They Hanged My Saintly Billy

They Hanged My Saintly Billy

Copyright © Robert Graves 1957

All rights reserved.

FOREWORD

TODAY is the centenary of Dr Wm Palmer's public execution for the alleged poisoning of his friend John Parsons Cook; and all opponents of capital punishment should be wearing black. 'I am a murdered man, Dr Palmer told the Prison Governor after his twelve-day trial, one of the best attended, and most scandalous, ever staged at the Old Bailey; which was the truth. The medical evidence against him had broken down completely, and the circumstantial evidence conflicted, but the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney-General were both out to secure a verdict of guilty from the handpicked jury.

Dr Palmer was, I grant, a scoundrel and spendthrift—though hardly in the class of Edwin James, Q.C., one of the Crown Counsel who helped to hang him and got disbarred five years later for frauds amounting to over £60,000—but he was also well known for his generosity to the unfortunate, and his remarkable stoicism when things went wrong. James, then a Member of Parliament, got safely away to New York, owing £100,000, and there not only resumed his legal practice but became a successful actor at the Winter Garden Theatre. Palmer had no such luck. His wax effigy appears in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Exhibition, among England's most notorious poisoners: doubtless as a warning to all who dare challenge the combined might of the police, the insurance companies, and the Jockey Club.

Mr James Hodge, editor of The Trial of Wm Palmer, in the 'Notable British Trials' series, is pleased to rank Dr Palmer among the 'mass-executioners'. To me, however, he recalls 'Hanging Johnny' in the sea-chanty:

They say I hanged my mother,

Away, boys, away!

They say I hanged my brother,

Then hang, boys, hang!

They say I hanged my Annie,

Away, boys, away!

I hanged her up so canny,

Then hang, boys, hang!

They say I hanged my daddy,

Away, boys, away!

But I never hanged nobody,

Then hang, boys, hang!

Palmer was similarly accused of murdering fourteen people: in particular his wife Annie, the last survivor of a suicidal family. That she poisoned herself to get him out of debt by her life insurance is the only theory that covers all the facts; but his deep grief has been unkindly dismissed as hypocritical. The case did not come up for trial. My conclusion is that 'he never killed nobody'.

My uncle, Dr Clifford Pritchard, M.D., to whom I dedicate this book in grateful acknowledgement of advice, and the loan of books, is my sole personal link with the Palmer case. He took over a medical practice at Highgate from his friend, the late Dr George Fletcher, J.P., Palmer's leading biographer, who as a boy met many of the characters in this story, including old Mrs Palmer, and once even carried John Parsons Cook's cricket-bag.

In reconstructing Palmer's story, I have invented little, and in no case distorted hard fact. But the case is so complex that to argue it out in historical detail would have made a very bulky and quite unreadable book. I worked from the following main sources:

' The Times' Report of the Trial of Wm Palmer, Illustrated (Ward & Lock, London, 1856). The Queen v. Palmer: Verbatim Report of the Trial, in two parts (J. Allen, London, 1856). The Queen v. William Palmer: Official Report of the Minutes of Evidence (George Hebert, London, 1856). Illustrated Life and Career of Wm Palmer of Rugeley (Ward & Lock, London, 1856). Last Hours and Execution of William Palmer the Poisoner (Taylor & Green, London, 1856). The Cries of the Condemned: Proofs of the Unfair Trial of Wm Palmer by Thomas Wakley, Esq., Coroner, London (C. Elliot, 1856). A Letter to the Lord Chief fustice Campbell by the Rev. Thomas Palmer (mainly written, it seems, by Edward Kenealey, Palmer's junior Counsel—T. Taylor, London, 1856). In Favorem

Vitae: A Letter to Mr Serjeant Shee on the Trial of Wm Palmer by Henry Conington (John Russell Smith, London, 1856). W. Palmer Exhumed: A Few Words on the Trial by L.B.—M.A. Cantab. (Palmer & Son, London, 1856). The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence by Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor (John Churchill, London, 1865 edition). Sixty Years on the Turf by George Hodgman (Grant Richards, London, 1901). The Life and Career of Dr Wm Palmer of Rugeley by Dr George Fletcher (Fisher Unwin, London, 1925). The Trial of Wm Palmer edited by E. R. Watson ('Notable British Trials' Series—Wm Hodge, London, 1952).

Unfortunately, the thirty-four 'lascivious' letters written by Dr Palmer to Jane Bergen have disappeared since 1933, when Dr Fletcher's collection of Palmeriana was dispersed at his death.

As usual, I have to thank Kenneth Gay for his constant help with this book at every stage.

ROBERT GRAVES

Deya, Mallorca, Spain. June 14th, 1956

Chapter I

THE OLD BAILEY: MAY 14TH, 1856

THE trial of William Palmer, aged thirty-one, surgeon and race-horse owner, began yesterday at the Old Bailey after a delay of nearly five months. He had been arrested on Friday, December 15th, 1855, by the police superintendent at Rugeley, Staffordshire—a town of which he is both a native and a resident —on a charge of having, three weeks before, feloniously, wilfully, and with malice aforethought, committed murder on the person of his friend and brother-sportsman John Parsons Cook. The arrest followed upon a verdict of wilful murder returned by a coroner's court at Rugeley. Palmer was thereupon committed to Stafford Gaol, of which he has since been an inmate.

Popular excitement rose to such a pitch, when he was further accused of several other poisonings, that in the view of the county audiorities he could not expect to meet with a fair trial at Staffordshire Assizes. An application for a trial in London having been granted, a special Act (19 Vict. cap. 16) was needed to regularize the procedure; and, this having been hurried through Parliament, the Crown resolved that the prosecution should be conducted by Attorney-General Cockburn himself, rather than by any private person.

Yesterday, May 14th, the case was at last called at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, before Lord Chief Justice Campbell, Mr Justice Crcsswell, and Mr Baron Alderson; the other Commissioners present being the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor of London, two Sheriffs, two Under-Sheriffs, and seven Aldermen—including Mr Alderman Sidney, late M.P. for Stafford, who happens also to be a native of Rugeley and, we understand, was formerly well acquainted with the prisoner's family.

Supporting Mr Attorney-General for the Prosecution, were Mr Edwin James, Q.C., Mr Bodkin, Mr Welsby, and Mr Huddlcston.

Mr Serjeant Shee had been appointed to conduct the Defence, with the assistance of Mr Grove, Q.C., Mr Gray, and Mr Kenealey.

To judge by the very numerous applications for admission to the Court, which were made so soon as ever the trial was appointed, and by the vain endeavours of large crowds to force their way into the building yesterday, despite an unseasonable chilliness of the weather, the keen interest which this case excited when first called to public attention has in no degree abated. Every entrance was besieged at a very early hour, and even the fortunate holders of admission cards had to pass the scrutiny of many stern janitors before they could be accommodated in the body of the Court. Among the distinguished visitors were the Earl of Derby, Earl Grey, the Marquis of Anglesey, Lord Lucan, Lord Denbigh, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, with other peers of lesser rank. The Lord Advocate of Scotland sat beside the Attorney-General during the trial.

Punctually, at five minutes to ten o'clock, the learned Judges entered, accompanied by the Lord Mayor, the Aldermen, and the Sheriffs, and took their seats on the bench. A jury consisting largely of respectable City tradesmen was empanelled, after which the Lord Chief Justice ordered all witnesses, with the exception of medical men, out of Court.

The prisoner, on being called upon, pleaded 'Not Guilty' in a firm voice.

As a final earnest of the Crown's intention to give the prisoner a scrupulously fair trial, it was demanded by Mr Serjeant Shee for the Defence, and granted by Mr Attorney-General for the Prosecution, that any juryman who might be either a proprietor or shareholder in any insurance company should be asked to withdraw. Frequent allusions to insurance companies, with which the prisoner had dealings, would be made in the course of the trial: particularly to The Prince of Wales, The Solicitors' and General, and The Midland Counties.

No juryman, however, withdrew, and the Attorney-General thereupon began his speech for the Prosecution.

Outside the Court crowds still gathered thick, and included many Rugeley folk who had come up by train on the previous day in the full expectation of being admitted to witness the trial, and now expressed their disappointment most forcibly.

'By what right have the Under-Sheriffs admitted those d…

nobs to satisfy their idle curiosity? There ain't a Staffordshire man in the whole bunch, and I'll wager not a one of them so much as knows Dr Palmer by sight!'

'Did you see Lord Lucan? Him whom the Commander-in-Chief sent home from the Crimea? Perhaps his admission card should be regarded as a consolation prize for his military failures.'

' Some pretty murders were done in the Crimea by these selfsame nobs, but it's hardly likely that they'll ever be brought to justice. Murder by neglect is more difficult to prove than murder by strychnine or prussic acid; and if charged, they would plead to be tried by their peers.'

DR WILLIAM PALMER

'A right denied, however, to house-breakers, pick-pockets and other criminals in a small way.' 'A very shrewd hit, Sir!' 'I am obliged for your agreement, Sir.' 'Did you know Dr Palmer?'

'Did I, indeed? I'm a near neighbour of his. James is my name: a bookseller of Rugeley. And you, Sir?'

'I'm from Uttoxeter—a betting man, as you'll have gathered from the cut of my jib. I wonder whether your impressions of Dr Palmer tally with mine? I cannot claim to have known him well, but I should say that he's a good-principled man. Of course, he couldn't pay when he didn't have the money, and he had the ill-luck to be barred from the Ring at Tattersall's, because of a failure in that respect. But, my dear Sir, he was a devil when it came to "punting", as we call speculation on the Turf. And he knew as much about making a book as yourself—if I may be so bold! For though book-makers and book-sellers come close to each other in a dictionary, so also do card-makers and card-sharpers, ha, ha! and are equally ignorant of the others' trade. They talk of his cleverness; I wouldn't call him clever. Why, I've heard my fellow-Turfites wonder how he ever managed to win a penny . . . But what is your experience of him?'

'Well, Sir, I should agree that he's not a clever man. I should also add that neither is he a deep man. But he's a very cool man. Though speculative, as you say, he never seemed to be either elated or depressed by the results of his speculation, as so many gentlemen of your profession unfortunately become at times. And from the cut of his jib, as you put it, nobody would ever guess him to be anything but a country surgeon

'He doesn't drink, I understand?'

'He drinks but little, and was only once seen the worse for liquor... At The Talbot Arms Hotel in Rugeley he would sit still and bite his nails, listening to the conversation of others; a habit which must have been of considerable profit to him, because "in wine is truth"; and I have seen betting men come reeling out of The Talbot, one after the other, when he was paying the score. In short, he's a perfectly sober, cool man; kind and generous to all around. And here with me, Sir, is our Rugeley sexton to confirm what I have said.'

The old sexton removed his cloth cap in greeting, and sang out eagerly: 'Yes, Sir, I've known Dr Palmer, man and boy, these thirty years. He's the very last person in the town as I should have suspected of such an ungodly thing. He's a religious gentleman, and many's the time, when I've had a sup of ale too much, he's chastized me for it. He'd say: "Do keep yourself respectable, Jemmy, and don't go to them public inns. If you wants a drink of ale, come by my house." And there's Bill Hawton, used to be clerk of the sawmill, which was Mr Palmer Senior's business. Bill Hawton fell ill last year and couldn't come to The Yard for a long time. Well, Sir, the only member of the numerous Palmer family who sent him joints of meat and coal, and other things he might need, was the Doctor; and he lent him money into the bargain. He called it "lending", Sir, but bless you! that was but his way of giving without causing poor Bill to regard it as a charity. Above ten pound, he gave Bill Hawton in money, apart from the value of the goods. And anyone at Rugeley will tell you that the Doctor was affectionate to his family, to his widowed mother in particular, though 'tis said that he had good cause to be ashamed of her giddy ways. And many's the labouring man will regret what's happening here today! For even if they acquit Dr Palmer of the charge—and, for myself, I'm prepared to swear him innocent—he's ruined, and suspicion will always attach to him.'

The bookseller smacked the sexton on the back. ' I like a man who speaks up for a friend in trouble. And, if you ask me, the special Act of Parliament, which was passed to let the Judges try him here, conveys a hundred times more prejudice than it removes. Dr Palmer may have enemies in Staffordshire, but he also has many friends—and the friends outnumber the enemies. If he had been committed to the county assizes, the trial would have been conducted in a perfectly quiet and Christian atmosphere. You have only to ask the servants at the various hotels he frequented, within thirty miles in all directions of Rugeley: they will invariably speak of him as "a nice, pleasant, decent sort of man"—unless the Police have got at them, like some I know. And it's the talk of good people of that sort that moulds public opinion far more than the newspapers, such as The Illustrated Times, which have already poisoned London against Dr Palmer.'

Inside, the Attorney-General had opened his speech for the Prosecution. He set forth the complicated nature of the facts on which the Crown's case rested, and begged the jurors to lend their patient attention to them, while discarding from their minds all prejudiced opinions which they had acquired either from hearsay or reading. This might be difficult in a case already so widely discussed throughout the country, but he begged them to make the effort.

'Gentlemen,' he then proceeded,' William Palmer, the prisoner at the bar, is by profession a surgeon. He practised as such at Rugeley in Staffordshire for some years, until he became addicted to Turf pursuits, and was gradually weaned away from his profession. During the last two or three years, I am informed, he had made over his practice to his assistant, by name Benjamin Thirlby, who was then and is now, a chemist and druggist of Rugeley. He kept only one or two patients . . .'

Here the Attorney-General coughed, paused, and with an accent that seemed to some persons in Court unwarrantedly pointed, went on: ‘ . . patients in whose lives he had—shall I say? —a more immediate interest than in others.'

The Rev. Thomas Palmer, who loved his elder brother William with a sincere devotion, half-rose in his seat to protest; but their sister Sarah Palmer, a modest and beautiful young lady, who helps Thomas in his parochial duties at Coton Elms in Derbyshire, tugged at his coat to restrain him. 'Be patient, Tom,' she whispered. 'Take an example from William, who sits there no less calm and conscious of his innocence than Bishop Cranmer at the stake.'

The Rev. Thomas thereupon subsided in liis seat, and the little scene passed unobserved by the Court officers, for all eyes were fixed on the prisoner at the bar. William Palmer certainly looks at least ten years more than his thirty-one, with which he is credited on the indictment. He is solidly built, very broad-shouldered and bull-necked, though not above the average height. His complexion is florid, his forehead high, his features somewhat mean, yet respectable enough. He has thin, lightish-brown hair, brushed back over an almost bald head, and whiskers inclining to red. Nothing in his appearance suggests either ferocity or cunning; and his manner is exceedingly calm and collected, without a trace of bravado, guilt or remorse. Shrewd observers, however, will notice a remarkable discrepancy between the ruddy coarseness of his face and the extreme prettiness of his hands—which are white, small, plump and dimpled, almost womanly in their appearance, and which he spends a deal of time admiring as he sits in the box, sometimes picking at his nails for lack of a penknife to trim them neatly. He is no longer allowed to wear wash-leather gloves as a protection for these hands against the sun, but little sunlight penetrated into the County Gaol and House of Correction at Stafford this last winter, and their colour seems to afford him great satisfaction.

The Attorney-General's speech occupied the entire morning; and in it he gave a lucid and detailed account of what he intended should be established by the witnesses for the Prosecution. The Rev. Thomas Palmer and Miss Sarah Palmer listened with set faces; their tightly compressed lips and narrowed eyes evinced disgust at what Miss Palmer was overheard to call, sotto voce, during a momentary pause in the speech: 'A wicked bundle of hearsay, lies and scandal.' When the speaker began to discuss the prisoner's pecuniary difficulties which suggested a motive for the crime, and pronounced: 'A man may be guilty of fraud, he may be guilty of forgery; it does not follow that he should be guilty of murder,' a deep frown settled on both brows. Some offence was also felt by a gentleman in a back row, who exclaimed:' Give a dog a bad name and hang him, Sir!'; whereupon the Rev. Mr Palmer turned round in a fury, and shouted: "Who calls my brother a dog?'

The gentleman in the back row could not be discovered, but the Lord Chief Justice threatened to clear the Court if any further interruptions occurred. He would, indeed, have ordered the ushers to eject the Rev. Mr Palmer, but that Mr Alderman Sidney apprised him of the latter's identity. Nor could he greatly object to the warmth of his rejoinder which, though officious, had been uttered in reproof of the unknown voice. He therefore contented himself with the dry warning: 'Sir, if you respect my wig, I'll undertake to respect your cloth.' The Revd gentleman duly apologized, and no further incident broke the dignity of the day's proceedings.

Certainly, the Rev. Thos Palmer did not forget what he has since called 'the one fatal instance on which my brother William infringed the commercial code of this country'. But that had been many years before, and he now persuaded himself that William, a regular churchgoer, who took the sacrament every Sunday, and contributed generously to all Church charities, repented with all his heart of that lapse, which had been attended by strongly extenuating circumstances.

Chapter II

THE WILES OF JANE WIDNALL

DR. PALMER'S immediate family consists of Ins 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 arc 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, 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.

MRS PALMER'S HOUSE

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 coachhouse 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 mans 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 rackety, 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 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.

'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 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 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.

One Sunday, halfway 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 stepdaughter, 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 stepdaughter. 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 schoolfellow 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. Then 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.

Chapter III

MR DUFFY'S SAMPLE BOX

RUGELEY, a long, straggling, overgrown village which kranks, however, as a town, is kept very clean, and occupied by some persons extremely well-to-do in the world. It is about the size of Twickenham, but seems to have enlarged itself without any apparent design beyond the whim of the bricklayer and the varying price of building sites. Commercial travellers call it a good place for business, and declare that the accounts here are particularly safe. Lovers of bustle and crowded pathways might well find the quietude of Rugeley's cottages (with their large leaden lights and heavy shutters) not a little oppressive, but many visitors profess themselves charmed by its almost deserted streets. Housewives may be seen at the windows busily plying the needle behind rows of red geraniums, while their menfolk are away in the fields, or hard at work at Bladen's brass-foundry or Hatfield's manufactury.

