come in under the shadow of this red rock
"This isn't black and white, darling. And yet here she was, in tones."; a Matthew/Mary fic of epic proportions (and a little bit AU).
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
__
i
He often thought of summer winds, August heat. Perhaps it was a romantic notion, some refractory memory between dreaming and reality, but he allowed his mind to wander to the grounds, to a nature unspoilt, healthy and flaxen with sun. There were wild-flowers, but they were never poppies; there were people, but they were never uniformed. They were never men. They were always one woman, how he imagined and remembered her, palms spread over the wading-grass.
He was caught in the smell, too, of droning and scorched land; the hum of crickets and a sky too blue to truly be real. There was cow parsley and foxglove held in her hands, her hair hot under the sun. She had laugh lines, and freckles; youth a diaphanous veil surrounding only them -
He had seen men with Thanatos, the daemon of death, on their left shoulder.
- but he dreamt of August: when the veil slipped back from his eyes and meadows turned to mud, summer's luminescence fading to the auge first light of day.
August was when the dream broke, and she held poppies in her hands.
__
I
1914
It was at New Year's, when he was four months in but the war was six, that he re-entered the walls of Downton. Matthew had thought about languishing in Manchester for the few weeks before his training, but it had all seemed like too much effort, too large an upheaval before the true tumult began. He'd convinced himself he had stayed for his mother's sake, because he was certain it was not for his own, nor for anyone at the abbey.
Mary refused to look at him most of the night, her eyes fixed on her plate whenever he spoke. He would rather have not talked at all, but forced himself into inane chitchat as a mere distraction from the buzz inside his head, the nauseous discontent that precluded his every move. When the women departed and he was released from Robert's awkward appraisal of his time away, he finally took the opportunity to speak to Mary in the library, walls flickering with firelight but little else. The dark, warm atmosphere laid out his nerves, the tight knot in his stomach loosening when he saw her sat serenely on the sofa, holding an empty tumbler.
“I don't know what Carson would have to say about you stealing your father's brandy.”
She looked up from the flames with a vague and settled smile. “Even a butler has his favourites.”
Matthew gave a hum of amusement, hovering by the mantelpiece. Watching him, she realized how he had changed, how his movements were more graceful and economic than before; with his head turned to the fire she could see the arc of his cheekbone, the firelight caught in his eyelashes. His uniform, such a vibrant, heady red, glowed in the dusky palate of the room.
“You didn't leave Downton,” she said, suddenly, realising her study of him, unsure of whether he noticed or not, had left a drawn out silence between them.
“No, there hardly seemed reason to, what with... enlisting.” He turned and his face was set, eyes direct on hers. He had felt her gaze on him, and beneath the physical awareness it built in him, the hum in his chest, he found space to be frustrated by her speculation; frustrated that she could look upon him with baleful eyes, but never meet his gaze directly - it caused a gap of understanding in which they could not talk of this frisson between them, could not sift through it in the infuriatingly little time they had.
She silently stared down at the glass in her hands, rolling it between her palms. He watched the crystalline cuts in it flash odd patterns on the fabric of her dress, catching the inside of her wrist. “Has the war made you very certain of where we stand?” she asked, voice flat.
He wanted to laugh. So she did want to speak of it, after all. He supposed he should not be surprised; their timing had always been impeccably wrong, and he wanted to tell her not now. Much as I want the peace of mind for both of us, not now, I do not want to rush this.
“Mary,” he said quietly. She stopped. Her languid movement ceased, and she stood, moved with her back to him to stand against the writing desk. He continued cautiously. “I'm more sure than I was,” he said, and then gave a bitter laugh. “If anything, inadvertently, it means I'm sparing you the prospect of becoming a war widow.”
She turned on him, sudden and sharp and terrifyingly precise. “Oh, Matthew,” she said, in hushed tones and narrowed eyes.
He took her unfaltering gaze. “I wouldn't want that for you.”
“Then what? Do you not realise that we truly - we must care for your well-being?” Conviction, what wavered in her voice, felt prized, precious. She paused, stared at him for a long time. “Don't you realise why I'm so afraid?”
She had made eye contact, but she was retreating again, hands bunched, her reflection smudged and narrow behind her. He recognised the vulnerability in her admittance, the small foray into past territory that caused her to make her physical presence small. He stepped forward, hesitated, and then crossed the floor to stand beside her. She held herself tightly, and kept her gaze averted; she blinked, breathed in as though about to speak, then let it out again slowly. She could see in periphery that his mouth was slightly open, eyes bright and surprised, so suddenly like the Matthew she recognised; so like the him of before and not the soldier of now, and when he leaned in and pressed his forehead to hers it felt like all his youthful diffidence had been pushed away.
Oh, Matthew.
He did not quite know why he leaned to her, apart from the excuse of comfort. It was an astonishing fact of arrival, that feeling could be legitimised by such a small touch. This sense of heightened awareness seemed shared between them, as though everything had clarified, become mutual and less constrained. Perhaps we do not have to speak to solve this. Yet he knew they would have to speak, that this could be nothing more than a goodbye, that he could not lean in further and kiss her, however much he might want to.
