Hester Waring's Marriage (11 page)

‘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 Sydney. 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 for 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.

The groom, however, wore an expression which could only be compared to that of an extremely satisfied cat who had just got away with an extremely large quantity of cream. Which, looking at the bride, the congregation found a little strange.

After the ceremony they all enjoyed the wedding breakfast, though why it was called breakfast at such a late hour baffled the bride.

Tom, being Tom again, there was an unparalleled array of food, though God knew where it had come from, Sydney not being quite the thing in the food line, but as more than one guest said, driving home through the moonlight, ‘Well, you know Tom.'

All the guests ate and drank mightily, except the bride, who for once felt sick at the sight of food, but found that her husband was as adept after marriage as before it in getting her to drink a rather large quantity of wine.

‘Come on, my dear, it will put roses in your cheeks,' he told her, pouring her out yet another glass.

Sarah thought that she had never seen anything quite so forlorn as Hester Dilhorne in her splendid new home on her wedding night. She hoped that Tom would be kind to her.

Surprisingly, after everyone had gone home and husband and wife were left alone in their great barbaric mansion to retire for the night, Hester felt an enormous unreasoning resentment that they were keeping to their bargain when Tom took her up the wide staircase, kissed her hand and said, ‘Goodnight, Mrs Dilhorne,' to her outside her room before retiring to his.

Of course, the bride did not really wish him to come in with her. The mere idea that he might made her breath
shorten, her heart beat violently, and a dreadful flush mount from her toes to her head and back again. She felt so excited and queer, what with the wedding and the wine, that it needed a long drink of water and a cold flannel on her face to restore her composure.

The groom was well aware of what the bride was thinking, and was certain that good food, affection and comfort would bring them to a true wedding night before long.

T
om Dilhorne's marriage was more than a nine days' wonder. Even when the initial excitement over it had died down, what passed for society in Sydney had so little to occupy it that, every time gossip flagged, someone was sure to start talking about it and wonder how the newlyweds were faring. After a short time even Sydney could not have foreseen what a remarkable titbit was going to keep their curiosity fed and their tongues wagging.

Often, in those early days, when Tom drove out in his gig, Hester sat beside him, and a mocking world noticed how solicitous he was in his care of her, helping her down, carrying her little reticule, and when it was very hot tenderly holding her parasol over her head for her.

‘He's like a man with a new toy,' one wag said. ‘Who'd have thought it of old Tom, eh?' as though Tom were sixty and not in his mid-thirties, but he seemed like an institution these days. It was difficult to remember the time when he had not dominated Sydney's economic and commercial life, even if he was not part of the Exclusives' social world—other than being invited to Government House, that was.

Hester had no idea of what marriage to Tom might en
tail. Any attempt she had made to imagine her future with him had come up against her lack of knowledge of how a man like Tom Dilhorne would live, and what he would expect of her in the odd bargain she had made with him.

In the event her life was strangely easy. Her day began at breakfast, which was a leisurely affair, not a leisurely affair in Fred Waring's manner, but one peculiar to Tom. He took the opportunity each morning to read through his papers and correspondence while eating and drinking at a slow pace, making the odd comment to her. He also made notes on small pieces of paper which he put in his pocket—and forgot.

Occasionally he threw a letter, or a piece of paper, over to Hester and asked her for her opinion of it. At first she was timid and said something noncommittal in the hope that he would not do it again. A useless tactic. Very soon she realised that the only way to satisfy him was to make some substantive comment, however slight.

It was obvious that he saw her dislike at having to commit herself, equally obvious that he was determined to make her do so. One morning he tossed across a letter from a business rival making him an offer, which on the surface was attractive, but which he sensed was dubious after some fashion. There was little in the letter to support this, only his own intuition which had stood him in good stead over the years.

Hester read the letter through carefully and then put it down with a sigh.

‘Yes, Mrs Dilhorne?' He always called her Mrs Dilhorne now, whether to impress on her that, despite all, she was his wife or as a means of not using her Christian name—she was not sure which. She looked across at him. He was totally relaxed, like a great cat, she thought. His
face was unreadable, immobile; only his blue eyes, hard and cold, watched her.

‘I don't like it,' she told him, her voice slow and hesitant. ‘I don't know why, but there's something wrong with it.'

‘True, Mrs Dilhorne. And I can't tell you why either.'

He reached for the letter. ‘We shan't be dealing with him—at least not on this offer.'

Relief swept over Hester. She had said the right thing. She was aware that Tom was still watching her while he swept his papers together and prepared to leave for his office.

‘What if I had approved?' she asked.

He treated her to his grin. The one that said to friends and enemies alike that Tom Dilhorne knew what was what.

