A Precious Jewel (17 page)

“Well, then,” she said, smiling at him, “I suppose it would be all right.”

“I still have not taken you up the hill, have I?” he asked, gesturing toward the back of the house, and the wooded hill that formed the northern boundary of the park. “It is a strenuous walk, Priss, but there is a splendid view from the top. Shall we do it?”

“Yes,” she said. “That would be lovely.”

“After luncheon,” he said, turning toward the house with her, his arm still about her waist. “I shall have Cook make up a small picnic basket for us again. Come upstairs with me, Priss. I want you.”

“Yes,” she said as he hugged her closer.

The honeymoon lasted for two full weeks. The weather cooperated—there was scarcely a cloud in the sky during the daytime. The little rain they had was kind enough to fall at night. Her body cooperated—she had had her monthly period just prior to their first real loving. And the neighbors cooperated, leaving them alone, accepting, however disapprovingly, the fact that Sir Gerald Stapleton wished to spend his days with the unchaperoned young lady who was his companion.

Priscilla had always lived a great deal in her imagination. Perhaps that very fact helped her to distinguish between illusion and reality. She knew that what she was experiencing, what Gerald was experiencing, was not anything of any permanence. Men did not fall irrevocably in love with women they had
taken from whorehouses. He would have too much pride to do so and would be too much a product of his society. And even if he wished to so thumb his nose at convention, society would not allow it. And society would inevitably win. It always did.

She had made her choice when she had taken her first client at Miss Blythe’s and sacrificed her virginity to him. And she would not do anything as futile and foolish now as regret that decision. If she had not entered on her profession, she would never have met Gerald.

Things were as they were. For now, for this moment in time, however long it lasted—but it would not last very long—they were in love. She loved him beyond time, but even he—yes, it was not wishful thinking to believe so—even he was in love for this moment of time, though he said not a word to her of his feelings.

And they were lovers. Gloriously, passionately lovers. In all those encounters with so many different men at Miss Blythe’s and in all her encounters with Gerald, she had never dreamed that the sexual act, which could be so distasteful and even ugly, could also be an experience of such beauty and—she could never find quite the right word. Goodness? It was a thing of goodness. With Gerald it was goodness. It was right. It was the way man and woman should be. The way
they
should be.

She gave herself up to an enjoyment of their honey
moon, knowing all the dangers of so relaxing her guard, knowing that honeymoons always end, that life intrudes again sooner or later. She could only hope that in their case it would be later.

It was two weeks after the Earl of Severn left. Two weeks and three days of love.

She recognized the exact moment when it came to an end. And she accepted it with a heart that immediately locked itself against hopelessness and despair. She had had her honeymoon, her two weeks and three days of heaven. Many women never knew as much in a lifetime.

She was at the lake, having walked there one morning while Gerald was out on unavoidable business with his bailiff. She was sitting on the low stone wall of the bridge, looking out across the water. She had not brought a book with her. She was content during those days merely to sit and dream when he was not with her.

She saw him coming through the trees, his step eager, a smile on his face. She felt her love well up inside her like a tangible thing, and returned his smile. When he came to the end of the bridge, she reached out her arms to him.

“I have been waiting here for you,” she said. “I knew you would find me.”

And he stopped. The smile on his face lost its animation and gradually died over the span of perhaps one minute, during which time he neither moved nor
said a word. When he did speak, the honeymoon was over.

She knew it, and lowered her arms, and accepted it.

H
E WAS TOTALLY
and quite consciously in love. He had always been in love with her, he supposed—with her small and softly feminine body, with her dark and shining curls and wholesome prettiness, with her eager, mobile face and warm smile, with her quiet good sense and practicality, with her unfailing good nature.

But he had never trusted her. She had been an experienced whore when he met her and had been trained by Kit Blythe, who had a reputation for being one of the best instructors in London, if not
the
best. It was Priss’s profession to be all those things he had fallen in love with, her way of earning a living. And she had done well for herself. Life as his mistress was undoubtedly more luxurious and less demanding than life at Kit’s.

Or perhaps it was himself he had never trusted. He had never in his life had a good relationship. Oh, there was his friendship with the Earl of Severn. But never a good love relationship. He had been incapable of inspiring love in his father, and his mother’s love had not lasted beyond his infancy. Priss too, if he allowed himself to relax into his fondness for her, would let him down.

Of course she would let him down. He was merely the man who paid her salary.

He had always held her at arms’ length, determined to take only physical comfort from her, and not even allowing himself to become dependent upon that. And he had always planned to let her go before it was too late for him. He had always thought of the end of his lease on the house in London as the time when he would settle with her and find his temporary comfort with other women.

Never with a mistress again. Never again.

But he had done something he had not tried to do in years, something he had been afraid to try. He had done it without conscious thought and without a consideration of his fear. He had reached out to her to comfort her, to give something instead of always taking. For the moment he had forgotten that the hand that reaches out to help always gets slapped aside. He had given to her.

And it was only after he had given there beside the lake that he realized what it was he had given. It was himself. And he realized that in giving he had received. He had received all the wonder of love, all the closeness to another human being that went far deeper than the mere sexual union of bodies and that did not depend at all on the medium of words.

