Mourning or no mourning, Anne was resourceful. On hearing from her friend Eleanor Eden (now Lady Auckland) that Eleanor's niece Isabella Elliot was in trouble at her boarding school, she suggested that she might take the girl in and oversee her education. Isabella, aged 13, had had a traumatic upbringing. She was the only child of Eleanor's second brother Hugh, a diplomat of some importance, a gambler, a charmer and a thoroughly unreliable man. He had been posted to the Court of Frederick the Great in Berlin, where in 1779 he had secretly married a young Prussian heiress, Louisa, or Charlotte, van Kraut. Their first child, Louisa Isabella (usually known as Isabella) was born there but when Hugh was posted to Copenhagen early in 1783, his wife refused to accompany him. Hearing rumours that her conduct in court circles was making her ‘the subject of general remark’, that is she was having an affair, he took desperate measures. Returning secretly to Berlin, he abducted Isabella and sent her, accompanied by servants, north to Copenhagen. After challenging his wife's lover to a duel, in July he followed his daughter back to Copenhagen, dispirited in both mind and body. Here he lived quietly in his villa at Christiansholm, occupying himself with his child, his books and his thoughts. The effect on Isabella of such an abrupt separation from her mother can be imagined. In 1785 or 1786 Hugh brought her to England to live with the family of his elder brother Gilbert 4th Baronet Minto168 but, probably because of the illness of Gilbert's wife, in 1786 little Isabella was packed off to Fortescue House, a boarding school near the Minto family home in Twickenham. Hugh returned to Copenhagen, where he subsequently fathered two boys by an unknown mother. One might have expected Isabella to have stayed with her aunt, Eleanor Eden, but in December 1785 William Eden had been appointed to negotiate a commercial treaty with France, and left for Paris the following March taking his family with him. Isabella's letters to her father, which are preserved among the Minto Papers in the National Library of Scotland, make pathetic reading.