‘Oh, I knew that if you gave me an opinion that was the one you would give me.'

‘Just like that.' She was as short as he usually was.

‘Just like that, Mrs Dilhorne.' The grin grew. ‘You've a good mind there, be sure you cultivate it.'

She was suddenly Fred Waring's high-bred daughter. ‘You patronise me, sir.'

‘No, indeed. Merely compliment you. The name is Tom, or Mr Dilhorne. No sirs from my wife—or anyone else—in this house.'

Cat and mouse, thought Hester furiously. That's the game Tom plays with people. He won't eat me, he won't, he won't. But her smile at him was as friendly as she could make it, and his response was to kiss her hand as he left: a response which somehow seemed to excite not just the hand, but her whole body in the strangest fashion, leaving it dissatisfied for the rest of the day.

I'm Tom's pet mouse, she raged, when she went through to the kitchen to supervise the day's work, tingling all
over. He won't even eat me, not he. He'll keep me to prod with a gentle paw, to let me know who's master.

But you like it, you know you like it, said her horrible Mentor, and don't you wish that the cat would do more than play with you harmlessly. How about some more grown-up fun?

Oh, be quiet, she thought fiercely. Where do such dreadful notions come from?

 

Then there was the matter of dress. Hester had brought to her marriage a tiny wardrobe of elderly clothes. Outdated threadbare gowns, all of which had seen better days, and most of which had been made over from her mother's old dresses. They were dark in colour. Mrs Waring had been in perpetual mourning for Rowland, and they did nothing for Hester's complexion and figure.

Sitting at breakfast one morning, and throwing back a paper on which she had just given an opinion, Hester met Tom's disapproving stare.

At first Hester thought that the disapproval was for her opinion, but Tom's next words dispelled that.

‘Clothes, Mrs Dilhorne,' he said succinctly.

‘Clothes, Mr Dilhorne?' she mocked him gently.

He nodded his head. ‘Yours are hardly exciting, Mrs Dilhorne.'

‘My clothes are not meant to be exciting. They are meant to be ladylike.'

He nodded again. ‘Aye, they are that. Go to Mrs Herbert at the Emporium and order something less ladylike and more attractive. My wife must not look like a dowd. Her sempstresses will know what to do.'

To some extent Hester already had Tom's measure. She knew how far she could go, and that he preferred spirit to submission.

‘Must, Mr Dilhorne? Must?'

‘Must, Mrs Dilhorne.' The blue eyes approved her show of spirit. ‘We are to dine at Government House on Saturday. I am, among other things, a rich merchant, and my wife must look like a rich merchant's wife.'

‘But still ladylike, I hope. What do I use for money, Mr Dilhorne?'

‘Why, nothing, Mrs Dilhorne. You use my name. You'll be astonished what it will do for you in Sydney.'

Hester found herself laughing. ‘No, I won't. I already know.' And she went and bought herself something less gaudy than she thought he might have chosen—although there she wronged him, as she was later to discover—but sufficiently fashionable to cause Captain Parker to raise his eyebrows when he saw her at Government House on Saturday.

 

Next it was food. Hester had spent her life since coming to New South Wales feeling hungry. As Tom's wife she was suddenly able to indulge herself. She helped Cook and Mrs Hackett in the kitchen and attacked the results of their work with a kind of frantic delicacy.

One evening when she was eating her dinner with even more appreciation than usual, she looked up to find Tom smiling at her. It was his Cheshire Cat grin which said, I'm amused at something which other people can't see. What in the world could be provoking it? thought Hester irritably. He's seen me eat before.

‘Enjoying your dinner, Mrs Dilhorne?'

‘Indeed, this mutton is excellent.'

‘I think so, too. Compliment Cook for me.'

‘You may address your compliments to me, Mr Dilhorne.'

He bowed over his plate. ‘I will double them, my dear. Ability as well as beauty becomes my wife.'

‘Now you are funning, Mr Dilhorne. Your wife is no beauty.'

Tom looked across at her. Several weeks of good eating and affectionate treatment had made her lank hair glossier, was beginning to give it deep waves, and had improved her complexion, which now wore the look of health. She was beginning to acquire curves where none had existed before. His amusement grew as he watched the well-bred greed with which she disposed of her meal.

‘Do you never look in your glass, Mrs Dilhorne?'

‘Frequently—how else would I do my hair?'

‘How else?'

It was plain that she had no idea of how much she had changed and was still changing.

‘I thought that Captain Parker was a deal too attentive to you last Saturday—considering that you are my wife.'

