Hester Waring's Marriage

by Paula Marshall

  ‘Sho I told him,’ returned Osborne dolefully. ‘He laughed at me. Shaid I was green, and felons didn’t deserve good marriages. Shorry again, Dilhorne. I think he’sh upset because he shtands to lose a lot if you and Hester make a go of it. Ain’t quite the thing, either, what he says about her round Sydney and bribing your housekeeper to tattle about you, and laughing at Hester for being plain. I told him it wasn’t her fault she was plain.’

  By now Osborne was lost to everything, even the change on Tom’s face when he spoke of Jack’s comments about Hester.

  He looked up at Tom, his face working a little. ‘He ain’t quite the thing. Should tell him sho, but I ain’t man enough. Even Pat Ramsey don’t want to tangle with Jack, best man in the regiment with sword and pistols, boxes like Gentleman Jackson, too. I ain’t up to him. More’s the pity. Needsh a lesson, take a good man to give him one.’

  He yawned, downed one last drink and saying, ‘Odd thing, I’m damned tired thish afternoon, Dilhorne’, he put his head on the table and began to snore.

  ‘Sorry about that, lad,’ said Tom, fetching a towel from the landlord and putting it under the boy’s head. ‘But I had to find out—and so I have.’

  He called the landlord over, and told him to send for one of his own men to drive Osborne back to quarters when he had recovered.

  After that he drove home, feeling rather better about life than he had done that morning, although his thoughts about Cameron were shot with blood. The knowledge that Hester’s name was often on his lips, that he was bad-mouthing her about Sydney was the last, worst, insult. The betting and the bribery were bad enough, but the abuse of Hester was intolerable.

  ‘By damn,’ he said to himself, ‘give me half a chance to have a go at you, Jack, my boyo, and you’ll wish you’d never been born.’

  Now to deal with Mrs Hackett and after that with Hester. He had no doubt that she was as miserable as he was. Question was, how could he persuade her to come about, and also persuade her not to retreat back into being miserable Hester Waring, and not triumphant Mrs Dilhorne? Well, let him settle with Hackett and Cameron and that might not be too difficult.

  Once home, he found the woman in the kitchen. Her look for him was sullen. She had originally feared him, but familiarity over the weeks had dulled that, replacing it with contempt for not being a proper man who would insist on his rights with Hester.

  He was peremptory. ‘Give me five minutes, and then present yourself in my study.’

  With never a please or a thank you, she thought resentfully, but she duly knocked on his door five minutes later.

  Tom had his back to her. He ignored her for several minutes during which time he could almost feel her agitation growing behind him.

  He turned suddenly, leaned against his old-fashioned tall desk at which he stood, not sat, and surveyed her, his eyes as hard as stones.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, are you?’ he asked sardonically.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Master Dilhorne.’

  ‘Sir to you, Mrs Hackett, sir.’ That he should insist on the demeaning sir was a sign of his acute displeasure. He wanted to humiliate her as she had humiliated Hester.

  ‘Can you think of a single reason why I should not turn you away, without pay, and without a character, and make damned sure that no one in Sydney would ever employ you again?’

  Her face turned an ugly purple. ‘You wouldn’t do that…sir.’

  His face changed and she began to tremble. His expression was purely murderous. The fear of him which she had once felt came back with a rush. As Alan had prophesied to Sarah, for all his changed manner and appearance he was wild Tom Dilhorne still: a man whom it was dangerous to cross.

  ‘Would I not?’

  His expression might be hard but his voice was soft. ‘I’ve a mind to do it now, straight away. This minute, and if I did who would employ you to spread their affairs abroad? If you tell me what you’ve said and done about me and mine, why, I might just keep you on. But stand there and pretend that you don’t know whereof I speak and I’ll throw you out of doors myself this very minute, and joy in the doing of it. Now, think on.’

  He had not raised his voice above a whisper, and it was worse and more deadly than if he had shouted at her.

  ‘I may have said something to a few friends, sir…’ she began. Her fear of him was suddenly so strong that she could not lie to him.

  ‘And money?’ he said, watching her expression change as he spoke. ‘Did someone pay you money to tattle?’

