A Precious Jewel (21 page)

“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.

S
IR 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.”

“I suppose I will be gone for about two weeks,” he said. “I wish I weren’t going, Priss. I hate the thought of having two spinster aunts fuss over me for all that time.”

“But just think of the pleasure you will be giving them, Gerald,” she said. “You will probably come back fat from all the goose and mince pies they will have stuffed into you.”

He grimaced as she laughed.

“Christmas is a wonderful time for families,” she said. “I remember …” She stopped and smiled at him.

“Do you, Priss?” he said, running one knuckle along her jawline. “Shall we have Christmas before I
go? I’ll have a goose sent over for Mrs. Wilson to stuff and bring some holly. And we’ll sing carols and all that sort of thing. Shall we?”

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

And so they spent an hour the afternoon before he left for his aunts’ decorating the parlor with holly, trailing ivy from the picture frames, arranging pine boughs on the tables. And he climbed onto a chair while she stood beneath him with raised arms as if to catch him if he fell, hanging a small sprig of mistletoe from the ceiling to one side of the door.

In the evening he returned, dressed in satin knee breeches and brocaded coat and elaborately tied neckcloth, just as if he were about to attend a ball at Carlton House. And she was dressed in a delicate gown of dark green silk, and wearing her bracelet and earrings.

“You look beautiful, Priss,” he said, taking her hands and kissing her cheek. “The dress is new?”

“Yes,” she said. “My big extravagance. You look very splendid, too.”

“The shades of blue match?” he asked. “My valet assured me that they do.”

“They do,” she said, smiling.

They ate their Christmas dinner in the small dining room and then sat before the crackling log fire in the parlor, singing carols, vying with each other to remember the words to all the verses, laughing when
they both fell silent in the middle of the fourth verse of “Good King Wenceslas.”

“It goes on forever, anyway,” he said. “It is a bit of a bore, if you want my frank opinion, Priss.”

“Shall I read the Christmas story?” she asked.

“Do you have a Bible?” he said.

She fetched one from upstairs, always her treasured possession. She read the story while he watched her and listened.

“Priss,” he said when she was finished, “Kit did not teach you to read, did she?”

“Yes, she did,” she said quite truthfully. Miss Blythe had been her governess for eight years, from the time she was six.

“Just one year ago?” He frowned.

She smiled and closed the Bible and set it aside.

“I have a Christmas present for you,” she said. “I hope you will like it. I think you will.”

“You shouldn’t have, Priss,” he said. “You don’t need to be buying presents for me.”

“I did not buy it,” she said. “I made it.” She got to her feet and drew a large flat package from behind a chair.

He untied the ribbon and spread back the wrapping paper. And found himself looking down at a watercolor painting of his house at Brookhurst.

“Priss?” he said, looking up at her in surprise. “You painted this? You paint?”

“I sketched it when we were there,” she said, “and
painted it here. Do you like it, Gerald? There are four of them.”

He lifted away the top painting to find three others: the rose arbor, the grass alley, and the lake, the grass at one side dotted with daisies, the arched bridge at the other reflected in the water among the lily pads—the place where their love affair had begun and ended.

“Priss,” he said, while she sat very still and looked anxiously into his face, “they are so very pretty.” He looked up at her smiling ruefully. “Those are not very adequate words, are they?”

“They are praise indeed,” she said, clasping her hands to her bosom in a gesture quite uncharacteristic of her. “You think them pretty, Gerald?”

“I am going to have them framed,” he said, “and hung in the study at Brookhurst. Then when the account books make no sense to me, I will be able to look up and see them and enjoy them. Thank you, Priss.”

He went out into the hallway to fetch two packages from the inner pocket of his cloak.

“For me?” she said. “Both of them?”

“One of them is foolish,” he said.

She smiled down at him and opened the long package first. The necklace matched her bracelet and her earrings almost exactly.

“I have had to sit all through dinner,” he said, “watching your bare neck and wanting to put this
there, Priss. But I forced myself to wait. Let me clasp it for you.”

“Gerald,” she said, turning on the sofa they shared and bending her head forward, “you must have hunted forever to find just the right piece.”

“I did actually,” he said, turning her by the shoulders and examining his gift at her throat. “But it was worth it, Priss. It looks good and the set is complete.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I never thought to possess such lovely jewels again.”

“Again?” he said.

She fingered the necklace and touched one earring before answering. “I meant after you gave me the bracelet,” she said.

“Are you going to open the other package?” he asked. “You may think it foolish, Priss. You may find it dull. I am not sure of your tastes, but it seemed to me that you might like it.”

