A Precious Jewel

by Mary Balogh

  Sir Gerald sat.

  PRISCILLA ENTERED THE blue salon the following morning with some trepidation. She had just had a lengthy and painful interview with Miss Blythe, who had told her when it was over that Sir Gerald Stapleton was waiting to speak with her.

  He had come to say good-bye, she thought. She wished he had not. She had begun to accustom her mind that morning to the knowledge that she would not see him again.

  Surely he did not expect her to take him to her room. The rules allowed no clients in the mornings. Miss Blythe had said nothing about a bending of the rules.

  She wished that her jaw were not as black and yellow as it was or her eyes so ringed with dark shadows. She had not slept at all during the night, weary though she had been. And she had been unable to stop at least some of the tears from flowing.

  “Priss?” he said, turning from the window he had been staring through and crossing the room to take her outstretched hands. “Ah, your poor face. I wish I could have stopped it happening, you know, and whatever indignity you were subjected to.”

  She smiled warmly at him. “Sir Gerald,” she said. “You have come to take your leave of me, sir? How kind of you. I do hope you enjoy the summer in the country.”

  “I have come to take you away from here if you will come,” he said.

  She withdrew her hands from his and stared at him.

  “I have leased a house,” he said. “I think you will like it. I have hired two servants and plan to hire as many more. And I have arranged for some furniture. Will you let me set you up there, Priss? Will you be my mistress?”

  “Your mistress, sir?” she asked. His mistress? Only him? No others? No daily appointments encompassing three hours and involving three gentlemen? Only him? Only Sir Gerald? He was not going away, after all? She was not to be saved from herself after all?

  “I don’t like sharing you,” he said. “It is distasteful to me. I want you for myself. Will you come?”

  Would she come? He wanted her for himself? He did not wish to share her? There would be only him? Only him!

  “You have spoken with Miss Blythe about this?” she asked.

  His grin made him look almost boyish for a moment. “She has driven a hard bargain on your behalf,” he said. “You must discuss it with her, Priss, and make known to her any changes you wish to make to the agreement. She has it all written out this morning for my signature. She will doubtless read it to you. I think you will find that it protects you from all possible disasters. In particular, you will be well provided for when I grow tir—” He ran a hand through his fair curls. “When we finally part, for whatever reason.”

  When he grew tired of her. How soon would that be? A matter of weeks? But surely he would not go to the trouble of furnishing a house for her and signing an agreement with her for a matter of weeks. Months, then? Surely not years. He must be close to thirty years of age. He would wish to marry soon—if he were not married already. Her stomach jolted. She had not considered that possibility. But it was a possibility nonetheless.

  She smiled warmly. “I am sure Miss Blythe would have had my best interests at heart,” she said.

  “You will come, then?” he asked.

  She had no choice, of course. She conceded that point without even stopping to consider further. She knew that she had no choice even though Sir Gerald would not force her to go, and Miss Blythe would certainly not do so. He had asked her to go with him, to be his mistress, and she knew herself quite powerless to resist. There was no point in going through the pretense of thinking wisely.

  “I think I would like to accept, Sir Gerald,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Splendid,” he said, smiling at her. “The house will be ready for you in two days’ time. Will that suit you, Priss? I have asked Miss Blythe to release you from your other duties in the meanwhile—provided you accepted my proposition, that is.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “May I see the house before it is ready, sir? Perhaps I can help to set it up.”

  He scratched his chin. “I would like to have it perfect for you,” he said. “But it is to be your house, Priss. If you would like to have a hand in arranging things, then I suppose I could take you there.”

  “Will you?” she asked, her eyes sparkling at him. “Today, sir?”

  “Right now, if you wish,” he said. “I have no other engagements until this afternoon, and I have my curricle outside the door.”

  “I shall fetch my bonnet,” she said, turning toward the door. But she turned back before opening it. “Will you mind being seen with me, sir?”

  “If you are to be my mistress, Priss,” he said, “I daresay we will be seen together from time to time. I am not ashamed of you.”

  She smiled and let herself out of the room. She drew several great steadying breaths before approaching the stairs. But before she reached the top, she was running up them two at a time.

  She was to be Sir Gerald Stapleton’s mistress. There was to be no one else, no more clients at Miss Blythe’s. Just him.

  SIR GERALD FOLLOWED HIS NEW MISTRESS FROM room to room in the house he had leased just that morning and watched her. She walked quickly and lightly, and she looked about her eagerly, seeing everything. Her cheeks were more flushed than usual, her eyes brighter.

  “I will need heavy curtains at these windows,” she said when they came to the main bedchamber upstairs. “The sun will shine brightly in the mornings. Not that I mind being awoken early, of course, especially on a day when there is sunshine. This is a pleasant street, sir.” She stood looking out through the window. “It seems quiet.”

  “I chose the neighborhood with care,” he said.

  She turned and smiled warmly at him.

  “This is a cozy room,” she said several minutes later, standing in the middle of the parlor downstairs and looking about her. “I like square rooms. They are easier to arrange. And I am glad the fireplace is large. The room will be warm in winter.”

