A Precious Jewel (11 page)

Usually he stayed for longer than the time needed
for a bedding and the short relaxation afterward—though not always. Sometimes he came in the evening and stayed all night, occasions she came to hope for and cherish without ever expecting.

He never again came to her drunk, though sometimes he arrived after midnight, irritable from some entertainment of the
ton
that he had not wished to attend in the first place. Once he came to her with a red nose and watering eyes and feverish cheeks.

“I can’t drive you out to Richmond as I promised, Priss,” he said from the doorway of the parlor, waving away her outstretched hands. His voice was nasal and breathless. “I have the devil of a cold. Some other time. I’m going home to bed.”

“Gerald,” she said, watching him hunch his shoulders and shiver, “there is a bed here. And you have a fever, poor dear. Come and lie down and let me look after you.”

“I don’t want you to catch it, Priss,” he said. “Keep your distance. I’ll come back in a few days’ time. Maybe tomorrow. I should feel better by tomorrow.”

“Did you bring your curricle?” she asked. “I will have Mr. Prendergast see to sending it home for you. Come and lie down, Gerald.” She linked her arm through his and led him in the direction of the bedchamber. He did not resist. “I shall go to the kitchen and fetch a bowl of steaming water for you to set your head over so that you can clear out your nose and breathe again. And while you are doing that I shall
mix up a powder for you to drink that will help you sleep. Let me help you off with your boots.” She pressed on his shoulders so that he sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t want to be a trouble to you, Priss,” he said.

She set one of his boots on the floor and tackled the other. She smiled up at him. “You are never a trouble, Gerald,” she said. “It will be my pleasure to make you comfortable. I would only worry about you if you were at home alone.”

He had never told her that he was not married or that he did not live with relatives. She had drawn her own conclusions from the number of times he had stayed with her overnight without ever seeming to feel uneasy that someone would wonder where he was. He probably lived in bachelor rooms with only a valet for company, she guessed.

He sniffed. “Wretched nose,” he said. “I wish I could cut it off.”

“You would look funny,” she said, cupping his cheek with a light palm as she got to her feet. “I shall be back in just a few minutes, Gerald, and then I shall make you more comfortable. You will be warm and asleep before you know it.”

He stayed for two days, two days of bliss for Priscilla. She rarely left the sickroom. He allowed her to fuss over him and hold him and comfort him just as if he were a child.

“You’re a good girl, Priss,” he said, hugging her
briefly when he was finally leaving. “I feel as right as rain again.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling. “You were the model patient, Gerald.”

She caught the cold from him, and the fever. They coincided with the days of her monthly period. She fought them out alone in her bedchamber upstairs so that by the time Gerald came back there was no trace remaining. She did not tell him.

One morning he arrived to take her to a milliner’s on Oxford Street to buy her a straw bonnet to replace her old one, which had been ruined when she had been caught out in an unexpected rain shower. And then he took her into a jeweler’s to buy her a diamond-and-emerald bracelet.

“But Gerald,” she protested, “you don’t need to buy me gifts. You provide well for me.”

“A gift is just that, Priss,” he said. “It is not payment for anything. I want you to have it, that’s all. I like to see you with pretty things.”

It was a very pretty bracelet. It reminded her of one her father had given her on her eighteenth birthday, one that had been kept for safekeeping with her father’s valuables, and one that she had been unable to reclaim after her father’s and Broderick’s deaths. She had last seen it on the wrist of Cousin Oswald’s wife.

“You aren’t crying, are you, Priss?” Sir Gerald asked.

The jeweler turned away tactfully and busied him
self with putting away the other bracelets they had been viewing.

“Yes, I am,” she said with a laugh, brushing a tear firmly from her cheek. “It is lovely, Gerald. Thank you.”

“Well,” he said, clearly embarrassed, “I think you should possess one valuable thing in your lifetime, Priss.” He fumbled in a pocket and handed her his handkerchief.

One evening he took her to Vauxhall Gardens, and she danced beneath the stars and the colored lanterns and ate ham and strawberries and drank wine and watched the fireworks display and strolled along the main promenade, her arm through Gerald’s.

