by Mary Balogh
But it was as if those two weeks and three days had never been. She led the way into the inner room, closed the door behind him, turned for him to unbutton her dress, and stepped out of it—she had removed all her undergarments before coming downstairs earlier. She undid the buttons of his shirt and lay down on the bed on her back, watching him.
Just as if those weeks and days had never been.
He stood beside the bed for a few moments, gazing down at her so that she wanted to reach out and take him by the hand. Put it into words, she wanted to tell him. I cannot read your eyes. But she said nothing. It was not her place to speak.
“The usual, if you please, Priss,” he said.
It was the only indication that there had ever been anything else between them. He had not had to give her instructions since she was at Miss Blythe’s.
She smiled and opened her arms to him. “It will be as you wish, Gerald,” she said. “Come, then, let me give you pleasure.”
His body was so very familiar, slim and pleasingly well muscled, with the smell of a remembered cologne. She knew so well how to fit herself to him, how to tilt herself and yet remain relaxed so that he could reach deeply into her. She knew the slow thrust of his body, the developing rhythm, his long steady enjoyment of the act of love. She knew when to ease her hips from the bed so that his hands could slide beneath. She knew the final deep, firm penetrations, the warm gush of his seed deep within. She knew the almost soundless sigh against the side of her face.
He was so very familiar. Gerald. Her employer. The man who paid for the use of her body and for her tenderness. The man she loved.
Not her lover. Not her love. That Gerald had been different. That Gerald had not used her body. He had loved it. He had loved her. But that lover had gone and would never return.
Her employer remained. For the moment, at least. For the moment she held him warm and sleeping on her body. She hooked the bedclothes with one foot, grasped them with one hand, and pulled them up about his shoulders. She held them around him, an excuse to have her arms about him. And she memorized the feel of him, the smell of him, the quiet sound of his breathing.
He slept for half an hour. It was almost as if all the visits he had paid to Miss Blythe’s had conditioned him to be done with his pleasure within an hour. He lifted himself away from her and the bed and began to dress.
“Thank you, Priss,” he said when he was fully clothed again. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a dressing gown. “It was good. Your holiday is over, I’m afraid. I shall call again the evening after tomorrow.”
“I shall be ready for you,” she said.
“I’ll try not to be so late,” he said. “It was good of you to wait up, Priss.”
It is my job, she almost said, but she stopped herself in time.
He was half out through the door when he stopped suddenly and turned to her. “Oh, here,” he said, reaching into an inner pocket of his coat and drawing out a small package.
“What is it?”
He placed it in her hands. “Just a little gift,” he said. “I bought it in York on my way home.”
They were tiny diamond-and-emerald earrings.
“I thought they would match your bracelet,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, touching a finger to one of them. “Yes, they will.”
“Well,” he said, turning to the door again, “I must not keep you up any later. Good night, Priss.”
“Gerald,” she called after him. “Thank you. They are beautiful.”
“Just a little something,” he said, and continued on his way.
Priscilla held the earrings against her mouth and closed her eyes. She let the tears run unheeded over the back of her hand.
HE HAD SPENT three days with his aunts, both unmarried, the younger ten years older than his mother. She had been their favorite, the apple of their eye.
“We were so very pleased for her when she married Sir Christian,” Aunt Hester, the elder, explained to him when they had recovered from their surprise at seeing him and their stiffness with him. “He had property, you know, and a comfortable fortune. And he seemed a steady young man.”
Yes, his father had been a steady man all his life.
“But all those babies,” Aunt Margaret said with a sigh and a blush for his male presence. “And all but you dead at birth or even before, Gerald. Poor dear Doris.”
“She worshipped you,” Aunt Hester said. “You were all that had made her life meaningful, she used to say when she was lying upstairs dying. Did she not, Margaret?”
Aunt Margaret sighed again. “If you could but have brought yourself to write to her, Gerald,” she said. “Just a few lines, dear. Just a line even. But there, boys are ever heedless, we used to tell her to console her. Did we not, Hester?”
“Write to her?” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “Write to her, Aunt, when I thought she was dead?”
Both of them stared blankly at him and exchanged looks with each other. And the whole truth came out. The whole simple truth, which he supposed both he and they should have guessed at years before.
There had been that time not long before his mother’s “death” when she had been going to take him to visit his aunts. He was to stay very quiet about it, he remembered, so that it would be a surprise to everyone. He could remember thinking it great fun to steal from the house when it was still night, because even Papa must not share in the secret, and run without talking down the driveway to the waiting carriage. And great fun to ride all day in the carriage with his mother and put up at an inn for the night when it was too dark to continue on the road.
Yes, he remembered it when he really thought about it, though the memory was lodged so far back in his consciousness that he had not thought of it for years. And he could remember laughing merrily the following morning when he awoke to find his mother dressed and his father in their room. It had been a super game, but his father had been too clever for them. They all went home and he never was taken to visit his aunts. He could not remember being upset at the change of plans.