He did not dare to move. Their collective breath coursed through the room, no other sound but that sweep of air passing their lips, her fingers playing at the edge of his epaulet; he could feel the slide of her hand on his shoulder, held there like they had been dancing. He could find no use for words; he reeled in sensation, reluctance.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed twelve, cheers floating through from the drawing room. He was the first to pull away, to search her face, the blush there; she gave a cracked smile, wedged between the desk and him.
“1915,” she whispered, fingers slowly sliding away from him. He committed the feeling to memory, her palm smoothing over his jacket lapel, holding still there, measuring the beat of his heart.
“Happy New Year, Mary.”
__
May, 1915; Festubert
The storm broke wide, far off at first, in a thick bank of cloud and thunder. It moved quickly, advanced and cracked and spit down warm rain; the earth hummed with its electricity, ran thick under his boots, and he turned his face up, wiped mud away with a sodden sleeve, gloves slipping in the runoff. He breathed in cordite and mud and water, the tang of thirsty earth, let the rain bounce on his lips and teeth and eyelids until he was blind and he choked, spitting acrid fluid onto the ground. His pistol was heavily dangling from a limp wrist; his coat heavy on his shoulders, breath heavy in his lungs. The rain bounced tirelessly against his helmet, and he had to shout above the staccato, feeling the round, smooth body of his pocket watch shudder as the seconds shifted mechanically by.
How many captured towns had he marched through? Troops glided smoothly past him, on stilted feet, his eyes scanning their faces, the regiment tags on their backs and arms; his own a bright flash of red and gold concealed by a greatcoat or caught under the strap of a kit bag, the hang of a gas mask, wavering on the measured sway of many shoulders. It shifted into those of Yorkshire, and he felt a swift kick of homesickness, actively scanning again for a familiar face; thought he saw Barrow's sharp profile or Mason, height above the rest. Napier, against the shelled-out remnants of a church, face pale in the fallen arches.
Perhaps the constant drive of rain was dulling his senses; perhaps he needed sleep. “Crawley! Move on!” came a far shout. His legs were lead as he marched forward, slipping too quickly in thickening mud. Move on, move on. On to the next.
Then the cry and click of weapons; the whistle, attached to his lips, slipping on water and saliva, the shrill sound slightly gargled. He listened to feet clamouring over ground, to sound breaking in the distance then closer, closer; he planted his own feet squarely, and like a man confident, he ran with a slit of torrential sky in his vision, that small slice of the world expanding into something frenetic.
__
January, 1916
Socializing, after a long and dragging stint in France, felt decidedly unappealing. In a crushing crowd, chatter in discord with the high tinkle of a piano, he felt discomfort; the question of fitting in again, of projecting a sheen of contentment, even jollity, seemed far too consuming a task.
He needed a gap of adjustment (though he knew he would not get it), at least two days to settle himself before he had to engage anyone else. It was similar to when he wrote letters - he found he could only write in the early mornings, when dawn's calm pervaded and a true, eerie quiet allowed him to forget the trenches and truly think again. Much as he wanted to be truthful, he knew he could not subject his mother to it - some small part of him, the previous boy he was, wanted to protect her from what he saw, and writing in stark ink made it all the more indelible.
So he said I carry on as best I can, and diverted to questions of home.
Speaking to Lavinia, this bronze-haired doll of a girl, he felt a part of himself returning to a more familiar banter, a corner of his personality he did not have to force. It was a relief, that such conversation could be comfortable. She was comfortable; she had no sharp edges, no jibes, no pointed looks. She was without challenge; he didn't know whether that attracted or annoyed him.
_
He was tall. He was elegant. He was kind-hearted. Lavinia imagined that Matthew Crawley was everything her mother wished for her; handsome and earnest and intelligent. A solicitor. Heir to an estate, though he hesitated on the point endearingly, eyes flitting to the floor. They had just met, amongst the awkward swirl of people and parties, still in that stage of discomfort and new acquaintance where every word and gesture seemed to matter such an inordinate amount. She had not expected him to come out with such a statement; instead, she eyed his uniform quietly, wondered at the somewhat distant look in his eyes as he surveyed the room - though many men, in a conversation's lull, seemed to have that long-range stare.
“A title - how frightfully grand,” she said bashfully, nervous of breaking his contemplation. She watched his shoulders settle back into something less tense, his grip on his glass loosening.
“My only title is Captain, for now,” he said, and though his eyes glittered with sudden levity, she thought she heard a tinge of bitterness in his voice, a burnish of discontent in his low vowels.
_
He was glad of the cool air on the street, music fading into the faint rustle of vehicles. For a moment he stood on the edge of the pavement, watching a lone man walk purposefully up the street toward him, head down, shoes clipping out the tempo of his stride. A car crawled past with dim headlamps reflecting on the water-slicked road. The man dragged on a cigarette as he walked, a tiny glow in the dark, and as he passed Matthew caught his profile in periphery. A faint jolt went to his stomach, a small surge of doubt, but below it, recognition.
His back was turned when the man spoke. “My God!” he inevitably said, and Matthew pivoted swiftly on his heel, taking in a figure half-turned toward him in an identical greatcoat, eyes squinting in the dark. “It really is Matthew Crawley, isn't it?”