It would have been better, she thought, if they had not been members of a party that included three of Gerald’s acquaintances and the mistress of one of them. The unattached young gentlemen ogled the ladies around them and openly commented on their physical attributes without regard to the sensibilities of the two women. And the other woman appeared to find everything funny and giggled incessantly.

But she would not allow the company to spoil her evening. Gerald kept her away from them for much of the time. And besides, she reminded herself, she was as much a mistress as the other girl, and she could not expect the other gentlemen to treat her with the same deference they would have accorded a lady.

It was a happy routine that life settled into, though
as time went on there was a little desperation involved, too. The Season was drawing to an end and summer was beginning. Gerald always spent his summers in the country, he had told her more than once, at Brookhurst, his home. He was planning to go that year, too.

It was going to be a long, lonely summer. And there was always the very real chance that in the months away from her he would decide that he no longer wanted her. Once he left London, perhaps she would never see him again.

The thought sometimes brought panic, and it always brought a dull ache of anticipated loneliness and pain. But Priscilla had never been one to wallow in self-pity or to allow her spirits to be dragged down with might-have-beens or might-bes.

She counted her blessings. At least she would be able to spend a summer in which she was her own person. If Gerald had not set her up as his mistress, her summer would be the same as the winter and part of the spring had been. She would be at work at Miss Blythe’s.

Loneliness was better than that. Her life there, which she had made bearable at the time, now made her shudder in retrospect. It was strange to her that she had ever been able to adjust her mind to a life of such indignity.

The human spirit, she had discovered with some surprise, was capable of carrying one unbroken
through even the worst of tribulations. It would carry her through a few months of loneliness and the absence of her lover. And if he no longer wanted her at the end of the summer, well then, she would live for as long as she could on the money she had saved and on the settlement he had agreed to pay her, and then she would do what she had to do to survive until she was thirty years old and able to inherit her mother’s fortune.

She would not think of it. The present had troubles—and joys—of its own. The future would be dealt with when it came.

As for the present, he had not left London yet. There was still each visit to be looked forward to and enjoyed. There was still pleasure to give and a little joy to take secretly for herself.

“I
HAVE BEEN
thinking of getting rid of Lettie,” Bertie Ramsay was saying to Sir Gerald. “I want to go to Brighton for a month or so, and m’aunt wants me to trot down to Bath after that—m’uncle’s sixtieth birthday or something like that. Sixty-fifth, maybe it is. It seems hardly worth the expense of paying her to wait for me. The girl giggles too much, anyway.”

The two of them were viewing the horses at Tattersall’s, though neither was buying.

Gerald could sympathize on that last point. He had found Lettie’s giggle most irritating at Vauxhall a few
evenings before. Priss would never have got out of Kit’s or merited a second visit from him there if she had been even half the giggler.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I would probably drop Priss too if I did not have a lease on the house.”

“If you ever think seriously of doing it,” Mr. Ramsay said, “you had better let me know, Stapleton. I would take her off your hands in a minute. A real lady is Prissy. Good between the sheets, is she? But then I daresay she is. She was one of Kit’s girls, wasn’t she? Kit always trains ’em well and slings ’em out on their ears if they don’t want to learn.”

Sir Gerald concentrated on the chestnut mare he happened to be looking at. He did not answer the question. He felt his fingers curling into his palms and flexed them. If Bertie Ramsay imagined that he would ever pass Priss on to the likes of him, he must have feathers for a brain.

“Coming to Brighton, are you?” Mr. Ramsay asked. “Or are you going to Brookhurst?”

“Brookhurst,” Sir Gerald said. “I always look forward to getting down there. I don’t know why I don’t live there all year, in fact.”

He did know, he thought almost as soon as he had spoken the words. There were too many ghosts at Brookhurst. Too many damned ghosts.

“Perhaps I’ll call on you there,” Mr. Ramsay said. “Brighton can get tedious, and who wants to spend
longer than he needs to do in Bath with all the octogenarians?” He laughed loudly and merrily at his own joke.

“You would be welcome,” Sir Gerald said.

