A Precious Jewel (18 page)

She had been the one person in his father’s life, Gerald had often thought, whom his father had loved. He had adored her, pampered her, lavished gifts on her. And she had always glowed in his presence, young though she was to have a husband so much older.

Gerald had still been hurting when the marriage took place, still bewildered by the realization that his mother had lived for five full years after he had thought her dead, still in misery over the knowledge that she had not loved him after all.

Helena had soothed the hurt and finally taken it away altogether. She had been a friend to him—an
older, wiser friend who had brought the sunshine back into his life. She had always found the time to talk with him and to listen to all the pent-up frustrations and uncertainties and hopes and dreams of a growing boy. She had shielded him from his father’s impatience with him. She had helped him with his studies, sitting patiently with him for hours while he memorized poetry and history, explaining with unending patience facts about numbers that eluded his understanding.

He had grown to love her dearly. Not as a man loves a woman, and not quite as a son loves a mother—she was, after all, only five years his senior. He had loved her as one friend loves another older and wiser friend. He had worshipped her.

She had always loved the outdoors and had laughed merrily whenever her husband had fondly accused her of doing so only because she knew she made such a pretty picture against the background of flowers and trees. She had had a habit of going up behind him, circling his shoulders with her arms, and kissing his cheek. Gerald had always marveled at how she could make so free with his grim father, and at how his father clearly liked it, though he rarely smiled.

Gerald often used to seek her out to share some confidence. He had sought her out one summer day when he was eighteen. The twenty-nine-year-old Sir Gerald could no longer remember what it was that
had sent him hurrying so eagerly to find her. But he had known to seek her out at her favorite place—the lake.

She had been sitting on the wall of the bridge, wearing a low-cut pink dress, her image reflected among the lily pads in the water. As pretty as a picture. His father was quite right. Gerald had hastened his steps.

“I have been waiting for you,” she had said. “I knew you would find me. So tell me all about it, Gerry.” And she had smiled her warm smile and reached out her hands for his.

He could no longer remember what it was he was to have told her all about.

He had closed the gap between them and put his hands in hers. And he had talked eagerly on about something—he could no longer recall what. Poor foolish boy. She had had all his love, all his trust, there in her two hands.

“Gerry,” she had said when he paused for breath, squeezing his hands, “you are all grown up, aren’t you? And such a very handsome young man.”

He had known that to be a bouncer. He had started to grin. But there had been something in her face.

“The young ladies must be turning their smiles and their wiles on you already,” she had said. “Are they, Gerry?”

He had probably blushed.

“Ah, but you will need someone very special,” she had said. “Is there anyone special?”

He had shaken his head.

“You are a virgin, Gerry?” she had asked in her soft, sweet voice.

Suddenly he had been aware of birds chirping, insects droning, silence.

“The first time should be beautiful for you,” she had said. “It should be with someone who will know how to make it so.”

She had smiled into his eyes and released one of his hands. With her free hand she had slid her dress off one shoulder and downward to expose a generous and creamy breast, its tip pink. And she had drawn his hand against it and beneath it to cup it. She had covered his hand with her own, guiding his thumb over her nipple, pressing inward on it with her own thumb over his. Then she had exposed her other breast in the same way and cupped it with his other hand.

He had stood still and terrified, the unfamiliar softness and weight of a woman’s flesh in his hands, an uncomfortable heat surging through his body, a painful tightening in his breeches.

She had not taken her eyes from his face or stopped smiling.

“Does that feel good, Gerry?” she had asked. “You need not be afraid. Move your hands. Do what you will.”

He had moved his hands over her breasts, looking down at them, swallowing awkwardly.

“Oh, Gerry,” she said, her voice changed, husky,
“you are so beautifully young. You do not know how I have longed to be touched by a young man. By you. You do not know how I have wanted you this summer.”

She had reached out her hands and begun to unbutton his breeches.

He had turned in a panic and run.

A few weeks later, after two other such encounters, during one of which he had lingered longer and allowed her to fondle him, he had gone to his father and asked if he might go to university, though he had no capacity for learning.

Perhaps it had been the only time his father had been pleased with him. He had gone to Oxford very shortly afterward and lost his virginity to a thin and pockmarked chambermaid two days after his arrival there.

The only time he had seen Helena after that was at his father’s funeral almost three years later. She had been heavily veiled in black and had never once looked directly into his eyes. She had taken the legacy her husband had left her and disappeared from her stepson’s life.

It all flashed through Sir Gerald’s mind as he stood at the end of the bridge again, looking again at a pretty, pink-clad, eagerly welcoming, warmly smiling woman whom he loved and whom he had begun to trust.

Just as he had trusted Helena with the fragile
emotions of a boy whose mother had abandoned him and whose father was disappointed in him. He had learned with Helena—finally—that a woman’s love is a fickle and a selfish thing. He had learned that the only person it was ever safe to trust was oneself.

And it was gone. All of it. Within the span of a minute or perhaps less. She was Priss, his mistress, the woman who satisfied him utterly in bed and made him comfortable out of bed. A paid employee, marvelously skilled at her profession. And he was the poor fool who could never quite seem to wake up to the realities of life.

She lowered her hands.

“It is getting a little chilly, don’t you think?” he said.

She looked up at the sky. A small cloud had moved across the face of the sun. There were more clouds approaching.

“Yes,” she said. “I think perhaps we are in for a change in the weather.”

“We should walk back to the house,” he said. “There are some letters and papers that need my attention.”

“Yes,” she said, getting to her feet, smiling at him.

“I have been neglecting them,” he said, turning and clasping his hands at his back as she came down the arch of the bridge toward him and fell into step beside him. “I had better spend the afternoon in the study, Priss.”

