Fic: A Girl in Black (24/?)
Title: A Girl in Black (24/?)
Author: mrstater
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Characters & Pairings: Mary Crawley/Richard Carlisle, Cora Crawley, Sybil Crawley, Violet Crawley, Rosamund Painswick, Anna Smith, Dr Clarkson
Chapter Word Count: 5239 words
Chapter Summary: While Mary's on bed rest, new instincts stir as she finds herself no longer carrying the burden of her secret alone. Meanwhile, in London, Richard makes headlines...
Author's Notes: Back on schedule. :) As of right now, my outline indicates there will be twenty-six chapters, plus an epilogue, which means...we're almost to the end. But that makes me really sad, so we won't think about that right now! Still lots of ground to cover, so without further ado(except to thank ju_dou for betaing, which this week included helping me sort a rather sticky timeline on top of juggling her own busy RL schedule) here is this week's update. I hope everyone enjoys...
Previous Chapters |
24. The Awakening
"Your uterus has moved higher up in your abdominal cavity," says Dr Clarkson the next morning. "I can feel how it's already expanded to accommodate a growing foetus even though you've not yet begun to show."
He palpates her stomach with gentle, practiced fingers, but Mary nevertheless tenses muscles already sore from her sleepless night curled like a child in utero herself against the cramps that gripped her until she had to surrender to Anna's insistence that Mama be awakened. She trains her eyes on the ceiling, too mortified to look at the physician who has attended her since she was born, too afraid that if she does she will find the even tones belied by a flush of mortification that he is conducting this examination on his lordship's unmarried daughter. In any case, her ladyship's bright, unblinking stare from the chair drawn up to the other side of the bed must be strain enough for Dr Clarkson's professional demeanour.
"You're definitely pregnant," he states, his hands leaving Mary's abdomen. "As to whether you'll stay in that condition..." He turns to rummage through the black bag on the bedside table. "...that's less certain."
Her gaze wavers for a glimpse of whatever instrument he has taken from his kit, but he's turned from her and moved down to the foot of the bed, where he instructed her to lay with a sheet draped over her knees at the start of the examination. She looks away again, turning her head the opposite direction on the pillow to Mama, though she feels her own fingers clutch tightly around the hand she remembers being so soft and cool on a fevered brow as a girl, whilst Clarkson lifts the sheet and murmurs an apology for any discomfort cause by the internal check.
"Your cervix is closed," he says after a moment, the upward lilt of his soft brogue leading Mary to believe this is favourable despite the unfamiliar terms that must pertain to the female anatomy. Perhaps inappropriately, she remembers Granny's words about how uncomfortable and untidy intercourse could be, and appreciates anew how that was not the case with Richard. She has that, at least.
"Bleeding is not uncommon in early pregnancy," Dr Clarkson says, straightening up and draping the sheet modestly over her calves again.
"Then..." Mama hesitates and Mary glances at her, surprised to see her visibly choked. "She's not having a miscarriage?"
She sounds almost...relieved. But how could that be? Isn't a miscarriage the most straightforward solution to their troubles? Any relief must be due to some potential danger to Mary's health, which makes her grasp tighter to Mama's hand as sudden fear seizes her at the realisation of her own ignorance on the subject of childbearing.
"I urge cautious optimism," says Clarkson from the washstand, where he rinses his hands and instrument in the porcelain basin. He returns to the bedside as he rolls down his shirtsleeves and buttons the cuffs. "We won't know for certain for several days. If in that time the cramping continues, or worsens…if the bleeding persists, or grows heavier, or…" His voice recedes to a rumble as he waxes medical and Mary closes her eyes against tears that blur red as her blood pulses in her ears. "…then she may indeed miscarry."
"Is it because I rode?" she hears herself ask, eyes snapping open to see her hand, free of Mama's, shoot across her body to grasp Clarkson's sleeve. "I jumped Diamond over a fence…"
The doctor takes her hand, gently prising her fingers loose from the cotton.
"Although I will prescribe total bed rest for the next few days as a precautionary measure, physical exertion does not, as is commonly believed, cause spontaneous foetal abortion."
Mary draws in a sharp breath at the word, and Clarkson's brow furrows as he goes on.
"If you should miscarry, Lady Mary, you won't be to blame." His forehead relaxes as he gives her a reassuring smile. "But you are a healthy young woman. There is no reason why you should not have a healthy pregnancy and a safe delivery..."
Except that she never wanted to be pregnant or deliver a baby. Never even thought about wanting either.
"...in early August, I should say, going by the dates of your cycle. But sometimes these things do happen, with no explanation."
Apart from wishing for it?
"I'll give you something for the pain," Clarkson releases her hand and rifles through the bag again. "It'll help you rest, too. Have you experienced a great deal of nausea? Ginger can alleviate the symptom. Ginger ale."
Mary is hardly cognizant of having heard or submitted to his instruction to open her mouth until she tastes the bitter dose of laudanum on her tongue. Mama thanks him as he packs up his medical bag, and she steps into the hall with him, snatches of their murmured conversation drifting back into the room: "Call me if there is any change..." "Of course we can count on your discretion... The father doesn't know... Mary's, either..."
At the last, Mary can no longer hold back her tears.
"Richard doesn't know," she sobs into her hands as Mama steps inside the room, sagging against the door to push it shut behind her. "He won't know because it's too late now and it's all my fault."
Mama raises her hand, as if to smooth her hair back into place, but her fingers curl around the side of her head as she presses the heel into her temple. With a sigh, she pushes off the door and trudges to the bed.
"It's not too late. I'll phone Sir Richard if you want me to, and ask him to come." She sinks down on the edge of the bed and takes Mary's hand. "But in any case it's not your fault. You heard Dr Clarkson. You didn't cause this. Whatever happens."
Pressing her fingers to her lips, Mary shakes her head. "He was only being kind. I've said things…such terrible things. You heard me. I said maybe the baby wouldn't be--"
"Hush now." Mama's hands find her shoulders, and the room swims around Mary, black creeping in around the edge of her tear-blurred vision, as she feels herself being pushed back against the pillows. "They needn't be repeated."
"It's not just what I said. It's what I thought..."
Mary struggles against the coverlet being drawn up over her. How many are there? And what are they made of? Lead? Her limbs and the lids of her eyes seem to be, her lips and tongue, too; a sour taste lingers on them, mingled with the salt of the tears that streak down her face as she forms the syllables and words with effort.
"I know that a pregnancy can be made to end. And now I may have done it."
"You need to sleep, Mary."
