A Precious Jewel (14 page)

“Kit taught you to read?” he said.

“Yes.” She smiled a little uncertainly at him.

“How long were you with her, Priss?” he asked.

“Almost six months altogether,” she said, “before you took me away from there.”

“Six months,” he said. “You must be an apt pupil.”

She laughed and bit her lip. “But I had very little else to do,” she said, and blushed.

He returned the book to her. “There are many volumes in the library here,” he said. “My father collected them. You may go in there anytime you wish, Priss.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He found her in there one day when he was late returning from a lengthy discussion with one of his more garrulous tenants. She was sitting at the desk, writing.

“Gerald,” she said, slipping the paper beneath the blotter and coming around the desk with her usual gesture of outstretched hands. “I did not hear you come. You must have ridden around to the stables by the other way. You have had a very long morning. I hope you have eaten. Are you very tired?”

“Only glad to be home,” he said, squeezing her hands and stopping himself only just in time from leaning forward to kiss her cheek. “You write too, Priss? May I see?”

“Oh, it is nothing,” she said hastily. “Only scribbles. A diary.”

“Ah,” he said, “a diary. Secrets. I won’t pry, then.”

“Thank you,” she said. “May I bring you some refreshments, Gerald?”

“Come and walk in the garden,” he said. “You will need your bonnet, though, Priss. It is hot out there.”

He played the pianoforte for her the evening after admitting to her that he played. He took her into the drawing room, which he rarely used because of its excessive size, and seated her beside him on the bench.

“I am very out of practice,” he said, “and never was exactly concert material anyway, Priss. Don’t expect too much. My fingers would tie themselves together if I tried to tackle Bach or Mozart. I shall play you some folk songs. Perhaps you will recognize some of them. Did you ever hear music before you left home?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

He played “Robin Adair” while she sat very still, watching his hands and listening. He was pleased to find that he made only two mistakes. It had been almost a year since he had last played. And he recalled that the previous summer he had spent hours of every day at the keyboard, killing the ghosts, thumbing his nose at his father’s contempt for his feminine accomplishment, losing himself in the one form of beauty that could set his soul on fire.

He started to play “Barbara Allen.” Priscilla hummed the tune quietly.

“You know it?” he asked.

“Yes.” She sang the first verse as he played the melody again and continued on with the second verse. She had a soft and sweet soprano voice. The
whole sad story lived itself out beneath his fingers and from her lips before they both fell silent.

“More of Kit’s teaching?” he asked at last.

“I know the song,” she said. “I heard it a long time ago.”

“Priss,” he said. But he said no more. He started to play a short Bach finger exercise, surprised to find that the stiffness was going from his fingers already. She had sung in a voice that had known some training.

Who was she? Devil take it, who was she? But he did not want to know. He was afraid to know. He wanted her to be Priss.

He was a little sorry for his decision to bring her into his bed all night and every night. But how could he order her back to her own bed without giving the impression that she had displeased him? He could never find the right words.

She was slowly banishing the loneliness and all the feelings of inadequacy that had haunted him all his life. She was there, always there. If he was awake and unable to sleep, and tossing and turning to find a comfortable position, she was there, quietly asleep beside him, a softness and a warmth to draw him. And he often moved closer to her, resting his head against her arm or wrapping his own carefully about her waist, and found that suddenly he was comfortable and sleepy again.

If he was too restless to lie on the bed and got up to
stand by the window, he knew her to be sleeping quietly just behind him. He knew that when he was drowsy and ready for sleep again, he could climb back into bed and warm himself against her warmth and fall asleep in the circle of her peace.

And on those occasions when she woke up and came to stand beside him, he was able to verbalize in his mind, and sometimes out loud to her, what it was that was holding him from sleep, what it was that so very often held him from sleep. She pushed back the loneliness.

But he was sorry for it. For it was all illusion and there was the terror there constantly in the back of his mind that the loneliness, the emptiness, the futility, of his existence would rush back at him with even greater force when he was finally alone again—as he would inevitably be sooner or later.

She was a woman. Men did not pretend to give love. His father had never pretended. At least he had always known where he stood with his father. But women were the great pretenders, the dangerous ones. For there were men, gullible men like himself, who sometimes believed them.

His mother had always been there, too, to soothe away the loneliness of being an only child, to comfort him after a harsh word from his father. She had always been there. Always—until he was eight years old.

And Priss was always there now. Whenever he
needed her, she was there. And it would be so easy to fall into the fatal error of believing that she would always, always be there for him. It was so easy even now to believe that she was there because she cared, because she wanted to be.

“You know that it is always my pleasure to give you comfort,” she had told him on one occasion when he was feeling particularly vulnerable.

“Not just your job?” he had asked her, cupping her face in his hands and gazing down into her warmly smiling eyes before coming down on top of her.

“My pleasure,” she had said.

And he had allowed himself to believe her for the rest of that night, burying himself in her soft warmth, imagining that it was love she gave, giving back love—though he had never learned how to please a woman—then lying on his side afterward, his arms about her, his head pillowed on her breast, her hand stroking lightly through his hair.

It had felt very good. Sometimes it was good to give in to such illusions.

Provided one remembered soon enough that it was illusion and not reality. Provided one remembered that she was being paid very well to create just such an illusion. Provided one recalled that even at Kit’s whorehouse that very first time, when she had never set eyes on him before, she had smiled at him as if he were the only man in the world and pleasured him as if he were the only man ever to have possessed her.