Matthew blinked several times, taking a step forward. “Yes,” he said tersely, searching the angles of the other man's face; it was only when he smiled that his features seemed to clarify. “Evelyn Napier,” Matthew breathed.
Napier stuck out his hand. “How wonderful to see you again!” he said, with a deft shake. “You know, it's odd, I swear I saw you in France. But, no time for talking there - how is everyone at Downton?”
Matthew suddenly thought of that pale profile against church arches, coat collar drawn up black along his jaw, cap low on his head, and the bright glint of broken glass behind him in the rubble. “They're - they're all well.”
Napier settled back on his heels, looking at Matthew for a long moment. His eyes lingered on his epaulettes. “Well, look at us, both officers,” he said finally, holding the cigarette up but not touching it to his lips. “'Captain Crawley' does have a certain ring to it.” He paused. “What regiment?”
Matthew gave a small smile. “Duke of Manchester's Own.”
“How has the war been treating you?”
There, Matthew could see a deftness in his gaze that no-one else had given him, a boldly worded challenge: Tell me how it is for you. Really, the truth. He felt a sort of liberation in it, a freedom in knowing that this other person would realise what he was speaking of as fully as himself. He did not have to hide behind euphemisms or strained, select words; he could say it's been hell, and mean it. Yet perhaps he was too practised at tiptoeing around the subject, for what came from his mouth was another veiled banality.
“Not good enough for me to wish it weren't over,” he joked weakly.
Napier laughed, an awkward, hearty sound. “And... Lady Mary? How is she? I suppose she's Mrs. Crawley now, wasn't that the plan?”
He said it so innocently that Matthew knew it was a query phrased out of simple ignorance. It was strange, standing before someone who understood his history in one place, and yet could know nothing else of his life before it apart from a few choice scenes. Napier's gap of knowledge between Pamuk's death and next four years were a yawning space, a stretch of time so full of events that he scarcely had words to explain it all; but he realised, with a small and dizzying rush, that he had no obligation to tell Evelyn Napier anything of what had transpired. So he gave a non-committal smile in response, dipping his head slightly.
“Goodnight, Lieutenant Napier,” he said.
Napier looked on in confusion. “Captain Crawley,” he said, in a quiet address. Matthew watched him walk away and felt a weight settle in his chest. He was sure he would never see Napier again, the chances of their orbits colliding made lesser by the war's cruelty; he took a deep breath, and tilted his head up to the sky. He closed his eyes. Were another man's assumptions really so damaging, in the end? Let him think what he liked.
__
June
He made up his mind on the train into London from Dover, resolved the words somewhere along the slow crawl into St. Pancras. He had realised, on a nightly patrol of the trenches two days before his leave, that Lavinia was exactly the sort of girl he would have married if he had never known Yorkshire, or the spires of Downton, or the coy timbre of Mary's laugh. In the night-glow of lanterns and far-off flares, he had stared into the middle-distance of no-man's land and known a more ancient, honest part of himself, stripped down by the day's grime and the month's toil; he wondered if fighting had reverted him to that Manchester boy, or if it had, by its fierce nature, caused him to grown into a sombre and serious creature. He knew the divide, the self which made him love Lavinia honestly, resolute in moving on - perhaps he had always been this creature, only with Downton and France solidifying, justifying an already ingrained duty in his heart and pumping it through him. Mary was not a duty; she was a longing, a pent-up frustration, a woman under a diaphanous veil in the August sun.
The seeds of his decision began there, in the maze of trenches, with a scatter of stars in the sky, above the smoke and aching notes of an accordion floating toward him; there, with his eyes tracking along the palette walls of his troop’s dugouts, Lavinia before his eyes and Mary's in his mind, elusive but life-altering speech wavering on his tongue.
_
There was a warm, summer rain when he proposed.
He was kneeling in his uniform, riding boots pinching his feet where they were awkwardly bent, his greatcoat wrapped around her shoulders. She blushed, and held his trembling hands, water slicking on their palms. “Get up off the ground, Matthew, you'll get mud on your trousers.”
“I'm used to it,” he joked inanely. He could feel water slipping down his neck, pooling against his collar. “I'll get up when you answer,” he said, so low that she had to read it from his lips below the drive of rain.
She nodded. He cocked his head, eyes silvered in the inclement light. “I'd rather you vocalize your assent,” he said playfully.
“Yes.” She half-pulled him up from the ground, her arms hugging him before he hugged her, hands wavering on her back before pressing solid to her spine for just a moment.
“Go inside,” he said fondly, pressing a small kiss to her mouth.
She turned away and ran to the house, the coat sitting large on her frame, shoulders too wide as she clutched it around herself; he took in her bright hair against the drab colour of it, the wool waterlogged.
He imagined what life would be like with her, and saw the sort of domesticity that seemed far from reach, but was what he longed for, now more fiercely than he ever had before. Something simple and honest in which he imagined himself riding his bicycle to work every day, returning in the low evening to gentle conversation; her small voice and her fawn hair and her wide, childlike eyes.
