Hester Waring's Marriage (21 page)

‘Have you any notion of what is wrong with you, Hester?'

‘A sickness of the stomach, I suppose.'

‘You might call it that.'

Unaccountably Tom was smiling. ‘But I suspect that you are increasing. Do you have any reason to suppose that it might be so?'

She sat up suddenly. ‘Oh, yes. My courses are late, but they have been late many times before, as you must know, and it wasn't because of a baby then.'

‘Then you were recovering from near starvation, which
always affects a woman's courses, and you have never had morning sickness before. If this continues and you continue to miss your courses, we must take you to Alan to be examined. But I am bound to tell you that I have no doubt that you are expecting a baby.'

Hester looked at him anxiously. ‘Do you mind, Tom?'

He pulled her to him. ‘Oh, Hester, I have never told you, but it has been my dearest wish that we should make a baby. I hope that you feel the same, but remembering how you behaved with John Kerr and your schoolchildren, I need hardly ask.'

She smiled at him. ‘It is my dearest wish, too, and I do hope that you are right. How odd that you should know and that I should not.'

‘Well, in some respects your life has been very sheltered—although not in others. Whereas I…' and he grimaced ‘…there is little that I do not know about men and women. Alan certainly added to my knowledge of them when I helped him on the transport.'

‘Is there anything I can take to cure my sickness?'

‘I remember that Alan used to prescribe gruel and a plain diet in the early morning before the patient rose, and from now on that is what we shall do. It seems to help.'

 

Alan Kerr duly confirmed that Hester was pregnant and Tom's attitude to it was all that might have been expected. He was both protective and brisk. He bluntly told Hester that once her sickness had abated she must live a reasonably active life: she was not an invalid.

He was encouraged in this by Alan, who was as unorthodox in his treatment of pregnancy and childbirth as he was in his insistence on a healthy diet to avoid sickness and in his rational care of the health of the convicts who surrounded them.

Hester had only one demand to make of them both, and that was that when the baby was being born she wanted to know that Tom was somewhere near. ‘You will promise me that, won't you, Mr Dilhorne? It's your child as well as mine.'

‘I promise, Mrs Dilhorne, that I shall agree to whatever makes you happy—will that do?'

To his great relief, as her sickness diminished her energy returned and, far from causing her to lose her looks, pregnancy enhanced them, conferring on her a new radiance which more than one who met her privately remarked on.

Lying awake one night, for her pregnancy made sleep difficult, Hester could only marvel at Tom's kindness and consideration for her. Oh, he was still the hard, devious man whom all Sydney knew, and she had no illusions about that. What mattered to her was the private Tom whom only she knew: a complex, many-sided man who had manipulated her into marriage—for which she daily thanked him.

She was also coming to understand him more and more. Recently she was sure that something was troubling him and that—contrary to his usual practice—he was not telling her what it was. Now it was beginning to worry
her
.

At this point Tom stirred and rolled towards her, opening one eye. He pulled her down beside him. ‘Still awake, woman? You need your sleep. Is owt wrong?'

‘No,' Hester said, not yet ready to question him about possible trouble. ‘It's odd, when I first knew you, and then after I married you, I seemed to need to sleep so much—and now I don't.'

‘Not odd at all,' he mumbled, but he refused to amplify his answer further, simply putting a friendly arm around her so that she, too, drifted into sleep, since now, when it did come, it always came easily.

 

Jack Cameron moped around Sydney. He had done little to advance his revenge on that swine Dilhorne. Anger seethed in him, growing stronger by the day, fuelled by the knowledge that he was finding it increasingly difficult to pay him the interest on his debts.

After his abortive meeting with Hester, to watch Tom walk and drive around Sydney with her by his side, to hear of his business successes, to learn that one of his horses was winning races regularly and that he had made a killing in his deal with the Yankee whalers, all served to inflame him the further. The news that the Governor was about to make him a magistrate was enough to start him gibbering.

