Fic: A Girl in Black (23/?)
Title: A Girl in Black (23/?)
Author: mrstater
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Characters & Pairings: Mary Crawley/Richard Carlisle, Cora Crawley, Sybil Crawley, Robert Crawley, Matthew Crawley, Anna Smith, John Bates, Taylor
Chapter Word Count: 5614 words
Chapter Summary: Mary attempts to get over the hurdle between her and Richard--both literally and figuratively, as she gives in to the allure of Boxing Day traditions. Will the leap--and the ensuing consequences--prove insurmountable?
Author's Notes: Surprise! A Wednesday update. I felt I owed it to you all as soon as it was complete after failing to update last week. Though I can't promise chapter 24 will be ready before the usual time next week. Thanks so much for bearing with me as RL takes on that hectic end-of-the-year pace; I don't want the last few chapters of this fic to be rushed! Special thanks this week to gilpin25 for sharing her knowledge of the traditional English foxhunt (and for horse-picking ;)) and to jou_du, who continues to prove herself a most invaluable beta.
Previous Chapters |
23. The Jump
"Taylor, pull the car over."
The chauffeur's eyes meet Mary's anxiously in the rear-view mirror. "Now, m'lady? Here in the ditch? We’re nearly at the station."
"And I’m nearly going to be sick. The ditch would be preferable to the Renault, don't you think?"
"Oh! Yes, m'lady, at once!"
As it is, even though Taylor brings the car to a stop off the side of the road, Mary still only narrowly avoids emptying her stomach on the upholstery in the time it takes him to climb down from the driver's seat and come around to get her door. In the end she must do it herself before he reaches her, though his hand encased in its heavy driving glove finds her elbow as she steps down onto the embankment.
"Watch your step, Lady Mary, it's that slippery, and too dark to see the icy patches in the grass."
She risks it, pulling her arm from his grasp and dashing off to lean over the edge of the ditch, which she can barely see in the predawn dark, except as an outline in the Renault's headlamps. Thankfully the old driver backs away, boots crunching in the ice and on the gravel as he goes back around to his side of the car, allowing her at least an illusion of privacy in this horrifically revelatory position.
Scarcely has she straightened up again, however, perspiring despite the chill and trembling both from the exertion of heaving and the wind's bite across her sweat-dampened skin, when Taylor returns. He maintains a careful distance; the gleam of metal diverts Mary's attention to his hand, curled around a thermos flask.
"Go on, m'lady. Have a drink. It'll settle your stomach."
As she dabs the corners of her mouth with her handkerchief, she eyes the container. "What is it?"
"Why, tea, Lady Mary." Taylor's voice lilts upward, as if in question rather than a statement; indeed, Mary isn't certain what else a chauffeur would be drinking but tea before six in the morning.
"It might have been coffee," she blurts out, hoarsely.
Richard's chauffeur probably drinks coffee at very odd hours. Much like Richard himself. I seldom have time for more than coffee and toast before my morning commute to the office, his voice rasps through her mind, lack of sleep and sickness apparently reducing her mental faculties to anything but inanities. Does he sip coffee now? Glower at the morning's headlines as he waits on the station platform, impenetrable against the cold?
A knife of wind cuts through Mary's coat and her stupor.
"Thank you, Taylor." She accepts the thermos flask from him and staggers half-blind on the uneven uphill ground toward the waiting motor. "You won't mind if I drink this while we continue on our way?"
"Begging your pardon, Lady Mary, but ought you to give yourself a bit more time to recover?" The chauffeur lurches in front of her, one hand catching her arm again to balance her as the other grasps the car door handle. "I do apologise, m'lady, if it's my driving that's made you ill. The puddles will have frozen over again in the night, and I'm being cautious."
"It's not your driving," Mary replies, though she remembers that just the other day Papa returned from some jaunt or other into the village and complained of Taylor's unsteady hands on the wheel making him a little queasy and mused that it might be time to suggest the chauffeur retire. She sips the tea and notes how his faded eyes regard the thermos warily from his sagging face.
"It's nothing catching, either," she says.
Her flippant tone probably not reassuring him that he won't catch stomach flu from her and be finished off. The heart attack he would suffer if she told him the truth certainly would: It's that I'm pregnant, Taylor, and must go tell my lover, with whom I've had the most frightful quarrel.
"I have no time to give myself," she says, climbing into the car. "I must be at the station before the six o'clock train departs."
Whether because Taylor drives a little more daringly, or because they stopped closer to the village than she realised, the clock illuminated by a gas lamp beneath the overhang of the platform reads a quarter to six when Mary steps tentatively onto it. The idling motor recedes into the din of intermittent puffs of steam from the awaiting train, the jarring voices of engineers readying the locomotive for its cross-country journey, freight workers loading baggage, and of course the conversations of the passengers themselves. Without glancing at their faces peering out from between the brims of hats and collars turned up against the cold for Richard's furrowed brow and piercing blue eyes, Mary ducks into the lavatory, not to be sick but to check in the mirror that she doesn't look it.
Unfortunately, the visage reflected back at her looks discomfited at best. Not having rung for Anna to assist her with the usual morning toilet, Mary simply stuffed the plait she wore to bed up into her hat; she notices a bit of pale pink grosgrain peeking out beneath the navy felt and reaches up to conceal it and the youth it represents. There's nothing she can do about her eyes, however, too dark and too big in her thin pale face, the purplish shadows beneath them which she tried to hide with a dusting of powder showing through anyway. The combined effect makes her look every bit a girl who lay awake all night hugging her knees to her chest with the bedclothes drawn all the way up over her head, as she used to do after Uncle Harold told her and her sisters ghost stories.
There was one they used to beg him to tell over and over, which she forgot years ago only to remember last night, about the invisible hand of a mother who died in childbirth rocking her surviving infant's cradle. For the first time since entertaining the possibility of pregnancy she considered the danger giving birth could be to her, but death was not the fear that robbed her of sleep.
After Richard told her he would spend the night in the village Mary went straight up to her room and, by some stroke of luck, Mama allowed her the privacy she craved. Sybil, on the other hand, did not, but marched in with all the righteous fury of a Suffragette.
How could you just sit there and let Papa say those horrid things to Sir Richard? she demanded to know. Why didn't you fight for him? No wonder he's leaving. He must think you don't love him.
Good, Mary thought. He should know how it feels.
But of course she didn't say it aloud to Sybil, in part because it was no longer true that she was uncertain of his love. The accusations pricked her already wounded conscience, and she retaliated, blow for blow.
Forgive me for not playing to your little feminist romantic fantasies by standing up against our tyrannical patriarch for my poor wronged lover. But this is a grown-up situation, and you're a child.
Sybil left, then--not before she shouted that the only person who was acting like a child was Mary--and she slammed the door shut behind her with such a resonant finality that Mary twitched her thumbs against her forefingers as Anna, who played witness to the row, plaited her hair.
