Hester Waring's Marriage (13 page)

He smiled wryly. ‘You must understand their resentment, Hester, and learn to live with it. Now, smile with me. We are enjoying the afternoon, are we not? There will be fireworks soon, you will like them, I know, and the band is about to play, which, seeing that they have all been drinking hard while they waited for us to finish, will be an adventure in itself.'

Hester suddenly understood that he was speaking to calm her, that nothing which had been said or done to him
had the power to hurt him, and that he was trying to make her respond in the same way.

As though he had read her mind, he said quietly, ‘They want to see you distressed. Smile and be happy, and that will annoy them the more. It is like the Japanese, you see, who have this exercise called Judo where you turn your opponent's strength back on them.'

Despite herself, Hester began to smile. It was so like Tom to take an insult and use it to draw some strange moral, some lesson in living, instead of allowing it to distress him. He saw the smile and pressed her hand lovingly.

Will French, one of Tom's business rivals and friends, came up to them—everyone in Sydney was allowed to enter the grounds on these fête days, once the dinner was over. High and low rubbed shoulders together, another source of irritation to the respectable.

‘Mrs Dilhorne, Dilhorne,' he said in his bluff way. ‘You are looking well, Mrs Dilhorne. Rosy, in fact.'

‘Oh, that is merely the effect of temper, Mr French,' returned Hester spiritedly.

‘Aye,' said French, ‘I heard that one of the young officers disgraced himself.'

Tom laughed. ‘Even for Sydney, that gossip travelled rapidly.' The humour in his voice was real, not pretended.

French looked at him sharply; there was no fathoming Dilhorne. ‘Yes, well, but that isn't what I came to speak of. Mind if we talk business, Mrs D.?'

Before Hester could reply, Tom said, ‘If you have anything to say, French, you may always say it before my wife.'

French did not allow this to surprise him and said, ‘Eh, well, you've been a good friend to me and you've dealt fairly with me since. Thought you might like to know that there's an underhand market in Government spirits and
stores these days. Thought you had an understanding with O'Connell that what was here, in bond, came out to be distributed through you, kickbacks to you and the military both.'

This was news to Hester, and she thought again how strange it was that the very men and their wives who were making private fortunes for themselves by appropriating Government liquor and by selling it off, through Tom, should follow a social code which allowed them to insult him at will.

Tom knew what she was thinking. ‘Time you learned how these things are organised, Hester,' he told her. ‘So, French, someone, an officer—or officers, perhaps—is stealing, unofficially, that is, instead of officially, and the stuff is being sold around Sydney?'

French nodded.

‘And it's being done without O'Connell's knowledge?'

French nodded again.

‘My thanks,' said Tom seriously. ‘I'll put out feelers. Can't have someone walking off with the cream of the crop and cheating his fellow officers—to say nothing of Tom Dilhorne.'

Hester could not help herself. She began to giggle. Tom looked at her with mock severity. ‘Find it funny, do you, my dear? That someone is doing Dilhorne and partner down.'

‘Partner?' interjected French, a little puzzled.

‘Partner,' repeated Tom, waving his hand at Hester. It was her reward, she knew, for working hard with him and trying to behave as he would. He was now beginning to tell the world that he and she were more than a simple married couple. She could not thank him now, not in front of Will French and hostile spectators.

Instead, she watched some of the private soldiers of the
73rd walk across the lawn, flaming brands in their hands, to set alight tall branches cut from one of the great pines which stood high above the sea. Others were lighting lanterns among the groves to illuminate the growing dusk, and the first fireworks began to flare and sputter. The band's beery version of Handel's
Fireworks' Music
made a suitable accompaniment to the jollification.

Hester, her face alight, enjoyed the fireworks, insults to Tom and thieves who looted stores alike forgotten. Tom watched her, not the fireworks, such innocent delight wrenching unexpectedly at his hard-bitten soul.

French, staring at him, was suddenly surprised. So Dilhorne did have a soft spot, after all—and it was for his plain wife, of all people. Who would have thought it? A judgement which many others were making with cruel amusement.

