Dr Palmer's immediate family consists of his elder brother Joseph, a former timber-merchant and colliery owner, now retired from business, and living with his wealthy wife at Liverpool; his younger brothers George, a Rugeley attorney, who married a rich ironmaster's daughter and Thomas, a clergyman of the Established Church; and Sarah, an unmarried sister, who devotes her life to good causes. There was another younger brother, fourth in the list, named Walter, a bankrupt and drunkard, recently deceased; also a sister who married a Mr Heywood of Haywood and, after a life of indecent scandal, drank herself into the grave.
Old Mrs Palmer, the mother, a hale woman in her late fifties or early sixties, is still living at The Yard, in Rugeley, the house where all her seven children were born. It takes its name from the timber-yard which old Mr Palmer, the sawyer, used to manage. Joseph succeeded him for a while in the business, but presently abandoned it altogether. The Yard is a handsome, comfortable place, built of red brick. On one side, next St Augustine's Church, a splendid ivy-tree climbs to the very roof, its dark foliage making the blind of the staircase window shine snowy white by contrast. On the other side, a bulging two-storey bow window, built of stone and overlooking the canal, has been awkwardly patched on to the original structure. The windows are glazed with plate-glass, and their gay wire blinds and rich silk curtains are very much in the fancy style of a prosperous public house. Another bow window, behind, is as old as the house, and has small diamond-shaped panes set in lead, like the stern lights of ancient ships. The entrance door is protected by a wide verandah, respectably painted in clean white but which, not being overgrown by clematis, honeysuckle, or other creeping plants, has a naked sort of aspect. Well-clipped box and privet enclose the front garden, so that anyone with half an eye can see that a gardener is kept here. The wharf, where the timber was formerly loaded on canal barges, and the yard where it was stacked, has of late been converted into a gently sloping lawn. A few shrubs line the gravelled carriage drive, but they are brown at the tips and look unhealthy. The great crane, which once creaked under the weight of heavy timber baulks, now rests idly at the water's edge, planked over against the weather. Occasionally, long and narrow barges pass, each draught-horse forced slantwise by the strain on the tow rope. At the farther end of the timber-yard a few blackened planks remain, piled together in the form of a pent-house, which serves as a convenient roosting place for Leghorn fowls and a bantam or two.
The back premises are so foul that they charge the front with hypocrisy. Here the garden has been allowed to go out of cultivation-the flower beds trodden underfoot until they are as hard as the gravelled walks that surround them. A few dish-clouts hang up to dry. We noticed a water-butt with rusty hoops; and a coach-house and stable that even a London cabman would cough at. The black thatch of the stable is dripping away, and its woodwork seems too rotten even for kindling. Old Mrs Palmer, to be sure, no longer keeps a carriage.
'The nearer the church, the farther from God,' is a proverb of doubtful truth. But true it is that William Palmer, as a child, had two churches frowning down on him, and scores of graves around. He could take reading lessons from the inscriptions on the gravestones and vaults, such as the large one near the gate with its carved letters picked out in green moss:
Praises on tombs are trifles vainly spent;
A man's good name is his best monument!
The gardener, by name Littler, once top-sawyer at The Yard, knew the family well and is ready, for a pint of ale, and a half-ounce of tobacco, to talk about them. Here is his account.
ROBERT LITTLER
Old Mr Palmer was very strict with the children generally: made them play in the grounds, or in the graveyard, and kept them out of the village lest they should run into mischief. When he died, however, they were allowed to run wild. Mrs Palmer, you see, is of a very different character from her late husband; but, being in her employ, I cannot say more than that. You must inquire elsewhere, if you are still curious. The old master never flogged William so often as he did the others, Walter in especial, and not because he was a particular favourite, but because he was careful to avoid trouble. Walter was very racketty, and the people hereabouts used to agree on William as the best of the bunch; though perhaps fear of the birch made him a trifle sly. He was Mrs Palmer's darling, yet I never saw him fly into a pet, as Joseph was apt to do.
