The band began to play, softly this time, and with great feeling, the Regimental march, ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, to usher in the official toasting. The flunkey who was acting toastmaster began to instruct the guests to raise their glasses. The noise of the company rising was accompanied by the sound of a sudden commotion at the far end of the table, away from the Dilhornes.
A young lieutenant who had drunk more than was good for him had risen before the command was given, and had begun to shout in the direction of the Governor.
‘No!’ he bellowed. ‘Drink the Loyal Toast to His Majesty King George III in the company of felons and scum who should still be working in chains, not I! You may be Governor here, sir, but you strain my loyalty if you require me to share the Loyal Toast with him.’
He waved drunkenly at Tom, and, lifting his glass high began to pour the bright red liquid in it on to the tablecloth in a steady stream.
The uproar grew.
Colonel O’Connell, his face as crimson as the spilt wine, shouted down the table, ‘Be quiet, you young fool. Have you lost your wits?’
Other officers, seated near him, embarrassed that the lad in his cups should say publicly what they all privately thought, began to pull him down, but he would not be silenced, shouting again before Major Menzies clamped a hand across his mouth.
‘No, it is he who is mad,’ he roared, indicating Macquarie who sat, unmoved, with a stone face while the uproar continued. ‘To ask officers and gentlemen to sit here and consort with such as Dilhorne, to think of making him a magistrate—and the rest of you are hypocrites…’ The remainder of his outburst was lost behind Menzies’s large palm.
Heads turned. Men guffawed. Women tittered. The only unmoved person in the room beside Macquarie was Tom himself.
He smiled, picked up his glass, and watched the young man being dragged struggling from the room by his embarrassed fellow officers, his muffled protests continuing until he was finally hauled through the double doors at the far end.
The expression on his face was unreadable. He turned to Mrs Major Middleton sitting on his right, who had shown her displeasure at his presence by not addressing a word to him, saying, ‘Come, madam, drink a toast to the only honest man in the room. He, and only he, had the courage to say what you are all thinking. He deserves a bumper for that—you will surely not grudge him one.’
Mrs Middleton looked him straight in the eye and said, her voice ice, ‘That being so, Mr Dilhorne, one wonders why you chose to attend.’
Tom continued to hold his glass out but, seeing her lack of response, his mouth curled again.
‘No?’ he said. ‘Why, madam, I am here because the Governor invited me, as he did you. I cannot say fairer than that. You would not have had me insult him by a refusal, surely?’
Hester watched him, fascinated. Oh, she knew that face and that voice. She heard Pat Ramsey suck in his breath, saw Mrs Middleton’s face flame as red as a turkey cock’s wattles.
‘The Governor should have more sense—’ she began, then realised what Tom had done. He had compelled her to speak to him, not once, but twice, even though she had inwardly vowed, once she had seen who her companion was, that he would receive no such favours from her. Worse, he had made her defend herself when he was the one who should have been doing the defending!
‘Some people,’ she announced firmly to the table at large, ‘know their place in life and keep to it!’
Tom drank his wine, emptying his glass before he replied to her, ‘I do so agree with you, madam.’ His smile was deadly. ‘And my place tonight is here, at this table, beside you.’
He looked at his glass. ‘Why, Mrs Major Middleton, is it not? I do believe that I have emptied my glass—and left nothing for the Loyal Toast. You see, you do not have to drink with me, after all.’
Pat Ramsey began to laugh, he could not help himself. He remembered what he had advised Jack Cameron—never to cross verbal swords with Tom Dilhorne for he would surely lose.
‘Your husband compels my admiration,’ he said to Hester. ‘I only—’
‘You need say no more,’ said Hester, cutting him short. ‘I know exactly what you are thinking, Captain Ramsey, and it is the same as that poor young lieutenant. You know as well as I do that Tom was right. He is the only person at this table telling the truth, and he will be punished for it.’