 

Tom might once have agreed with the unpleasant gossip which went on behind his back. His entry into marriage had been cold-blooded enough and Hester being a kind of trophy had been the best part of the game. And if to coax her into bed with him had begun as simply one move in that game, it was rapidly turning into something more than that.

It was not only living in close proximity to her which was making him desire Hester, so that to possess her fully was not simply to satisfy an itch of the flesh, but it was Hester herself who was beginning to compel him. It was an emotion which the hard man had never felt for any woman, however kind he had been to his mistresses, and it was to some extent divorced from sex.

He had experienced such a feeling only once before when he had come upon Alan Kerr, bewildered and lost on the transport, abandoned among human wolves who
saw him as sexual prey, all the certainties of his old life destroyed, and with no understanding of the brutal realities of his new one.

The urge to protect someone as helpless as Alan had been in his misery had overcome Tom then. It had made him offer a fierce friendship which had enabled Alan to survive, and the result had been the forging of a lasting relationship.

In Hester he had found someone else who needed him if she were to survive, and the same impulse which had led him to save Alan had moved him from his first real sight of her at the interview to the day on which he had married her—even though, as with Alan, he refused to face the reality of what he was doing, burying it beneath the cynicism which was all the surface man ever showed.

To his everlasting surprise he was beginning to fall in love with her in the truest sense.

The innocent joy with which she embraced her new life, her good mind, her gradually blossoming face and body, and her fierce and unthinking loyalty to him at the banquet, were all beginning to have their effect on him.

He found himself thinking of her all the time. If he did, or saw, something interesting when he was away from her, he reminded himself to tell her of it when he reached home. A new pair of gloves, a pretty fan, seen as they arrived in his Emporium, were picked up as presents for her, sure to make her face glow.

The smallest gift gave Hester, who had seldom been given anything, immense pleasure. Yesterday he had gone into his Emporium to oversee the unpacking of bales of priceless Chinese silks and he had picked up a roll of the purest, palest lemon, held it in his big hands, the nails scrupulously trimmed so as not to snag the delicate stuff,
called over Mrs Herbert, who arranged these things, and ordered a dress to be made for Hester.

‘A surprise, mind,' he said to her. ‘You have her measurements, and I want it quite
à la mode
, you understand, but simple, nothing fancy. Use one of the fashion plates which came in from England—and she's not to know. No meaningful looks and all that.'

Mrs Herbert was always respectful of her employer's taste and feelings for female dress—she had clothed Mary Mahoney for him—a taste she thought incongruous for such a big and physical man.

His employees laughed when he had gone.

‘Sweet on her, ain't he? Look at what he's taken home for her already this week. Not his choice he goes to bed alone, I'll be bound. Madam thinks she's too good for him,' was the general agreement.

If Tom knew what was said behind his back, he was quite indifferent to it. The game he played with life dictated that he knew and understood what people thought, said and did—and then he used it against them. Only a fool cared about the opinion of fools and, to Tom Dilhorne's cold eye, most people were fools.

 

They had been married for nearly two months when Tom came home early one afternoon and told Hester that, when he had been going down King Street earlier in the day, one of the aborigines had stopped him and told him that there was going to be a great storm that night.

Most of the Europeans would have laughed at such a prophecy, but Tom had learned in his hard life that nothing was to be ignored. Aborigines had told him similar things before, and they were usually right. He had tossed the man a coin. He had shown his teeth at Tom, and said something
in his own language which Tom hoped was thanks, but thought was more likely to mean ‘you poor white fool'.

‘In case he's right,' Tom said to Hester, ‘we'll drive out with a picnic and have a look at the storm in the open. Have you ever seen one, Hester?'

Hester confessed that she had not.

‘Well then,' said Tom, ‘there's nothing to lose, and if there's no storm we shall have had a pleasant evening out.'

His man of all work, Miller, harnessed the big carriage, and Tom brought food from Sydney for the picnic. He drove them through the bush to an open space, well beyond the town, which overlooked the sea on one side and the distant mountains on the other.

