‘Thought Dilhorne had more sense,’ guffawed Jack Cameron to his hangers-on in the Mess, ‘than to marry Fred Waring’s plain and penniless piece.’ He was always nastily eloquent about Hester—for some reason her helplessness offended him.
He thought the joke an exquisite one, the unmentionable marrying the unfortunate. Like many he considered that Dilhorne’s usual common sense and his eye for a bargain had deserted him. What kind of a bargain was Hester Waring? Unless of course he was taking her on merely because she was a gentlewoman—which just went to show how desperate an Emancipist rogue could get in his struggle for respectability.
Even the Governor, when his wife told him the surprising news, had raised his eyebrows but made no verbal comment. He thought that whatever Dilhorne did was carefully considered, so this marriage, too, must have its reasons.
Not only the Exclusives were entertained by it. Tom Dilhorne’s latest coup was celebrated with derision in Sydney’s grog shops, much reduced by Governor Macquarie’s latest edict which had closed many of them—another count in the tally against him. Rich Tom, who could have had anyone—well, almost anyone—had chosen the school-ma’m, Fred Waring’s dreary dab of a daughter. Past it, or desperate for some reason, was the general verdict.
If Hester knew none of this by direct report, she could not but be aware of the furore which her proposed marriage to Tom had excited—turning heads, meaningful stares, and almost sneering congratulations from people who had hardly spoken to her for years.
Far from weakening her resolve, this criticism strengthened it, and her Mentor’s comments on the response of the respectable was even more unprintably harsh than usual. After all, few of her critics had so much as offered her a crust—only Mrs Cooke had helped her in any way before she had met Tom.
Even Mrs Cooke was as surprised as the rest since Hester was so different from Mary Mahoney, who was intrigued by Tom’s choice of a wife. While the rest of Sydney thought that Tom had, for once, shown less than his good sense, Mary, who knew him well, wondered a little. With Tom there was always more than met the eye.
The arrangements for Sydney’s oddest wedding went ahead rapidly. Neither Tom nor Hester wanted a great fuss. They were both privately agreed that, providing the banns were called and they both stood before a priest, the presence of others was not needed. Nevertheless, there were some whom both bride and groom agreed must be present.
There were other problems to solve. Hester was worried that her marriage might mean that she would leave her children without a teacher. She confided in Tom and, knowing his resourcefulness, was not surprised when a few days later he told her that he had found a solution.
‘Quite by chance I spoke to Captain Ramsey about our wish not to let the children down. He had a word with Sergeant Fenton whose wife has been running a Sunday school for the garrison’s children and she would be only too happy to take your place in the little school, provided that you assisted her to begin with—seeing that you have been so successful with them. Will that do?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Hester eagerly. ‘I would like to continue teaching for a little time, at any rate, but in future my first responsibility must be to you.’
And so it was settled.
One Saturday Hester accompanied him on his visit to the Kerrs. They had particularly asked that she be present. Hester had no real wish to visit them; she was still a little frightened of Tom, however, and dared not tell him that she did not wish to go with him. At the back of her mind, he was still the Tom Dilhorne whom her parents had hated.
Lucy had said, after their little tea party, that Tom would look after her, but Hester was not so sure. Catching sight of him sometimes, when he was frowning, knowing that there were those who cringed away from him when he spoke to them, she wondered what she was marrying.
His great physical strength alternately attracted and frightened her. What, if after the wedding, he insisted on his marital rights? Could she take him at his word? She knew of his reputation for deviousness; after all, had he not practised it on herself? She knew, too, that there were dark stories about how he had acquired his wealth, and he had certainly arrived in the colony in chains. It was rumoured that he had been a successful thief in London’s underworld.
She would also have been worried if she had heard Sarah Kerr’s reception of the news of Tom’s choice. He had wanted to tell Alan and Sarah of his intention to marry Hester before he told anyone else, but a series of circumstances deprived him of the chance.
He was only able to speak to Alan briefly, one morning when he met him on his doctor’s rounds, before the news reached them from other tongues.
‘Tell Sarah I’m sorry I wasn’t able to inform her myself,’ were his last words.