His mother, it seemed, had been thwarted in her plan to leave his father and to take him with her. And she had “died” just a month or two later. She had been sent away, banished, forbidden to see or communicate with her son ever again.
She had written, of course, sent numerous gifts, all of which had been returned to her.
“But we thought you might have written, Gerald,” Aunt Hester said. “You had no quarrel with her, after all, and she said you had always been fond of her.”
“Of course, dear,” Aunt Margaret said, “we realized that perhaps your papa had forbidden you to write. But boys usually have a way of doing what they want to do despite their papas. And she was your mama.”
“But I thought she was dead,” he said. “Until her body arrived home five years later, I did not know she had been alive.”
Aunt Hester dissolved into tears.
“Ah,” Aunt Margaret said, “the cruelty of the man. I am sorry, Gerald, to speak so of your papa and him dead, too. But the cruelty. And she died so slowly, dear, of consumption.” She held a handkerchief to her eyes for five full minutes.
“She will know,” Aunt Hester said finally, straightening her spine and returning her own handkerchief to her pocket. “She will know the truth, Gerald. And there is no fear that your papa is where she is now to ruin her joy again. And she will be with your ten brothers and sisters, dear, and more happy than she ever was here, poor Doris.”
They fussed around him, making a pot of tea and arranging several small currant cakes on a plate for him, respecting his need for silence.
And he sat silently, staring at the floor before his feet, grieving again for his mother who had died in loneliness, deprived of the one being who had made her life meaningful—him. He sat silently while his mother was restored to him again after sixteen bitter years.
And when he was able to think of the matter—later, after he had swallowed two of the c
akes to please his aunts and drunk two cups of the overstrong tea, and after he had retired to bed, having refused their offer of hot bricks to set at his feet—then he was able to realize that he need no longer feel the burden of having failed his father.
His father had failed him.
He left his aunts three days later, much against their wishes and with many hugs and kisses to take with him. He was not allowed to leave before he had given a firm promise to return.
“Such a fine young man,” Aunt Hester said. “And our own nephew, Margaret. Our only living relative apart from each other.”
“And with poor Doris’s hair,” Aunt Margaret said. “Such lovely fair curls, Gerald, dear. And Doris’s smile. And her good heart.”
He made directly for London, though he did stop in York to choose a gift for Priss. He could scarcely wait to see her. He wanted to take her the world, and the sun, moon, and stars, too, for good measure. But instinct told him not to take her too lavish a gift. Something modest and personal would seem far more like the love offering he wanted it to be.
The earrings seemed to have been made for her. They seemed to have been made to match her bracelet. He drew them out of his pocket many times during his journey home to look at them and to dream of sitting beside her as she opened the package. He would take them from her hands and clip them to her ears himself, kissing each ear as he did so and then kissing her mouth.
He would tell her about his mother. He wanted her to know about his mother.
But one’s nature does not change overnight, he discovered with some regret when he returned to London. It was all very well when he was far away to dream about what he would say and do. But he had never been good with words. He had never been easy in relationships with other people. And in the eleven years since his encounters with Helena, and the sixteen since the loss of his mother, and in all the years with his father, being suspicious of other people and unwilling to trust them with himself had become deeply ingrained.
And circumstances were against him. He dashed off a note to her the morning after his late return to town and then somehow got himself entangled in a misunderstanding that resulted in his having to escort Miss Rush to the theater with the Bendleton party. It was eleven o’clock by the time he got to Priscilla’s house.
And why would any man visit his mistress at eleven o’clock? There could be only one possible reason. Clearly it was the reason she expected. She was the old Priss, Priss as she had been at Kit’s and in his keeping until the summer had made her into his lover. She was a mistress waiting to be bedded by her employer.
Incredibly, foolishly, disastrously, he had doubted again. He had looked into her eyes for some sign, for some indication that the Priss who had loved him—surely she had loved him—really had existed and still did exist in the mistress who waited for him to take her to bed.
But she did and said only what her training had taught her to do and say. And that smile, which had always seemed so warm to him, was not warm at all, he saw when he looked searchingly into her eyes. It was not warm, and it was not a smile. It was a shield, a cold and metallic shield behind which she hid.
But who was hiding behind it? He was too uncertain of himself, too unwise in the ways of human nature, too innocent, perhaps, to dare to try to find out.
And so he allowed himself to fall into the ritual she began. He bedded her, and even told her before he joined her on the bed and mounted her that he wanted it the old way. He did not love her body at all. He used it for a pleasure that did not turn out to be pleasure but only physical satiety.
And he was punished justly. She was warm and soft and yielding—and utterly passive. The way he liked his women to be. Sex without a relationship. Physical intimacy without involvement. The illusion that he was in control, that he was master.
He left her at midnight and remembered his gift only just in time. He gave it to her not at all in the way he had planned. He gave it as if it were nothing to him, a mere bauble, an afterthought. And she received it accordingly. She looked at it, agreed that the earrings would match her bracelet, and thanked him—an afterthought.
