Well, marrying man or not, she had never thought that her fate would depend on a Board with Tom Dilhorne on it. Were her father alive, he would have had her out of the room in an instant—once he had recovered from the shock of seeing an ex-felon enshrined in state, that was. Just as well, perhaps, that he was not alive.
She had to acknowledge, however, that the wretch was a lot better looking than she had expected, quite handsome in an odd way—though he did not attract her, by no means. But she had to admit that he was very well turned out, particularly his waistcoat. That was very fine.
At this point Hester twisted her hands in her lap. If the Board did not return soon with their verdict, she feared that she might faint before them from a mixture of fear and hunger.
She sat up smartly. Oh, no, I won’t, she thought, and if they turn me down I won’t cry or have hysterics, although God knows what I shall do if they don’t appoint me. Her mind went round and round until she felt dizzy, so that when the door opened and Robert Jardine beckoned her in she gave a great jump and turned a white scared face towards him.
‘The Board will give you their decision now, Miss Waring,’ and he held the door open for her.
She walked in, her head high, a little colour staining her thin cheeks. She tried to keep her hands still as she bowed to them, and waited for the Chairman to speak. Her father had been a friend of Godfrey Burrell’s before drink had destroyed him. Once, when she was a little girl, he had given her a paper of sweets—but that was long ago.
He began in his usual pompous style. ‘Miss Waring, the Board is prepared to offer you the post, provided that you understand that you must serve a probationary period of three months to determine your suitability. If, at the end of that time, your performance is not satisfactory, you will be dismissed forthwith. Mr Jardine, the clerk, has so minuted. Do you understand me?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Hester shortly, staring blindly in the direction of Tom who shifted uncomfortably in his chair at the sight of her evident distress.
Godfrey Burrell felt impelled to make Hester fully aware of the precarious nature of her appointment. ‘I feel bound to tell you, Miss Waring, that the Board has made you this offer with some reluctance. There are those among us who fear that you will not be up to the task. It is to be hoped that you will prove them wrong.’
I was right, thought Hester. It’s Tom Dilhorne, still trying to get back at Father. Well, damn him, I’ll prove him wrong. I’ll have to prove him wrong. It was impossible for her to imagine the truth: that only her father’s ogre had saved her.
‘I will do my best to give you satisfaction,’ she added steadily.
‘Good, good.’ Burrell was in haste to go to his dinner. Something about Hester disturbed him. Probably Dilhorne was right again, damn him. As he looked at her, it seemed possible that she was not getting enough to eat.
He had a sudden flash of memory of the pretty little girl she had been when the Warings had first arrived in Sydney. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Well, they had given her a chance, which was more than many got. He indicated the clerk, standing by the table, head bent.
‘Jardine will give you the particulars of your post and he will be in charge of your remuneration. He will give you a small advance to tide you over until pay-day. If you wish to communicate with the Board, you will do so through him. So far as monitoring your performance is concerned, I am proposing that Mr Dilhorne shall oversee you for the next three months.’
What the devil does he know about education, or teaching, for that matter? thought Hester’s Mentor nastily. I’ll see him and the rest of you in Hell before I give you the satisfaction of dismissing me.
Hester’s expression was so demure that the only person who could detect the seething rage behind her subservient mask was Tom himself. He had seen her eyes change while Burrell was speaking, and he knew dumb insolence when he met it. His almost-feminine intuition told him that there was more to her than met the eye.
Plenty of time to find out, though. The Board’s remit meant that he would have the opportunity to discover exactly what poor plain Hester Waring was made of!
Chapter Three
Lachlan Macquarie was reading the brief report sent to him by Jardine concerning the School Board’s decision to appoint Hester Waring on probation, thinking to himself that he saw the Machiavellian hand of Tom Dilhorne in its form, when Lieutenant Munro put his head around the door to inform him that Colonel O’Connell, his successor as Lieutenant Colonel of the 73rd Foot, had arrived and was waiting to see him.