  She wondered how he knew. She had thought that the matter had been secret betwixt her and Cameron. She wanted to deny it, but in the face of his white-hot anger she dared not.

  Tom laughed. ‘So…someone paid you?’

  ‘That officer,’ she told him despairingly. ‘Cameron. He stopped me not long after you were wed. Said he’d pay me for anything about you and Mrs Dilhorne. I never took money before…that was the first, as God’s my witness.’

  She suddenly dropped to her knees before him. ‘Oh, God, Mr Dilhorne, sir, please don’t turn me away. I’ll have nowhere to go if you turn against me. No one will want me, they’ll be too afeared of you to employ me. I’ll starve.’ She gave a great sobbing cry and clutched at his knees.

  Tom looked down at her, the anger running out of him. It was only a poor old woman, after all, who hadn’t the sense to see what a cushy berth she had, and that Hester was a kind mistress. Above all, he could not condemn her to what he had rescued Hester from.

  ‘Get up, get up,’ he said brusquely. ‘What did he pay you?’

  ‘He gave me another guinea today when I told him about last night. God’s truth, sir, that’s all.’

  Tom closed his eyes. So last night, too, would be running around Sydney. Godsend Hester did not hear of it before he could deal with the old hag and settle with Cameron.

  ‘Give me his guinea, and we’re quits on that. First there’s a spare room over the mews where the other servants live. It’s neither so large nor so fine as the one you have, but Miller shall do it up, and when he has, you may move your traps there. I’ll have no more servants spying on me in my home.’

  He pushed her away. She began to sob her thanks, fumbling in her pocket for the guinea which she placed in his outstretched hand.

  ‘Be quiet, woman, you sicken me. Now for the second condition. If I find you telling tales again, other than ones I might ask you to tell, that is, I’ll have you on the street before you can turn round. Mind what I say, and be grateful that worse hasn’t befallen you. Now go.’

  What to do now? Tell Hester? About Mrs Hackett’s tattling, yes. About Cameron, no. He would settle with Cameron before he told her the truth about the bet.

  He picked up the papers on his desk. Madame Phoebe wished to speak to him urgently on a business matter. He grinned to himself wolfishly. He would see her this very night, without fail, at her house. The 73rd’s officers might be there, Cameron among them, and who knew what Tom Dilhorne would choose to do then?

  He took the guinea from his pocket, tossed it spinning into the air, caught it, made it disappear, before plucking it from the heart of a flower in one of the vases Hester had placed in his study. Then, having apparently placed it in the right-hand pocket of his breeches, he spread his hands to demonstrate that he no longer held it—and took it triumphantly from his left-hand pocket.

  Tom Dilhorne had not lost his skills, not he. Which of them he would use to teach Jack Cameron a necessary lesson, he did not know.

  Driving to Madame Phoebe’s he felt elated. He had told Hester over dinner that Mrs Hackett had been the informant and had so confessed. He also told her of the guinea given to her by an officer. He had not named Cameron.

  Hester, sitting opposite to him, face cold and withdrawn, heard him out without interrupting him. But there was a spark in her eye which told him, to his affectionate amusement, that she wanted to believe that he had not been the one who had spread the details of their marriage around Sy
dney—even if she said nothing. She was disliking their rift as much as he was.

  She then said, irresolutely, ‘But the bet, Mr Dilhorne. You haven’t explained the bet.’

  Good! He was Mr Dilhorne again. Before she could stop him, he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘That shall be explained, too,’ he promised. ‘Now I have business to transact, and must leave you. Do not expect me home early tonight.’

  His last memory was of her face, which betrayed her disappointment at his going.

  He entered Madame Phoebe’s with savagery added to his joy that Hester was softening towards him, even before he had needed to explain how the bet had come about and why Cameron had lied to deceive her.

  Madame Phoebe greeted him affectionately.

  ‘Thought you wouldn’t come here again, Tom, after you’d married gentry.’

  He grinned at her, ‘You know better than that, Phoebe. Besides, Mrs D. won’t mind me coming here, so long as we confine affairs to business. She’s hot on business, Mrs D.’

