Hester Waring's Marriage
Auteur
Paula Marshall
Lezers
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Hoofdstukken
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Chapter One
Sydney, New South Wales, 1812
‘Oh, but,’ said Tom Dilhorne, his face alight with amusement, ‘one thing is certain. No one is going to accuse me of furthering my own wicked ends if I promote the claims of Hester Waring to be the new teacher for Governor Macquarie’s little school. Have you seen her lately? Robert Jardine pointed her out to me yesterday. A more downtrodden grey mouse you never saw. She looks like a lost soul.’
‘Oh, we all know your tastes run to buxom blondes, Tom,’ said Dr Alan Kerr with a sideways grin directed at his redheaded wife, Sarah, ‘and Hester Waring’s far from that.’
They had just enjoyed their weekly dinner together at the Kerrs’ splendid new villa overlooking the Harbour, and Tom was, as usual, asking their advice on a matter which exercised him.
‘The trouble is,’ he went on, ‘that although she’s the only applicant, no one on the Board really wants to appoint her.’
‘No one but you, I suppose,’ said Sarah, handing him Sydney’s newest citizen, Master John Kerr, to hold.
‘True,’ said Tom, manoeuvring the little bundle gently to avoid damaging his beautiful broadcloth coat—he had lately taken to respectability, and no longer wore the rough clothes of an Emancipist. Emancipists were so called because they were ex-felons, transported from Britain, who had served their time. Those who had arrived in New South Wales as free men and women were commonly spoken of as Exclusives. They were the Government officers, soldiers, sailors and those men and women who had, for one reason or another, emigrated willingly to Britain’s newest colony.
Exclusives despised and ignored Emancipists and did not recognise them socially. Governor Macquarie was currently annoying them by attempting to bring Emancipists into the official life of the colony. Tom might be the richest man in Sydney, but he remained a social outcast despite Macquarie’s having appointed him to the School Board. The divisions between the two groups ran deep. It might be true to say that Tom’s success increased the resentment against him.
Hester Waring continued to dominate the conversation.
‘She must really need the post,’ said Sarah reflectively. ‘Her father, Fred, thought himself one of the foremost Exclusives by reason of his gentle birth, even whilst he was drinking and gambling himself to death. Did he leave her anything, do you know?’
‘Nothing but debts,’ said Tom shortly, using his spotless handkerchief to mop up his godson’s milky bubbles: a sight which caused both Kerrs great amusement.
‘Oh, you may laugh,’ he told them, grinning himself, ‘but a man of parts should be able to manage anything, even a leaky baby,’ he added ruefully as John successfully marked out his territory on Tom’s new trousers.
In the hubbub which followed Hester was temporarily forgotten, and only after Sarah had taken John off to bed did normal conversation resume again. This time the talk was of something else which would have been an impossibility a few years earlier.
Tom had finished sponging his damaged trousers, commenting that one of the advantages of his former ruffian’s clothing was that it did not matter what sins were committed in or on them.
‘Pity, when you looked so fine today,’ said Alan.
‘Yes,’ replied Tom. ‘I’m practising.’
‘For what?’ asked Alan, who sometimes liked to be as brief as Tom often was.
‘Now that he’s put me on the School Board,’ Tom said, taking up the wine Alan had poured for him, ‘he’s thinking of making me a magistrate. You, too,’ he added, waving at Alan. ‘He asked me to speak to you of it.’
‘Oh, how splendid,’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘You’ll be Sydney’s first Emancipist Justices.’
‘Aye, that’s the trouble. There are those who think ex-felons like Alan and me have no right to be on the Bench.’
‘Well, if the Governor wants us to be magistrates, then magistrates we shall surely be—in the long run, if not the short.’
Alan was referring to the fact that the Governor’s powers were boundless by reason of his distance from England and Government. True, the Government could overturn his edicts, but only after many months had passed.
