by Mary Balogh
“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.�
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“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.
CHRISTMAS 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.
She had been careless for a long time. She had known about it and worried about it vaguely. But not enough to do anything about it.
Oh, she never once neglected to cleanse and douche herself whenever he put his seed in her. She had always completed the time-consuming and tedious procedure that had been such a prominent part of her training and the part that Miss Blythe had always enforced most strictly.
But she had known—it had been stressed during her training—that speed was of great importance. that the seed must be flushed out before it had a chance to take root.
When she had shared Gerald’s bed at Brookhurst, she had not got up after each coupling. She had been too embarrassed to do so, too afraid that he would question her. And during that two-week period of their honeymoon she had been too happy and too drowsy from their lovemaking to think about getting up from the bed in order to be practical.
By the time she did cleanse herself there, they had often been making love all night, and some of his seed had been in her for many hours. She had got away with it there. Her monthly periods had always come with relief-bringing regularity.
Yet now, ironically, when he did not often stay with her for a whole night, her carelessness had caught up with her. She was a week late. Only a week. But her cycle had always been perfectly regular. It had not been upset even when she first became sexually active. There was not a great deal of hope that she was wrong in her fears.
Besides, there was a deep, quite intangible physical certainty that she had taken his seed into her womb and had accepted it there. Part of him and part of her had united, and now there was a new life in her womb, a life that was both him and her and yet neither.
She knew that she had his child in her. Their child. The realization paralyzed her with terror. There had not been a great deal at Miss Blythe’s that could bring shame to any of the girls. Allowing oneself to be got with child was deeply shameful there, the one thing that would have even the most hardened of the girls hanging her head and quailing with terror at the scathing lecture she must face alone from Miss Blythe. Having to be sent away and looked after by Miss Blythe while awaiting the birth was slow and dreadful humiliation, the return to work and the pitying, wondering looks of the other girls an unenviable ordeal. Miss Blythe would not allow any girl who wished to remain with her to abort a child.
Priscilla did not have enough money—even if she sold her precious jewels—to keep even herself for the seven years until she could claim her mother’s inheritance. She could certainly not keep herself and a child, too. And if she must work for her living, there was only one type of job she was qualified for, but Miss Blythe would never take her and a child, too. No abbess of any other whorehouse would take a child, either.
And if she were to take to the streets alone, who would look after the child while she was at work?
Yet she could not do—she would not do—what other girls always did. She would not give up Gerald’s child. She would die before she gave it up.
She sat alone on Christmas evening, her book closed, one hand stroking absently over the smooth leather of its cover, opening her mind to the terror she had been repressing for a week. She was going to bear a bastard child, hers and Gerald’s. And she would keep the child until death made it impossible for her to do so any longer.
But there were plans to make. She was going to have to bring her liaison with Gerald to an end within—how long? Two months? Three? Would it be very noticeable after three? Not outwardly, perhaps. But he frequently saw her naked. She would have to be gone within three months.
It would be as well. She had always lived with the conviction that when the lease ran out on the house he would also wish to terminate their agreement. And though he had seemed to be pleased and contented with her since his return in October, there had been none of the fire or the tenderness of that brief spell during the summer—except perhaps on the evening of their Christmas.
She was his mistress, one who satisfied him, one he was accustomed to and comfortable with. But still, when all was said and done, she was his mistress. And spring would bring with it a restlessness, a desire to move on to another woman, or to several women for a time, perhaps. Perhaps he would return to Miss Blythe’s.
It would be as well to end her employment herself instead of waiting for the inevitable and humiliating dismissal. Perhaps since she would have been with him for almost a year and had always given him good and obedient service—perhaps he would overlook the fact that she was the one to end it. Perhaps he would pay her the full settlement he had agreed to with Miss Blythe.
Perhaps she would be able to demean herself enough to ask him. After all, she would be asking not for herself, but for his child, though he would not know it.
And perhaps she would go to Miss Blythe—almost certainly she would. She would endure the scolding that had never failed to dissolve into tears every poor girl who had ever had to face it. She would endure it because she also needed Miss Blythe’s help. She had no idea what she would do after she had left this house and Gerald’s protection.
Priscilla traced the gold lettering on her book, not seeing what she was doing. It was Christmas Day. She was thinking of another woman, who had given bir
th to a bastard child on that day. Mary, and her faithful Joseph, who had married her despite her disgrace, although he had not even been the child’s father.
But then, of course, Mary had not been a whore.
“AND THEN AFTER church,” Sir Gerald said, holding his mistress’s naked body snugly against his side, rubbing his cheek against her soft curls, “they took me to a neighbor’s house where it turned out every resident and his dog for a five-mile radius of the village was assembled. They had to present me to every mortal one of them, Priss. And every time I was their dear nephew and did I not resemble my poor dear mother to a quite remarkable degree? It was deuced embarrassing.”
“But you must have given them so much pleasure, Gerald,” she said.
“They just about burst with it,” he said. “Aunt Hester knitted me an egg cozy large enough for my head, to be worn at night—complete with tassel. I tried to wear it to please her on Christmas night. I almost died of itch before midnight.”
Priscilla chuckled.
“And Aunt Margaret knitted me a pair of mittens,” he said, “in canary yellow. It was devilish embarrassing, I tell you, Priss, trotting along the village street on Christmas morning, an aunt on each arm, to take our constitutional, two canary paws waving in the wind for all to see and wince over.”
“Gerald.” She was shaking with laughter. “You are exaggerating.”
“No, the devil I am not,” he said indignantly. “I’ll fetch them to show you, Priss, though I will not put the nightcap on my head to demonstrate. Maybe Prendergast could get some use out of it.”
She chuckled again and fell silent.
He stretched his toes, feeling their warmth beneath the bedclothes and the warmth and relaxation of his whole body. It seemed to him that it was the first total contentment he had felt since kissing her good-bye beneath the mistletoe more than two weeks before.