The Town Hall occupies the centre of the Market Place; with its justice-room in the upper storey and, on the ground-floor, a literary institution next to a Savings Bank. Three or four London-looking shops are supported by plenty of countrified ones: butchers' with only a half-sheep as stock-in-trade; grocers' that sell bread; tailors' that keep stays and bonnets for sale.

Soon after you go out of the railway station, to cross the bridge by a flour mill, leaving The Yard and Rugeley's two churches behind, you reach a bend of the road where stands the shop that has most benefited by what are alleged to have been William Palmer's crimes—Mr Keeyes, the undertaker's. You are now in Market Street and approaching The Talbot Arms Hotel, generally still called The Crown, as before it assumed its present lordly name. You must be careful to distinguish it from The Talbot Inn, a much smaller place, which you have already passed. The Talbot Arms Hotel, where John Parsons Cook died, is a bold-faced house, not unlike a cotton mill from the outside, except that the

windows are too large; and behind stretches an acre of back yard, surrounded by stables and coach-houses, which are well filled during the celebrated six-day Horse Fair held in June, and during the lesser fairs in April, October and December; but quite empty for the rest of the year. Here you may well catch sight of Mr Thomas Masters, a trim old gentleman in drab breeches and a cutaway coat, standing at the door of his hotel, propped on a knotted

THB HIGH STREET, RUGELEY, SHOWING PALMER'S HOUSE, AND THE TALBOT ARMS HOTEL

blackthorn stick. He has lived here for seventy-four years, and what he does not know about Rugeley and its people is hardly worth knowing. He rides a brown mare thirty years of age: 'The two of us make a good bit over a hundred together,' he will tell you.

Opposite, and set back a little from the road, behind a fore-lawn no bigger than a billiard table and a few evergreens enclosed by iron railings, stands the two-storeyed building with broad modern windows and a grey 'rough-cast' facade, which Dr Palmer occupied at the time of his arrest. Its neighbours are the humble Bell Inn on the left side, and the house of Mr John Bennett, Shoemaker, on the right.

As you pass on, the shops become bigger and you even come across a bookseller's, Mr James's, with a fashionable mahogany front of plate-glass. The first turning to the left is an ugly lane, like a back street in Manchester, leading to the foundries. If you detain and question an inhabitant who has strayed into the street, he will tell you: 'Down there stands the old Post Office, where Palmer's friend, Mr Cheshire, got into trouble on the Doctor's account. We have a new Post Office now. And here's Mr Ben Thirlby's chemist shop—he worked for Dr Palmer—and yonder's the crockery shop where the Doctor used to deal, and there's George Myatt, the saddler's, where he had his harness repaired, and yonder's the tailor who made his suits.'

THE POST OFFICE, RUGELEY

Everything in Rugeley is 'Dr Palmer' now; no other topic of conversation will serve. By the way, if we give him his courtesy title of 'Doctor', which is a country custom when surgeons arc concerned, we trust to be forgiven. The correct form of address is, of course, 'Mr Palmer', or William Palmer, Esq.

So on to the Bank—open from ten to three. Here Dr Palmer kept his flickering account, sometimes reduced to a few shillings, but then again swollen to thousands of pounds, only to shrink again from his losses on the racecourse or the demands of greedy money-lenders. Now you are in Brook Street, the tree-lined scene of the annual Horse Fair: as broad as Smithfield, and as long as Regent Street, with plenty of room to inspect the horses, even should they stampede and charge down towards the Market Square like a cavalry regiment. The tall maypole facing you could serve for a three-decker's mast. Boys sometimes swarm to the top

—the young Palmer brothers were well-known for their climbing feats—but they must surely hurt their legs on the iron hooping halfway up. The houses on both sides of Brook Street are large and commodious, and to the south-west, in the far background, the dark hills of Cannock Chase frame a pleasantly rural view of

sheep, cows and immense wagons standing before the millers door. _

THIELBY'S SHOP, RUGELEY

The miller's wife proves to be both comely and loquacious. She says: 'The landscape around us is most beautiful for miles: nothing else but noblemen's mansions and grounds. Do you think the aristocracy would come and settle here, so far from London, if it wasn't so sweet a spot? There's Shoughborough Park, the Marquess of Anglesey's place, within four miles—"Beau Desert" they call it—with the most lovely country you can imagine all along the Shoughborough road. In the other direction there's Lord Hatherton's park and timber, from which half the Royal Navy's dockyards are supplied. Oaks, Sir, with trunks as big around as cart wheels! Then there's my Lord Bagot's—the finest woods in Europe, Lord Bagot's got. And Earl Talbot's magnificent estate, which has named both our oldest inn and our principal hotel; and Weston Hall; and a hundred such. Bless you, Sir, compared with Rugeley, Nottinghamshire's a fool to it. Then there's Hagley Hall within a hop, skip, stride and jump of us—a short mile in fact— the finest shrubberies man ever saw, and the Honourable Mr Curzon is so kind as to allow us all to walk in them. It's only this plaguey Dr Palmer has set people against Rugeley; or else the whole world would be singing its praises.'

Retrace your steps at this point, and go back by way of Market Square to the other end ot the town, where The Shoulder of Mutton Inn stands, an inn no larger than a cottage. Thomas Clewley, a fine-looking man with white hair and a cherry-face which puts one in mind of trifle at some evening party, has been landlord here for more years, he says, than he would care to reckon. The inn has a tall roof from winch dormer windows peep out across the street and over its entrance door hangs a crude painting of an immense shoulder of mutton, dwarfing the very respectably sized dried hams seen suspended from the kitchen hooks as one glances in through the passage window. The front parlour is lined with shelves containing what seem to be medicine bottles but are, in reality, travellers' samples of various wines, cordials and spirits. There is also on view the plaster image of a cow, such as grace dairymen's shops, or Hindoo temples, with the following Gothic inscription sunk in its base:' No Milk like Bristol Milk!'

The tap-room is built out from the side of the cottage, with a slate roof of its own; the windows have heavy white sashes and small panes, twelve to the square yard; broadsheet ballads and hand-coloured prints of pugilists, murderers and racehorses paper the walls. On a shelf over the door stands a bottle containing a two-headed piglet preserved in spirits of wine; and scrawled across the face of a broken American hanging clock, above a coloured view of Sharon Church, Connecticut, you may read the jocose warning: 'No tick here!'

Mr Clewley is even less reluctant to discuss the 'Palmer affair' than old Littler, and equally positive about the Doctor's innocence. We have taken down the following from his lips, in shorthand.

THOMAS CLEWLEY

Palmer never had it in him to hurt a fly. The way they now talk of him in the London papers, and in towns where he was barely known, nigh makes me vomit! I reckon Littler has given you the particulars of his two false starts in life—at Liverpool and at Haywood—and how he was twice deceived by that foxy-maned harlot, Jane Widnall. But he never tells the whole story, on account of loyalty to his employer, Mrs Palmer Senior.

The fact is, that when the poor lady had buried Mr Joseph Palmer Senior under a fine stone vault in the graveyard, she began to feel lonely and cold at nights. She would have married again, being a lively, handsome enough woman—as 'tis said coarsely in this town: 'Many's the good tune played on an old fiddle'—but that the deed drawn up by her eldest son Joseph forbade this. It's my suspicion that Mr Joseph Junior knew of a certain attachment she had formed on the very day of the funeral, and did not relish her beau as a stepfather; the man, Moody by name, had once been a collier, and was now managing the pit at Brereton for him. That danger passed, since Moody soon after got knocked over by a railway train when his horse bolted across the lines. But I'm sure that, a few years later, if Mrs Palmer had been free to follow her inclinations, she would have married Cornelius Duffy, the linen-draper. I don't suppose Littler said much about that business, did he? Very well, Sir: I'll tell you the story just as it happened.

Duffy was a strapping fellow of forty or so, a linen-draper from Belfast. Though a man of good looks, we reckoned him a pretty dull chap in the house; he'd sit still and drink, spirits mainly, and read the newspapers from back to front and from side to side, spelling out every word with his lips. He came to lodge here twice: the first time, when young Mr William—now Dr Palmer —had just been dismissed from his apprenticeship at Messrs Evans & Sons of Liverpool, but not yet gone to Dr Tylecote's at Haywood; the second time, just before Mr William broke his apprenticeship with Dr Tylecote. I remember that, on the first occasion, Mr William paid the score Duffy had run up—it wasn't a large one, but Duffy had been lodging with me the better part of a month, and I had not yet seen the colour of his money. I wasn't sorry to see his back. I wondered why Mr William, who was only seventeen years old, and did not appear particularly friendly disposed towards Duffy, should do this for him. Mr William seemed to guess what was in my mind, for he said: 'Mr Duffy once rescued my father from an overturned coach on the Wednesbury road; and we Palmers like to show our gratitude.' Yet there was little warmth in Mr William's good-bye when Duffy went off, nor any gratitude in Duffy's. To tell the truth, it was a most disagreeable leave-taking.

Then Duffy comes here for the second time, drinking and reading the newspapers slowly through as before, and still seems to shun company. I try to get him to talk about the coach accident, but he shuts up like an oyster. In the evenings, when this parlour and the tap-room attract the most custom—and we draw it from miles around because of our home-brewed, which is unequalled in this county, though I have not travelled widely enough to make any grander claim—Duffy always slips out for a country walk, well muffled up, and don't come home until close on midnight.

Where he might go was none of my business, nor what he did when he went wherever he might go. On the day that Mr William's brothers George and Walter ride to Walsall for the fetching back of Mr William, Duffy goes off after supper for his usual stroll and this time don't return at all. He owes the house some three or four guineas, and when I question Mr William, who comes in for a drink, he seems surprised to hear that Duffy's been along again. He don't offer to pay the bill, though I mention it; and says no word either for Duffy or against Duffy. 'No doubt he's been called away suddenly,' he says, 'and will soon be back. I understand that he has big interests in Liverpool.'

'Well, we still have his traps,' say I, 'including his sample box.'

'Then you may depend on it that he'll be back soon,' says Mr William.

I do no more in the matter, but wait; and time goes by, and no Duffy. Mr William, he says no word to me on the subject either, and I don't care to pump him. Presently, Duffy's boxes begin to smell very bad, and at last my missus opens them. It was no murdered child, as we feared, but a quarter of Stilton cheese which had grown over-ripe, among a few dirty shirts and stockings, a rusty razor, two or three tradesmen's bills, old letters and suchlike. In the sample box we found some small pieces of linen, which I held as a pledge for the debt owed the house, though not worth above five shillings in all. I never set eyes on Duffy again, and he went away with no clothing but what he wore on his back.

I often puzzled on his sudden disappearance, and feared foul play—no, Sir, don't mistake my meaning! He went away the day before Mr William's return from Stafford, and Mr William knew nothing of the matter at all. But the contents of the sample box gave me a clue to what happened. In among the papers, not put by with care as though they were of particular value, but just lying anyhow, my missus found a number of love letters which made her cry out: 'Well, T never did!' and nearly split her sides with laughing.

The first of the letters in date ran as follows—for which you may take my word. It's a long time indeed since I read that letter, but like the celebrated Scottish historian Mr Macaulay, I am gifted —or, as you may say, cursed—with a memory like a photographic camera. What I have once read I can recall at will years later without effort. I have won many a wager thereby. This, as I say, was how the letter ran:

The Yard: Dec. 3rd, 1841.

I trust you will pardon the liberty I take in writing to you, and the still greater liberty of begging you the favour of calling here tomorrow at 3 o'clock, with the same cambric linen samples that you offered mc yesterday. I know you will have some scruples as to my request, knowing that linen is unlikely to form the sole topic of our conversation, if you will be so kind as to accede to my request. You will find me alone at that hour. May I beg of you the kindness to forgive mc this note in anticipation of the cause which I shall explain to you? What I have written is strictly confidential, and having been informed of your high and noble sense of honour and your absolute discretion, I need say no more. Although we exchanged only a formal few words, and those in the presence of my son George, yet believe me, I am one of your warmest, most sincere friends,

Sarah Palmer

—To Cornelius Duffy, Esq., The Shoulder of Mutton Inn.

It seems that Esquire Duffy took his box of samples around to The Yard next day at the hour named, and was satisfied with the promised explanation, for the second letter read even warmer and more sincere. Now, how did that one begin? Ah, I have it:

The Yard: Dec. 5th, 1841.

My Dearest and Best Friend,

This morning I received a note from a lady neighbour, whom I am to go visiting, that she would prefer my taking tea with her on Monday instead of Tuesday. Now, can't you come Tuesday, at five o'clock? The boys won't be here, and I have given the servant leave to sit with her sick sister; but pray come by the back premises which are reached least obtrusively by the canal tow-path. You will come, won't you? I had anticipated so much delight in seeing you Monday. The postponement of one day seems very long to me, but I have to exercise discretion, because it would never do if unkind and malicious gossip about our love were to reach the ears of my son Joseph. All Monday I shall be thinking of the pleasure of seeing you, and I hope the time may pass quickly until our meeting. I am a lonely woman, and you have been very generous to me, more generous perhaps than you guess. Don't laugh at this note, for I have written it fresh from my heart. And pray, if not too late, accept Mr Sherrit's invitation which you declined before, to sing the tenor parts in the choir tomorrow. It will make you well thought of in the town, and also give me the opportunity to rest my eyes for an hour or more on your dear face; since my pew is so fortunately placed that I shall be able to do this without turning my head.

If you cannot come Tuesday, I will excuse myself to the lady on some pretext, for on no account on earth would I miss another meeting so happy as the last proved to be.

Most affectionately yours,

Sarah Palmer

The remainder of the letters were written in a more abandoned style, and always finished with loving kisses. The lovers made appointments to meet in many places, among them the graveyard and coach-house, and were never, it seems, discovered until Mr William returned from Liverpool. I was in no way interested in their love, nor did I censure them. It was but natural that a high-spirited woman like Mrs Palmer, forbidden to remarry, though still young in heart and sturdy enough in body—having, moreover, reached an age when she need not fear the disgrace of bearing an illegitimate child—should solace herself with the embraces of a fine, upstanding, tenor-voiced Irishman, such as Cornelius Duffy, her junior by several years. And Duffy, to judge from the tradesmen's bills we found in his traps, and the poverty of his possessions, would have been glad to oblige so wealthy a protectress as Mrs Palmer, to the full extent of his powers.

At all events, I should have burned the letters, if I had had the sense, but my missus and her sister grabbed them and used them for the purposes of business. It's been said that I charged sixpence a head for the peep-show; but that's a lie. The way in which they came to be seen was that my missus got speaking of them, and one or two young chaps at the bar gammoned her to let them take a squint. 'Not till you've spent a shilling or two in grog, that you don't,' says my missus. They held her to that—I was out at the time, trying the ale at Bilston, for a man gets plaguey tired of his own brew, be it never so good—and she showed the letters. Then in comes another young chap, and another, and all take a look, those of them as can read; until at last I stagger home. Seeing what's afoot, I get properly vexed, and snatch the letters from the missus, but the harm's done; and though I hide them in the family Bible, which is the last place I'd expect her to look, and swear I've burned them in the grate, she don't believe me. A day or two later, I consult the Song of Solomon, where I'd put them, and 'behold, they are vanished away, like unto a dream remembered on waking,' as Parson Inge would say sorrowfully when the choirboys prigged his poultry or rabbits. I didn't know what my missus had done with the letters, and if I had asked, she'd only have said: 'What letters?—them as you burned in the grate, Mr C?' There's no keeping women quiet in these matters, but I'm sorry that The Shoulder of Mutton earned a bad name in consequence of my carelessness. I've told you the whole tale to show you how it all came about.

The construction that I put on Mr William's case, since you ask me, is that he had a certain hold on his mother on account of being at first the only person who knew of her goings-on with Duffy. I believe that he was greatly distressed and shocked at the revelation. A lad can laugh at a matter of that sort if it happens in a stranger's house, and shrug his shoulders if it happens at a neighbour's—but his own mother! I daresay you remember how Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet felt—not that I'm accusing old Mrs Palmer of being in any way concerned with her husband's death, though there are cruel tongues in this town have hinted even at that. Well, as I should guess—but, mind, it's no more than a guess! —Mr William reads his mother a lecture on her sins, and threatens to tell Mr Joseph about them if she doesn't send Duffy packing. She gives in at once. Mr William asks her for money to settle Duffy's score with me, and she gives it to him. Be sure, Duffy's already screwed a deal of money out of her, but Mr William surmises that he'll pretend to be waiting for a remittance from Belfast to settle the score—with the object of making more money yet. Which, I reckon, is exactly what Duffy has in mind; but when Mr William surprises him by paying the score, and then (as I suppose) threatens him with the thrashing of his life if he ever returns to Rugeley, Duffy takes the hint. Mr William was very handy with his dukes, as we say here.

Months later, Mrs Palmer writes to Duffy at Liverpool to say that the coast is clear, because her son William has gone to Haywood and nobody else is in the know. She invites him back to The Shoulder of Mutton. He comes for three weeks or so, and those letters prove that she continued on the same course as before, only with greater heat. It seems she had lost all her modesty, and there are phrases in the last letters which would cause a pedlar to drop his pack with surprise. Then came news that Mr William had broken his apprenticeship, and that George and Walter had ridden off to Walsall to fetch him back. That must have put Mrs Palmer in great fear. She sends Littler with a sealed letter to Mr Duffy, containing money and warning him (as I reckon) to clear out at once for both their sakes, and leave no vestige behind—not even sending his boxes by carrier to any place, where they might be traced. All I can say for sure, is: she tells Littler that the letter contains money for Mr Duffy, who has undertaken to send her some fine linen sheets from Belfast. I reckon she'll have sent a fifty-pound note to make it worth Duffy's while to humour her. My missus remembers Littler coming in with the letter, and Duffy going upstairs to fetch something from his box—maybe a watch and chain she's given him.

