Hester Waring's Marriage (19 page)

Lucy looked sharply at her. Did Hester really not know how much she had changed. Had Tom not told her?

‘Do you never look in your glass, Hester?' she said, unconsciously echoing Tom. ‘Is it possible that you are not aware of the great improvement in your appearance? It is so great that you have become the talk of the ballroom.'

She would have said more had not Governor Macquarie and his wife come up to them, only for the Governor to add to Hester's confusion by praising her lavishly—he had always had an eye for a beautiful woman.

‘I wish that your husband were with you, Mrs Dilhorne, so that I might compliment him on his wife. If we had the old-style Queen of Beauty at our balls these days there is no doubt who would win the crown tonight. Trust Tom Dilhorne to acquire the prettiest woman in Sydney for his wife.'

The ground opened up before Hester. Jack Cameron had not overset her, but the Governor had. Coming on top of Lucy's remarks, he had finally convinced her that Tom was not paying her loving, but meaningless, compliments. She must examine herself in the glass when she reached home.

The Governor kissed her hand before moving on. The whole room watched him give the accolade to Mrs Dilhorne. Tom, approaching the little group after leaving Will French, was a delighted spectator.

Driving home through a night lit by an enormous moon, Hester spoke to Tom.

‘You were right, Mr Dilhorne.'

‘I am always right, Mrs Dilhorne. Which particular thing was I right about this time?'

‘My looks. I have to accept that I am greatly changed and that it is not solely due to the splendid clothes and presents which you have chosen for me.'

‘Oh, yes, Mrs Dilhorne, I was certainly right about that.'

‘But why?' she cried. ‘And how? What has happened to change me so?'

He grinned at her, his face triumphant. His day was finally made as Hester at last entered her kingdom.

‘Good food, Hester, my love, and food and wine, and
fun in bed. Especially fun in bed. Let's get home quickly—and make you even lovelier!'

 

Happy Tom might be, but Jack had to be dealt with—he was a loose cannon. Tom moved swiftly. He heard on the secret grapevine which existed in Sydney that Jack was determined to get his revenge for the insults which Tom had offered him, never mind his broken nose and damaged looks.

‘He's a mad dog, Tom,' his informant, Natty Jemson, told him. ‘I'd be careful if I were you, mate. He'd do you any damage. Best watch your back.'

Yes, mad dog was a good description of a man who was wandering around The Rocks, half cut, letting his hatred of Tom and his desire for Hester become public knowledge.

While there were those in The Rocks who might like to do Tom Dilhorne a bad turn, there were others who either feared him too much, or who owed him, either for his forbearance, or for what he had done in the distant past when he was still the young London thief let loose in a frontier town, ready to make it his own territory.

Tom walked to his office, dodging the growing traffic, thinking over what Jemson had told him, and pondering on how to cut Cameron's claws. Dealing with a mad dog was difficult: they were the most dangerous dogs of all because they were irrational.

Above all, Hester must not know of this. He wanted nothing to mar their happiness, so Jack must be dealt with quickly. Chance was kind. He entered his office, saying abruptly to Joseph Smith, ‘I want you to scour Sydney and buy up as many of Captain Cameron's debts as you can.'

Smith grinned at him. ‘No need. Larkin came in not an hour ago and offered me the lot—and glad to get rid of
them. I havered a bit—though I knew you'd most likely want 'em. Was I right?'

‘Very right. Pay him as little as you can—they're worthless, except to me.'

Buy up a man's debts and you could control him. Tom sat down at his desk, laughing and saying to himself, Here's to cutting Master Jack's claws, and wrote him a letter instructing him to visit Dilhorne and Co.'s office in a week's time to discuss matters of business relating to his debts. That should fetch him at the double, reflected Tom, as he handed it to his boy to deliver.

He was particularly merry at dinner that night. Hester said, smiling, ‘If I did not know you better, Mr Dilhorne, I would think that you had been drinking.'

Tom began to laugh. ‘A good idea that, my dear. We've been neglecting the bottle lately.'

