Madam Flemington had never reopened the subject of James Logie with Archie. In her wisdom she had left well alone. Installed in her little lodging in Hyndford's Close, with her woman Mysie, she had made up her mind to remain where she was. There was much to keep her in Edinburgh, and she could not bring herself to leave the centre of information and to bury herself again in the old white house among the ash-trees, whilst every post and every horseman brought word of some new turn in the country's fortunes.
News of the Highland army's retreat to Scotland, of the Battle of Falkirk, of the despatch of the Duke of Cumberland to the North, followed one another as the year went by, and still she stayed on. With her emergence from the seclusion of the country came her emergence from the seclusion she had made for herself; and on the Duke's thirty hours' occupation of Holyrood, she threw off all pretence of neutrality, and repaired with other Whig ladies to the palace to pay her respects to the stout, ill-mannered young General whose unbeguiling person followed so awkwardly upon the attractive figure of his predecessor.
Now that Archie was restored to her, Christian found herself with plenty of occupation. The contempt she had hitherto professed for Edinburgh society seemed to have melted away, and every card-party, every assembly and rout, knew her chair at its door, her arresting presence in its midst. Madam Flemington's name was on a good many tongues that winter. Many feared her, some maligned her, but no one overlooked her. The fact that she was the widow of an exiled Jacobite lent her an additional interest; and as the polite world set itself to invent a motley choice of reasons for her adherence to the House of Hanover--which it discovered before her reception by the Duke at Holyrood made it public--it ended by stumbling on the old story of a bygone liaison with Prince Charles's father. The idea was so much to its taste that it was generally accepted; and Christian, unknown to herself, became the cast-off and alienated mistress of that Prince whom her party had begun to call 'The Old Pretender.' It was scarcely a legend that would have conciliated her had it come to her ears, but, as rumour is seldom on speaking terms with its victims, she was ignorant of the interested whispers which followed her through the wynds and up the staircases of the Old Town.