'Why, Palmer,' he exclaims, 'these are not all that came today, surely?'
'Certainly, Sir,' answers William, lying with a good heart to save what he thought was the honour of the girl.
'Where, then, is the letter which I saw you open in the alley and thrust into your pocket?' Mr Evans asks him.
' Oh, that!' says William readily.' I forgot about it. The fact was I recognized the handwriting. It is the advertisement for patent medicines that comes regularly once a quarter. I diought no harm to open it and see what new lines they are offering.'
But Mr Evans Junior ain't satisfied. He takes William before Mr Evans Senior, and though William positively denies all guilt, he has been observed fingering and feeling all the letters. The Evans's don't risk taking proceedings against the lad, for want of evidence that would convince a jury, but they immediately discharge him, and write to Mrs Palmer at The Yard about the matter.
Mrs Palmer, she fell in a great pother when she heard the news, and went complaining to all and sundry, myself included, that her dear son was unjustly accused of a crime that he did not have it in his heart to commit. She should have remembered the proverb 'Least said soonest mended.' For, as I heard later from Mr Duffy the linen-draper—but I reckon I should keep my mouth shut on the subject of Mr Duffy—William confessed everything to his mother, who came at once from Rugeley, accompanied by his brother Joseph, who happened to be there on a visit, and implored Mr Evans Senior to be merciful. Mr Evans tells her: 'It don't rest with us, ma'am, but with our customers, whose money has been stolen to the tune of two hundred pounds or so. You must deal with them.'
'Oh, that I'll gladly do,' says Mrs Palmer. 'Pray give me the names and addresses, and the amount owing in each case! The poor boy borrowed the money to save a girl's honour.'
They gave her the names and addresses and other particulars, and she made good the money stolen. William confessed his guilt to Mr Evans, saying that he was properly penitent, and begged that he might remain until his apprenticeship ran out.
Howsomever, they hardened their hearts, though it was a first offence; but to prevent the public scandal that would be caused if they cancelled the indentures, they consented to take on another young Palmer to finish William's apprenticeship. So they got Thomas, the same as is now a clergyman, in William's place; and Thomas, who had been a wild lad hitherto, conducted himself in a most exemplary way, because William begged him to restore the family reputation which he had tarnished.
That should have been a lesson to William to have no more dealings with his Jane, especially as the lass had been put up to the lark by her mother, a woman of very bad character. Though passing as Simon Widnall's wife, she was no wife at all, and Jane was her illegitimate daughter by another man. This woman didn't allow William to get out of Jane's clutches, as I shall tell you, though she always kept in the background and acted silly.
At the age of eighteen, William, who already had a good knowledge of drugs and their uses, was apprenticed for five years to Mr Edward Tylecote, the surgeon of Haywood, not far from here. His house stands opposite to that of William's sister—the elder sister who, I'm sorry to say, was the black sheep of the family and whose goings-on I should be ashamed to relate, because of the pain they have given Mrs Palmer. She died of drink soon afterwards. Mr Tylecote is a capable surgeon, but his practice being a poor and scattered one, he was glad to have William's assistance, especially as Mrs Palmer undertook to pay his bed and board and fifty guineas a year for instruction, if only Mr Tylccote, at the close of the apprenticeship, would get him admitted into the Staffordshire Infirmary as a walking pupil.
William was doing pretty well at Haywood when, one day, he was startled to hear banns read in the church between James Vickerstaff, the assistant-gardener at Shoughborough Park, near by, and Jane Widnall. Howsomever, the bride proved not to be the red-haired lass, but her mother of the same name; and the union was in every way satisfactory, since Vickerstaff had been the lass's father, d'ye see? They say the mother's decision was made for two reasons. As to the first, Simon Widnall had turned her out of the house for receiving stolen goods; as to the second, she knew that William was apprenticed to Mr Tylecote, and young Jane had not lost hope of getting her fingers into the seven thousand pounds that William would enjoy when he came of age, and wanted to keep an eye on him.
William was remarkably true to the girl; indeed, you may say that he was besotted by her. He didn't wish his family to know that he loved her still, and saw her daily; and therefore had to use deceit. I believe he felt remorse at having, as he thought, taken her maidenhead, and wanted to make her his wife, if she would but wait. Jane, who had pretended great surprise at finding him in the same village as herself, managed the affair pretty welclass="underline" she kept him uncertain of her love, and admitted him to her favours rarely and in a grudging manner. When Mr Tylecote, tired with his morning's round and anxious for a rest after dinner, was settling for a nap, William would enter the dining-room and announce that a patient of his, over at Ingestre (as it might be), had requested a visit; at the same time offering to go. 'By all means,' Mr Tylecote would say, 'take the strawberry roan and the usual black draught!' William would mix a black draught, harness the roan, ride up village towards Ingestre, then circle about by the 'Abbey' and through a croft belonging to The Clifford Arms Hotel. He would enter the inn-yard by the back way, put up his nag, go off to Jane Widnall (who lived next door) and in due time empty the black draught on the midden and return to the surgery.
At last William had a row with Peter Smirke, Mr Tylecote's other assistant. Smirke was a little sprig of a man, who dressed in a dandiacal fashion and was received in the village society. The story they now tell at The Clifford Arms is that Smirke once saw William emerging from Jane's cottage at an hour he should have been elsewhere, and scolded him very severely. William put him off with a story of having dropped in to ask whether Mr Vickerstaff, her stepfather, could supply him with a few seedlings for the garden at The Yard—they always have seedlings of all sorts to spare at Shoughborough Park—and Smirke thought no more of the matter. William, however, told Jane the story, and she now began making eyes at Smirke, and even one day invited him into the cottage on some excuse and arranged for her mother to surprise him stealing a kiss. Jane pretended, for William's benefit, that this had been done to prevent Smirke from bringing any accusation against him at Mr Tylecote's; but her true object was to make William jealous.
In this she succeeded. William, being kept short of money, could not afford to dress so smartly as Smirke. But he went upstairs and poured acid over all Smirke's fine clothes and linen; finishing with a new pair of dress-boots that had just arrived from the bootmaker in time for a ball at The Clifford Arms, where Jane was to help the landlady with the service. William took a penknife and slashed those boots into ribbons. That was true lover's jealousy. All being fair in love and war, he never owned up to the deed, though it could only have been his.
I don't know the whole story of how William ran away with Jane to Walsall; but I'll tell as much as I do know. Mr Tylecote was not in the habit of going to church except at Christmas, Easter, and Harvest Thanksgiving, and for the funerals of his richer patients. William, on the other hand, always attended the early morning Communion Service, and again Matins. At Matins, he would arrange for a lad to come as if from Mr Tylecote, and call him out a few minutes before the sermon—the parson over at Haywood being a very powerful and long-winded preacher—and go off to see the lass.