Well, Mr William returns and hears about Duffy from me; the news is a great surprise to him and though, as I say, pretending to be unconcerned, he seems to have used it to his good advantage. His mother could not now reproach him for having continued in his youthful attachment to Jane Widnall (whom he wished one day to marry), when she had been making a fool of herself with a chap like Duffy—a married man, by the bye—after her promise to William to have done with such frolics for ever.

I don't mean to say that Mr William would have threatened his mother: 'If you will not plead my case with Joseph, I will expose you to him!' That he would not have done, for he loved his mother, with all her faults. But he may well have said: 'Mother, I forgive you, as I trust that you will also forgive me.' At all events, she did plead with Mr Joseph and, I am told—but this is only hearsay—offered to tell his wealthy wife certain things very discreditable to him unless he forgave Mr William. For it was known that Mr Joseph still paid five shillings a week for a bastard daughter of his, whom he fathered on a nailer's daughter, by name Alice Plummery, over at Darlaston; and other tales are told of him, besides.

So Mr William is forgiven, and Mrs Palmer is forgiven, and Mr Joseph relents, which goes to show what a Christian spirit the knowledge that we are all sinners together in the eyes of God can awaken! However, Dr Tylecotc would not take William back as his apprentice, because of the scandal that he caused in Haywood, and the deceptions he practised. This resolve greatly incommoded Mr William, who wished to renew his studies and make his way in life by industry. He was now so disgusted by the news of Jane's elopement with Peter Smirke, that he swore never to trust a female again, and once cried out in my hearing that if they had gone away to any nearer place of refuge from his wrath than Botany Bay, he'd have followed them with a gelding-knife. And I think that this talk of a gelding-knife, and his offer to fight his brothers, and Duffy, shows well enough that Mr William was the violent sort when aroused, not the cold, crafty poisoner, which he is now falsely represented as. being. To be sure, he poured acid on Smirke's clodies, but Smirke was such a little wisp of a man and so unhealdiy looking, that William could hardly in honour have gone to fisticuffs with him.

Well, as the saying goes, there's always a way out while there's brass in the purse.

Dr Tylecote had no desire to hinder Mr William's advancement in life; but he made a great deal of trouble before finally consenting to get him admitted as a pupil into the Stafford Infirmary at the end Qf his term, and write him a certificate of good conduct. It may well be, I can't say, that money changed hands; for pretty soon Dr Tylecote was seen driving on his rounds in a very handsome new gig, which until then he could not afford. He's a good surgeon, is Dr Tylecote, and a kindly man into the bargain.

The problem of Mrs Palmer's loneliness was not yet resolved, of course, but resolved it was later. I daresay before this trial is over, something will be said about Mr Jeremiah Smith to the learned Judges. Captain Hatton, head of the Stafford Constabulary, came down here around Christmas, with his colleague, Mr Bergen, and asked a great many pointed questions on a great many subjects. In the end, they seized those courting letters written by Mrs Palmer to Duffy. My missus pretended at first she knew nothing of them, but they threatened to take away the licence if she would not give them up; so my sister-in-law brought them in—which she had kept for a lark, she said, without my missus's knowledge, when ordered to burn them in the bread-oven.

But why should the letters be taken off? The reason, Sir, is plain enough. If old Mrs Palmer were called by the Defence lawyers to give evidence on behalf of her son, which she'd do with a good heart, then the Prosecution would out with those letters and get leave from the Court to put them in as 'evidence of character'. She couldn't deny 'em as her own, and even if she told the truth about Dr Palmer, proving his alibi (as it's called) on the particular hour when he is supposed to have poisoned Cook with strychnine pills, who would believe her? Those letters are plain evidence of schemings, lyings, and adultery. No, Sir, old Mrs Palmer won't appear in the witness box at the Old Bailey, of that you may be sure! If she did, not only would she do her son no particle of good, but the secrets of her heart would be published by the newspapers throughout the length and breadth of England.

Chapter IV

COLONEL BROOKES'S RESOLUTION

ABBOT'S BROMLEY, the country house belonging to Charles Dawson, Esq., a wealthy wholesale chemist from Stafford, is one of the handsomest and most comfortably furnished in the entire county, besides being wonderfully placed for scenery. It lies some seven miles from Stafford. Close by, rise the famous oaks of Bagot's Park, said to be the largest in England and perhaps in the world. Within walking distance you come upon Cannock Chase with its grassy slopes and great wealth of wild flowers, and Shoughborough Park with its banks of tall ferns. Abbot's Bromley also commands a view of Colnwich Nunnery, and of the swans reflected in the Trent's placid waters.

Charles Dawson, a robust and mellow-voiced widower in his sixties, has a fine eye for horseflesh, an epicure's taste in port, a connoisseur's knowledge of pictures, statuary, medals, et alia— and much to relate about the next stage in William Palmer's chequered career. The rest of this chapter will be told in his own words.

CHARLES DAWSON ESQ., J.P.

Poor little Annie, how sadly we all miss her here! I did my best to cure her infatuation for that smooth-tongued young scamp— as much, I swear, as any loving guardian could have done—but she would not listen to me. She had set her heart on becoming Mrs Wm Palmer. I also quarrelled mortally on her account with my old friend Mr Thomas Weaver, the solicitor; nor have I since had reason to repent my attitude, the way things turned out. Far otherwise, indeed!

Let me begin at the beginning—though, I warn you, it's by no means a savoury story. One day, while I was still actively conducting my druggist's business at Stafford, a gentleman with trembling hands and a face as yellow as a guinea, pushed open the shop door. I summed him up at once as an officer, attached to the East

India Company's forces, who had ruined his constitution by persistent bouts of fever, over-exertion in the sweltering heat of the Bengalee Plains, and constant indulgence in the curree and chutney used by the native cooks to disguise the unpalatable taste of their goat's flesh and chicken. He asked whether we could furnish him with a certain foreign drug which one of the retail druggists of the town, to whom he had applied, ignorantly asserted did not exist. I attended to this customer personally, and produced a sample of the drug named; though counselling him in a friendly manner against its indiscriminate use. He then explained that it had been recommended to him by an old English physician in Bombay as strongly assisting the action of the liver. I told him, with what I hope was becoming modesty, that some druggists often know more about the action of drugs than do some physicians; and suggested another course of treatment as both less costly and more efficacious. A few days later the gentleman returned to thank me for my advice and, introducing himself as Colonel Brookes, late of the East India Company's service, asked me to do him the kindness of dining at his newly purchased house in Front Street.

Colonel Brookes proved to be a reserved and gentle man, the veteran of many hard-fought campaigns against the Pindaries and Mahrattas. He was considerate, generous and wealthy, but unmarried and, though a Staffordshire man, had been so long absent from our shores as to have very few friends or acquaintances left in the county. I took a liking to the Colonel and presently introduced him to Dr Edward Knight, the most competent physician in Stafford, and old Mr Wright, the brewer; and we were very glad of him to make a fourth at short whist in our twice-weekly sessions, and thus fill the place vacated by the late Captain Browne, R.N., recently dead of an apoplexy. We found the Colonel to be a keen and skilful player, with a fine sense of sportsmanship, and though he never became our intimate in the rollicking style of poor Captain Browne, we congratulated ourselves on our acquisition. He opened his heart most fully to Dr Knight, with whom he discovered that he had been a fellow-scholar at the Grammar School some fifty years before, and who was married to a cousin of his. When Dr Knight inquired privately one day: ' Colonel, may I be permitted to ask a perhaps indiscreet question—why is it that you have never married?', he heaved a deep sigh and took fully a minute to answer.

Then he explained that he had been one of five brothers, of which he was now the sole survivor. 'They each and all died by pistol shot,' he added.

'They were inveterate duellists, I suppose ?' Dr Knight suggested.

The Colonel shook his head mournfully.

'Ah, so they fell in battle?' pursued Dr Knight.

Again a shake of the head. 'We Brookes are a melancholy breed, Sir,' the Colonel at last forced himself to say, 'and each of my brothers in turn, when the unhappiness of living this life out proved too great for him, blew out his own brains. That is the reason why I have never married; I cannot wish either to perpetuate the family taint of suicide by begetting children, or to bring disgrace on their mother. For though I have fought successfully against the temptation of self-murder all my life, and though its recurrence has become both less frequent and less violent with advancing age, I can never be sure that it will not one day leap upon me like a lurking tiger. Indeed, only the other evening

Emotion prevented the Colonel from completing the sentence, but Dr Knight made him promise that if he ever felt a return of the evil, he would promise on his honour to call without delay at the surgery, whatever the hour, for consolation and friendly support. Colonel Brookes pledged him his word as a soldier, and appeared to be very much heartened by the old Doctor's evident sympathy.

I had, by the way, also introduced Colonel Brookes to the Mr Thomas Weaver of whom I spoke just now: a competent solicitor, then entrusted with my own business affairs, who seemed willing enough to undertake the Colonel's. Mr Weaver advised him to buy a property in the town consisting of seventeen acres of land, valued at three to four hundred pounds the acre; also of nine fine dwelling houses at the back of St Mary's Church, the leases of winch brought in a handsome income, or at least handsome in comparison with the purchase price. The largest of these had lately become unoccupied at the expiration of its lease.

Now, though Colonel Brookes was a model citizen in all other respects, chronic ill-health had blunted neither his sexual appetite nor his virility; and when he engaged a widow and her daughter to act, respectively, as his cook and his parlour-maid, trouble soon ensued. Disdaining the widow, a buxom woman of forty who had already set her cap at him, he made surreptitious love to the seventeen-year-old daughter who (let me be frank), failed to repel his advances with the firmness that might have been expected of a decent girl. The mother, returning from the market one day, caught the pair together in the parlour: the Colonel seated on the sofa, the girl mounted astride his bony knees, while his aged hands greedily explored her young bosom. Rage and jealousy did their work: the widow not only gave immediate notice, but demanded fifty guineas from him as the price of silence.

Their precipitate departure from the house, and the blushes of the daughter when questioned on it, gave rise to so much talk among neighbours and tradespeople, that the Colonel was hard pressed to find domestic service; for Stafford is not a large town. He therefore privately consulted Mr Weaver, making a clean breast of the affair and begging for his help. Mr Weaver hummed and hawed for a while before he ventured:' Well, Colonel Brookes, I understand that you are not a marrying man, but that neither are you a monk, and I daresay during your stay in India you found little difficulty in assuaging . . .'

' No difficulty at all,' agreed the Colonel Among the heathen Hindoos these matters are easily and cheaply arranged. And I have always liked young bed-fellows; the younger the better, let me confess.'

Mr Weaver hummed and hawed again. Then he came out with: 'Well, Sir, I am not a pander by profession, but you consult me as a friend in trouble . . . well, there's pretty Mary Ann Thornton, who was in great distress last year. Captain John Browne, of the Royal Navy, her employer ... in short, he died suddenly, leaving her in the family way. However, since the child did not long survive its birth, no claim for maintenance was made on his estate, and Miss Thornton is at present unemployed. She has the reputation of being a hard worker, and appears to prefer mature men to her own contemporaries. She can't be a day above eighteen years old, with fair hair, blue eyes, and a good figure. May I send her along to your residence?'

The affair was thus arranged, and Mary Ann Thornton came to the Front Street house, bringing with her as cook an elderly aunt, whom the Colonel agreed to pay pretty high wages. Miss Thornton herself doubled the parts of housekeeper and concubine. The Colonel became passionately addicted to her company.

Well, Sir, men are men, and we of the whist club turned a blind eye to these domesticities, as being none of our business; especially after Dr Knight dropped a broad hint of why the Colonel shrank from marriage. 'And I am sure it is far better,' he said, 'that the

Colonel should keep a healthy young mistress, than be obliged to seek the doubtful solace of a bawdy house—his visits there would be not only dangerous, as exposing him to venereal infection, but also scandalous. We do not, I take it, wish to be known as persons who regularly associate with an old rake.'

We assented, though not without presentiment of some unhappy sequel. Miss Thornton soon came to realize the Colonel's increasing dependence on her services. She grew worldly and ambitious, and nothing would satisfy her save that 'he should make an honest woman of me', as she put it, paradoxically enough. Yet he continued obdurate in his resolve to stay a bachelor, even when she announced her pregnancy. It has, by the bye, been said that a younger lover fathered the child; this is Market gossip, though, and the Colonel at least believed himself responsible for her condition. I took the view that he could do worse than marry the girl, despite her gross ignorance and low birth. The former fault might have been remedied by private tuition; the latter would have been cancelled by the adoption of his name. He felt very tenderly towards her, that is certain, and made a solemn undertaking, in Mr Weaver's presence, not only to keep her in the style which she might have expected as a wife, but to remember her handsomely in his will. All her tears and pleadings, however, failed to shake his resolution not to marry. When he offered to arrange an abortion, if she so desired, she professed to be outraged, saying that this was a crime against the laws of England and against Nature. Until the very end of her confinement she cherished hopes for a change of heart in him, but all that he would do by way of placating her was to move from their somewhat cramped and public quarters in Front Street to the more commodious vacant house behind St Mary's Church, and furnish it regardless of expense. She suffered a difficult pregnancy, which made her behave in a very strange manner, casting the wildest threats at the Colonel. On one occasion (so he confided to Dr Knight) she snatched up a kitchen knife and chased him around the table. On another, when he went to his bedroom, shortly before dinner, he found her lying drunk on the floor, with an empty quartern bottle of gin tumbled beside her.

Nevertheless, the child, a girl, was born safe and sound. The Colonel felt lasting chagrin, since it had been to avoid the begetting of children that he had registered his vow; and Mary Ann Thornton, unappeasable resentment. Even if he now made her

Mrs Brookes, that honour would come too late: the child was born illegitimate. She continued to drink heavily and, since the Colonel had guilty feelings in regard to her, tyrannized over him with impunity. The affair reached such a pitch that neither old Mr Wright, Dr Knight, nor myself dared call at his house for fear of witnessing disgraceful scenes. The blue-eyed belle was fast losing her looks, becoming thin and angular, with that blueish pallor which betrays a constant recourse to gin; and made no attempt to rule her excessively foul and vulgar tongue. She never ceased to blame him for 'whoring' her and, by his cruelty and neglect, driving her to the bottle.

The chief bone of contention between them was the child, whom Miss (now Mrs) Thornton regarded with possessive greed, and on whom Colonel Brookes doted, for he loved the company of children. In better moods she encouraged his affection for little Annie, but when the gin was working in her, would roughly

order him out of the nursery. 'This is my b…. child,' she would scream. 'It could also have been yours, you toad, you turd, you Turk, if you had been the gentleman I first mistook you for! But you have cast a blight on the poor innocent's life by your refusal to lend her your name, and neither she nor I will ever forgive you. So, go, go—out with you—before I tear your eyes from their sockets! And one word of protest—you b—— you—and I'll dame you with these shears!'

She would then pick up the shears, or it might be a knife, or a cleaver, and my unhappy old friend would run for shelter to The Lamb and Flag. He even, on one occasion, took sanctuary in the vestry of St Mary's Church. Thus the scandal which Mr Weaver had hoped to avert, by his discreet pandering to the Colonel's weaknesses, grew a thousand times worse than if the unfortunate man had merely been known as a frequenter of bawdy houses. He could, of course, have posted out of the country for his weekly pleasures; to Liverpool, for example, and little harm done. But now, when one of her ungovernable rages overcame her, she would follow him all the way to The Lamb and Flag—not fully clad neither, her hair in curling pins—where with her ramping, stamping, tearing and swearing, for all the world like a drunken Lifeguardsman, she would create a most horrible scene, finally catching him by the collar and hauling him off home. 'Poor gentleman,' some of the rough fellows who frequented The Lamb used to say naively, 'he might as well have been married!'

After long deliberation, we of the whist club decided not to exclude him from the twice weekly sessions at my house, and thus add a last, and perhaps fatal, drop to his cup of bitterness; nor did the woman ever venture to pursue him there. I have since heard it said that these two evenings were sacred to amatory revenge; she had a lover, a bricklayer's labourer, whom she entertained in style during her protector's absence.

So it went on for some years, until the reign of the late King William—the year 1834, to be precise—when one morning Colonel Brookes was found dead in the parlour of his house, clad in dressing-gown, slippers and cap, with a bullet through his heart and a still-smoking pistol lying on the carpet beside him. The old cook made the discovery. She had heard her niece's voice raised in a shriek of anger, which was followed by a cry of despair from the Colonel, and then a pistol shot. A moment later Mrs Thornton quitted the parlour in hysterics and, rushing upstairs, slammed and locked the bedroom door behind her. The cook at once hastened to summon Mr Weaver, who in turn sent post haste for Dr Knight; and the two of them, so soon as Dr Knight had satisfied himself that life was extinct—mounted the stairs up to the bedroom and demanded that Mrs Thornton should come out and give them an account of this melancholy event. When she made no reply, Mr Weaver entered the room by way of the window—a ladder left by the painters affording him convenient and easy access to it. He snatched the gin bottle from Mrs Thornton's hands, and unlocked the door to admit Dr Knight.

Fortified by the spirits, Mrs Thornton agreed that she had had words with the Colonel, whom she reproached for his constant and unnatural demands on her services between the sheets; but swore, by all that she held most holy, that the cry overheard by her aunt was one of indignation, when he drew a pistol from beneath a sofa squab, pointed it at his heart, and warned her very coolly: 'If you utter one more word, I shall kill myself.' Then, inadvertently (they were told), she had uttered another word, or words, namely: 'For God's sake, don't! Think of the child!'— whereupon the Colonel pressed the trigger.

