by Mary Balogh
He had intended to go home for the night after paying his visit to her, since he had an early appointment with his tailor the next morning. But he could just as easily go there straight from Priss’s, he decided. He had not worn evening clothes. He yawned and settled himself for sleep.
“Gerald?” Her voice was a questioning whisper.
“Mm?” he said, trying not to lose the drowsiness that was settling over him.
“Gerald,” she said, “when the lease runs out on the house, you will not be renewing it, will you?”
“Eh?” he said. “That’s a few months in the future, Priss. I don’t have to think of that yet. What put that into your head?”
“I thought a year would be long enough,” she said. “I thought you would be ready for a change by then. You will, won’t you?”
He was awake and irritable. What the devil?
“How would I know?” he said. “Don’t worry about it, Priss. I will give you plenty of notice when the time comes. And I’ll make a decent settlement on you. Go to sleep now.”
“I think in the spring I should go home,” she said.
“Eh?” he said. “Home? Where you came from, you mean?”
“They miss me,” she said. “They want me to come back.”
“They?”
There was a pause. “My parents,” she said, “and my brothers and sisters. I am the eldest. I had to go away to work. But—but one of the boys is old enough now to work with Father and I can go home. I think perhaps I should, Gerald.”
“Tell them I need you here,” he said. “I won’t hear of your going on a visit, Priss. Not for any length of time, anyway.”
“I meant for always,” she said. “They want me back for always. I think we are growing a little tired of each other anyway, aren’t we?”
“I am not tired of you yet,” he said, thoroughly angry and hurt—and with a cold thread of fear needling at his heart. “And what you feel doesn’t signify, does it, Priss? I don’t pay you to be tired or anything else. I pay you to give me pleasure with your body.”
It was always the way of human nature, one part of his mind told him, but not that part that controlled his speech. The best way to cope with pain was to pass it on to someone else. Be slapped and slap right back. Be hurt and hurt right back. He wanted to hurt her.
“Yes,” she said.
“I don’t want to hear any more about it, then,” he said, his voice stern and implacable. Just like his father’s. “You have a good enough job here, Priss, and I pay you well enough, too. And they don’t really want you back. Not with the way you have been earning your living.”
Her voice was higher pitched than usual when she spoke. “They do not mind,” she said. “They say they do not mind. They love me for who I am.”
“Then they can have you back later,” he said, turning onto her, pushing her legs wide with his own, thrusting himself inside her, wanting to hurt her. “When I am finished with you, Priss. I am not finished yet. You can tell them that.”
She turned her head to one side and closed her eyes. She lay stiller than usual, unrelaxed, unyielding while he took her quickly, in anger and hurt and fear.
“I have to go,” he said, drawing away from her as soon as he had finished. “I have an appointment with my tailor in the morning.”
They were both silent as he dressed in the near darkness.
She was still lying on the bed, uncovered, when he turned to her before leaving.
“I’ll be here in the evening the day after tomorrow, Priss,” he said, so thoroughly his father that he felt fear at himself. “I’ll expect you to be ready for me. And I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense. Understood?”
She looked blankly at him. “I shall be ready when you come, Gerald,” she said.
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. He took a step closer to the bed in order to lay one knuckle against her cheek.
“Priss,” he said, “why did you have to make me angry? And what do you mean about being tired of me? Haven’t I treated you well?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Have I ever neglected you?” he asked. “Or been brutal with you? Have I ever demanded too much of you or come to you too often?”
“No,” she said. “You have always been good to me, Gerald.”
“Well, then,” he said, “why are you tired of me?”
She stared mutely up at him until he felt anger welling in him again. He clamped his teeth together and stared down at her.
“Well, then,” he said. “I’m sorry. You will just have to treat it as a rather unpleasant job, Priss, which has to be done in order to earn your daily bread. I believe factory workers and coal miners must feel the same, though they have to toil for many more hours than you.”
He turned and strode from the room. “Gerald,” she called after him in that thin, high-pitched voice that she had used earlier. He did not answer her call.
PRISCILLA PREPARED HERSELF WITH GREAT CARE two evenings later, wearing the rose-pink gown he liked, and dabbing on some of the perfume she had indulged herself with on a shopping trip just after Christmas. She had washed her hair that afternoon and brushed it carefully into soft curls.
She had hurt him. She knew that. She had chosen just the wrong time to speak to him. She might have known not to speak of such things when he had been settling for sleep after making love to her. His mind had caught onto the idea that she had grown tired of him, and he was hurt.
She sat beside the fire in the parlor, her hands in her lap, planning how she would greet him, how she would smile, what she would say. She did not want him hurt. He had such a fragile sense of his own worth, anyway. She must convince him that she was not tired of him at all. She must find some other way within the next two months of leaving him.
She sat until one o’clock in the morning before taking one of the candles into the hallway and calling to Mr. Prendergast to lock up and see to the fire. And she lay awake upstairs for another few hours, alert for his coming.
The following two evenings followed the exact same pattern.
