"Mary, how are you?"
"Very well Tom, and you?"
She hated it. Their conversations had ben so stilted, so unlike anything they had ever known.
Mary did not even know why. They spoke like this at breakfast, greeting one another, perhaps sharing a companionable smile, but that would change once Henry walked into the room.
Mary used to love having breakfast downstairs and had decided not to eat in bed, as was the custom for married women.
She used to love her bantering conversations with Tom as her father hid behind his newspaper.
But all of that changed once Henry walked into the room.
▫️
The day was dismal, dreary and grey. Rain and thunderstorms threatened and then surfaced, but Mary could not stay home. She pulled on her coat and took a large scarf of Matthew's and walked briskly towards the office, breaking into a run once the rain came.
She hadn't been there long, and hadn't been working at all, but sat, dejected, on the small sofa that she used to share with Tom. Staring ahead blankly.
Mary closed her eyes when she heard the doorknob turn and the old door creak. It was going to be Henry that walked through the doorway, suggesting that she return to the Abbey.
But, for all of her wisdom, Mary was wrong. It was not her husband standing soaked in the doorway, shaking his damp, chestnut head, but Tom. He evidently did not notice her there as he cursed an unnamed man under his breath.
Mary coughed involuntarily and caused Tom to jump.
"Christ... Mary! What are you doing here?" He inquired, shrugging off his coat.
She did not look at him and continued to stare straight ahead, but answered in a small voice: "Same as you, I imagine. Seeking refuge."
Tom walked over to the sofa and threw himself down, sighing.
"I needed a break. But what about you? What's upset the indomitable Lady Mary?"
Mary did not feel "indomitable" and she hadn't for some time. He hands lay clasped in her lap, squeezed together, the knuckles red from the pressure she was applying, and she scrutinised them, as though she were looking at a painting and trying to make sense of it.
"Tell me, Mary. Please."
He saw what she was doing to her delicate hands and carefully separated them, taking one in his own.
"I cannot, if I tell you then that would make it real."
"You're scaring me, Mary." Tom's voice rose and he sat up straight. "What's caused this?"
Tom had only seen Mary cry once, it was not at Matthew's funeral, or Sybil's, but on a dark November night, months after Matthew's death, when she finally broke and sobbed into her sherry and then into his dinner jacket.
He saw her cry for a second time that day in the office, when her chest heaved and her face contorted. Tears rolling down her cheeks. Tom did what came naturally to him, he pulled her towards him and into his warm embrace.
Only then did he realise part of the problem, a symptom if not the cause.
Mary was terrifyingly thin, he could feel her ribs as he rubbed her back.
She was skeletal.
"I'm so unhappy." She croaked between sobs before leaning back from him and scowling at her ring finger.
"Look at this. I hate it."
The ring that Henry gave her was horrid, everyone thought so. He'd claimed that sapphires suited Mary, but later told Tom that the ring was a product of one of his mother's marriages, she the frequent widow.
It was cold and austere and it always looked dirty. It was in sharp contrast to the the simple diamond that Matthew had been so proud to give her.
But Tom knew that Mary was not so materialistic as to hate a man for the ring he gave her. He knew that whenever she looked at it she saw the man who had stolen her happiness.
"Mary, if I tell you something, you have to realise that I am only trying to help you.
Tom had been wrestling with the information that he had been made privy to for weeks. At the start he hadn't believed that it could have been true. But lately he saw how miserable Henry made her.
"What is it?" She asked gravely, drying her tears.
Tom cleared his throat and began.
"Apparently Henry befriended one of the men in our garage and has been boasting of a few things. He told him of his mistress whom he has installed in the village. He's been with her for a few years and now feels that he can afford to keep her with him."