Fic: Another Chapter (4/5)
Title: Another Chapter (4/5)
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Characters & Pairings: Mary Crawley/Richard Carlisle, Matthew Crawley
Ratings & Warnings: rated R for sexuality
Format & Word Count: WIP, 2681 words in chapter 4
Summary: When Mary agrees to write another chapter in the book of Haxby Park, she unexpectedly writes a new start to her story with Sir Richard. [2x06 AU]
Author's Notes: As you can see, this is not, in fact, the last chapter of Another chapter, as I anticipated--though perhaps that means I'd better not say anything definitively! I hope you all enjoy these two scenes, which weren't in my original plan for the fic, but seemed necessary to get Mary and Richard on the floor in empty Haxby where I want them to end up and to bring some closure to the Mary/Matthew threads in chapter two. Thanks again for all your wonderful feedback and enthusiasm for this fic, especially those of you who winkled sneak peeks out of me. It's a real pleasure to share my story with you all, especially knowing that it's converted a couple of die-hard M/M shippers to R/M. See the Dark Mark glowing above Downton Abbey. ;)
One | Two | Three |
Four
The rustle of paper diverts Mary's attention from the scene beyond the window: the skeletal forms of denuded late autumn trees veiled in fog from yesterday's rain, blurred as the motor speeds down the road. She commands herself to smile, but no sooner has she fixed the pleasant expression upon her lips than it falls again as she sees that Richard is not, as she'd hoped, folding his newspaper and setting it aside, but merely turning the page.
As she resumes glowering out the window, however, his gloved hand closes around hers where it rests in her lap. "Thank you for seeing me off to the station." He chafes her knuckles with his thumb--but his gaze still does not waver from the newspaper.
"Why?" Mary pulls her hand from his grasp, busying her hands with a feigned search through the contents of her handbag. "You have your newspaper for company. There's hardly a point to my being here at all."
In fact they've hardly spoken since leaving Haxby the previous evening, the awkward end Richard made to their passionate exchange in the hall having a rather stifling effect on further conversation, as well. And yet the dialogue in Mary's own mind had not ceased all through the night; she'd lain in bed feeling as though the red papered walls of her room were closing in on her, at once longing for the bright openness of Haxby and castigating herself for doing so, and for her naïveté in believing Richard capable of sustaining the gallantry he'd exhibited over the weekend in the long term. He'd asked her to give the house another chapter, not a three-volume novel. And apparently isn't as keen as she for that chapter to include a bit of sex.
"It's Monday morning," the smooth rake of Richard's tones draws her out of her brooding. "Business hours. And I'd be careful how I spoke about my newspaper, if I were you," he adds, a hard coldness creeping into his voice which matches the colour of his eyes as they scan the words printed across the page. "Remember, it has the power to give you a life."
Or to destroy it, Mary thinks, but Richard looks at her, at last, and smiles. Not a twisted smirk, as his words might have indicated, but a gentle curve of his lips, his eyes crinkling at the corners and reflecting the golden glint of the morning sun diffused by the window and the lingering fog. For a moment she studies him, then snaps her handbag shut and directs her attention outside once more in her best impression of the aloof aristocrat, lest he see that she cannot read him and have that advantage over her, as well.
He's still smiling as they stand together on the platform as Branson takes the bags to a porter, the dimples beneath his chiselled cheekbones disarmingly handsome, so she does her best not to let her gaze wander to them. In one hand Richard holds his valise, but the free one again captures Mary's fingertips.
"We were standing just about here when I asked you to marry me, weren't we?"
Before she can school them into rigid disinterest--cold and careful, as Richard himself as described her--Mary's eyebrows go up. Richard, nostalgic? Well, so is she; though her memories are of standing in precisely this spot as she watched the train carry Matthew off to have all his hopes and hers with them gunned down in the trenches of the Somme.
"How could I forget?" she says, making no attempt to hide her sarcasm. "It was such a romantic proposal. And you didn't really ask me to marry you so much as tell me you wanted me to."
"Ah, that's right." Richard's gaze flickers downward to their loosely joined hands; before Mary can decide whether his cheeks are tinged with a blush, or if that's just the morning light reflecting off the glossy panelling of the train cars, he squeezes her fingers and meets her gaze again. "You were the one doing all the asking, weren't you? Namely, why did I want you to marry me?"
His smile fades, and Mary watches the roll of his Adam's apple down his throat beneath his starched collar as he swallows, hard. Nervously.
"If I'd told you it was because I loved you," he says, "would it have changed anything?"