Yet there was always a must cloying at the back of his mind; whom it must be and whom it must not. His own years-old statement, I will choose my own wife, seemed savagely bitter and acrid in his throat; he still thought of August dreams, still carried that imagined talisman because she was always at the edge of his imagined future, despite having taught himself to think in small chunks of time, in days and fortnights and months at most.
Dangerously, he allowed himself to think far ahead now, and he was afraid Lavinia would be unable to call Downton home. He was afraid of a hollow house with too many rooms and not enough vigour. Robert's sort of grand and rosy world was perhaps to fall to the wayside, but how could he know, how could he decipher the tangle of things?
He stared after Lavinia, and his mind settled back to simple immediacy. He knew the smell that would cling to the coat's fabric, upon its return. Knew it would smell of London and lavender, under the deep, earthy damp. The smell of sweet smoke; a city and a girl.
__
October
“I'm very glad to see you looking so well.”
Matthew was suddenly all bright and bold colours, struck out from the grandness of the room. He tilted his head gracefully, held his shoulders proudly, under gleaming red and black and gold; but it was his gaze she could not look away from, after so long, and she felt the familiar, if two years buried, plunge of breathlessness at their pale examination.
“You win,” she said. “We are at peace again.”
She did not feel at all at peace. She reeled, and for a moment held his wrist to steady herself. She felt the notching of his bones beneath the soft fabric of his mess jacket, and pulled away quickly. Her words were a neat place to end their conversation; the concert began, and she turned away from his eyes.
But he was hale, and he was whole, and at dinner, sat next to him, she could almost pretend that there had been no rift between them - until she made the gentle mistake of asking him of France. How she'd hated the sudden lack of perspective his eyes gained, the nervous flitting of his head toward her, and the ashamed angle at which he looked away.
“I'm so pleased that we're friends again,” he'd said as he was leaving. Staring at his retreating back, the strong lines his greatcoat made of his shoulders, she felt a tight fist form in her stomach; not quite lust or longing, but a sort of coiled nausea, one she did not know how to abate. She could tell that beneath Matthew's veil of good-natured happiness, there was a faint edge in his eyes, small halting lilts in his speech and quick fluidity in his gestures, as though trying to cover some unstoppable tremor from cracking his veneer.
She gave him the toy as much to assuage her own fears as put luck over his; she begged he would be safe, staring at the photograph Isobel had given her, able to put colour in the lines of his face now, the burnish of his hair, the azure eyes. Some small part of her still wished she had kissed him, at the station, the part which loved with sensual longing. So as to know his smell again, to have him ingrained in her mind in finely attuned points - the catch of his coat buttons under her fingers, the tilt of his mouth and his eyelashes flitting against the fine skin of her temple, or his voice thrumming through her like the last deep reverberation of a cello's plucked string.
_
Whom it must be and whom it must not.
Over time, he had forced himself to see her as 'cousin Mary' again. She could be nothing more, not after their parting. There were degrees to which he could be honest with himself, and Mary, cousin or not, was at his very deepest level, not easily extracted, and not easily explained.
Until his Thursday morning departure, he was settled in the fact that they were friends again. His nerves had built with each step closer to the station, and yet when he had seen Mary there through the clearing smoke, something in him had levelled out; some easier stride had come to him, and he had known to trust her with those left behind him.
If I don't come back had been a phrase he made himself believe; he had seen too many of the promises of other men harshly retracted by a single bullet, enough to know he could not ignore the hard truth. Cruel as it was, saying such a phrase to Mary's face and seeing it settle there, in the line of her mouth and her eyes, caused him to once again become fiercely acquainted with his feelings for her. Two years had separated them, but war had accelerated something that they had left too long; they were weary, in one sense, mature in another, and yet as he left, Lavinia was not who he saw, much as propriety and circumstance dictated she should be - no, who he saw in the smoke of the departing train was Mary, small and receding on the platform, hand over her mouth. His stomach plunged, and he knew then that he still wanted her, knew with even more conviction that he had never stopped.
He remembered her eyes glinting the night before, the playful smile at her lips. He remembered her asking about the front, the sad incline of her head, regretful and quick, when he could not speak of it. They had fallen back into their old banter easily, flanking each other at dinner, and in the walk through the great hall toward his departure. That evening, Lavinia seemed to be always at the periphery of his sight, but Mary directly in his vision.
He remembered her words, her fingers playing nervously at the stem of her wineglass, so like when he first proposed; he remembered the curve of her neck as she'd looked down, the sharp, clean contrasts of her clothes and her skin. He remembered her voice, its easy slide into playfulness.
I think I'm about to be happy. Does that count?
He felt in his pocket for the token she had handed him, holding it in his palm.
The little toy dog was her by extension. Yet when she had given it to him at the station, he had wished to reach out to her - not simply with the brush of gloved fingers, but to break through the barrier they had constructed. He had only wanted to feel the thrum of another human (her) heart, another's (her) breathing, so that he could be reassured, could affirm life before the train carried him elsewhere. He had wanted to use the contact as goodbye, in a way he was sure his eyes had failed to communicate; a way to correct words lost by inadequate eloquence.
