A Precious Jewel (26 page)

He took her by the shoulders, kissed the top of her head, and put her firmly from him.

“Good-bye, Priss,” he said.

He strode from the room and closed the door so hastily behind him that it slammed. He was halfway down the street before he realized that the sound behind him was Prendergast calling after him and waving the cane he had left behind.

T
HE VICAR BOWED TO PRISCILLA WHILE HIS WIFE
took one of her hands in her plump one and patted it after placing a cloth-covered plate on a table.

“Good morning, ma’am,” the vicar said. “And welcome to our village of Fairlight. We are always delighted to welcome new inhabitants into our midst. My name is Whiting, ma’am, and this is my good wife.”

“So pleased to make your acquaintance, my dear,” Mrs. Whiting said, smiling and nodding her head. “We heard that you are a widow lady. May I express my own and the vicar’s deepest sympathies if your bereavement is of recent date?” She glanced at Priscilla’s pale blue woolen dress.

Priscilla had arrived on the stage the evening before in widow’s weeds and with a detailed story provided by Miss Blythe. But she had put the black clothes away
in the bottom of her trunk that morning when she got up and unpacked her things.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling at her two visitors. “And thank you for the cakes, ma’am. I would ask you to have a seat and drink a cup of tea with me, but I must say something first, if you please.”

The vicar rubbed his hands together and smiled.

“I am not a widow,” Priscilla said. “I am not married and never have been. I have come where it is quiet and far from town to have my child. It will be born in five months’ time.”

Vicar and Mrs. Whiting stared at her and exchanged glances.

“I do not wish to put you in an awkward position,” Priscilla said. “I fully realize that I may have to live the life of an outcast here. But I will not pretend to be a recent widow, as I had intended to do. What is past is past and the future will be difficult. But at least I want it to be an honest future. I am not going to hide the truth.”

“Oh, my poor dear.” Mrs. Whiting bustled across the room, took Priscilla’s arm, and led her to a chair as if she were an invalid. “You ought not to be standing still on your feet. You will have veins in your legs to trouble you as you get older if you do. Do sit down. Did your young man refuse to marry you after all? Or was he killed in battle? I have heard of that happening and could fair break my heart over the suffering of the poor girl left behind.”

“There was never any question of marriage,” Priscilla said. “I was his mistress, you see. For a year.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Whiting said, having seated Priscilla. She leaned over the fire, poking it into brighter life. “I never did think those women were as scarlet as people like to believe. They are human just like the rest of us, I have always believed. ‘There but for the grace of God …’ ”

The vicar cleared his throat.

“Our Lord forgave Mary Magdalene and the woman taken in adultery,” he said. “He set us a great example to follow, my dear. But he did tell them to go and sin no more. I admire your honesty, ma’am. But I would not be worthy of my calling if I did not add that I hope you have now seen the error of your ways and will turn from them for the rest of your days.”

Priscilla looked at him. “I had to eat, sir,” she said. “But I do regret that I have involved an innocent child in the ugliness of my situation. Since I cannot now change that, though, I do intend that the rest of my life will be spent in seeing that his life is as happy and as respectable as I can make it. I love my child already. And I love its father, though he was but my employer.”

“A fair and thoughtful answer, my dear,” the vicar said, coming toward her, his hand outstretched. “If you prove to be as intent on reforming your character and life as you seem today, then you will find nothing but encouragement here. We are a small community.
but we help our own through times of adversity. Welcome again to Fairlight, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Priscilla said, smiling at first one and then the other of her visitors. “Thank you. I am Priscilla Wentworth, by the way.”

“Miss Wentworth.” The vicar’s wife was filling a teapot with steaming water from the kettle. “I shall make a cup of tea and share it with you, dear. The vicar has to call upon Miss Sloane, who has been very difficult since she lost her sister last autumn, poor dear. Peevish, some might call her if they did not understand her situation. She is as deaf as a post, as misfortune would have it. But it is amazing what smiles and nods can accomplish. You will enjoy visiting her while you are waiting for your little one to arrive. We have had a great absence of little ones here in recent years.”

The vicar took his leave. Priscilla settled back in her chair, took a cup and saucer from Mrs. Whiting’s hands, and listened gratefully to the endless confidences her new friend proceeded to share with her.

She felt human again. Miraculously human. And more glad than she could say that she had risked putting off the masquerade, that she had risked being herself.

She felt as if the long, slow process of healing had surely begun. She had felt it the evening before when she had stepped down from the stage into the picturesque little village by the sea in Sussex and found her
thatched cottage in its own fenced garden at the end of the village street closest to the sea. And she had felt it early that morning when she had stepped outside the cottage and walked to the edge of the cliff a short distance away and seen the sandy path snaking its way down past cliffs and sand dunes to a long and sandy beach.

She had felt as if perhaps, after all, there might be healing. As if perhaps she would survive and continue on into a new phase of her life.

She had been completely, totally destroyed by Miss Blythe’s words. For a while, for several hours, she had been nothing, a creature of no identity. She had been reminded that she was, by her own choice, a mere object to the world of men, one to be used, enjoyed, despised, and discarded. To the world of women she was a creature to be scorned, shunned, hated, and feared.

She could not expect to inspire love in either man or woman for what remained of her life, she had been told. Only perhaps among females of her own kind.