“Oh, I do,” she said a few moments later, gazing down at the book she had unwrapped. It was bound in brown leather with gold lettering and gold-edged pages.
“The Love Sonnets of William Shakespeare,”
she read, tracing the letters with her finger. “Oh, I do, Gerald. You cannot imagine. They are the most beautiful poems in the world.”

“Well,” he said, “I can remember reading that one about a summer’s day in school. I didn’t think it was half bad, actually.”

“ ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’” she
said quietly, opening her book to hear the pages crackle with newness.

“And then he twists it to make her seem lovelier than summer,” he said. “Rather clever, actually. He was a clever man, Shakespeare, wasn’t he, Priss? It is true too, isn’t it? Summer does not last.”

“No,” she said. “But it always comes again, Gerald.”

“Yes,” he said, struck by the thought. “I suppose it does.”

She lifted the book in order to smell the new leather.

“Well,” he said, taking one of her hands in his, removing the book with the other and setting it on the sofa, “I am going to have to leave, Priss. I want to make an early start in the morning.”

“Yes,” she said, getting to her feet. “Don’t be late, Gerald.”

He had decided before coming that he would not take her into the bedchamber that evening. He wanted to have Christmas with her, even it if was eight days early. And he did not want her to feel that it was a work evening.

“One thing first, though,” he said, leading her by the hand until she stood beneath the mistletoe. “Happy Christmas, Priss.”

He drew her into his arms and kissed her for the first time since their love affair had ended in the summer, opening his mouth over hers as his lips touched hers.

“Happy Christmas, Gerald,” she said, her arms up about his neck.

He kissed her again.

And he was glad he was not planning to stay and glad that he was not going to spend the whole Christmas holiday with her. For already, holding her in his arms, kissing her, resisting the urge to reach into her mouth with his tongue, he could feel the return of a deep tenderness that was not at all the same thing as the physical desire that had flared with their embrace.

“Have a safe journey,” she whispered to him. “Be careful, Gerald.”

“I’ll be back with the new year,” he said, putting her from him, picking up his gift from her. “I’ll send you a note as soon as I am in town again, Priss.”

“Yes,” she said, one hand covering her necklace.

“Good night, then,” he said.

“Good night, Gerald.”

He leaned forward over the bulk of his package and kissed her again.

C
HRISTMAS WAS NOT
a pleasant time. Although she often and deliberately counted her blessings, Priscilla could not draw from the holiday any of the magic or joy that it had always brought with it until the year before.

He would be gone for only two weeks, she told herself. Not for an eternity. Not even for as long as he had
been gone in the autumn, and she had lived through that. Besides, they had had a wonderful Christmas together before he left. And being without him was good practice. She must not—oh, she must not, she kept telling herself in some fright—become dependent upon him. He was her employer, not her lover.

She went to church on the evening of Christmas Eve, alone, in guilty defiance of Gerald, and sat unobtrusively at the back. It was the first time she had been to church since she had become a fallen woman. It was a beautiful service, and Christ was born as surely as he had been born every Christmas for more than eighteen hundred years, and all that was the Christ came into the world again. But it was something she observed rather than felt. She was an outsider.

She had never felt her exclusion from respectability so strongly or so bleakly. And when she was on her way out of church, a richly dressed lady glanced at her and drew her skirts against herself so that she would not brush against and be contaminated by the lone woman who could be nothing but a street prostitute.

She gave Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Prendergast and Maud their gifts on Christmas morning and sat with them to eat Christmas dinner. And she talked with them and laughed a great deal at Maud’s incessant stories and Mrs. Wilson’s scoldings at the girl for talking so boldly in the presence of Miss Prissy.

She visited Miss Blythe in the afternoon, taking with her an eager Maud, who liked the thought of a
different kitchen with new ears to regale with her chatterings. The girls were all in high spirits at the holiday from work and the gifts that Miss Blythe had given each one. There was a carefully wrapped lace handkerchief for Priscilla, too. She stayed for two hours, extending the time she had planned to spend there for the sake of Maud—and for the sake of her own loneliness, too.

And she spent the evening alone in the upstairs rooms of her house, reading Gerald’s book, as she had read it every evening since he had left, pausing over the one sonnet he remembered from his schooldays.

“ ‘And summer’s lease hath all too short a date,’ ” she read, smiling rather sadly.

Yes, far too short. And summer would not come again, either, as she had told him it would. Not with Gerald, anyway. By the time summer returned, he would be only a memory to her and she to him.