He sighed and put the report down. O’Connell’s visits these days were not usually pleasant ones. He disliked intensely many of the measures which Macquarie was introducing, seeing them as pandering to the convict population. He wondered what it was that O’Connell wanted to complain about this time.
‘Send him in,’ he ordered wearily.
O’Connell was a big man, running to fat in the peace of Britain’s southernmost frontier.
‘Good to see you,’ said the Governor after the formalities had been dispensed with.
O’Connell grunted, and said coolly, ‘You might not be so happy when you’ve heard what I have to say.’
‘No?’ said Macquarie. ‘What is it this time, Jock?’
‘Dilhorne,’ returned O’Connell heavily. ‘There’s a rumour goin’ around—I don’t know whether there’s any truth in it, mind, since it seems to have started with Jack Cameron…and you know how unreliable he is—that you intend to make a magistrate out of Tom Dilhorne of all people. The man came here in chains, he’s still as artful as the devil, has taken over everything in sight—they say that somehow he’s even persuaded the Yankees to let him in on their whaling business.
‘You know as well as I do that he owns a controlling interest in the brickfields—I curse him every time the wind blows from that direction and covers us all in red dust—he monopolises haulage, is probably the man behind Dempster’s woollen mill, is fighting Will French for control of quarrying, and on top of that, is almost certainly the money man behind the building contractor who is changing Sydney for you…’
He ran out of breath before he had finished detailing the whole of Tom’s empire in the colony. After all, Macquarie knew its scope as well as he did.
‘All of that,’ returned Macquarie coolly, ‘would justify me in making such a man of substance a magistrate rather than not.’
‘Goddammit,’ roared O’Connell violently, ‘the man’s a felon! And how did he gain such a control of everything so quickly, tell me that?’
‘Ex-felon,’ said Macquarie, determined not to be ruffled. ‘He has served his term, and I have no reason to believe that he has been criminal in acquiring his wealth. He’s known, in fact, for being a man of his word. All the more credit to him when you realise that he arrived here as a very young man with absolutely nothing. I consider that such a career deserves to be rewarded, not punished. The colony needs such people.’
‘Needs such people!’ howled O’Connell, fascinated. ‘What in God’s name has happened to you, Lachlan, since you became Governor here? I never thought that you, of all people, would be soft on criminal scum. What a cake you’re making of yourself.’
‘Tom Dilhorne is a talented man,’ said Macquarie steadily. ‘He is bound to stay here, he cannot ever return to England, and the colony needs men of intelligence and vision whose allegiance is to Sydney and to New South Wales and not to some imagined home months away in the Northern Hemisphere. I have no doubt that he will make an excellent magistrate, not least because he understands the mentality of the people who will be brought before him.’
‘Dammit!’ O’Connell was beside himself. ‘Of course he’ll understand them! That’s the rub. He’s one of them. Sophistry, Lachlan, sophistry. I didn’t believe Jack Cameron when he prophesied this, but even he seems to have more sense than you. Where will it all end, eh? Tell me that?’
‘I can’t agree with you. I had better tell you now that I also wish
to make Dr Alan Kerr a magistrate, too. But until Dilhorne agrees to be one, I shall not invite him. I want to appoint them together.’
‘Make Kerr, a traitor and a mutineer, a magistrate! Wait until Dilhorne agrees! D’you tell me that he has had the infernal gall to refuse you? Or can it be that he has more sense than you?’
‘Dilhorne is a wary man, as I suppose even you might grant,’ replied Macquarie severely. ‘And he is as eager as I am that we do not go too fast. He is already on the School Board and has shown himself most helpful and useful there.’
‘Oh, appoint him Deputy-Governor and have done,’ snarled O’Connell nastily. ‘Really, Lachlan, all this comes from your nonsensical notion that this hell-hole surrounded by impenetrable bush will become a great capital city to rival those of Europe! Imagine it, peopled by convicts and light skirts, the dregs of Britain!