He went over to the great lacquer sideboard and came back with a bottle of red wine which he opened and poured her a glass. Instead of handing it to her, he held it to her lips, saying, ‘Drink up for Tom, my love. I did a good piece of business today. No, I shan't tell you what it is this time. Let it mature.'

He laughed at his own cleverness as she obediently drank the wine down while he cradled her head tenderly with his left hand.

Later he was to look back wryly and conclude that happiness had made him careless and over-proud, something which misery had never done. But at the time he celebrated.

The wine was finished off in bed, and it was good.

 

In the night they awoke to make love again, and it was particularly satisfactory so that at the end they were laughing together with the joy of it.

Tom had raised himself on his elbows above her, and Hester, putting up her hands to stroke his face said, between her gasps of laughter, the most incongruous thing which she could think of, given his size and his strong, quirkily handsome face.

‘Oh, you are my pretty boy, Tom! You're my pretty boy!'

He stared down at her, his face working. His own laughter stopped completely. His face then became quite still and, without a word, he collapsed by her on the bed, one arm flung across her body, shaking violently.

At first Hester thought that he was still laughing, but when he raised himself into a crouch, his hands over and protecting his head, she suddenly realised that he was crying. Great racking sobs were tearing apart a man who had not cried since he was a small boy: a man who had little pity for others and none for himself.

Hester was terrified. Tom had become her rock, her foundation stone. He had rescued her from penury and ruin. To see him so broken and distressed shook the underpinnings of her world.

What had she said or done to cause this?

Nothing mattered to her but that she should comfort him as he had so often comforted her.

She sat up and uncoiled him enough to clutch him to her breast as though he were her child. She rocked and stroked him, using only his name, avoiding all endearments since the last one which she had uttered had proved so disastrous.

Gradually he lay quiet against her. Her shoulders and breasts were wet with his tears.

After a little his hand crept out to clutch her own.

‘Hester. I frightened you. I'm sorry.'

She stroked the hand. ‘I was frightened—a little. But
that does not matter. You have made me much braver than I was.'

He gave a cracked half-laugh. ‘Well, that's something good I've done, perhaps.'

He fell silent.

‘If it would help you,' she told him gently, ‘you could tell me what I did or said that troubled you so. But not if it would pain you too much.'

For a little time Tom did not answer her and, except that his breathing had not changed, she might have thought him asleep.

‘Oh, Hester,' he said, at last, ‘you broke a childhood memory. Something I had pushed away and forgotten. For years I have acted as though my life began when I reached London. I destroyed my earliest memories quite deliberately because I could not bear to remember them. It was as though they had never been. It might even be true to say that I was only born as the Tom Dilhorne I am when I met Alan Kerr on the transport which brought us to Botany Bay. Between us we changed my life completely.'

Tom fell silent again, and when at last he spoke it was in a flat uninflected voice, quite unlike the many voices which she had heard from him before.

‘My pretty boy, you said. My mother used to call me that when I was a little lad. I had forgotten that, too, until you said in love, what she had said to me—also in love. When I heard you I was suddenly a child again, and all I had deliberately forgotten came back to me in a rush—and then all the things which I have done since. God forgive me for what I am and for what I have done.'

He fell silent again.

To say anything would be wrong. To hurry or to question him would be wrong. He only needed to know that she was with him—and that she loved him.

He spoke again. ‘You have spoken freely to me of your past life, and I have told you nothing of mine. I have been wrong—there should be no secrets between us. I will tell you what I have told no other. Not even Alan knows what I was and where I came from, although he may suspect from words I have let drop what my life has been.

‘My mother was a farmer's daughter, decently brought up in the Yorkshire Dales. She said that her family was comfortable and it was customary for the daughters to be sent to the big house for instruction and experience.'

He laughed shortly.

‘Experience! Well, she got that, poor girl, if nothing else. Right enough the son of the house made her his mistress. She said that it was true love. She told me some nonsense about a marriage; said that she would never have lain with him else. The big house was near the moors, but some uncle of his married them, secretly in a little church far away from his home.