Mama speaks very quietly--a hiss, not a whisper. And though the black is closing in as Mary's body sinks, heavy, so heavy, into the pillows and mattress, she sees the blue above her. The bright wide horror--How could you? Whose daughter are you?--before cutting away in disappointment.
Fallen...she is a fallen woman...
She falls asleep.
~*~
"May I have the pleasure of this dance?" Richard calls across the Claridge's ballroom, his white-gloved hand extended.
Mary means to glance around to see who he might be addressing--it cannot be her, surely--but his gaze holds her. Seems to pin her, in fact, against the column she backs up against. His long strides carry him quickly to her, one hand grasping hers as the other snakes around her waist, pressing against the backs of her hips to draw her into the dance.
"I'm afraid you'll have to find another partner," she protests as he sweeps her across the dance floor in a dizzying circle. Not a waltzing manoeuvre, but a frantic one-step to a ragtime tune. "As you can see, I'm in mourning."
Richard's chuckle rumbles against her chest as he holds her tight against him. "That won't be possible, as we seem to be the only people dancing."
He nods toward the ballroom, and Mary follows his gaze to see that she was quite mistaken; they aren't surrounded by the pillars and painted plastered ceiling of Claridge's, this is the dark, low-ceilinged Cave of the Golden Calf, and apart from the man banging on the off-key piano up front, they are the only people in it.
"Where is everyone?" she asks.
"Riding to hounds, of course. Leaving me quite alone to kiss my girl in white."
As Richard tilts his head, leaning in to brush his lips against hers, Mary murmurs, "White?"
"Yes, white. Just as I asked."
He draws back slightly from her, eyes darkening as they rake over her bodice. Mary looks down, too, and draws in a sharp surprised breath to find herself not, as she expected, wearing the black beaded gown she meant to wear to Agnes Belcher's engagement party, though not her familiar ivory watered silk, either. It's the Lucile creation she ordered for Christmas, before pregnancy altered her proportions...
"Oh dear," Richard remarks, his eyes alighting on her stomach where a red stain blooms and creeps upward like a rosebush climbing up a garden wall. "You seem to have acquired a scarlet letter."
His fingers disentangle from hers, and his hand leaves her waist and Mary begins to tremble at the loss of his warmth. She claps her hand over her mouth as bile burns in her throat at the sight of blood fashioning itself into a pattern across her bosom like ink from an invisible pen, but her vision is obscured and she cannot make it out.
"What does it say?" she asks Richard, but he has turned his back to her and is walking away.
He seems to be carrying something, and as she stares after him in a momentary stupor she realises that on his shoulder rests a small head in a lace cap, the matching satin Christening gown Mama keeps packed in tissue in a trunk draped over the sleeve of his evening jacket.
"You lied to me," Richard calls back to her, his shoes making a staccato tap across the floor, like the beat of a snare drum, or the clack of typewriter keys, over the tinkle of the rag on the piano. "Liars make poor mothers."
Mary tries to cry out that she didn't even know she was to be a mother, she didn't know anything, but her voice is strangled in her throat and drowned out by the beat of the typewriter keys. At least her feet are not rooted to the pavement--the pavement? For a moment this confuses her, and she does stand stock still, contemplating her new surroundings. The newspaper district of Fleet Street, though somewhere the piano from the Cave continues to play.
She spies Richard's top hat in the midst of bowlers and trilbies and chases after him, shouting. Her throat burns with the rasp of her sob, but the sound of it doesn't reach her ears, only the baby's wail as she follows them into the warehouse in the back of the DailyTelegram office building, though that, too, is muffled by the roar of the printing presses churning out the evening editions. She pauses to look at the front page on the top of a stack of folded papers hefted by a newsboy, and sees her own face on it, gawking up at the sign of the nightclub; Richard is nowhere to be found on the paper or among the double-octuple presses.
Weaving her way through the maze, ninety-six thousand pictures of her bewildered expression flashing past in an hour, she at last spies the metal staircase that lead up to the main offices. Her shoes stamp and clank on the cage-like grid beneath them, and by the time she reaches the top and the door of Richard's office she is out of breath, panting in time to the rhythm of typewriter keys on the other side.
"Please, Richard, may I come in?" she shouts, pounding both fists against the door. "There is something I must say to you. It's about the baby!"
The door opens mid-knock and she nearly falls into Miss Fields, who peers disapprovingly down at her from over the tops of her half-moon spectacles. Mary tries to look around the secretary, but she only sees Gwen, bent over the back of a straight-backed chair drawn up to a desk, in a pose which for a moment reminds Mary of her old governess teaching her to play the piano. She strains her ears for the playful melody of a rag.
"Not to worry, Lady Mary," says Miss Fields, pulling the door closed on the scene. "We're teaching the child to type!"
"But she doesn't need to type!” Mary shoves herself into the narrowing gap between the door and the frame and wraps her arms protectively around her aching belly. "She won't be a secretary, she's a lady."
Miss Fields purses her lips as the typewriter click-clacks away in the office. "Don't be ridiculous. If she's a lady, why hasn't anyone fought for her?"
~*~
She fights.
Swats at the hand that shakes her shoulder. Presses her other one over her wrenching stomach. No. You won't take it. I won't let you. No one fought for me, but I'll fight for her. She doesn't know if she says any of it aloud or not, though the voice speaking to her is not within her head.
"I'm not going to take anything, Mary. It's just a bad dream. Wake up."
"Sybil?" Mary fights the sticky crust of sleep that seems almost to have pasted her eyelids shut.
"Of course." The sweet face, flushed in the candlelight, comes into focus above; fingers sweep over Mary's perspiring brow. "Who did you think it was? And what did you think I was going to take from you?"
Mary tries to answer, but her throat constricts and she chokes on the words. She rolls onto her side to reach for the glass of water on the bedside table, wincing at the twinge in her abdomen, and only succeeds in brushing her knuckles against the glass. Sybil's quick reflexes prevent a small deluge on the mahogany, and she presses the glass to Mary's lips, helping her to drink.
"Golly," come the husky tones as Mary gulps. "Is Dr Clarkson sure you've only got a cold?"
"Is that what Mama said is wrong with me?"
"She said you were highly contagious."
"Corrupting, I think she means."
"What is the matter with you?" Sybil asks, her brows knitting heavily together with her frown. "You were disoriented and delirious."
"It's the laudanum." Mary blinks, and her bedroom comes into sharper focus, as much as it can in the candlelight, with the draperies drawn so that she doesn't know whether its night or day, how many nights or days have passed since Dr Clarkson examined her and Mama left her to be punished by her own mind. "It's beginning to wear off now."
