood the boys were always bringing home anecdotes of old Admiral Showery:  not all of them true ones, perhaps, but they fitted him.  He was a rough seaman, fond, as they say, of his glass and his girl, and utterly despising his brother Geoffrey for the airs he gave himself, and crawling on his knees to a female Parleyvoo; and when Geoffrey died, the admiral drank to his rest in the grave:  ‘There’s to my brother Jeff,’ he said, and flinging away the dregs of his glass:  ’There ‘s to the Frog!’ and flinging away the glass to shivers:  ‘There’s to the Turncoat!’