‘As well make legislators and magistrates of kangaroos, wallabies and aborigines as put Tom Dilhorne on the Bench. And as for Kerr… He may once have been a gentleman, but he’s as bad as Dilhorne. He wants convicts’ food improved, and demands better housing for them. What next, I ask you?’
He had almost choked himself to a stop. He started again. ‘Face it, Lachlan, this place has no future except as a useful penal settlement and, by your conduct, you ain’t even allowing it to be that.’
Macquarie’s whole body was stiff with anger. He was visibly controlling himself as he replied to the infuriated O’Connell.
‘I can’t agree. But I can see why you think as you do, because you are only looking at the short term, which really is not surprising, because the short term is all that you and the 73rd have. Give Dilhorne the benefit of the doubt. Some of the Exclusives, like Godfrey Burrell, are already doing so.’
‘I’d give him a cat-o’-nine-tails for his back, rather,’ replied O’Connell, rising and jamming his shako on his head. ‘No point in talking to you these days, Lachlan. But I warn you that my officers are most disturbed by what you are doing, proposing to entertain such as Dilhorne and Kerr at Government House, having them to dinner with officers and gentlemen and gentlewomen of good family. You are storing up trouble for yourself.’
‘But that will not prevent me from doing my duty, and if I see that my duty lies in making Dilhorne a magistrate, then that is what I shall do.’
O’Connell’s only response was to bang uncivilly out of the room, leaving the Governor to sigh at a world in which he found himself more sympathetic to an ex-felon than to his old comrade-in-arms and friend. Given time, Dilhorne, and men like him, could create the kind of society in New South Wales which Macquarie wanted to see.
Tom Dilhorne was not thinking either of Governor Macquarie or of Hester Waring. It was his own changing life to which he was giving his mind and to its effect on his long-term mistress, Mary Mahoney.
She had always said that she did not wish to marry him, but recently he had become aware that as she grew older she was changing her mind about marriage. In consequence he had to face a truth about himself and her. He might wish to marry, but if he did, he would not want Mary Mahoney for a wife, nor did he think that she would be happy with him for a husband.
Only long-term loyalty and a sense of decency kept him with her. He could see no way of ending their liaison without hurting her, so he was tied to her, and that, as he often said to himself, was that.
He was handed his freedom in the most unexpected manner, one which made him laugh at his own conceit in thinking that he was the only one of them who was dissatisfied.
On paying his weekly visit to her she told him quite coolly, even if with some regret, that their relationship was at an end.
‘A good man wishes to marry me, Tom,’ she said, ‘and you never will. Besides, I’m not the wife for you now. You’re not the man you were, you’ve changed, and what once might have worked now will not. You’ll be wanting a fine lady for a wife, Tom, someone like Sarah Kerr, someone to whom you can talk, who will live easy in your grand new house as I never would, or could. I could never entertain the nobs, nor do I want to.’
He said nothing—and that, too, she understood.
‘It’s been over for you for some time, but for all your reputation you’re a good man, and you wouldn’t turn me away after so long. No, don’t deny it.’
‘You’re sure you want this, Mary?’
‘Quite sure—and you want it, too.’
He could not deny what she had said so simply.
Instead he said, ‘I’ll see you right, Mary. You may have this cottage, and a little income.’
When she would have refused him, he insisted. ‘Who knows,’ he told her, ‘what you might need in future?’
At length she agreed with him, and they parted in friendship, without bitterness.
‘Find that grand wife, my love, and find her soon,’ she bade him as she kissed him goodbye.
Tom had said he’d keep an eye on Hester and he always carried out his promises. Strolling by her school, which was in one room of a converted warehouse in York Street, on a bright and shining morning not long after Mary Mahoney had given him his congé, he heard the sound of childish laughter coming from the schoolroom. He rejected the idea of peering through an open window to find out what was happening—too undignified—instead he entered through the front door. The classroom door was ajar, and he stood quietly outside so that he could not be seen.