So is the pain, she notes, gingerly pushing herself to sit more upright against her pillows. She relaxes the muscles which she clenched during her nightmare, and does not think she feels the cramps as she did before. Though that could be the lingering effects of the drug.
"Doctors don't give laudanum for colds," says Sybil.
"Apparently they do for miscarriages."
Now it is Mary who prevents water from being spilt in her bed as Sybil's fingers go slack around the glass, slick with condensation.
"A miscarriage? But that would mean you're--"
"Pregnant," Mary says, sparing her little sister having to. "And Dr Clarkson isn't sure I'll lose the baby." Though I deserve to.
Sybil's lips hang open for a long moment before she sits back, one leg curled beneath her, and says, "Oh, Mary."
"You must be so terribly disappointed in me. Your big sister, fallen off her pedestal. If I ever was on one."
Sybil leans in, grasping Mary's hand where it picks at the coverlet. "I'm not disappointed in you."
Sobbing, Mary clutches her sister's hand, which does not pull away even when her fingernails carve into her palm in relief. She notices the bumps of calluses on the pads, the slight flaking of skin not as well cared for as an earl's daughter's is expected to be, because Sybil's head is not full of plots to secure a good match for herself, but of securing secretarial jobs for servants.
"But...Richard," she says. "He...abandoned you?"
Mary shakes her head, though she cannot shake the nightmare image of him walking away from her with her baby. "He doesn't know. I...tried to tell him, but...You see why it wasn't a simple matter of standing up and doing battle with Papa for him?"
"I do, and I'm so sorry I got so angry with you. Can you forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive," Mary replies, choked again at this turning of tables, that someone should worry about her forgiveness when she needs it from everyone else in this house. Sybil scoots to sit beside her on the bed, laying her head on Mary's shoulder and grasping her hand as she's always done since she was a little girl.
"If you don't tell Richard, Papa's going to put you on the first boat to America when he finds out. He'll expect you to have the baby in secret and leave it for some relative to bring up."
"Heavens. Mama's efforts to censor your reading material and curb your appetite for the sensational really haven't proved very effective, have they? You probably know more on the subject of illicit love affairs and out of wedlock pregnancies than I do."
Though Sybil laughs softly, Mary can't help but think of her dream. It seems so absurd now, Miss Fields and Gwen taking the child away and teaching it to type--her; the baby was a girl in the dream--but the underlying thought is not. Mightn't it be better for the baby, whatever its sex, to be raised by someone else?
What kind of mother couldn't work up the courage to tell the man who wanted to marry her that she was pregnant? Was so selfish and reckless that she might have killed her unborn child? She is twenty-one, and scarcely has given more thought to motherhood than a vague knowledge that someday, if she married Patrick, she would have a son to inherit Downton as she would never be allowed to. She never desired children. How could she possibly make a good mother?
And Richard…He didn't even have time to eat breakfast, or to linger in bed after the act that made the child.
"What's it like?" Sybil's voice breaks gently into Mary's introspection.
"Pregnancy? Nauseating. Exhausting."
"No." Sybil giggles again, but it trails away into a sigh as she sits up to look Mary in the eye, her face all sincerity and curiosity and not the least bit shy. "Making love with a man."
Across the room, the oval full-length mirror and the trifold ones of the dressing table reflect the illuminated circle of the bed where Mary sits. Instead of her pale face peering from the stark white linens and nightgown, however, she sees the ghosts of reflections past. Herself and Richard, undressing in front of each other--and undressing each other--with such ease. How is it that being naked with him was so much easier than being honest? In the mirror she watched the moment of their joining, too, when Richard asked if she trusted him before his warm weight sank onto her, into her.
"I wanted to do it again," she answers. "For the rest of my life."
~*~
"Ginger ale and ginger biscuits," says Aunt Rosamund, sweeping into the bedroom without knocking--and certainly without an invitation--on the second morning that Mary is confined to her bed, and inspecting the breakfast tray beneath raised ginger eyebrows. "I always thought it was tea and chicken soup that the doctor ordered for a cold? If one has a cold."
"Tell Rosamund that these absurd suspicions are the result of reading those hideous newspapers your beau publishes," comes Granny's voice from the doorway.
Though already half-recumbent in bed, Mary wilts further into her pillows at the sight of her grandmother entering the bedroom with no less aplomb than Rosamund, despite relying upon on her cane. Mary feels much improved--bleeding and cramps all but abated-- but not sufficiently recovered to receive her aunt and her grandmother at once. Not that taking on the both of them together is an easy feat for a person in the pink of health.
"Because if she's right," Granny goes on, laying her left hand over the right as it curls around the ivory handle of her cane, "then it would mean my own granddaughter looked me in the eye and lied to me about Sir Richard being your..."
She cannot say lover, and Mary cannot Granny her in the eye this time, or tell a falsehood. However, after a swallow of ginger ale she does manage to say, "I'm not sure it's really fair to give Aunt Rosamund all the credit. After all, it was pretty obvious you didn't believe me."
"A lie doesn't cease to be a lie just because no one believes it," Granny replies in a thin voice as she lowers herself onto the bedside chair.
"Well," says Rosamund, almost gleefully as Granny lowers herself into the bedside chair. "It appears you're to be a great-grandmother, Mama."
"And you a great-aunt," Mary reminds her.
Rosamund tilts her head and purses her lips briefly before she says, "Cheer up, Mama. Mary and Sir Richard won't be the first couple who did things in the wrong order."
Mary is only momentarily surprised at her aunt's admission of an unconventional courtship. The apple, it seems, did not fall far from the family tree; she only wishes Aunt Rosamund thought to impart some wisdom before she shirked her chaperone duties about how not to bring forth fruit out of season.
"But why did you lie?" Granny asks, seeming not to have heard Rosamund. "What was the point? Did you think we wouldn't notice when you looked as if you swallowed a watermelon whole?"
"Or when the Christmas gown Lady Duff Gordon fitted her for...didn't fit?" Rosamund gives Mary much the same pointed look she did that day in the dressing room at the boutique. "In fairness, pregnancy is the very last fate we would wish or imagine to befall one of our girls. Though I could see from their body language at Fortnum's that the...dynamic...between Mary and Sir Richard had changed."
"I only wonder that he hasn't suspected," Granny says. "After all, he's a profiteer of just this sort of scandal."
"He did suspect," Mary says, her appetite for even Mrs Patmore's tasty ginger biscuits vanishing. "I lied to him, too."
"Are you still certain, Rosamund, that we'll be able to pull off this marriage? Or will we be sending Mary to her other grandmother until this problem resolves itself?"