What do you think, Anna? she asked as she climbed into bed. Who's the child in this scenario?
After a moment of tight-lipped hesitation, the reply came: The only one I know for certain is the one inside your ladyship right now. The child who deserves to have a father who at least knows he exists.
Mary snuffed out the candle, unable to face the maid again after that. Nor could she even after a night's wrestling with her indecision left her with no choice but to do what the maid told her from the beginning she must do. Not because she feared Anna would be smug about it, as her sisters would be in such a scenario. Because she knew how kind Anna would be. Kindness would be her undoing.
She must be pulled together when she faces Richard. Her body is coming apart as it is.
The shriek of the train whistle jolts her back into the present and into motion. Her heels click across the tiles at the same tempo as her heart, though she scarcely hears them underneath the thunder of her own pulse in her ears.
She stops short on the platform at the sight of a familiar female face; Gwen's copper hair and crimson suit and hat that once belonged to Sybil blaze colour in the midst of the other passengers in their dark travelling clothes in the uncertain flicker of gas lamps in the predawn station. The former housemaid clutches a sheaf of papers to her chest and nods earnestly up at Richard, so that even with his back to her Mary is certain he's instructing her as to some task she's to perform during her ride in third class. No Boxing Day holiday for secretaries, she muses, and at that moment Gwen catches her eye. The young woman 's mouth opens in speech, and she bustles off to her carriage as Richard turns.
Perhaps Mary is ever so slightly inclined toward Sybil's romanticism, after all: it seems for a moment that the sharp lines of his face ease, and that the flash in his eyes is hope.
But no--they only caught the light as he turned. He does not move a centimetre in her direction, and she knows he will not. She recognises the tension beneath his sharp cheekbone, along his strong jaw line, as he struggles to maintain control over the stolid mask. Her eyes widen slightly as their downward path brings them to settle on his scarf; her throat constricts as if her own knots tighter around her neck.
The peacock print.
If she came here with any notion of that he would meet her half-way, the scarf disabuses her of it entirely.
Richard Carlisle is not a man who offers second chances. If she wants one, she will have to swallow her own pride and ask him for one.
Why didn't you fight for him?
Mary draws a breath, the crystals of ice in the air seeming to frost over the fibres of her lungs, and takes a step toward him. Sybil is not the only one of them who will fight. She will see.
"Richard," Mary says, the words shuddering out and hanging between them amidst the steam of her breath. "There is something I must tell you. Before you go."
"Before I go." His gaze wavers from hers, glancing off to her side and behind her, searching for someone, something. Taylor. Or a porter. With her baggage.
Dear lord, he did hope...The blues and greens and browns of his scarf refract as a kaleidoscope as her eyes mist.
"I can't go with you." She reaches out for him. "But--"
"ALL ABOARD!" calls the conductor, and the whistle emits another blast.
Richard turns away, and strides toward the first class train carriage, his knuckles white as he clutches the handle of his briefcase.
"You have nothing to say that I wish to hear."
~*~
The sky is only faintly lightening as Taylor pulls the car round to the back entrance so that Mary may sneak upstairs and into bed before her family wake to see her or to question where she has been. The servants, of course, have long since risen--and so shall their curiosity at the sight of the last daughter of the Earl of Grantham they would expect to greet before the sun, much less on their turf. Which, she forgot till now, would be a hive of preparation not only for the day as usual, but to send the family off to Haxby Park for the traditional Boxing Day hunt and dinner party.
Her approach slows in the kitchen yard as the whickers of horses drift through the crisp air and walls of stone from the stables and she makes out Bates and Thomas spit-shining two pairs of riding boots--Papa's and Sybil's. Normally riding to hounds is the best part of Christmas, for Mary, but of course she begged off the hunt this year, expecting to entertain Richard; Edith bowed out, too, though usually so eager to show Billy Russell that looking smart in hunting clothes is Mary's only advantage over her in a foxhunt, despite his assertions since their childhood years that Mary could jump for England in the Olympic Games if she wished to.
But Edith swears she will never hunt again after witnessing the Turkish attaché break his neck. Morbidly, Mary rather wishes she were so traumatised; if only she went after a fox in November instead of Richard, leaving him to write up his damn interview with Mr Pamuk, she wouldn't have been so offended by his departure to publicize his death. Or become pregnant.
She would be free to stand up to Papa.
She would be free to run off with Richard.
She would be free.
A gust of wind kicks up and sweeps her improperly pinned hat off her head. She claps it back on, but not before her plait escapes, streaming out behind her.
"Bates?" she says as her approach draws the valet's attention along with Thomas' appraising gaze. "Will you please find Anna and tell her to fetch my boots to be polished and readied? I've decided to join the hunt after all."
Thomas' insolent suspicion is to be expected, but she is unprepared for Bates to search her with a faint upward curve to his mouth that makes the crinkle of his eyes seem less warm than quietly passing judgment. Anna likes him; but does she like him well enough to betray Mary's confidence?
And would he, in turn, betray her to Papa?
"Very good, m'lady," he says, compliant, and not, she decides with a measure of relief, complicit.
She hurries upstairs, remembering that a hunt at Haxby--nearly an hour's ride to warm up the horses without exerting them, and almost as long a drive for the non-riders who will take an early luncheon and then follow the hunt on foot should weather permit-- means her family will be up earlier than usual despite their late Christmas night. Despite her efforts, she is caught anyway. Mama, dressed and wrapped in the fringed shawl Papa gave her but Aunt Rosamund picked out, stands in Sybil's doorway, speaking in harsh but hushed tones with the nightgown-clad girl poised with an indignant hand on the doorknob.
"This is out if character," Mary says coolly, "Mama out of her bed before seven, and Sybil having got up on the wrong side of hers."
Mama looks over her shoulder, features tugging downward in lines etched deep and harsh as the tone now addressing Mary.
"Do you honestly think I could sleep after what occurred last night?" She looks her over, as if noticing for the first time Mary's equally uncharacteristic state of dress. The lines ease with hope. "Where have you been?"
"Seeing Sir Richard off."
Mary glances away from Mama, unable to face her inevitable disappointment. The hurt and anger with which Sybil regards her are hardly better, nor faded since last night. In fact she appears not to have slept, either. Did anyone in this house? Edith, probably; Mary glares across the hall at her middle sister's closed bedroom door. Though she supposes she ought to be grateful Edith isn't peeking out into the hall, smirking like something of a moustache-twirling villainess herself.
"I've just been telling Mama that I'm boycotting the hunt today," Sybil says, with a defiant lift of her chin. "As a form of protest."
"You are being unreasonable and melodramatic." Mama turns back to her. "It's your first time riding to hounds as an adult. You'll be bloodied, if a fox is killed. And Papa has so looked forward to this day. I thought you were excited, too."
"I was--until Papa showed his true colours as a prejudiced tyrant."