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 lusty, 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 Sheritt, him 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 school-fellows 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 Sheritt, 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?' cries 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 letter-boxes 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 twenty pounds, and another forty-two pounds, 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 alley-way, and opened it. But it contained only a wad of advertisements by some 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 alley-way and reached Lord Street ahead of William. There he stood at the counting-house, waiting to receive the letters.
'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 thought 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 Evanses 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 Tylecote, 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-headed 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 well: 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 short 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 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 step-father, 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 pen-knife 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 contrary, 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.
One Sunday, half-way through a sermon on the Last Days, the new Mrs Vickerstaff nudged old Vickerstaff, who was a careful, plodding sort of fellow, saying that she felt faint and would he take her home? So Vickerstaff starts up from his doze and takes her home, where he finds William in bed with his step-daughter, as had been arranged. There is a great row, and Vickerstaff threatens William with a fowling-piece if he will not swear, in the hearing of them all, to marry Jane. William solemnly swears, and is talked into visiting Walsall, to plead with brother Joseph for his blessing on the match, the lass coming along too. So, early on the Monday, William asks Mr Tylecote's leave to go for a day's rabbit shooting; Mr Tylecote agrees, and William hires a nag from The Clifford Arms, meets Jane a mile out of town, pulls her up behind him, and trots off.
Nothing is heard of the pair for some days; but at last comes a letter to Mr Tylecote, apologizing heartily for having been called away to Walsall on sudden business, and asking him to forward a letter which he enclosed, to a Mr Lomax of Stafford. Mr Tylecote steps across the road and consults William's brother-in-law, Mr Heywood, who says: 'I don't like the look of this, and they say in the village that the scamp has gone off with Vickerstaff's step-daughter. I think, Mr Tylecote, you would be in your rights, as his employer, to open the enclosure.' So they unseal the envelope, which is to ask Mr Lomax as a great favour to redeem William from an inn at Walsall, where he is being held in pawn for a bill which he cannot pay, because Joseph will do naught for him. Now, this Mr Lomax was a wealthy young man, his school-fellow at Bonney's, whom William had once saved from a sad scrape.
The seal broken, Mr Tylecote could not in honesty send on the letter to Mr Lomax; nor did he feel inclined to redeem William himself. Mr Heywood therefore rode over to Rugeley to tell old Mrs Palmer what was afoot. She could not be found, having gone out visiting a friend, but not left word which friend it was; so Walter and George set off on their own to fetch William home from Walsall. They came upon him with the lass, at dinner in the inn, quietly cracking walnuts and sipping his port. George behaved in a hectoring manner, and rudely ordered him back to Rugeley. William replied that he would not stand for such insolence from a younger brother and, rising from his chair, offered to fight him; but Walter quoted the text: 'Be ye kindly and affectionate one to another in brotherly love,' and reconciled the two. Then George goes off to pay the bill, and William to collect his gear. But in the inn-yard he gives both brothers the slip, takes chaise to Stafford, where he leaves the lass, and makes his way alone to Rugeley.
The lass had money in her purse, no less than a hundred pounds of old Vickerstaff's savings, which she had stolen, in case William should have no luck with Joseph. She sees now that the game is up: if Mrs Palmer tells Joseph the truth about the thefts at Liverpool, which have hitherto been kept from him-for Joseph has heard no more of the lass than that William wants to make her his wife-William will lose his seven thousand pounds, and she may as well call the marriage off. But she can't go back to Haywood and face old Vickerstaff's wrath. So she writes secretly to Peter Smirke, saying that she has been deserted by William upon her confessing that she loves another, namely Smirke. Peter Smirke at once leaves Mr Tylecote, believe it or not, and marries her. They set off together for Australia, where Smirke sets up in practice at Sydney, and nothing is heard of either for many a year.
Ay, that is how it went. And Mrs Palmer forgave William, once more. Perhaps Tom Clewley, at The Shoulder of Mutton, will be able to fill in some of the gaps in the tale that I have left on purpose.