She knew why Miss Blythe had been so incredibly cruel. Even as she had cringed and wept and wanted only to die she had known that Miss Blythe was doing what she must do. For only a woman who knew herself and reality without illusions could hope to survive in such a situation without losing herself completely. A woman who was with child was particularly susceptible to hopes and dreams. She must know that there was no hope and no substance to her
dreams. Otherwise, she would not be able to cope with the reality of what was to come.

She had been destroyed, as Miss Blythe had intended she should. She had also been put together again, badly shaken, and weak from her ordeal. But together nevertheless, with the hope that she would eventually be whole again. For she was still Priscilla Wentworth in the most private part of her life. It was just that she had to accustom herself to the knowledge she had always had—that she was two quite different persons and that there was no bringing together those persons.

Perhaps.

Even at the time she had not been quite sure. What she had had with Gerald could never have lasted—she had never expected it to do so—but it had been real, nevertheless. There had been a gentleness, a tenderness, even a friendship, between them. There had been a relationship. She was sure there had been. She had not been merely a body to him to be used and enjoyed and discarded.

She had loved him. She still did and always would, she believed. Perhaps it made sense to train girls at a whorehouse never to see their clients as persons, never to allow even the smallest degree of feeling to intrude into the business they conducted with those clients. But it was impossible—surely it was—to be a man’s mistress for almost a year without learning to know him and understand him. And knowledge
and understanding brought with them a reaction—feeling.

How could she have lived with Gerald for almost a year without coming to know him as a man who had warmth and tenderness to give and a fear of giving? How could she not have seen that he had been deprived of love through much of his childhood and boyhood and was now afraid to love? That he was a man of only average intelligence, who felt himself inferior to other men and unworthy of anyone’s regard?

How could she have lived with him and not come to love him deeply?

She must put him from her head and her heart and her life, Miss Blythe had said. She had been nothing to him except his paid whore.

But even if it were possible to do as she had been told, she would not do it. The only explanation she would be able to give her child for bringing it into a world where it must live with the stigma of bastardy and a mother who had been a whore was that she had loved his father. That she still loved him. That he was worthy of being loved.

And so, even when she left London, numb with the pain of her parting from Gerald, paralyzed by the knowledge that she would never see him again, she was putting herself back together again, knowing that there was after all more to her life than Miss Blythe believed. Even when she left, she knew that she no longer wanted those two separate beings to live for
ever apart in her body: Prissy and Priscilla. She was going to meld the two, make them one, risk having both rejected.

But at least she would have herself back. Her total identity back.

The package Gerald had left on the table in the parlor contained an amount double that he had agreed on as a settlement—if he were the one to end the connection. If she was very careful, she would be able to live on it for a long time. And her jewels, even though she felt almost as if she would rather die than sell them, would keep her and the child for some time longer.

For five years? Probably not. But she would not think of that for a time. The present had pain of its own to offer. She could not also shoulder the burden of the future. Besides, Vicar Whiting had said that the people of his village had a way of helping their own in times of adversity. And both he and his wife had spoken as if they wanted her to be one of their own.

The warmth that the thought brought to her was almost too wonderful to bear.

L
IFE WOULD GET
back to normal, Sir Gerald kept telling himself over the ten days following the severance of his relationship with his mistress. Life was normal. It was just that Priss had gone and he had not quite adjusted to the fact that he could no longer take
himself off to her house whenever he wanted companionship or comfort.

He was foolish to have kept her for so long. He would not have done so if he had only had more experience in breaking off with mistresses. Miles had seemed to have no problem at all with Jenny after just two months and seemed quite unperturbed by the highly public manner in which she was choosing his successor.

What if it were Priss? he thought. What if it were Priss strutting her wares in the park each afternoon, decked out like a duchess, and allowing half the besotted male population of London to pay court to her there?

What if it were Priss? Would he charge at the whole pack of men like a mad bull? Or would he challenge them one at a time?

There were plenty of entertainments with which to keep himself busy. There was Lady Trevor’s ball the night Priss left and his obligation to dance with Lady Severn. And there was a whole ocean to be drunk dry when it was over and a hangover to occupy his mind and body the next day—without Priss’s magic hands to soothe the headache or her lap to lay his head in.

There was dinner to attend at Miles’s house later that evening with Miss Seymour as their other guest, and the theater afterward. And the gradual realization that Lady Severn was trying to match him with her friend. She had already invited him to Severn Park
for the summer. It was altogether probable that Miss Seymour had received an invitation, too.

And there was the waking up one morning with a tickle at the back of his throat and a nose that insisted on being blown almost constantly as soon as he got out of bed, and a fever that built through the day until he shivered with the cold and burned with interior fires. By the following morning, when the Earl of Severn called on him and thought at first that he had a hangover again, he was feeling thoroughly irritable and sorry for himself and angry with Priss for not being there to nurse him back to health.

And if that were not bad enough, the earl, being insensitive enough not to realize that a fellow was thoroughly out of sorts when he had a fever and a stuffy nose and a raw throat and when his mistress had just abandoned him in his need, slammed him one on the jaw when he happened to make a less than complimentary remark about the countess.

It seemed, Sir Gerald thought from the depth of his gloom after his friend had left a short while later, their quarrel having been patched up, that Miles was coming to care for his wife after all. The thought made him feel even more wretchedly womanless.