Dr Knight and Mr Weaver went pensively downstairs again. Unable to decide on the truth of the story, they came to ask my advice as a Justice of the Peace. In the absence of any witnesses other than the aunt, who was hard of hearing, and Mrs Thornton herself, the truth could never be exactly known; but Dr Knight pleaded that the child's future must, at any rate, be safeguarded. Little Annie was already proverbial in the neighbourhood for her simplicity, goodness of heart and gentle manners, and had become a leading scholar at St Mary's Sunday School. 'It is bad enough to be born out of wedlock,' said Dr Knight, 'it is worse to be the daughter of a suicide. And what girl in Christendom, however saintly, could face the world in the knowledge that her mother had committed murder?'

'How does the will run, my dear Sir?' I asked Mr Weaver, whom I still esteemed highly at that time.

'Well,' said he, 'all I know is that you two gentlemen are named as his executors. The Colonel drew the will himself last July—against my advice, because it's no easy matter for a layman to draw a sound will unassisted by a solicitor—and would not show me the document, but deposited it, sealed, in my safe.'

'Can you explain the hugger-mugger?' I asked.

'Well, Sir,' he answered, 'it may be that Mary Ann Thornton figures in the will, which made him ashamed to discuss her case with me. She has occasioned him much unhappiness of late years, and because I recommended her to him as his servant

'As his concubine, Sir,' I reminded him.

'For Heaven's sake, let me be! You'll be saying next that I charged a stud-groom's fee for the transaction.'

'You have earned it, at all events,' said I bitterly.

Mr Weaver then accompanied us to his office and unsealed the will in our presence. The Colonel had divided his property into two parts: the nine houses were to go to Mary Ann Thornton absolutely; a capital of some twenty thousand pounds, mainly in Sicca rupees, and the rents of the farmland (which might not be sold in her lifetime), were to be divided between Mary Ann Thornton and his daughter Ann Brookes, in the proportion of three parts to two. Dr Knight and I were also appointed guardians of the child, and charged to pay her only the interests of her fortune until she came of age or married, when she might receive the whole of it. The Colonel, however, insisted that the child must be taken from her mother, a confirmed drunkard, and brought up genteelly.

We both professed ourselves happy enough to comply with the testator's wishes, but Mr Weaver sighed as he said: 'This will is flawed. I fear it will be disputed.'

Disputed it was, by Mrs Thornton, who went to another solicitor for advice. While not objecting to the legacies, she was outraged by the Colonel's animadversions on her character and his attempt to rob her of Annie, whom he claimed as his own daughter; and vowed that she would fight the case in every court, low or high.

Meanwhile, she was in danger of the rope; for all Stafford knew her character and openly accused her of murder. A Coroner's inquest could not be avoided. Dr Knight managed the business very well; he somehow contrived to bring Mrs Thornton to the inquest cold sober and decently garbed in widow's weeds. He also coached her into telling the same story she had told before, though omitting the scandalous part and altering the account of her quarrel with the Colonel. When she had done, Dr Knight himself gave evidence of the Colonel's confidences made him some years previously, as to why he would never marry, and mentioned the Colonel's promise to call upon him at the surgery if ever he felt the suicidal mania threatening him again.

The Coroner then asked: 'Dr Knight—pray remember that you are on your oath—did the Colonel in effect call upon you at the surgery, and did he warn you of the recurrence of his mania?'

Dr Knight replied: 'The answer, Mr Coroner, is both yes and no. He came, as I now believe, ready to make such a statement, and if he had done so, I should have taken immediate steps to place him under restraint. But he contented himself with hints, which I was too obtuse to grasp. He came calling at about five o'clock, and talked somewhat disjointedly; a condition characteristic of the malarial fever from which he suffered at regular intervals. I at once urged him to take the usual stiff dose of quinine. He promised that he would do so upon his return home; but before rising to go, he asked me: "Dr Knight, are you a Freemason?" I smiled as I answered: "If you were yourself a Mason, and if I were also a Mason, you would have already known me as your fellow by my manner of shaking hands on our first acquaintance; but if you are not a Mason, as I suppose must be the case, how can you expect me to reveal myself as one, if indeed I am? You must surely be aware that membership of the Order is a close secret."

* Colonel Brookes let that comment pass, and launched into a story. "I have just had very sad news from Liverpool," he said. "It concerns a friend of mine, the Captain of a fine East Indiaman, which makes a regular run between Liverpool and Bombay. I dined at his table every day, both when I returned to India in 1817, as a major, after a six months' convalescence; and again on my last voyage, when I sold out and came home to the among my own people. This Captain was a Freemason, and as conscientious in his loyalty, Dr Knight, as you seem to be. Well, one day he was aggrieved to find that his first mate had confided to a lady passenger some disquieting news about the soundness of the ship's rigging, and added: 'God knows, madam, what our fate will be if we chance to run into foul weather off the Cape!' The lady's husband, a Madras merchant, ran in alarm to the Captain's cabin and demanded to know the facts of the matter. My friend reassured him that the rigging was sound—though, in truth, he had been forced by the owners to sail, on penalty of losing his command, despite his protests that 'the yards were rotten as damp straw'. The merchant having gone, my friend charged the first mate with spreading dangerous alarm and betraying nautical secrets. To which the mate replied, rudely laughing in his face: 'And I suppose, Captain, that you yourself have never betrayed any secret which you solemnly swore "to heal, conceal and never reveal"?'

' "At this reference to the Masonic oath, my friend looked up sharply, whereupon the first mate quoted to him certain prime Masonic secrets entrusted only to adepts of a high degree." '

The Coroner somewhat testily asked, at this point, whether the evidence was relevant.

'Pray have patience,' answered Dr Knight, 'and you will see that it is not only relevant, but crucial.' He proceeded: 'The Colonel then told me that his friend the Captain, knowing the first mate not to be a Mason, was both amazed and alarmed; but it came out that he had himself betrayed these secrets one night in a feverish delirium, when the first mate came to him for orders. He had the impudent officer put in irons, then returned to his cabin, and was found soon afterwards shot through the heart— clad in dressing-gown, slippers, and cap . . . This, Sir, was the end of the Colonel's story. He took his leave of me, and from the circumstance that his corpse was found the next morning similarly clad and similarly shot, my opinion is that you may, without the least compunction, bring in a verdict of suicide. If anyone is to blame it must be myself, for not insisting that he should take the quinine then and there in my surgery.'

The Coroner thanked Dr Knight for his frankness, confessed himself satisfied with the evidence, and 'suicide while under the delusive influence of a malarial fever' was the verdict returned by the jury. When I afterwards complimented Dr Knight on the fertility of his invention, he made no reply.

Mrs Thornton, as I have said, disputed the will in so far as it denied her a mother's natural rights. It was also disputed by a Mr Shallcross, who represented himself as Colonel Brookes's heir-at-law; he pleaded that the Colonel had not been of sound mind for the past three years, as large bequests to the drunken and sordid woman who made his existence a living hell sufficiently proved. The Court found that the Colonel had been of sound mind, save during his occasional bouts of malaria, and therefore had the right to bestow his property at pleasure. He had, however, wrongly described the child as 'Ann Brookes', and wrongly assumed the right to appoint guardians for her. Nevertheless, Mr Shallcross's evidence, and the testator's own considered opinion, made it apparent that the child stood in want of suitable protectors. The Court also ruled that the testamentary language was not sufficiently forcible to convey the estate to mother and child absolutely, but gave them only a life interest in it. At their decease, it must become the property of Mr Shallcross, or whoever else might then be the late Colonel's heir-at-law. The estate was therefore thrown into Chancery, the costs of the trial deducted from its value, and Anne Thornton made a ward in Chancery. The Court appointed Dr Knight and me her guardians, at the charge of the estate; and the Colonel's wishes were, in effect, respected— except that the value of the estate, after the lawyers had been satisfied, was whittled to less than a half, and that Annie's fortune now consisted solely of a two hundred pound life-annuity, purchased for her by us.

Well, as little Annie Thornton's guardian, and a married man, it was only natural that I should take her to live in my house, where I put her under the same governess as my own children. And let me tell you, Sir, that I never had a moment's cause to regret my action. That girl was a paragon of virtue, and had not an enemy in the whole world. Though painfully sensible of her false position as an illegitimate child—even if one of independent means—and as being banished for her own good from the society of an ill-bred and dissipated mother, yet she trusted in the kindness of God; showing in all her looks and actions the profoundest gratitude to Dr Knight and myself for the care bestowed on her. We had no scruple in referring to her as 'Annie Brookes', and thus keeping alive in her mind the nobler part of her natural inheritance.

Soon after Annie's arrival in our house, my wife had the misfortune to be struck down by an incurable disease. Though still only a little girl, Annie insisted on acting as sick-nurse, and her intrinsic kindness of heart and constant vigilance by night as well as by day were something more than surprising. My poor wife's sufferings terminated six weeks later. Annie wept bitterly; and after a decent interval I married again, for the sake of my children. What I had done to deserve further chastening by Heaven, Heaven alone can say; but as the result of a fall on a slippery road my new wife miscarried in the first year of our marriage; and the complications of this accident were also mortal in their effect. Once again Annie played the ministering angel, and was constantly at the sufferer's sick-bed; not only to administer medicine and perform the often distasteful duties of a nurse, but to give her spiritual consolation in the dark hours of the night when sleep was far, and pain unabating. Indeed, Annie combined three noble professions in those sad months: those of doctor, nurse and clergyman. She was reduced to a mere shadow when my wife's death at last released her from these self-imposed tasks.

I did my best to restore Annie's spirits, as soon as the period of mourning ended, by arranging treats and excursions for the family; and little by little her natural gaiety returned. But Dr Knight and I agreed that the time had come when she must go to a finishing school; and we unluckily decided upon one recommended by his cousin, Dr Tylecote of Haywood—the medical man whose then assistant was none other than William Palmer.

Miss Bond's school enjoyed, and still enjoys, a high reputation for good schooling in all ladylike accomplishments—Annie learned to play the pianoforte there in a quite masterly way—and the girls were, it need hardly be added, under continuous surveillance. It happened once or twice, however, that Palmer, as Dr Tylecote's assistant, was sent to visit the school, when a girl had been overcome by a colic, or cut her finger, or had suffered some other slight accident which lay within Palmer's limited powers to alleviate. On one occasion the sufferer was Annie, and it appears that he treated a strained ligament in her ankle with such gentleness that she fell head over heels in love with him—though he had no suspicion of her feelings, being busily engaged at the time in an intrigue with a red-headed girl from Liverpool, the stepdaughter of a local gardener. Moreover, Annie happened to be very advantageously seated in church, for her pew commanded Palmer's profile at a short distance, straight across the aisle.

My quarrel with Mr Weaver grew out of this unfortunate affair. His elder daughter had also been sent to Miss Bond's finishing school, and one day, in the course of general conversation, she chanced to reveal Axinie's secret attachment to Palmer, for which the girls were teasing her unmercifully. Weaver mentally noted the fact and, when Palmer was about to inherit his seven thousand pounds, and asked him to arrange for their conveyance, brought it out. 'Do you want a wife, Mr Palmer?' asks he. 'For if you do, I can introduce you to a very pretty young girl with a snug little fortune. She's a ward in Chancery. Colonel Brookes, her father, left her eight thousand pounds, which gives her a secure income of two hundred pounds a year.'

'There is nothing I should like better,' says Palmer, 'but can you be sure that this beauty would look twice at me?'

' Indeed, I can,' Mr Weaver answers.' She has fallen deep in love with you already. Annie Brookes is eighteen years old, and highly accomplished.'

Yet Mr Weaver was fully acquainted with the circumstances of Palmer's leaving his appointment in Liverpool, and of his ill-behaviour at Dr Tylecote s; and doubtless also of his profligate life while walking the wards in Stafford Infirmary. To encourage such a depraved young man to marry my Annie for her money was nothing short of criminal; and so I told him to his face.

Chapter V

STAFFORD INFIRMARY

STAFFORD, an ancient borough and market-town celebrated for its red bricks, its shoes, and its salt works, contains no less than thirteen thousand inhabitants; of whom at least three thousand (or so we were assured by the landlord of The Junction Hotel) are usually sober—reckoning children among that number. As seen from the railway, the town appears, at this season, like an island lying in a yellowish lake. The farmers here flood their meadows to manure them, and the aptly named River Sow is therefore divided into a dozen or more streams, which career crazily along with their discoloured waters, in haste to hurl themselves into the swollen Trent below.

All the new houses are built in brick so red that it hurts the eyes —as though one were staring at a fire—and capped by ugly slate roofs. Yet cross the long wooden bridge with its white railings, near the railway station, turn around by a flour mill and follow the lane until you reach Greengate Street'; and there you will find a charming row of old half-timbered houses on either side of the street, some large, some small, but all with heavy carved gables, and warm-coloured plaster set between the dark-brown timbers.

One house close to the Market Place is well worth a visit. Its great forehead hangs halfway over the pavement, with large bay windows like four-poster bedsteads let into the wall. The pale oaken beams standing out from the plaster-work are arranged in a variety of graceful lines that recall the tattooing on the body of a South Sea blander. Messrs Jenkinson & Co., linen-drapers, occupy the premises, and their shop window is decked out with every article 'that fashion can require or beauty desire*—as an advertisement informs us. Festoons of pink and blue ribbon elegantly droop from side to side, and bright yellow driving gloves are arranged in straight lines across the panes. At the entrance door, a bundle of coloured silk parasols and another of sober black umbrellas are stacked like so many halberds in an armoury; and through the bay windows above you can see piles of blue hat-boxes, tall slabs of linen cloth, and portly canvas blocks of unpacked goods, bound around with bands of iron, as if to keep their figures in. Mr Jenkinson, the proprietor, will be introduced to our readers presently.

Meanwhile, here is the Town Hall, towering up from the Market Place, with a clock stuck against it like a target. It can hardly be called a pretty building, having no more ornament than a blank sheet of writing paper, and the windows are mere holes in the wall; but at least it is built of Portland stone, not red brick. On either side of it stand half-timbered houses, with cock-hat roofs and their fronts slashed like a soldier's uniform, which lend its pallid stucco walls a certain aristocratic dignity, as it might be an austere and gloomy Tsar surrounded by his merry Muscovite bodyguard. Then, for Tsarina, you have the tall, white, square tower of St Mary's, a church founded by King John, and famous for its memorial to Stafford's most celebrated son—Izaak Walton, the Angler. Passing the Grammar School, an ancient foundation enlarged by King Edward VI, you will observe a dozen or more inns; an elegant bowling green; and the Stafford Infirmary, about whose architecture the less said the better, but which has now acquired a certain historic lustre from the circumstance of William Palmer's having, for a period, walked its wards.

There are many better—and we fear, many even worse— hospitals for the indigent sick than this Infirmary. Money for its support being grudgingly voted, because the expense falls on the rates, the accommodation is wholly inadequate, and amenities are very few. Most patients regard their transference here as tantamount to a sentence of death, though the medical staff, we understand, show a praiseworthy devotion to their duties, and though one or two at least of the younger surgeons are aware not only of the anaesthetic use of ether in operations, but also of the principle of antiseptics as recently discovered by Mr Joseph Lister, house-surgeon at University College Hospital. For in practice, ether, as an unnecessary expense, is never administered; and antisepsis is difficult to achieve in an out-of-date building where hospital gangrene and pyaemia must remain a constant scourge, and where the shortage of nurses, except the drunken and incapable, rules out even elementary cleanliness in the wards.

Hospital reform, however, is not the subject of our study; let it suffice to say that a walking-pupil in Stafford Infirmary, or any other similar institution—if he is not to become the victim of a nervous disorder—must habituate himself to distressing sights, noisome smells, and such a scene of human misery, despair, and degradation, that his susceptibilities will soon become blunted. To relieve his mind of these horrors he may well be tempted to abandon shame in the wildest larks and most outrageous debaucheries.

William Palmer went to the Infirmary about Midsummer, 1845; but did not remain there for more than a few weeks.

Mr Edward Jenkinson, linen-draper, a small, stout, irascible man with a huge strawberry mark spread across his face and very disagreeable features, was holding forth about William Palmer in The Dolphin Inn the other day, shortly before the trial at the Old Bailey began. Mr Jenkinson drinks neat brandy only, and can afford this luxury; for he is well-to-do and has no family to support, his physical disadvantages having decided all the women to whom he ever offered marriage that they would be far better off in any other circumstances whatsoever. The contempt with which some of them accompanied their refusal has turned him into a misogynist, though one unable to conceal the jealousy he feels for men to whom women freely yield their favours, even uninvited.

MR EDWARD JENKINSON

It would never have come to this, I swear, had my fellow-jurymen listened to me eleven years ago, when the first of Palmer's vile crimes came to light. He was then a walking-pupil at the Infirmary and had not yet inherited his fortune. But he talked freely about how he proposed to spend the money, and the number of foolish girls whom he persuaded that they had been born expressly for the purpose of assisting him to do so must have run into double figures. Palmer had the power of deceiving himself as a means of deceiving his victims: he proposed marriage to each in turn, and convinced himself that she was the most desirable woman alive. If the girl anticipated marriage by granting him what he asked, Palmer at once cooled towards her, as too giddy to be his wife; if, on the other hand, she refused him, he thought her cold, and abandoned the chase. It is said that he got two girls in the family way during his apprenticeship with Dr Tylecote at Haywood, and three more in Stafford; but that is mere gossip from the public houses.

One day I was summoned to attend a Coroner's inquest on the death of a poor shoemaker named Abley, and my fellow-jurymen elected me their foreman as perhaps the most talented . .. well, for whatever reason it may have been, they elected me. The evidence was provided by Mrs Bates, the landlady. It appears that Palmer invited Abley to take a drink at The Lamb and Flag—it was a cold, raw day—and asked him what he fancied.

'A pint of ale, if you don't mind,' says Abley.

'Come, come,' says Palmer, 'don't stint yourself! A pint of ale falls chill on the stomach in weather like this. I'll treat you to something better. What about a sip of brandy?'

