AN: At long last, here is the start to my 'Haxby in the Afternoon' sequel. I should say that I normally don't post stories until they are complete, which makes it so that I can do regular updates. But in this case the story is nowhere near to done yet, and I can promise the updates will be far less frequent... so please bear with me! (My idea is that by publishing chapter one, it will force me to actually finish the story rather than letting it sit in my work-in-progress folder forever.) Hope you enjoy!
1. Beginnings
It was the dazzling lights of the Strand that woke Mary up from her slumber as the blue coupe pulled up to the side of the Savoy hotel well after midnight – the drive had taken longer than expected, and she had fallen asleep against Richard's shoulder sometime around Leicester. But the flashing of the billboards as they drove into London brought her back to reality – if one could call it that, for this part of the city always struck her as a kind of fantasy land, a world where giant illuminated lotion bottles competed for attention with the twenty-foot tall faces of West End stars. It was a carnival in a half-remembered dream, and for a moment she was unsure whether she was awake or not.
They had left Haxby earlier in the evening without a second glance back, in what Mary was certain was a high-speed pursuit, like the kind in one of those Keystone Kops moving pictures. She could imagine the scene so clearly: Matthew returning to the estate after dark with Papa in tow and discovering the half-renovated house empty; the puzzled speculation, the recounting of the afternoon's fistfight. Then, realization and horror! Cue frantic, fast-forward running to the car, wild gesticulating; the Crawley men would jump in the vehicle and instruct the new chauffeur to make haste for London, because the family's eldest daughter had been kidnapped by the nefarious newspaperman.
But by the time they stopped for petrol and a bite to eat at a pub by the road, the fears that flickered through her head in comic fast-motion black and white had been put to rest by a telephone call to Anna – dinner had yet to be served and no one seemed to know she was even gone. Mary intended to keep it that way and told Anna to say she was ill and in bed, not to be disturbed. She still worried – after all, it was suspicious for her to not appear for dinner or breakfast, and anyone could try to check up on her only to find her room vacant. But she hoped the flimsy excuse would buy them at least a morning's head start. It was all rather familiar, after Sybil's attempt at elopement, and Mary was surprised to find herself in the same position. Though at this point, the family would probably accept the valet or the head gardener over Richard Carlisle, so she told herself it was simply easier this way.
What a reversal: now she was the rebellious one, the irresponsible one, the one running away to a new life. Mary had always acted that part, but in truth she did never once believed it - she was content enough with tradition if it meant she got what she felt she was owed. And her politics may land more with Sybil's than with the elder generation, but the only party she supported was herself.
Now she found herself copying her younger sister, venturing down the very path she had gone to great lengths to stop Sybil from taking. Mary was sure they would have a good laugh about it, sometime in the future. Although whether that laugh would be over tea in the drawing room of Downton remained to be seen, for perhaps neither girl would be allowed back due to their choice of a new life with unsuitable people over the old life and tradition.
They both looked forward to their respective new adventures, though in Mary's opinion Sybil's choice was far beneath what she was worthy of, living with a former servant in his mother's cottage in Ireland. In a way that was the family life Mary was escaping: evening bridge with the mother-in-law, afternoon tea with the vicar, garden gossip with the neighbors. Mary could no longer begrudge her sister the right to make up her own mind; yet she could not help but feel the Crawley girls were too intelligent and sophisticated for that, and it saddened her that Sybil had traded her feminist ambitions for the dreariness of domesticity. Mary was not about to make that mistake.
She and Richard both had always fancied themselves above the silly ideal of domestic bliss, at least as defined by ever-waning Victorian propaganda still embraced by many of their peers. It was one of the things they had in common when they first met at Cliveden, sharing a mutual disdain for the unending smugness with which one of Mary's fellow debutants spoke of the rural idyll she and her new husband were about to build. "Imagine the two of them," she had whispered in Richard's ear during an especially gushy description of the magnificent sheep and cows that would be the couple's new neighbors, "in the middle of a field, with nothing but each other and the livestock for company."
"At least the hunting rifles would come in handy, and I don't mean for the animals," had been his droll reply.
Richard's proposal to her, then, was not merely shunning love in favor of a business accord between two sharp and strong parties, but shedding the traditional expectations of what marriage could be. They would be partners in a joint venture, beyond the bourgeois sedative of romance novel nonsense, and Mary felt she could define for herself what exactly that arrangement would mean.
For she was smart enough to know that the happily-ever-after of romance novels was often a dead end, at least for her gender. But Richard was not a happily-ever-after sort of person, and she liked that about him. His ambition was limitless, and she doubted he believed in endings at all, his life being the continual pursuit of the next goal. And while Mary may not be out on the streets with a placard demanding liberation, she did have her own ambitions, and she was also smart enough to see there was far more power in hosting a London dinner party than a country play date.
Haxby had been the peculiar aberration in this otherwise solid outlook, and Mary concluded they both had faltered. She, because she had not been ready to admit what she wanted her life to be; and Richard, because he had been so eager for a life with her that he cast off his own ambitions. But now Haxby was behind them, hundreds of miles in the rearview mirror, and London was ahead in its chaos and glory. It was a new beginning, but it was also a return. London could bring them back to who they were; who they were meant to be, before war and history and compromise got in the way.