At first, as Hester said, it was all a hum. There was no storm. But they ate the food and drank the wine which Tom had so thoughtfully packed.

‘More wine!' exclaimed Hester. ‘You are turning me into a toper, Mr Dilhorne.'

‘But you hold it so much better now,' said Tom, who never tired of plying her with food and drink and little attentions these days. He put her shawl on and let his hands linger on her neck. He felt her shiver at his touch and asked her anxiously, ‘Do you feel cold, Mrs Dilhorne?'

In reply, Hester flushed slightly and said ‘No', but leaned ever so slightly against him while she did so.

If propinquity was affecting Tom, it was affecting Hester even more. Her fear of all men had begun to disappear, and what she was beginning to feel for Tom was far removed from fear.

To enjoy a picnic meal on the edge of the bush which they often did—for Tom liked eating in the open—meant Tom feeding Hester titbits, and Hester managing to lick his fingers when he offered them to her. Just as though I were an intelligent horse, she thought with amusement.

The ogre Dilhorne had long since disappeared from her internal monologue, to be replaced by Tom, who brought her presents and thought of so many amusing and interesting things to do.

He had promised her that they would go swimming one day, and then had said slyly, ‘But seeing that we're not really married, Mrs Dilhorne, the question of what to wear becomes difficult.'

Hester had fallen straight into the trap.

‘Oh, why is that, Mr Dilhorne?'

‘Well, swimming is only worthwhile when one isn't burdened by clothes.'

For the first time he saw that she did not flush when he said something which she might previously have thought over-daring, but appeared to ponder on what he had said.

‘Never having had such an experience, Mr Dilhorne, either with, or without, clothing, I cannot say whether you are correct.'

On this evening they made the picnic last and Hester began to offer him the choicest parts of her share, putting orange segments on her palm, and raising them to his lips, saying, ‘Your turn to be a horse, Mr Dilhorne.'

Tom in reply licked her hand as though he were an overeager pony who somehow managed to eat halfway up to her elbow before stopping.

After they had drunk their wine and were lying on the grass there was some interesting, if rather mild, horseplay involving Hester's wide-brimmed straw hat which Tom demanded as forfeit if Hester were unable to inform him what the current rate for Treasury Bills was in Sydney.

‘What use would my hat be to you if you won?' asked Hester, who had just discovered that her wineglass was unfortunately empty.

Tom looked at her as she reclined beside him. She was
wearing a dotted Swiss muslin dress, a cobweb of a shawl, and a straw hat with a blue ribbon twined around it in such a fashion that it tied under the chin. Her looks had improved beyond belief; her complexion was clearing, was turning into a delicate pink and white, her hair had regained its lost lustre, and her expression these days was one of innocent mischief.

‘Your hat looks so fetching, my dear, that wearing it could only improve my looks, too.'

This rather feeble sally by Tom's standards struck Hester as most uncommonly witty. Admiring him in his black silk trousers and shirt, a scarlet sash about his waist, she told him that she had really no answer to such an ill-judged statement.

Where it would all have ended Tom did not know. Hester's mood was so relaxed that anything seemed possible, even out here in the open. The storm, however, now took a hand in the game, and events followed a slightly different turn.

Just at the moment when Tom said that Hester's collar needed a little rearranging, a clap of thunder announced that the promised storm was arriving.

Hester agreed to let him straighten it.

‘My fingers are all thumbs tonight, Mr Dilhorne.'

Surprisingly Tom managed, with remarkable lack of skill, to start to undo the collar rather than to fasten it up, stroking Hester's neck absent-mindedly while he did so, causing little shivers of delight to run up and down her body: a truly delightful sensation which she had never experienced before.

Hester jumped at the next violent crack of thunder, and Tom resigned himself to the fact that the first assault had not been so much repelled as not registered at all!

Hester's mood, however, was such that he had a small
private bet with himself that Mrs Dilhorne might find herself a truly married lady by morning.