Abley says that he's no great shakes at brandy drinking, but at this a young Rugeley fellow named Timmis, who had been at Bonney's school with Palmer, pipes up: 'Abley's damnably modest. He's one of the grandest brandy-drinkers in the county. Why, I've seen him toss down three tumblers full, one after t'other, and not turn a hair.'

'I'll lay you three to one in half-sovereigns,' says Palmer, 'that he can't down more than one.'

Timmis then takes Abley aside and says: 'Did you hear that? Palmer's word is his bond, and if you drink a couple of tumblers it will be worth thirty shillings to yours truly.'

'What you win is of no interest at all to me,' says Abley. 'Nor am I any sort of a drinking man. All I want is my pint of ale, and if Mr Palmer grudges me that, I'll pay it myself.'

'Come, don't be unreasonable,' says Timmis. 'What are two tumblers to a bold fellow like you? Drink them down quick, as if they were medicine, which indeed they are, and I'll give you one half-sovereign of my three.'

'Agreed for fifteen shillings,' says Abley, 'which must be handed in cash to Mrs Bates, who'll pay me when I've sobered up.'

'Very good,' says Timmis, and entrusts the money to Mrs Bates.

Abley then accepts his first tumblerful of brandy—right French brandy from Cognac—and drains it, like a soldier of the line. While all eyes watch him do so, Palmer waits at the bar, with his hand on the second tumbler, which he presently takes over to Abley. 'You conquered that manfully,' he said, 'but I wager this will make you choke.'

Abley downed his second dose, without heel-taps, neither. The men in the tap-room laughed and joked a bit at Palmer's expense. 'Never mind,' Abley says, 'I'd do the same again for fifteen shillings, these hard times.'

Presently he turns greenish and, says he: 'I'll go into the stable. I'll be cleared out just now and ready for my pint at last.'

'Good luck to you,' says Palmer. He pays his debt to Timmis, and then launches into a long, tantalizing story, a cruelly funny one too, so the fellows said, about the straits to which a ship s crew were reduced for lack of women on a long voyage of exploration in the Arctic Seas. Never you mind the details, but it kept the house in a roar, being very comically told. Timmis capped it, and then another customer chimed in—the landlady meanwhile hiding her blushes behind a row of bottles. Everyone had forgotten Abley, and it was nigh an hour later that Palmer paid his score and sauntered off. Then someone remarks:' Abley's not come back for his pint, has he? I wonder how he's faring?'

A search was made, and they found Abley stretched on a heap of sacks in the stable, groaning, with both hands pressed against his stomach. Two men carried him home and put him to bed between warmed sheets; but he died the same night.

At the inquest we jurymen viewed the body, and some of us were satisfied that since Abley had been a thin, pale man in indifferent health, to drink two full tumblers of brandy on an empty stomach and then He in the cold stable for an hour or longer was a fatal act—even though the intention cannot have been suicidal.

But I smelt a fishy smell to the business, and when the other parries wished to bring in a verdict of death from natural causes, I said: 'Gentlemen, that don't satisfy me, and I'll tell you why. Stafford is a small town, and a good deal of talk goes on in one tavern and another, some of it false, some of it true, some of it half and half. Well, I was at The Junction last night, and heard talk there about this Palmer, who laid with his old schoolfellow that Abley couldn't down more than a single tumblerful. It seems that Mrs Abley, a buxom young wench, has been an out-patient at the Infirmary—she goes to be dressed for a Severe scald on her thigh, caused by a jet of boiling water from a kettle. Palmer was directed to dress the wound in this intimate part of her frame, and from the confidences which she made to a neighbour's wife it seems that a mutual attraction ensued. However, Mrs Abley is not entirely lost to shame. She is reported to have said: " Mr Palmer, though I admit a sincere affection for you, I am not forgetful of my marriage vows, and while Abley lives I shall be faithful to him.''

' "Why, that is a pity," says Palmer, "for you are the very woman I should otherwise have asked to be my wife and help me spend my inheritance wisely and well. But there's no help to it, I see. If you take marriage that seriously, we must both pine apart."

' "I have no complaints against Abley," says she. "He's a good husband in his way, industrious and thrifty, though not everything I could wish as a lover—no, not by any means. And his stomach never having been good, I have to cosset him with baby-food, a diet which does nothing to whet his desire for me. If only I could give him shellfish, and great bloody beefsteaks, and roasted love-apples! Yet I have never seen him drunk in my life, nor even the worse for liquor, and there are all too few married women in Stafford who can say that of their husbands." '

A juryman asked me: 'You think, then, Mr Jenkinson, that the business at The Lamb and Flag had been rigged—that it was Palmer's intention, with the connivance of Timmis, to discredit Abley in the eyes of his wife by sending him home reeling drunk? Or was it perhaps so to stupefy him with drink that he wouldn't come back at all that night, but leave room in his bed for another?'

'No,' I answered, 'my suspicion is an even graver one. I think that he planned to murder the poor shoemaker!'

'You are suggesting, Mr Jenkinson,' says the juryman, 'that, having diagnosed a weak heart, he counted on the action of the brandy to kill him, and deliberately embarked on that smutty story of the sailors and the polar bear to distract attention from Abley's fate?'

' It is my decided opinion that he did not count on the action of the brandy alone,' I said. 'I keep my ears open, and one of my carters happens also to be an out-patient at the Infirmary. Yesterday I asked him: "Bowles, what do they say up yonder about young Palmer, the student?" and Bowles told me that Palmer is said to be the devil of a rake with flighty young women; and that a new order posted on the notice-board is aimed at him. "What order? " I asked Bowles. "Why, Master," he answers, "I mean the order which forbids the Infirmary pupils to have anything further to do with the dispensing of medicines. There's a shortage of hands at the Infirmary, you see, Master; and no paid officer employed at the dispensary; in consequence, any pupil can go there and mix what drugs he pleases, pretending that he's been ordered to do so by a medical officer. Well, it's buzzed about that Palmer has been in the habit of conducting experiments of his own in the dispensary—'for a lark,' he says. He's been putting drugs in fellow-pupils' drinks to make them vomit, or piss green, or fall into drowsy fits from which they awaken only with hardship and aching heads." '

I continued: 'This is all hearsay evidence, gentlemen, I admit. But there's no smoke without a fire, and I therefore propose we demand an autopsy, and thus satisfy ourselves that no "lark" was perpetrated on the unfortunate man by Palmer. On the evidence, he had the opportunity to slip something into the second tumbler of brandy, while all eyes were watching Abley's consumption of the first.'

My fellow-jurors objected to this as an unproved surmise, and argued that on my own showing Palmer did not love Mrs Abley with sufficient passion to plan her husband's death; and that if he had perhaps dosed the brandy, this was not done with intent to kill. The verdict would, at the worst, be 'manslaughter'. 'He's well loved at the Infirmary,' one of them said, 'and I should not, myself, care to set so black a mark upon a young fellow's name.'

'The law's the law,' I insisted, 'and we have been charged to decide upon the cause of Abley's death without fear or favour.'

In the end I persuaded them to demand an autopsy, despite the inconvenience that the delay must cause us all; and Dr Masfen from the Infirmary duly performed his disagreeable and thankless task. But the vomit in the stable had meanwhile been swabbed up, and Abley's stomach was empty, except for some cordial draught which he had been given by his wife when at the point of death; thus it was too late to secure a sample of the fatal draught for analysis. Moreover, the stomach showed signs of chronic inflammation; and Dr Masfen pronounced that death seemed due to natural causes. This was accordingly our verdict, though I didn't like it, by no means.

A fortnight later—not so soon as to make it seem that the warning had any connexion with the inquest, but soon enough— Palmer was privately advised to leave the Infirmary. In my own opinion, the medical officers feared that if they took disciplinary action, Palmer would charge them with defamation of character; and their own negligence in the matter of allowing pupils to dispense dangerous drugs might come to light. It may even be that if some medical gentleman unconnected with the Infirmary had performed the autopsy, he would have found more than Dr Masfen troubled to find. For if the state of Abley's stomach had betrayed the action of poison, would the Infirmary staff have escaped censure? Tell me that!

Idle talk, I say, idle talk! All I know for sure is that Palmer let his acquaintance with Mrs Abley lapse. He suspected, I have no doubt, that its renewal would be dangerous.

Chapter VI

AT BART'S

THE following account was furnished by a young surgeon, late of St Bartholomew's Hospital, now settled in Harley Street, and a decided luminary of his profession. He does not, however, wish his name to be mentioned in connexion with the Palmer case—not, at least, until his friend's character (as he hopes and trusts) shall have been vindicated in all respects. Disclosures would embarrass him professionally.

'A SURGEON'

One can judge a man only as one knows him. History has made the name of Nero odious, yet it is admitted by the historian Suetonius that, after his suicide, loyal friends still laid flowers on the imperial tomb, and continued to play certain musical pieces which he had composed, though no longer forcibly obliged to applaud them—indeed, quite the reverse! Tears of sincere sorrow were likewise, we read elsewhere, shed at the tombs of such monsters as Genghis Khan, King William Rufus of England, and Lucrezia Borgia the Italian poisoner. Not that I should have shed any myself; but allow me to depose—and I would sign my name to this but for the delicacy of my present situation as a consulting surgeon to Royalty—that I found William Palmer a thundering good fellow and a deuced good friend.

He came to London in the latter part of the year 1845 and, like myself, engaged the knowledgeable Dr Stegall as his 'grinder' to help him pass the medical examination and secure his diploma. He offered Dr Stegall a fee of fifty guineas should he succeed, to which, I understand, his widowed mother promised to add the sum often guineas; and his friend, Mr Jeremiah Smith, a solicitor of Rugeley, a further ten.

For some days after his arrival in London, Will Palmer lodged at Dr Stegall's house; but the course of behaviour expected of him, there did not suit his book at all. It was 'early to bed, early to rise', constant study and no distractive pleasures—unless he counted it a pleasure, of an evening, to participate in a family game of cards at a halfpenny a hundred points, or in a dramatic reading of Mr Dickens s Barnaby Rudge, each person representing one character in the novel, while Dr Stegall undertook the narrative. Will Palmer had just come into a fortune—of some seven thousand pounds, I believe—and greatly enjoyed the sense of liberty that being flush gave him.

Once Dr Stegall gently rebuked Will for having bought, in the space of four days, a gold-headed malacca cane, a jewelled snuffbox, and a French watch of exquisite workmanship. 'Money, Dr Stegall,' replied Will, 'is meant to be spent. It's the mean habit of hoarding that dries up trade, cripples industry, and bloats the funds of the roguish Assurance Societies. What's more, these trinkets, as you call them, are solid investments which will add to my consequence when I put up a brass plate as a qualified surgeon.'

But that same afternoon he honoured me with a confidence during our walk in the Hospital grounds. 'Charley,' he said, 'if you knew how my inheritance has been earned, you would hardly blame me for the small value I give it.'

'I'm ready to listen,' I replied.

'Then here goes,' he said. 'My father ground the faces of his workmen in a shameful manner. Moreover, the principal with which he started his sawyer's business was got together by very dubious means. If I now give you the story, it's only to show you how wholeheartedly I detest my origins, and how determined I am to start afresh.'

'You want to be your own ancestor?' I suggested. 'As one of the ancient Romans, a man of vulgar birth, very happily put it.'

'That's the nail hit on the head, Charley,' he agreed. 'Well, to tell of my maternal grandfather: he began as a gunner in the Royal Navy and, pray spare me your blushes if I confess that he acted as bully to one Peggy Taff who kept a brothel in a back street at Derby. Peggy drove a pretty good trade, and was continually sending my grandfather to the bank with her earnings. The old scoundrel took the precaution to enter them all in his own name, not hers, and at last, when she reproached him with showing too much fondness for one of the women of the house, a certain Mrs Sharrod, he knocked her about severely and drew the whole of her fortune from the bank, some five hundred and sixty pounds.

My grandfather and Mrs Sharrod, who later became my grandmother, migrated to Litchfield, where they rented a small farm and lived like respectable people. My mother, their daughter, used to visit Litchfield Market, twice a week, selling poultry, butter and eggs. They did well enough, and presently settled in King's Bromley, near Stafford, where Field-Marshal the Marquess of Anglesey has his seat: that glorious old soldier who fought at Corunna, lost a leg at Waterloo, and afterwards became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.'

'I saw him in Queen Victoria's Coronation Procession,' said I, 'and how the crowd cheered!'

Will sighed and went on: 'My mother had two strings to her bow: the Marquess of Anglesey's steward, and my father, a young sawyer of low origin. The steward was named Hodson, and would have married my mother, but that he already had a wife; so my father saved him the trouble, by marrying her himself. Mr Hodson continued to be romantically attached to my mother; indeed, I've been told that my eldest brother Joseph may thank him as the author of his being. My own parentage was never, I understand, in doubt; because soon after Joseph's birth the family quitted King's Bromley and came to Rugeley. By this time, my father was in a fair way to make his fortune, for he and Hodson had not only gone snags in my mother's favours but done the same with the profits of the Marquess's timber, then being felled to supply the Royal Navy. The Marquess was away in Ireland, and his eldest son, the present Marquess, showed such negligence that Hodson had a clear run. Now, it seems that while Hodson courted my mother, my father was quietly marking the fallen logs I, I; 2, 2; 3, 3—so that he got six for the price of three. Or even more; an old fellow by the name of Littler who worked for him in those days has told me that he has seen no less than ten No. 10's carted out of Shoughborough Park during a single day. My father prided himself on a little rhyme which he had composed himself; and taught us at his knee:

It is a sin to steal a pin,

But guineas are fair game.

The hound who hounds a million pounds

Writes "Lord' before his name.

This inheritance of mine, Charley, is ill come by, and the sooner it's spent, the better I'll be pleased.'

I felt dismayed at the bitter tones in which Will Palmer branded his father as a cuckold, his mother as an adulteress, and both of them as thieves. His story reminded me forcibly of the Biblical text: 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge.'

'No, but Will,' I objected,'I heard you tell Dr Stegall the other day that you were directly descended from Sir James Palmer, Chancellor of the Order of the Garter, in the reign of the martyred Charles I; and from his son Roger, the Earl of Castlemaine, a boon companion of the Merry Monarch, Charles II'

'So I did,' he said carelessly, 'but Stegall is no friend of mine; and I reserve the truth for my friends only, if I may count on you as such. To do so relieves my heart of a heavy burden. Though it may be unscientific to believe that dishonesty, infidelity, or cruelty is inheritable—as one may well inherit a gouty tendency, or short sight, or a syphilitic taint, or melancholia—I can't choke back the resentment I feel towards my father. Now, look'ee, Charley, I don't relish Stegall's household or the regimen he forces on me. I shall clear out, bag and baggage, at the end of this week. What do you say to rooming with me ? I hear you well spoken of as a thoroughbred entire, sound in wind and limb, without vices and a good stayer. In short, I'd be proud to have you as my stablemate.'

'If it puts me to no greater expense than I am incurring at present,' I answered, 'I should be most happy to join you. I won't say that I'm enchanted with the company I'm keeping; but my purse is light, and the rooms are cheap.'

'Tell me more,' he says, handing me an uncommonly good cigar and igniting it for me.

'Well,' I said, 'it's this way. 'My "chums", as they call themselves, are sad dogs; very sad dogs indeed—though what the significance of "sad" in this phrase may be, I'm sure I don't know. They are, in point of fact, confoundedly gay, so gay as to be perfect bores. The summum bonum of their happiness seems to consist in strolling along the Haymarket or Regent Street of an evening, clad in ruffianly overcoats, smoking foul black cigars, and peering under the bonnet of every poor little dressmaker or milliner making her solitary way home, wearied after a day's toil, and weighed down by a heavy oilskin-covered wicker basket. They call it a lark to ogle the unfortunate girls and put them out of countenance—I call it blackguardly. Then, when the shops are closed, and they have refreshed themselves at some public-house bar with copious draughts of half-and-half, they call it a lark again to march arm-in-arm, four or five of them, down quiet streets and shouting "Lullaliety!" at the tops of their voices.

'Myself, I could never abear boisterousness,' says he.

'And I draw the line sharply’ I continued, 'at the sport of wrenching knockers off street doors, and proudly displaying them to one's fellow-chums, very much as a Sioux or Ojibway "brave" exhibits his scalps.'

'What are their peculiar habits at table?' Will asks with mock gravity, as one might inquire about some strange variety of jungle animal.

I told him: 'They make beer their morning beverage—"drunk from the native pewter,"—as the cant phrase is—and chaff me when I suggest that tea or coffee, both of which quicken rather than dull the intellect, may be the more civilized brew. "Charley the slop-drinker," one of them waggishly called me, until I flung a pint of half-and-half in his face, and followed it with the native pewter. There came no more waggishness from that quarter for a while, I warrant you. They breakfast from whatever happens to be in the cupboard—bread, cold meat, a stale pasty, or a petrified cheese-rind—and if the beer is expended, gin and water must serve. Generally half a dozen chums from the lodgings opposite thrust their way in, to join the merry meal and talk over last night's lark—how Johnny bonneted the policeman, or how old Tom stole the garter off a young lady's leg as she was mounting into a hansom cab. Savages, Will, ignoble savages! Nor do these visiting chums remember to bring the necessary breakfast tools with them; but the meat and cheese is sliced with a rusty pocketknife, or the very scalpel with which one of my party has been operating on a mouldering human femur, now carelessly tossed into the cupboard next to the loaf of bread. Gin and water is drunk from pickle-jars or gallipots, or the ornamental vases on the chimney-piece.'

Will chuckled at my recital, and I went on to tell of my chums' dinner taken at a 'slap-bang', or cheap eating-house, where they ate cow-heel or hot alamode, and offered familiarities to blowsy women waiters, who returned them in kind; I also described their disorderly supper. 'You'll live a very different life when you room with me, Charley,' he said. 'You'll eat and drink of the best, and never have a chum in the world to plague you.'