Her worry that her family was hot on their heels allayed, she nevertheless wondered as they resumed their drive whether Matthew would be suspicious. After all, he knew exactly where she had spent the afternoon and with whom, and perhaps Anna's tale of illness would sound implausible to his ears. But it was out of her control. The storm was coming, Mary supposed, so it did not really matter if it arrived sooner or later. That did not stop her from a having a nightmare as soon as she fell asleep of being greeted upon their arrival in town by several generations of Crawleys going back to the middle ages, posed artificially in rows on either side of Richard's front door as if they were taking a family photograph, all with chins upturned in unwavering disapproval.
But as they drove past the bright lights of the main entrance of the hotel, turning off the Strand to a hidden side door on the alley, Mary began to drift back to the wakeful world. Here there were no garish billboards, no carnival-style faces, no disappointed relatives with the exaggerated features of the landed gentry; simply sedate street lamps running down to the Thames and a lone brass door under a red awning, guarded by a doorman in a crisp black uniform. It was the antithesis of any greeting she was used to, and Mary marveled at how different this was to the grand arrival at a country house: a single hotel valet substituted for an entire household's staff fanned out in welcome to the new arrivals.
Then again, London was very different than the country, and amidst the bustle and garishness of the city, the humble entrance had its own discreet grandeur. It was like a secret, visible only to those keen enough to look past the spectacle, its ostentation somehow enhanced by its intentionally subtle appearance.
This part of the hotel was not for guests drawn in by spectacle; in fact, it seemed designed specifically to put them off. The single doorman guarding the single door was actually for residents of the grand apartments perched on top of the Savoy, all of whom demanded a quiet entrance and a quiet street. Their flats occupied the rooftops; in the country, that was for the servants, but then London was upside down anyway. Sarah Bernhardt was one of those residents; so was Sir Thomas Dewar, the whiskey baron; and so was Sir Richard Carlisle. Now, Mary mused as the car came to a jolting halt at the curb, the list would include her too.
"Good evening, Sir Richard," the doorman said as he approached and opened her side of the door, "milady." She couldn't contain a blush as she alighted from the coupe; how unseemly to be accompanying Richard home at this hour, long after midnight. But the doorman's expression did not falter in the slightest, a steady professionalism governing his reaction if he was shocked. That was worse, Mary realized, hoping he was shocked – unless of course this was a regular occurrence. She knew very little about Richard's personal life before he met her; perhaps he was accustomed to late-night female visitors and the doorman was some sort of accomplice.
"Hello, Benin," Richard said smoothly as he grabbed his weekend bag from the backseat and handed the valet the keys, following Mary into the small lobby. A bit too smoothly?, she wondered, considering his unperturbed manner as the doubts she had been suppressing in the back of her mind rose to the surface with the inevitability of bubbles in a slowly boiling kettle.
The truth was, she had not really thought this through. Just four days ago she had told Richard she never wanted to see him again; her whole family was witness to that. And now she had run off with him, in the middle of the night, without so much as a handbag or a change of clothes. She had wanted a fresh start, she thought ruefully; well, that was what she was getting.
Their encounter at Haxby earlier that day had changed her life, in a most dramatic way. Mary never would have thought a few hours could have such an impact, but that was all it took to win her over. No, she corrected herself, that was not true; it was more like two years of Richard trying to win her over. Failing, sometimes miserably, yet even then he had clawed his way into her heart and now she was the one who did not want to let go. She had made her mind up before she even set foot in Haxby, she told herself, despite her protests and doubts. So why hadn't she the foresight to have Anna pack a trunk?
Her lot was never very good with abrupt change. Which is why she was currently examining her own mind as she would assess a stranger at a first meeting, with the curiosity and suspicion with which one greeted all foreign agents. The speculation ran rampant - perhaps her feet had carried her to Haxby that afternoon not because it was what she wanted, but because she could not stay away. Perhaps she was in London now because she was afraid of a future at Downton, not because she was rejecting it. Perhaps they were not in London at all, but some strange alternate universe where opulence was understatement and the elite lived in the attic while the servants lived on the ground and she did not know where she belonged. Worst of all, perhaps her passionate twilight with Richard in the basement of Haxby had been just a dream, as distant and nonsensical as the marquee faces of Piccadilly, or the Crawley ancestors that seemed to haunt her unconscious thoughts and whom they would never be able to outrun.
There was no going back from this, she thought as Richard wordlessly pressed the elevator call button in the building's tiny lobby. She could explain spending the afternoon at Haxby as some sort of final parting, at least to her family. And she had no idea what Richard's reaction would have been had she chosen to return to Downton instead of leaving with him, but she was clever enough to have gotten out of it if she wished. She could even justify driving with him to London, if only she ended up anywhere but here. But actually going home with him, to his apartment, in the middle of the night? No, there was no explaining that, to anyone. Part of her wanted to flee out to the Strand, hail a taxi and go straight to Aunt Rosmaund's; her virtue may not be intact but at least her fate would not be sealed.
Yet as the elevator arrived and the operator pulled back the brass accordion door for her to pass through, Richard's hand found her elbow and gave her a reassuring squeeze. She looked up into his dimmed blue eyes, her mind still foggy from sleep and dazed by this surreal world she was entering, and she realized they were not so far apart. He looked as tired as she was, from driving all night, from their endless talking all day. In fact, he looked endearingly exhausted as he stifled a yawn, and the part of her that could not bear to be apart from him won easily over the part that wanted to run – if she ran, she would not get to tumble into the pillows next to him and indulge in the first peaceful rest she'd had since Christmas, since Lavinia's funeral, since she first met the intriguing Sir Richard Carlisle so long ago and thought how very much she would like to fall asleep secure in the knowledge that she would awake to his tender gaze in the morning.
No, there was no going back from this. She was already too far gone.