A Precious Jewel

by Mary Balogh

  “But I like to hear about your people, Gerald,” she would say, and sometimes he would flash her a grateful smile and continue with what he had been saying.

  Sometimes she longed to tell him that for years she had helped her father run an estate. She longed to talk with him, discuss matters with him, as well as merely listening. She longed to go with him on his visits.

  But she held her peace. She did not want him to know her as she was beginning to know him. And of course it was out of the question for her to go anywhere with him that would bring them into communication with other people. She was his mistress and living with him, unchaperoned, at his country home. She imagined that gossip about her was rife in the neighborhood, with disapproval of his lack of taste in bringing her into the country with him.

  He spent two whole days puzzling over the estate books in his study, a permanent frown on his face.

  “Hazelwood explained it to me this morning,” he said to Priscilla when she went quietly into the room during the afternoon and stood at his shoulder, looking down at the neat columns of figures. “But I never could make head nor tail of accounts. I’ll understand them yet, though.” He continued to frown down at the book.

  Priscilla scanned it over his shoulder. He must have a very efficient bailiff. The accounts were clearly and carefully kept. They made perfect sense to her after five minutes. She could have explained them to Gerald. But she set one light hand on his head, her fingers playing with his hair, and stayed quiet.

  “You don’t need to be in here among all this man stuff, Priss,” he said after a while, sitting up and circling her waist with one arm. “Why don’t you put your bonnet on and go sit in the rose arbor? Am I neglecting you?”

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, resisting only just in time the impulse to lean down to kiss his forehead, “I will fetch my embroidery, Gerald, and sit quietly in here with you. May I?”

  He brightened. “Looking at your pretty face may inspire me with understanding,” he said. “You don’t know how fortunate you are, Priss, to be a woman and not to have such things to worry about.”

  “I know,” she said. “I will leave the puzzling to you, Gerald.”

  It took him two days, but eventually he mastered all the business that had been conducted on his farms since his residence there the summer before.

  Priscilla learned that he was restless and that frequently he did not sleep well. After that first night he told her that she might as well sleep in his bed at nights and save him the trouble of having to move from bed to bed. It was not an arrangement that she relished, giving as it did too much the illusion of closeness between them and foreboding as it did too much of loneliness for the future. But she had always obeyed him, even if on occasion she had argued with him. She obeyed this command without protest.

  She became quite accustomed to waking in the night to find him tossing and turning beside her or gone from the room altogether. Once—it was early dawn—she got out of bed to look from the window and was in time to see him galloping off from the stables. Often when she woke he would be standing naked at the window, gazing out into the darkness.

  Sometimes she left him alone with his own thoughts, knowing the importance of privacy. Sometimes she crossed the room to stand beside him, murmuring his name or leaving him to accept the comfort of her presence or ignore it as he wished.

  On one occasion he set an arm about her and drew her against his side.

  “You should be sleeping, Priss,” he said. “Did I disturb you?”

  “I am quite happy to be standing here with you,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said, rubbing his cheek against the curls at the top of her head, “you are a good girl.”

  She kept him silent company until he began to talk.

  “I should have sold it when my father died,” he said. “It was foolish to keep it, was it not? There are nothing but ghosts here, anyway.”

  “Brookhurst?” she said. “You thought of selling it?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “That’s the strange thing. Only now does it strike me that I should have done so. Sold it. Sold all the memories, all the ghosts. Let someone else live with them.”

  “Don’t you love it, Gerald?” she asked. “I have had the impression that you do.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I could never do anything right, you know,” he said. “Never. I suppose it must have seemed a cruel fate to him that I was the one to survive when there were ten or so other possibilities. He told me once that most of those dead babies were boys. His sons. My brothers.” He laughed softly. “But I was the one to live. God’s joke on my father.”

  “Gerald,” she said. “I am sure he loved you. You were his only son, his only child.”

  “I was never very bright, you know,” he said. “My tutors used to despair of ever teaching me to read or figure. Figures especially have always been my demon. You wouldn’t know, Priss, but there is so much to be learned and it always terrified me because I could not seem to make much progress.”

  “But I have seen you work through your estate books,” she said, “and understand them.”

  “You would not realize this,” he said, “and perhaps I should not tell you. Perhaps I should just let you continue to be impressed with my learning. But there are many who would have looked at those books and understood them in an hour. It took me two days.”

  “Gerald,” she said, setting her head on his shoulder.

  “He used to rage at me,” he said, “until I got older and he realized it was hopeless. Then he was worse. He used to look at me with open contempt. Priss, you wouldn’t know how I tried to please him, how I longed and longed to please him.”

  She lifted a hand and brushed a tear from her cheek.

  “At school I scraped by,” he said. “I would not even have gone to university if … Well, something happened to make me desperate to leave home. I went to Oxford and was a disaster there. It was all Greek to me, even the subjects that were not literally Greek.”