‘He will have a thick head in the morning, and time to think on his folly,’ said Pat, unrepentant. ‘Now we must drink the Loyal Toast, you and I.’ He lifted his glass, Tom held his empty glass before him and bowed low, first to Mrs Middleton, and then to Hester.
Still defiant, she drank up her wine, saying loudly to an amused Pat, ‘For both of us, Mr Dilhorne and myself,’ to hear Pat reply,
‘Bravo, Hester, my dear. One can only hope that your loyalty to him will gain a reward commensurate with your courage.’
Hester thought that he might be taunting her, but perhaps not. She was beginning to discover that Pat Ramsey had hidden depths.
After the toast the company were released to stream into the grounds outside, golden in the late afternoon sun, to discuss with great animation, some amusement and much anger, all that had passed.
The general opinion was that Macquarie had deserved such an outburst for daring to foist the unacceptable on his superiors in Government House where one supposed that such outcasts as Dilhorne would not be received.
Hester, followed by curious and sneering eyes, refused Pat Ramsey’s offer to escort her outside and made straight for Tom. He was as unmoved as ever, talking to the Governor who had made a point of going over to him the moment the dinner ended, taking his arm and walking him outside as a plain indication of his displeasure at the behaviour of the officers of his old Regiment.
Seeing Hester coming towards him, a defiant expression on her face, Tom excused himself, took her arm and walked her away from the disapproving company to a small grove of Norfolk pines through which, far below, the distant sea could be seen rolling.
He felt her arm tremble beneath his hand and said softly to her, ‘Come, Mrs Dilhorne. You were a brave girl in there. Give them no satisfaction by showing distress.’
‘Distress!’ exclaimed Hester, her voice rising. ‘It is they who should be showing distress—’
‘Hush,’ he interrupted her, and his voice was gentle. ‘It is no more, and no less, than I expected. Perhaps Macquarie will now see that my advice is sound. I have to confess that his conduct in first inviting us, insisting on our attending, and then making such a point in coming over to honour me afterwards, whilst personally gratifying to us, was neither wise nor sensible. Alan taught me a scrap of Latin once which the Governor would do well to ponder on. Festina lente, Make haste slowly.’
He smiled wryly. ‘You must understand their resentment, Hester, and learn to live with it. Now, smile with me. We are enjoying the afternoon, are we not? There will be fireworks soon, you will like them, I know, and the band is about to play, which, seeing that they have all been drinking hard while they waited for us to finish, will be an adventure in itself.’
Hester suddenly understood that he was speaking to calm her, that nothing which had been said or done to him had the power to hurt him, and that he was trying to make her respond in the same way.
As though he had read her mind, he said quietly, ‘They want to see you distressed. Smile and be happy, and that will annoy them the more. It is like the Japanese, you see, who have this exercise called Judo where you turn your opponent’s strength back on them.’
Despite herself, Hester began to smile. It was so like Tom to take an insult and use it to draw some strange moral, some lesson in living, instead of allowing it to distress him. He saw the smile and pressed her hand lovingly.
Will French, one of Tom’s business rivals and friends, came up to them—everyone in Sydney was allowed to enter the grounds on these fête days, once the dinner was over. High and low rubbed shoulders together, another source of irritation to the res
pectable.
‘Mrs Dilhorne, Dilhorne,’ he said in his bluff way. ‘You are looking well, Mrs Dilhorne. Rosy, in fact.’
‘Oh, that is merely the effect of temper, Mr French,’ returned Hester spiritedly.
‘Aye,’ said French, ‘I heard that one of the young officers disgraced himself.’
Tom laughed. ‘Even for Sydney, that gossip travelled rapidly.’ The humour in his voice was real, not pretended.
French looked at him sharply; there was no fathoming Dilhorne. ‘Yes, well, but that isn’t what I came to speak of. Mind if we talk business, Mrs D.?’
Before Hester could reply, Tom said, ‘If you have anything to say, French, you may always say it before my wife.’