Alan was as disbelieving as the rest of Sydney. Hester Waring! He could think of no one less suited to be Tom’s wife and the mistress of his grand home. Much later Sarah was to say of this time that every occasion on which Hester’s name was mentioned there was an exclamation mark behind it. Her own reaction was the same.
‘Hester Waring! You are funning, Alan!’
‘I know how you must feel. I felt the same myself. But no, I am not funning. I had the news from Tom today.’
More exclamation marks followed, with a few question marks thrown in.
‘But why Hester Waring of all people? I always imagined that Tom would marry someone grand, handsome and clever who would stand up to him. What can he be thinking of? More to the point, what can she be thinking of? He’ll eat her.’
‘Perhaps she wants to be eaten. Or to eat,’ offered Alan helpfully.
Typically Sarah rounded on him and on herself. ‘What a cat I am! Poor, half-starved monkey. What on earth will the wedding be like? I know one thing, everyone will want to go, just to make sure that it’s really happening.’
‘Oh, it’s happening,’ replied her husband cheerfully. ‘Tom gave me the date. He says that the banns are being called straight away. And I invited them both for dinner on Saturday.’
‘It explains why Tom hasn’t been visiting us lately,’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘The dog! He’s been courting. I’m glad you asked them. Whatever I think of the marriage I mean to do my best for them.’
‘What will amuse you,’ went on Alan, watching his wife bound about the room, exclaiming further and rearranging things in order to give vent to her feelings, ‘is that she took Lucy Wright with her to have tea at Tom’s new villa, and that Lucy went without consulting Frank. The first he knew of it was when Pat Ramsey twitted him about it in the Mess after he heard the news.’
‘Now, how did you find that out?’ asked Sarah, fascinated.
‘After I met Tom, Pat came over and told me that apparently Frank tried to reprimand Lucy over the visit. Lucy told him roundly that Hester needed her support, that Tom Dilhorne was a much misjudged man, and sent Frank back on duty without any dinner!’
Sarah exploded with laughter. ‘How like Lucy. She resembles her mother more every day.’
‘Yes, Pat says Lucy’s given everyone a guidebook tour of Tom’s mansion which made it sound like a cross between the Imperial Palace in Peking and the British Museum. All the old cats who have refused to know him will be queuing up for an invitation to his dinner parties now that he has a wife. Just to see it for themselves.’
Sarah dried her eyes. ‘Well, Villa Dilhorne—’ her nickname for Tom’s home ‘—is rather splendid. But isn’t there a danger that Hester will want to make it over into something cosy?’
‘Not according to Pat. Lucy said that Hester apparently fell for it hook, line and sinker.’
‘What gossips you men are,’ said Sarah. ‘If I’d come home and told you all that, you would have said, “Just like women”.’
‘Seriously, Sarah,’ her husband replied, ‘we must support Tom. Hester is his choice of a wife. He’s been a good friend to both of us and we must try to help Hester. She has hardly a friend in the world.’
‘But is catching the richest husband in Syd
ney. Yes, yes, I know. I will be a good girl and not say or think naughty things. But she never liked me much.’
‘I expected you frightened her,’ offered Alan slyly.
‘Me? Frighten anyone! What nonsense!’
Sarah welcomed Tom and Hester to dinner with all the warmth of her warm-hearted soul. She took Hester by the hand when she entered the house, kissed her cheek and said, ‘Tom’s wife is always welcome here.’
Privately she was shocked. She thought that Hester looked ill, and was not sure whether or not she was frightened of Tom. Hester spoke little at dinner, except once when Tom leaned over and asked her opinion of the pudding which, to prevent herself from gobbling, she was eating with elaborate slowness. Her self-control at meals was still frail.
She looked at him and said, ‘It is excellent, Mr Dilhorne. The food of the Gods.’
Tom’s mouth twitched a little at this.
‘And what is that, Miss Waring?’
‘Well, sometimes it’s plum pudding, and sometimes it’s anything I really like when I’m eating it: Ambrosia Mr Dilhorne.’
