Hester Waring's Marriage

Well, Hester Waring was a lady. But no lady of the first light would marry him. She was a sensible little thing—clever, too, by the ingenious way in which she answered him when he teased her. Yes, she'd make an excellent housekeeper, and a wife who would know what's what, the right fork to use and what to say and do.

But the idea of getting into bed with any man, especially him, would no doubt send her scurrying away like a hare. She'd nearly run away when she'd seen him that day, for all her brave face. Her dreadful father might have made her frightened of him, but, judging by the way she looked at them, he'd made her scared of any man she met.

Well, Tom knew a trick or two that might bring a smile to Hester's face!

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Sydney, New South Wales, 1812

‘O
h, 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 cer
tainly 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!