"Not if you didn't mean it."
Richard's valise hits the pavement at his feet with a thud, and he takes both her hands tightly in both of his, drawing her so near enough that her skirt brushes the hem of his greatcoat. "I never lie, Mary. Never."
Of all the things he might have said, only this could have made Mary forget to breathe. I can talk about love and moon and June and the rest of it, if you wish. She'd thought he meant he viewed their marriage in a purely pragmatic light, and had no intention of pretending more depth of feeling than he possessed for the sake of mere convention. Not that he actually did feel more than he'd let on. As much as Matthew might have felt for her and now, more--much more--than Matthew had ever declared.
But Mary isn't sure she's ready to own to that aloud. Not yet.
"Except when you told me it was because you thought very highly of me?" she says. "And that you thought we'd make a good team who could build something worth having?"
"That was all the truth," Richard insists, his fingertips pressing into Mary's palms. One corner of his mouth, however, quirks upward in a self-conscious smile. "Just not the entire truth."
With his dimples and the ends of his hair curling from beneath the brim of his hat, he looks almost boyish. And completely sincere. The fog that has been hanging about breaks, finally, dissolved by the sunlight beaming onto the platform as it had yesterday through the big windows of bright, gilded Haxby. Mary's head clears, as well, and warm fingers seem to steal all through her, loosening the icy knot into which her stomach had tied itself during her sleepless night, and extinguishing the burning tightness in her lungs as they expand with fresh air.
"Obviously I misjudged you," Richard goes on. "I thought you'd laugh at me, or tell me love was very middle class. Our kind of people don't get excited, that's now how we are, and all that. If I could turn back time and do it all over--"
His words are swallowed up by the blast of the train whistle, but Mary doesn't need to hear them to know what they are, or that in return for his total honesty, however overdue it might have come, she owes him hers.
"I don't know if it would have made a difference then," she says when the shrill echo has died away into the din of porters loading baggage and passengers boarding the cars. The flicker of disappointment across Richard's face is unmistakable as he releases one of her hands and stoops to retrieve his valise; though earlier Mary had wished to wound him, she feels a corresponding ache in her own chest. Squeezing his hand, she adds, "But now…I think it may."
It's not an impassioned declaration, not by any stretch--her kind don't get excited, or at least she doesn't--but she thinks her actions in Haxby yesterday must have spoken quite a bit louder to him than these quiet words exchanged on the platform.
And so had Richard's, that other morning two years ago, when he'd stood here in the swirl of smoke chuffing from the engine looking just like this wearing the same hat and greatcoat and hopeful expression. So exactly like then is this moment that Mary thinks she hears his husky words uttered through the dimpled smile: I'm counting on it.
But Richard doesn't speak to her. Not audibly. He leans in and brushes his lips across hers, lightly. Too lightly, Mary thinks, her body at once awakening to the memory of yesterday's kiss. She disentangles her fingers from his, lifting her hand to touch his cheek, and then all at once his hand is at the small of her back, pressing her snugly against him as her arms go about his shoulders, her fingers finding their way into the fine hair at the nape of his neck.
Her story with Matthew never included a send-off like this.
As if privy to her thoughts, when Richard draws back, he says, "My goodness, that was warm and heartfelt. I'm only headed to work, not to war, Mary."
She doesn't blush at her display of unrestrained affection, but meets his gaze squarely. "Isn't everything a war with you?"
His chuckle rumbles through her as he presses another kiss to her cheek, murmuring, "Mmm. And all's fair," and the smile never wavers from his lips, nor his gaze from hers until the train carries him around the bend.
~*~
Mary can't see Matthew's face at all as she pushes his wheelchair about the park when she returns from the station.
She's glad.
Particularly when he says, "So Haxby Park's yours now, your papa tells me."
"Richard's," she corrects him, through a clenched jaw.
What else has Papa said to Matthew about her and her forthcoming marriage? It's been a long time since she harboured any resentment toward her father for giving Matthew his preference or toward Matthew for securing it, but the old feelings rear up now like a horse that has never truly been broken.
Oddly enough, it's the thought of Richard that reins them back in, a smile loosening her lips and the knot in her chest with the realisation that the brief exchange between her and Matthew echoes the one she had with Richard.
"Although when I said as much to him," she tells Matthew, "he said he bought it for me."
"Nothing says love like an empty house and twelve thousand acres."