Provided one remembered that she was a woman. Just as his mother had been. And just as Helena had been.

Sometimes he wished that he had not brought her from London with him at all. And often he wished that he had left her in her own bedchamber, to be used only occasionally, when his body cried out for her.

T
HEY HAD BEEN AT BROOKHURST FOR ALMOST A
month when the Earl of Severn arrived unannounced one afternoon.

“My mother and Connie have taken themselves off to spend a month or so with Pru and Theo and the children,” he said, shaking his friend heartily by the hand. “I excused myself from accompanying them and came here on the chance that you would be in residence, Ger. You are going to entertain me for a couple of weeks.” He grinned.

“I would have invited you,” Sir Gerald said, “if I had thought you were going anywhere while still in mourning, Miles.”

Priscilla was slipping quietly from the room. But the earl’s voice stopped her when she had her hand on the doorknob.

“Prissy?” he said. “Did Gerald bring you down here, too?” He was walking toward her, his hand
outstretched, she saw when she turned to look at him. “The country air must agree with you. You are looking remarkably pretty.”

She looked at his hand, swallowed, and placed her own in it. “Thank you, my lord,” she said, and would have continued on her way.

“You are not leaving on my account, are you?” he asked. “You must not do so. Ger, command your lady to stay, if you please. And where did you leave your manners this morning? My tongue is hanging out for a cup of tea.”

“Nothing stronger?” Sir Gerald said. “Tea, Miles?”

“Tea in the presence of a lady,” the earl said with a grin.

“Sit down, Priss,” Sir Gerald said.

Lord Severn waited for her to sit before taking a chair himself.

She sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap while the two friends exchanged news and banter. And she gradually relaxed. He had made her feel like a lady again, the earl, just as he had when he had called on her in London with Gerald.

And he really was the most handsome man she had ever seen, she thought dispassionately. Doubtless every second female who looked at him fell hopelessly in love with him, and yet he seemed not to be a conceited man. She of course was not one of those females. There was no corner of her heart left to lose.

“Prissy,” Lord Severn said, turning to smile at her,
“we are being very ill-mannered talking of people you do not know. Connie is my younger sister, Pru my elder. Pru has two children already and is swearing to have five more before she settles into a dignified middle age. I am not at all sure I will have the energy to play uncle to seven energetic youngsters.”

“But doubtless some of them will have grown to a quieter stage of maturity by the time all seven of them are out of the cradle, my lord,” she said.

“Ah,” he said, “the voice of sense. Is she always so grave and so wise, Ger?”

Sir Gerald smiled at her.

“Gerald,” she said that night when she was undressing for bed, “I feel very embarrassed. I ought not to be here when the Earl of Severn is visiting you, but I do not know where I should go. Do you wish me to return to London?”

He frowned at her. “This is my home,” he said, “and I have chosen to bring you here, Priss. Anyone who does not like it can stay away or take himself off as soon as he knows the truth of the matter. But you don’t have to worry about Miles. He likes you.”

“Does he?” she said. Certainly the earl had impeccably good manners. Whether or not he liked her she did not know. And even if he did, she supposed that he might find it distasteful to be staying at a home where the owner’s mistress was in residence.

“I am wearing one of these infernal shirts again,” Sir Gerald said irritably, “and I have dismissed my
valet for the night. Come and open the buttons for me, Priss, will you?”

She crossed the room to him.

“There,” she said a few moments later. “You just have to slip them through the buttonholes, Gerald, instead of tearing at them.”

“That’s easy enough for you to say,” he said, smiling ruefully at her, “when you can manage to sew all those delicate stitches into your cloth. My fingers won’t always do what I tell them to do.”

“Yes, they will,” she said. “On a keyboard they are faultless, Gerald. I will not hear you constantly belittling yourself.”

He was laughing when she looked up into his face.

“Now I know how to draw a compliment from you,” he said, pulling his shirt free of his waistband. “You sounded quite cross then, Priss.”

“I
was
cross, too,” she said, laughing back at him. “You are a very special person, Gerald, and do not even realize it.”

“We had better go to bed,” he said, “before my head swells too large to balance on my shoulders.”

For a few days she succeeded in keeping out of the earl’s way whenever Gerald was not with her. Yet when the three of them were together, he would invariably draw her into the conversation.

She was playing the pianoforte in the drawing room one morning when Gerald had ridden out on business as usual and Lord Severn had gone into the
village. She had finally given in to the temptation to play a week or more before, having sat and listened to Gerald on several occasions. She hoped that the servants would never have occasion to mention the fact to their employer.

But when she finished a Haydn sonata that she had been practicing for several days, she jumped about on the bench, aware suddenly that someone was standing silently behind her.

“I startled you,” the earl said with a smile. “I do beg your pardon. The French windows were unlatched and I was drawn by the sound of music. You have a fine touch.”

She stood up, her heart pounding. “Please, my lord,” she said, “don’t tell Gerald.”

His eyebrows rose. “He does not know?” he said.

“He plays himself,” she said. “Very well.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “That gives you something in common.” He looked closely at her.

“He believes himself so lacking in accomplishments,” she said. “But he has this, and I believe he is proud of it even though his father was contemptuous of his talent.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, “the late Sir Christian Stapleton. There was not one grain of humor in the whole man, I believe. You are afraid that you outclass Gerald, Prissy?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “He is far more talented than I. But perhaps he would not realize that. Besides …”