"Obviously it hasn't occurred to either of you that this problem may be resolving itself as we speak!" Mary blurts out, her arms wrapping around her abdomen beneath the breakfast tray.
Her aunt and grandmother look at her, aghast.
"Oh, my dear," says Granny, one hand uncurling from around her cane, visibly trembling as it reaches out for Mary. "Surely you don't mean to say you're losing the poor baby?"
It's that same conflict of interests Mary detected from Mama; they don't want her to be pregnant without a husband, but they don't want her to cease being pregnant, either.
More importantly, they forgive her. Because they love her. And if they can, perhaps Richard...
"Really, Mama," Aunt Rosamund cuts in, "do you think she'd be sitting up sipping ginger ale if she were in the process of having a miscarriage?"
Mary smiles weakly at Granny. How strange--and yet how typical, in this family--that she should be the one offering reassurance under such circumstances. "I had a little scare, but Dr Clarkson said last night that if I continue as I am at present, I may be out of bed for New Year's Eve." The day after tomorrow.
"You see?" Aunt Rosamund draws up another chair alongside Granny's and perches at the end of it. "Now, Mary. As your grandmother said, there is the matter of the marriage to sort. I admit Sir Richard's ignorance complicates things, but we're a clever lot. Only you must tell us everything so we're playing with a full deck."
Granny cringes. "Must you speak of our Mary's fall from grace as if she were the heroine of some lurid romance you can't put down?"
"There isn't much to tell," Mary says with a slight shrug of her shoulders. "Richard said he intended to marry me, and I invited him to my room, where as soon as the deed was done he left to publish his exclusive interview with Mr Pamuk."
"And you thought he'd got what he came for and didn't mean a word he said to get you into bed?" Rosamund says, then awaits Mary's response with raised eyebrows. "That explains why you took his departure as such a personal affront."
"I assumed he wanted to marry for love," says Mary, struggling to keep her voice steady; for all the times she's recited this in her mind, speaking it aloud stirs emotions she thought she had gained control over. "He never stated so explicitly."
"Thank heaven for small favours," mutters Granny.
"I expect you not to understand affairs of the heart," Mary snaps. "You'd be as pleased as Papa for me to marry Cousin Matthew, though he's even less fashionable than Sir Richard."
Granny emits an offended gasp and looks to Rosamund for help.
"Believe it or not, Mary, that's not what your grandmother meant."
"Isn't it, though? You loved Uncle Marmaduke and from all accounts that counted for very little."
"Indeed," says Aunt Rosamund, "but we're not talking about my marriage. We're discussing your naïve assumption that cads talk marriage to seduce virgins. That's simply not true. They talk love."
"I don't agree with Rosamund's language," says Granny, "but I don't fault her logic. Has Sir Richard mentioned marriage since? That would give us more insight into his intentions."
I am a man of my word. If I say I will marry a woman, I will do it. "He wanted me to elope with him. After Papa threw him out."
"And you turned him down?" cries Rosamund, while Granny splutters and sags in her chair, looking as though she may require smelling salts.
"I couldn't run away with him after I'd lied to him about being pregnant. If I knew for certain that he wants to marry because he loves me...Is it so very wrong to wish for certain words to be said?" After all, it was Richard himself who put the idea into her head. Has it never occurred to you that you might marry for love?
In the ensuing silence, during which Mary is certain Granny and Aunt Rosamund think she's the greatest fool that ever lived, she can't think why she said all this to them. If Mama, an American, doesn't care about her sentiments--or whatever sentiments she hopes to receive from Richard--then why should Rosamund and Granny? You are going to be a mother. You've made your last selfish decision.
Yet for all that, Granny seems almost encouraging as she says, "There's a little saying you might have heard. Actions speak louder than words. Sir Richard strikes me as a man of action."
"I should say so," Rosamund snorts; Granny presses her lips together in annoyance as she regards her, and the look emboldens Mary to reveal a little more of her feelings to her grandmother than she would ever have imagined herself doing.
"His life's work is built on words. If he loved me, wouldn't he have said so, without hesitation?" I always say what I mean.
"He's a newspaperman," Rosamund says. "The goal of which is to say as much as possible in as few words as are necessary."
"Mary, dear," Granny says, "you said yourself it would be wrong to marry him under false pretences. Have you considered the irony of expecting Sir Richard to say particular words to you whilst withholding an even more important truth from him?"
The weight of the words presses Mary back against her pillows, and she closes her eyes against the mirror image of herself reflected across the room.
"I think we ought to let her rest now," says Granny, the chair and old joints creaking as she gets to her feet. "I'll ring for someone to take away that tray."
"I'll ring for Sir Richard to come," says Rosamund. "He can't be too angry about a lie if you confess while there's a danger to your life or the baby's."
"You don't know Richard at all if you think he'd take such blatant manipulation sitting down."
She said the same to Mama when she repeated the offer yesterday. But she calls her aunt back after Granny has gone out--well aware of the probable eavesdropping on the other side of the door.
"When Uncle Marmaduke dropped you for work...Did it make you feel you weren't important?"
"Let me ask you a question," says Rosamund. "Once upon a time, you thought you'd marry Cousin Patrick. Would you have rather sat across the dinner table from him every night for forty years knowing he had little other care than all the pheasants he shot that day? Or would you prefer to go to bed alone on occasion and be kept company by the thought that Richard is preoccupied with how soon he'll be able to join you?"
~*~
Having done little but sleep or lie abed, resting, for the better part of four days, Mary awakens early the next morning. For the first time in weeks the churning in her stomach is with hunger, not nausea, and she sits up against the pillows, poised to ring for her breakfast when the bedroom door swings open and Anna comes in.
Without a breakfast tray.
"Thank you for looking in on me," Mary says; it is not the first time Anna has taken it upon herself to check on her beyond the usual requirements since the bleeding started. "I'm feeling quite well this morning. I think I'll take toast and eggs for breakfast. Perhaps a glass of ginger ale, just to be safe. Anna?"
For the maid stands at the foot of the bed, hands clasped in front of her, fidgeting with the apron of her day uniform, not seeming to have heard a word of instruction.
"Are you quite well?"
"Forgive me, Lady, Mary, but...It's just...William was ironing the Times to take up with his lordship's tea, and one of the headlines was so shocking that he nearly burnt it to a crisp. And I thought you should know."
"What could be published in the Times that I should care about?" Mary asks flippantly, though she knows her blood did not run so cold when she heard the news about the Titanic.
"Sir Richard's attacked Mr Napier."