“I think I’ll walk over to Lettie’s now,” Mr. Ramsay said. “There’s not much for cattle here today, is there? I have my eye on Spender’s grays, but I doubt he will sell them cheap. I think I’ll plow Lettie a couple of times and then break off with her. I’ll miss that body, I must confess, but it don’t hurt to have a change every couple of months or so. How much do you think I should pay her, Stapleton?”

Sir Gerald shrugged. “I suppose that is between you and Lettie, Ramsay,” he said. “You would not want to turn her out onto the streets without a decent settlement, though, would you?”

“She don’t have to work the streets if she don’t want to,” Mr. Ramsay said. “She could get some respectable employment instead. There are plenty of jobs for girls in kitchens and such. She does it because she enjoys what she gets from the likes of you and me, Stapleton. All the same they are, the Cyprian breed. Prissy too, if you don’t mind my saying so. Quite the lady, she is. Could get a job as some old girl’s companion just like that if she chose.” He snapped his fingers. “But that would be too dull for her. She would prefer to earn her bread by——” He completed the sentence with an obscenity.

Sir Gerald noticed that his hands were opening and closing at his sides again.

“If you want to go to Lettie, Ramsay,” he said, “don’t let me keep you. I shall stroll around here awhile longer and see what sells.”

“I hate to leave you alone,” Mr. Ramsay said, “but I had better get this thing over with Lettie while I have it in my mind. How many handkerchiefs do I have?” He laughed as he patted his pockets. “I am bound to have the waterworks turned on all over me.”

Sir Gerald turned away.

Bertie Ramsay was only a chance acquaintance, a friend of Peter West, another acquaintance of Sir Gerald’s with whom he had agreed to go to Vauxhall a few evenings before. He had not been looking for any such entertainment, but it was the same evening as he had been asked to go with the Majorses. He had pleaded a prior engagement and had thought that perhaps the opportunity to be seen by them squiring around another young lady was too good a one to be missed. It appeared to have worked like a charm.

When Ramsay had had nothing to do at White’s an hour or so earlier and he had had nothing particular to do, either, he had agreed to accompany the man to Tattersall’s.

He hoped Ramsay would forget about his plan to call at Brookhurst during the summer.

Sir Gerald left Tattersall’s and began to walk aimlessly. He had never thought of his relationship with
Priss as anything sordid. Even when he had taken her as his regular whore at Kit’s it had not seemed sordid. He was a normal young man with normal appetites, satisfying them in a thoroughly normal way at a whorehouse that had a reputation for cleanliness and skilled girls.

Priss was his mistress, the woman he housed and paid to give him regular and exclusive access to her body and the satisfaction of his needs. There was nothing unusual about such an arrangement. He benefited, Priss benefited, everyone’s interests were served, and no one got hurt.

There was nothing sordid about it.

Sir Gerald looked up sharply to find himself the object of a furiously shaking fist and a stream of hair-raisingly colorful language. It seemed that he had crossed a street with his head down and caused a near collision between a gentleman’s phaeton and a vegetable cart. It was the carter who was excited. The gentleman was grinning.

“Who is she, Stapleton?” he yelled. “You had better keep yourself alive for her, old chap.”

Sir Gerald grinned back at him and raised his hat to the carter.

He could not associate vulgarities like “plowing” and that other one Ramsay had used with Priss and what happened between them in their bed.

Priss was too good to be described in coarse terms. Not good in the way one would expect a whore to be
good, perhaps, but good in the way one would expect a wi—. Well, she was good. She satisfied him utterly and always had. Even that very first time she had given him precisely what he had asked for. He could not remember a time when she had failed to please him in bed.

And yet he had told Ramsay in that careless tone men tended to use when talking of women, especially women they used only for sex, that he would have thought of dropping Priss too if he had not leased the house for a year.

Would he? Was he keeping her only because he had paid for the house anyway and might as well get value for his money? Would he drop her if he had to pay out more rather than keep her over the summer so that she would be there for him when he returned to town in the autumn or winter?

Devil take it. He stood still on the pavement and did some mental calculations, frowning down at the ground. It was early July. He would spend the second half of the month at Brookhurst and all of August and September. Often he stayed for October, too, and sometimes for November. Two years before he had stayed until after Christmas.