  “Gerald,” she said, “it does not matter. Intelligence and knowledge do not make a man.”

  He laughed softly. “He used to rage at my clothes,” he said. “I have to rely on my tailor and my valet to help me these days, Priss. I never know quite what should go with what. I can never quite see why it matters that something should match something else or that something should be all the crack. I didn’t know that that blue dress of yours was unfashionable until you told me so. It’s pretty. That is all I see.”

  She burrowed her head against his neck.

  “My father was an educated man of culture and impeccable taste,” he said. “And he was blessed with a son like me.”

  “I am sure that he loved you anyway, Gerald,” she said.

  “The only thing I was ever any good at was music,” he said. “And I learned early that that was a feminine accomplishment and not in any way to be encouraged. A gentleman can be expected to appreciate good music and to be discriminating in his musical tastes, of course, but he must on no account be a performer.”

  She lifted her head. “You play an instrument?” she asked.

  “The pianoforte,” he said, shamefaced.

  “There is one in the drawing room,” she said with a smile. For days she had been aching to play it, and had even come close to giving in to the temptation when he was away from home. But she was afraid that one of the servants would tell him that she had been playing and there would be too many awkward questions for her to answer. “Will you play it for me one day, Gerald? Will you? Please?”

  “I am out of practice,” he said. “But I suppose I could play something for you, Priss, if you would like.”

  “I would like,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He looked at her in the dim light that glowed through the window. He stroked one hand over her naked breast. “I am not sorry I brought you with me,” he said. “You have a kind heart, Priss. I ought not to have said all these things to you. Now yo
u will realize that I am a very ordinary man with many shortcomings. Certainly not hero material.”

  You are my hero, she wanted to tell him. But they were the wrong words to say. She was only his mistress. She searched for the right ones.

  “You are a person, Gerald,” she said, “no more and no less heroic than almost every other man you could name. You have always been good to me, and that is all I care about. The degree of kindness we show to other people is really all that matters, isn’t it?”

  “You are chilly,” he said, drawing her close to his side again, “and you didn’t even put anything on to keep yourself warm. Come. I have kept you from bed for too long. Will you mind if I keep you from sleep a little longer, Priss? I want you.”

  “You know,” she said, “that it is always my pleasure to give you comfort.”

  “Not just your job?” he asked, settling her on the bed and cupping her face in his hands, smoothing his thumbs over her cheeks before joining her there.

  “My pleasure,” she said, reaching up her arms for him, opening her body to give him the treasure of her love, which he would recognize only as pleasure and comfort.

  HE GOT TO know her better after they moved to the country, though he was not at all sure that he wished to do so. She began, little by little, to become a person before his eyes, a person with depths of character he had only guessed at before and accomplishments he had not dreamed of. It had been better, perhaps, to know her only as his mistress, to know only her body with any degree of intimacy.

  She had very little to do with his servants, keeping away from them as much as she could and not even trying to interfere with the running of the house. And yet there was a quiet dignity about her, a ladylike demeanor, which appeared to win their respect within a few days of her arrival. They treated her with deference even though it must have been no secret in the house that she shared his bed at night.

  She accepted without question the fact that when he visited his neighbors or accepted their invitations to some evening entertainment, he would go alone. And on the few occasions when visitors arrived at the house, she would take herself off quietly to some place where she would not be discovered without his having to tell her to do so.

  It was after one such visit that he made a major discovery about her. He did not know where she had gone and had to ask his housekeeper. Miss Prissy was sitting in the conservatory, the woman told him. He went in search of her there.

  It seemed she was unaware that the visitors had left. Or perhaps it was that she had not expected him to come looking for her. However it was, she looked up startled when he stepped close to her and hastily slid a book beneath the cushion of the seat next to her.

  “Priss?” he said, frowning. “Were you reading?”

  “What?” she said. But she flushed. He had been far too close to have misunderstood what he had seen. “Yes, I was.”

  “You can read?” he said, withdrawing the book from its hiding place and seating himself beside her.

  “Miss Blythe taught me,” she said, her voice breathless. “It is just a little vanity, a little pleasure of mine.”

  “Journal of the Plague Year,” he said, reading the gold writing on the spine of the book.

  “By Daniel Defoe,” she said. “I do not like it as well as Robinson Crusoe, though it is worth reading.”

  “I read that at school,” he said. “Robinson Crusoe, that is. He is the one who got stranded on a desert island for so many years?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is a marvelous depiction of how the human spirit can triumph over almost any adversity, even loneliness and near despair. And of how it can bring order out of chaos and something bearable and meaningful out of emptiness.”

  He frowned. “I found it a little tedious, if I recall,” he said. “There weren’t enough characters, though it started well enough with the shipwreck and all.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I think you are right about the sparsity of characters, Gerald, though Friday is an interesting one.”

  “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, re
sting 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.