A Precious Jewel (22 page)

She had been careless for a long time. She had known about it and worried about it vaguely. But not enough to do anything about it.

Oh, she never once neglected to cleanse and douche herself whenever he put his seed in her. She had always completed the time-consuming and tedious procedure that had been such a prominent part of her training and the part that Miss Blythe had always enforced most strictly.

But she had known—it had been stressed during her training—that speed was of great importance.
that the seed must be flushed out before it had a chance to take root.

When she had shared Gerald’s bed at Brookhurst, she had not got up after each coupling. She had been too embarrassed to do so, too afraid that he would question her. And during that two-week period of their honeymoon she had been too happy and too drowsy from their lovemaking to think about getting up from the bed in order to be practical.

By the time she did cleanse herself there, they had often been making love all night, and some of his seed had been in her for many hours. She had got away with it there. Her monthly periods had always come with relief-bringing regularity.

Yet now, ironically, when he did not often stay with her for a whole night, her carelessness had caught up with her. She was a week late. Only a week. But her cycle had always been perfectly regular. It had not been upset even when she first became sexually active. There was not a great deal of hope that she was wrong in her fears.

Besides, there was a deep, quite intangible physical certainty that she had taken his seed into her womb and had accepted it there. Part of him and part of her had united, and now there was a new life in her womb, a life that was both him and her and yet neither.

She knew that she had his child in her. Their child. The realization paralyzed her with terror. There
had not been a great deal at Miss Blythe’s that could bring shame to any of the girls. Allowing oneself to be got with child was deeply shameful there, the one thing that would have even the most hardened of the girls hanging her head and quailing with terror at the scathing lecture she must face alone from Miss Blythe. Having to be sent away and looked after by Miss Blythe while awaiting the birth was slow and dreadful humiliation, the return to work and the pitying, wondering looks of the other girls an unenviable ordeal. Miss Blythe would not allow any girl who wished to remain with her to abort a child.

Priscilla did not have enough money—even if she sold her precious jewels—to keep even herself for the seven years until she could claim her mother’s inheritance. She could certainly not keep herself and a child, too. And if she must work for her living, there was only one type of job she was qualified for, but Miss Blythe would never take her and a child, too. No abbess of any other whorehouse would take a child, either.

And if she were to take to the streets alone, who would look after the child while she was at work?

Yet she could not do—she would not do—what other girls always did. She would not give up Gerald’s child. She would die before she gave it up.

She sat alone on Christmas evening, her book closed, one hand stroking absently over the smooth leather of its cover, opening her mind to the terror she
had been repressing for a week. She was going to bear a bastard child, hers and Gerald’s. And she would keep the child until death made it impossible for her to do so any longer.

But there were plans to make. She was going to have to bring her liaison with Gerald to an end within—how long? Two months? Three? Would it be very noticeable after three? Not outwardly, perhaps. But he frequently saw her naked. She would have to be gone within three months.

It would be as well. She had always lived with the conviction that when the lease ran out on the house he would also wish to terminate their agreement. And though he had seemed to be pleased and contented with her since his return in October, there had been none of the fire or the tenderness of that brief spell during the summer—except perhaps on the evening of their Christmas.

She was his mistress, one who satisfied him, one he was accustomed to and comfortable with. But still, when all was said and done, she was his mistress. And spring would bring with it a restlessness, a desire to move on to another woman, or to several women for a time, perhaps. Perhaps he would return to Miss Blythe’s.

It would be as well to end her employment herself instead of waiting for the inevitable and humiliating dismissal. Perhaps since she would have been with him for almost a year and had always given him good
and obedient service—perhaps he would overlook the fact that she was the one to end it. Perhaps he would pay her the full settlement he had agreed to with Miss Blythe.

Perhaps she would be able to demean herself enough to ask him. After all, she would be asking not for herself, but for his child, though he would not know it.

And perhaps she would go to Miss Blythe—almost certainly she would. She would endure the scolding that had never failed to dissolve into tears every poor girl who had ever had to face it. She would endure it because she also needed Miss Blythe’s help. She had no idea what she would do after she had left this house and Gerald’s protection.

Priscilla traced the gold lettering on her book, not seeing what she was doing. It was Christmas Day. She was thinking of another woman, who had given birth to a bastard child on that day. Mary, and her faithful Joseph, who had married her despite her disgrace, although he had not even been the child’s father.

But then, of course, Mary had not been a whore.

“A
ND THEN AFTER
church,” Sir Gerald said, holding his mistress’s naked body snugly against his side, rubbing his cheek against her soft curls, “they took me to a neighbor’s house where it turned out every resident and his dog for a five-mile radius of the village was
assembled. They had to present me to every mortal one of them, Priss. And every time I was their dear nephew and did I not resemble my poor dear mother to a quite remarkable degree? It was deuced embarrassing.”

“But you must have given them so much pleasure, Gerald,” she said.

“They just about burst with it,” he said. “Aunt Hester knitted me an egg cozy large enough for my head, to be worn at night—complete with tassel. I tried to wear it to please her on Christmas night. I almost died of itch before midnight.”

Priscilla chuckled.

“And Aunt Margaret knitted me a pair of mittens,” he said, “in canary yellow. It was devilish embarrassing, I tell you, Priss, trotting along the village street on Christmas morning, an aunt on each arm, to take our constitutional, two canary paws waving in the wind for all to see and wince over.”