‘It’s too soon,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve enough to do with the School Board. Let me do well there before moving on to the next hurdle. The long run will be better than the short.’
‘Fred Waring must be turning in his grave at the idea of you being a magistrate,’ said Sarah, laughing.
‘Aye, and that brings me to his daughter again. I trust you, Sarah, to tell me what talents I should look for in a teacher of small children.’
‘Patience,’ said Sarah with a smile. ‘The ability to teach them their ABCs, a little simple figuring, and some history, perhaps, to introduce them to old England.’
‘Aye. I thought so. If she can do all that then she should be mistress—if only the Board gives her a fair chance—but Fred made so many enemies.’
‘Not her fault, poor girl,’ said Sarah and Alan together.
‘She probably needs the money, too,’ added Sarah. ‘Why don’t they want her—apart from Fred, that is?’
‘Too ladylike and too retiring. Not strong enough to do the post justice. I don’t want to condemn the poor thing out of hand, regardless of Fred’s dislike of me.’
Hate would have been a better word, Alan thought.
Tom ploughed doggedly on, thinking aloud. ‘The thing is, Jardine told me in confidence that she’s far worse than respectably poor. He says she can barely afford a square meal and is as proud as the devil, although living on the edge of starvation and penury. Fred left her nothing.’
‘As bad as that?’
Both Kerrs looked at one another and then at Tom. ‘So you want to make sure they appoint her?’
Tom nodded. Alan thought, not for the first time, what a deceptive creature his friend was. Despite his mild, almost handsome appearance with his sandy-blond hair and his brilliant blue eyes, Tom was quite one of the most dangerous men Alan had ever known, certainly the cleverest and the most devious.
‘There’s another problem for you, Tom. I suppose that Miss Waring will be fearful when she sees that you are on the Board.’
‘Surely not,’ said Tom, his intuition letting him down for once. He never bore minor grudges, they didn’t pay, and he had never seen Fred as more than an ineffectual irritant. He had simply been a junior Government clerk who had lost his place in good society through his own folly and who had had no more sense than to cross verbal swords with a master like Tom—and lose.
‘I’m afraid that Fred told Hester repeatedly what an ogre you are, Tom,’ Sarah said. ‘You know what an inflated idea he had of himself—and he really did come from a very good family. Poor Hester was brought up as a lady, even though, once Fred was ruined, they had no money to sustain her in that role. I do hope that you can help her.’
‘Oh, aye, but it may be difficult. Depends a little on Hester, too, you know. It’s hard to do the right thing for those who won’t, or can’t, help themselves. But I don’t like to think of the lass starving.’
And that was that. All three of them, having eaten well, and sitting in comfort, if not to say luxury, felt a little guilty at the thought of poor, half-starved Hester Waring. They agreed in hoping that Tom might be able to help her before, inevitably, they passed on to other things.
It was the following Sunday, the one day of the week in which Sydney lay quiet under a mid-October sun already beginning to take on summer’s heat.
On one side of the town was the boundless sea across which every British inhabitant had come, either willingly or unwillingly. On the other side lay miles of bush; vegetation as far as the eye could see, most of it uncrossed and unexplored by whites, still the home of those aborigines who had not come to Sydney to live naked in its streets, beggars in the land which had once been theirs. They existed only as objects of passing interest, barely more than the wild animals, kangaroos and wallabies which also wandered around the town.
To look upwards was to see the Blue Mountains, vague in the distance, cutting the colony off from the rest of the vast continent. Convict legend held that freedom—and China—lay beyond them. Whether anyone really believed in the China part was dubious. As for freedom, no one who had ever escaped from Sydney and fled towards them had returned to tell whether freedom, or anything else of value, was to be found there.
Hester Waring, unaware that she was the subject of interest among what passed for the great and powerful in Sydney, as well as the notorious, walked out of St Philip’s church after attending morning service.
