’Twas no easy task. For my mistress said the child was over young; and my master told me I had somewhat else to think of than such tomfoolery. Howbeit, when I told them that, say what they pleased, Jeannette was mine, and that so soon as my time was up two years hence I should take her to myself with leave or without, they thought better of it, and yielded somewhat.
My mistress said, two years hence we should all be grown older, and if we were then of the same mind perchance she might be of another. My master, too, counting to retain me in his service as a son-in-law, said there was time enough betwixt now and then. And thus it came to pass Jeannette and I were left to our hopes, and needed no sweeter comfort to make the weeks fly.
But, one day early in February, as I walked on my master’s business near Charing, I saw a sight which made me uneasy on another’s behalf. For there, at the road corner as you go to Whitehall, I perceived a man who pulled out a purse and gave it to another; and when I looked closer, I saw that he who gave was Captain Merriman, and he who received was my old fellow-apprentice, Peter Stoupe.
Instantly, although I heard not a word, and there might have been a hundred other considerations, I took it into my head that this business meant mischief to Ludar. And, cudgelling my brains further, I called to mind how, that memorable night in Moorfields, while I talked with the drunken sergeant, Peter had sneaked past us, and put my sweet little mistress in a flutter.
What if, instead of heeding us, he had been listening to what the soldier said? He knew or guessed enough of the maiden’s story—having heard me tell it often—to put two and two together. What if he, as well as I, had learned the soldier’s secret; and, to despite me and profit himself, had sold it to the one man from whom it was by all means to be kept?
I cursed my wickedness, who, lapped in my own happy fortune, had thus neglected my absent master’s interest and let this knave get beforehand with me. For, be Ludar alive or dead, I owed it to him to save the maiden from the Captain, even if it cost me my life.
So, as I say, this vision of the passing of the purse woke me out of my dream, and warned me that there was danger in the wind.
That afternoon, the same Providence which gave me the alarm put into my way a means of acting upon it.
My master I found in a sore state of vexation because a certain book he was printing, from which he expected some profit, was refused a licence by the Stationers’ Company. They liked it not, said the clerk, and had sent it on to his Grace, who had other matters to think of, and was, besides, away in Canterbury on a visitation.
At this my ears pricked.