"Sybil Patricia Crawley! How dare you speak about your father that way!"
"You can't defend the way he treated Sir Richard last night," Sybil lashes back. "It was positively beastly of him. Even if Sir Richard was in the wrong--which I don't think he was--Papa is supposed to be a gentleman. And the newspaper world is hard."
"Believe me, my darling," says Mama, darting her gaze sideways as if to check that no one is coming down the hall, then lowering her voice, "your father deeply regrets the public nature of the confrontation--"
"So secret sins are preferable?"
"Sybil..." Mama's shawl slips off her shoulders with her heavy sigh. Adjusting it, she braces one hand against the ornately carved doorjamb as she goes on. "You must try to see it from his perspective. A father's greatest duty is to safeguard his daughters from dishonourable men. From where he stands, Sir Richard placed Mary in a compromising situation when he took her to that…nightclub…" She half-swallows the word, as though it is an obscenity she has been made to utter.
"The Cave of the Golden Calf," Mary says, the corner of her mouth twitching.
Not amused, Mama half-turns toward her as she continues the speech which is no longer directed solely at Sybil. Or at all.
"Sir Richard hasn’t courted your sister properly, and now we've learnt of these underhanded dealings involving another young woman whose father was too ill to protect her."
"Lavinia Swire's a person with her own free will," Sybil argues. "Why does no one call her honour into question? And anyway, Sir Richard was right. Breaking the Marconi scandal uncovered corruption in the government."
Mary arches an eyebrow at her little sister. "Do you think by trotting out politicians' misconduct he means to reform the government, or to profit from it?"
"Does it matter, when justice is served in the end?"
"I am not going to argue whether the end justifies the means," Mama cuts in, glowering at Mary before stepping sideways to stand between them, her hands coming to rest on Sybil's shoulders. "You are sixteen years old. You will go to your room and dress, come down for a hearty breakfast, and then you will ride to Haxby Park with your father for the hunt. Is that understood?"
"Yes," Sybil replies with a curt not. "But I won't be happy about it."
"Your happiness or your misery are entirely your own choice."
"Don't worry, darling," says Mary as Sybil starts to shut the door, "I'll be along, too."
"What?" Mama spins around as the door slams. "You mean to ride with the hunt?"
"No, to polish the bridles."
Mama's mouth opens in retort, but before she can speak a lilting I beg your ladyship's pardon drifts to them from down the hall.
"Anna?" says Mama as they both turn to see the maid hurrying toward them, her round eyes fixed on Mary.
"Mr Bates just told me you asked for your riding clothes to be readied," she pants. "Lady Mary...do you really think that's such a good idea?"
"And why shouldn't it be?" Papa booms, and they turn to see him emerge from his dressing room, a copy of the Times tucked under his arm. "It's the best one I've heard from Mary in months." As he goes past, he gestures with the rolled broadsheet and gives her what seems like the first smile she's seen from him in about that long. "Remember who you are, my darling daughter, and forget this Carlisle nonsense."
His retreating form blurs through another veil of tears, but when he has rounded the corner into the gallery, Mary blinks them back, and turns to go, at last, to her own bedroom. The lump lingers in her throat, however, choking the words she flings back over her shoulder at Mama.
"Yes, I certainly detect an air of regret about last night."
"Mary, please don't allow your bitterness about the entail to poison you to your father in every way," says Mama, following close behind. "He loves you more than you can imagine, and you must believe what I told Sybil about him feeling that he's failed to protect you."
Mary stops to open her door, and glances back to see Mama clutching her shawl tight to her chest, which shudders with a sob.
"And so have I. If I hadn't left you alone with Sir Richard that afternoon..."
"If only you hadn't given me the idea to sleep with him in the first place."
The tears seem to dry in Mama's eyes at once as they widen. "Excuse me?"
Rolling her eyes, Mary opens the door and goes in, flopping down upon the sofa, heedless of the dirt on her shoes as Mama turns back in the hall to whisper to Anna to please see to Sybil and await further instruction regarding Mary's things. When she comes in, leaning back against the door to shut it, Mary examines her fingernails as she resumes the conversation.
"You're the one who told me Granny was wrong about sex."
Mama flinches, and makes a strangled sound in her throat, and Mary can hardly believe she's spoken so bluntly. Then again, wouldn't it be rather ridiculous to revert to euphemisms now that she's had sex?
"You could have left me in fear and ignorance," she goes on. "Instead you told me how exciting it was, to be with a man you know and trust and..." Love. She catches herself, and meets Mama's eye. "Clearly you didn't tell Papa that Aunt Rosamund has fallen out of first place for Worst Chaperone, as he looks like Christmas finally came."
He was whistling "Good King Wenceslas" as he strolled down the hall, she realises belatedly.
"Of course I didn't tell him! And believe me, Mary, I feel almost the same way about Richard as your father does, but I do think he should at least have the chance to do right by you before your papa finds out just what he's done."
"You say it as though Richard's done something I haven't. I've been right there with him all the time. In this instance," she says, her hand falling to her side on the sofa cushion, "leading the way."
For a moment Mama regards her in silence, and Mary watches her own fingers picking at a loose thread in the upholstery.
"That's the first glimmer of responsibility you've shown me," says Mama, and Mary looks up to see her lowering herself onto the edge of the armchair angled in toward the foot of the sofa. "But you still didn't tell Richard you're pregnant. Did you?"
Mary shakes her head.
"Well I'm relieved, actually." Mama sits back in her chair, huddled in her shawl as she rubs her hand across her forehead. "I can't think of anything worse for any of us than if you told him and he left." She lowers her hand into her lap and catches Mary's eye. "Though if you don't tell him soon, I will."
"Mama--"
"You'll have to ride now," Mama cuts her off, getting up again, "if we want to avoid more awkward questions from your father. I suppose I should probably warn you." She stops behind the chair, running her hand over the curved gilt back. "Matthew's going along."
"Matthew?" Mary lifts her head from the arm of the sofa. "But he's in London!"
"He and Cousin Isobel returned late last night. Reggie Swire took suddenly ill. His lung condition...Anyway, Matthew sent up a message asking if there was still room in the hunting party for him."
"No wonder Papa's so happy."
"Mary, darling..."
Mary looks up, hoping that in this matter, at least, Mama will acknowledge a justifiable hurt, that Papa has found the son she failed to be.
"Anna is right," she says. "Riding to hounds is no activity for an expectant woman. Please go easy."
"Oh, Mama." Mary swings her feet onto the floor and stands. "When have I ever made anything easy?"
~*~
Diamond's hooves clatter onto the wooden planks of the bridge, and she snorts in protest, shaking her head against the bridle as Mary reins her in.
"I know, darling," she says, patting the mare's neck. "This is too mild for my taste, too."
