Hester Waring's Marriage

by Paula Marshall

  Tom began to laugh. ‘A good idea that, my dear. We’ve been neglecting the bottle lately.’

  He went over to the great lacquer sideboard and came back with a bottle of red wine which he opened and poured her a glass. Instead of handing it to her, he held it to her lips, saying, ‘Drink up for Tom, my love. I did a good piece of business today. No, I shan’t tell you what it is this time. Let it mature.’

  He laughed at his own cleverness as she obediently drank the wine down while he cradled her head tenderly with his left hand.

  Later he was to look back wryly and conclude that happiness had made him careless and over-proud, something which misery had never done. But at the time he celebrated.

  The wine was finished off in bed, and it was good.

  In the night they awoke to make love again, and it was particularly satisfactory so that at the end they were laughing together with the joy of it.

  Tom had raised himself on his elbows above her, and Hester, putting up her hands to stroke his face said, between her gasps of laughter, the most incongruous thing which she could think of, given his size and his strong, quirkily handsome face.

  ‘Oh, you are my pretty boy, Tom! You’re my pretty boy!’

  He stared down at her, his face working. His own laughter stopped completely. His face then became quite still and, without a word, he collapsed by her on the bed, one arm flung across her body, shaking violently.

  At first Hester thought that he was still laughing, but when he raised himself into a crouch, his hands over and protecting his head, she suddenly realised that he was crying. Great racking sobs were tearing apart a man who had not cried since he was a small boy: a man who had little pity for others and none for himself.

  Hester was terrified. Tom had become her rock, her foundation stone. He had rescued her from penury and ruin. To see him so broken and distressed shook the underpinnings of her world.

  What had she said or done to cause this?

  Nothing mattered to her but that she should comfort him as he had so often comforted her.

  She sat up and uncoiled him enough to clutch him to her breast as though he were her child. She rocked and stroked him, using only his name, avoiding all endearments since the last one which she had uttered had proved so disastrous.

  Gradually he lay quiet against her. Her shoulders and breasts were wet with his tears.

  After a little his hand crept out to clutch her own.

  ‘Hester. I frightened you. I’m sorry.’

  She stroked the hand. ‘I was frightened—a little. But that does not matter. You have made me much braver than I was.’

  He gave a cracked half-laugh. ‘Well, that’s something good I’ve done, perhaps.’

  He fell silent.

  ‘If it would help you,’ she told him gently, ‘you could tell me what I did or said that troubled you so. But not if it would pain you too much.’

  For a little time Tom did not answer her and, except that his breathing had not changed, she might have thought him asleep.

  ‘Oh, Hester,’ he said, at last, ‘you broke a childhood memory. Something I had pushed away and forgotten. For years I have acted as though my life began when I reached London. I destroyed my earliest memories quite deliberately because I could not bear to remember them. It was as though they had never been. It might even be true to say that I was only born as the Tom Dilhorne I am when I met Alan Kerr on the transport which brought us to Botany Bay. Between us we changed my life completely.’

  Tom fell silent again, and when at last he spoke it was in a flat uninflected voice, quite unlike the many voices which she had heard from him before.

  ‘My pretty boy, you said. My mother used to call me that when I was a little lad. I had forgotten that, too, until you said in love, what she had said to me—also in love. When I heard you I was suddenly a child again, and all I had deliberately forgotten came back to me in a rush—and then all the things which I have done since. God forgive me for what I am and for what I have done.’

  He fell silent again.

  To say anything would be wrong. To hurry or to question him would be wrong. He only needed to know that she was with him—and that she loved him.

  He spoke again. ‘You have spoken freely to me of your past life, and I have told you nothing of mine. I have been wrong—there should be no secrets between us. I will tell you what I have told no other. Not even Alan knows what I was and where I came from, although he may suspect from words I have let drop what my life has been.