“Gerald.” She was shaking with laughter. “You are exaggerating.”

“No, the devil I am not,” he said indignantly. “I’ll fetch them to show you, Priss, though I will not put the nightcap on my head to demonstrate. Maybe Prendergast could get some use out of it.”

She chuckled again and fell silent.

He stretched his toes, feeling their warmth beneath the bedclothes and the warmth and relaxation of his whole body. It seemed to him that it was the first total
contentment he had felt since kissing her good-bye beneath the mistletoe more than two weeks before.

He had intended to go home for the night after paying his visit to her, since he had an early appointment with his tailor the next morning. But he could just as easily go there straight from Priss’s, he decided. He had not worn evening clothes. He yawned and settled himself for sleep.

“Gerald?” Her voice was a questioning whisper.

“Mm?” he said, trying not to lose the drowsiness that was settling over him.

“Gerald,” she said, “when the lease runs out on the house, you will not be renewing it, will you?”

“Eh?” he said. “That’s a few months in the future, Priss. I don’t have to think of that yet. What put that into your head?”

“I thought a year would be long enough,” she said. “I thought you would be ready for a change by then. You will, won’t you?”

He was awake and irritable. What the devil?

“How would I know?” he said. “Don’t worry about it, Priss. I will give you plenty of notice when the time comes. And I’ll make a decent settlement on you. Go to sleep now.”

“I think in the spring I should go home,” she said.

“Eh?” he said. “Home? Where you came from, you mean?”

“They miss me,” she said. “They want me to come back.”

“They?”

There was a pause. “My parents,” she said, “and my brothers and sisters. I am the eldest. I had to go away to work. But—but one of the boys is old enough now to work with Father and I can go home. I think perhaps I should, Gerald.”

“Tell them I need you here,” he said. “I won’t hear of your going on a visit, Priss. Not for any length of time, anyway.”

“I meant for always,” she said. “They want me back for always. I think we are growing a little tired of each other anyway, aren’t we?”

“I am not tired of you yet,” he said, thoroughly angry and hurt—and with a cold thread of fear needling at his heart. “And what you feel doesn’t signify, does it, Priss? I don’t pay you to be tired or anything else. I pay you to give me pleasure with your body.”

It was always the way of human nature, one part of his mind told him, but not that part that controlled his speech. The best way to cope with pain was to pass it on to someone else. Be slapped and slap right back. Be hurt and hurt right back. He wanted to hurt her.

“Yes,” she said.

“I don’t want to hear any more about it, then,” he said, his voice stern and implacable. Just like his father’s. “You have a good enough job here, Priss, and I pay you well enough, too. And they don’t really want
you back. Not with the way you have been earning your living.”

Her voice was higher pitched than usual when she spoke. “They do not mind,” she said. “They say they do not mind. They love me for who I am.”

“Then they can have you back later,” he said, turning onto her, pushing her legs wide with his own, thrusting himself inside her, wanting to hurt her. “When I am finished with you, Priss. I am not finished yet. You can tell them that.”

She turned her head to one side and closed her eyes. She lay stiller than usual, unrelaxed, unyielding while he took her quickly, in anger and hurt and fear.

“I have to go,” he said, drawing away from her as soon as he had finished. “I have an appointment with my tailor in the morning.”

They were both silent as he dressed in the near darkness.

She was still lying on the bed, uncovered, when he turned to her before leaving.

“I’ll be here in the evening the day after tomorrow, Priss,” he said, so thoroughly his father that he felt fear at himself. “I’ll expect you to be ready for me. And I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense. Understood?”

She looked blankly at him. “I shall be ready when you come, Gerald,” she said.

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. He took
a step closer to the bed in order to lay one knuckle against her cheek.

“Priss,” he said, “why did you have to make me angry? And what do you mean about being tired of me? Haven’t I treated you well?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Have I ever neglected you?” he asked. “Or been brutal with you? Have I ever demanded too much of you or come to you too often?”

“No,” she said. “You have always been good to me, Gerald.”

“Well, then,” he said, “why are you tired of me?”

She stared mutely up at him until he felt anger welling in him again. He clamped his teeth together and stared down at her.

“Well, then,” he said. “I’m sorry. You will just have to treat it as a rather unpleasant job, Priss, which has to be done in order to earn your daily bread. I believe factory workers and coal miners must feel the same, though they have to toil for many more hours than you.”

He turned and strode from the room. “Gerald,” she called after him in that thin, high-pitched voice that she had used earlier. He did not answer her call.

P
RISCILLA PREPARED HERSELF WITH GREAT CARE
two evenings later, wearing the rose-pink gown he liked, and dabbing on some of the perfume she had indulged herself with on a shopping trip just after Christmas. She had washed her hair that afternoon and brushed it carefully into soft curls.

She had hurt him. She knew that. She had chosen just the wrong time to speak to him. She might have known not to speak of such things when he had been settling for sleep after making love to her. His mind had caught onto the idea that she had grown tired of him, and he was hurt.

She sat beside the fire in the parlor, her hands in her lap, planning how she would greet him, how she would smile, what she would say. She did not want him hurt. He had such a fragile sense of his own worth, anyway. She must convince him that she was
not tired of him at all. She must find some other way within the next two months of leaving him.

She sat until one o’clock in the morning before taking one of the candles into the hallway and calling to Mr. Prendergast to lock up and see to the fire. And she lay awake upstairs for another few hours, alert for his coming.