Hester Waring's Marriage by Paula Marshall Read Free Book Online

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.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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!
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜But that will not prevent me from doing my duty, andif 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.
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    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