' "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.