Will now rented a fine set of rooms in Bartholomew Close, belonging to a fellow by the name of Ayres, and fitted them up in approved style, covering the walls with anatomical charts and models, and laying out two or three hundred guineas on professional works. This was a great convenience to me during my home-studies, and Will did not deceive me by demanding any larger contribution than I had paid at the hole-in-the-wall from winch he rescued me. I drank tea for breakfast out of a handsome china cup, and ate bacon and eggs, or grilled kidneys, or kedgeree and fish (a capital food) off a well-heated plate with excellent table silver. Our rooms were never in disorder, and Will himself showed a particular niceness about his morning dress, which was neat rather than showy; and though somewhat provincial in his manners at the start, he soon learned London etiquette and became quite the gentleman.

So far as I know, he always paid his debts, even to tailors, which many a peer of the realm disdains to acknowledge—as though tailors were not also God's creatures, and entitled to payment for their tedious labours! When not walking the hospital, I stayed at home and studied; but for the first few months Will Palmer did not join me and proved very remiss in his attendance at the Lecture Theatre. I thought this none of my business; for if he chose to make the rounds of the betting-houses and mix with the racing fraternity—already his thoughts were turning to the Turf— at least he did not bring any doubtful characters back with him to Bartholomew Close. He respected my quiet, and showed me the most thoughtful consideration.

One evening, I remember, he said to me: 'Charley, you look fagged. Much study is a weariness to the flesh. Come out with me to supper! I'll stand you treat, and shan't expect any return but the pleasure of your company.'

I could hardly refuse, though I pointed out that if he took me to a more than ordinarily genteel place, I had no suitable togs for the occasion.

'Oh, damn the togs!' he answered. 'Borrow some of mine, if you like—we're much of a height, and your shoulders are as broad as mine.'

So presently we walked down the Strand, where he led me to an oyster shop, described as a 'night house', where scarlet lobsters and crabs like giant tea-roses jostled one another in appetizing profusion on the stone counters; where pickled salmon lurked in shady groves of fennel; where Finnon haddocks, truly Scotch in their hardness and crispness, were ranged in thick layers; where oyster tubs crowded the walls; and where a gilt placard hanging from the flaring gas jet invited us to partake of chops, kidneys, or steaks. At the counter stood a row of swells, cooling their parched throats with Colchester natives, and swearing unrestrainedly at the flannel-aproned attendants. Through the doorway of an inner room I caught sight of many ladies of the Town, in silks, satins, feathers, and plenty of'slab', that is to say, red ochre and bismuth, staining their cheeks.

Will was leading the way in, when he turned sharply about and came out again. 'Let's away,' he muttered, 'there's a fellow here whom I'd as lief meet as the Devil himself.'

'Who can that be?' I inquired, disappointed of my oysters and crab-meat.

'A fellow named Dawson,' he replied, 'who owns a big house near Stafford, and has done me an ill turn. I'm determined to marry his ward, the sweetest and most engaging little girl in the world. But he stuffs her ears with ill-natured tales against me. It's my opinion he wants to make her his third wife.'

We retraced our steps and presently walked across St Martin's Lane, where he led me to a public house, and said: 'Charley, I shall now show you England's greatest living hero, next to the Iron Duke, of course.' He nodded at the publican behind his bar, a white-haired, battered giant who stood ringed about by prizefighters with broken noses, cauliflower ears, and bleary eyes, and by a mixed assembly of dog-fanciers, bookmakers, ratting-match concocters, and the very scum of sporting life generally. Ah, those cutaway coats, the nankeen trousers fitting tightly to the leg, the bell-shaped hats, the blue-and-white neckties, the queer jargon and outrageous oaths!

'Who's your friend?' I asked.

'Who's he, indeed, Charley? Are you really so green? You should be ashamed to ask the question! Why, that's the great Tom Cribb, formerly pugilistic champion of England; who sparred in the presence of the Russian Tsar and the King of Prussia in the year before Waterloo; and who guarded the entrance to Westminster Hall at the disorderly coronation of his late Majesty, King George IV. Though now attained to the age of seventy, he could still, if he pleased, dash all the teeth from your jaw with a mere back-hander.'

Then we turned up Little New Street, even at that late hour blocked by the carts opposite a cheesemonger's; along King Street and the illumined windows of the Garrick Club; then down a steep flight of steps, and into Evans' Supper Room.

'Here you'll find a scene rather more to your liking, I hope,' said Will Palmer. And, in effect, Evans's of Covent Garden is an establishment that has ever since delighted me when I could afford to sup there. You don't know it? Why, it's the finest place of its kind in the metropolis—I rate it far above Rhodes's, or the Cyder Cellars in Maiden Lane, or the Coal Hole in the Strand. It's divided into two parts, do you see? First, the cafe, furnished in truly Parisian fashion—except that it doesn't spill over into the street—and hung around with framed portraits of the most famous theatrical personages in ancient and modern times. The cafe is where men of importance from every walk of life gather to exchange gossip. In fact, so much gossip is exchanged that a 'syndicate', or combination, of newspaper reporters has been formed to spread out among the tables, each secretly cocking an ear to the disclosures of the group sitting nearest him. Afterwards they pool their takings, perhaps less honestly than the members of a thieves' kitchen, but honestly enough to keep the syndicate in being. The newspaper proprietors pay them a fixed sum for their suppers so long as they continue to collect, or at least fabricate, printable news.

Then there's the Singing Room, a hall with a platform at the upper end on which a grand piano is stationed, and to which the singers climb when called upon by the chairman who sits beneath. The important business of eating is solemnly and industriously undertaken here by six or seven hundred men. Ladies are, of course, debarred, owing to the freedom of language which is permitted the performers; and women of the Town equally so, owing to the respectability of the audience. It happened that some most distinguished guests were present on this occasion, including several Members of Parliament, and two titled racehorse-owners whom Will pointed out to me; and (a thing that interested me far more) seated at the next table to us were two men whom I recognized as the famous novelists William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens! Mr Thackeray, a member of the adjoining Garrick's Club, still makes Evans's, as he has put it, 'my nightly chapel of ease'. He was then engaged in writing his immortal Vanity Fair, though under the misfortune of being married to an insane wife. Mr Dickens, already the author of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, had just been offered, and accepted, the editorship of the recently founded Daily News; and Mr Thackeray had been invited to celebrate this success. Mr Dickens lay under the almost equal misfortune of being unhappily married to a woman who had borne him a number of children, while he loved her younger sister to desperation. Will told me all this, sotto voce, observing that domestic unhappiness often positively assisted men of genius to pen immortal works. 'Not that I would ever have read a word written by either of them,' he added, 'had it not been for Dr Stegall and his merry evenings. I find Ruff's Guide to the Turf engrossing enough.'

He ordered 'Black Velvet' (which proved to be champagne mixed with stout), a couple of dozen oysters, and thin slices of buttered wholemeal bread as a commencer; to be followed by rump-steak and a good claret. On the other side of our table sat a party of provincials, Wolverhampton tradesmen by their accent and garb, who gazed at Will with veneration and astonishment, until presently one of them recognized him. Will bowed gravely but paid no further attention, though it appeared that this was an old schoolfellow; and the chap's 'Dang me, if it isn't Billy Palmer of the Rugeley Yard!' got drowned by a growl from his mates: 'Howd thy rattle, Tinny!' For now the Chairman had rapped on the table with his hammer and was crying: 'Attention, pray, my lords and gentlemen, to the music from Macbeth, No. 63 in the books, if you please!'

Up came the singers, half a dozen of them being boys with well-controlled trebles, and their rendering of Locke's beautiful melodies entranced us all. A decorous silence reigned, the audience abstaining from any clatter of hardware; but at the end broke into tumultuous applause, clapping their hands and beating on the table with fists and knife-handles.

I kept my ears open for some sublime or witty remark from the famous novelists, but apart from 'May I trouble you, Sir, to pass the mustard?' or 'These arc indeed capital chops,' I heard nothing of interest except Mr Dickens's discourse on the beneficial effect of Sunday Schools in increasing the number of children who can read and write, thus yearly swelling the literate public. 'I rely upon these former Sunday School pupils to keep my young brood in beef, mutton and potatoes, my dear Thackeray,' said he, 'not upon the University men and their families.'

'So I judge by your style and your subjects,' Mr Thackeray replied with a sigh that doubtless referred to his own childless state; though it would have sounded deuced crushing to any writer who had a lower opinion of his talents than Charles Dickens.

The Chairman then rapped for a comic singer, whose name escapes me, but I remember that he sang 'The Derby Ram' in a very arch manner, persuading the audience to expect obscene words because of the rhymes that led up to them, yet shutting his mouth fast like a freshwater mussel when he came to the point, and treating us to a most prodigious wink, as who would say: 'If you know the missing words, laugh by all means, gentlemen, but do not blame me for indecency—for I did not teach you them myself.'

Will kept replenishing my glass, only occasionally sipping at his own, and derived considerable amusement from the calf-eyes which a great, bearded, bald-headed Fellow of the Royal Academy was making at a handsome boy-soloist, as he sang:

Mother would have wed me with a Tailor

And not gi’en me my heart's delight,

But give me the lad with the tarry trowsers

That shine to me like diamonds bright!

He remarked: 'Although Cupid is said to have been a beautiful boy, I think it both foolish and unnatural to worship at any shrine save that of his mother Venus.'

The next song happened to be 'Here's a health to the King and a Lasting Peace', bawled by a tremendous basso; and Will nudged me delightedly with his oyster-knife at the lines:

And may misfortune still pursue

The senseless woman-hating crew . . .

Soon after eleven o'clock we slipped out. Will called a cab and we drove to Moss's, a first-class hell in the aristocratic neighbourhood of St James's Street. Moss's had a bright fanlight over the door, and a police constable stood guard on either side of the entrance. They had orders to take account of all visitors, their style of dress and apparent station in life; and hoped to be rewarded for their quiet 'good-night' with a half-crown, or a good cigar. 'Many little perquisites like these solace the arduous duties of the West-End peeler,' Will told me confidentially, as he pulled at an ivory bell-knob.

At once, as in the children's story of the White Cat, the portals flew open. In we went, and they closed behind us as if by magic. Wc found ourselves faced by a second door, iron-panelled and covered with green baize, from the centre of which a gleaming eye viewed us through a small square aperture. When Will nodded affably, an iron bar swung back, two bolts were shot, we mounted a flight of softly-carpeted stairs, and I was at last introduced to the mysteries of a London gambling-house. Splendid rooms they were: brilliantly lighted, warmly curtained, much-mirrored; and in one of them stood a table spread with cold fowl, ham, tongue, beef and salads. 'These are provided gratis,' said Will, 'and so are the wines, spirits and cigars. Help yourself at Rabbi Moss's expense!'

Seeing me somewhat embarrassed by my situation, he muttered jovially: 'Cheer up, my hearty! Though you may not be one of Swan & Edgar's young men, nobody will mistake you for anything but the gentleman you are. Step over to the gaming table!'

This was an ordinary billiard table, furnished with cushions, pockets, and a rack of cues to disguise its illegal employ. Police raids had been frequent lately, and no sooner did the alarm go, than a billiard game began. As an added precaution, the lame croupier, a sharp-looking, wiry manikin, dispensed with the rake in vogue at Baden-Baden and Aix—using instead a hooked stick which was also his crutch. He called the odds, never making the slightest miscalculation; and a tall, blond-moustached, handsome man shook the dice box. Will told me afterwards that the latter was of noble family, held a commission in the Blues, and did not come here in the hope of pecuniary gain. It was merely to pass the time on his way home from the club, for he had a horror of going to bed. Two years later I saw this same swell leaning against the orchestra at the Opera, and examining the house through an enormous tortoiseshell lorgnette. He is now dead: killed at Balaclava with the Heavy Brigade, I understand.

'Seven's the main!' the blond moustache shouted.

'Seven's the main!' echoed the croupier. 'Make your game, please. The castor's backing in at seven, gentlemen!'

Down came the box, out rolled the dice. 'Eleven's the nick,' said the croupier. Stakes were raked in with the crutch, winners paid, and a fresh main called a quarter of a minute later.

Will ventured a five-pound note, and lost. Presently a bright thought occurred to him. 'Confess, lad,' said he, 'have you ever played ?'

'Never,' I answered, 'and don't intend to.' 'Ah, but for me you surely will? I'll lay heavily on your virgin luck.'

'I haven't a shilling in my pocket,' I protested.

'Then here's a couple of sovereigns,' he said. 'I'll stake you. Lose, and it costs you naught. Win, and we go snags.'

Very reluctantly I placed the two coins on the nearest number. The main was again called, the dice shaken, and before I knew what had happened, six sovereigns were in my hand. 'I have kept my half-share,' he told me. 'Now stake your winnings.'

' No, no!' I cried. 'Let it be my perpetual boast that I never lost at dice, and never won less than six times my stake.'

He laughed at that and clapped me on the shoulder, saying:' Ah, my lad, if only I had your firmness of character, what a noble life mine would be—and how infernally dull into the bargain!'

Then he placed his winnings on the number I had favoured, lost, and scratched his head. 'I believe old Moss rigs it somehow,' he mused. 'I wonder what the trick is. The dice aren't cogged.' He selected a splendid cigar from a box stamped 'Benson', offered it to me, took a couple for himself, and when I had been regaled with a glass or two of excellent hock, out we went.

To one policeman at the door he handed half-a-crown, to his companion the third cigar. We hailed another cab. Our next port of call was a Dance Hall in the vicinity of Leicester Square. We paid a shilling each to the money-takers at the entrance, with another sixpence for a reserved seat, and watched the noisy, ragged polka in progress. 1 have not been able to find this establishment since; but I remember thinking it strange that the gentlemen would dance, tall hat on head, and umbrella, or knobbed walking-stick, clasped in the same hand which guided a partner's delicate fingers. The buffet here was not a free one: indeed, I considered the prices exorbitant. However, Will settled me in a plush chair and supplied me with liver-sandwiches and more hock, while he went in search of a dancing partner. I felt most disinclined to follow his example, especially with one of the ladies of the Town who frequented this place—I recognized two or three among them as our out-patients—and therefore sat still, drinking and dozing, until Will appeared at about one o'clock and loudly condemned my lack of enterprise. I begged to be taken home and, though protesting that the night was yet young, he steered me from the hall into a cab. Back at Bartholomew Close, he helped me remove my togs—or, rather, his own. I have never before or since seen double: but Will now had two heads and, true to form, I took a deep clinical interest in the phenomenon.

Afterwards he made coffee, a large cup of which soon improved my condition. Then he sat on my bed and divulged yet more family secrets—including some horrible tales about his father's callous treatment of the workmen. But of his mother, he said gently: 'True, she's a vulgar and lecherous woman, but she's helped me out of many a scrape—a kindness for which I've rewarded her most filially. I've always taken her side against my four brothers—the first, Joseph, a drunkard; the second, Walter, also a drunkard; the third, George, a close-fisted and ambitious lawyer; the fourth, John, a narrow-minded saint of the sort they call "prigs". All she needed, when my father died, was a capable bedfellow; and when she lost her first fancy man, a collier, and her second, a Belfast linen-draper whom she wished to marry—but my brothers would not allow it—I induced Jerry Smith to take the Irishman's place and keep her sweet-tempered. Jerry's an obliging fellow, and quite enjoys his commission; besides, he's always short of money, and she's no niggard.'

From any other man's mouth this would have been a disgusting admission; but he had never yet, he said, confided in a fellow-student as he now did in me; which I found flattering. And Will spoke in such a humorous, affectionate way that I made no protest; being indebted to him for the many kindnesses he had done me, as well as for the night's entertainment. This much is certain: he showed great tenderness towards the poor patients at Bart's, supplying them with such dainties and nourishing foods as they had neither enjoyed before in our wards nor, some of them, ever in their lives; and he would often get up subscriptions for them when they were due to leave, and head the list with a couple of guineas.

As the summer advanced, Will realized that not many weeks remained for him to take the College examination, and that he was sadly in arrears of study. All at once he abandoned his usual free and easy course of life, and joined me in my grind, working eight or nine hours a day, Sunday included, and only last week did the reason for this sudden furious industry appear. I came across a letter of his hidden in the leaves of an anatomical treatise which I had then possessed; he must have put it there to mark a page, and later forgotten its whereabouts. The letter was addressed to Mr

Dawson's ward, the very lady whom he afterwards married, and I have given it to Serjeant Shee, Will's Defence Counsel, to prove what manner of man he was in those days. It ran something like this:

My dearest Annie,

I snatch a moment from my studies to write to your dear, dear, little self. I need hardly say that the principal inducement I have to work is the desire of getting my studies finished so as to be able to press your dear little form to my breast.

With best, best love, believe me, Dearest Annie, your own

William

Will would often sit up until midnight, dissecting, and beg me to keep him company. He used to say: 'I don't feel quite comfortable over such work when I'm alone. It's very stupid, I know, but one can't always control one's thoughts.' And when I happened to fall ill for a few days, he would pay a porter to occupy my chair of nights. Will Palmer, if he set himself to accomplish a task, always brought it to a successful conclusion. He had a remarkable memory, a delicate hand with the lancet, and a surprising power of correct diagnosis. Though none of my former chums—many of whom were ignominiously plucked—expected him to win his diploma, and some even swore that he must have hired another student to impersonate him, he passed very creditably. It was also said that he defrauded Dr Stegall of his grinder's fee; but that I cannot believe, because he was most conscientious about paying his debts and Dr Stegall, who was equally conscientious about Ins grinding, would not have failed to dun Will if he had not paid up. The origin of the story was, I surmise, Mr Jeremiah Smith's failure to pay the promised ten guineas, and the conversion to his own use of the further ten guineas offered by Mrs Palmer. Dr Stegall issued a writ against Smith, but the case was settled out of Court, Mrs Palmer paying.

That I myself satisfied the examiners, and even earned their praise, I attribute largely to Will's generosity, which enabled me to work undisturbed. And if it is true that he spent the better part of two thousand pounds while at Bart's, what business of mine was that?