For Hester, it was one of the few times when she enjoyed the society of which she had once been a part. Joining in the service, she could forget for a short time her unfortunate situation, and the hunger which gripped her permanently these days.
Today she had offered God, or whatever power there might be which ruled this cruel world, a small prayer that the letter which she had sent to Robert Jardine, Clerk to the School, and half a dozen other Boards, would bring her some relief from hardship.
She had met him in York Street the day before and he had been kind to her in his stiff, formal way. He had offered her a little, a very little, hope. She clutched that hope fiercely to her, had tried not to show him how much she depended on it, and had walked away, her head high, even if her stomach was empty.
She had not deceived Jardine, who had stared after her gallant, if pathetic, figure. It was painfully obvious to him that she was not eating properly. He was trying to influence Godfrey Burrell in her favour, but he dare not press him too hard—Godfrey would simply fly off in the opposite direction and damn the girl forever.
He had also informed Hester that Tom Dilhorne would be a member of the Board which would interview her. He did not share Fred Waring’s view of Dilhorne and, to reassure her, told her that Tom, unlike others, had torn up Fred’s debts when he had died, rather than dun his penniless daughter.
Hester had stared coldly at him. ‘The man is detestable,’ she had said. ‘He did everything in his power to hurt my father. Father told me that no man was safe from his machinations, and no woman, either.’
Jardine had shrugged his shoulders before he left her. There was no point in telling her that she was wrong about Dilhorne’s behaviour towards her father—or to women. She wouldn’t believe him. He had to trust that, for her own sake, she would not let it ruin her performance before the Board.
Hester left church, hoping against hope that her prayer would be answered. Outside in the brilliant sunlight she made her quiet way through the chattering worshippers, bowing slightly to the odd acquaintance who was prepared to acknowledge that she still lived.
Her old friend Mrs Lucy Wright came up to her when she reached the church gate.
‘Oh, Hester, there you are,’ she exclaimed. ‘I missed you last Sunday. Are you well? You don’t look very well,’ she finished doubtfully.
Hester resisted the temptation to say, truthfully and savagely, ‘Of course I’m not well. I would have thought that plain to the merest idiot and, whatever else, you are certainly not that.’ Instead she replied quietly, ‘I had an ague last week which prevented me from attending.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Hester. You are quite recovered now, I trust?’
Lucy herself looked very well, her whole charming ensemble serving only to make Hester look even more pinched and shabby than she already was.
‘Yes, I am quite recovered now,’ Hester said, adding nothing further about her ailment or her reduced condition. She was sure that Lucy, for all her easy kindness, did not really want to hear about either of them. She was also acutely aware that Lucy’s husband, Lieutenant Frank Wright, had pulled out his watch in an impatiently pointed manner in order to hint to Lucy that she had spoken to Hester for quite long enough.
Well, she, Hester, was not going to take any notice of Frank. Lucy rarely did, going her own way in her cheerfully spoiled fashion, secure in his admiration even if she occasionally exasperated him.
‘How is baby, Lucy?’ she asked. ‘I hope she is still in health.’ Her interest was quite genuine. Hester loved babies.
There, that would serve to restore Lucy’s wandering attention. Her face had lit up. The way to her affections was through her two-month-old baby girl. She began to talk eagerly of her charms, of how forward she was—there had never been a baby like her. At the same time she was trying to avoid looking too hard at Hester, for the more she saw of her the worse she thought she looked.
Why in the world was she wearing such an out-of-date black dress, which appeared to have been made over rather amateurishly from one of the late Mrs Waring’s old gowns? Surely Hester possessed something more suitable to attend church in! It was too bad that she had let herself go completely since her father had died. A reasonable marriage was all that was left to Hester, but who would want to marry such a scarecrow?
Lucy debated handing out some useful advice to her friend about buying a better gown, for instance, or a more becoming bonnet—the one she was wearing was deplorable—but she decided against it. She could almost feel Frank’s impatience with her for talking to Hester at all. He was not an unkind man, but he did not approve of his wife’s friendship with the late Fred Waring’s unattractive daughter who had neither looks, presence, nor money to recommend her.
