looking into the heart of light, the silence
II
August 1918
It was the first time they'd sat apart at dinner. It felt like a new rift between them, and he kept his gaze isolated to the table, both grateful and unsettled that such grandiosity continued in his absence, an absence in which he knew acute and cruel reality. Robert had once spoken to him of purpose, but now Matthew wanted to laugh bitterly at his words, at this house, at the absurd notion that they simply continued. Yet he would inherit this life, and he loathed it, in that moment of transition, loathed everyone's caution around him and the accosting colours of their clothes, the smell of the house, and every reminder of the front caused by the clusters of uniformed men in the great hall and library; he had become used to cramped quarters and muted tones and sharp, acrid smells, and whilst there he could escape in dreams of bright, golden stone, but here the dream surrounded him and became suffocating.
He felt out of place and far too aware of what was going on beyond these walls; he felt a stifled sense of urgency humming through him and he had to hold himself with rigid formality to keep from drumming his fingers in impatience, or leaving the room altogether.
Laughter flickered around the table; he looked up to see Mary's eyes on him, her smile a gentle prompt, and he knew if she were next to him she'd quietly ask after his well-being. He felt a new sort of stillness, more natural than what he had self-imposed; he looked back at her steadily, and thought of how her neck had tensed as he'd shook hands with Carlisle. Something fell into place, then. He could not bring himself to smile, mouth unable to form the right arrangement of muscles, but he studied her, holding her gaze as softly as if her gloved hand were held in his.
_
Seeing him shake hands with Richard settled something cold in her stomach. Perhaps it was guilt, for she knew the two would be at odds, but Matthew's graciousness toward the other man made her feel weak with gratitude. The dull resignation in her chest was sparked through and pushed away when Matthew's eyes slid to hers, and she felt disappointment when she was not seated next to him at dinner. The mischief with which he'd held her gaze earlier was gone, his eyes fixed dully on the table, and her open, amiable Matthew was suddenly somewhat unreadable.
In truth, she had never thought of Matthew in battle - she had, in that secret gaze, seen the haunting in his eyes and wondered, known he could not talk of it, but she had never truly thought of him there, in mud and artillery fire, between the scarred limbs of blasted trees and barbed wire; she had never imagined the physicality of Matthew in the war, the things he had done. She had never imagined him holding a pistol. She could only see the stains it put on him, the change and abrasion of him physically, the mental retreat into himself. When he left, or she heard of other men lost, or the abbey echoed with the voices of recuperating soldiers, she did not allow herself to think how or where or why. It was only a question of when; when he would return, when he would be scathed, when a soldier would appear in the great hall with his back to her, his golden hair so similar...
And then Matthew looked up. He stared at her directly - his face leaner, shadowed by the candlelight, the lines of his suit sharp - and his eyes cleared. She smiled for him, for his return to the present; she smiled for the fact that his blue, blue-eyed clarity briefly clouded again with something more grateful, something like adoration. The rest of him was so still, and she knew that this was his physicality here, careful and poised, sat with a straight-backed elegance that the military had taught him.
This is what will haunt me, she thought. This look, his heart bared so quietly.
Not long after, she watched him slip from the drawing room, his eyes again distant. No-one noticed when she followed him.
_
He was sat in burgeoning purple light on the bench beneath the cedar, staring up at its branches. She walked toward him with caution, watched his hazy outline clarify as she neared; his eyes were closed, head tilted to rest against the bench, and she took an embarrassed half-step backward before she saw his eyes open again, slowly, his hands curl smoothly against the lip of the wood as he straightened his back. He saw her. He gave the small tick of a smile.
“Hello,” he said smoothly, standing when she stopped a few paces from him. He'd undone his bow tie, the white silk hanging gracelessly around his neck.
“What on earth are you doing out at this time of night?” she asked, taking his place on the bench. She watched him blink and step backward, sit cautiously beside her.
“Seemed a shame to waste such a pleasant evening,” he said, after too long a pause.
“Were you quite all right, at dinner?” She knew, as she asked it, that he would evade the question with a quiet affirmative answer; his shoulders bent forward, his eyes slid away from hers, his hands knotted themselves in his lap.
“Of course,” he told her.
She nodded politely, looking at the small darted gather of fabric at the back of his collar, over his spine, where the line of the suit strained with his discomfort.
“Mary - ” he started, then looked up at the house and gave an unhappy sigh. He stood in the assumption she would follow and strode to the edge of the woodland; she watched him, saw him under the thickening evening light, his pace quick. As he got further away, he dipped in and out of the smudged landscape; his suit became absorbed by the thick black of forest, his body against it only distinguishable by the pale glow of his hair and his shirt, in thin, swaying white slashes at his neck and wrists. She marvelled at the familiarity of his walk - the slope of his shoulders with each step, his hands loose at his sides - that upright gait so easy and fluid even whilst he was in turmoil. She knew she would recognize it anywhere for how many times she had studied it, imagined it, felt its steps beat measured at her side.