She grips the saddle horn a little harder under her knee and twists around to see Matthew riding up behind, looking quite as ill at ease in his hunting costume--which was a Christmas gift from her parents, an essential outfit for a future earl--as Richard did in his shooting tweeds. And not half so smart. Richard would sit a horse nicely, she thinks--if he cared to tear himself off his swivel chair to learn; she's seen how suited he is to a top hat.
But she came here to not think of Richard.
"Do you need to stop for a rest?" Matthew calls, when he is within earshot, slowing his mount to a trot, the peals of horns and the bays of the hounds and the thunder of hooves and view hallos receding into the distance with the hunting party. He reaches for the flask dangling by a strap from his saddle and unscrews the cap, offering it to her.
"Hardly," Mary sneers, certain he's probably brought water instead of brandy; she should have stuck with Billy, who always has very good brandy in his flask. Apparently Mama told Papa she was a little under the weather and shouldn't overdo it today, which prompted him to suggest with all the subtlety of Lady Rutland playing matchmaker at a dinner party that Matthew would do well to stick with Mary for his first time riding to hounds.
Shrugging, Matthew takes a drink. He squints at the pack of red and black-jacketed riders galloping over the crest of the hill around the wood. "Then hadn't we better catch up?"
"Oh, I intend to. But as I do hate to come up from behind, I know a little shortcut." She and Billy and Edith have thought of it as their own personal steeplechase course for years. "Though I daresay it's for rather more experienced riders."
Matthew's gaze follows the jerk of her chin to indicate the gully below the bridge that cuts through the corner of the wood to meet the path the party will take. "Wouldn't more experienced riders know that's a lark and frowned upon by the master of the hunt?"
"My. Someone brushed up on his hunting etiquette for the occasion," Mary mocks him. "You may want to press on and see if you can catch Sybil and Papa. He'll be so pleased to see you, I'm sure."
"No, I don't imagine he would be, after I already let you send Lynch away when Cousin Cora was so adamant--"
"Let me?" Diamond whickers as Mary turns her about, and Matthew tugs hard at the reins as his own horse darts sideways, startled. "Just like you let me decide whether Papa should know about Miss Swire being Sir Richard's source for the Marconi scandal? I must say, I was wrong about you. You've got exactly the stuff to make a fine earl one day. Who'd have thought a solicitor from Manchester could be so paternalistic?"
Though red-faced, Matthew retains a cool composure that would serve him well in court--should he ever rise in his profession, that is. "You seem to think I act from a misguided sense of honour. That I regard it as my duty to look after you because I have inherited what should, in a just world, be yours."
"That's about the long and short of it."
"Be that as it may, Mary, everything is not about you. I felt I owed the present Earl of Grantham an honest answer about why the future Countess felt uncomfortable celebrating Christmas at Downton."
She slaps the crop against Diamond's flank and the horse breaks into a gallop across the bridge and down the hill on the other side. Muddy water splashes over into her face as she charges through the stream the bridge bypasses, and she smiles. Good.
Let her be as stained on the outside as she is within. Let the picture in the attic be unveiled.
A gate looms before them, and she leans over Diamond's neck, the coarse mane lashing her face through the netted veil.
And takes the jump.
~*~
"You should go straight up to bed," Mama says, inspecting Mary with anxious eyes as she steps down gingerly from the car when they arrive back home after dinner, Sybil and Edith having stayed behind at Haxby for the night, as they all planned to do.
"Don't be such a worrywart, Cora," says Papa, grasping her hand. "It's only that she hasn't ridden in far too long. And she rode much too hard."
He frowns down at Mary, and she rolls her eyes; not so much as his reproof as at Matthew being such a telltale after she scolded him for that very fault.
"I'm sure he's right, Mama," she says, though of course in light of her mother's earlier admonishment about going easy, this hardly eases the troubled lines off her face, though she says it more for her own peace of mind.
After her bath at the Russells', she felt a twinge deep in her pelvis not unlike menstrual cramps, and though the hunt worked up more appetite than she had in weeks, by the time they were all sat down to dinner she was unable to eat a bite for the sensation of her stomach being clamped tight in a fist. Papa's suggestion of simply being out of shape seems a much more reassuring. And likely. Of course there's always the possibility that it is, indeed, menstrual pain. In which case they all ought to be very relieved.
She's not sure that she is.
But she brushes the thought aside, affecting an air of unconcern as Carson sweeps the front door wide for them to enter the hall, footmen at the ready to assist with the family's coats and hats.
"Anyway, blame it on Billy, inspiring me with all that talk of equestrian events being added back into the Olympics again."
"Are you scheming to ride for Britain in the Berlin Games in '16?" Papa asks with a chuckle; Carson, helping him out of his greatcoat, can scarcely contain the disapproval evident in his substantial eyebrows. "The team could use you, after our rather abysmal performance in Stockholm last summer."
Mary's shoulders stiffen, her arms only part-way out of the sleeves of her coat as Thomas holds it. She should be glad that Papa is joking with her again, his demeanour warm. Instead, she can only think how the night before he was anything but joking as he coldly ordered Richard from the house.
"I have to make a name for myself somehow," she says, catching his eye as she draws her arms out of her coat, her voice taut as her stomach constricts against a shooting pain. "Since I won't be marrying a famous newspaperman."
She strides through the vestibule to the front hall; Papa follows with Mama, neither saying a word until she is part-way up the stairs.
"I suppose it won't make any difference to you," he calls up to her from the foot of the staircase, "but I am sorry about last night."
"How generous of you to say so, Papa. When you've got everything you want. The chance to put a social climber back in his place. A son."
She pauses on the landing, fingers curled over the smooth carved railing as she peers down at Papa, and sees him flinch.
"I've only ever wanted two things, Papa. Downton, and Richard. And because of you, I'll have neither."
He replies, very quietly, his lips scarcely seeming to move. "Carlisle was never a suitable match for you, and I don't believe you can truly be so attached to him, except to get to me."
Now Mary winces; hadn't Richard made the same accusation?
"As for Downton..." Papa's broad chest swells as he clasps his hands behind his back. "Do you think I want to give Downton to anyone who isn't my own child? But Downton is my child. And my parent. It's part of an ordered universe--of which, my daughter, dear as you are to me, you are not the centre. No matter what is implied by inappropriate gifts of ostentatious jewellery."
"Mary," pants Mama, hurrying up the stairs, "please go to bed before you say something you don't mean." She looks back at Papa. "Both of you."
"Too late, Mama." Mary at last breaks eye contact with Papa and resumes climbing the stairs. "And I meant every word."
~*~
In her bedroom, she finds Anna laying out a fresh nightgown on the downturned coverlet, ready to assist her with undressing for bed. Gritting her teeth at the sight of the maid, she avoids meeting the blue eyes which were so apprehensive this morning about her riding to hounds, and no doubt will examine her now for any ill effects of the hunt.
But Mary's jaw goes slack with a gasp and her gaze automatically seeks Anna's when she steps out of her bloomers.
The white, lace-trimmed cotton is stained with bright red blood.