‘Any road, whatever the truth of it, she found herself expecting. One of the other servants informed on them, and told her lover's father that she was carrying his son's by-blow. The father was a tyrant who frightened them all, her lover included, and the consequence was that my fine young gentleman deserted my mother. She never saw him again after his father discovered her condition.

‘Hart, she called him, my dearest Hart. She never really believed that he had abandoned her. It must have been his father, she said, who prevented him from seeing her—he would never have betrayed her else. Whatever the truth of it, she was put out to be a skivvy on a farm far away from both the big house and her own home and family. She never saw any of them again. Her family disowned her—she had brought disgrace on them. She was to exist as a banished whore, to have her bastard—me.'

Tom's laugh was sad, more of a gasp than a laugh.

‘I was brought up on the farm. I remember that we didn't have a bad life at first. But the farmer's wife grew old and sick and my mother was a pretty girl. The farmer took her to his bed against her will. I mind the night that he did. I saw her struggle and fight with him… His wife told her brothers what he had done. They came to the farm, thrashed the farmer and turned my mother and me away.

‘You can see why I wanted to forget my past, Hester. It's an ugly story. My mother had been raped, but we were punished as severely as though she had been willing. I don't know how old I was then. I still don't know how old I really am. Another farmer took us in. He was a brute who couldn't keep servants. He abused my mother and beat me. She soon lost her pretty looks.

‘He began to beat my mother, too. It gave him pleasure—and it's why I can't bear to see a woman hurt. I remember so clearly now what I willed myself to forget—and how it all ended. I suppose that I was about twelve or thirteen, and was big for my age. My mother said that I was growing to look like my father. She taught me my letters and made me keep up my reading and writing. There was a Bible and a Bunyan and Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
in the house and some chap-books.

‘One day he came in and found us reading together. For some reason it angered him. He began to beat her cruelly. Always before I had been afraid of him, although I'd promised myself that I would kill him one day when I grew big enough. I was fearful that he was killing her. There was a carving knife on the table. I can see it now. I remember picking it up and plunging it into his side. I never knew whether I'd killed him or not…

‘He fell, bleeding, across my mother. She was crying and wailing, “They'll hang you for this, Tom.”

“‘Never,” I said. I was young and stupid and giddy with pride at what I'd done. We left him lying in his blood and ran away to London. It would be hard for them to find us there, she said.

‘London! She'd no more idea than I had how far away it was. It was just a name to us. We walked there and it was her death. She'd begun to cough blood at the farm. We slept in barns and under haystacks. I wasn't too young to know that she sold herself for food to keep us alive.

‘Somehow we reached London. I remember thinking that we'd arrived in Hell. I knew about Hell from the
Book of Martyrs
. My mother was dying when we got there and it didn't take long for her to go. With her last breath she was babbling about herself and Hart on the moors before I was born. I was left alone. I had no one and nothing—no family, no means to survive, no decent clothing to give me respectability, no trade and not even a home. I slept in the street, under bridges, in inn yards, begging for scraps.

‘I soon learned that thirteen-year-old boys can be cheated but I rapidly found ways of avoiding that. I worked for a magician for a time and learned a lot of useful tricks, but he wanted me for his bed, so I ran away from him. In the end I became a thief because there was nothing else for me to be. I was big and strong and clever, and I soon became an organiser of thieves, boys like myself. I was a fence before I was out of my teens. Oh, I was a likely lad, I can tell you.

‘By the time that I was eighteen I was fly and rich with it. I'd a pad of my own and a pretty mistress. I often wondered what happened to her after the Runners arrested me when I over-reached myself. I thought that I could take on the masters of my world.'

His laugh this time was a bitter one.

‘It taught me to mind my back, Hester, but too late to
benefit me then. My elders saw me beginning to threaten their profits and they shopped me, betrayed me to the Runners. Oh, yes, I was a real threat—I've always known how to manage people and I looked after the boys I ran, my pickpockets. I didn't simply exploit them like they did. They were the ones with the power, though. They set me up for the Runners and I was taken red-handed, with all my gains about me.