He came one week after his last visit, during the afternoon, when she was out walking with Maud. Mr. Prendergast informed her when she came in that he was awaiting her in the parlor.
And so after all she had to greet him with flattened hair and wind-reddened cheeks and nose and a mind unprepared for what she would say.
“Gerald,” she said, rushing into the room. She hurried toward him, her hands outstretched. “I did not know you were coming. I am so sorry to have kept you waiting.”
He kept his hands behind his back. “Hello, Priss,” he said.
She lowered her hands and smiled at him a little uncertainly. “Shall I go and comb my hair?” she asked. “And get ready for you, Gerald? Are you willing to wait for a few minutes?”
“To go to bed?” he said. “I don’t know, Priss. Is that what I want to do?”
She looked at him silently for a few moments. “You do not want it, Gerald?” she asked. “Tell me what I may do for you, then. How can I make you comfortable?”
“I don’t know if you can,” he said. “I thought it did not matter, Priss. It never mattered at Kit’s. I paid for pleasure. It did not matter who the girl was or what she thought of me provided she did what she was directed to do. I thought it would not matter with you. You always did as you were told. You always knew how to please me. You still do. And I would wager that if I took you to bed you would give it me as I like it best. You would, wouldn’t you?”
“I am here for your pleasure, Gerald,” she said.
“Precisely,” he said. “But the thing is, Priss, that you are not just any girl any longer. I suppose I have been with you too long. Maybe you are right about that. You aren’t just any woman’s body to me any longer. You are Priss. And I don’t think I could derive any pleasure from being with you if you are tired of me. It should not matter because it is your profession and I pay you to do just that, don’t I? But I can’t do
it any longer, that’s all. So what do you want, Priss? Only promise me one thing. You won’t go back to Kit’s, will you? I don’t want to think that any man who fancies an hour’s sport will be able to have a go at you.”
It was her chance. Her chance to end things with a fair degree of amity. It was her chance to draw maximum benefit from their separation, since he was the one suggesting an immediate breaking off of their relationship.
“Tell me what you want,” he said. “I just can’t bed you if the money is the only thing making you willing to do it, Priss. And don’t come any closer. I don’t want you touching me.”
“Gerald,” she said. “Oh, Gerald, I am not tired of you. It is just that—that they wanted me to go home and I thought I might as well if you were growing tired of me. I thought you surely would be after almost a year. And there was … There was the summer and—and the autumn. And I did not want to think that perhaps you did not know how to break it off with me.”
She stopped talking and stared lamely at him. “I am not tired of you, Gerald. And it is not just the money. You were always my favorite, you know.” She could feel herself flushing. “You were the only one with whom it was never—unpleasant. It has never been unpleasant with you. It is my profession and of course I had to do it before even when it was unpleasant. But it has never been so with you. Giving you pleasure has always given me pleasure too.”
“Has it, Priss?” He looked at her wistfully. “I am not much of a man, am I? And I never learned how to please a woman. I don’t …”
“I like you better than any other man I have known, Gerald,” she said. “And you please me well enough.”
“Even last summer?” he said. “You were not disgusted, Priss? I did not work you too hard?”
“It was not work.” She whispered the words, hurt now herself. “You know it was not work, Gerald. You know it.”
He smiled a little uncertainly. “I think it was the summer, Priss,” he said, “and the warm weather and the rustic surroundings.”
“Yes,” she said.
He reached out one hand to her and she placed one of hers in it. “You will tell them that you have a job you do not wish to leave, then?” he asked.
She nodded.
He drew a deep breath and let it out. “Let’s go into the next room, then, shall we?” he said. “No, Priss. I don’t care that your hair has been messed by your bonnet. It looks good enough to me. And I don’t care that you have clothes on under that dress. You can remove them next door. Come with me? Now?”
Fool, she thought as he led her by the hand into the bedchamber and closed the door. Fool, fool, fool. She was one month with child already. A practiced eye, a less innocent eye than Gerald’s, would perhaps already see the beginnings of change in her breasts. She would have to be away from him within the next two months.
And yet she had just declared her love for him, in so many words. She had just allowed him to begin a new and indefinite phase of their relationship.
Fool, she thought as he undressed her with his own hands and as she undressed him. She was allowing him to make love to her again. It was not going to be the usual coupling. It was going to be love. His hands were already at her waist, arching her into his body. His tongue was already stroking into her mouth. She was already responding.
Ah, Gerald, Gerald.
“You were very close to your family, Priss?” he asked her much later, holding her in his arms, against the relaxed warmth of his body.
“Yes,” she said.
“It must have been hard for them to see you go,” he said, “and hard for you to leave.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know when you left,” he asked, “what you would do?”
“No,” she said. “I suppose women never do. They always assume, I suppose, that there will be a respectable position available. I don’t believe any woman enters this profession from choice, Gerald. At least I have never known any such woman. All the girls at Miss Blythe’s simply had nothing else of value to sell.”
