Paris, May 1925
It is the third morning of their honeymoon, and as she slowly wakes in the pre-dawn stillness, the first thing Mary registers is the masculine hand sliding over her stomach, brushing silky fabric against her skin, as Charles burrows nearer to her in his sleep.
And then, in her half-awake state, she remembers waking up just as early one morning, it must be over two years ago now – it was during the period in which she had started to drift, naturally, in her sleep, toward the very middle of the bed, again, which – for some reason she always thought of these two phenomena as connected – was around the time George started speaking in a manner nearly resembling sentences.
As she drifted awake on that spring morning in 1923, her own hand was resting on her lower stomach, not unlike how she had rested it while pregnant. But the fragment of dream that came to her barely conscious mind did not involve George, or the idea of other, hypothetical, future children.
There had been adoration murmured against her skin– surely it was bare in her dream, but she couldn't be sure, as she tried to piece it together again, plucking at her nightdress and the flesh underneath, wrinkling her forehead, eyes absently scanning the familiar wallpaper – and lips had pressed softly, unhurriedly to her stomach. She closed her eyes, sighing peacefully, and soon fell asleep once more.
It is not until this morning, on her second honeymoon – Paris, and then Switzerland, this time – that she thinks about that seemingly insignificant, half-awake flight of fancy again.
Is it his hand clutching at her stomach in the same way, sleepy fingers softly making indents in her skin? His lips coming to rest on her neck just as they lingered on her ribs last night, decadently, deliciously, in absolutely no hurry to move on? The very real adoration whispered against her skin?
But it is as if that long-ago morning was yesterday, and it makes her wonder whether it actually happened at all, or if the memory itself is merely a dream, one that she in fact just had, in this sumptuous hotel bed. She will never know, she muses, but it is in that moment that the memory of the dream – the dream of the dream? – seems significant.
Because the vague male presence in that dream, she realizes now with a curious certainty, was, in all his anonymity, decidedly not Matthew.
She wonders now, as Charles starts to stir, clearly indulging in the still-novel pleasure of waking up together, as he drowsily stretches his leg over her thigh, pulling their bodies against each other, making her shiver and squirm, she wonders.
Could such a fleeting subconscious experience have helped her see that there was a way out of the fog of grief? Because she remembers the distinct feeling that she was changing that spring, suddenly bounding several steps ahead from the year before, when, as the weather had slowly warmed and her grandmother's garden had flourished, she had buried herself in her new purpose, her new duty, running Downton in Matthew's stead.
And she had enjoyed herself, even, on occasion, as spring turned to summer, as she recognized her strengths – and her strength – but she had not let him go, not as she teetered at the edge of blatantly flirting with various interested parties – her new husband included – nor when she dithered about where to sleep in the bed that had not seemed nearly so gargantuan before she had ever shared it.
Nonetheless, she is here now, a fact for which she cannot account, not completely.
And Charles is kissing her jaw just under her ear, revealing that he is properly awake now, and so she turns her head toward him, and, in that cheeky manner of new lovers, she says, "Good morning, darling."