"Such good luck," she'd said. She had toppled the physical wall between them, and he'd known in that moment it could never be righted.
__
part II
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
__
i
He often thought of summer winds, August heat. Perhaps it was a romantic notion, some refractory memory between dreaming and reality, but he allowed his mind to wander to the grounds, to a nature unspoilt, healthy and flaxen with sun. There were wild-flowers, but they were never poppies; there were people, but they were never uniformed. They were never men. They were always one woman, how he imagined and remembered her, palms spread over the wading-grass.
He was caught in the smell, too, of droning and scorched land; the hum of crickets and a sky too blue to truly be real. There was cow parsley and foxglove held in her hands, her hair hot under the sun. She had laugh lines, and freckles; youth a diaphanous veil surrounding only them -
He had seen men with Thanatos, the daemon of death, on their left shoulder.
- but he dreamt of August: when the veil slipped back from his eyes and meadows turned to mud, summer's luminescence fading to the auge first light of day.
August was when the dream broke, and she held poppies in her hands.
__
I
1914
It was at New Year's, when he was four months in but the war was six, that he re-entered the walls of Downton. Matthew had thought about languishing in Manchester for the few weeks before his training, but it had all seemed like too much effort, too large an upheaval before the true tumult began. He'd convinced himself he had stayed for his mother's sake, because he was certain it was not for his own, nor for anyone at the abbey.
Mary refused to look at him most of the night, her eyes fixed on her plate whenever he spoke. He would rather have not talked at all, but forced himself into inane chitchat as a mere distraction from the buzz inside his head, the nauseous discontent that precluded his every move. When the women departed and he was released from Robert's awkward appraisal of his time away, he finally took the opportunity to speak to Mary in the library, walls flickering with firelight but little else. The dark, warm atmosphere laid out his nerves, the tight knot in his stomach loosening when he saw her sat serenely on the sofa, holding an empty tumbler.
“I don't know what Carson would have to say about you stealing your father's brandy.”
She looked up from the flames with a vague and settled smile. “Even a butler has his favourites.”
Matthew gave a hum of amusement, hovering by the mantelpiece. Watching him, she realized how he had changed, how his movements were more graceful and economic than before; with his head turned to the fire she could see the arc of his cheekbone, the firelight caught in his eyelashes. His uniform, such a vibrant, heady red, glowed in the dusky palate of the room.
“You didn't leave Downton,” she said, suddenly, realising her study of him, unsure of whether he noticed or not, had left a drawn out silence between them.
“No, there hardly seemed reason to, what with... enlisting.” He turned and his face was set, eyes direct on hers. He had felt her gaze on him, and beneath the physical awareness it built in him, the hum in his chest, he found space to be frustrated by her speculation; frustrated that she could look upon him with baleful eyes, but never meet his gaze directly - it caused a gap of understanding in which they could not talk of this frisson between them, could not sift through it in the infuriatingly little time they had.
She silently stared down at the glass in her hands, rolling it between her palms. He watched the crystalline cuts in it flash odd patterns on the fabric of her dress, catching the inside of her wrist. “Has the war made you very certain of where we stand?” she asked, voice flat.
He wanted to laugh. So she did want to speak of it, after all. He supposed he should not be surprised; their timing had always been impeccably wrong, and he wanted to tell her not now. Much as I want the peace of mind for both of us, not now, I do not want to rush this.
“Mary,” he said quietly. She stopped. Her languid movement ceased, and she stood, moved with her back to him to stand against the writing desk. He continued cautiously. “I'm more sure than I was,” he said, and then gave a bitter laugh. “If anything, inadvertently, it means I'm sparing you the prospect of becoming a war widow.”
She turned on him, sudden and sharp and terrifyingly precise. “Oh, Matthew,” she said, in hushed tones and narrowed eyes.
He took her unfaltering gaze. “I wouldn't want that for you.”
“Then what? Do you not realise that we truly - we must care for your well-being?” Conviction, what wavered in her voice, felt prized, precious. She paused, stared at him for a long time. “Don't you realise why I'm so afraid?”
She had made eye contact, but she was retreating again, hands bunched, her reflection smudged and narrow behind her. He recognised the vulnerability in her admittance, the small foray into past territory that caused her to make her physical presence small. He stepped forward, hesitated, and then crossed the floor to stand beside her. She held herself tightly, and kept her gaze averted; she blinked, breathed in as though about to speak, then let it out again slowly. She could see in periphery that his mouth was slightly open, eyes bright and surprised, so suddenly like the Matthew she recognised; so like the him of before and not the soldier of now, and when he leaned in and pressed his forehead to hers it felt like all his youthful diffidence had been pushed away.
Oh, Matthew.
He did not quite know why he leaned to her, apart from the excuse of comfort. It was an astonishing fact of arrival, that feeling could be legitimised by such a small touch. This sense of heightened awareness seemed shared between them, as though everything had clarified, become mutual and less constrained. Perhaps we do not have to speak to solve this. Yet he knew they would have to speak, that this could be nothing more than a goodbye, that he could not lean in further and kiss her, however much he might want to.