Instead of spending the night with Priss, as he had eagerly planned to do since the day before, he spent it wandering about the streets of London again, telling himself that he had had a fortunate escape, that it was better so.
There had still, after all, been Helena. And there was still his own nature, which was made for a dull and ordinary existence, not for love or passion.
He would make himself ridiculous if he tried to express his love. And the object of his love was not one who could be in any way fitted into the pattern of his life. Only as his mistress. She was his mistress already. He would keep her so for a while.
After a while he would have had enough of her. He would be glad to let her go, thankful that he had not said anything to her that would lead her to expect some permanent sort of relationship.
THEY SETTLED BACK into the old way again. And really it was not so bad, each felt. Both were grateful that a crisis had been averted, an ending avoided.
He came, not during the evening two days after his first visit, but early in the afternoon, long before she was expecting him.
“The air is crisp, Priss,” he said when she came running lightly downstairs, “and the sky blue, and all the leaves underfoot. I have come to take you walking.”
“Oh, have you, Gerald?” she asked, her eyes shining at him. “Maud has a cold and I have not been able to go out since yesterday. I have been so cross. I almost dared all by venturing out alone.”
“Don’t even try it,” he said. “You might feel the flat of my hand if I caught you at it, Priss.”
But his tone was light, and she smiled at him. Not her practiced smile, but almost a grin. And he noticed that she was wearing her earrings, though they were not quite appropriate wear for daytime with a wool dress. Even he knew that.
They walked through Hyde Park, which was almost deserted at that hour of the day and that time of the year, crunching the leaves underfoot, swishing their feet through them.
“Just like a couple of schoolchildren,” she said.
He told her about his mother. All of it. He had not planned to do so. Perhaps that was why the words came easily and fluently.
“Poor lady,” she said when he had finished. “Some people know so little happiness in their lives, Gerald. I do not wonder that your aunt said what she did about heaven. One can only hope that there is a heaven, where the injustices of this life are set right.”
“Yes,” he said. “I wish I could have said just one word to her, Priss. I wish I could have said good-bye.”
“Poor Gerald,” she said. “But she was your mother. She knew your father and you. I think she would have realized the truth. Perhaps nothing as fiendish as your being told that she was dead. But she would have known that you did not stop loving her. Oh, she would have known that, Gerald.”
He patted her hand. “Perhaps,” he said. “You have a kind heart, Priss. Shall I take you somewhere for cakes?”
“There are cakes at home,” she said, “and jam tarts.”
“Let the jam tarts decide it, then,” he said. “Home it will be.”
He stayed with her until the following morning, and they were comfortable together the whole time with a quiet sort of friendship. He slept with his arm about her, her head on his shoulder, after coupling with her once. And he had slept the night through, he realized with some surprise when he woke up to daylight.
He kissed her hand when he was leaving and directed her to be ready for him in two days’ time. He would take her to one of the galleries, he told her, and she should teach him how to be a discerning art critic.
“Oh, Gerald,” she said, laughing, “there is no such person. There is only what you like and what you do not like.”
“But I never seem to like the right things, Priss,” he said with a smile. “I like what is pretty rather than what is considered great art.”
She
liked his smile when he was teasing. She wished he would relax and do more of it.
But she was content. The end was not quite yet, and she was glad of it.
And he planned how to please her. Now that he knew she was literate and intelligent, he planned to take her about to the places she would enjoy. No matter that he had avoided them during his years in London as he always avoided anything that would bring him only tedium. He would take Priss and enjoy seeing her happy.
“I shall see you the day after tomorrow, then,” he said. He would not allow himself to see her more than once in every two or three days, he had decided during the night walk about London.
“I shall be ready,” she said.
SIR GERALD’S AUNTS INVITED HIM TO SPEND Christmas with them, and he decided to go, drawn by the lure of family, which he had not known for years. It was not an easy decision to make. He wanted to stay in London with Priscilla.
But it was the best decision, he decided after it was made. If he stayed in town he would be besieged by the usual invitations from well-meaning acquaintances who pitied his lone state. And how could he reject such invitations, using as an excuse that he preferred to spend the holiday with his mistress?
Besides, he thought, Christmas was a time for love and intimacy. Perhaps if he stayed he would disturb the fragile peace and contentment that had existed between him and Priss since his return at the end of October. Perhaps love would flower between them again and leave them empty once more when the holiday was over. And perhaps this time they would be unable to pick up the pieces again. He did not want to lose her, he had discovered over the past two months.
“What will you do with yourself, Priss?” he asked her. “Will you be lonely?”
“No, of course I won’t,” she said to him, smiling. “Miss Blythe has invited me to spend the day with her. The girls have a holiday, you know, and will be feasting and celebrating. Perhaps I will call for an hour but not for the whole day. I shall stay here and celebrate with Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Prendergast and Maud. They have nowhere else to go. Miriam has asked me if she may have the afternoon free to visit her family. I have told her she must go on Christmas Eve and not return until the day after Christmas. The door will be barred against her, I have said, if she tries to return earlier.”