Read Chapter 25
Author: mrstater
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Characters & Pairings: Mary Crawley/Richard Carlisle, Cora Crawley, Sybil Crawley, Violet Crawley, Rosamund Painswick, Anna Smith, Dr Clarkson
Chapter Word Count: 5239 words
Chapter Summary: While Mary's on bed rest, new instincts stir as she finds herself no longer carrying the burden of her secret alone. Meanwhile, in London, Richard makes headlines...
Author's Notes: Back on schedule. :) As of right now, my outline indicates there will be twenty-six chapters, plus an epilogue, which means...we're almost to the end. But that makes me really sad, so we won't think about that right now! Still lots of ground to cover, so without further ado(except to thank ju_dou for betaing, which this week included helping me sort a rather sticky timeline on top of juggling her own busy RL schedule) here is this week's update. I hope everyone enjoys...
Previous Chapters |
24. The Awakening
"Your uterus has moved higher up in your abdominal cavity," says Dr Clarkson the next morning. "I can feel how it's already expanded to accommodate a growing foetus even though you've not yet begun to show."
He palpates her stomach with gentle, practiced fingers, but Mary nevertheless tenses muscles already sore from her sleepless night curled like a child in utero herself against the cramps that gripped her until she had to surrender to Anna's insistence that Mama be awakened. She trains her eyes on the ceiling, too mortified to look at the physician who has attended her since she was born, too afraid that if she does she will find the even tones belied by a flush of mortification that he is conducting this examination on his lordship's unmarried daughter. In any case, her ladyship's bright, unblinking stare from the chair drawn up to the other side of the bed must be strain enough for Dr Clarkson's professional demeanour.
"You're definitely pregnant," he states, his hands leaving Mary's abdomen. "As to whether you'll stay in that condition..." He turns to rummage through the black bag on the bedside table. "...that's less certain."
Her gaze wavers for a glimpse of whatever instrument he has taken from his kit, but he's turned from her and moved down to the foot of the bed, where he instructed her to lay with a sheet draped over her knees at the start of the examination. She looks away again, turning her head the opposite direction on the pillow to Mama, though she feels her own fingers clutch tightly around the hand she remembers being so soft and cool on a fevered brow as a girl, whilst Clarkson lifts the sheet and murmurs an apology for any discomfort cause by the internal check.
"Your cervix is closed," he says after a moment, the upward lilt of his soft brogue leading Mary to believe this is favourable despite the unfamiliar terms that must pertain to the female anatomy. Perhaps inappropriately, she remembers Granny's words about how uncomfortable and untidy intercourse could be, and appreciates anew how that was not the case with Richard. She has that, at least.
"Bleeding is not uncommon in early pregnancy," Dr Clarkson says, straightening up and draping the sheet modestly over her calves again.
"Then..." Mama hesitates and Mary glances at her, surprised to see her visibly choked. "She's not having a miscarriage?"
She sounds almost...relieved. But how could that be? Isn't a miscarriage the most straightforward solution to their troubles? Any relief must be due to some potential danger to Mary's health, which makes her grasp tighter to Mama's hand as sudden fear seizes her at the realisation of her own ignorance on the subject of childbearing.
"I urge cautious optimism," says Clarkson from the washstand, where he rinses his hands and instrument in the porcelain basin. He returns to the bedside as he rolls down his shirtsleeves and buttons the cuffs. "We won't know for certain for several days. If in that time the cramping continues, or worsens…if the bleeding persists, or grows heavier, or…" His voice recedes to a rumble as he waxes medical and Mary closes her eyes against tears that blur red as her blood pulses in her ears. "…then she may indeed miscarry."
"Is it because I rode?" she hears herself ask, eyes snapping open to see her hand, free of Mama's, shoot across her body to grasp Clarkson's sleeve. "I jumped Diamond over a fence…"
The doctor takes her hand, gently prising her fingers loose from the cotton.
"Although I will prescribe total bed rest for the next few days as a precautionary measure, physical exertion does not, as is commonly believed, cause spontaneous foetal abortion."
Mary draws in a sharp breath at the word, and Clarkson's brow furrows as he goes on.
"If you should miscarry, Lady Mary, you won't be to blame." His forehead relaxes as he gives her a reassuring smile. "But you are a healthy young woman. There is no reason why you should not have a healthy pregnancy and a safe delivery..."
Except that she never wanted to be pregnant or deliver a baby. Never even thought about wanting either.
"...in early August, I should say, going by the dates of your cycle. But sometimes these things do happen, with no explanation."
Apart from wishing for it?
"I'll give you something for the pain," Clarkson releases her hand and rifles through the bag again. "It'll help you rest, too. Have you experienced a great deal of nausea? Ginger can alleviate the symptom. Ginger ale."
Mary is hardly cognizant of having heard or submitted to his instruction to open her mouth until she tastes the bitter dose of laudanum on her tongue. Mama thanks him as he packs up his medical bag, and she steps into the hall with him, snatches of their murmured conversation drifting back into the room: "Call me if there is any change..." "Of course we can count on your discretion... The father doesn't know... Mary's, either..."
At the last, Mary can no longer hold back her tears.
"Richard doesn't know," she sobs into her hands as Mama steps inside the room, sagging against the door to push it shut behind her. "He won't know because it's too late now and it's all my fault."
Mama raises her hand, as if to smooth her hair back into place, but her fingers curl around the side of her head as she presses the heel into her temple. With a sigh, she pushes off the door and trudges to the bed.
"It's not too late. I'll phone Sir Richard if you want me to, and ask him to come." She sinks down on the edge of the bed and takes Mary's hand. "But in any case it's not your fault. You heard Dr Clarkson. You didn't cause this. Whatever happens."
Pressing her fingers to her lips, Mary shakes her head. "He was only being kind. I've said things…such terrible things. You heard me. I said maybe the baby wouldn't be--"
"Hush now." Mama's hands find her shoulders, and the room swims around Mary, black creeping in around the edge of her tear-blurred vision, as she feels herself being pushed back against the pillows. "They needn't be repeated."
"It's not just what I said. It's what I thought..."
Mary struggles against the coverlet being drawn up over her. How many are there? And what are they made of? Lead? Her limbs and the lids of her eyes seem to be, her lips and tongue, too; a sour taste lingers on them, mingled with the salt of the tears that streak down her face as she forms the syllables and words with effort.
"I know that a pregnancy can be made to end. And now I may have done it."
"You need to sleep, Mary."