  ‘My mother was a farmer’s daughter, decently brought up in the Yorkshire Dales. She said that her family was comfortable and it was customary for the daughters to be sent to the big house for instruction and experience.’

  He laughed shortly.

  ‘Experience! Well, she got that, poor girl, if nothing else. Right enough the son of the house made her his mistress. She said that it was true love. She told me some nonsense about a marriage; said that she would never have lain with him else. The big house was near the moors, but some uncle of his married them, secretly in a little church far away from his home.

  ‘Any road, whatever the truth of it, she found herself expecting. One of the other servants informed on them, and told her lover’s father that she was carrying his son’s by-blow. The father was a tyrant who frightened them all, her lover included, and the consequence was that my fine young gentleman deserted my mother. She never saw him again after his father discovered her condition.

  ‘Hart, she called him, my dearest Hart. She never really believed that he had abandoned her. It must have been his father, she said, who prevented him from seeing her—he would never have betrayed her else. Whatever the truth of it, she was put out to be a skivvy on a farm far away from both the big house and her own home and family. She never saw any of them again. Her family disowned her—she had brought disgrace on them. She was to exist as a banished whore, to have her bastard—me.’

  Tom’s laugh was sad, more of a gasp than a laugh.

  ‘I was brought up on the farm. I remember that we didn’t have a bad life at first. But the farmer’s wife grew old and sick and my mother was a pretty girl. The farmer took her to his bed against her will. I mind the night that he did. I saw her struggle and fight with him… His wife told her brothers what he had done. They came to the farm, thrashed the farmer and turned my mother and me away.

  ‘You can see why I wanted to forget my past, Hester. It’s an ugly story. My mother had been raped, but we were punished as severely as though she had been willing. I don’t know how old I was then. I still don’t know how old I really am. Another farmer took us in. He was a brute who couldn’t keep servants. He abused my mother and beat me. She soon lost her pretty looks.

  ‘He began to beat my mother, too. It gave him pleasure—and it’s why I can’t bear to see a woman hurt. I remember so clearly now what I willed myself to forget—and how it all ended. I suppose that I was about twelve or thirteen, and was big for my age. My mother said that I was growing to look like my father. She taught me my letters and made me keep up my reading and writing. There was a Bible and a Bunyan and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the house and some chap-books.

  ‘One day he came in and found us reading together. For some reason it angered him. He began to beat her cruelly. Always before I had been afraid of him, although I’d promised myself that I would kill him one day when I grew big enough. I was fearful that he was killing her. There was a carving knife on the table. I can see it now. I remember picking it up and plunging it into his side. I never knew whether I’d killed him or not…

  ‘He fell, bleeding, across my mother. She was crying and wailing, “They’ll hang you for this, Tom.”

  “‘Never,” I said. I was young and stupid and giddy with pride at what I’d done. We left him lying in his blood and ran away to London. It would be hard for them to find us there, she said.

  ‘London! She’d no more idea than I had how far away it was. It was just a name to us. We walked th
ere and it was her death. She’d begun to cough blood at the farm. We slept in barns and under haystacks. I wasn’t too young to know that she sold herself for food to keep us alive.

  ‘Somehow we reached London. I remember thinking that we’d arrived in Hell. I knew about Hell from the Book of Martyrs. My mother was dying when we got there and it didn’t take long for her to go. With her last breath she was babbling about herself and Hart on the moors before I was born. I was left alone. I had no one and nothing—no family, no means to survive, no decent clothing to give me respectability, no trade and not even a home. I slept in the street, under bridges, in inn yards, begging for scraps.

  ‘I soon learned that thirteen-year-old boys can be cheated but I rapidly found ways of avoiding that. I worked for a magician for a time and learned a lot of useful tricks, but he wanted me for his bed, so I ran away from him. In the end I became a thief because there was nothing else for me to be. I was big and strong and clever, and I soon became an organiser of thieves, boys like myself. I was a fence before I was out of my teens. Oh, I was a likely lad, I can tell you.

