Sleeping beauty
When he looked at her unmoving body, he could pretend she was only sleeping. The beauty of her face never left her and her soft features displayed nothing of the pain she had gone through. He could pretend until he hears the new-born child wailing in her father's arm. How could life be so doomed? To loose ones beloved daughter in the moment of everyone's greatest happiness…
All had gone well, the doctor had told them. Matthew had been in a bliss and Mary smiling softly, had cradled the infant in her arms. They had left the young mother rest in fresh sheets, bathed in silvery moonlight falling through the silken curtains of her window. The child was sleeping in a cradle at the side of Mary's bed.
They had all drunken to much champagne to celebrate the new Crawley girl. Never had he seen Matthew being so content, not even at his own wedding. No one had imagined, that in her bedroom Mary was falling into a deep fever dream, of whom... no... he should not… could not think about it, for it would make him fall apart entirely.
They had been on their way to bed, when they heard the little girl wailing for her mother, without getting an answer. It was him, not Matthew, who found her – pale faced, red blood sipping through the sheets. Maybe it had been Cora, who had called the doctor. He didn't remember. He had held her, tried to wake her up. But when the doctor arrived, Mary, his beloved child, had already stopped breathing.
Matthew was shell-shocked and he, the mighty earl of Grantham himself, was barely able to operate. Nobody can prepare a father for the death of a child – first his unborn son and now Mary, his sweet, strong-minded girl. They had not been made for happiness: Matthew and Mary – doomed since the day they laid eyes on each other. He should have prevented it, should have never allowed, that his heir marries his daughter. For now both were destroyed: One dead, the other forever broken. Matthew was not even able to look at his wife on her deathbed.
Robert Crawley touched the sleeping beauty's face, cold and slightly blue. Someone had adorned white roses around her, he heard Cora sobbing but couldn't care less. Robert felt nothing but his own pain. If god had any mercy he would have taken the father and not the daughter.
Mary… Mary… was he whispering her name, or was it Matthew calling for her?
Tomorrow they would lay sleeping beauty to eternal rest. Tomorrow, but not today. Parting from her – he was not able to stand that. Not today, not while he remembered the happy smile, she had given him, when he had left her room. If men could die of a broken heart, his would have stopped, when he had held Mary and she had opened her eyes. Only to do a last deep sigh and then drop dead onto the sheets of her bed.
Robert Crawley had known hardship in his life, but nothing had ever broken him. Nothing but this: Letting his sleeping beauty go!