“Your family must have been upset,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But they must love you very much,” he said, “to tell you that it makes no difference to them. They must love you to want you back anyway, Priss.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I am going to send you on a visit to them,” he said.
“In the spring, Priss. For a month. Perhaps two. No, not two. For six weeks at the longest. I’ll send you when spring comes.” His fingers were stroking gently through her curls.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Gerald.”
“I want you to be happy,” he said. “It will make you happy, Priss?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, then,” he said, “you must go. I’ll arrange for it.”
He was sleeping five minutes later.
Priscilla closed her eyes and breathed in the warm masculine smell of his cologne. The back of her throat and her chest ached and ached.
THE EARL OF Severn came back to town early in February and took up residence in his house in Grosvenor Square. He had left off his mourning and was ready to do some living, he told his friend.
They went to the opera together one evening, but Sir Gerald ended up walking home alone afterward while the earl made his way to the green room. Three days later, when Lord Severn finally arrived again at his friend’s door, bathed and clean-shaven and dressed in fresh clothes, but with shadowed, somewhat bloodshot eyes, it was to announce that he had set up a new mistress.
Jenny Gibb, dancer, had the reputation of never looking lower than a duke and fifty thousand a year for a protector. She could afford to be particular since there was very little argument over the claim that she was the most beautiful, most curvaceous, and most fascinating creature to grace the capital in a decade.
Of course, Sir Gerald thought, pouring both of them a brandy, Miles was probably her male counterpart, bloodshot eyes and general sleepless appearance notwithstanding.
“I thought you said it was going to be at least a week,” he said, handing the earl a glass.
“Ah, Ger,” his friend said, “it would have been, too, with any ordinary woman. But the fair Jenny is no ordinary woman. Far from it. I am going to need a two-hour workout at Jackson’s every morning to stay fit enough for her. Not one wink of sleep, Ger. Not one. And strenuous acrobatics every minute of the time. Three nights and two days of it.”
“You aren’t boasting, by any chance?” Sir Gerald asked.
“I?” the earl said. “Boasting? You forget I have a year’s energy and frustrations to work off. How is Prissy? Are you still with her?”
“Still with her,” Sir Gerald said. “I am going to send her into the country next month or the month after to visit her family. They wanted her to move home, but she decided to stay for a while longer.”
“Ah,” the earl said, “true love is winning its way, is it, Ger?”
Sir Gerald frowned. “That’s nonsense talk, Miles,” he said. “Priss is my mistress and deuced good at her job, too. Not like Jenny or anything like that, but then I don’t look for anything like that.”
“No,” the earl said with a smile, “I could have guessed that Prissy is not anything like Jenny, Ger. But then Prissy is a lady. Jenny is not, for which blessing I shall be eternally thankful. Any decent cattle at Tattersall’s these days?”
“You want to look?” Sir Gerald asked. “I’ll come with you for an hour. I have promised to take Priss to the British Museum later on.”
The earl laughed. “Culture with your mistress?” he said. “A strange combination. Perhaps an erotic combination? Are you going to show her the Elgin marbles?”
Sir Gerald flushed. “I most certainly am not,” he said. “I am not having Priss gazing at a lot of naked men.”
The earl threw back his head and laughed. “Did Priss not work at Kit’s once upon a time?” he said.
Sir Gerald put a glass down and got to his feet. “Are
we going to Tattersall’s or are we not?” he asked. “I think we had better, Miles, before I end up popping you one on the chin and getting myself knocked senseless as a result.”
Lord Severn looked levelly at him. “Sorry, old chap,” he said. “That was not too tasteful a remark, was it? If I may, I’ll drop by Prissy’s with you and pay my respects before you bear her off on the culture hunt. I take it the visit is for Prissy’s benefit rather than yours?”
“She has a way of explaining things,” Sir Gerald said. “lf she had been one of my teachers at school, Miles, I think perhaps I would have understood a few things. I might even have turned out to be a scholar.”
The earl clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Today’s food for thought,” he said. “Get me out into the air, Ger, will you? I still have Jen’s perfume in my nostrils even though I almost scrubbed my skin off just three hours ago.”
SHE COULD NOT wait any longer, Priscilla thought, staring into the darkness. Not even another week. She had already waited far too long. It was the end of March. If she did not have the type of figure that did not show pregnancy early, she would not have been able to wait even this long. And almost any man but Gerald would surely have noticed long before.
She had delayed and delayed, constantly stealing just one more day and just one more day. Their relationship had entered a new phase of quiet tenderness since January. The passion of the previous summer had not returned, except during some of their love-making, but the dispassionate, almost purely sexual relationship of the autumn and early winter had passed, too. There had been a tenderness, a closeness. almost like that she imagined existing between a man and his wife in a good marriage once the honeymoon phase of their relationship had passed.
And because of her carelessness she had to destroy it all, both for him and for herself.
His arms were about her from behind. She was lying facing away from him, her head cradled on his arm, her body resting warmly against his. She must end it the next time he called. She must speak to him as soon as he arrived. She had her story all ready. It was just to have the courage to use it.