“Yes,” she said. “I shall read. There are so many books in your library that I have not yet read.”

They walked side by side in silence, not touching.

“I think we’ll be going back to London soon,” he said. “Tomorrow, perhaps. Or better still, the next day. I have done everything that needs to be done here. The country gets dull after a while. It is time to go back. Will you have enough time to get ready?”

“Of course,” she said. “It will be as you wish, Gerald.”

“I think it is going to rain,” he said.

“Yes.” She looked up at the sky again.

“You ought not to have wandered so far from the house, Priss,” he said. “You might have got caught out in it and taken a chill.”

“But the weather is so warm,” she said. “And it will not rain until later this afternoon, Gerald.”

“Even so,” he said. “You should not wander away, Priss, without letting me know where you are going. What if I had twice as much work as I do? I would have wasted precious minutes looking for you.”

He could not believe the stupidity of his words or the irritability of his tone. It was almost as if the voice was quite divorced from his brain.

“I am sorry, Gerald,” she said. “It will not happen again.”

He spent the afternoon in his study, standing at the window watching the clouds move in, and sitting at his desk, his head in his hands.

What a prize idiot he had made of himself in the past two weeks, he thought—starry-eyed and lovesick over a whore. He thought of her as she had been at Kit’s. He thought of all the other men who had possessed her there, calculated the numbers, wished he could put names and faces to them. He thought of the one who had smacked and bruised her face and deliberately visualized all the possible perversions the man had then subjected her to—and paid her for performing.

But, no. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He was being unfair to Priss. It was not her fault that life was as it was and circumstances were as they were. It would be unfair to hate her and want to degrade her merely because she was doing well the job he had employed her to do.

And if she was a whore, then he was a man who found it necessary to employ whores because he was no good at real relationships.

He got to his feet and wandered to the window again. She had been right. It was still not raining, though it was going to do so.

“Priss,” he said to her when they rose from the dinner table that evening after almost an hour of stilted conversation and loud silence, “I am going back to the study. There is still plenty to do, and I have made arrangements to leave the morning after tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Don’t wait up for me,” he said. And he drew a deep
breath and said what he had not thought he would have the courage to say. “In fact, you might as well sleep in your own room tonight. I won’t disturb you then when I come to bed.”

“As you wish, Gerald,” she said.

“You might as well stay in there tomorrow night as well,” he said, “and get plenty of rest ready for the journey. Journeys are always exhausting.”

“If you wish,” she said. “I shall say good night, then, Gerald.”

“Good night, Priss,” he said, glancing down at her mouth and turning to stride away in the direction of his study.

He spent the next four hours getting thoroughly and methodically drunk, the first time he had done so since the night in London when he had gone to her afterward. This time he kept away from her both for the rest of the night while his bedchamber spun around at too dizzying a pace to allow him to close his eyes and during the next morning when his headache felt as large as the house.

P
RISCILLA RELAXED AGAINST
the cushions of the carriage and watched the scenery pass the windows. Soon—after two weary days—London would appear and she would be back home again.

Home! Yes, it was home, her workplace downstairs.

the rooms in which her real identity lurked upstairs. She longed to be back there, back upstairs.

Gerald, she saw, turning her head from the window for a moment, was looking out the window opposite. Their shoulders almost touched, but did not quite do so.

“We will be there soon,” he said, feeling her eyes on him. “We will both be home soon, Priss.”

“Yes.” She smiled at him.

“It will be good to be home,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The journey has been a long one.” He reached out one hand, but before he could touch hers, he returned it to his knee. “You must be weary, Priss.”

“Not too badly, Gerald,” she said. “The carriage is comfortable.”

All through the journey she had been making plans. He was tired of her. Their honeymoon had come to an abrupt end three days before. He had grown tired of her, as she had known he would sooner or later. She was not going to make a grand tragedy out of the situation despite the feeling of dull despair that gnawed at her consciousness. She would not let it in.

Soon, as soon as he decently could, he would break off with her, settle with her, and be on his way. Perhaps he would do it as soon as they arrived back in London, though she did not believe so. Gerald often found it difficult to be decisive. Perhaps he would
continue with her for a few weeks or a few months. Perhaps until Christmas. Perhaps until the lease ran out on the house.

She wanted to end it herself. When one knew that an inevitable end was approaching, and emptiness and pain, it was sometimes better to do something to hasten that end, to feel that one had some small measure of control over one’s destiny.

She should end it herself. She should tell him when they returned to her house that she no longer wanted to live there or be in his employ. She should tell him that she was eager to return to Miss Blythe’s or to begin some other life.

Except that perhaps she was no more decisive than he. And the thought of returning to a life of whoring, of offering herself to more than one man each day and to any man who cared to pay for her favors, was nauseating and terrifying. It had not been so bad the first time because she had really not known what it would be like. She had not looked beyond that first terrible deflowering. Now she did know.

No, she could not go back. And yet if she left Gerald now she would probably have to. She had saved almost every penny of her earnings, and she had her diamond and emerald bracelet, but they would not be enough to keep her until the age of thirty.

If she stayed with Gerald, she could earn a little more money, another few months of freedom once she was finally alone. And if she waited for him to cast
her off, she would be entitled to a larger settlement. Miss Blythe had arranged for that. If she was the one to leave him, the settlement would be small.

She wanted to end a relationship that had become nothing but pain. But real life forced her to be practical.

“I’ll be leaving London again tomorrow,” he said abruptly, and her heart turned over within her. “I have been promising to visit all sorts of people. I should call on my aunts. I must do it now without putting it off again as I have done so many times. I’ll probably be away for a month or two.”

“Early autumn,” she said. “It will be a good time to travel, Gerald. Neither too hot nor too cold.”