  He strolled into the smaller room adjoining the parlor. “You will be able to use this room as your private sitting room if you wish, Priss,” he said.

  She came to stand at his shoulder. “Oh, no,” she said. “I think I will make this into a bedchamber. It will be more convenient when I am entertaining you, will it not, just to walk through into this room rather than having to go upstairs. The rooms up there can be my private ones.”

  “As you wish,” he said. “It is to be your house, Priss.”

  She looked rather like a child with a new toy, he thought. Her dark curls were somewhat disheveled from her bonnet. Her face looked sparklingly pretty if one ignored the ugly bruise on her jaw.

  “I have put the choosing of the furniture into the hands of one of my own servants,” he said. “If you wish to make any special requests, you had better tell me now and I will let him know.”

  “But I would so love to choose everything myself,” she said. “May I, please? It is a man who is to furnish the house? Men invariably have poor taste and never think of coordinating colors and styles.” She smiled impishly at him. “Some men, anyway. I do not necessarily include present company.”

  He ran one hand through his hair. “Is not a bed a bed and a sofa a sofa?” he said.

  “You see?” She laughed at him. “I rest my case, sir.”

  “Priss,” he said, “if you are to be my mistress, I think it would be as well to drop the ‘sir,’ don’t you? You had better call me Gerald.”

  “Gerald,” she said, and smiled at him.

  Before they left the house to return to Miss Blythe’s, he agreed to send her shopping the next day with Mrs. Wilson, the housekeeper he had engaged for her. He had also agreed to allow her to interview and hire the remaining two servants he wished her to have.

  “If they do a poor job,” she said with a smile, “I will have only myself to blame since I will have hired them myself. Are you sure you are willing for me to have four servants, Gerald? It seems an excessive number.”

  “You
are my mistress, Priss,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to be able to say that I don’t know how to treat you right.”

  He was glad the house was unfurnished and there was no opportunity to consummate their new relationship. She somehow looked different from the Prissy he had been calling on and bedding for all of two months. She looked prettier and daintier and more childlike.

  She looked like more of a person. He had only ever seen her engaged in her profession. He had not expected that she would be interested in the house and its furnishings or in its staffing. He had expected that she would be interested only in the performance of her duties and the earning of her salary.

  He knew nothing whatsoever about her, he realized suddenly. Except her body, of course. He knew that quite intimately—and liked what he knew.

  He did not want to know her as a person. He would be glad when she was in residence and he could visit her, as he had at Kit’s, purely in order to satisfy his appetites. Except that he would no longer have to make an appointment and his visits would no longer be limited to one hour.

  She was his. His personal possession. He liked the thought despite all his earlier reluctance to keeping a mistress.

  But he was glad he could not make love to her that day. She was out of her milieu and he was a little uncomfortable with her. Besides, there was that bruise and the reminder it gave him that she had been regularly possessed by many other men apart from himself. It was a knowledge that he had carefully suppressed until the night before when he had seen the physical evidence.

  He did not like the thought.

  “I do like it, Gerald,” she said as she tied the strings of her bonnet in the hall and he picked up his hat and cane. “Thank you and for the offer you made me this morning. I will try my very best to please you for as long as you choose to employ me.”

  “You always have pleased me, Priss,” he said. “You are good.”

  “Are you not leaving town after all?” she asked.

  “Not just yet,” he said. “I’ll go into the country for the summer. But you will be able to stay here, Priss. I have leased the house for a year.”

  She smiled at him and preceded him through the door.

  THE EARL OF SEVERN was laughing—again. He had seemed to do nothing but laugh since his return to town, Sir Gerald thought.

  “So you have set her up in a love nest, Ger,” the earl said. “She must be something, this Prissy of yours. You must take me to meet her before I return to the country next week. Will you?”

  “I suppose I could arrange that,” Sir Gerald said. “But I have told her it is her house, Miles. I would have to have her consent first.”

  “Of course,” the earl said. “Your timing was poor, though, Ger. I was going to come to Kit’s with you the next time you went. Who is there these days? Is Rosemary still with Kit?”

  “She left ages ago,” Sir Gerald said.

  “Ah,” the earl said. “An interesting girl, Rosemary. I suppose I shall remain celibate and do honor to this mourning.” He looked down at his black clothes rather ruefully.

  “The thing is,” Sir Gerald said, running one hand through his hair, “that I intended to put an end to it last night, Miles. I was going to change to a different girl or leave there altogether for a while.”

  The earl laughed. “After visiting her three times a week for the last two months?” he said. “It sounded to me as if you were pretty keen on her, Ger.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Sir Gerald said. “I don’t intend to get pretty keen on any female. As soon as they get wind of it, they get their fangs in. And then you are lost forever. I hate women. It’s just too bad they are necessary to one’s well-being.”

  “Ger.” Lord Severn got up from behind the desk in his library and strolled to the fireplace, where he set one elbow on the mantel. “Females make up at least half of the human race. Is it not a little nonsensical to generalize about them, to believe they are all the same beneath the skin?”