Beside him, Captain Jack Cameron, who had, for once, attended a church service as other than a duty to his men in the 73rd Highland Regiment, was also growing increasingly impatient. He really had better things to do than stand about waiting while Lucy Wright patronised Hester Waring, whom even the shortage of marriageable women in the colony could not make attractive to Jack—or anyone else’s—eyes. Bad enough to endure the Parson’s whinings without doin’ the charity round afterwards!
Frank’s patience finally ran out just as Lucy was on the point of asking Hester to dinner—she thought some company might cheer her up.
He walked over, took his wife by the arm and gave Hester a cursory nod. ‘Come, my dear,’ he said to his wife, ‘dinner will be growing cold and Jack and I are on duty this afternoon. You will excuse us, Miss Warin’, I’m sure.’
His look for Hester was so casually indifferent that she timidly dropped her eyes to avoid it. She was only glad that his fellow officer, Captain Parker, for whom she had long nursed a tendre, was not there to see her in her present forlorn state.
She put out a hand to touch Lucy’s for a moment before she left, grateful for even this poor contact with the life she had once known. Not for the world would she have told Lucy of her true condition, how much she needed a good meal, how desperate she was for company. She had developed in her poverty a fierce pride which, in happier times, she had not known that she possessed.
‘Kiss baby for me,’ she said in her quiet, ladylike voice, no guide at all these days to her true feelings. ‘I must go, too, my own dinner will be growing cold.’ Oh, dear, what a dreadful lie that was! She seemed to be telling more and more of them these days, but to let Lucy know the truth of what was waiting for her was impossible. Lying was inevitable.
The pang which she felt on seeing Frank and Lucy move away to rejoin the others was made all the more sharp when she heard, floating through the clear spring air, Jack Cameron’s unkind comment, ‘Thought you was stuck for ever with Fred Waring’s plain piece, Luce. Haw! Haw!’
Fred Waring’s plain piece! Hester’s ears burned at the horrid sound, but her fierce pride kept her tears from falling. Better to be alone than be exposed to such insults. She quickened her pace to get away from them all—even going in the opposite direction from her own poor lodgings so that she might avoid their pity and their derision.
Mrs Cooke’s house where Hester lodged was of two-storied brick and stood in a lane off Bridge Street which was still unpaved. Like most houses in Sydney it boasted a veranda, and hanging in it a cage containing Mrs Cooke’s brilliantly feathered red-and-yellow parrot. It was larger and noisier than most.
Hester could hear it squawking as she neared home. Her father had rented the top floor from Mrs Cooke, an army widow who preferred to remain in New South Wales rather than return home to England.
After his death, Hester, burdened with her father’s debts, had asked to keep only one room and to feed herself. She had a little ready money, most of which she had realised from selling the last of the few bits of her mother’s jewellery which had escaped Fred Waring’s greedy fingers. He had parted with everything he possessed in order to continue drinking and gambling in the vain hope that he might recoup his lost fortune.
Hester was thinking of her father when she mounted the steps to the veranda and stopped to pet the bird which seemed to be as rapacious as most of the parrots in Sydney. At least, she thought, handing the noisy creature a large nut, parrots were properly fed.
She pushed the front door open to find that the house was full of the pleasant smells of a good dinner. She tried not to let her mouth water, only to find her thoughts wandering again. If she were a parrot, she presumably would not want stew, but would prefer nuts. Did nuts smell sweet to parrots?
‘Oh, there you are, Miss Waring,’ said Mrs Cooke, coming out of her small kitchen. ‘I thought as how I heard you. Was there many at church today?’