‘Nonsense, Mr Dilhorne. Captain Parker has always been kind. Even when I was friendless and poor. He was rather less so than usual last Saturday.'

‘Kind, you call it,' murmured Tom, ignoring the truth of the last part of her sentence, and that Hester had not yet changed sufficiently to attract a handsome young man. ‘Where I was brought up we had another name for it. I hope that he remembers that you are my wife now.'

Hester knew him well enough to know when he was teasing her. The idle drawl, the slightly hooded eyes, the look to see how the mouse was reacting. And yet, and yet, this time she was not so sure.

Tom Dilhorne's mouse, she thought again. I wonder whether mice are ever allowed to bite back when the cat plays with them.

‘I've always thought Captain Parker rather handsome,'
she murmured idly, spooning cream lavishly on to her peaches. ‘It is to be hoped that he will find himself a young woman to please him.'

‘Careful with the cream, Mrs Dilhorne,' was Tom's answer to this sally. ‘We can't have you getting fat. I know for a fact that Captain Parker likes 'em thin.'

It was almost impossible to get a rise out of him, thought Hester crossly, and to punish him spooned out a double dose of cream.

‘I like cream,' she said, her manner all defiance, ‘eating it is one of the benefits of marriage.'

‘Only one, Mrs Dilhorne? What are the others?'

Hester waved her spoon in a totally unladylike manner. Tom had that effect on her. He's corrupting you, her Mentor said. Then I like being corrupted, Hester thought back defiantly, pleased to be naughtier than her Mentor for once.

‘Besides eating cream there are comfortable rooms, not worrying whether I can afford a new pair of hose or a new gown—' and before she could stop herself ‘—and someone to talk to.' Her defiance had, quite without her meaning it, descended into bathos. She wondered what Tom made of this absurd catalogue.

His expression remained impassive. He would not de-mean her by expressing the pity roused in him by this recital of the ordinary comforts of life as a demonstration of the benefits which she felt marriage had brought her. Not for the first time he cursed Fred Waring's lamentable selfishness which had so deprived his daughter. It would not do to let her know of his pity. Either she would not believe him, or she would resent it furiously.

‘And me, Mrs Dilhorne? Am I one of the benefits of marriage?'

The spoon was carefully put down. What was she to say
to that? The truth, of course. The mouse could not escape the cat's paws, but could avoid a mauling.

‘Indeed, Mr Dilhorne, as I said. The pleasure of your conversation more than makes up for the disadvantages of the situation in which we find ourselves.'

‘We could always remedy that, Mrs Dilhorne.'

Hester's response to this dry suggestion that they dispense with their white marriage was immediate. Her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes were suddenly wide and startled.

Tom watched her ruefully. For all her gallant manner and apparent bravado she was not yet ready to contemplate being Tom Dilhorne's wife in more than name. It was all a game which she could safely play with him, secure in the knowledge that there would be no consequences.

Well, let that pass. He would reassure her now. His time would come. He yawned and made no effort to speak again, to provoke her into saying something which she might later regret. If he made no move now, she would think that she had misunderstood him. Men and women had great powers of self-deception as he well knew to his own frequent profit.

Meantime he must try to make her see that she was slowly turning into an attractive woman, and when she smiled and defied him she was more than that. He had only been half joking when he had twitted her about young Parker. After all, he was near to Hester in age and his fresh, blond, good looks made Tom feel even more battered than he was.

For her part Hester, as Tom had thought, concluded that she had misunderstood him. The cat did not intend to pounce and Mrs Dilhorne might go safe to her lonely bed.

 

Hiring Mrs Hackett because Sarah could find no one else was an even greater mistake than Tom thought that it
might be. To begin with she disliked Hester because she disliked all women younger than herself; besides, Hester was so plain, and drunken old Fred's daughter to boot, who had no business marrying wealth, even Emancipist wealth. Tom she disliked because he had always frightened her from the days when she was Corporal Hackett's wife, and he was a thrusting newcomer.

She was no fool, though, and soon grasped that her employers were man and wife in name only and were sleeping in separate rooms. She spied on them, watched them furtively in order to make sure that her suspicions were correct, and then took this gleeful gossip, too good not to share, and sent it on its way around Sydney.

What next? It beggared belief. Clever Tom Dilhorne had no more sense than to marry a wife who wouldn't let him get into her bed! At last, gossip had something real to get its teeth into. Madame Phoebe's rocked with the news; the garrison crowed with mirth. Jack Cameron started a book, taking bets as to when Tom Dilhorne would get into his wife's bed, how long it would take, and whether it would last. Pat Ramsey told Lucy and Frank the unbelievable news one afternoon, after he had heard it at Phoebe's the night before.