Mama speaks very quietly--a hiss, not a whisper. And though the black is closing in as Mary's body sinks, heavy, so heavy, into the pillows and mattress, she sees the blue above her. The bright wide horror--How could you? Whose daughter are you?--before cutting away in disappointment.
Fallen...she is a fallen woman...
She falls asleep.
~*~
"May I have the pleasure of this dance?" Richard calls across the Claridge's ballroom, his white-gloved hand extended.
Mary means to glance around to see who he might be addressing--it cannot be her, surely--but his gaze holds her. Seems to pin her, in fact, against the column she backs up against. His long strides carry him quickly to her, one hand grasping hers as the other snakes around her waist, pressing against the backs of her hips to draw her into the dance.
"I'm afraid you'll have to find another partner," she protests as he sweeps her across the dance floor in a dizzying circle. Not a waltzing manoeuvre, but a frantic one-step to a ragtime tune. "As you can see, I'm in mourning."
Richard's chuckle rumbles against her chest as he holds her tight against him. "That won't be possible, as we seem to be the only people dancing."
He nods toward the ballroom, and Mary follows his gaze to see that she was quite mistaken; they aren't surrounded by the pillars and painted plastered ceiling of Claridge's, this is the dark, low-ceilinged Cave of the Golden Calf, and apart from the man banging on the off-key piano up front, they are the only people in it.
"Where is everyone?" she asks.
"Riding to hounds, of course. Leaving me quite alone to kiss my girl in white."
As Richard tilts his head, leaning in to brush his lips against hers, Mary murmurs, "White?"
"Yes, white. Just as I asked."
He draws back slightly from her, eyes darkening as they rake over her bodice. Mary looks down, too, and draws in a sharp surprised breath to find herself not, as she expected, wearing the black beaded gown she meant to wear to Agnes Belcher's engagement party, though not her familiar ivory watered silk, either. It's the Lucile creation she ordered for Christmas, before pregnancy altered her proportions...
"Oh dear," Richard remarks, his eyes alighting on her stomach where a red stain blooms and creeps upward like a rosebush climbing up a garden wall. "You seem to have acquired a scarlet letter."
His fingers disentangle from hers, and his hand leaves her waist and Mary begins to tremble at the loss of his warmth. She claps her hand over her mouth as bile burns in her throat at the sight of blood fashioning itself into a pattern across her bosom like ink from an invisible pen, but her vision is obscured and she cannot make it out.
"What does it say?" she asks Richard, but he has turned his back to her and is walking away.
He seems to be carrying something, and as she stares after him in a momentary stupor she realises that on his shoulder rests a small head in a lace cap, the matching satin Christening gown Mama keeps packed in tissue in a trunk draped over the sleeve of his evening jacket.
"You lied to me," Richard calls back to her, his shoes making a staccato tap across the floor, like the beat of a snare drum, or the clack of typewriter keys, over the tinkle of the rag on the piano. "Liars make poor mothers."
Mary tries to cry out that she didn't even know she was to be a mother, she didn't know anything, but her voice is strangled in her throat and drowned out by the beat of the typewriter keys. At least her feet are not rooted to the pavement--the pavement? For a moment this confuses her, and she does stand stock still, contemplating her new surroundings. The newspaper district of Fleet Street, though somewhere the piano from the Cave continues to play.
She spies Richard's top hat in the midst of bowlers and trilbies and chases after him, shouting. Her throat burns with the rasp of her sob, but the sound of it doesn't reach her ears, only the baby's wail as she follows them into the warehouse in the back of the DailyTelegram office building, though that, too, is muffled by the roar of the printing presses churning out the evening editions. She pauses to look at the front page on the top of a stack of folded papers hefted by a newsboy, and sees her own face on it, gawking up at the sign of the nightclub; Richard is nowhere to be found on the paper or among the double-octuple presses.
Weaving her way through the maze, ninety-six thousand pictures of her bewildered expression flashing past in an hour, she at last spies the metal staircase that lead up to the main offices. Her shoes stamp and clank on the cage-like grid beneath them, and by the time she reaches the top and the door of Richard's office she is out of breath, panting in time to the rhythm of typewriter keys on the other side.
"Please, Richard, may I come in?" she shouts, pounding both fists against the door. "There is something I must say to you. It's about the baby!"
The door opens mid-knock and she nearly falls into Miss Fields, who peers disapprovingly down at her from over the tops of her half-moon spectacles. Mary tries to look around the secretary, but she only sees Gwen, bent over the back of a straight-backed chair drawn up to a desk, in a pose which for a moment reminds Mary of her old governess teaching her to play the piano. She strains her ears for the playful melody of a rag.
"Not to worry, Lady Mary," says Miss Fields, pulling the door closed on the scene. "We're teaching the child to type!"
"But she doesn't need to type!” Mary shoves herself into the narrowing gap between the door and the frame and wraps her arms protectively around her aching belly. "She won't be a secretary, she's a lady."
Miss Fields purses her lips as the typewriter click-clacks away in the office. "Don't be ridiculous. If she's a lady, why hasn't anyone fought for her?"
~*~
She fights.
Swats at the hand that shakes her shoulder. Presses her other one over her wrenching stomach. No. You won't take it. I won't let you. No one fought for me, but I'll fight for her. She doesn't know if she says any of it aloud or not, though the voice speaking to her is not within her head.
"I'm not going to take anything, Mary. It's just a bad dream. Wake up."
"Sybil?" Mary fights the sticky crust of sleep that seems almost to have pasted her eyelids shut.
"Of course." The sweet face, flushed in the candlelight, comes into focus above; fingers sweep over Mary's perspiring brow. "Who did you think it was? And what did you think I was going to take from you?"
Mary tries to answer, but her throat constricts and she chokes on the words. She rolls onto her side to reach for the glass of water on the bedside table, wincing at the twinge in her abdomen, and only succeeds in brushing her knuckles against the glass. Sybil's quick reflexes prevent a small deluge on the mahogany, and she presses the glass to Mary's lips, helping her to drink.
"Golly," come the husky tones as Mary gulps. "Is Dr Clarkson sure you've only got a cold?"
"Is that what Mama said is wrong with me?"
"She said you were highly contagious."
"Corrupting, I think she means."
"What is the matter with you?" Sybil asks, her brows knitting heavily together with her frown. "You were disoriented and delirious."
"It's the laudanum." Mary blinks, and her bedroom comes into sharper focus, as much as it can in the candlelight, with the draperies drawn so that she doesn't know whether its night or day, how many nights or days have passed since Dr Clarkson examined her and Mama left her to be punished by her own mind. "It's beginning to wear off now."