  ‘By the time that I was eighteen I was fly and rich with it. I’d a pad of my own and a pretty mistress. I often wondered what happened to her after the Runners arrested me when I over-reached myself. I thought that I could take on the masters of my world.’

  His laugh this time was a bitter one.

  ‘It taught me to mind my back, Hester, but too late to benefit me then. My elders saw me beginning to threaten their profits and they shopped me, betrayed me to the Runners. Oh, yes, I was a real threat—I’ve always known how to manage people and I looked after the boys I ran, my pickpockets. I didn’t simply exploit them like they did. They were the ones with the power, though. They set me up for the Runners and I was taken red-handed, with all my gains about me.

  ‘What I’d committed were capital crimes—and to cap it all, I’d even bought the law. An old man in a nightgown with a black cap on his head sentenced me to death. I suppose that it’s the criminal bastard’s usual end. I couldn’t believe it. Clever Tom Dilhorne was to swing. My lack of years didn’t save me. The old man said when he sentenced me that I was a dreadful example of youthful vice and he’d do the world a favour by sending me out of it. I can’t help wondering how he would have fared if he’d been turned out, quite alone, on the London streets at thirteen.

  ‘I remember now that I lay in Newgate in a stupor. I couldn’t believe that I was going to escape this time. I remember vowing that if by some chance I didn’t hang, I would be more wary. I’d never trust anyone again—my best friend had informed on me—and I’d never put myself in a position where I could be betrayed by anyone.

  ‘The day before I was due to swing the turnkey came to my cell. I was lying in the straw in a daze.

  “‘Get up, boy,” he shouted.

  ‘I thought that he’d come for me a day early, or that I’d miscounted the days. I’d lost all track of time. He let me think that it was Tyburn Tree I was bound for. They took me outside and chained me to another three poor devils and drove us in a cart to the hulks. The talk was that our sentences had been commuted to transportation—and so it proved.’

  He gave a great sigh before he started to speak again. Hester realised that in some way he was purging himself—that he must tell her the whole sad story.

  ‘I met Alan on the transport. He was just coming out of his stupor. His case was worse than mine for he was a gentleman and was as green as grass among the hardened felons who surrounded him—myself included.

  ‘He had been a surgeon on a naval ship of the line, sentenced for treason, for unwisely expressing sympathy for the ideals of the French Revolution, something which his captain chose to regard as mutiny. He had been lucky not to be hanged on the spot but to be transported instead.

  ‘I felt sorry for someone who was as green as he was. I don’t know why. No one had ever felt sorry for me. I think now that I needed someone to care for, perhaps to make up for what I couldn’t do for my poor mother. I befriended him, protected him, saved him from assault—and worse. It was the best thing I ever did.

  ‘He was educated, clever and a natural teacher. And I wanted to learn. How I wanted to learn! I thought that if I had known more I might not have been caught so easily, might not have descended to be a thief. I wanted to dig myself out of the pit I was in. So when he said that he wanted to repay me for saving him I asked him to teach me all that he knew. In the long days and nights on the transport and then on Norfolk Island when we reached New South Wales he educated me.

  ‘I could read a little and I could scrawl something which passed for writing and I was naturally clever with figures, but I spoke like the scum I was. He taught me to read properly and to write an elegant hand, the hand which surprises so many when they see it. I imagine that it surprised you…’

  Hester nodded and he laughed drily.

  ‘He taught me to speak like a gentleman. I’d always been a good mimic and I learned quickly. I mastered Latin, too, it helped us to pass the long time on the voyage and to keep us sane. That was why I knew perfectly well what I was doing when I teased you about teaching the little ones Latin. I knew perfectly well what amo meant, but I wanted to see your face when you answered me.

  ‘We were off the Cape of Good Hope when he began teaching me a little Greek—which was all that he knew. Alan said that I had the best memory of anyone he had ever met. I never forget anything which I have read, written, heard of, or experienced—which is why it puzzles me that I forgot my early life so completely.

