Hester Waring's Marriage (2 page)

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, dis
missed 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.