“Do you think Lavinia notices it?” he asked, when she had reached him, on the periphery of the oak and alder trees, the still-humid air so much cooler in this little dip of land. “Do you think she sees my - my worry, as you do, or does she ignore it?”
She faltered. “I don't know why you're asking me - ”
“I'm asking, Mary, because I trust you.” His head was tilted, and he stepped closer to her, eyes earnest and immovable. “Because you see it. You see it.” She watched his breath shudder and his eyes close into the deep-set shadows of his face, hands lifting to touch her, but not quite hovering above her arms. “Do you understand what that means? What - why you've noticed and she hasn't?”
“Matthew, the boundaries - ”
His eyes snapped open, dark cornflower blue. “We are well beyond boundaries,” he hissed. “Or has Richard caged you so fully that you cannot speak to me anymore?”
There it was. The fact of whom she was bound to. Lavinia may have had Matthew's ring, but he did not hold her secrets. Matthew challenged her, yet Mary knew she could not tell him, not here, with his tie undone and shadow sitting in the notch where his collarbones met - a space she had never seen before; his eyes wild with something like anger, fingers running restlessly over his palms.
“Does he think I will do something untoward because I might not return?” Matthew asked.
She could not tell him, not here, out of view of the house, under the swish of alder leaves with their delicate, glowing bark knotted and slashed with black.
Not now, when she reached to hold his wrist like she had at the concert, and felt his skin properly against hers, his pulse fluttering with the taut jump of his tendons as he clenched and unclenched his fist.
Not here, where her breath was locked in her lungs at his proximity, her poise rigid. She could not catch him with a lie. She could not be the one to cause his mistrust, nor could she bear to hear it strain the strings of his voice into a higher pitch when they were once held in low notes of longing.
I might not return.
She tipped forward onto her toes and pressed her hands against his back in a half-embrace. Their shoulders arced against one another and she wanted to hum at the feeling of his palms spread flat to her waist; she kept their torsos centimetres distant because that way lay something sharp and dangerous, but wanted, with a thick guilt in her stomach. His head against her shoulder was enough, his hands and his speaking low in her ear.
“We cannot leave this alone, can we?” he said, anguished, small, his fingers grazing her spine much more confident than his words indicated.
“No. We cannot.”
She knew there were many ways to say I love you. She knew that she had already said many of them to this man, but she had only known one lust; no, this, this now, was love, this shuddering, hesitant embrace in which their abdomens shook from the effort of not touching, their hands straying in the same pattern on each other's backs, feeling different fabrics and different muscles but the same layout of bone. Enough. Here, she could know him holding her closely but away, away from the dangerous planes of hip to hip; she could feel his heartbeat and her own in synchrony, could touch his hair, here, in this dip of shadowed land, and know the soft coolness of it.
“I do not want to let it go,” she murmured against his shoulder. She could deign to that sort of honesty. He pulled back, and the air trembled, split with cricket song, shook as he breathed out a single word.
“What?”
“I'm tired, Matthew,” she said. “Richard makes me tired.”
He frowned, voice snapping like the dry grass beneath their feet. “So why are you - ” She lay her fingertips over his mouth to silence him, felt his lips slide closed in consternation.
“This isn't black and white, darling,” she said, taking her fingers away, and in a breath of air he was close and shaking, closer than he'd been in an age; close enough that she could see where his eyelashes started dark and grew out to white-blonde, and the blue smudge of sleeplessness that lined the corners of his eyes. They were hip to hip, his mouth a gentle brush on hers, and it was difficult to tell who had instigated this, the dangerous contact. He tasted of the evening's wine, and there was that tilt, that press of his nose to her cheek, that skip of her fingers up over his shirt buttons, pressing lightly in the hollow arc at the top of his sternum; there was that hum, low in their throats, the desperate resignation of it making her pull away sooner than she wished.
“I'm tired too,” he whispered, holding his forehead against hers, hands mapping the beads on her dress beneath her shawl. “I'm...” His head tilted as she skimmed her palm across his hair. “...exhausted...” His nose brushed against hers, eyes cast down to their shoes in the inky grass.
“Oh, Matthew, no.”
She heard him swallow. “I know.”
He walked away first. She stared at the purpled glow of his shirt in the shadows, the bend of his head toward the ground causing an infuriating lock of his hair to flop forward. He seemed to still himself, his body realigning into that proud way of moving again; yet there was something angelic in him, something she had not seen in months, years, a diffidence in his angling away from her. He slowly turned back to her with his hands in his pockets, that hair still loose over his forehead, shifting as he blinked, a small flush on his cheeks. He looked like a boy, she thought; he looked so very handsome.
“Set a date, Mary,” he said, with a reticent, beautiful smile.
He was slipping away, again, and she felt panic; but how could she keep him, constrained as she was by duty? She hesitated on the edge of some insanity, teetering there until her voice sliced clean through it, pushing dangerous into the air. “Paris.”