No, I have only met him once or twice since, our ways having parted. He presently devoted himself wholly to the service of the God Apollo, Patron of Racing, and I to that of Apollo's son, Aesculapius, the God of Healing.

Chapter VII

THE COURTSHIP OF ANNIE BROOKES

WILLIAM PALMER, Esq., Surgeon', as he could now style himself, returned to Rugeley from London with the intention of abandoning all his former irregular ways and settling down decently. The principal reason was, it appears, a serious attachment which he had formed.

One day in the August of 1845, just before William went to work at the Infirmary, Mr Thos Weaver, the solicitor, had invited him to dine, and arranged that he should meet with Annie Brookes as if by accident. Although her annuity was the bait offered him, Annie possessed remarkable beauty, and the joy and surprise of meeting the man whom she had so long idolized made her eyes shine and her cheeks flush very engagingly. The young couple exchanged no more than a few words, but William expressed hopes of their further acquaintance; and Annie stammered that this would make her happy, and that her guardian, Mr Charles Dawson, was kindness itself, as Mr Weaver could testify. 'Perhaps you would care to call upon him?' she artlessly pleaded.

A day or two later, at dinner, Annie mentioned the meeting to Mr Dawson, in Dr Knight's presence. Mr Dawson saw at once that she had warm feelings for William Palmer, but said nothing until dinner ended and the ladies left the table. Then he asked Dr Knight who, being very deaf, had missed the conversation: 'Do you know anything of this William Palmer whom Annie says she met briefly at Tom Weaver's?'

'If he's the fellow whom I take him to be,' Dr Knight answered, 'Annie would do well not to renew her acquaintance. He studied with my cousin, Dr Tylecote, over at Haywood. Come, fill my glass, and you shall hear what Tylecote told me about him only last Wednesday . . .

' " I've just ridden to Rugeley," he said, " to dun old Mrs Palmer for a debt that the young rake her son has long owed one of my neighbours, Farmer Parker. A labourer's widow, do you see, was tossed by Farmer Parker's bull at Gayton, breaking one leg and acouple of ribs. I'm her club doctor, but I happened to be in bed with a colic and couldn't attend her; so I sent young Palmer to summon Dr Masfen from the Stafford Infirmary, undertaking to pay his fee on the widow's behalf; and Palmer was to make up any medicines Masfen might prescribe. Masfen duly attended the widow, set the leg, saw that she was comfortable, and rode off, after giving Palmer instructions for certain medicines. Farmer Parker stood at the bedside, very solicitous, as to some extent responsible for the widow's injuries, his bull having attacked her on a public footpath. He asks Palmer: 'What's the amount of Masfen's fee?' Palmer says: 'Two guineas,' and Farmer Parker takes up a weighty canvas bag, puts his great paw in, scoops out a handful of gold and silver, and throws two guineas on the coverlet. Palmer eyes the bag thoughtfully and inquires: 'By the bye, can you change me a five-pound note?' 'Certainly,' answers Parker, who had not expected to get off so lightly as with two guineas. He hands Palmer five sovereigns new from the Mint. Palmer searches his pockets for the five-pound note, and looks alarmed; but suddenly his face clears and he says: 'Ah, now I remember! I was in such a hurry to ride over for Mr Masfen that, when changing my trowsers for these breeches, I left the note in a pocket. Well, it's of no consequence—I can send it along tonight by the boy who brings the medicine.' But he fails to do so.

' " A couple of months later," Dr Tylecote continued, "Farmer Parker demanded the money from me, threatening me with the law, and saying that he had three times written to Palmer for it, but got no reply. Knowing nothing about the matter, I summoned Palmer, who struck his forehead and exclaimed that the debt had clean escaped his memory, and that Farmer Parker had not reminded him of it, neither. 'But at the moment,' he said, 'my purse happens to be empty—I've just paid my tailor.' So I advised him to ride home before breakfast and borrow the money from his mother. 'I'll do that,' he said cheerfully. He rode to Rugeley right enough, but he never paid Farmer Parker those five pounds; for yesterday I accidentally met with Parker, who accused me, very rudely, of encouraging my assistant to cheat him. By then, however, Palmer had run away to Walsall with that red-headed girl, and I refused to take him back. So I went myself to call on Mrs Palmer at The Yard, and she settled the debt." '

Mr Dawson looked grave and said: 'I shall not mention this matter to Annie until I have had a word with Tom Masters of The Talbot Arms Hotel at Rugeley; he'll know, if anyone, what character young Palmer bears in the neighbourhood. Old Tom can be counted upon for an honest report: he rides straight and never baulked at a gate. It may well be that negligence, rather than crooked dealing, accounts for that unpaid debt.'

'Get a second opinion, by all means,' Dr Knight hastened to say. 'I'm not one to blacken any man's character on hearsay evidence alone.'

Masters's revelations seem to have been highly unfavourable.

When Mr Weaver one day proposed to take William Palmer

with him on a visit to Abbot's Bromley, Mr Dawson discouraged him. He said: 'My dear fellow, you, your wife, your family, and your kin to the seventhdegree are most welcome in our domain and, I hope, always will

be, even when I amgone; but pray do not bring along that young reprobate—for I have daughters.'

Mr Weaver flushed, and wanted to know what he meant. Mr Dawson explained: ' From Tom Masters's account, your protege has seduced no fewer than four girls in the course of this last year. Even if the number has been exaggerated one hundred per centum, it yet remains considerable. Nor do I care to be asked, as was Farmer Parker of Gay ton: "Can you change a five-pound note?", for I should then be forced either to He and pretend that I had no such sum in the house, or else oblige and never see my money again.'

Mr Weaver flushed still more deeply.' Sir,' he said, 'I am deeply sensible of your kindness in giving me, and extending to my family in perpetuity, the freedom of Abbot's Bromley. Were it not for that, and our long friendship, I should at once report this conversation to young Palmer and advise him to bring an action for slander; because an action certainly .lies. As things are, I shall simply desire you to retract your words.'

Mr Dawson replied very quietly: ' Sir, you must forgive me if, while retracting my accusations against your protege, which I admit are based only on hearsay (however credible the source), I do not make amends by inviting you to introduce him into this household. I have daughters; and I also have a pretty ward for whose well-being I am responsible to the Court of Chancery.

The two friends parted coolly. How Mr Weaver excused or explained this failure to young Palmer is not known, but he must have conveyed a broad hint of Mr Dawson's aversion to him.

At this period of his life, William Palmer had nothing in particular to occupy his attentions. He had quitted Dr Tylecote's employ, but not yet proceeded to Stafford Infirmary; Jane Widnall had betrayed him; he lacked the funds demanded by betting or other diversions, and must rely for food, shelter, and pocket-money on his mother at The Yard. As was very natural, he decided to challenge fortune by secretly renewing his acquaintance with Annie Brookes. On the pretence of botanical study, he would lurk in the woods and fields near Abbot's Bromley, especially among the great oaks of Lord Bagot's park, keeping one eye open and one ear cocked for Annie's approach on her afternoon walk; but unless she came alone he would not disclose himself. These tactics succeeded pretty well. On the first occasion, Annie passed by the spot in Bagot's Park where he leant against an oak examining some ferns under a magnifying glass. She happened to be walking, arm-in-arm, with Miss Salt, daughter of Dr Salt, the Rugeley surgeon; and, though she evidently recognized young Palmer, did not call Miss Salt's attention to him, being averse from betraying her feelings. He therefore resumed his station in the Park at the same hour on the following day and presently, to his joy, saw Annie approaching alone, with careful glances in all directions, as if satisfying herself that she had not been observed. Now, Annie Brookes was an honest girl and therefore offered no pretence of surprise when she saw him waiting for her on a log; but stood still in the lane with a look of love and appeal that affected him strangely. He slipped his glass back into its case, flung down the ferns which he had been examining, and boldly advanced to take both her hands in his own.

They remained thus for perhaps a quarter of a minute; then he laughed, and so did she. Almost at once they began to talk merrily and naturally, though with lowered voices, like children hiding together in a hayloft or woodland cavern. Annie recalled his gentle sympathy when she had sprained her ankle at Miss Bond's school; he declared that he had already fallen in love with her then.

Yet he attempted no vulgar familiarities, and even held her in a sort of awe, this being the first well-bred young lady for whom he had ever felt any tenderness. They agreed to meet at the same spot, at the same hour, two days later; and this second meeting was so successful that she even invited him to kiss her, and nearly swooned with pleasure when he saluted her, very chastely, on the brow.

But the course of true love—for it certainly was true love on Annie's part, and almost certainly on his—never runs smooth. One of the Dawson girls soon suspected from Annie's manner that she was hugging a secret, and decided to spy on her from a safe distance when next she took an afternoon walk. Being an ill-natured creature, Miss Dawson ran home at full tilt, as soon as she had satisfied her curiosity, to fetch her father. She found him in the greenhouse, inspecting his tomatoes, which were a new and superior strain, with a strawberry flavour. (In Stafford, by the way, the appearance of tomatoes at table is still the subject for humorous comment, owing to their supposedly aphrodisiac qualities, and Mr Dawson's gardener always threw him arch glances when he inquired after the plants.) Learning that Annie lay at that moment locked in a passionate embrace with a young stranger, Mr Dawson hurried behind his daughter to the glade where this indecent event had been reported, but arrived too late to surprise them in any compromising posture. Quite the reverse: Annie and William sat at some distance from each other, he with his legs crossed, smoking a cigar; she, with no evident disarray of either dress or hair, intently poring at the structure of an unusual fern, through the magnifying glass that he had lent her. On Mr Dawson's appearance, Annie sprang to her feet with a little cry of joy: 'Oh, Papa,' she said, 'do come and look at this lovely sight —who ever would have thought that Nature would hide her marvels so closely as to demand a magnifying glass for their discovery!'

William also rose, but slowly, removed the cigar from his mouth and swept off his hat in gentlemanly style.

Mr Dawson ordered his tell-tale daughter home, and as soon as she was out of earshot, turned to Annie and said: 'Mother Nature is not, I think, the only female hereabouts that hides her secrets. Who is this young gentleman ? I don't think I have the honour of his acquaintance.'

'Why, Papa, it's Mr William Palmer,' she answered. 'He is training to be a surgeon. I met him first at Miss Bond's, when he dressed my sprained ankle, and more recently at Mr Weaver's office—Mr Weaver has only good to tell of him—and three weeks ago last Monday we met by accident in diese woods. Mr Palmer is a keen botanist, and so am I, as you must know from my collection of pressed flowers and ferns. We meet on our rambles, now and again, and sometimes he kindly lends me his glass.'

Mr Dawson was silent for a while, and then, choosing his words with great precision, 'Mr Palmer,' he said, 'Bagot's Park is not my property, and clearly you have as much right to enjoy its natural beauties as I have. But these beauties do not include my ward, Miss Brookes.'

By no means disconcerted, William bowed to Annie, and then answered, smiling: 'Well, Mr Dawson, she comes here often enough to be mistaken for a native. And it seems only right to count her among the natural beauties of Bagot's Park; that is to say, I should hesitate, myself, to call her either ugly or artificial.'

'Have done with your compliments, young Palmer,' cried Mr Dawson angrily. 'How dare you force your noxious company on this innocent girl without a word to me?'

Will appealed to Annie. 'Miss Brookes,' he asked, 'did I force my noxious company on you?'

'Oh, no, Mr Palmer, no!' she exclaimed in confusion. 'Indeed, quite the reverse. I saw you first, and came to thank you for your kindness at Miss Bond's; and then I became interested in the sights revealed by your magnifying glass and suggested that we should meet again to continue botanizing together.'

'That exculpates you, Annie,' said Mr Dawson as kindly as he could, 'but it does not exculpate Mr Palmer. He should have called at my house on the very morning after that first accidental meeting—if accidental it was—and asked my permission to botanize with you'—here all at once Mr Dawson grew portentously stern—'and, if there be such a word in the dictionary, to amourize! What answer have you to this, Mr Palmer?'

'I should certainly have called at your residence, Sir, had our mutual friend, Mr Weaver, not informed me that you discouraged such a visit.'

'Worse and worse! You knew my ill opinion of your manner of life, yet you made love to my ward?'

'With the greatest respect, Sir, this love was not a one-sided ardour, as I think Miss Brookes will have the truthfulness to confess.'

Mr Dawson cut short Annie's gasping assent. 'You take advantage of Miss Brooke's innocency,' he exclaimed, 'to force deceit upon her! I repeat, Mr Palmer, that she is my ward. The Court of Chancery holds me responsible for her moral welfare.'

'Her moral welfare cannot be nearer to your heart, Sir, than it is to my own.'

'Mr Palmer, I will not venture to call you a liar or a hypocrite, because my opinion of your morals is formed from hearsay alone; but there's a great deal of talk current which is most unfavourable to you. I took the precaution, when Annie mentioned a Mr Palmer some weeks ago, to consult her fellow-guardian, Dr Knight, as to your antecedents. He gave me Dr Tylecote's report upon you . . .'

'Dr Tylecote, Sir, is prejudiced. He took no trouble to teach me his trade, and not only used me as an errand-boy, but also set his assistant Smirke to spy on my actions. I finally quarrelled with Dr Tylecote about a loan of five pounds, for which a rascally farmer demanded payment twice over . . .'

'Pray be silent! Dr Knight then recommended me to consult Tom Masters of The Talbot Arms Hotel.'

'Ha, ha! That's very good! I warrant old Tom had nothing to say in my favour? He hates each and every Palmer, dead or alive, ever since my father won a suit against him for trespass on our property.'

"That may be as you say,' Mr Dawson continued unperturbed. 'Nevertheless, I have heard enough discreditable talk to warrant my forbidding you the house, and to restrain Miss Brookes from seeking you out again, either in this park or elsewhere.'

William exchanged a quick loving glance with Annie, who appeared much distressed and ready to faint. Then he said: 'You, Sir, are Annie's guardian, but not her father; and there must come a time when you will be unable to oppose your ward's marrying the man of her choice. I would gladly take a wager that I can count on Annie singling me out, and holding by this choice. Therefore, unless you are prepared to lose her altogether when your guardianship expires, you would be wise to show me greater consideration. Annie, will you marry me some happy day?'

Annie looked miserably from one to the other of the two men whom she loved best in the world. 'Dear Will,' she said, turning very pale, 'I cannot give you that promise while Mr Dawson entertains such a bad opinion of you, however mistaken he may be. It would make life wretched both for him and me. I don't know what these ugly stories about you are, and I don't want to know. Perhaps you have been foolish. But if you love me truly, you won't be offended by Mr Dawson's anxiety on my behalf. You can see how much store he sets by my virtue and discretion; and I do blame myself a little for having hidden my true feelings from him. So now, you had best apply yourself seriously to the medical profession and secure the necessary diploma. Then you'll be a full-fledged surgeon; you'll soon earn the respect of the world as well as Mr Dawson's, and give the He to all those disagreeable stories. I won't forget you; pray count on that.'

'You may say good-bye now, my girl,' said Mr Dawson.

'Papa, may I kiss my friend?' she pleaded.

'No, you may not!' came Mr Dawson's gruff reply.

William, looking very sulky, said to Annie: 'Very well, then; let's leave it at that, my dear! I had thought better of you. Good-bye!'

He did not deign to take his leave of Mr Dawson; but turned his back and strode away towards the park gates.

The above account was given by Mrs Remington of Rugeley, at whose cottage William Palmer lodged on his return from London, to avoid a clash with his brothers George and Walter, then staying at The Yard. Mrs Remington is a frail old body with a pink, unlined face and the whitest of hair, who dresses in a fashion that had been no longer new in the year of Trafalgar. She heard the tale from William Palmer's own lips, and declares that love for Annie Brookes was the greatest thing in his life and that, though he may have been a wild young scamp before, he now decided to reform for her sake.

We then questioned Mrs Remington about his bad behaviour at Stafford Infirmary.

MRS REMINGTON

Ah, that was just it! Annie's refusal to offer him any sure hope of marriage so cast him down, and conditions in the wards were so shocking, that he does seem to have behaved pretty ill. However, he and she continued to correspond secretly, and he pressed his suit with such fervour, representing himself as a lost soul who would go straight to the Devil unless she held out a hand to rescue him, that Annie at last gave in. But this was conditional on his working hard, gaining his diploma, and loving no other woman beside herself—as she would love no other man. And they both kept their word, you may be sure! Whilst at my cottage, which was nearly a twelvemonth, Dr Palmer was as good a young fellow as ever walked. 'I'll marry that girl,' he used to say to me, 'or know the reason why!'

Only the other day I came across some of his letters, left behind in a drawer when he went off, and here they are. The first is from her to him, immediately after that sad scene in Bagot's Park:

Tuesday

My own dear William:

Why did you sulk when you bade me good-bye in the park this morning? Mr Dawson is always very kind to me, and I should ill requite his goodness by acting directly contrary to his wishes. Come, put on one of your best smiles and write me a real sunshiny note, for you have made me very unhappy. I shall expect a letter on Thursday.

Ever yours, Dearest,

Annie Brookes

He always wrote to her, at this time, in care of Mr Dawson's gardener; and made it very much worth the man's while. This next letter was sent him in London, about a month before he gained his diploma:

Abbot's Bromley, Sept. 13, 1846 9 a.m.

Dearest William,

I think it was your turn to write, and I fancy that if you will only try and recollect you will think so too. But never mind, although I have not written, you know quite well that I am always thinking of you.

Mr Dawson went to London on Monday last and yesterday Miss Salt came over to see us. We gathered ferns together. I hope you will continue your botanical studies, and allow me the opportunity of puzzling you. I have two secrets to tell you, but these I must reserve for Saturday. I don't mind telling you that I think it is your friend Masters who is trying to prejudice Dr Knight. Miss Salt says she knows it is that very crabbed gentleman—whom, of course, you will now love dearer than ever.

