Hard Promises,
Chapter 1
Mary supposed she would have to start going to church now. After all, in the strictest sense, her prayers had been answered. He was back, and he was safe. And she must hold up her end of the bargain.
"I beg of you, if I've ever done anything good, please keep him safe." Those were her words, and she must honor them now.
Still, watching him lie in his narrow bed, day after day, not smiling, barely talking, and scarcely eating, she couldn't help but feel that she'd entered into a contract without thoroughly reading the terms of agreement. Yes, Matthew was back from the war and alive, but he was miserable. Anyone could see that, and anyone could understand why.
He was a cripple. Even saying the words, silently to herself, they sounded barbed, as if she was being purposefully cruel, but she wasn't. She was simply stating the truth. Matthew was crippled. For the rest of his life. There was to be no negotiation. She knew that, and he knew it, too. She saw the understanding wash over him when she told him that day, fidgeting nervously, wondering where Dr. bloody Clarkson was, and then inanely offering to make them both some tea so she'd had an excuse to run upstairs to her room and cry into her duvet.
He'd cried too, which was how she knew he knew, had really understood the gravity of what she'd tried to tell him in the most elliptical way possible. Matthew wasalways clever.
Which was why he needed her, she'd decided. He was too smart to take this strange half-punishment, half-reprieve easily. She would have to do it for him, show him how to plow forward with constancy and tolerance, even though she hardly knew how herself. Still, she would learn, and she would teach him.
And so, since that day last week, she'd attended to him, swapping shifts with Sybil and then adding his mother, Isobel, into the rotation once she'd finally been able to make her way home from Paris. He mostly slept—the morphine made sure of that—but he still needed near-constant care: dressings replaced, wounds cleaned, bedpans changed, meals delivered, and perhaps most of all, company provided, lest he do something rash.
The trained nurses were stretched too thin to devote that much attention to just one man. This, she'd told Dr. Clarkson firmly, was what she could do. She couldn't nurse anyone, the way Sybil and Isobel could, but she could nurse him, and that was to be the end of it.
Of course, it hadn't been then end of it. There had been increasingly frustrated and impassioned protestations from Dr. Clarkson over the course of the next few days, but, honestly, Mary never doubted her eventual victory. He might have some extra patches on his jacket these days but this was her house and her family and she'd be damned if anyone prevented her from acting as she saw fit. Isobel, Sybil, and, most importantly, her mother and grandmother, concurred. Poor man. If he wasn't so insufferable, she'd have felt sorry for him.
It was during a night shift on the tenth day since his delivery—or deliverance, depending on one's perspective—that he finally turned to her out of what she'd thought was a deep sleep and said, "You have to help me die."