Read Chapter 24
Author: mrstater
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Characters & Pairings: Mary Crawley/Richard Carlisle, Cora Crawley, Sybil Crawley, Robert Crawley, Matthew Crawley, Anna Smith, John Bates, Taylor
Chapter Word Count: 5614 words
Chapter Summary: Mary attempts to get over the hurdle between her and Richard--both literally and figuratively, as she gives in to the allure of Boxing Day traditions. Will the leap--and the ensuing consequences--prove insurmountable?
Author's Notes: Surprise! A Wednesday update. I felt I owed it to you all as soon as it was complete after failing to update last week. Though I can't promise chapter 24 will be ready before the usual time next week. Thanks so much for bearing with me as RL takes on that hectic end-of-the-year pace; I don't want the last few chapters of this fic to be rushed! Special thanks this week to gilpin25 for sharing her knowledge of the traditional English foxhunt (and for horse-picking ;)) and to jou_du, who continues to prove herself a most invaluable beta.
Previous Chapters |
23. The Jump
"Taylor, pull the car over."
The chauffeur's eyes meet Mary's anxiously in the rear-view mirror. "Now, m'lady? Here in the ditch? We’re nearly at the station."
"And I’m nearly going to be sick. The ditch would be preferable to the Renault, don't you think?"
"Oh! Yes, m'lady, at once!"
As it is, even though Taylor brings the car to a stop off the side of the road, Mary still only narrowly avoids emptying her stomach on the upholstery in the time it takes him to climb down from the driver's seat and come around to get her door. In the end she must do it herself before he reaches her, though his hand encased in its heavy driving glove finds her elbow as she steps down onto the embankment.
"Watch your step, Lady Mary, it's that slippery, and too dark to see the icy patches in the grass."
She risks it, pulling her arm from his grasp and dashing off to lean over the edge of the ditch, which she can barely see in the predawn dark, except as an outline in the Renault's headlamps. Thankfully the old driver backs away, boots crunching in the ice and on the gravel as he goes back around to his side of the car, allowing her at least an illusion of privacy in this horrifically revelatory position.
Scarcely has she straightened up again, however, perspiring despite the chill and trembling both from the exertion of heaving and the wind's bite across her sweat-dampened skin, when Taylor returns. He maintains a careful distance; the gleam of metal diverts Mary's attention to his hand, curled around a thermos flask.
"Go on, m'lady. Have a drink. It'll settle your stomach."
As she dabs the corners of her mouth with her handkerchief, she eyes the container. "What is it?"
"Why, tea, Lady Mary." Taylor's voice lilts upward, as if in question rather than a statement; indeed, Mary isn't certain what else a chauffeur would be drinking but tea before six in the morning.
"It might have been coffee," she blurts out, hoarsely.
Richard's chauffeur probably drinks coffee at very odd hours. Much like Richard himself. I seldom have time for more than coffee and toast before my morning commute to the office, his voice rasps through her mind, lack of sleep and sickness apparently reducing her mental faculties to anything but inanities. Does he sip coffee now? Glower at the morning's headlines as he waits on the station platform, impenetrable against the cold?
A knife of wind cuts through Mary's coat and her stupor.
"Thank you, Taylor." She accepts the thermos flask from him and staggers half-blind on the uneven uphill ground toward the waiting motor. "You won't mind if I drink this while we continue on our way?"
"Begging your pardon, Lady Mary, but ought you to give yourself a bit more time to recover?" The chauffeur lurches in front of her, one hand catching her arm again to balance her as the other grasps the car door handle. "I do apologise, m'lady, if it's my driving that's made you ill. The puddles will have frozen over again in the night, and I'm being cautious."
"It's not your driving," Mary replies, though she remembers that just the other day Papa returned from some jaunt or other into the village and complained of Taylor's unsteady hands on the wheel making him a little queasy and mused that it might be time to suggest the chauffeur retire. She sips the tea and notes how his faded eyes regard the thermos warily from his sagging face.
"It's nothing catching, either," she says.
Her flippant tone probably not reassuring him that he won't catch stomach flu from her and be finished off. The heart attack he would suffer if she told him the truth certainly would: It's that I'm pregnant, Taylor, and must go tell my lover, with whom I've had the most frightful quarrel.
"I have no time to give myself," she says, climbing into the car. "I must be at the station before the six o'clock train departs."
Whether because Taylor drives a little more daringly, or because they stopped closer to the village than she realised, the clock illuminated by a gas lamp beneath the overhang of the platform reads a quarter to six when Mary steps tentatively onto it. The idling motor recedes into the din of intermittent puffs of steam from the awaiting train, the jarring voices of engineers readying the locomotive for its cross-country journey, freight workers loading baggage, and of course the conversations of the passengers themselves. Without glancing at their faces peering out from between the brims of hats and collars turned up against the cold for Richard's furrowed brow and piercing blue eyes, Mary ducks into the lavatory, not to be sick but to check in the mirror that she doesn't look it.
Unfortunately, the visage reflected back at her looks discomfited at best. Not having rung for Anna to assist her with the usual morning toilet, Mary simply stuffed the plait she wore to bed up into her hat; she notices a bit of pale pink grosgrain peeking out beneath the navy felt and reaches up to conceal it and the youth it represents. There's nothing she can do about her eyes, however, too dark and too big in her thin pale face, the purplish shadows beneath them which she tried to hide with a dusting of powder showing through anyway. The combined effect makes her look every bit a girl who lay awake all night hugging her knees to her chest with the bedclothes drawn all the way up over her head, as she used to do after Uncle Harold told her and her sisters ghost stories.
There was one they used to beg him to tell over and over, which she forgot years ago only to remember last night, about the invisible hand of a mother who died in childbirth rocking her surviving infant's cradle. For the first time since entertaining the possibility of pregnancy she considered the danger giving birth could be to her, but death was not the fear that robbed her of sleep.
After Richard told her he would spend the night in the village Mary went straight up to her room and, by some stroke of luck, Mama allowed her the privacy she craved. Sybil, on the other hand, did not, but marched in with all the righteous fury of a Suffragette.
How could you just sit there and let Papa say those horrid things to Sir Richard? she demanded to know. Why didn't you fight for him? No wonder he's leaving. He must think you don't love him.
Good, Mary thought. He should know how it feels.
But of course she didn't say it aloud to Sybil, in part because it was no longer true that she was uncertain of his love. The accusations pricked her already wounded conscience, and she retaliated, blow for blow.
Forgive me for not playing to your little feminist romantic fantasies by standing up against our tyrannical patriarch for my poor wronged lover. But this is a grown-up situation, and you're a child.
Sybil left, then--not before she shouted that the only person who was acting like a child was Mary--and she slammed the door shut behind her with such a resonant finality that Mary twitched her thumbs against her forefingers as Anna, who played witness to the row, plaited her hair.