Though Mary's grown accustomed to Matthew's bitter tones in the days since they learned he would live out his days as the wheelchair-bound Earl of Grantham, she stumbles a little over a tree root to hear it directed at her. Eyes narrowing on the back of his head, she opens her mouth to utter words as sure to give him a jolt as the bump in their path, only to recall the way his face had looked across the dinner table when Richard talked about filling Haxby with children, and bite her tongue.
"Forgive me." Matthew says, his voice coiled as tight as the tendons in the hand he drags through his hair. "Clearly Sir Richard does love you, very much. His happiness of late is…contagious."
"As the Spanish flu?" With a sigh, Mary tightens her grip on the handles of the wheelchair and resumes their walk. "You know the thing is, Matthew, I believe twelve thousand acres is Richard's way of saying he loves me."
It helps, of course, that he has said it in so many words, but if she's honest with herself, she'd known it before he had, had felt it on both occasions they'd been at Haxby together; but she hadn't let herself accept it, hadn't let them build something worth having.
"And the house won't be empty for long," she goes on, steering the chair toward a bench beneath the bare outstretched branch of an oak that's stood on the property since long before the walls of Downton were erected. "Richard's coming back at the weekend for an auction in York. I may even go with him."
"Well if you should ever invite me to Haxby for a visit," says Matthew, visibly and audibly more relaxed as she sits at the end of the bench, angling herself conversationally toward him, "I promise I shan't refuse to make myself comfortable on your drawing room settee on grounds that you bought it. I might even talk about my own experience with furniture buying. Or recommend pieces for your home." He looks at her, a twinkle in his bright blue eyes for the first time in far too long. "Your grandmother, I recall, is quite fond of the swivel chair."
They share a quiet laugh, and when it fades away, Matthew turns toward her a little more fully in his chair. "If I'm prying, Mary, please tell me, and I'll gladly shut up, but…When you say Richard's way, I can't help but wonder what you mean. I think perhaps I can guess..."
"No…" Mary gives a rueful little laugh as she watches her fingers smooth a wrinkle that doesn't exist on her skirt. "You really couldn't."
Surely no one would guess that Richard had secured her hand with his tacit blackmail. The real question, she supposed, was whether anyone would be surprised to learn the levels to which he was prepared to stoop to get what he wanted.
Or how she could allow herself to forget it.
Even this morning, after yesterday's reminder that she had no choice but to marry him, she had not been unmoved by his declaration. Quite the opposite, in fact. How could that be?
She searches Matthew's face for answers, as if it makes no difference that he's not in possession of all the facts. Or even part of them.
"Have you ever read a story that started out quite badly, but got better as it went on? Good, even?"
What she really wants to ask is whether he thinks something worth having can be built on a shaky foundation, but that might invite too many questions. And she's afraid he might refer to certain parts of the Bible that come to mind now, when she least wants them to, about foolish men and houses built upon the sand. Which Haxby clearly is not.
Matthew's eyes look beyond her shoulder, flashing almost white as the brilliant daylight strikes them; the hollows around them look even deeper and darker in contrast. Still, he fights a valiant battle to smile.
"I daresay those are much more satisfying stories than the ones that start out well and end badly. I'm glad for you, Mary, that your story's turning out to be the former."
Unlike mine. The unspoken words resonate in the cold, empty autumn air as clearly as if he'd spoken them. It hits Mary quite suddenly that she is not the one of them who has no choice in the course of her future.
"Richard thinks you should still marry Lavinia."
A cloud passes over the sun, and a shadow across Matthew's face, casting his haggard features into stark relief. His mouth twists. "How unfortunate I didn't think to consult with him before I broke off the engagement."
Mary fights the urge to stand; she knows that tone, knows that if they'd had this discussion... before...that would have been the end of it. Matthew would have walked away, and Mary would have followed to make amends.
Or would she? Had she ever trod carefully on Matthew's feelings before he'd been wounded? Was everything between them so utterly changed?
"I only meant that if it would make you happy and Lavinia was willing--"
"Willing?" he cuts her off, sharply, his eyes even more so. "Would you have been willing, Mary? If we'd been engaged, and I'd gone off to war and come home…" He looks down, ashamed, at his useless legs. "...like this…Would you have been happy to have a passionless marriage?"
Though it's Matthew's lips that form the words, it's Richard's voice she hears in her mind, his breath warm against her skin as he whispers the answer to Matthew's question: You like stories with a little sex in them. And Matthew knows it--though he hasn't the slightest idea that Kemal Pamuk died in her bed or that she nearly gave herself to Richard just yesterday without so much as a blanket to lie down on.
"And why," says Matthew, his voice breaking, "does no one consider whether I would be?"