Matthew's face etched in confusion. “Sorry?”
She straightened her shoulders into conviction, holding her head high. “When is your next leave?” she asked quietly, slowly, seductively enough that he would pick up the hint in her words. “I was wrong to say it's black and white, Matthew, because it is something much, much bolder than that.”
He was silent, stunned by her breathless implication; he tipped forward, stumbling back down the small slope toward her. “God, that's - that's not what I meant,” he told her, a low, close whisper.
She shut her eyes. I might not return. Perhaps she could tell him, there, with the distance of the Channel. I might not. His head angled in toward hers as she took his wrist again, slipping her fingers beneath his cuff to feel the delicate notching of bone. “Please,” she whispered. “Paris.”
He twisted their hands and pressed his thumb into the centre of her palm; he repeated that sad, hesitant smile, and his thumb stroked across her palm over and over, bending to the scrape of his fingernail, and she felt it as a low, strong ache in her stomach.
__
November, 1918
It was not Paris. It was not anywhere. It was him in a small and obscure corner of France (perhaps Belgium), where the borders constantly shifted wider and thinner like contracting lungs. But Matthew could breathe here, in this thick and bold countryside, swathed and dried by autumn. Thiérache, in a decrepit stone cottage with low-beam ceilings, a white film of dust over the windows and walls and table.
The noise came low to his ears, weaving through the streets from a distance, reaching them when at a fever pitch and echoing off the narrow walls; a French soldier, blue tunic flashing brightly as he waved his arms: ‹‹La guerre est terminée! Alliés! Alliés! La guerre est terminée!››
Men shouted outside; Mason vomited into the sink's basin, tap squeaking with rust but no water; Matthew's helmet dropped from his hands onto the ground, tin clanging against flagstones, and he slid from the table, kicking it away as he headed for the door, the clean air outside, the orchard sweeping downland in front of him.
“One hundred days,” he heard one man mutter, dragging a cigarette against grubby lips. “One hundred fucking days.”
“Last one died two sodding minutes before ceasefire.” Matthew felt his heart lurch, body staggering between the trees until he reached the orchard's edge, dew still lodged in the grass, soaking the caked dirt from his boots back to mud.
I've forgotten what English soil smells like, he thought, touching his hand to the tree bark. He thought of white spindly alders, of Mary's thin, lithe limbs swaying like those branches, reaching to him, hands on his back and the fractious, dangerous promise of Paris that would not come to fruition. The war was over. He would go home. His correlation to duty would become more nebulous. I've forgotten.
In the end, he stayed away far longer than he should have. Three months.
__
December 1918
London was his exodus. Lavinia welcomed him with open arms and gentle eyes; he should have expected her meekness, but he longed for some sort of ferocity from her, a hardened kiss of some feeling, an affirmation that he could live, could feel adrenaline outside of terror.
They'd crossed each other carefully, circled and spoken in vapid waves. Was this what their life was to be? He thought of it angrily, with bitter disdain, trying to push the feeling off as a layover from France, but he looked at Lavinia now and felt only again that dull, pervading ache, a tiredness he could not shake.
“I won't be coming up with you for the shoot,” she said.
“No?” His eyes challenged her, purposely; this part of him, where the visceral need for combat reigned, he knew had not yet broke off from the war. “I'll need someone to partner me.”
She smoothed her skirt, and he stared at the neatness of her brown boots, the polish of them against the carpet. “I'm not sure I'll like all that banging about,” she said, and his mind heard it as provocation.
You wish me to do battle with you?
His voice snapped. “I'm not sure I'll like it much either.”
No.
Perhaps.
Please.
There, in those electric moments when the conversation turned entirely, they finally found a semblance of passion; perhaps out of frustration, but it was late and she kissed him, pressed against him a little too evenly, and then their roles were reversed and his name siphoned from her lips in the dark, lungs caged by her corset and the sharp dig of the doorway against her back, his body skimming hers with shirtsleeves rolled, forearms bare. She ran her fingers over the fine gold hair there, knowing he would kiss her again, a hard and frantic thing that shuddered through her.
“Matthew,” Lavinia hissed, in that sweet, rasping voice, and that was all he remembered, her breath shaking over the syllables of his name, hands feather-light on his shoulders, and the soft clatter of hairpins falling to the floor one by one.
“Matthew.” Her hands pushing him back, hair half-fallen, head angled against the door frame to look up at him. “This isn't right,” she whispered. “I met and was prepared to marry Captain Crawley, but that's all over now.”
How strange, the selves we show and lock away; how quickly they can change. He stared at her, frowning sweetly, lips parted. Did he truly have to explain his circumstance and duty, those prescribed things he had decided upon in a trench nearly three years ago, and how much they angered him?
“So it would have been different if we'd married during the war?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically. He moved to step back, but her fingers pressed against his mouth, and he thought of Mary, of that shadowed land, and he understood.
“Go home,” she said, not unkindly.
__
part III