What do you think, Anna? she asked as she climbed into bed. Who's the child in this scenario?
After a moment of tight-lipped hesitation, the reply came: The only one I know for certain is the one inside your ladyship right now. The child who deserves to have a father who at least knows he exists.
Mary snuffed out the candle, unable to face the maid again after that. Nor could she even after a night's wrestling with her indecision left her with no choice but to do what the maid told her from the beginning she must do. Not because she feared Anna would be smug about it, as her sisters would be in such a scenario. Because she knew how kind Anna would be. Kindness would be her undoing.
She must be pulled together when she faces Richard. Her body is coming apart as it is.
The shriek of the train whistle jolts her back into the present and into motion. Her heels click across the tiles at the same tempo as her heart, though she scarcely hears them underneath the thunder of her own pulse in her ears.
She stops short on the platform at the sight of a familiar female face; Gwen's copper hair and crimson suit and hat that once belonged to Sybil blaze colour in the midst of the other passengers in their dark travelling clothes in the uncertain flicker of gas lamps in the predawn station. The former housemaid clutches a sheaf of papers to her chest and nods earnestly up at Richard, so that even with his back to her Mary is certain he's instructing her as to some task she's to perform during her ride in third class. No Boxing Day holiday for secretaries, she muses, and at that moment Gwen catches her eye. The young woman 's mouth opens in speech, and she bustles off to her carriage as Richard turns.
Perhaps Mary is ever so slightly inclined toward Sybil's romanticism, after all: it seems for a moment that the sharp lines of his face ease, and that the flash in his eyes is hope.
But no--they only caught the light as he turned. He does not move a centimetre in her direction, and she knows he will not. She recognises the tension beneath his sharp cheekbone, along his strong jaw line, as he struggles to maintain control over the stolid mask. Her eyes widen slightly as their downward path brings them to settle on his scarf; her throat constricts as if her own knots tighter around her neck.
The peacock print.
If she came here with any notion of that he would meet her half-way, the scarf disabuses her of it entirely.
Richard Carlisle is not a man who offers second chances. If she wants one, she will have to swallow her own pride and ask him for one.
Why didn't you fight for him?
Mary draws a breath, the crystals of ice in the air seeming to frost over the fibres of her lungs, and takes a step toward him. Sybil is not the only one of them who will fight. She will see.
"Richard," Mary says, the words shuddering out and hanging between them amidst the steam of her breath. "There is something I must tell you. Before you go."
"Before I go." His gaze wavers from hers, glancing off to her side and behind her, searching for someone, something. Taylor. Or a porter. With her baggage.
Dear lord, he did hope...The blues and greens and browns of his scarf refract as a kaleidoscope as her eyes mist.
"I can't go with you." She reaches out for him. "But--"
"ALL ABOARD!" calls the conductor, and the whistle emits another blast.
Richard turns away, and strides toward the first class train carriage, his knuckles white as he clutches the handle of his briefcase.
"You have nothing to say that I wish to hear."
~*~
The sky is only faintly lightening as Taylor pulls the car round to the back entrance so that Mary may sneak upstairs and into bed before her family wake to see her or to question where she has been. The servants, of course, have long since risen--and so shall their curiosity at the sight of the last daughter of the Earl of Grantham they would expect to greet before the sun, much less on their turf. Which, she forgot till now, would be a hive of preparation not only for the day as usual, but to send the family off to Haxby Park for the traditional Boxing Day hunt and dinner party.
Her approach slows in the kitchen yard as the whickers of horses drift through the crisp air and walls of stone from the stables and she makes out Bates and Thomas spit-shining two pairs of riding boots--Papa's and Sybil's. Normally riding to hounds is the best part of Christmas, for Mary, but of course she begged off the hunt this year, expecting to entertain Richard; Edith bowed out, too, though usually so eager to show Billy Russell that looking smart in hunting clothes is Mary's only advantage over her in a foxhunt, despite his assertions since their childhood years that Mary could jump for England in the Olympic Games if she wished to.
But Edith swears she will never hunt again after witnessing the Turkish attaché break his neck. Morbidly, Mary rather wishes she were so traumatised; if only she went after a fox in November instead of Richard, leaving him to write up his damn interview with Mr Pamuk, she wouldn't have been so offended by his departure to publicize his death. Or become pregnant.
She would be free to stand up to Papa.
She would be free to run off with Richard.
She would be free.
A gust of wind kicks up and sweeps her improperly pinned hat off her head. She claps it back on, but not before her plait escapes, streaming out behind her.
"Bates?" she says as her approach draws the valet's attention along with Thomas' appraising gaze. "Will you please find Anna and tell her to fetch my boots to be polished and readied? I've decided to join the hunt after all."
Thomas' insolent suspicion is to be expected, but she is unprepared for Bates to search her with a faint upward curve to his mouth that makes the crinkle of his eyes seem less warm than quietly passing judgment. Anna likes him; but does she like him well enough to betray Mary's confidence?
And would he, in turn, betray her to Papa?
"Very good, m'lady," he says, compliant, and not, she decides with a measure of relief, complicit.
She hurries upstairs, remembering that a hunt at Haxby--nearly an hour's ride to warm up the horses without exerting them, and almost as long a drive for the non-riders who will take an early luncheon and then follow the hunt on foot should weather permit-- means her family will be up earlier than usual despite their late Christmas night. Despite her efforts, she is caught anyway. Mama, dressed and wrapped in the fringed shawl Papa gave her but Aunt Rosamund picked out, stands in Sybil's doorway, speaking in harsh but hushed tones with the nightgown-clad girl poised with an indignant hand on the doorknob.
"This is out if character," Mary says coolly, "Mama out of her bed before seven, and Sybil having got up on the wrong side of hers."
Mama looks over her shoulder, features tugging downward in lines etched deep and harsh as the tone now addressing Mary.
"Do you honestly think I could sleep after what occurred last night?" She looks her over, as if noticing for the first time Mary's equally uncharacteristic state of dress. The lines ease with hope. "Where have you been?"
"Seeing Sir Richard off."
Mary glances away from Mama, unable to face her inevitable disappointment. The hurt and anger with which Sybil regards her are hardly better, nor faded since last night. In fact she appears not to have slept, either. Did anyone in this house? Edith, probably; Mary glares across the hall at her middle sister's closed bedroom door. Though she supposes she ought to be grateful Edith isn't peeking out into the hall, smirking like something of a moustache-twirling villainess herself.
"I've just been telling Mama that I'm boycotting the hunt today," Sybil says, with a defiant lift of her chin. "As a form of protest."
"You are being unreasonable and melodramatic." Mama turns back to her. "It's your first time riding to hounds as an adult. You'll be bloodied, if a fox is killed. And Papa has so looked forward to this day. I thought you were excited, too."
"I was--until Papa showed his true colours as a prejudiced tyrant."
"Sybil Patricia Crawley! How dare you speak about your father that way!"