He did not dare to move. Their collective breath coursed through the room, no other sound but that sweep of air passing their lips, her fingers playing at the edge of his epaulet; he could feel the slide of her hand on his shoulder, held there like they had been dancing. He could find no use for words; he reeled in sensation, reluctance.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed twelve, cheers floating through from the drawing room. He was the first to pull away, to search her face, the blush there; she gave a cracked smile, wedged between the desk and him.
“1915,” she whispered, fingers slowly sliding away from him. He committed the feeling to memory, her palm smoothing over his jacket lapel, holding still there, measuring the beat of his heart.
“Happy New Year, Mary.”
__
May, 1915; Festubert
The storm broke wide, far off at first, in a thick bank of cloud and thunder. It moved quickly, advanced and cracked and spit down warm rain; the earth hummed with its electricity, ran thick under his boots, and he turned his face up, wiped mud away with a sodden sleeve, gloves slipping in the runoff. He breathed in cordite and mud and water, the tang of thirsty earth, let the rain bounce on his lips and teeth and eyelids until he was blind and he choked, spitting acrid fluid onto the ground. His pistol was heavily dangling from a limp wrist; his coat heavy on his shoulders, breath heavy in his lungs. The rain bounced tirelessly against his helmet, and he had to shout above the staccato, feeling the round, smooth body of his pocket watch shudder as the seconds shifted mechanically by.
How many captured towns had he marched through? Troops glided smoothly past him, on stilted feet, his eyes scanning their faces, the regiment tags on their backs and arms; his own a bright flash of red and gold concealed by a greatcoat or caught under the strap of a kit bag, the hang of a gas mask, wavering on the measured sway of many shoulders. It shifted into those of Yorkshire, and he felt a swift kick of homesickness, actively scanning again for a familiar face; thought he saw Barrow's sharp profile or Mason, height above the rest. Napier, against the shelled-out remnants of a church, face pale in the fallen arches.
Perhaps the constant drive of rain was dulling his senses; perhaps he needed sleep. “Crawley! Move on!” came a far shout. His legs were lead as he marched forward, slipping too quickly in thickening mud. Move on, move on. On to the next.
Then the cry and click of weapons; the whistle, attached to his lips, slipping on water and saliva, the shrill sound slightly gargled. He listened to feet clamouring over ground, to sound breaking in the distance then closer, closer; he planted his own feet squarely, and like a man confident, he ran with a slit of torrential sky in his vision, that small slice of the world expanding into something frenetic.
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January, 1916
Socializing, after a long and dragging stint in France, felt decidedly unappealing. In a crushing crowd, chatter in discord with the high tinkle of a piano, he felt discomfort; the question of fitting in again, of projecting a sheen of contentment, even jollity, seemed far too consuming a task.
He needed a gap of adjustment (though he knew he would not get it), at least two days to settle himself before he had to engage anyone else. It was similar to when he wrote letters - he found he could only write in the early mornings, when dawn's calm pervaded and a true, eerie quiet allowed him to forget the trenches and truly think again. Much as he wanted to be truthful, he knew he could not subject his mother to it - some small part of him, the previous boy he was, wanted to protect her from what he saw, and writing in stark ink made it all the more indelible.
So he said I carry on as best I can, and diverted to questions of home.
Speaking to Lavinia, this bronze-haired doll of a girl, he felt a part of himself returning to a more familiar banter, a corner of his personality he did not have to force. It was a relief, that such conversation could be comfortable. She was comfortable; she had no sharp edges, no jibes, no pointed looks. She was without challenge; he didn't know whether that attracted or annoyed him.
_
He was tall. He was elegant. He was kind-hearted. Lavinia imagined that Matthew Crawley was everything her mother wished for her; handsome and earnest and intelligent. A solicitor. Heir to an estate, though he hesitated on the point endearingly, eyes flitting to the floor. They had just met, amongst the awkward swirl of people and parties, still in that stage of discomfort and new acquaintance where every word and gesture seemed to matter such an inordinate amount. She had not expected him to come out with such a statement; instead, she eyed his uniform quietly, wondered at the somewhat distant look in his eyes as he surveyed the room - though many men, in a conversation's lull, seemed to have that long-range stare.
“A title - how frightfully grand,” she said bashfully, nervous of breaking his contemplation. She watched his shoulders settle back into something less tense, his grip on his glass loosening.
“My only title is Captain, for now,” he said, and though his eyes glittered with sudden levity, she thought she heard a tinge of bitterness in his voice, a burnish of discontent in his low vowels.
_
He was glad of the cool air on the street, music fading into the faint rustle of vehicles. For a moment he stood on the edge of the pavement, watching a lone man walk purposefully up the street toward him, head down, shoes clipping out the tempo of his stride. A car crawled past with dim headlamps reflecting on the water-slicked road. The man dragged on a cigarette as he walked, a tiny glow in the dark, and as he passed Matthew caught his profile in periphery. A faint jolt went to his stomach, a small surge of doubt, but below it, recognition.
His back was turned when the man spoke. “My God!” he inevitably said, and Matthew pivoted swiftly on his heel, taking in a figure half-turned toward him in an identical greatcoat, eyes squinting in the dark. “It really is Matthew Crawley, isn't it?”
