I often carried William through the fields in my arms and played at marbles with him; he was a capital aim at marbles, or ball, or tipcat. As a baby he was very fat and lust, but so were all his brothers and sisters—not a one of them could walk before sixteen or eighteen months. When William reached the age of five he went as a day-scholar to the Free Grammar School, the next house along the road; that was in old Bonney's time. Mr Bonney was reckoned a man of great discrimination, he could tell a boy's character at a glance—a pity he's dead! We had as many as eighty-three scholars in his day, come in from all the towns and villages around. We have only twenty-four at present, the new master not being of the same quality. Yes, William received a sound education under Mr Bonney. And he went of his own accord to take singing lessons from Mr Sherritt, liim who's now our Parish clerk and would take no boy unless he was of good character—he speaks highly of William still. Indeed, a better-tempered or more generous lad there never was; and a very nice young gentleman he became. In the case of a school row, he would always stand up for the weaker side, and use his fists to advantage. Perhaps that was why his schoolfellows never took to him, as they did to his other brothers, but kept their distance. I have heard it said of late—since this wretched business started, I mean—that he would borrow money under false pretences from the men employed at The Yard, and not repay them; but he never tried such a trick on me, nor did I ever hear any complaint from my mates at the time. Well, William was just as generous when he grew up; he never forgot an old face. Why, whenever he met me or Mr Sherritt, he'd say: 'Will you have a glass of something to drink?' He gave a deal to the poor, and in a quiet way, too; as one who stores up treasures in Heaven, not with a sound of trumpets.
When he left school at the age of seventeen, his father apprenticed him to Messrs Evans & Sons, the wholesale chemists of Lord Street, Liverpool. There he behaved very well indeed for some months, and was attentive to his various duties, and caused every satisfaction; until, like Samson in the Good Book, he met his Delilah. William, you see, lodged a few streets away from the counting-house, with one Widnall. He could not be put up by his brother Joseph, because at that time Joseph was working a colliery at Cannock Chase, not many miles from here—a business, let me tell you, which lost him a few thousand pounds. William had hitherto lived an innocent life, and was still what they call a he-virgin when the landlord's red-headed daughter Jane, who was William's senior by two years, decoyed him into her bed. She thought William a pretty good catch, having heard that he possessed seven thousand pounds of his own, and was determined to lay her hands on it. After a few weeks had passed she pretended to be with child and, coming to him with eyes red from weeping, begged that he would marry her.
When he protested that this was out of the question, much as he loved her and regretted her plight, she demanded fifty pounds for the performance of an abortion. William replied that he had not above five pounds in his pockets, and would not enjoy his inheritance until the age of twenty-one.
'Very well’ said she, 'if I cannot turn away the brat you have given me, then I must needs bear it; and my father will make you either marry or support me.'
William stood at a loss. 'I am a respectable girl,' she went on, 'and you have seduced me.'
'But where am I to find the fifty pounds ?' asks William. 'That's a deal of money,' he says.
'You have a rich brother,' answers the red-haired lass. 'Borrow from him.'
'Joseph is the last man in the world I can approach,' says William. ' 'Tis like this. My father, in the year of the Queen's Coronation, comes home to dinner one day, eats and drinks with gusto, but falls dead of heart-failure with his bread and cheese still clutched in his hand. The will he left behind was unsigned; and Joseph, as the eldest son, might by law have taken all the property in his own right, bar the widow's thirds. However, he was kind enough to execute a deed by which he should keep only seven thousand pounds, and we others should have the same sum apiece; and my mother, the remainder and the landed property, for her lifetime—on condition that she would not re-marry. And there's a clause in the deed, my dear, which debars any of us from enjoying our inheritance if we marry before the age of twenty-one, or commit any grave fault. Joseph is a good-hearted man, but he's also a severe one, and I don't propose to vex him.'
'Why did you hide all this from me?' cried Jane Widnall in a rage. 'I'd never have let you so much as kiss me, if I'd known how matters stood!'
' You never asked me,' says William.
Presently the lass goes off to an abortionist, or pretends to; then she comes back and takes to her bed for a few days. She tells William that all's well, but that he must find two hundred pounds within six weeks, because she's stolen that sum from her father's strong-box, and there'll be the Devil to pay if it's not put back before he makes up his quarterly accounts. 'I shall accuse you of the theft,' she threatens William.
'Why did you pay two hundred pounds, and not fifty?' he asks, in surprise.
'I couldn't find the ready money,' she explains, and says: 'The wretch has threatened to inform my father, and I'll be ruined.'
William is a greenhorn, and suspects nothing. He should have known that no abortionist would perform an operation except for cash on the nail, or afterwards run the risk of going to gaol for the crime of abortion and the equally serious crime of extorting money by threats. Then, on the advice of a fellow-apprentice, he backs a certainty at the Liverpool Races. It loses him five pounds. So he sells his gold watch, given him as a present by old Mrs Palmer when he left home, and with the five pounds it fetches, backs a certainty at the Shrewsbury Races. He loses again, and in despair resorts to other means of money raising.
Messrs Evans & Sons are troubled. Various customers write to say that they have paid their accounts owing to the firm, but have received no acknowledgements. What, then, has happened to the cash, which they are positive has been sent? It seems as if there are thieves at the Liverpool Post Office. Now, as I've heard the story, the merchants of Liverpool have their own letterboxes into which letters addressed to them are placed by the Postmaster, as soon as the mails come in by coach or railway train. Confidential clerks go to collect these letters, which arrive much earlier this way than if they had been delivered by the penny-postman.
Well, complaints of lost money became more frequent, and the Liverpool Post Office denied responsibility; so Messrs Evans wrote to the General Post Office in London, and the authorities there sent an inspector down to Liverpool to lay a trap for the thief. But no thief was caught, and the missing letters remained a mystery, and fresh complaints came pouring in that money had been despatched by post, but had not been acknowledged. One customer had remitted ,£20, and another £42, no less.
It occurred to Mr Evans Junior that, though the inspector had done all he could in tracing letters from the various country Post Offices to the one at Liverpool, it yet remained to trace them from the Liverpool mail-box to the counting-house in Lord Street. It happened to be the day when William went to fetch the letters— for he shared this task with a respectable senior apprentice—and Mr Evans Junior decided to watch him from a little distance so soon as ever he emerged from the Post Office. William was seen to finger and feel all the envelopes in turn, to make out if any of them had enclosures. One happening to be more bulky than the rest, he paused at the entrance to an alleyway, and opened it. But it contained only a wad of advertisements by a manufacturer of patent medicines, so he crammed it into his pocket, and finding the other letters lean and uninviting, took them to the counting-house. Meanwhile, Mr Evans Junior had hurried past the alleyway and reached Lord Street ahead of William. There he stood at the counting-house, waiting to receive the letters.