A Precious Jewel by Mary Balogh

said, hugging herbriefly when he was finally leaving. “I feel as right as rain again.”
    “Of course,” she said, smiling. “You were the model patient, Gerald.”
    She caught the cold from him, and the fever. They coincided with the days of her monthly period. She fought them out alone in her bedchamber upstairs so that by the time Gerald came back there was no trace remaining. She did not tell him.
    One morning he arrived to take her to a milliner’s on Oxford Street to buy her a straw bonnet to replace her old one, which had been ruined when she had been caught out in an unexpected rain shower. And then he took her into a jeweler’s to buy her a diamond-and-emerald bracelet.
    “But Gerald,” she protested, “you don’t need to buy me gifts. You provide well for me.”
    “A gift is just that, Priss,” he said. “It is not payment for anything. I want you to have it, that’s all. I like to see you with pretty things.”
    It was a very pretty bracelet. It reminded her of one her father had given her on her eighteenth birthday, one that had been kept for safekeeping with her father’s valuables, and one that she had been unable to reclaim after her father’s and Broderick’s deaths. She had last seen it on the wrist of Cousin Oswald’s wife.
    “You aren’t crying, are you, Priss?” Sir Gerald asked.
    The jeweler turned away tactfully and busied himself with putting away the other bracelets they had been viewing.
    “Yes, I am,” she said with a laugh, brushing a tear firmly from her cheek. “It is lovely, Gerald. Thank you.”
    “Well,” he said, clearly embarrassed, “I think you should possess one valuable thing in your lifetime, Priss.” He fumbled in a pocket and handed her his handkerchief.
    One evening he took her to Vauxhall Gardens, and she danced beneath the stars and the colored lanterns and ate ham and strawberries and drank wine and watched the fireworks display and strolled along the main promenade, her arm through Gerald’s.
    It would have been better, she thought, if they had not been members of a party that included three of Gerald’s acquaintances and the mistress of one of them. The unattached young gentlemen ogled the ladies around them and openly commented on their physical attributes without regard to the sensibilities of the two women. And the other woman appeared to find everything funny and giggled incessantly.
    But she would not allow the company to spoil her evening. Gerald kept her away from them for much of the time. And besides, she reminded herself, she was as much a mistress as the other girl, and she could not expect the other gentlemen to treat her with the same deference they would have accorded a lady.
    It was a happy routine that life settled into, thoughas time went on there was a little desperation involved, too. The Season was drawing to an end and summer was beginning. Gerald always spent his summers in the country, he had told her more than once, at Brookhurst, his home. He was planning to go that year, too.
    It was going to be a long, lonely summer. And there was always the very real chance that in the months away from her he would decide that he no longer wanted her. Once he left London, perhaps she would never see him again.
    The thought sometimes brought panic, and it always brought a dull ache of anticipated loneliness and pain. But Priscilla had never been one to wallow in self-pity or to allow her spirits to be dragged down with might-have-beens or might-bes.
    She counted her blessings. At least she would be able to spend a summer in which she was her own person. If Gerald had not set her up as his mistress, her summer would be the same as the winter and part of the spring had been. She would be at work at Miss Blythe’s.
    Loneliness was better than that. Her life there, which she had made bearable at the time, now made her shudder in retrospect. It was strange to her that she had ever been able to adjust her mind to a life of such indignity.
    The