To cap everything, he had gone to Lucy Wright's one afternoon and had heard something which finally destroyed his last hold on sanity. To go there at all showed how far he had fallen since young Wright, taking pity on the yellow-faced hangdog he had become, took him home for tea—an entertainment which the old Jack would have heartily despised. The new one accepted the offer lethargically.

A great deal of idle small talk went on about low persons whom Jack normally avoided. He was about to leave when Lucy, feeling sorry for him left stranded and alone, handed him a china cup full of boiling hot tea. He had scarcely taken it from her when a woman nearby said loudly to the company at large, ‘Have you heard the latest, my dears? Hester Dilhorne is increasing.'

Before Lucy could reply, Yes, she already knew, Jack gave a strangled cry and created a sensation by crushing his cup in his hand, scalding himself in the process, and cascading boiling liquid and pieces of Lucy's precious china on her carpet.

Such a to-do followed with Jack's cut and burned hand being dressed, a servant being sent for, pieces of china
being retrieved, and the carpet mopped, that the reason for Jack's strange behaviour was overlooked. Only that sardonic onlooker, Pat Ramsey, a late arrival come to view the spectacle of Guinea Jack at an afternoon tea party, raised his eyebrows, said ‘Well! Well!', to nobody at all—and came to the correct conclusion.

Jack sat in a daze with all the females exclaiming over him. He was the object of more sympathy than he had received for years. Everyone assumed that Lucy had overdone the hot tea and that Jack had had some sort of accident with it. No one—other than Pat Ramsey—could conceivably have guessed that when Jack had learned of Hester's pregnancy he had received an almost mortal blow which was to drive him on to his final acts of madness.

Pregnant! By that appalling swine! Jack rode back to the Barracks, nursing his bandaged hand and his hate, recalling something which he felt made the mere idea of a pregnant Hester Dilhorne even more obscene.

It had happened some weeks earlier when his private hell had become unendurable.

That day he did not know what was wrong with him. The previous evening when he had been in bed with one of Madame Phoebe's girls, trying to forget that he was an unhappy Jack Cameron, Hester Dilhorne's face had risen before him and effectively ruined his pleasure. Even Ramsey, that turncoat whom he had seen in cheerful conversation with Dilhorne more than once, had tried to be kind to him, but damn him, too, a gentleman should know better than to consort with a felon.

Desolation saw him saddling his horse and riding off, alone, towards the bush. He tried not to think, looked about him instead, but sun and scenery had no attraction for him and his mind turned round and round in the ruins of his life.

He came to a great stand of gum trees and shading greenery and rode into it to escape the sun which mocked his dreadful mood. He sat there for some time, hidden from view—until he suddenly had company.

Some distance away, beyond a large level opening in the bush, two riders emerged from another clump of boskage. One of them was that unspeakable cad, Dilhorne, dressed in an odd costume—white silk shirt, loose black silk trousers tucked into beautiful cavalry boots and a grey slouch hat on his head.

The other rider—and Jack's heart leapt with savage glee—was a boy! A boy wearing black and white jockey's silks and a black and white jockey cap whose broad peak obscured his face.

What a tale to tell Sydney! Tom Dilhorne, alone in the bush—with a boy!

Fascinated, Jack watched them dismount. Dilhorne first, and then, steadying the boy, he helped him from his horse. They stood for a moment close together, talking, but he could not hear what was said, they were too far away.

Dilhorne put his hand into his saddle-bag, took something out, and then he and the boy walked towards an open expanse of green, and he saw that it was a ball which they were throwing the short distance between them as they walked.

Tom had brought the ball home some days earlier after joining in an impromptu game of cricket between the regiment's officers and men, assorted Government clerks and anyone who cared to play.

When the pair reached the green they faced one another and began throwing the ball to and fro. Slowly they lengthened the distance between them, still flinging the ball back and forth.

There was something odd about the boy's catching and
throwing even though he was skilful at both. At first Dilhorne threw easy balls which the lad caught, equally easily, and then suddenly they became stronger and more difficult, until he flung a very low one, slightly sideways.