Read Chapter Five
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Characters & Pairings: Mary Crawley/Richard Carlisle, Matthew Crawley
Ratings & Warnings: rated R for sexuality
Format & Word Count: WIP, 2681 words in chapter 4
Summary: When Mary agrees to write another chapter in the book of Haxby Park, she unexpectedly writes a new start to her story with Sir Richard. [2x06 AU]
Author's Notes: As you can see, this is not, in fact, the last chapter of Another chapter, as I anticipated--though perhaps that means I'd better not say anything definitively! I hope you all enjoy these two scenes, which weren't in my original plan for the fic, but seemed necessary to get Mary and Richard on the floor in empty Haxby where I want them to end up and to bring some closure to the Mary/Matthew threads in chapter two. Thanks again for all your wonderful feedback and enthusiasm for this fic, especially those of you who winkled sneak peeks out of me. It's a real pleasure to share my story with you all, especially knowing that it's converted a couple of die-hard M/M shippers to R/M. See the Dark Mark glowing above Downton Abbey. ;)
One | Two | Three |
Four
The rustle of paper diverts Mary's attention from the scene beyond the window: the skeletal forms of denuded late autumn trees veiled in fog from yesterday's rain, blurred as the motor speeds down the road. She commands herself to smile, but no sooner has she fixed the pleasant expression upon her lips than it falls again as she sees that Richard is not, as she'd hoped, folding his newspaper and setting it aside, but merely turning the page.
As she resumes glowering out the window, however, his gloved hand closes around hers where it rests in her lap. "Thank you for seeing me off to the station." He chafes her knuckles with his thumb--but his gaze still does not waver from the newspaper.
"Why?" Mary pulls her hand from his grasp, busying her hands with a feigned search through the contents of her handbag. "You have your newspaper for company. There's hardly a point to my being here at all."
In fact they've hardly spoken since leaving Haxby the previous evening, the awkward end Richard made to their passionate exchange in the hall having a rather stifling effect on further conversation, as well. And yet the dialogue in Mary's own mind had not ceased all through the night; she'd lain in bed feeling as though the red papered walls of her room were closing in on her, at once longing for the bright openness of Haxby and castigating herself for doing so, and for her naïveté in believing Richard capable of sustaining the gallantry he'd exhibited over the weekend in the long term. He'd asked her to give the house another chapter, not a three-volume novel. And apparently isn't as keen as she for that chapter to include a bit of sex.
"It's Monday morning," the smooth rake of Richard's tones draws her out of her brooding. "Business hours. And I'd be careful how I spoke about my newspaper, if I were you," he adds, a hard coldness creeping into his voice which matches the colour of his eyes as they scan the words printed across the page. "Remember, it has the power to give you a life."
Or to destroy it, Mary thinks, but Richard looks at her, at last, and smiles. Not a twisted smirk, as his words might have indicated, but a gentle curve of his lips, his eyes crinkling at the corners and reflecting the golden glint of the morning sun diffused by the window and the lingering fog. For a moment she studies him, then snaps her handbag shut and directs her attention outside once more in her best impression of the aloof aristocrat, lest he see that she cannot read him and have that advantage over her, as well.
He's still smiling as they stand together on the platform as Branson takes the bags to a porter, the dimples beneath his chiselled cheekbones disarmingly handsome, so she does her best not to let her gaze wander to them. In one hand Richard holds his valise, but the free one again captures Mary's fingertips.
"We were standing just about here when I asked you to marry me, weren't we?"
Before she can school them into rigid disinterest--cold and careful, as Richard himself as described her--Mary's eyebrows go up. Richard, nostalgic? Well, so is she; though her memories are of standing in precisely this spot as she watched the train carry Matthew off to have all his hopes and hers with them gunned down in the trenches of the Somme.
"How could I forget?" she says, making no attempt to hide her sarcasm. "It was such a romantic proposal. And you didn't really ask me to marry you so much as tell me you wanted me to."
"Ah, that's right." Richard's gaze flickers downward to their loosely joined hands; before Mary can decide whether his cheeks are tinged with a blush, or if that's just the morning light reflecting off the glossy panelling of the train cars, he squeezes her fingers and meets her gaze again. "You were the one doing all the asking, weren't you? Namely, why did I want you to marry me?"
His smile fades, and Mary watches the roll of his Adam's apple down his throat beneath his starched collar as he swallows, hard. Nervously.
"If I'd told you it was because I loved you," he says, "would it have changed anything?"
"Not if you didn't mean it."