French did not allow this to surprise him and said, ‘Eh, well, you’ve been a good friend to me and you’ve dealt fairly with me since. Thought you might like to know that there’s an underhand market in Government spirits and stores these days. Thought you had an understanding with O’Connell that what was here, in bond, came out to be distributed through you, kickbacks to you and the military both.’
This was news to Hester, and she thought again how strange it was that the very men and their wives who were making private fortunes for themselves by appropriating Government liquor and by selling it off, through Tom, should follow a social code which allowed them to insult him at will.
Tom knew what she was thinking. ‘Time you learned how these things are organised, Hester,’ he told her. ‘So, French, someone, an officer—or officers, perhaps—is stealing, unofficially, that is, instead of officially, and the stuff is being sold around Sydney?’
French nodded.
‘And it’s being done without O’Connell’s knowledge?’
French nodded again.
‘My thanks,’ said Tom seriously. ‘I’ll put out feelers. Can’t have someone walking off with the cream of the crop and cheating his fellow officers—to say nothing of Tom Dilhorne.’
Hester could not help herself. She began to giggle. Tom looked at her with mock severity. ‘Find it funny, do you, my dear? That someone is doing Dilhorne and partner down.’
‘Partner?’ interjected French, a little puzzled.
‘Partner,’ repeated Tom, waving his hand at Hester. It was her reward, she knew, for working hard with him and trying to behave as he would. He was now beginning to tell the world that he and she were more than a simple married couple. She could not thank him now, not in front of Will French and hostile spectators.
Instead, she watched some of the private soldiers of the 73rd walk across the lawn, flaming brands in their hands, to set alight tall branches cut from one of the great pines which stood high above the sea. Others were lighting lanterns among the groves to illuminate the growing dusk, and the first fireworks began to flare and sputter. The band’s beery version of Handel’s Fireworks’ Music made a suitable accompaniment to the jollification.
Hester, her face alight, enjoyed the fireworks, insults to Tom and thieves who looted stores alike forgotten. Tom watched her, not the fireworks, such innocent delight wrenching unexpectedly at his hard-bitten soul.
French, staring at him, was suddenly surprised. So Dilhorne did have a soft spot, after all—and it was for his plain wife, of all people. Who would have thought it? A judgement which many others were making with cruel amusement.
Tom might once have agreed with the unpleasant gossip which went on behind his back. His entry into marriage had been cold-blooded enough and Hester being a kind of trophy had been the best part of the game. And if to coax her into bed with him had begun as simply one move in that game, it was rapidly turning into something more than that.
It was not only living in close proximity to her which was making him desire Hester, so that to possess her fully was not simply to satisfy an itch of the flesh, but it was Hester herself who was beginning to compel him. It was an emotion which the hard man had never felt for any woman, however kind he had been to his mistresses, and it was to some extent divorced from sex.
He had experienced such a feeling only once before when he had come upon Alan Kerr, bewildered and lost on the transport, abandoned among human wolves who saw him as sexual prey, all the certainties of his old life destroyed, and with no understanding of the brutal realities of his new one.
The urge to protect someone as helpless as Alan had been in his misery had overcome Tom then. It had made him offer a fierce friendship which had enabled Alan to survive, and the result had been the forging of a lasting relationship.
In Hester he had found someone else who needed him if she were to survive, and the same impulse which had led him to save Alan had moved him from his first real sight of her at the interview to the day on which he had married her—even though, as with Alan, he refused to face the reality of what he was doing, burying it beneath the cynicism which was all the surface man ever showed.
To his everlasting surprise he was beginning to fall in love with her in the truest sense.
The innocent joy with which she embraced her new life, her good mind, her gradually blossoming face and body, and her fierce and unthinking loyalty to him at the banquet, were all beginning to have their effect on him.
He found himself thinking of her all the time. If he did, or saw, something interesting when he was away from her, he reminded himself to tell her of it when he reached home. A new pair of gloves, a pretty fan, seen as they arrived in his Emporium, were picked up as presents for her, sure to make her face glow.