  Madame Phoebe nodded. Long ago Tom had lent her the money to start her house in Sydney, but once she had paid him off, he had never had any stake in it, although she always sent for him when she needed money or advice.

  Mrs Hackett’s latest piece of gossip about Tom and Hester had already reached her via Jack Cameron, so she knew that Tom had been banished from his wife’s bed again. Now, smiling, she offered him not only the customary bottle of wine to share while they talked, but discreetly hinted to him of her own availability.

  As usual, he refused both offers, but was willing to lend her money to extend her flourishing business. She needed to redecorate and refurnish. She even offered him a share of her profits—to see his shaking head.

  ‘It’s not that I disapprove, mind, but I have a wife, now, and a future to think on. Yours isn’t the kind of business I need any more, Phoebe. But I’ll always bail you out,’ he added as he rejected her, but his rejection was a gentle one. He admired and respected her—one more woman making her way successfully in the world—and his rejection was not based on any self-serving morality, or on contempt for what she offered.

  She was a sensible woman and accepted what he said without offence. ‘I offer a necessary service,’ she said simply, and wondered how long Tom would go without needing it if his wife proved obstinate, and now that Mary Mahoney was respectably married.

  The house was already roaring. Tom made his way to the gaming room which was crammed with the officers of the 73rd intent on making another night of it.

  He looked around and found the man he wanted seated at the big main table in the middle of his cronies, and walked the length of it towards Jack, every jeering eye upon him.

  Above the noise he heard his own name, and then that of Hester’s repeated, followed by loud laughter and Captain Parker’s voice saying, ‘Steady on, Jack, the lady’s a good friend of mine.’

  Tom stopped and pushed his way through the group of officers who fell silent at the sight of him. Quite deliberately he had not shaved himself and was still wearing his working clothes: he had visited the brickfields that afternoon.

  At last he found himself facing the author of the jests and the man he most wanted to see.

  Jack was not a whit abashed by Tom’s arrival. He raised his glass, and sneered, ‘The man himself’, before offering Tom a mocking toast. Parker, standing by him, put a restraining hand on his arm. Jack shook it off.

  Tom ignored the mockery and the toast. ‘Captain Jack Cameron, I believe.’

  ‘As you well know, dammit, Dilhorne. Now what may I do for you?’

  ‘You can tell me what you have been saying about my wife, Jack.’

  ‘Captain Cameron, sir, to felons, Dilhorne, and what I say about your wife is my affair, not yours.’

  He drank from the glass, emptied it, and poured himself another. Parker again laid his hand on his arm. Again Jack shook it off.

  Tom spoke into the silence which had followed Cameron’s last words. ‘Oh, but it is my business, Jack. I ask you again: what were you saying about my wife?’

  ‘Leave it, Dilhorne, he’s drunk,’ said Parker, his pleasant face worried.

  Tom ignored him. The attention of the whole room was now centred on Jack and himself as though they were a pair of gladiators homing in for the kill.

  No sense of propriety, of what was the done thing, governed matters in a brothel. Many thought that since Dilhorne was an ex-felon and not a gentleman Jack might say anything he pleased to Tom about himself and his wife—who had put herself beyond the pale by marrying him.

  Knowing this, Tom put his hand in his pocket, pulled out Mrs Hackett’s guinea and flung it on the table in front of Jack.

  ‘If I give you your money back, will you tell me then, or shall I have to beat it out of you, Jack?’

  Jack’s response to this was a reddened face and a bellow of laughter. He ignored the coin lying before him.

  ‘By God then, Dilhorne, you shall have it. I was saying what a fine fellow you were. Such a fine fellow that even that plain piece your wife, and damme, they come no plainer, ain’t so desperate for it that she’ll let an ex-felon like you into her bed again. What do you say to that, Dilhorne, hey, hey?’

  His drunken laughter pealed into an appalled silence.

  Tom had gained what he wanted. Jack had been provoked into saying something which even the class-hardened officers of the 73rd might find difficult to stomach. But in the doing he had destroyed his own iron control. It broke.

  He had hardly raised his voice when he had spoken to Cameron. He was indifferent to abuse of himself. He was amused by it, even. He knew that he had been a thief and a rogue: that was a statement of fact, not an insult. What he had not grasped was that he would be so enraged at Hester being bad-mouthed.