  “They are,” Sir Gerald said fervently. “They like to own and possess. They like to pretend to tender feelings, but in reality their own comfort is the only thing of any importance to them. They are clever, vicious schemers. Trust a woman and you are lost for life.”

  The earl clucked his tongue. “Yes, they do like to manage,” he said. “Witness my mother and my sisters, for example. But usually it is a benevolent despotism, Ger. They have this enormous compulsion to try to arrange for the happiness of the men in their lives without ever thinking to consult the man’s wishes first. But there is no particular malice in most of them.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it, anyway.” Sir Gerald got abruptly to his feet and crossed the room to the window. “She has already had me take her to the house and agree to let her choose the furnishings tomorrow. And she has already decided that our bedchamber will be the room adjoining the parlor instead of the master bedchamber upstairs as it should be. It will be more convenient, she said.”

  “And it probably will, too,” the earl said, laughing again. “Desire can cool quite abominably in the passage from downstairs parlor to upstairs bedchamber, Ger. One must make the choice between a cooled desire or a hard bed on the parlor floor. Your Prissy sounds like a sensible wench. And you did tell her that the house is hers, did you not say?”

  Sir Gerald frowned. “I would not have done it if some oaf had not cuffed her and bruised her,” he said, “and forced her into some perversion she would not give me the details of. I saw blood, Miles, I swear, and look where it has led me.”

  “Whores have to take their chances,” the earl said. “It comes with the profession. And Kit would have seen to it that it did not happen again. I don’t believe you would have reacted the same way with any other girl, Ger. You fancy this girl. You might as well humor yourself and do her a favor. Becoming a mistress is a step up in the world, after all. Enjoy her while you have her.”

  “But how am I to get rid of her?” Sir Gerald asked.

  “Think of that when you finally weary of her,” Lord Severn said with a grin. “A good fat settlement and some sparklers for the throat or ears usually do the trick quite nicely, I have always found. It is something of a blow to one’s pride, but most girls are quite happy to be handed on to someone else after a while.”

  “Kit has made me sign an agreement that looks after the settlement,” Sir Gerald said.

  The earl threw back his head and laughed. “Good old Kit,” he said. “She treats her girls rather like daughters, doesn’t she? Your Prissy must be a favorite of hers.”

  “The favorite, apparently,” Sir Gerald said with some gloom. “I really do feel quite trapped, Miles. It was almost like signing a marriage contract.”

  “Well,” his friend said, “you have to remember, Ger, that in reality it was no such thing. I wish I could go to the races. Would you care for a ride out to Richmond just for the mere sake of a ride?”

  “Why not?” Sir Gerald said with a sigh. “I can’t go to Priss until she leaves Kit’s the day after tomorrow. It would look a trifle impatient, wouldn’t it?”

  His friend laughed again and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Ger,” he said, “I can hardly wait to meet the girl.”

  PRISCILLA COULD NOT remember a happier day since before the deaths of her father and brother. She had been frantically busy, seeing to the arrival of the furniture and draperies and carpets, directing workmen as to their placement, using her own meager strength to move furniture that after all did not look quite right where it had been first placed, arranging draperies into pleasing folds, interviewing half a dozen girls for the two positions available on her staff.

  She had had a bath and washed her hair before dinner and had put on the rose-pink evening gown with the flounced hem that had always been her father’s favorite, though it was now woefully old-fashioned. Her bruise, she had been happy to see at an anxious glance into her mirror, had faded to a dull yellow.

  She wandered through from the master bedchamber
with its simple furnishings to the smaller bedchamber next door, which was furnished only with a chair and table and easel. Her few books were beside her bed in the bedchamber. Her paints and paper and pens and needlework were in the smaller room, which she had named her workroom.

  This would be her private world, the world Gerald would not see, the world she would inhabit when not working. She felt thoroughly happy as she looked about her. She had not had a private world at Miss Blythe’s even though she had been fortunate enough to have several hours of every day to herself, alone in her room. But the room had been the same one in which she had done business for three hours of each day.

  Now her two worlds could be kept separate. She felt almost like a real person again. She felt less dominated by that oppressive label that reduced her to only a body to be used for men’s pleasure. She felt less of a whore.

  She looked about her one more time with pleased satisfaction and turned to the stairs. Gerald had left a message that he would call on her during the evening. She did not know the exact time, as she had always done at Miss Blythe’s. But it did not matter. She loved the downstairs, too, and had spent more time and money on its furnishings. She had wanted her work environment to be a pleasant one.

  She had wanted it to please him.

  She stood up when she heard the knock on the outside door and waited for her manservant to answer it and to announce her visitor. She held out her hands to him.

  “Gerald,” she said. “How lovely to see you.”

  “Hello, Priss,” he said, taking her hands and squeezing them. “You have settled in, then?”

  “As you see,” she said. She twirled about, her arms extended. “What do you think?”

  She had not been extravagant. Everything had been chosen very carefully with an eye to comfort and color and economy. He had given her carte blanche when she went shopping, but she had not wanted to waste his money. She did not know how wealthy he was. Besides, money was never to be wasted.