‘Yes,’ replied Hester, removing her bonnet. ‘Mrs Wright was there. She said that her baby was well.’ She made for the stairs, hoping that Mrs Cooke would not offer her any stew. In her present famished state she did not think that she could refuse it, but she would not take charity from Mrs Cooke, no, never!
With a sigh Mrs Cooke, who had already decided to offer Hester some stew, watched her whisk away to her room. Miss Waring looked right poorly these days, which was no surprise seeing that she was not getting enough to eat. Pity that all her fine friends never thought to offer her dinner, or even a little something.
Sitting on her bed in her room, Hester was wondering what she would have said to Lucy if she had asked her to dinner. She thought that for one moment Lucy had been on the verge of doing so, but Frank had soon put paid to that.
Well, she hadn’t, and Hester had learned not to waste time thinking about remote possibilities, particularly those which were never going to happen. Her dinner would be the heel of a loaf of bread scraped with some rancid butter which the grocer at Tom’s Emporium had let her buy cheap, and a withered apple which had just managed to survive to spring. Her drink would be water.
She had just finished buttering the bread when Mrs Cooke put her head around the door.
‘I’ve made some stew today, Miss Waring. I was a-wondering if you might like to help me out by eating it up for me.’
‘Oh, dear…’ Hester was as pleasant as she could be, hiding the bread and the apple under an old towel ‘…I’m afraid I’ve already eaten, but it was kind of you to think of me. Another time, perhaps.’
Mrs Cooke walked downstairs, thinking glumly that there was nothing you could do to please some people. She had been sure, knowing perfectly well how meagre Hester’s dinner was likely to be, that she would not be able to refuse such a tempting offer.
Hester, however, felt that she had no alternative. More than her pride was at stake. Once she had accepted Mrs Cooke’s charity, where would it end? There had been others who had offered charity to the Warings, but their patience had always run out in the face of her parents’ ingratitude—Mrs Waring had been as proud and thankless as her husband. Hester had no wish to find herself bitterly resented, perhaps ultimately turned away, by Mrs Cooke.
If she did both Mrs Cooke and herself an injustice by thinking this, she was not to know and preferred not to find out.
Her meal over, she lay on her bed and—tired to the bone—tried to sleep. Instead she remembered her past; usually she tried to forget it, preferring not to remember why and how the Warings had been exiled from England so that she had ended up, alone and penniless, lost on the frontier of Britain’s newest empire.
Her father had ruined himself by drinking, gambling and making unwise investments. Everything had gone: his estate and the house which the Waring family had owned for over three hundred years.
His only comment to his wife and daughter—his son Rowland had died in the Peninsular War—on the new life his relatives had arranged for him, as a remittance man in a penal colony so far away from all he had known, was typical of him in its feckless optimism: ‘A new start, my dears, in a new country. We shall make our fortune yet!’
The harsh realities of life in New South Wales and Sydney, which he found when he reached there, drove him immediately back to the bottle which became his constant companion, even in death. Hester had found him at the bottom of Mrs Cooke’s stairs one morning, stiff and cold, an empty brandy bottle clutched in his hand.
Mrs Waring had died shortly after settling in Sydney and, once she was gone, no one was ever to know of Hester’s suffering during the last years of Fred’s life while he declined slowly to the grave.
The worst of it, as Hester painfully remembered, was that Fred had still kept his pride of birth despite the loss of everything which went with it. He, the poor clerk, dismissed for incompetence from the government post his relatives had found for him, but who had once been a country gentleman, had particularly resented the rich and successful Emancipists who flaunted the wealth which he felt was rightfully his.
He had hated Tom Dilhorne most of all because he was the most successful. Going one day to the committee meeting of a small club to which he belonged, he was surprised to find Tom coolly sitting there among his betters. This was before Tom had reformed his dress and he was garbed in what Fred Waring called his felon’s rags.
‘What is that convict doing here?’ he demanded.
