A Precious Jewel (13 page)

She shook her head. “And you were an only child?” she asked.

“I was the one that escaped, so to speak,” he said. “There were an alarming number of miscarriages and stillbirths, I gather. Something like six before me and four after me, though I may have the numbers wrong.”

She closed her eyes. “Ah, poor lady,” she said.

He shrugged. “It made it easier for her to abandon her responsibilities,” he said. “She might have felt obliged to stay if there had been more of us, especially if there had been one still at her breast. One of those stillbirths happened only six months or so before she died the first time.” He smiled and plucked a rose to weave into her hair. “You would think she would have loved the one child to live, wouldn’t you?” he said.

“Oh, Gerald.” She touched the lapels of his coat. “Are you sure she did not? Could an eight-year-old
understand the complexities of what was going on in the adult world around him? Perhaps she had no choice but to leave you.”

“Perhaps you are right,” he said, turning away abruptly and striding out through the arch. “She was a woman, after all.”

Priscilla went after him and walked silently beside him. He had his hands clasped behind his back. He did not offer his arm.

“You are the wise one, Priss,” he said. “You know how to stop yourself from having children, stillborn or live. Whenever you wish to take yourself off, you can do so with a clear conscience, can’t you? And in the process you will save a few poor mortals from imagining that there is such a thing as love in this world.”

“Gerald,” she whispered. And she was not sure if the intense pain she felt and the tears she fought were for the cruelty of his words or for the bleak disillusion that he had carried forward into his life from the age of thirteen.

He took his duties as landlord very seriously. She discovered that within just a few days of their arrival. He rode out almost every morning to visit his tenants and laborers, sometimes not arriving back until well after luncheon. And he talked about their problems and concerns and suggestions to his bailiff and sometimes to her, with furrowed brow. He usually stopped himself after a few minutes with her.

“But I must not bore you with man talk, Priss,” he would say. “You must tell me to be quiet when I start prosing on.”

“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 you 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.

H
E 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.”