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but encouragement here. We are a small community, but we help our own through times of adversity.
Welcome again to Fairlight, ma'am."
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"Thank you," Priscilla said, smiling at first one and then the other of her visitors. "Thank you. I am
Priscilla Went-worth, by the way."
"Miss Wentworth." The vicar's wife was filling a teapot with steaming water from the kettle. "I shall make
a cup of tea and share it with you, dear. The vicar has to call upon Miss Sloane, who has been very
difficult since she lost her sister last autumn, poor dear. Peevish, some might call her if they did not
understand her situation. She is as deaf as a post, as misfortune would have it. But it is amazing what
smiles and nods can accomplish. You will enjoy visiting her while you are waiting for your little one to
arrive. We have had a great absence of little ones here in recent years."
The vicar took his leave. Priscilia settled back in her chair, took a cup and saucer from Mrs. Whiting's
hands, and listened gratefully to the endless confidences her new friend proceeded to share with her.
She felt human again. Miraculously human. And more glad than she could say that she had risked putting
off the masquerade, that she had risked being herself.
She felt as if the long, slow process of healing had surely begun. She had felt it the evening before when
she had stepped down from the stage into the picturesque little village by the sea in Sussex and found her
thatched cottage in its own fenced garden at the end of the village street closest to the sea. And she had
felt it early that morning when she had stepped outside the cottage and walked to the edge of the cliff a
short distance away and seen the sandy path snaking its way down past cliffs and sand dunes to a long
and sandy beach.
She had felt as if perhaps, after all, there might be healing. As if perhaps she would survive and continue
on into a new phase of her life.
She had been completely, totally destroyed by Miss Blythe's words. For a while, for several hours, she
had been nothing, a creature of no identity. She had been re-minded that she was, by her own choice, a
mere object to the world of men, one to be used, enjoyed, despised, and discarded. To the world of
women she was a creature to be scorned, shunned, hated, and feared.
She could not expect to inspire love in either man or woman for what remained of her life, she had been
told. Only perhaps among females of her own kind.
She knew why Miss Blythe had been so incredibly cruel. Even as she had cringed and wept and wanted
only to die she had known that Miss Blythe was doing what she must do. For only a woman who knew
herself and reality without illusions could hope to survive in such a situation without losing herself
completely. A woman who was with child was particularly susceptible to hopes and dreams. She must
know that there was no hope and no substance to her dreams. Otherwise, she would not be able to cope
with the reality of what was to come.
She had been destroyed, as Miss Blythe had intended she should. She had also been put together again,
badly shaken, and weak from her ordeal. But together nevertheless, with the hope that she would
eventually be whole again. For she was still Priscilla Wentworth in the most private part of her life. It was
just that she had to accustom herself to the knowledge she had always had that she was two quite
different persons and that there was no bringing together those persons.
Perhaps.
Even at the time she had not been quite sure. What she had had with Gerald could never have
lasted she had never expected it to do so but it had been real, nevertheless. There had been a
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gentleness, a tenderness, even a friendship between them. There had been a relationship. She was sure
there had been. She had not been merely a body to him to be used and enjoyed and discarded.
She had loved him. She still did and always would, she believed. Perhaps it made sense to train girls at a
whorehouse never to see their clients as persons, never to allow even the smallest degree of feeling to
intrude into the business they conducted with those clients. But it was impossible surely it was to be a
man's mistress for almost a year without learning to know him and understand him. And knowledge and
understanding brought with them a reaction feeling.
How could she have lived with Gerald for almost a year without coming to know him as a man who had
warmth and tenderness to give and a fear of giving? How could she not have seen that he had been
deprived of love through much of his childhood and boyhood and was now afraid to love? That he was a
man of only average intelligence, who felt himself inferior to other men and unworthy of anyone's regard
How could she have lived with him and not come to love him deeply?
She must put him from her head and her heart and her life, Miss Blythe had said. She had been nothing
to him except his paid whore.
But even if it were possible to do as she had been told, she would not do it. The only explanation she
would be able to give her child for bringing it into a world where it must live with the stigma of bastardy
and a mother who had been a whore was that she had loved his father. That she still loved him. That he
was worthy of being loved.
And so. even when she left London, numb with the pain of her parting from Gerald, paralyzed by the
knowledge that she would never see him again, she was putting herself back together again, knowing that
there was after all more to her life than Miss Blythe believed. Even when she left, she knew that she no
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