The chairman, Godfrey Burrell, a fellow Exclusive of Fred’s who was a grazier and entrepreneur of some wealth—and a desire to become even wealthier—closed his eyes at the sight of Fred’s red, belligerent face. He was, as usual, barely sober. Tom settled back in his chair and looked Fred straight in the eye with what Fred could only deem was confounded insolence.
‘Mr Dilhorne is here at the committee’s invitation,’ Burrell said, stiffly. ‘He is a man of substance, a friend of Governor Macquarie and, as such, we have invited him to join the club.’
He might more truthfully have added that in this club, where no women were ever admitted, and would therefore not be offended by having to associate with an ex-felon, they were prepared to tolerate Dilhorne in the hope that they might share in his rapidly growing wealth. A pity to cut one’s self off from profit, after all.
Fred was unwise. ‘You have invited this…felon…to join the club! Pray, why was my opinion not asked?’ There was an unpleasant silence since no one cared to answer him. Fred was tolerated these days, not liked. He flushed angrily.
‘I don’t care to sit down with transported scum who arrived here in chains,’ he said at last, ‘however rich he might be, and however much some of you may wish to make money out of him. I tell you, either he goes, or I go.’
Tom leaned even farther back in his chair. He was always impervious to insult. He looked at Burrell, then at Fred, and murmured, ‘I have no intention of leaving.’
Burrell’s response was to stare coldly at poor Fred. ‘And I have no intention of asking Mr Dilhorne to leave, and I believe the committee is of the same opinion. He is here at our invitation. I ask you to change your mind, Waring, and be civil to him. Otherwise, it is you who must leave.’
Fred’s pallor was extreme. He had put himself into a position from which there was no retreat. In his early days in the colony he had been a great friend of Burrell’s and several other members of the club. But his drinking, his losses at cards, his inability to pay what he had lost, coupled with his own descent into a barely clean raffishness, and his open sexual looseness, had lost him most of the friends whom he had once possessed.
He rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘I told you I’d not sit down with Dilhorne,’ he replied, ‘and I meant it.’
He staggered from the room, ending up at Madame Phoebe’s gaming hell and night house, and was later deposited, dead drunk, on Mrs Cooke’s doorstep for Hester to haul him painfully upstairs, to clean him up as best she could, and somehow get him into bed.
Later he told her, in detail, of how Dilhorne had done for him at the club, as in business. He had lost his clerkship because of his inattention to his duties, but chose to blame Tom rather than his own carelessness. He never entered the club again: it was his last link with respectability and his own folly had severed it.
Then there were his gambling debts. He borrowed from a friend who sold his IOUs to Tom. Another friend’s debts went the same way. Fred found himself owing money to the man he detested most in the world.
Even before his quarrel with the committee over Tom, he had pointed him out to Hester as the author of his misfortunes in language so lurid that Hester had shuddered at it, as well as at her father’s persecutor. His subsequent descent into ruin he firmly and unjustly blamed on the man he saw as its author, and he taught Hester to hate and fear him.
Hester rose and looked out the window at the garden below where Kate Smith, the little daughter of Mrs Cooke’s neighbour, was playing.
Her memories of her father were always of what he had become in the colony. She could hardly remember what he had been like before he reached Sydney. Dimly she seemed to recall a big, jolly man who had been idly kind to her, although his true affections were always centred on her brother.
And her mother? Somehow she had never seemed to have had a mother at all, and once they had reached Sydney, Mrs Waring had taken one look at it, and gone straight into a decline which ended in her early death.
To be fair to her mother, the town which they had reached nearly eight years ago after a long and miserable sea journey was very little like the town which Governor Macquarie was now so urgently building. Most of the houses had been wooden shacks; to land here must have seemed to her mother like arriving in a wilderness peopled with convicts, strange animals and savages, particularly after her previous life in their beautiful country house in Kent.