That was undignified, too, but he did not want Hester to know that he was there. His presence would distract her, she would behave unnaturally, and for some reason he wanted to find out what she was like when she was unaware of being watched.
She was sitting before a group of little children, a smiling baby girl on her knee, reading to them from a children’s book which was one of the few relics of her old life in England. Behind her were two small groups of boys and girls painstakingly copying pot-hooks on to their slates from two larger slates which she had propped up before them.
Her face was alight with mischief. She was still painfully thin and starved-looking, her clothing was shabby and old, but her expression and demeanour were so different from those he remembered from the interview that he drew in his breath a little at the sight. There was no doubt that she was in full control of the class and that she—and they—were happy.
He listened to her amused voice and watched her absent-mindedly hug the little one to her. She was not only starved of food, he thought suddenly, she was starved of affection. The story over, she put the child down with some reluctance.
Tom judged that this was the moment when he could show himself. He made a great noise of coming in so that she might not know of his earlier presence. He entered the schoolroom to find that her face was shuttered again. The liveliness in it was gone, and the old look of barely suppressed fear was present at the sight of him.
In God’s name, what had that drivelling fool Fred Waring told her of him to frighten her so? Or was she like this with all men?
Hester gazed dumbly at him in his gentlemanly finery. Why was he here? Had he come to torment her? She had been so happy a few minutes ago. She watched him walk across to the group of very young children to whom she had been reading. He put his hand in his pocket to do something which he had seen his old friend Dr Alan Kerr do many times to disarm little ones.
‘I’ve a paper of comfits here, my dears. Do you think that your teacher will allow you to share them?’
Hester looked at him stonily. Then, to her dismay, she heard her voice come out in a squeak. ‘Of course.’
Tom handed her the packet, and she divided the sweets among the children while he watched.
‘I thought that I’d come to see you without warning,’ he drawled. ‘Better for you and the children, too. I told the Board that I would check your progress regularly.’
Damn him, thought Hester, dismally aware that her Mentor’s language deteriorated even more than usual in his presence. What does Dilhorne know about anything that gives him the right to check on me? But meekly, h
ead bent, she explained what she was doing in a defeated manner which contrasted so strongly with her behaviour when she had thought that she was alone that it was almost as though he had imagined what he had previously seen.
Tom grinned inwardly. He decided to see how Miss Waring’s defeated manner would stand up to a little teasing provocation. When she had finished he looked at her earnestly, and drawled, ‘The Latin, Miss Waring? When do you get to the Latin?’
She stared at him. What could he be talking about?
‘The Latin which you promised the Board. Or was it Greek? Amo, I believe you said. What exactly does that mean?’
‘I love,’ she replied, before she could stop herself, her expression stupefied and her Mentor screaming, Is the man mad?
‘You love.’ His expression was as grave as a parson’s. ‘When do you begin to teach the little ones this important discipline?’
‘I shall not teach them Latin,’ returned Hester repressively. ‘The mere idea is ridiculous.’
The lunatic ruffian appeared to consider this.
‘If you say so,’ he remarked dubiously.
‘I do say so!’ Hester was more firmly repressive than ever.
‘Then Greek, perhaps?’ The air with which Tom offered this might almost have been described as helpful.
Could the man be serious? There was not the ghost of a smile on his face.
‘I shall not teach them Greek, Mr Dilhorne. Mother Goose is quite sufficient for them at this age.’
How can I be having such a ridiculous conversation with a man who, whatever his other faults, is supposed to be inconveniently clever?
‘You relieve my mind, Miss Waring. The mere idea of a roomful of youthful prodigies was beginning to worry me.’
Madder still. Hester had an insane desire to laugh. Indeed, her voice wobbled a little with amusement as she answered him. ‘I have no intention of creating prodigies, Mr Dilhorne.’
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