"You can't defend the way he treated Sir Richard last night," Sybil lashes back. "It was positively beastly of him. Even if Sir Richard was in the wrong--which I don't think he was--Papa is supposed to be a gentleman. And the newspaper world is hard."
"Believe me, my darling," says Mama, darting her gaze sideways as if to check that no one is coming down the hall, then lowering her voice, "your father deeply regrets the public nature of the confrontation--"
"So secret sins are preferable?"
"Sybil..." Mama's shawl slips off her shoulders with her heavy sigh. Adjusting it, she braces one hand against the ornately carved doorjamb as she goes on. "You must try to see it from his perspective. A father's greatest duty is to safeguard his daughters from dishonourable men. From where he stands, Sir Richard placed Mary in a compromising situation when he took her to that…nightclub…" She half-swallows the word, as though it is an obscenity she has been made to utter.
"The Cave of the Golden Calf," Mary says, the corner of her mouth twitching.
Not amused, Mama half-turns toward her as she continues the speech which is no longer directed solely at Sybil. Or at all.
"Sir Richard hasn’t courted your sister properly, and now we've learnt of these underhanded dealings involving another young woman whose father was too ill to protect her."
"Lavinia Swire's a person with her own free will," Sybil argues. "Why does no one call her honour into question? And anyway, Sir Richard was right. Breaking the Marconi scandal uncovered corruption in the government."
Mary arches an eyebrow at her little sister. "Do you think by trotting out politicians' misconduct he means to reform the government, or to profit from it?"
"Does it matter, when justice is served in the end?"
"I am not going to argue whether the end justifies the means," Mama cuts in, glowering at Mary before stepping sideways to stand between them, her hands coming to rest on Sybil's shoulders. "You are sixteen years old. You will go to your room and dress, come down for a hearty breakfast, and then you will ride to Haxby Park with your father for the hunt. Is that understood?"
"Yes," Sybil replies with a curt not. "But I won't be happy about it."
"Your happiness or your misery are entirely your own choice."
"Don't worry, darling," says Mary as Sybil starts to shut the door, "I'll be along, too."
"What?" Mama spins around as the door slams. "You mean to ride with the hunt?"
"No, to polish the bridles."
Mama's mouth opens in retort, but before she can speak a lilting I beg your ladyship's pardon drifts to them from down the hall.
"Anna?" says Mama as they both turn to see the maid hurrying toward them, her round eyes fixed on Mary.
"Mr Bates just told me you asked for your riding clothes to be readied," she pants. "Lady Mary...do you really think that's such a good idea?"
"And why shouldn't it be?" Papa booms, and they turn to see him emerge from his dressing room, a copy of the Times tucked under his arm. "It's the best one I've heard from Mary in months." As he goes past, he gestures with the rolled broadsheet and gives her what seems like the first smile she's seen from him in about that long. "Remember who you are, my darling daughter, and forget this Carlisle nonsense."
His retreating form blurs through another veil of tears, but when he has rounded the corner into the gallery, Mary blinks them back, and turns to go, at last, to her own bedroom. The lump lingers in her throat, however, choking the words she flings back over her shoulder at Mama.
"Yes, I certainly detect an air of regret about last night."
"Mary, please don't allow your bitterness about the entail to poison you to your father in every way," says Mama, following close behind. "He loves you more than you can imagine, and you must believe what I told Sybil about him feeling that he's failed to protect you."
Mary stops to open her door, and glances back to see Mama clutching her shawl tight to her chest, which shudders with a sob.
"And so have I. If I hadn't left you alone with Sir Richard that afternoon..."
"If only you hadn't given me the idea to sleep with him in the first place."
The tears seem to dry in Mama's eyes at once as they widen. "Excuse me?"
Rolling her eyes, Mary opens the door and goes in, flopping down upon the sofa, heedless of the dirt on her shoes as Mama turns back in the hall to whisper to Anna to please see to Sybil and await further instruction regarding Mary's things. When she comes in, leaning back against the door to shut it, Mary examines her fingernails as she resumes the conversation.
"You're the one who told me Granny was wrong about sex."
Mama flinches, and makes a strangled sound in her throat, and Mary can hardly believe she's spoken so bluntly. Then again, wouldn't it be rather ridiculous to revert to euphemisms now that she's had sex?
"You could have left me in fear and ignorance," she goes on. "Instead you told me how exciting it was, to be with a man you know and trust and..." Love. She catches herself, and meets Mama's eye. "Clearly you didn't tell Papa that Aunt Rosamund has fallen out of first place for Worst Chaperone, as he looks like Christmas finally came."
He was whistling "Good King Wenceslas" as he strolled down the hall, she realises belatedly.
"Of course I didn't tell him! And believe me, Mary, I feel almost the same way about Richard as your father does, but I do think he should at least have the chance to do right by you before your papa finds out just what he's done."
"You say it as though Richard's done something I haven't. I've been right there with him all the time. In this instance," she says, her hand falling to her side on the sofa cushion, "leading the way."
For a moment Mama regards her in silence, and Mary watches her own fingers picking at a loose thread in the upholstery.
"That's the first glimmer of responsibility you've shown me," says Mama, and Mary looks up to see her lowering herself onto the edge of the armchair angled in toward the foot of the sofa. "But you still didn't tell Richard you're pregnant. Did you?"
Mary shakes her head.
"Well I'm relieved, actually." Mama sits back in her chair, huddled in her shawl as she rubs her hand across her forehead. "I can't think of anything worse for any of us than if you told him and he left." She lowers her hand into her lap and catches Mary's eye. "Though if you don't tell him soon, I will."
"Mama--"
"You'll have to ride now," Mama cuts her off, getting up again, "if we want to avoid more awkward questions from your father. I suppose I should probably warn you." She stops behind the chair, running her hand over the curved gilt back. "Matthew's going along."
"Matthew?" Mary lifts her head from the arm of the sofa. "But he's in London!"
"He and Cousin Isobel returned late last night. Reggie Swire took suddenly ill. His lung condition...Anyway, Matthew sent up a message asking if there was still room in the hunting party for him."
"No wonder Papa's so happy."
"Mary, darling..."
Mary looks up, hoping that in this matter, at least, Mama will acknowledge a justifiable hurt, that Papa has found the son she failed to be.
"Anna is right," she says. "Riding to hounds is no activity for an expectant woman. Please go easy."
"Oh, Mama." Mary swings her feet onto the floor and stands. "When have I ever made anything easy?"
~*~
Diamond's hooves clatter onto the wooden planks of the bridge, and she snorts in protest, shaking her head against the bridle as Mary reins her in.
"I know, darling," she says, patting the mare's neck. "This is too mild for my taste, too."
She grips the saddle horn a little harder under her knee and twists around to see Matthew riding up behind, looking quite as ill at ease in his hunting costume--which was a Christmas gift from her parents, an essential outfit for a future earl--as Richard did in his shooting tweeds. And not half so smart. Richard would sit a horse nicely, she thinks--if he cared to tear himself off his swivel chair to learn; she's seen how suited he is to a top hat.