She had written to her uncle, Sir John Saville, telling him of her father and mother’s deaths, but she had heard nothing from him. It was all too painfully evident that Sir John had washed his hands not only of his brother-in-law, but of his brother-in-law’s child. She was obviously settled in Sydney for life—but what sort of life? What would she do when the last of her pathetic store of money ran out if she failed to be appointed to teach at the new school?
The scene before her disappeared. She closed her eyes, and began to shiver at the mere possibility. If she did not gain this poor post, she knew that there was only one destination left for her. It was one that the penniless daughters of the lesser gentry and poor clergymen had often taken before her, and that was the streets, to sell the one thing which she still possessed—her body.
How much would anyone pay her for that? Hester had no illusions about herself or her possible fate. Such a poor creature as she was would command only pennies from private soldiers, grateful for anything so long as it was a woman and available. Unless Madame Phoebe thought that she might make something of her and took her into her brothel.
She must not think of the past. Common sense said think only of the present. It also said that she must sit down and plan what to say to the School Board in order to persuade the gentlemen on it not to listen to Tom Dilhorne so that he might not ruin her as he had ruined her father.
‘Dilhorne! Hey, Dilhorne, come here, damn you!’
Tom Dilhorne sauntering, apparently idly, along under the hot midday sun of a busy weekday—although nothing Tom did was ever genuinely idle—ignored the contemptuous cry behind him and strolled on.
The man who had called after him was Jack Cameron, Hester’s recent tormentor, who was one of a group of officers of the 73rd Highland Regiment, part of the garrison which guarded Sydney and its surrounding districts in New South Wales in 1812. Several of the officers laughed openly at his anger. It was not that they liked Dilhorne, but Jack was far from popular with his fellow officers.
Jack, aware of their barely concealed amusement, swore beneath his breath, started forward, caught Tom by the shoulder and tried to swing him around. This was a little difficult as he was shorter and slighter than Tom, who was one of the largest men in the colony.
‘Damme, Dilhorne. Can’t you answer when a gentleman speaks to you?’
‘A gentleman, is it? So that’s what you are,’ muttered Tom, pulling away from the detaining hand, bending his head to look down at Jack from his greater height.
His barely masked insolence was not lost on Jack, who had missed Tom’s exact words but had caught his intent. His dark face darkened even further. No damned ex-convict was going to speak to him in such a fashion.
‘Goddammit, you felon! If it ain’t bad enough to be sent to the ends of the earth, but we have to endure the insolence of the rogues we’re sent to guard as well!’
His eyes raked Tom’s appearance dismissively. He added, after further looking him up and down as though he were something vile laid out for a gentleman to sneer at, ‘Even if you are tricked out to ape your betters these days, Dilhorne, you still look like the scum you are!’
Tom’s face remained impassive under these insults.
‘You wished to speak to me?’ he drawled. He managed, without trying, to sound vaguely menacing.
Jack exclaimed roughly, ‘They tell me that you have a hoss for sale. How much d’you want for it? And no tricking me, mind.’
‘Shouldn’t dream of it,’ murmured Tom, bright blue eyes hard on Jack’s black ones. ‘If I had one to sell, that is. Only, I ain’t.’ He brushed the dark blue shoulder of his fashionable coat where Jack had held it, almost absent-mindedly, but the hint of danger which always hung about him was in that, as in everything else he did.
His answer was a lie and the man opposite to him knew it was. True, Tom had had a horse for sale, but the moment Jack had enquired about it, Tom had withdrawn it from the market. He knew of Jack’s reputation with dogs, horses and women, and had no intention of allowing his good black to be mistreated by such a creature. Would keep it rather.
Jack’s anger mounted. ‘You know damned well you have a hoss for sale, Dilhorne. Ramsey here told me of it, didn’t you, Ramsey?’
Captain Patrick Ramsey, who didn’t know which of the two men he liked less, Jack or Dilhorne—the one being a cad and the other beneath a gentleman’s consideration—shrugged his shoulders, and offered carelessly, ‘So I thought I heard.’