Sarah’s antennae told her that there was more to this exchange than met the eye or ear. Hester’s soulful expression and Tom’s satiric one were not lost on her.
Later, when Tom was talking of some deals with Sandy Jameson, and how Jameson’s clerk had tried to set him down, Hester said slyly, ‘Tried to set you down, Mr Dilhorne? It would be a brave man or woman who would try.’
‘Come, come, Miss Waring,’ he asked, ‘am I to consider that a compliment?’
‘If you like, Mr Dilhorne, if you like. Now, if you had been wearing your waistcoat with the peacocks at the time, he wouldn’t even have tried.’
‘I must remember that the next time I do business with Jameson, but as it was…’ he paused, tantalisingly, until Sarah gave way, and said impatiently,
‘As it was, Tom?’
‘As it was, I took him by the nose, twisted it, told him to mind his manners, knocked him to the floor—quite gently mind, no rough stuff—and then walked over him into Jameson’s office.’
‘And what did Jameson say? Seeing that Macquarie wants to make you a magistrate, and you had just assaulted his clerk?’
‘He didn’t say anything. I said it. I told Jameson that my memory of him went back to the time when he had no seat to his breeches, and if he told his clerk to insult me again, it would be his nose which got the treatment—and, by the by, I was thinking of calling in the money he owed me over the quarry. That took the roses from his cheeks and made him more than uncommon polite, I can tell you.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t do business with me like that,’ said Hester, her face grave.
‘Ah, but you’ve always been so polite to me, Miss Waring,’ said Tom untruthfully. ‘Polite people get wine and plum puddings. I should have told Jameson that.’
Alan was laughing. ‘You’ll make a splendid law-abiding magistrate, Tom. I thought that you’d left rough-housing behind.’
‘Well, I have, pretty largely. But it never hurts to let people know that you’re still fly. Take that clerk, for instance—he’s so polite when I see him now, he could almost give lessons to Miss Waring, except that you don’t need lessons in that area, do you, Miss Waring?’
‘I fear that I do sometimes, Mr Dilhorne. But if I do need correction I trust that nose-pulling is out!’
‘Depend upon it, Miss Waring—’ Tom was earnestness itself ‘—I should find a more appropriate punishment.’
Later they discussed the wedding. Alan was to be best man, and Tom had proposed that, of all people, Robert Jardine be asked to give the bride away.
‘For,’ said Tom, ‘were it not for Jardine, I should not have the pleasure of marrying Miss Waring.’
To Alan and Sarah’s surprise, Hester blushed a rosy-red which was not entirely unbecoming. Before she could stop herself, Sarah said, ‘How was that, Tom? Jardine, of all people.’
‘He kindly gave a character reference for me to Miss Waring who was a little dubious about my credentials as they related to the principles of education and the advice I might give to the Board.’
Alan threw his wife a warning look and said solemnly to his friend, ‘Only you, Tom, could come out with something so totally meaningless that sounds so grand. But we take the point; we’ll enquire no further.’
‘So, if Miss Waring consents, Jardine it will be. I take it that you had no one else in mind,’ he asked Hester politely.
Hester replied no, she thought not, with as much sincerity as she could muster, seeing that there was no adult male in the whole of Sydney whom she had any claim on.
‘Unless, of course,’ Tom murmured wickedly, ‘Captain Parker might like to take a hand.’
To Sarah’s delight Hester slapped at him gently and said, ‘No, thank you, Mr Dilhorne. Mr Jardine will do as well as anyone.’
‘And we want a quiet wedding,’ continued Tom, ‘But I do have business interests which require to be satisfied, if Miss Waring does not mind too much.’
‘Like Jameson’s clerk,’ muttered Hester sotto voce, and tried to look as though she had said nothing. It was not, even now, always possible to silence her Mentor.
‘I should like Lucy Wright to come,’ she added, ‘and that will mean inviting Frank. I don’t know how he will feel about attending an Emancipist’s wedding.’
‘Oh, he’ll come,’ said Tom with a grin. ‘Like the rest of Sydney he’ll want to see the fun the day I get married. And Captain Parker, Hester. Surely you’ll want Captain Parker?’