  ‘Why should I remember so much but forget that? Unless, of course, I had willed myself to forget it. I remembered dimly that my mother had been brave and loving, but that was all. And then for it all to come back so suddenly when you spoke just now. That is a mystery, too.

  ‘Alan also taught me medicine and made me his assistant on the transport. He said that I would have made a good doctor or an even better dominie. There’s a thought for you! Wild Tom Dilhorne a scholar! So when I interviewed you for that post I probably knew more than the rest of the Board put together, because I’ve read widely since. An old clerk, transported for theft, taught me bookkeeping and other business skills in return for me helping him as I helped Alan. Between the two of them they educated me so that I was saved from being another ex-thief who didn’t know how to earn an honest living.

  ‘I never revealed what I had learned when we reached Sydney and Alan and I parted to go our own ways. Let them think Tom Dilhorne a wild man and an ignoramus. That helped me to grow rich, I can tell you. Many is the time when my rivals or the Exclusives talked in front of me in their superior way, never knowing that I knew exactly what they were saying. Quoting their bits of dog Latin and speaking French—Alan taught me that, too—in front of the stupid felon.

  ‘I’ve not told you all, my love, not all I’ve done. It’s not fit for you to hear. Even Alan doesn’t know the whole truth, but the poor lost bastard survived—if at a price.’

  He had finished.

  Hester sat up and pulled his head against her breast as though he were her child and rocked him.

  ‘My poor love, oh, my poor love.’

  The story of the lonely boy and his betrayed mother had moved her beyond words. And I thought that I had suffered, she said to herself. I hardly know what suffering is.

  Tom’s lack of self-pity, the matter-of-fact way in which he had spoken, shocked her the most. He had told her his story in a level voice, almost as though he had been speaking of someone else. Whatever she had thought his past might have been, she could never have imagined what he had told her.

  For his part Tom lay quiescent against her as she kissed and stroked him gently, bringing him to climax by her own actions. For once he was passive, the loved one, the acceptor of delight, and not the fierce and tender lover who initiated their pleasure.

  He had put his past behind him. He had become Tom Dilhorne, rich and powerful, who ruled and controlled his world absolu
tely. To remember was to become the helpless boy again, to be controlled, not to control. He had conquered his world, but at a dreadful price.

  Telling Hester was, they both knew, in some odd way the greatest gift he could make her. He had surrendered his deepest self to another, although after Newgate he had vowed never to do so again.

  Chastened, purged, he slept at last. Hester, holding him against her heart, lay awake until the new day arrived to bring them back to the demanding present. She was no longer Tom’s toy, she was truly his partner, as her Mentor had promised. In the future his associates would discover that if they accepted him, they had to accept her.

  What he had told her explained what drove him so frantically towards success in everything that he touched and, above all, the energy which had allowed him to find her, to understand her, to change her whole existence, while at the same time not diminishing any part of his busy life. No one, watching him, could have guessed from the man that he showed the world what he had been and how much he had suffered—nor would she ever tell anyone his secrets.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tom was sitting at his desk in his counting-house on the morning of the day on which he had asked Jack Cameron to visit him. His concentration was broken by the sound of a struggle outside his room.

  He had barely had time to rise to his feet when the door flew open. Jack Cameron stood outside, Tom’s letter in one hand, a scarlet-faced Joseph Smith’s ear in the other.

  ‘I mean to teach your insolent lackey a lesson, Dilhorne.’

  ‘I merely asked him to wait until I found out whether you were free to see him, Master Dilhorne.’

  ‘Ex-felons are always free to see me when I need to see them,’ sneered Jack.

  ‘You mistake,’ Tom returned mildly. ‘It is I who need to see you.’

  He was perfectly cool with Cameron now that Hester was not involved. ‘If you don’t release Mr Smith at once, I fear that it is I who will teach you manners, since you seem to have forgotten the last lesson I gave you.’