The boy dived to retrieve it, and when he did so he threw his other hand triumphantly into the air to celebrate his success. His cap flew off and Jack knew that he would tell no one in Sydney what he had seen, for the boy was Hester Dilhorne!

Their laughter and shouts floating towards him, he watched the game in an agony of jealousy. It ended when Hester reached the limit of her powers, and Dilhorne, misjudging a little, threw the ball high above her head, and in trying to catch it she fell over backwards into a clump of bushes.

Dilhorne ran towards her and lifted her out, hugging and kissing her. Fortunately for Jack's sanity their game did not end as it usually did, for their time was short and they were due to dine with Will French.

They stood close for a few minutes, Dilhorne's arms around her. He kissed Hester's cheek before throwing her into the saddle, and she kissed his hand in return. They rode away rapidly, passing not far from where Jack was hidden, and the last thing he heard was Hester's voice shouting, ‘Race you home!'

Jack never knew how long he sat there. He was bathed in sweat and filled with emotions which he had never before experienced. Why should that devil have such a treasure? How could he be so careless of her? He was laughing when the poor little thing fell into the bushes. He, Jack, would care for her better than that. What God was there who left him almost broken and let that swine take his pleasure around Sydney, riding his fine horses and showing off his prize?

The feelings for Hester which had swept over him on the night of the ball were intensified. His memory showed him her grace when she had run and jumped for the ball. That devil should take more care of her, not let her risk herself so.

Jack knew that he was being irrational. He hardly knew whether he desired Hester for herself, or because she was Dilhorne's wife. He only knew that since the night of the ball he could not rest easy.

Now that graceful child was to be burdened because of Dilhorne's base passions. It was not to be borne. He would put an end to him and achieve the twin aims of his life: revenge on the man who had humiliated him, and his desire to have Hester for his own. Surely with Dilhorne out of the way she might look more kindly on one who loved her so dearly.

 

Consumed with hate, Jack had ridden back to Sydney to begin watching Dilhorne's every movement. He had discovered that his prey regularly drove to the quarry on the same afternoon each week and he had decided that Dilhorne's journey home might provide a suitable spot for a shot from ambush.

Jack took his horse, musket and pistol. Dismounting, he lay in the shadow of a clump of small trees not far from the track along which Tom would pass. Lying in the bush, waiting for his victim, served only to increase his torment. Here he was, stranded in an alien wilderness, pursuing a man whom back home he would hardly have known, but who had become a potent symbol of the ruin into which his life had fallen.

Dilhorne's appearance brought Jack a relief almost sexual in its power. He raised his musket, sighted carefully
and loosed a shot to finish off the impudent swine once and for all.

Tom's hat flew from his head. His horse reared beneath him at the sound of the shot, and with the instinct which rarely failed him, he fell from its back into the bush, to lie quite still in the hope of deceiving his attacker. With luck he would either leave the scene thinking his fell deed done, or would come over to finish what he had begun, giving Tom an opportunity to get at him.

In the silence which followed the sound of Dilhorne's horse bolting, Jack rose, seized his pistol, and debated whether to go over and finish off his victim. Even in his growing madness caution held him back.

No, he thought. Best leave him. If he's dead, well and good, if not, folly to tangle with such an artful bruiser, who would certainly be armed and might be waiting for him. There would be another day.

He could not confess the truth to himself: that his fear of Dilhorne was nearly as great as his hate.

Tom, lying prone, his right arm extended—he had plucked his pistol from his belt after his fall—was ready for his enemy as Jack had suspected. He heard the departing hoofbeats and waited for some time before rising again.

His face thoughtful, he chased after his horse which had abandoned its flight into the bush to begin peacefully grazing while his master mused on Jack Cameron and his now murderous proclivities. Tom had no doubt as to who had fired the shot and that it was no accident. He regretted that he had driven Cameron too hard in his interview with him when he had been unaware that Jack's obsession with Hester had been the final straw which had tipped him over into madness.

He also had no doubt that he must watch his back since
he was sure that Cameron was likely to attack him again once he discovered that his first attempt had failed.