But she came here to not think of Richard.
"Do you need to stop for a rest?" Matthew calls, when he is within earshot, slowing his mount to a trot, the peals of horns and the bays of the hounds and the thunder of hooves and view hallos receding into the distance with the hunting party. He reaches for the flask dangling by a strap from his saddle and unscrews the cap, offering it to her.
"Hardly," Mary sneers, certain he's probably brought water instead of brandy; she should have stuck with Billy, who always has very good brandy in his flask. Apparently Mama told Papa she was a little under the weather and shouldn't overdo it today, which prompted him to suggest with all the subtlety of Lady Rutland playing matchmaker at a dinner party that Matthew would do well to stick with Mary for his first time riding to hounds.
Shrugging, Matthew takes a drink. He squints at the pack of red and black-jacketed riders galloping over the crest of the hill around the wood. "Then hadn't we better catch up?"
"Oh, I intend to. But as I do hate to come up from behind, I know a little shortcut." She and Billy and Edith have thought of it as their own personal steeplechase course for years. "Though I daresay it's for rather more experienced riders."
Matthew's gaze follows the jerk of her chin to indicate the gully below the bridge that cuts through the corner of the wood to meet the path the party will take. "Wouldn't more experienced riders know that's a lark and frowned upon by the master of the hunt?"
"My. Someone brushed up on his hunting etiquette for the occasion," Mary mocks him. "You may want to press on and see if you can catch Sybil and Papa. He'll be so pleased to see you, I'm sure."
"No, I don't imagine he would be, after I already let you send Lynch away when Cousin Cora was so adamant--"
"Let me?" Diamond whickers as Mary turns her about, and Matthew tugs hard at the reins as his own horse darts sideways, startled. "Just like you let me decide whether Papa should know about Miss Swire being Sir Richard's source for the Marconi scandal? I must say, I was wrong about you. You've got exactly the stuff to make a fine earl one day. Who'd have thought a solicitor from Manchester could be so paternalistic?"
Though red-faced, Matthew retains a cool composure that would serve him well in court--should he ever rise in his profession, that is. "You seem to think I act from a misguided sense of honour. That I regard it as my duty to look after you because I have inherited what should, in a just world, be yours."
"That's about the long and short of it."
"Be that as it may, Mary, everything is not about you. I felt I owed the present Earl of Grantham an honest answer about why the future Countess felt uncomfortable celebrating Christmas at Downton."
She slaps the crop against Diamond's flank and the horse breaks into a gallop across the bridge and down the hill on the other side. Muddy water splashes over into her face as she charges through the stream the bridge bypasses, and she smiles. Good.
Let her be as stained on the outside as she is within. Let the picture in the attic be unveiled.
A gate looms before them, and she leans over Diamond's neck, the coarse mane lashing her face through the netted veil.
And takes the jump.
~*~
"You should go straight up to bed," Mama says, inspecting Mary with anxious eyes as she steps down gingerly from the car when they arrive back home after dinner, Sybil and Edith having stayed behind at Haxby for the night, as they all planned to do.
"Don't be such a worrywart, Cora," says Papa, grasping her hand. "It's only that she hasn't ridden in far too long. And she rode much too hard."
He frowns down at Mary, and she rolls her eyes; not so much as his reproof as at Matthew being such a telltale after she scolded him for that very fault.
"I'm sure he's right, Mama," she says, though of course in light of her mother's earlier admonishment about going easy, this hardly eases the troubled lines off her face, though she says it more for her own peace of mind.
After her bath at the Russells', she felt a twinge deep in her pelvis not unlike menstrual cramps, and though the hunt worked up more appetite than she had in weeks, by the time they were all sat down to dinner she was unable to eat a bite for the sensation of her stomach being clamped tight in a fist. Papa's suggestion of simply being out of shape seems a much more reassuring. And likely. Of course there's always the possibility that it is, indeed, menstrual pain. In which case they all ought to be very relieved.
She's not sure that she is.
But she brushes the thought aside, affecting an air of unconcern as Carson sweeps the front door wide for them to enter the hall, footmen at the ready to assist with the family's coats and hats.
"Anyway, blame it on Billy, inspiring me with all that talk of equestrian events being added back into the Olympics again."
"Are you scheming to ride for Britain in the Berlin Games in '16?" Papa asks with a chuckle; Carson, helping him out of his greatcoat, can scarcely contain the disapproval evident in his substantial eyebrows. "The team could use you, after our rather abysmal performance in Stockholm last summer."
Mary's shoulders stiffen, her arms only part-way out of the sleeves of her coat as Thomas holds it. She should be glad that Papa is joking with her again, his demeanour warm. Instead, she can only think how the night before he was anything but joking as he coldly ordered Richard from the house.
"I have to make a name for myself somehow," she says, catching his eye as she draws her arms out of her coat, her voice taut as her stomach constricts against a shooting pain. "Since I won't be marrying a famous newspaperman."
She strides through the vestibule to the front hall; Papa follows with Mama, neither saying a word until she is part-way up the stairs.
"I suppose it won't make any difference to you," he calls up to her from the foot of the staircase, "but I am sorry about last night."
"How generous of you to say so, Papa. When you've got everything you want. The chance to put a social climber back in his place. A son."
She pauses on the landing, fingers curled over the smooth carved railing as she peers down at Papa, and sees him flinch.
"I've only ever wanted two things, Papa. Downton, and Richard. And because of you, I'll have neither."
He replies, very quietly, his lips scarcely seeming to move. "Carlisle was never a suitable match for you, and I don't believe you can truly be so attached to him, except to get to me."
Now Mary winces; hadn't Richard made the same accusation?
"As for Downton..." Papa's broad chest swells as he clasps his hands behind his back. "Do you think I want to give Downton to anyone who isn't my own child? But Downton is my child. And my parent. It's part of an ordered universe--of which, my daughter, dear as you are to me, you are not the centre. No matter what is implied by inappropriate gifts of ostentatious jewellery."
"Mary," pants Mama, hurrying up the stairs, "please go to bed before you say something you don't mean." She looks back at Papa. "Both of you."
"Too late, Mama." Mary at last breaks eye contact with Papa and resumes climbing the stairs. "And I meant every word."
~*~
In her bedroom, she finds Anna laying out a fresh nightgown on the downturned coverlet, ready to assist her with undressing for bed. Gritting her teeth at the sight of the maid, she avoids meeting the blue eyes which were so apprehensive this morning about her riding to hounds, and no doubt will examine her now for any ill effects of the hunt.
But Mary's jaw goes slack with a gasp and her gaze automatically seeks Anna's when she steps out of her bloomers.
The white, lace-trimmed cotton is stained with bright red blood.
Read Chapter 24