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The first thing of Mary's that Edith can remember truly desiring was the pink frock. In truth, it wasn't pink - more of a mauve that Mama and the dressmaker said would look lovely with Mary's pale skin and dark hair. Mary was newly nine, had outgrown most of her old dresses, and as Mama held up the bolt of cloth, Edith thought she had never looked more smug.
"Dusted rose," Mama intoned. As a general rule, Edith preferred green, but she couldn't help reaching out to stroke the fabric. It looked rich, sumptuous, like some kind of sweet or cake that was not for her.
"And dusty it most certainly shall be, what with all her gallivanting about outdoors!" Granny had added sourly when Mary entered the drawing room in her new dress a few weeks later. "Honestly, what a waste. She'll outgrow it in a month at this rate!" But even Edith could see the smile playing about her grandmother's eyes - Mary had always been her special favorite.
"When can I have a new frock?" Edith had asked quietly, sidling up to her mother as Mary twirled and Sybil watched with wide, adoring eyes.
"Oh darling, it was your turn last time," Cora soothed, patting her middle daughter's drooping head. "And you mustn't be jealous, Edith. It isn't proper or becoming in a young lady." Her mother hadn't said the words sharply - far from it, they had been sympathetic, even kind. But it struck Edith nonetheless: she had never before thought of herself as jealous.
Fair - that was what she was. It was Edith, after all, who divided stolen cakes into even thirds once Mary had finagled them from Mr. Carson. Sometimes she took so long, paying such attention that no one piece should be bigger than the others, that Mary hissed, "Oh, for heaven's sake!" and Sybil began to whine.
It was Edith who, years ago, would suggest they visit baby Sybil in the nursery, her heart aching at the thought of her little sister all alone. "Why shouldn't she be with us?" she'd demanded fiercely of the governess, who had come in to find the two older girls cross-legged on the floor, the two-year-old Sybil sat happily between them.
It was Edith who had readily shared the paper kite - a treasured possession given her by Patrick - first with Mary, who had quickly tired of it, complaining that the string was far too short, and then with Sybil, who promptly let it tangle in the branches of a tree. And it was Edith who, at that same garden party, had swapped a clean glove of her own for one of the pair Mary had soiled in her attempt to retrieve the kite. They had gone about for the rest of the party tucking their respective dirty hands behind their backs, making a game of it. It had been nearly impossible not to burst into a fit of giggles every time they caught one another's eye.
It was only much later, watching her father's face go soft at the sight of his eldest daughter in her new dress, that Edith had begun to suspect that "fair" was something that only happened in games. She began to feel that she was perpetually failing some kind of inspection given first by her parents, then by others - as though she always managed to turn up with two dirty palms, a beggar beside spotless, perfect Mary, and not even comparable to Sybil, who was everyone's darling no matter what she did.
The frock was the first, but by no means the last coveted possession. Edith remembers books from Papa, a necklace from Mama's mother in New York who wrote especially that she wanted dear, sweet Mary to have it. "Well," Mama had said judiciously, "Mary is the only granddaughter she's met, after all."
But Edith was still stung and indignant. "Why should they prefer Mary," she complained to Sybil, who was only eight but already a practiced listener. "How does a baby make a good impression? And how is it my fault they'd gone back to New York by the time I came round?"
There was Diamond too, the exquisite black horse Mary had been given for her sixteenth birthday. Edith did not much like riding, but the prospect of racing through the surrounding meadows appealed to her as much as it might to any other young girl who read too many novels. The first time Mary rode out, Edith had feigned a headache. Peaking through the drawn curtains of her bedroom window, she'd watched them go - Mary tall and haughty on her new horse, Sybil in tow on a docile pony, and Lynch on an old bay gelding, attempting to keep the two girls in check.
By then, she was so accustomed to cataloging the things that Mary had and she did not, that it was impossible to break the habit. It wasn't the horse she wanted, nor the books or the jewelry. A little of it was Mary's beauty, and the beauty Sybil would so obviously have - and that Edith so obviously did not. She had always been practical though, and knew that her face was, if not striking in the way that her sisters' were, at least not remarkably unattractive.
No - the main thing was simply that bitter realization she had still not managed to swallow: that you could not make people love you any more than they already did, no matter how you might try - that sometimes, things were simply not fair. That her life, it seemed, was one of those things. She reminded herself of it almost daily, but it was like burning one's tongue repeatedly, hoping each time that the tea has cooled a little. Every new shock of pain was always just as bad as the last, and it never seemed to get any easier.
Patrick, of course, was the thing of Mary's that Edith had wanted most of all.
When they were younger they had all been friends: Mary, Patrick and Edith, and later Sybil. They had been allowed, for the most part, to do as they liked about the house and in the grounds whenever Uncle James brought him to stay. Mary was the natural leader, but Edith liked to think that Patrick preferred her. He was a sweet, honest boy, but lively too. He was always ready to slip a tadpole into the governess' shoe or get down on all fours and imitate a hunting hound with fervor if Mary commanded it. But he would be sincerely apologetic afterward - both to the frazzled, shrieking governess and the head housemaid, who scolded him for his dirty clothes. In this way, he was very like Edith, and Mary was quick to point it out whenever they had all three been reprimanded. "She deserved it and I shan't apologize," she would say, nose in the air, as Edith and Patrick looked sheepishly away, having already confessed to the crime.
By the time Sybil was six - when it had become clear to their parents that there would likely be no more children, and thus no son to inherit - they had all come to understand that Mary was meant to wed Patrick. It would all be so tidy, Mama declared, and Patrick was like a son to him anyway, Papa insisted. Mary herself said very little. Thinking of it now, Edith realizes that this was the beginning of Mary's coldness, the point at which the passionate, stubborn child in her started to become the guarded and careful, though no less stubborn woman.
Edith knows that she loved Patrick all along, first as a cousin - almost a brother - then as a friend, and finally as a boy. A boy who belonged, already, to someone else. She had shied away from the feeling for several years, barely letting the words enter her mind, hoping that avoidance might render them untrue. Patrick was not a hat Mary might let her borrow if she was feeling particularly generous, nor a hoped-for nod of approval from Papa which Edith might, if she managed to say something very clever at dinner, receive. Mary's name was practically written on his skin, as it now was on the house, the grounds, on everything Edith had once thought she too had a right to.
The night she realized it, finally acknowledge the feeling to herself, was Mary's eighteenth birthday. Funny, she thinks, how the private, pivotal moments of her life have been measured by the milestones in Mary's. When her older sister had come into the drawing room, resplendent in a gown of deep blue, Edith had been watching Patrick's face. In it she'd seen no lust, though that she might have been able to forgive - men frequently watched Mary with poorly disguised desire. What she saw was a kind of stunned awe, an endearing echo of the young boy he had been. His kind, open face practically glowing with joy. With love. As she'd thought the word, she'd let that new sentence form around it.
I love Patrick.
I am in love with Patrick.
And then, as if coming to her senses: Patrick loves Mary. She had cried herself to sleep that night, remarking, somewhere in the back of her mind, just how silly it was to cry for what could simply not be helped.