‘Why should I?’ was Hester’s response to this sally. She had no idea of how Tom had discovered her early tendre for Captain Parker, but he was already the subject of one of their private jokes, like the plum puddings which were puzzling Sarah.
‘And, Sarah,’ said Tom, ‘we shall want your help over a housekeeper for Hester when Mrs Jones goes. Hester will be in charge, but we shall need someone to supervise the kitchen. So far the only one we can find is Mrs Hackett and I can’t say I fancy employing her.’
Sarah made a face. ‘I’ll try my best, but I’m not hopeful. You know what a shortage of women there is in the colony, servants included.’
Sarah and Alan looked at one another after their guests had left.
‘I still don’t believe it,’ Sarah said, ‘she’s such a half-starved scrap. But I do believe he cares. More, perhaps, than he knows. I never thought to see it. What’s more, they understand one another. I would warn anyone who values their safety not to say anything against her, in or out of his presence.’
Alan nodded. ‘He’s still dangerous. People forget that he is because he’s suddenly acquired perfect manners and perfect clothes. On top of that he’s taking a lady for his wife. Very much a lady, too, for all her terrible history. God knows how high he will rise at his present rate. But beneath it he’s still the same man he ever was. And you don’t twist tigers’ tails, even though they might look as though they’ve turned into tame cats.’
‘Does she care for him, Alan?’
‘I’ll use your words—more than she knows,’ said her husband. ‘And she’s got spirit, Sarah. You were wrong about that.’
‘So I was,’ replied Sarah generously. ‘But Tom’s doing that, bringing her out. Making her talk. I wonder what all that was about plum puddings. I should dearly like to know.’
‘It will do, then?’ Alan was serious. He had always been Jonathan to Tom’s David ever since they had met on the transport which had brought them to New South Wales and he’d been taken under the fly criminal’s protection, for even though Alan had been the older of the two, he had been an innocent in the young Tom Dilhorne’s world, and now he wanted David to be happy.
‘Oh, yes, it will certainly do, my love.’
To universal surprise Miss Hester Waring, spinster, aged twenty-one, penniless gentlewoman, come down in the world from a family which boasted a lineage back to the Conquest, married Mr Tom Dilhorne, bachelor and ex-felon, transported f
or God knows what, who did not know exactly how old he was, except that he thought that he might be in his mid-thirties, who was almost certainly illegitimate and who had no idea of who his father might have been, and who by his own efforts had made himself the richest man in New South Wales.
The wedding ceremony in Villa Dilhorne was as small and private as Tom had said it would be, with only Alan and Sarah Kerr, Robert Jardine, Will French, Joseph Smith, the Wrights, Mrs Cooke, Kate and Mr and Mrs Smith, present. The latter because of the chickens, Tom had said gravely—leaving Sarah to wonder exactly what he meant.
Hester, of course, appreciated his innuendo, and was already learning to listen carefully to everything Tom said and detect the hidden meaning which often lay behind his apparently careless utterances.
Tom, being Tom, had taken up Sarah’s joke, and had had Villa Dilhorne carved on a great block of stone at the entrance to the long drive so that the guests would not lose their way.
Governor Macquarie sent Hester a beautiful bouquet of flowers from his own gardens and Tom bought her a new gown to wear, over her protests that it was not proper for the groom to do any such thing.
‘But I can’t have you wearing one of those made-over efforts on your wedding day,’ he had replied reasonably. ‘It’s not fitting.’
Hester thought, looking at herself in the glass at Mrs Cooke’s on her wedding morning, that it didn’t help much, she was still so thin and plain, even though Tom had artfully managed to feed her once or twice in the few weeks before the wedding.
She told Sarah Kerr, who was her matron of honour, that hers must have been the only wedding where the groom’s appearance outshone the bride’s. This was so evidently true that even Sarah could not think of anything witty to say which might cheer the bride up. Hester’s inward misgivings were so great that she was surprised that they did not cause her to sink through the floor before the eyes of the admittedly limited congregation.
Hester Waring's Marriage Page 10