So is the pain, she notes, gingerly pushing herself to sit more upright against her pillows. She relaxes the muscles which she clenched during her nightmare, and does not think she feels the cramps as she did before. Though that could be the lingering effects of the drug.
"Doctors don't give laudanum for colds," says Sybil.
"Apparently they do for miscarriages."
Now it is Mary who prevents water from being spilt in her bed as Sybil's fingers go slack around the glass, slick with condensation.
"A miscarriage? But that would mean you're--"
"Pregnant," Mary says, sparing her little sister having to. "And Dr Clarkson isn't sure I'll lose the baby." Though I deserve to.
Sybil's lips hang open for a long moment before she sits back, one leg curled beneath her, and says, "Oh, Mary."
"You must be so terribly disappointed in me. Your big sister, fallen off her pedestal. If I ever was on one."
Sybil leans in, grasping Mary's hand where it picks at the coverlet. "I'm not disappointed in you."
Sobbing, Mary clutches her sister's hand, which does not pull away even when her fingernails carve into her palm in relief. She notices the bumps of calluses on the pads, the slight flaking of skin not as well cared for as an earl's daughter's is expected to be, because Sybil's head is not full of plots to secure a good match for herself, but of securing secretarial jobs for servants.
"But...Richard," she says. "He...abandoned you?"
Mary shakes her head, though she cannot shake the nightmare image of him walking away from her with her baby. "He doesn't know. I...tried to tell him, but...You see why it wasn't a simple matter of standing up and doing battle with Papa for him?"
"I do, and I'm so sorry I got so angry with you. Can you forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive," Mary replies, choked again at this turning of tables, that someone should worry about her forgiveness when she needs it from everyone else in this house. Sybil scoots to sit beside her on the bed, laying her head on Mary's shoulder and grasping her hand as she's always done since she was a little girl.
"If you don't tell Richard, Papa's going to put you on the first boat to America when he finds out. He'll expect you to have the baby in secret and leave it for some relative to bring up."
"Heavens. Mama's efforts to censor your reading material and curb your appetite for the sensational really haven't proved very effective, have they? You probably know more on the subject of illicit love affairs and out of wedlock pregnancies than I do."
Though Sybil laughs softly, Mary can't help but think of her dream. It seems so absurd now, Miss Fields and Gwen taking the child away and teaching it to type--her; the baby was a girl in the dream--but the underlying thought is not. Mightn't it be better for the baby, whatever its sex, to be raised by someone else?
What kind of mother couldn't work up the courage to tell the man who wanted to marry her that she was pregnant? Was so selfish and reckless that she might have killed her unborn child? She is twenty-one, and scarcely has given more thought to motherhood than a vague knowledge that someday, if she married Patrick, she would have a son to inherit Downton as she would never be allowed to. She never desired children. How could she possibly make a good mother?
And Richard…He didn't even have time to eat breakfast, or to linger in bed after the act that made the child.
"What's it like?" Sybil's voice breaks gently into Mary's introspection.
"Pregnancy? Nauseating. Exhausting."
"No." Sybil giggles again, but it trails away into a sigh as she sits up to look Mary in the eye, her face all sincerity and curiosity and not the least bit shy. "Making love with a man."
Across the room, the oval full-length mirror and the trifold ones of the dressing table reflect the illuminated circle of the bed where Mary sits. Instead of her pale face peering from the stark white linens and nightgown, however, she sees the ghosts of reflections past. Herself and Richard, undressing in front of each other--and undressing each other--with such ease. How is it that being naked with him was so much easier than being honest? In the mirror she watched the moment of their joining, too, when Richard asked if she trusted him before his warm weight sank onto her, into her.
"I wanted to do it again," she answers. "For the rest of my life."
~*~
"Ginger ale and ginger biscuits," says Aunt Rosamund, sweeping into the bedroom without knocking--and certainly without an invitation--on the second morning that Mary is confined to her bed, and inspecting the breakfast tray beneath raised ginger eyebrows. "I always thought it was tea and chicken soup that the doctor ordered for a cold? If one has a cold."
"Tell Rosamund that these absurd suspicions are the result of reading those hideous newspapers your beau publishes," comes Granny's voice from the doorway.
Though already half-recumbent in bed, Mary wilts further into her pillows at the sight of her grandmother entering the bedroom with no less aplomb than Rosamund, despite relying upon on her cane. Mary feels much improved--bleeding and cramps all but abated-- but not sufficiently recovered to receive her aunt and her grandmother at once. Not that taking on the both of them together is an easy feat for a person in the pink of health.
"Because if she's right," Granny goes on, laying her left hand over the right as it curls around the ivory handle of her cane, "then it would mean my own granddaughter looked me in the eye and lied to me about Sir Richard being your..."
She cannot say lover, and Mary cannot Granny her in the eye this time, or tell a falsehood. However, after a swallow of ginger ale she does manage to say, "I'm not sure it's really fair to give Aunt Rosamund all the credit. After all, it was pretty obvious you didn't believe me."
"A lie doesn't cease to be a lie just because no one believes it," Granny replies in a thin voice as she lowers herself onto the bedside chair.
"Well," says Rosamund, almost gleefully as Granny lowers herself into the bedside chair. "It appears you're to be a great-grandmother, Mama."
"And you a great-aunt," Mary reminds her.
Rosamund tilts her head and purses her lips briefly before she says, "Cheer up, Mama. Mary and Sir Richard won't be the first couple who did things in the wrong order."
Mary is only momentarily surprised at her aunt's admission of an unconventional courtship. The apple, it seems, did not fall far from the family tree; she only wishes Aunt Rosamund thought to impart some wisdom before she shirked her chaperone duties about how not to bring forth fruit out of season.
"But why did you lie?" Granny asks, seeming not to have heard Rosamund. "What was the point? Did you think we wouldn't notice when you looked as if you swallowed a watermelon whole?"
"Or when the Christmas gown Lady Duff Gordon fitted her for...didn't fit?" Rosamund gives Mary much the same pointed look she did that day in the dressing room at the boutique. "In fairness, pregnancy is the very last fate we would wish or imagine to befall one of our girls. Though I could see from their body language at Fortnum's that the...dynamic...between Mary and Sir Richard had changed."
"I only wonder that he hasn't suspected," Granny says. "After all, he's a profiteer of just this sort of scandal."
"He did suspect," Mary says, her appetite for even Mrs Patmore's tasty ginger biscuits vanishing. "I lied to him, too."
"Are you still certain, Rosamund, that we'll be able to pull off this marriage? Or will we be sending Mary to her other grandmother until this problem resolves itself?"