He was deeply and consciously in love. And accepted her love for him—it was not all completely
feigned; he would never believe that—and his for her as a gift.

And yet he said nothing to her. He did not need to—that was one reason why he said nothing. It was there between them, so obvious that even a third person could not miss it. Miles had had no intention of leaving quite as soon as he did. And Gerald did not know the words—that was another reason. He had never been good with words or swift with thoughts. There was no way of putting into words what was there in his heart and his head and his eyes and his body—and that he saw reflected in her.

There were no words. He did not try to find them. There were only the words of everyday conversation, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the communication that was all the time binding them together beyond the words.

“You should see it in autumn, Priss,” he told her when he took her on the long trek over the lawns behind the house and through the trees and up the hill the afternoon after Lord Severn left. “A riot of color in all directions. I remember coming up here as a very small boy—I think it must have been with my mother—and twirling about and about to see all the reds and oranges and yellows blur into lines until I fell down.”

She laughed with him and unlaced her fingers from his in order to spread on the grass the blanket she had carried beneath one arm.

“It is a lovely scene even in summer,” she said. “Did you ever sled down the hill in winter, Gerald? Or is it too far from the house? I remember….” But she turned to smile at him and did not tell him what she remembered.

“There was only me,” he said. “I don’t recall any children from the village coming out here in winter, though there were some tree-climbing sessions and torn breeches and spanked bottoms in summer.”

She laughed again as he reclined on one elbow beside her and sucked on a blade of grass. And they both fell silent as she clasped her knees and gazed about her and he gazed at her. He made love to her before they opened the picnic basket, just as he had made love to her that morning before luncheon, and as he would make love to her all night except when sleep cheated them of pleasure.

He did not lose touch with reality during the two weeks that followed. He was in love and he basked in the glory of that love with his lover. But he knew that love never lasted. He had seen proof of the fact too many times with the people he had trusted and loved.

He knew that sooner or later he would realize with his heart as well as his head that Priss was a totally ineligible lover. He knew that he would fall out of love with her just as surely as he had fallen in and that, when the time came, she would be merely his mistress again and perhaps not even that. He would make
a settlement on her and go on his way while she moved on to another protector.

And he knew that she would fall out of love with him. There was no such thing as permanency of love with women, and Priss was not in the business of love, only in the business of giving the illusion of love.

He accepted the fact that what they had would not last. But he wanted it to last as long as possible and pushed back into his unconscious mind the certainty of the end.

And despite himself he started to trust her. He started to relax. He started to be happy.

He came upon her in the rose arbor one afternoon after enduring a brief visit from the son and daughter of his closest neighbor. She was reading.

“Ah,” he said, “the loveliest corner of my whole property.”

She set the book aside and smiled at him. “Yes,” she said. “There is nothing more perfect than a rose, is there?”

He plucked a deep red bud, careful not to prick his fingers, and threaded it into her hair, as he had done on a previous occasion.

“Yes, there is,” he said, looking down into her eyes. “When I set them together, I can see that there is, Priss.”

It was the closest he ever came to putting into words his feelings for her.

He leaned down and scooped her up into his arms
and sat down with her. She smiled and nestled her head on his shoulder. When he looked down at her after a few silent, comfortable minutes, it was to find that she was asleep. They had been awake much of the night before.

He rested his cheek against her curls and closed his eyes. There was no gesture more touching than to fall asleep in another’s arms, he thought. Just like a child. He felt trusted. And trusting, too.

Despite himself he began to trust her, to believe that perhaps after all he was worthy of being loved.

He wanted their idyll together to last forever. He knew it would not last that long, but he made plans to keep her there at Brookhurst, alone with him, away from the world, until it did end.

It ended two weeks and three days after it began. And it did not end gradually as he supposed he had expected it to happen. It ended in the span of perhaps a minute, perhaps less.

It ended, leaving him shattered and bewildered and unhappy and wanting only to get away from there and away from her. Away from himself.

S
IR GERALD HAD COMPLETED HIS BUSINESS WITH
his bailiff. He had not rushed. He never did so when involved with duty. But he felt a rush of happiness when he was free again at last, and hurried to the house to find Priscilla. She was not in any of the daytime rooms or in the conservatory. Neither was she in the rose arbor, he found when he glanced in there. She would be at the lake. It seemed to be her favorite place.

She was there, he saw as he strode through the trees. The pink of her dress contrasted with the green of the trees and grass surrounding her. She was sitting on the wall of the bridge, her image reflected among the lily pads in the water below her.

He wanted to be with her. He wanted to touch her, to be enclosed in the magic that was her. He smiled when he knew she had seen him, and hurried toward her. She reached out her hands when he came to the
end of the bridge in that gesture of welcome that had always been characteristic of her.

“I have been waiting here for you,” she said. “I knew you would find me.”

And something jarred in him. Some long-suppressed memory.

Helena. His stepmother. His father’s second wife, whom his father had married exactly one year after the death of his first. She had been nineteen at the time, he fifty-four. Gerald had been fourteen.

Helena. So very much like Priss that he was dazzled now by the resemblance. Her hair had more reddish hues than Priss’s and had been longer. She had been a little taller, perhaps, with a more generous figure. But so like Priss. Always happy, always warmly smiling, always generous with her time and attention.