The smallest gift gave Hester, who had seldom been given anything, immense pleasure. Yesterday he had gone into his Emporium to oversee the unpacking of bales of priceless Chinese silks and he had picked up a roll of the purest, palest lemon, held it in his big hands, the nails scrupulously trimmed so as not to snag the delicate stuff, called over Mrs Herbert, who arranged these things, and ordered a dress to be made for Hester.
‘A surprise, mind,’ he said to her. ‘You have her measurements, and I want it quite à la mode, you understand, but simple, nothing fancy. Use one of the fashion plates which came in from England—and she’s not to know. No meaningful looks and all that.’
Mrs Herbert was always respectful of her employer’s taste and feelings for female dress—she had clothed Mary Mahoney for him—a taste she thought incongruous for such a big and physical man.
His employees laughed when he had gone.
‘Sweet on her, ain’t he? Look at what he’s taken home for her already this week. Not his choice he goes to bed alone, I’ll be bound. Madam thinks she’s too good for him,’ was the general agreement.
If Tom knew what was said behind his back, he was quite indifferent to it. The game he played with life dictated that he knew and understood what people thought, said and did—and then he used it against them. Only a fool cared about the opinion of fools and, to Tom Dilhorne’s cold eye, most people were fools.
They had been married for nearly two months when Tom came home early one afternoon and told Hester that, when he had been going down King Street earlier in the day, one of the aborigines had stopped him and told him that there was going to be a great storm that night.
Most of the Europeans would have laughed at such a prophecy, but Tom had learned in his hard life that nothing was to be ignored. Aborigines had told him similar things before, and they were usually right. He had tossed the man a coin. He had shown his teeth at Tom, and said something in his own language which Tom hoped was thanks, but thought was more likely to mean ‘you poor white fool’.
‘In case he’s right,’ Tom said to Hester, ‘we’ll drive out with a picnic and have a look at the storm in the open. Have you ever seen one, Hester?’
Hester confessed that she had not.
‘Well then,’ said Tom, ‘there’s nothing to lose, and if there’s no storm we shall have had a pleasant evening out.’
His man of all work, Miller, harnessed the big carriage, and Tom brought food from Sydney for the picnic. He drove them through the bush to an open spac
e, well beyond the town, which overlooked the sea on one side and the distant mountains on the other.
At first, as Hester said, it was all a hum. There was no storm. But they ate the food and drank the wine which Tom had so thoughtfully packed.
‘More wine!’ exclaimed Hester. ‘You are turning me into a toper, Mr Dilhorne.’
‘But you hold it so much better now,’ said Tom, who never tired of plying her with food and drink and little attentions these days. He put her shawl on and let his hands linger on her neck. He felt her shiver at his touch and asked her anxiously, ‘Do you feel cold, Mrs Dilhorne?’
In reply, Hester flushed slightly and said ‘No’, but leaned ever so slightly against him while she did so.
If propinquity was affecting Tom, it was affecting Hester even more. Her fear of all men had begun to disappear, and what she was beginning to feel for Tom was far removed from fear.
To enjoy a picnic meal on the edge of the bush which they often did—for Tom liked eating in the open—meant Tom feeding Hester titbits, and Hester managing to lick his fingers when he offered them to her. Just as though I were an intelligent horse, she thought with amusement.
The ogre Dilhorne had long since disappeared from her internal monologue, to be replaced by Tom, who brought her presents and thought of so many amusing and interesting things to do.
He had promised her that they would go swimming one day, and then had said slyly, ‘But seeing that we’re not really married, Mrs Dilhorne, the question of what to wear becomes difficult.’
Hester had fallen straight into the trap.
‘Oh, why is that, Mr Dilhorne?’
‘Well, swimming is only worthwhile when one isn’t burdened by clothes.’
For the first time he saw that she did not flush when he said something which she might previously have thought over-daring, but appeared to ponder on what he had said.
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