"Obviously it hasn't occurred to either of you that this problem may be resolving itself as we speak!" Mary blurts out, her arms wrapping around her abdomen beneath the breakfast tray.
Her aunt and grandmother look at her, aghast.
"Oh, my dear," says Granny, one hand uncurling from around her cane, visibly trembling as it reaches out for Mary. "Surely you don't mean to say you're losing the poor baby?"
It's that same conflict of interests Mary detected from Mama; they don't want her to be pregnant without a husband, but they don't want her to cease being pregnant, either.
More importantly, they forgive her. Because they love her. And if they can, perhaps Richard...
"Really, Mama," Aunt Rosamund cuts in, "do you think she'd be sitting up sipping ginger ale if she were in the process of having a miscarriage?"
Mary smiles weakly at Granny. How strange--and yet how typical, in this family--that she should be the one offering reassurance under such circumstances. "I had a little scare, but Dr Clarkson said last night that if I continue as I am at present, I may be out of bed for New Year's Eve." The day after tomorrow.
"You see?" Aunt Rosamund draws up another chair alongside Granny's and perches at the end of it. "Now, Mary. As your grandmother said, there is the matter of the marriage to sort. I admit Sir Richard's ignorance complicates things, but we're a clever lot. Only you must tell us everything so we're playing with a full deck."
Granny cringes. "Must you speak of our Mary's fall from grace as if she were the heroine of some lurid romance you can't put down?"
"There isn't much to tell," Mary says with a slight shrug of her shoulders. "Richard said he intended to marry me, and I invited him to my room, where as soon as the deed was done he left to publish his exclusive interview with Mr Pamuk."
"And you thought he'd got what he came for and didn't mean a word he said to get you into bed?" Rosamund says, then awaits Mary's response with raised eyebrows. "That explains why you took his departure as such a personal affront."
"I assumed he wanted to marry for love," says Mary, struggling to keep her voice steady; for all the times she's recited this in her mind, speaking it aloud stirs emotions she thought she had gained control over. "He never stated so explicitly."
"Thank heaven for small favours," mutters Granny.
"I expect you not to understand affairs of the heart," Mary snaps. "You'd be as pleased as Papa for me to marry Cousin Matthew, though he's even less fashionable than Sir Richard."
Granny emits an offended gasp and looks to Rosamund for help.
"Believe it or not, Mary, that's not what your grandmother meant."
"Isn't it, though? You loved Uncle Marmaduke and from all accounts that counted for very little."
"Indeed," says Aunt Rosamund, "but we're not talking about my marriage. We're discussing your naïve assumption that cads talk marriage to seduce virgins. That's simply not true. They talk love."
"I don't agree with Rosamund's language," says Granny, "but I don't fault her logic. Has Sir Richard mentioned marriage since? That would give us more insight into his intentions."
I am a man of my word. If I say I will marry a woman, I will do it. "He wanted me to elope with him. After Papa threw him out."
"And you turned him down?" cries Rosamund, while Granny splutters and sags in her chair, looking as though she may require smelling salts.
"I couldn't run away with him after I'd lied to him about being pregnant. If I knew for certain that he wants to marry because he loves me...Is it so very wrong to wish for certain words to be said?" After all, it was Richard himself who put the idea into her head. Has it never occurred to you that you might marry for love?
In the ensuing silence, during which Mary is certain Granny and Aunt Rosamund think she's the greatest fool that ever lived, she can't think why she said all this to them. If Mama, an American, doesn't care about her sentiments--or whatever sentiments she hopes to receive from Richard--then why should Rosamund and Granny? You are going to be a mother. You've made your last selfish decision.
Yet for all that, Granny seems almost encouraging as she says, "There's a little saying you might have heard. Actions speak louder than words. Sir Richard strikes me as a man of action."
"I should say so," Rosamund snorts; Granny presses her lips together in annoyance as she regards her, and the look emboldens Mary to reveal a little more of her feelings to her grandmother than she would ever have imagined herself doing.
"His life's work is built on words. If he loved me, wouldn't he have said so, without hesitation?" I always say what I mean.
"He's a newspaperman," Rosamund says. "The goal of which is to say as much as possible in as few words as are necessary."
"Mary, dear," Granny says, "you said yourself it would be wrong to marry him under false pretences. Have you considered the irony of expecting Sir Richard to say particular words to you whilst withholding an even more important truth from him?"
The weight of the words presses Mary back against her pillows, and she closes her eyes against the mirror image of herself reflected across the room.
"I think we ought to let her rest now," says Granny, the chair and old joints creaking as she gets to her feet. "I'll ring for someone to take away that tray."
"I'll ring for Sir Richard to come," says Rosamund. "He can't be too angry about a lie if you confess while there's a danger to your life or the baby's."
"You don't know Richard at all if you think he'd take such blatant manipulation sitting down."
She said the same to Mama when she repeated the offer yesterday. But she calls her aunt back after Granny has gone out--well aware of the probable eavesdropping on the other side of the door.
"When Uncle Marmaduke dropped you for work...Did it make you feel you weren't important?"
"Let me ask you a question," says Rosamund. "Once upon a time, you thought you'd marry Cousin Patrick. Would you have rather sat across the dinner table from him every night for forty years knowing he had little other care than all the pheasants he shot that day? Or would you prefer to go to bed alone on occasion and be kept company by the thought that Richard is preoccupied with how soon he'll be able to join you?"
~*~
Having done little but sleep or lie abed, resting, for the better part of four days, Mary awakens early the next morning. For the first time in weeks the churning in her stomach is with hunger, not nausea, and she sits up against the pillows, poised to ring for her breakfast when the bedroom door swings open and Anna comes in.
Without a breakfast tray.
"Thank you for looking in on me," Mary says; it is not the first time Anna has taken it upon herself to check on her beyond the usual requirements since the bleeding started. "I'm feeling quite well this morning. I think I'll take toast and eggs for breakfast. Perhaps a glass of ginger ale, just to be safe. Anna?"
For the maid stands at the foot of the bed, hands clasped in front of her, fidgeting with the apron of her day uniform, not seeming to have heard a word of instruction.
"Are you quite well?"
"Forgive me, Lady, Mary, but...It's just...William was ironing the Times to take up with his lordship's tea, and one of the headlines was so shocking that he nearly burnt it to a crisp. And I thought you should know."
"What could be published in the Times that I should care about?" Mary asks flippantly, though she knows her blood did not run so cold when she heard the news about the Titanic.
"Sir Richard's attacked Mr Napier."
Read Chapter 25