‘There, you see,’ said Tom equably, ‘A rumour. I’m sorry you were deceived by it, Captain…Cameron…ain’t it?’
‘You know damned well who I am,’ roared the enraged Jack.
‘Seeing that we’ve not been introduced…’ Tom began.
This outrageous statement amused all the officers but Jack. Tom thought that, with luck, he might begin to gibber if he baited him much more. The mere idea of a Highland officer and gentleman being introduced to such as Tom Dilhorne…
‘If that is all, Cameron—’ Tom was now politeness itself ‘—you will allow me to take my leave.’ His manner was so coolly courteous that it added fuel to Jack’s anger.
‘Sir to me, Dilhorne,’ he shrieked, only to find Tom bowing slightly to him and his fellow officers.
‘Good day to you, Captain Cameron, gentlemen.’ And his bow encompassed the other officers before he turned to saunter away.
Jack began to follow him—only to be pulled back by Pat Ramsey.
‘No,’ said Ramsey, sharply. ‘Dammit, Jack, why give him the opportunity to roast you? Whatever else, he has the wit of the devil. You should know that by now.’
‘Take your hands off me, Ramsey,’ Jack snarled. ‘You know damn well that he has a hoss for sale. He’s insulting me by refusing to sell it to me. You know that.’
‘It’s his horse to do as he pleases with,’ said Pat reasonably. ‘Why give him the pleasure of taking you down?’
‘Because these…Emancipists…and Dilhorne in particular, are getting too big for their boots since Macquarie became Governor here. Who’d have thought that he, of all people, would be sweet on felons? Push them up to be the equal of gentlemen. He’ll be making magistrates of them yet. Dilhorne and that low creature, Will French—you’ll see.’
‘Doing it too brown, Jack,’ said Pat easily. He was always one of life’s observers. ‘Not even Macquarie would make a magistrate of Dilhorne.’
There were times when Pat felt a grudging admiration for the man. Until recently Dilhorne had worn the clothes of an ex-felon. These clothes, loose black or grey trousers and jacket, battered felt hat and a red-and-white spotted neckerchief, were almost a uniform and it was doubtless their lack which had enraged Jack. He resented the sight of an ex-felon losing his outward and visible brand and pretending to be a gentleman by wearing a gentleman’s clothes. Only trouble was, rumour said that Dilhorne had made himself the richest man in the colony.
Pat shrugged. That was Dilhorne’s business, not his. Stupid of Jack to let the man rile him so, but then, Jack had always been a hot-headed fool unable to control his temper.
To placate Jack he said lightly, ‘How about a drink? Wash away the taste of this place a little. Forget we’re here when we’re in the mess. Imagine we’re back home.’
‘You’re right. At least once we’re there we don’t have to talk to scum such as Dilhorne and his kind. My dream is to see that impudent dog writhing beneath the lash again before we leave Sydney.’
He called back to the others, ‘Come on, let’s go in out of the damned sun and pretend that we’re anywhere but here, being insulted by felons!’
Tom emerged from his livery stable driving his gig. He looked up and down the road and watched the officers disappearing in the direction of the Barracks. Well, at least they were not there to see the direction in which he was travelling. That would merely have served to give Cameron another attack of the dismals so severe it might have caused him an apoplexy.
He laughed to himself, flicked his whip lightly on his horse’s flanks and drove in the direction of Government House to visit Governor Macquarie. Passing a chain gang, he raised his whip in reply to a hoarse cry of ‘Mornin’, Tom,’ from one of them, saluting them more courteously than he had done Jack Cameron.
He had been such a labourer once himself, and, if chance now saw him rich, well-dressed and behind a prime piece of horseflesh, he did not allow that to make him forget what he had once been.
Fleetingly, and for no reason at all, he found himself thinking of Hester Waring and the School Board which was meeting on the morrow. He wondered briefly how she was faring before the world of business claimed him again.