I have got a present for you, but as it is intended as a surprise, I must not spoil it by telling you what it is. Suppose, instead, that I tell you something you will not care to hear half so well, namely that I am ever, my very dearest William,

Your affectionate

Annie

The present she gave him was a pair of bed-socks knitted in scarlet wool, because he had complained of the coldness of his bed. What the other two secrets were, I'm sure I don't know.

Then here's a letter which he wrote, but never sent. Perhaps it's what he called a 'trial gallop'. He used to write his letters at night, then sleep on them, and polish them up in the morning. This one is dated 'Rugeley, May 16th', of the next year, which was the very day he had hopefully fixed for their marriage. He asked me once when my own wedding-day had been. 'May 16th,' I answered. 'Well, then, Mamma,' he said—he always called me 'Mamma'—'it shall be mine, too.' But though Annie Brookes had given him her solemn promise, and informed Mr Dawson that she was satisfied as to the young man's reformation, both Mr Dawson and Dr Knight still strongly opposed the union. It was only because of Mr Weaver's writing to the Court of Chancery on her behalf, and vouching for Dr Palmer's respectability, as being now a qualified surgeon and a man of substance, that the Lord Chancellor made out an order permitting the marriage. It was to take place in the September of that year, when Annie turned eighteen; or sooner, if her guardians would let her. Here, read this:

Rugeley, May 16th, 1847

My Dear Little Annie,

It was not the rain that prevented me from joining you at Stafford, as you wished. I sprained my foot and it was so painful that I could not keep it on the ground. I slid off the pathway as I was turning the corner of The Yard, past Bonney's. Now you know the reason, I am sure you will forgive me.

Oh, Annie! You cannot tell how dull I have found the last few days; I sit and think over my miserable bachelor life, and feel so dull and lonesome, I really cannot explain. I resolved, yesterday, to write again to Mr Dawson, but you forbid me doing this, so I must wait the other four months. My dear Annie, I cannot tell you how much I love you, and how I long to call you mine for ever.

Yours most affectionately, W.P.

P.S. Did Dr Knight get the game I sent? Did he mention anything about it?

There's no more letters, Sir, but when he left this cottage on the occasion of his marriage—the wedding dinner was provided for forty at Abbot's Bromley, and he invited my husband and me—

Dr Palmer declared that he had spent the happiest days of his life in my cottage. I felt rather hurt when I found my rooms let by him to a friend of his without my consent; but he says: 'Never mind, Mamma, I have let them to a very respectable man, and have got you two shillings a week more rent. I'm sure you deserve it, you're so very kind.'

He had leased a nice house from Lord Litchfield. You'll find it immediately opposite The Talbot Arms Hotel—he chose the situation, I dunk, to spite Mr Tom Masters, the landlord; and there, at the entrance, he set up his brass plate. I should have mentioned that, while lodging with me, he worked regularly at his profession, helping old Dr Bamford, the Palmers' family physician, with patients who lived in remote farms and hamlets. That gave him good experience for, as he used to say: 'A diploma's not everything. Dr Bamford may have no diploma nor medical degree, but experience he has, and that's what counts in doctoring.' I dunk that Dr Bamford, who had always liked Master William, came to feci great gratitude for him, especially as he demanded no fee for his assistance, but only out-of-pocket expenses.

No, there's little more to tell you, except that one night he came home intoxicated from a party.' Mamma,' he said,' I'm very ill. But it's not that I drank a deal of wine: as you know, I'm very abstemious. Someone seems to have played a trick on me, by drugging my drink. Serves me right for doing the same, as a lark, once or twice last year when I was at Stafford.' He began telling me of his love for Annie Brookes, right poetical he was, too. Then suddenly he stops and says: 'I'll tell you the truth, Mamma, because you're so good and truthful yourself. One of the reasons I love Annie is that she's like a sweet, pure lily-of-the-valley sprung from black, stinking mud. Her father was a poor coward, the laughing-stock of Stafford, and a suicide; her mother a greedy, spiteful, foul-mouthed strumpet, from whom she had to be rescued by the Court of Chancery. If Annie can be virtuous and hold up her head despite all the misfortunes of her birth—for you know, Mamma, that she's illegitimate into the bargain—why, then so can I! Need I drag out my own family history, Mamma? Surely you'll know it, including the dirty new scandals which my mother's behaviour has caused in the town. You'll have heard of them, no doubt?'

I nodded sadly, for everyone said that, to begin with, Dr Palmer's real father, like the elder brother's, was Hodson, the Marquess of Anglesey's steward, to whom his mother had been leased in return for a few loads of stolen timber.

"Well,' he goes on, 'Mr Weaver did very wisely when he sponsored the match. Annie and I are birds of a feather, and neither of us can cast faults of parentage in the other's teeth. Together, we'll make a clean new home, and raise healthy children, and live in love and truth until death do us part.'

His words were so beautiful that I hugged him to me, and called him my poor lamb.

Chapter VIII

THE NURSERY

WHEN Dr Palmer married Annie Brookes on October 7th, 1847, he could count himself tolerably well off. His house, rented at only twenty-five pounds a year, was furnished with elegance; he had a handsome carriage for going his rounds, and although three or four surgeons were already practising in Rugeley, the town boasts four thousand five hundred inhabitants, and the outlying villages another couple of thousand. Consequently Dr Palmer did not lack for patients; indeed, he made quite a reputation, during the December Fair that year, from his skilful setting of broken bones, and soon had more work in hand than pleased him. Benjamin Thirlby was employed at this time by Dr Salt, Rugeley's leading surgeon, to make up medicines and dress wounds; and two years before this had opened the chemist's shop already mentioned in our sketch of the town. One day, according to the account most usually heard, Thirlby felt aggrieved because Dr Salt had reprimanded him sharply for an oversight in the matter of some prescription, and poured out his woes to Dr Palmer when he next visited the shop.

' Nay, Ben,' said Dr Palmer,' this trouble is soon remedied: why don't you cut your stick and come to me? I'll pay you better than Salt.'

'I'll come with all my heart,' cried Thirlby, still very angry. 'The nineteen years I worked for that ill-mannered old skinflint have been nineteen too many!'

Dr Palmer stretched out his hand for Thirlby's, to shake on the bargain; and Thirlby grasped it firmly.

Dr Salt, though often grumbling of his assistant's pigheadedness, never expected him to break his engagement, however harshly he might be scolded. But Mrs Thirlby now informed him —for Thirlby himself hid his shame under a mask of surliness, and turned to walk in the opposite direction whenever he saw Dr Salt approaching—that Dr Palmer had offered her husband twenty pounds a year more than his former wage. The news made Dr Salt very angry indeed. That a surgeon should entice away another's assistant is considered as grave a breach of professional etiquette, as when a gentleman steals his neighbour's French cook, or a minister of religion poaches for souls in a fellow-minister's congregation. Dr Salt, who was much respected locally, did not scruple to complain in public of Thirlby's ingratitude and Dr Palmer's ill-manners, and earned a deal of sympathy; Rugeley being a town where sharp practice has never been condoned as a good joke, as it so often is in Liverpool and London.

Miss Salt, Dr Salt's daughter and Annie Palmer's closest friend, when she called the next day as usual, explained how difficult her situation had become as a result of Thirlby's sudden change of employment.

' Oh, but my dear child,' cried Annie, 'I'm afraid you have been given quite the wrong notion. William told me all about Thirlby as soon as he came home. It appears that your father scolded Thirlby because he had forgotten to prepare some pills, and when he pleaded that the prescription was written so illegibly that it would have been dangerous to guess at its meaning, your father called him a bleary-eyed clodhopper and dismissed him on the spot. William, happening to pass by, found Mrs Thirlby in a flood of tears, and kindly told her not to despair—Thirlby should first make sure that the dismissal was final, and if so, come to work with himself. She sent Thirlby off to try at the surgery whether vour father might perhaps relent, but he soon returned, saying: ' Dr Salt swears that he never goes back on a dismissal. I'll come to you, Will, if I may." As you see, Will is not in the least to blame.'

Miss Salt naturally concluded that Thirlby had been lying to Dr Palmer. She told her father so, but he merely remarked 'Humph!', and never troubled to inquire into the matter; though when Dr Palmer offered him neither an apology nor an explanation, he cut him dead one morning in the Market Square.

Dr Salt did not forbid his family to continue their friendly relations with the Palmers. He knew that Miss Salt had been Annie Palmer's bridesmaid at the wedding and loved her dearly; and that his son Edwin thought highly of Dr Palmer. 'It takes all sorts to make a world,' he would say in sour tones that showed his ill opinion of a world so made; but he was kind enough not to involve his children in the quarrel.

Annie Palmer grieved to think that Dr Salt had taken an aversion to her beloved husband. She had inherited a tendency to melancholia from her father and, though hitherto the fits had been slight and short-lasting, some drunken talk she now overheard from the tap-room of The Talbot Arms Hotel across the street, about her husband's escapades at Stafford Infirmary, plunged her into a black misery. Yet Dr Palmer was tenderness itself, and did all in his power to cheer Annie up, attributing these moods to her condition; for she had found herself pregnant after three months of marriage. He bought her a chaise and a beautiful pair of ponies to drive about the country with, and she used to tell Miss Salt: 'I really can't explain these black fits, unless Will is right in saying that they're due to my baby, for you know I'm very happy indeed. I have all that heart could desire, or that money can buy. And to be a mother is a glorious thing!'

When at last he begged to be taken into Annie's confidence, it came out that guilt was gnawing at her conscience. By order of the Court of Chancery she had been separated from her mother, whom the Bible required that she should honour, and had never asked leave to be reunited with her. 'Mr Dawson and Dr Knight,' Annie told him, 'both spoke unkindly of my mother, and I dared not oppose them. Neither have I dared to mention the matter to you. But I should think very ill of myself if I didn't long wholeheartedly to see her again. I can't pretend that I have pleasant memories of her, but perhaps I was a difficult and disagreeable child. If so, I should like to do better now and make her love me again; as she must have done once. All mothers dote on their children until some little thing turns up to disappoint them. What if I died in childbirth? Would that not be God's punishment on me for not having insisted on visiting her while I yet could?'

It speaks exceedingly well for Dr Palmer that though he had heard the whole story of Colonel Brookes and Mary Ann Thornton from Mr Weaver, if from nobody else, he decided to humour his wife. Mrs Thornton, by this time a haggard and prematurely aged eccentric, still occupied the house behind St Mary's Church, Stafford, where Colonel Brookes had died and Annie had been born. She kept no servants, seldom appeared in the street except on her brief visits to shops, and lived among a swarm of cats with which she held prolonged and one-sided conversations about subjects certainly well above their heads.

Mrs Thornton would not at first open the front door to the elegant young couple who came calling in their chaise-and-pair; but when Annie had made herself known, through the keyhole, she unlocked the door hastily and, with tears coursing down her dirty cheeks, sobbed out: 'My little love . . . My own lost darling!'

Annie timidly asked her mother not to squeeze her quite so hard because she hoped, within a few months' time, to become a mother herself.

' At last I have something to live for!' Mrs Thornton exclaimed, raining alcoholic kisses on Annie's face. She promised to put the house in better order for a next visit which, she hoped, would take place as soon as possible. Dr Palmer showed great attention to the poor creature, even bringing himself to address her as 'Mamma'; and Annie returned home deeply grateful for his kindness and understanding.

She was very religious, and persuaded her husband to be the same. They regularly attended the new church of St Augustine's, near The Yard, which is kept up in style, with gravelled walks and turf well-swept and trimmed. (The old Parish Church, on the other hand, is a mere Gothic ruin. Its square tower has empty holes for windows, like the eye-sockets of a skull, and is swathed with tattered ivy. Its chancel, roofed in with boards and tarpaulin, has been turned into a Sunday School.) Enter the new church by the great oaken door, and the swinging inner doors faced with red baize, as new and bright as a postman's coat in May, and you will find the Palmers' pew well to the fore. Black-bound prayer books and Bibles with* gilt edges rest on its ledge, and the fly-leaf of a Book of Common Prayer is inscribed: William Palmer, Rugeley, Aug. 28, 1837; the gift of his mother, Mrs Sarah Palmer, Rugeley. A Bible contains some pencil notes in Dr Palmer's handwriting: He was a teacher come from God—Means, Prayer—God's word all the means of grace—Particularly means, faith in Christ—Faith has a heavenly influence. The interior of the church is newly whitewashed, and flooded with light streaming in cleanly through diamond-paned windows; but a huge red curtain casts a warm glow upon the sides of a polished, goblet-shaped pulpit. Dr Palmer is said to have been exceedingly attentive to the sermons, and the only member of the congregation who took notes; he would also read the responses louder than anyone else and give generously to all charities.

A rumour, almost certainly unfounded, had of late coupled his name with that of Mrs Salt, Dr Salt's daughter-in-law, whom he was treating for some female ailment; and this, added to Dr Salt's opinion of him, caused a decided shrinkage in the flow of patients. But he did not care, being already tired of medical work. The following letter to his wife, which has come into our hands, must have been written from Rugeley about this time, when she had gone for a change of air to stay with Mr Edwin Salt and his wife some fourteen miles away.

Sunday Evening

My ever adored Annie:

I feel certain that you will forgive me for not writing to you last night, when I tell you that since I last saw you I have not had two hours' sleep. I do assure you, I never felt so tired in my life—I am almost sick of my profession. Sorry I am to say, my Mother has had another attack and one of my late sister's children I think will be dead before morning. It is now half past ten, and I have just come home from Haywood to write you: for I do assure you, my dearest, I should have been very unhappy had I not done so.

My dearest Annie, I propose, all being well, to be with you tomorrow about three, and depend upon it, nothing but ill health will ever keep me away from you—forgive me, my duck, for not sending you the paper last night, I really could not help it. I will explain fully tomorrow. My dear, remember I must say something about needlework—you will be amused. My sweetest and loveliest Annie, I never was more pleased with you in my life than on Friday afternoon last— it was a combination of things. God bless you! I hope we may live together and love each other for sixty years to come.

Excuse me now, for I must go. Till tomorrow at 3. Accept my everlasting love and believe me,

Ever your most affectionate Wm Palmer

On the advice of a sporting friend, George Myatt the Rugeley saddler, Dr Palmer now resolved to supplement his earnings by an altogether different means: namely, the breeding of racehorses. In Rugeley, where horses are almost the sole subject of serious conversation among the mass of the people, there was nothing surprising or improper in such a resolve. On the contrary, should he succeed in his new trade, a great number of men would offer themselves as patients who judged a physician or surgeon by his ability to judge a horse. He must be able to pronounce on its good and bad points; accurately diagnose its diseases, if any; reckon its speed and staying-power; and, at the finish, by an abstruse but rapid calculation, tell to within a couple of guineas what it should fetch in the ring. If by virtue of his critical faculty, Dr Palmer could buy cheap and sell dear; and if he could lay his hands on three or four useful mares, engage famous stallions to cover them, and so breed foals which sporting men would come many miles to look at—why, his fortune was made! So Dr Palmer laid out most of his remaining capital on horseflesh, and leased from Lord Litchfield a large paddock at the back of the house, with stabling for twelve horses and several fields adjacent—altogether some twenty-one acres enclosed by hawthorn hedges. He had the property in order shortly before the birth of his first child, whom he christened William after himself, and who is today a healthy seven-year-old, showing promise of great intelligence.

'Harry Hockey', the withered old groom until recently employed by Dr Palmer at Rugeley—his real name seems to be Henry Cockayne—discoursed to us, straw in mouth. Since Dr Palmer's arrest, the fields have reverted to Lord Litchfield, and Harry keeps an eye on the hunters and carriage horses put out to grass there.

HARRY HOCKEY

No, Sir, I could never complain that Dr Palmer treated me badly, nor could any of the boys employed. But ours was a rum concern. What I mean is that the Doctor's chief passion was racing, yet he never bred any colts to run, barring Rip van Winkle, whom Nat Flaxman coaxed into second place at the Brighton T.Y.O. Sweepstakes last year. He bought a good many for that purpose, that's certain, at very large prices, too, and sent them to train at Saunders', in Hednesford. I reckon he began his racing career four years ago—the Spring of 1852—and his colours were registered as all-yellow.

This place was a nursery only; with no training done, except for the ringing we gave the colts. He kept, on an average, three or four broodmares at a time, and there always used to be a good many young things about. He was proud of his stables, and often brought parties of friends to view them, and talked big about the mares. However, he seldom kept up an interest in any particular animal for more than a week or two after he bought it. They say, Sir, that he was the same with his fancy women. For a short while they entranced him, but because of some slight fault, real or fancied, he would suddenly wish himself rid of them. He used to sell them—the mares, I mean—for most curious prices. Once, I remember, he priced a couple at ten pounds. Perhaps he needed the money, but I'd have offered three times that sum for either of them, had I known he was selling, and pledged my cottage to raise it. He bred some good horses, I can assure you, but all to what purpose? The money he made can't have paid the expenses, not one quarter! He always seemed to buy at the highest price, and sell at the lowest; all Rugeley called him a mug. Yet even Tom Masters allowed he had a wonderful eye for a horse, and most people were glad to get his free opinion on their own purchases. It s my view that he had a great contempt of money, which was matched only by his need of it. He paid mc well, not regular, but well enough: a guinea a week, sometimes two.

The races were meat and drink to him. There's many racing gentlemen I know who find time for shooting and fishing, or else they hunt foxes. The Doctor wasn't one of them. He had a good, clumsy seat on a horse, and used to ride beside Saunders to watch colts of his being tried out; but I never saw him going over the sticks, or jogging off to a meet, though there's three packs of hounds that meet regularly hereabouts.

No, bless you, Sir, a good eye for a horse and a close attention to the studbook don't suffice to win a man money at racing, which is a dirty business, and best kept out of by honest folk, among whom I hope to reckon myself. Come, Sir, sit down on this bench with me. I understand that you're green to the game. What's that you want to know? About the ringing?