Matthew blinked several times, taking a step forward. “Yes,” he said tersely, searching the angles of the other man's face; it was only when he smiled that his features seemed to clarify. “Evelyn Napier,” Matthew breathed.
Napier stuck out his hand. “How wonderful to see you again!” he said, with a deft shake. “You know, it's odd, I swear I saw you in France. But, no time for talking there - how is everyone at Downton?”
Matthew suddenly thought of that pale profile against church arches, coat collar drawn up black along his jaw, cap low on his head, and the bright glint of broken glass behind him in the rubble. “They're - they're all well.”
Napier settled back on his heels, looking at Matthew for a long moment. His eyes lingered on his epaulettes. “Well, look at us, both officers,” he said finally, holding the cigarette up but not touching it to his lips. “'Captain Crawley' does have a certain ring to it.” He paused. “What regiment?”
Matthew gave a small smile. “Duke of Manchester's Own.”
“How has the war been treating you?”
There, Matthew could see a deftness in his gaze that no-one else had given him, a boldly worded challenge: Tell me how it is for you. Really, the truth. He felt a sort of liberation in it, a freedom in knowing that this other person would realise what he was speaking of as fully as himself. He did not have to hide behind euphemisms or strained, select words; he could say it's been hell, and mean it. Yet perhaps he was too practised at tiptoeing around the subject, for what came from his mouth was another veiled banality.
“Not good enough for me to wish it weren't over,” he joked weakly.
Napier laughed, an awkward, hearty sound. “And... Lady Mary? How is she? I suppose she's Mrs. Crawley now, wasn't that the plan?”
He said it so innocently that Matthew knew it was a query phrased out of simple ignorance. It was strange, standing before someone who understood his history in one place, and yet could know nothing else of his life before it apart from a few choice scenes. Napier's gap of knowledge between Pamuk's death and next four years were a yawning space, a stretch of time so full of events that he scarcely had words to explain it all; but he realised, with a small and dizzying rush, that he had no obligation to tell Evelyn Napier anything of what had transpired. So he gave a non-committal smile in response, dipping his head slightly.
“Goodnight, Lieutenant Napier,” he said.
Napier looked on in confusion. “Captain Crawley,” he said, in a quiet address. Matthew watched him walk away and felt a weight settle in his chest. He was sure he would never see Napier again, the chances of their orbits colliding made lesser by the war's cruelty; he took a deep breath, and tilted his head up to the sky. He closed his eyes. Were another man's assumptions really so damaging, in the end? Let him think what he liked.
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June
He made up his mind on the train into London from Dover, resolved the words somewhere along the slow crawl into St. Pancras. He had realised, on a nightly patrol of the trenches two days before his leave, that Lavinia was exactly the sort of girl he would have married if he had never known Yorkshire, or the spires of Downton, or the coy timbre of Mary's laugh. In the night-glow of lanterns and far-off flares, he had stared into the middle-distance of no-man's land and known a more ancient, honest part of himself, stripped down by the day's grime and the month's toil; he wondered if fighting had reverted him to that Manchester boy, or if it had, by its fierce nature, caused him to grown into a sombre and serious creature. He knew the divide, the self which made him love Lavinia honestly, resolute in moving on - perhaps he had always been this creature, only with Downton and France solidifying, justifying an already ingrained duty in his heart and pumping it through him. Mary was not a duty; she was a longing, a pent-up frustration, a woman under a diaphanous veil in the August sun.
The seeds of his decision began there, in the maze of trenches, with a scatter of stars in the sky, above the smoke and aching notes of an accordion floating toward him; there, with his eyes tracking along the palette walls of his troop’s dugouts, Lavinia before his eyes and Mary's in his mind, elusive but life-altering speech wavering on his tongue.
_
There was a warm, summer rain when he proposed.
He was kneeling in his uniform, riding boots pinching his feet where they were awkwardly bent, his greatcoat wrapped around her shoulders. She blushed, and held his trembling hands, water slicking on their palms. “Get up off the ground, Matthew, you'll get mud on your trousers.”
“I'm used to it,” he joked inanely. He could feel water slipping down his neck, pooling against his collar. “I'll get up when you answer,” he said, so low that she had to read it from his lips below the drive of rain.
She nodded. He cocked his head, eyes silvered in the inclement light. “I'd rather you vocalize your assent,” he said playfully.
“Yes.” She half-pulled him up from the ground, her arms hugging him before he hugged her, hands wavering on her back before pressing solid to her spine for just a moment.
“Go inside,” he said fondly, pressing a small kiss to her mouth.
She turned away and ran to the house, the coat sitting large on her frame, shoulders too wide as she clutched it around herself; he took in her bright hair against the drab colour of it, the wool waterlogged.
He imagined what life would be like with her, and saw the sort of domesticity that seemed far from reach, but was what he longed for, now more fiercely than he ever had before. Something simple and honest in which he imagined himself riding his bicycle to work every day, returning in the low evening to gentle conversation; her small voice and her fawn hair and her wide, childlike eyes.