  To hear her jeered at by a drunken roué in a vile dive before half the officers of the Sydney garrison was almost too much.

  ‘This!’ he riposted, and lunged across the table at Jack.

  Glasses, bottles, wine, gaming counters, IOUs, and cards sailed in all directions. Before anyone could stop him he had seized Jack by the ears and smashed his face down into the hard mahogany of the table.

  He was lifting Jack’s now lolling head to repeat the action, but the men around him, initially stunned by the speed and ferocity of his attack, pulled him away, leaving his victim head down, semi-conscious, with the blood from his ruined face mingling with the spilt wine.

  Deathly silence was followed by uproar. One group clustered around the fallen Jack and another pinned Tom hard against the wall. He made no effort to resist. His face was suddenly as calm as though he were taking tea with the Governor wearing his beautiful clothes and speaking in the cultured accents of a scholar and gentleman.

  ‘By God,’ shouted the officer whose arm was across Tom’s chest to prevent him from attacking Jack again, ‘it’s easy to see that you’re no gentleman, Dilhorne.’

  ‘And you call that a gentleman.’ Tom’s quiet drawl was deadly. ‘Just let me loose and he’ll never insult a lady again. My work’s only half-done.’

  His voice was all the more disturbing for being so indifferent.

  ‘I’ve no doubt that he’ll call you out when he’s recovered,’ said the young officer who held Tom by the right shoulder.

  Tom turned his head to stare coldly at him. ‘So’s he can poke his little sword into me, I suppose. I know a trick worth two of that. He’ll not insult or tell lies about my wife again if I have to cut his tongue out to stop him.’

  This last threat was uttered so pleasantly that the young officer recoiled.

  The officers around Jack moved away, suddenly sobered. Parker, his face grave, came up to Tom and said, ‘He shouldn’t have said what he did about Hester, Dilhorne, I grant you that, but you’ve marked him for life. His nose is broken and his teeth are loose.’

  ‘Are they now?’ Tom’s drawl was at its most provoking. ‘Do you think that will teach him t
o be careful of what he says about my wife in future?’

  ‘Well, he was in drink,’ said Parker dubiously. ‘You should have waited to get satisfaction from him in the usual way, not gone for him like that, without warning. As it is, he’s bound to call you out when he’s recovered.’

  ‘Is he now? He wants satisfaction from me? I should say he’s got it already. I’m not playing your daft games, Parker.’

  ‘If he won’t give Jack satisfaction,’ said the young officer still grasping Tom’s shoulder, ‘I vote that we hand him over to the law to be tried for assault.’

  Before Parker could answer Pat Ramsey took a hand. He had been leaning against the wall watching the fracas with the sardonic amusement of a man who favoured neither party in it.

  He rounded on the officer. ‘You damned young fool, what good would that do? Do you want this affair aired more publicly than it will be? A squabble in a brothel? The whole room heard Jack insult Dilhorne, and what’s worse, Dilhorne’s wife. Hester Dilhorne is a lady. For defending his wife from an insult such as Jack offered her, Dilhorne would be chaired from the court. Do you want to disgrace the Regiment? Isn’t what has been said and done enough?’

  These evident truths silenced the uproar for Tom’s blood. A stalemate seemed to have been reached. In the silence that followed Ramsey dropped the authoritative tone he had been using and, picking up the guinea from the table where it still lay, somehow having avoided the chaos which Tom had created, said, in his usual airy manner, ‘Now, what was all that about a guinea?’

  He looked at Jack who was being carried from the room, drink and his injuries combined having rendered him senseless. ‘D’you think Jack might tell us? If he’s able to speak, that is?’ His lack of sympathy for the fallen Cameron was obvious.

  Young Osborne, sitting in the corner, nursing his thick head, and watching the fun, suddenly spluttered and said, ‘Time Guinea Jack got his, you know, and Dilhorne was the man to do it. Shun’t have talked like that ’bout poor Hester.’

  Tom’s revenge was complete. Guinea Jack was Cameron’s derisive nickname from then on.