Richard's valise hits the pavement at his feet with a thud, and he takes both her hands tightly in both of his, drawing her so near enough that her skirt brushes the hem of his greatcoat. "I never lie, Mary. Never."
Of all the things he might have said, only this could have made Mary forget to breathe. I can talk about love and moon and June and the rest of it, if you wish. She'd thought he meant he viewed their marriage in a purely pragmatic light, and had no intention of pretending more depth of feeling than he possessed for the sake of mere convention. Not that he actually did feel more than he'd let on. As much as Matthew might have felt for her and now, more--much more--than Matthew had ever declared.
But Mary isn't sure she's ready to own to that aloud. Not yet.
"Except when you told me it was because you thought very highly of me?" she says. "And that you thought we'd make a good team who could build something worth having?"
"That was all the truth," Richard insists, his fingertips pressing into Mary's palms. One corner of his mouth, however, quirks upward in a self-conscious smile. "Just not the entire truth."
With his dimples and the ends of his hair curling from beneath the brim of his hat, he looks almost boyish. And completely sincere. The fog that has been hanging about breaks, finally, dissolved by the sunlight beaming onto the platform as it had yesterday through the big windows of bright, gilded Haxby. Mary's head clears, as well, and warm fingers seem to steal all through her, loosening the icy knot into which her stomach had tied itself during her sleepless night, and extinguishing the burning tightness in her lungs as they expand with fresh air.
"Obviously I misjudged you," Richard goes on. "I thought you'd laugh at me, or tell me love was very middle class. Our kind of people don't get excited, that's now how we are, and all that. If I could turn back time and do it all over--"
His words are swallowed up by the blast of the train whistle, but Mary doesn't need to hear them to know what they are, or that in return for his total honesty, however overdue it might have come, she owes him hers.
"I don't know if it would have made a difference then," she says when the shrill echo has died away into the din of porters loading baggage and passengers boarding the cars. The flicker of disappointment across Richard's face is unmistakable as he releases one of her hands and stoops to retrieve his valise; though earlier Mary had wished to wound him, she feels a corresponding ache in her own chest. Squeezing his hand, she adds, "But now…I think it may."
It's not an impassioned declaration, not by any stretch--her kind don't get excited, or at least she doesn't--but she thinks her actions in Haxby yesterday must have spoken quite a bit louder to him than these quiet words exchanged on the platform.
And so had Richard's, that other morning two years ago, when he'd stood here in the swirl of smoke chuffing from the engine looking just like this wearing the same hat and greatcoat and hopeful expression. So exactly like then is this moment that Mary thinks she hears his husky words uttered through the dimpled smile: I'm counting on it.
But Richard doesn't speak to her. Not audibly. He leans in and brushes his lips across hers, lightly. Too lightly, Mary thinks, her body at once awakening to the memory of yesterday's kiss. She disentangles her fingers from his, lifting her hand to touch his cheek, and then all at once his hand is at the small of her back, pressing her snugly against him as her arms go about his shoulders, her fingers finding their way into the fine hair at the nape of his neck.
Her story with Matthew never included a send-off like this.
As if privy to her thoughts, when Richard draws back, he says, "My goodness, that was warm and heartfelt. I'm only headed to work, not to war, Mary."
She doesn't blush at her display of unrestrained affection, but meets his gaze squarely. "Isn't everything a war with you?"
His chuckle rumbles through her as he presses another kiss to her cheek, murmuring, "Mmm. And all's fair," and the smile never wavers from his lips, nor his gaze from hers until the train carries him around the bend.
~*~
Mary can't see Matthew's face at all as she pushes his wheelchair about the park when she returns from the station.
She's glad.
Particularly when he says, "So Haxby Park's yours now, your papa tells me."
"Richard's," she corrects him, through a clenched jaw.
What else has Papa said to Matthew about her and her forthcoming marriage? It's been a long time since she harboured any resentment toward her father for giving Matthew his preference or toward Matthew for securing it, but the old feelings rear up now like a horse that has never truly been broken.
Oddly enough, it's the thought of Richard that reins them back in, a smile loosening her lips and the knot in her chest with the realisation that the brief exchange between her and Matthew echoes the one she had with Richard.
"Although when I said as much to him," she tells Matthew, "he said he bought it for me."
"Nothing says love like an empty house and twelve thousand acres."