Yet there was always a must cloying at the back of his mind; whom it must be and whom it must not. His own years-old statement, I will choose my own wife, seemed savagely bitter and acrid in his throat; he still thought of August dreams, still carried that imagined talisman because she was always at the edge of his imagined future, despite having taught himself to think in small chunks of time, in days and fortnights and months at most.
Dangerously, he allowed himself to think far ahead now, and he was afraid Lavinia would be unable to call Downton home. He was afraid of a hollow house with too many rooms and not enough vigour. Robert's sort of grand and rosy world was perhaps to fall to the wayside, but how could he know, how could he decipher the tangle of things?
He stared after Lavinia, and his mind settled back to simple immediacy. He knew the smell that would cling to the coat's fabric, upon its return. Knew it would smell of London and lavender, under the deep, earthy damp. The smell of sweet smoke; a city and a girl.
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October
“I'm very glad to see you looking so well.”
Matthew was suddenly all bright and bold colours, struck out from the grandness of the room. He tilted his head gracefully, held his shoulders proudly, under gleaming red and black and gold; but it was his gaze she could not look away from, after so long, and she felt the familiar, if two years buried, plunge of breathlessness at their pale examination.
“You win,” she said. “We are at peace again.”
She did not feel at all at peace. She reeled, and for a moment held his wrist to steady herself. She felt the notching of his bones beneath the soft fabric of his mess jacket, and pulled away quickly. Her words were a neat place to end their conversation; the concert began, and she turned away from his eyes.
But he was hale, and he was whole, and at dinner, sat next to him, she could almost pretend that there had been no rift between them - until she made the gentle mistake of asking him of France. How she'd hated the sudden lack of perspective his eyes gained, the nervous flitting of his head toward her, and the ashamed angle at which he looked away.
“I'm so pleased that we're friends again,” he'd said as he was leaving. Staring at his retreating back, the strong lines his greatcoat made of his shoulders, she felt a tight fist form in her stomach; not quite lust or longing, but a sort of coiled nausea, one she did not know how to abate. She could tell that beneath Matthew's veil of good-natured happiness, there was a faint edge in his eyes, small halting lilts in his speech and quick fluidity in his gestures, as though trying to cover some unstoppable tremor from cracking his veneer.
She gave him the toy as much to assuage her own fears as put luck over his; she begged he would be safe, staring at the photograph Isobel had given her, able to put colour in the lines of his face now, the burnish of his hair, the azure eyes. Some small part of her still wished she had kissed him, at the station, the part which loved with sensual longing. So as to know his smell again, to have him ingrained in her mind in finely attuned points - the catch of his coat buttons under her fingers, the tilt of his mouth and his eyelashes flitting against the fine skin of her temple, or his voice thrumming through her like the last deep reverberation of a cello's plucked string.
_
Whom it must be and whom it must not.
Over time, he had forced himself to see her as 'cousin Mary' again. She could be nothing more, not after their parting. There were degrees to which he could be honest with himself, and Mary, cousin or not, was at his very deepest level, not easily extracted, and not easily explained.
Until his Thursday morning departure, he was settled in the fact that they were friends again. His nerves had built with each step closer to the station, and yet when he had seen Mary there through the clearing smoke, something in him had levelled out; some easier stride had come to him, and he had known to trust her with those left behind him.
If I don't come back had been a phrase he made himself believe; he had seen too many of the promises of other men harshly retracted by a single bullet, enough to know he could not ignore the hard truth. Cruel as it was, saying such a phrase to Mary's face and seeing it settle there, in the line of her mouth and her eyes, caused him to once again become fiercely acquainted with his feelings for her. Two years had separated them, but war had accelerated something that they had left too long; they were weary, in one sense, mature in another, and yet as he left, Lavinia was not who he saw, much as propriety and circumstance dictated she should be - no, who he saw in the smoke of the departing train was Mary, small and receding on the platform, hand over her mouth. His stomach plunged, and he knew then that he still wanted her, knew with even more conviction that he had never stopped.
He remembered her eyes glinting the night before, the playful smile at her lips. He remembered her asking about the front, the sad incline of her head, regretful and quick, when he could not speak of it. They had fallen back into their old banter easily, flanking each other at dinner, and in the walk through the great hall toward his departure. That evening, Lavinia seemed to be always at the periphery of his sight, but Mary directly in his vision.
He remembered her words, her fingers playing nervously at the stem of her wineglass, so like when he first proposed; he remembered the curve of her neck as she'd looked down, the sharp, clean contrasts of her clothes and her skin. He remembered her voice, its easy slide into playfulness.
I think I'm about to be happy. Does that count?
He felt in his pocket for the token she had handed him, holding it in his palm.
The little toy dog was her by extension. Yet when she had given it to him at the station, he had wished to reach out to her - not simply with the brush of gloved fingers, but to break through the barrier they had constructed. He had only wanted to feel the thrum of another human (her) heart, another's (her) breathing, so that he could be reassured, could affirm life before the train carried him elsewhere. He had wanted to use the contact as goodbye, in a way he was sure his eyes had failed to communicate; a way to correct words lost by inadequate eloquence.
"Such good luck," she'd said. She had toppled the physical wall between them, and he'd known in that moment it could never be righted.
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part II