Lady Mary Crawley had married Lord Anthony Gillingham because she had needed to. It was not need after the fashion of her needing to marry Patrick, nor was itneed in the manner in which she had needed to marry Matthew. It was another kind of need entirely, a shadow and type, she imagined, of the kind of need that ought to be between marriage partners, and covered over by a slightly baser instinct. The instinct had reminded her of Kemal Pamuk, whose full name she still employed and had from the moment she had announced it in a flurry of vehemence to her mother. Her lover.
Few understood it.
Certainly none had expressed understanding in amongst the wash of responses to the breaking of the story. She herself had denigrated it to that generic category to which it seemed most suited in the myriad of ways it might be grasped, and for wont of a better explanation.
'Lust,' she had told him, 'It was lust, Matthew.'
In truth, it had been - for who could look upon the face of the Turk and not admit a twinge of some sense of it - but it ran so very much deeper, she had discovered, than chemical reaction. She recalled sensation as he had taken a hold of her and forced her against a well-manicured wall: the vibrant shock of it so markedly different from the incessant whitewash of the ongoing promise of never experiencing anything out of the ordinary. Then, it had been so much more than that. As he had all but forced her hand in a differing way, she had learned it.
A desire for sensation itself.
How necessary it was to feel and how swiftly that ability was lost in the face of some hideous aberration from what ought to be. Pain killed what remained of sentiment. Her inability to love Patrick as she was required had become the avatar, since the Other was far too close to be recognized in this instance. Had Patrick not been assigned to her on the terrible tide of her being born a girl, perhaps she might have been alive enough to offer him more. Perhaps she might even have left him to Edith. Sybil at least, had sensed it too.
'But you see,' Mary had confessed, 'I'm not as sad as I should be.'
The process had only grown more vicious with time and aches, until the last, which had done it in. Even Richard had made her angry.
She had concluded, in the end, that there was a way in which life deemed it appropriate that - on enduring as much as one possibly ought to - nothing else need be endured again and, in so doing, robbed the last vestiges of the heart of the resonance of the truth. The pieces of feeling stumbled along in a new, hollow darkness, falling over and waiting to die, even as the crueler reality existed below. She had noticed that they wanted to live. Beyond all reason, the pieces had wanted to live. Thus, she had shuffled along as the dying flame fought on for oxygen beneath the smothering of her every intention and wish.
Shivers and sudden cold, she had decided, were only for the breathing.
By the time she had met Lord Anthony, she had not cried at all since the birth of her son, for whom she would give more than tears in this desert. She had wandered with each practical task into a process of being that required no more than existence in its starkest form. Then, the Newcomer had touched her in a pattern so strikingly familiar as the holding of a hand in greeting - attached, she assumed, to condolences. She'd had done with listening to the world. With feeling it, however, she seemed to have an ongoing addiction, for once she had bid the party farewell, she had broken a vase against their bedroom wall. Her bedroom wall.
'Sorry about the vase,' she had heard him say.
The baby had cried out for her as though he could hear it too and she had gone to him without the lingering of his father in his eyes. She had held him against her without the clinging of her hands to another dream. She had kissed his head with a blossoming and crumbling heart that had begun to break through the thaw. She had cried over him with a savage burning.
She had loved him. Them.
When Lord Anthony had returned a fortnight later, he had found her far more willing to discuss the intricacies of Greek Mythology. When he had dined at Downton for the sixteenth time, he had found her no longer threatened by his admiration of her son. When he had stared solemnly at an article on the invention of the traffic signal, he had found that she was no longer opposed to his kneeling. Piece by piece, she had begun to breathe. Piece by piece, the blood within her had allowed it. In the same way she had been talked by a pretty face into offering up her bed and been welcomed by a secure haven into offering up her heart, Lady Mary Crawley had been touched by a far-fetched promise into offering up her hand.
And hoped, again, for a life.