Though Mary's grown accustomed to Matthew's bitter tones in the days since they learned he would live out his days as the wheelchair-bound Earl of Grantham, she stumbles a little over a tree root to hear it directed at her. Eyes narrowing on the back of his head, she opens her mouth to utter words as sure to give him a jolt as the bump in their path, only to recall the way his face had looked across the dinner table when Richard talked about filling Haxby with children, and bite her tongue.
"Forgive me." Matthew says, his voice coiled as tight as the tendons in the hand he drags through his hair. "Clearly Sir Richard does love you, very much. His happiness of late is…contagious."
"As the Spanish flu?" With a sigh, Mary tightens her grip on the handles of the wheelchair and resumes their walk. "You know the thing is, Matthew, I believe twelve thousand acres is Richard's way of saying he loves me."
It helps, of course, that he has said it in so many words, but if she's honest with herself, she'd known it before he had, had felt it on both occasions they'd been at Haxby together; but she hadn't let herself accept it, hadn't let them build something worth having.
"And the house won't be empty for long," she goes on, steering the chair toward a bench beneath the bare outstretched branch of an oak that's stood on the property since long before the walls of Downton were erected. "Richard's coming back at the weekend for an auction in York. I may even go with him."
"Well if you should ever invite me to Haxby for a visit," says Matthew, visibly and audibly more relaxed as she sits at the end of the bench, angling herself conversationally toward him, "I promise I shan't refuse to make myself comfortable on your drawing room settee on grounds that you bought it. I might even talk about my own experience with furniture buying. Or recommend pieces for your home." He looks at her, a twinkle in his bright blue eyes for the first time in far too long. "Your grandmother, I recall, is quite fond of the swivel chair."
They share a quiet laugh, and when it fades away, Matthew turns toward her a little more fully in his chair. "If I'm prying, Mary, please tell me, and I'll gladly shut up, but…When you say Richard's way, I can't help but wonder what you mean. I think perhaps I can guess..."
"No…" Mary gives a rueful little laugh as she watches her fingers smooth a wrinkle that doesn't exist on her skirt. "You really couldn't."
Surely no one would guess that Richard had secured her hand with his tacit blackmail. The real question, she supposed, was whether anyone would be surprised to learn the levels to which he was prepared to stoop to get what he wanted.
Or how she could allow herself to forget it.
Even this morning, after yesterday's reminder that she had no choice but to marry him, she had not been unmoved by his declaration. Quite the opposite, in fact. How could that be?
She searches Matthew's face for answers, as if it makes no difference that he's not in possession of all the facts. Or even part of them.
"Have you ever read a story that started out quite badly, but got better as it went on? Good, even?"
What she really wants to ask is whether he thinks something worth having can be built on a shaky foundation, but that might invite too many questions. And she's afraid he might refer to certain parts of the Bible that come to mind now, when she least wants them to, about foolish men and houses built upon the sand. Which Haxby clearly is not.
Matthew's eyes look beyond her shoulder, flashing almost white as the brilliant daylight strikes them; the hollows around them look even deeper and darker in contrast. Still, he fights a valiant battle to smile.
"I daresay those are much more satisfying stories than the ones that start out well and end badly. I'm glad for you, Mary, that your story's turning out to be the former."
Unlike mine. The unspoken words resonate in the cold, empty autumn air as clearly as if he'd spoken them. It hits Mary quite suddenly that she is not the one of them who has no choice in the course of her future.
"Richard thinks you should still marry Lavinia."
A cloud passes over the sun, and a shadow across Matthew's face, casting his haggard features into stark relief. His mouth twists. "How unfortunate I didn't think to consult with him before I broke off the engagement."
Mary fights the urge to stand; she knows that tone, knows that if they'd had this discussion... before...that would have been the end of it. Matthew would have walked away, and Mary would have followed to make amends.
Or would she? Had she ever trod carefully on Matthew's feelings before he'd been wounded? Was everything between them so utterly changed?
"I only meant that if it would make you happy and Lavinia was willing--"
"Willing?" he cuts her off, sharply, his eyes even more so. "Would you have been willing, Mary? If we'd been engaged, and I'd gone off to war and come home…" He looks down, ashamed, at his useless legs. "...like this…Would you have been happy to have a passionless marriage?"
Though it's Matthew's lips that form the words, it's Richard's voice she hears in her mind, his breath warm against her skin as he whispers the answer to Matthew's question: You like stories with a little sex in them. And Matthew knows it--though he hasn't the slightest idea that Kemal Pamuk died in her bed or that she nearly gave herself to Richard just yesterday without so much as a blanket to lie down on.
"And why," says Matthew, his voice breaking, "does no one consider whether I would be?"
Read Chapter Five