A Precious Jewel

by Mary Balogh

  “Not the animals, Priss?” he said. “There are birds, too, apparently.”

  “If it is all the same to you, Gerald,” she said, “I would rather not. I cannot bear to think of animals being held in captivity. I think they should be free in the wilderness and the birds free in the sky.”

  “But then no one would ever get to see them close up,” he said.

  “But in paintings we would,” she said, “and in our imaginations. Besides, is it right to deprive another creature of its liberty merely for our pleasure?”

  He shrugged. “All the old armor and stuff it will be, then,” he said. “I just hope you will not be horribly bored, Priss. How about the Crown Jewels?”

  “It would be splendid to see those,” she said. smiling warmly at him. “Are you going to take me there, Gerald? How kind you are.”

  “Well,” he said, “I have to take you about, Priss, don’t I? And I was busy all last week.” Busy going mad with loneliness and boredom, he thought.

  She did not, as he expected her to do, wander quickly through the armory and past all the weapons, picking out only what might be called pretty. She examined everything in minute detail. He would have been mightily bored himself if he had not simply enjoyed watching her absorption and admiring her blue muslin dress, which he could not for the life of him see as being unfashionable. He felt a surging of pride when an elderly gentleman glanced at her once and then returned his eyes for a more appreciative look.

  “Oh,” she said with a sigh when they were on their way at last to see the Crown Jewels, “so much history, Gerald. We are surrounded by all this richness of our heritage.”

  “You wouldn’t be nearly as fascinated, Priss,” he said, drawing her arm through his, “if you had had to read through history books and sit through history lessons as I was forced to do.”

  She smiled at him. “Perhaps not,” she said. “Sometimes it is an advantage to be a woman of no education, I suppose.”

  “Believe me,” he said, patting her hand, “it is. As soon as we have finished in here, I am going to take you for an ice.”

  “Are you?” she said. “What a lovely afternoon this is turning out to be, Gerald.”

  He remembered the night before as he drove her home in his curricle. He had treated her more like the whore she had been at Kit’s than as the mistress he had set up in his own establishment. He had been so determined to break from the growing dependency he felt on her during those last weeks when she had been at Kit’s and the first little while she had been with him that he had behaved entirely according to a preconceived plan.

  But it had not been satisfactory. He had left her house and wandered aimlessly about the streets for hours before returning home to bed and lying awake for another few hours. He might as well have stayed with her as he had wanted to do.

  It was late afternoon. He had a ball to get ready for. He should drop Priss off at the door and continue on his way.

  “Thank you for a lovely afternoon, Gerald,” she said, smiling brightly at him as he lifted her to the ground.

  She was such a tiny little thing, he thought. His hands almost met about her waist. And she weighed no more than a feather. The poke of her bonnet did not reach quite to the level of his eyes.

  “Will you come in?” she asked him. “I will have tea brought to the parlor.”

  “It is not tea exactly I have in mind, Priss,” he said.

  “It will be as you wish,” she said, preceding him up the steps as he watched the feminine sway of her hips.

  He wondered many minutes later if their beddings brought her any pleasure at all. She always lay so very still and gave no sign or sound at all. He raised himself on his forearms and looked down into her face.

  Was there a certain dreaminess in her eyes? he wondered. But if there was, it disappeared immediately to be replaced by the practiced smile, the one whose warmth seemed to proceed from the depths of her soul.

  He watched her as he moved in her, pushing himself deep inside her. She held his eyes, the smile fading a little.

  “Gerald,” she whispered to him, “am I not pleasing you?”

  “You are pleasing me very well,” he said. “You always do, Priss. You are a good girl.”

  He continued to watch her after she had closed her eyes. After a while her teeth caught at her lower lip and he knew that his scrutiny made her self-conscious. He lowered his head against her curls and proceeded with his slow lovemaking.

  And for the first time he wondered about her, about the life she had lived before becoming a whore, about the forces that had led her willingly or unwillingly to adopt that profession, about her thoughts, her hopes, her dreams.

  He should not have come inside the house with her, he thought. The afternoon had been a good one. He should not have brought her to bed when he was feeling pleased with her and even affectionate toward her. He did not want her to be a person to him.

  Priss.

  Just his mistress, not a person.

  He slid his hands beneath her to hold her steady and drove himself to a quick climax.

  It was just sex with Priss. Sex for him, business for her.

  He felt her twitch at the bedclothes with one foot, as she usually did. The blankets and her arms settled warmly about his shoulders. He turned his face into her soft, sweet-smelling hair and allowed himself to slip into sleep.

  LIFE FELL INTO A PATTERN THAT PRISCILLA DID not find by any means unpleasant. She had a great deal of time to herself and used every moment of it to be busy. The day never seemed to have enough hours in it. She grew dissatisfied with writing stories and began to write a whole book. And she became absorbed with her characters and caught up in their emotions so that hours could pass that seemed more like minutes.

  Gerald came to her frequently, sometimes every day for a week, sometimes with gaps of several days between. She learned to expect him daily but not to live for his coming. She learned to enjoy his company and their physical encounters for what they were worth without giving in too strongly to the illusion that he was her lover, though the illusion was always there in the part of her that she knew to be fantasy.

  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 w
orry 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, Stapleto
n?”

  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.