So here's a new thing. I'm so sorry that I don't write often. I don't have the kind of writing time I would like! But I hope you enjoy this.
Mary Poppins and all associated characters are the property of Disney and P.L. Travers, not me.
Mary Poppins was four years old when she first encountered Death.
Her grandmother, a faded beauty from long ago, was visiting from her home outside of London when, while holding the young Mary in her lap, she suffered what was determined to be a coronary and passed. Self-possessed beyond her years, Mary Poppins climbed off her grandmother's lap and went to inform her mother that she no longer had a mother. She put it more delicately than that. At the funeral, there were many men in dark black suits, but there was one with slicked back hair who caught her eye and nodded. Young Mary raised her hand and waved. Her hand was quickly slapped down by her father; it was indecorous at the graveside. The man did not wave back.
Death knocked again only two years later, but this time it came even closer to home. Mary was a mere six years old when she stepped out into the street and was nearly run down by a lorry careening through the street. She was knocked to the ground and out of the way by a well meaning bystander who found the bones of his leg irreparably shattered. There was a man in a suit who tipped his hat at her and walked away. She frowned and the adults around her set about getting her savior to the hospital. When it was ascertained that Mary was not injured, she was quickly forgotten and taken home to be fussed over and scolded for such carelessness. No one mentioned the man dressed in black.
She forgot about the man in the suit but not the man in the street as she aged. When she was eleven years old and perfectly capable of making her own decisions, thank you very much, she wrote every year to update him on herself; she wouldn't want him to think of her as a waste of a perfectly good leg. He never said he thought of her that way and she desperately wanted to believe that it was true.
Mary Poppins grew as time marched forward and she blossomed into a beautiful young woman of seventeen. She had long since forgotten the man in the suit and she was a glowing example of what a privileged young lady should be. After flirting with a few suitors, she was engaged to be married on the eve of her eighteenth birthday. The wedding would be in six months time, enough time for her mother to throw an elaborate society affair that would be the talk of London for the rest of the year.
Unfortunately, the wedding was not to be. Perhaps it was fortunate, because Mary Poppins had realized in the months leading to her wedding that she was not ready to surrender her name, to become a wife. There was still so many thing she wanted to do and she wasn't ready to surrender herself to a life of making and raising children until she could take over the social chair for a charitable organization. Perhaps she was unfair in her characterization of married life; many of her friends married and seemed to glow with happiness, but something deep inside of Mary Poppins told her to wait. There was more to come.
There was and there wasn't. At eighteen and a half, three weeks before her wedding, Mary Poppins found herself without a wedding and without a groom, though not in the way she would have expected. At eighteen and a half, Mary Poppins found herself in mourning as her fiancé was interred, carried off by the disease in the water that carried thousands to the same inauspicious end. Mary Poppins was, of course, saddened by the senseless of life but she had her freedom and perhaps she wasn't as sad as a mourning fiancée should be. That fact would cause her considerable guilt in the future, but she couldn't help but be slightly relieved to be unburdened.
At the funeral, there were many men dressed in black coats; her wedding was to be in fall, but the weather assured that her fiancé's funeral seemed to take place in the dead of winter. The funeral was rushed; the ground would be cold and difficult soon. It was better he be laid to rest sooner rather than later. The mourners gathered, huddled together against the bone-chilling wind. Mary would go home later and find her lips terribly chapped. In the haze of numbing uncertainty and grief, she merely nodded to a tall man in a ill-fitting suit who pressed a handkerchief into her hand. It wasn't until he was out of sight that she was struck by a chord of familiarity; she has seen his face before. But he was gone and no one else could give her any details of the man. He was everywhere; she must know him, but she couldn't place his face.
Mourning was an awkward time; no one was quite sure exactly what was dictated by the death of a fiancé; she would not mourn with his real family, though everyone agreed she should observe. Mary found herself skirting the edges of mourning. She did appreciate that, as a woman in mourning, she was allowed hours unattended and undisturbed without question. In her silent room, she read and became further entrenched in the idea that she would not marry, though she was still unsure of what form her life would take.
By twenty-four, she was unmarried and considered a spinster. It was at twenty-four that Mary Poppins' life would change more drastically than it ever had. At age twenty-four and seven months, Mary Poppins found herself sick for one of the first times in her life. She'd always been a fairly healthy girl; the only time she could remember being laid out in bed was for a day when she'd caught a chill and that was mostly because her nanny was a bit of a hypochondriac.
So when Mary Poppins found herself unable to pull herself out of bed one morning, she worried. Everyone worried. Her mother called in doctors, specialists, but Mary Poppins found herself growing weaker. It didn't matter how many doctors her parents called; by the third day, Mary couldn't have distinguished one from the other. She was lost to herself and their faces, if she was even aware of them, were completely out of focus. She felt she was drowning and losing the fight for oxygen.
There came a point where it seemed too difficult to continue; Mary Poppins was a fighter but this was beyond any challenge. Her body was giving out on her and it was becoming harder to convince herself to keep going.
It was midnight when she opened her eyes and there was the man in the black suit standing in the corner of the world. Her eyes were clearer than they had been in a week. His nose was sharp and his eyes dark and flashing. Mary stared at him and waited for him to speak; he was quite handsome but watched her just as intently. She thought about reaching for the bell on her nightstand, rousing and summoning a waiting servant— after all, there was a strange man in her bedroom. That should require attention. She waited though. She wanted to know what he had to say.
The air was oppressive in her room. A roaring fire was kept in her fireplace—an attempt to sweat out the fever that was so close to sweeping her away. Her throat was dry and her voice would crack from a lack of use. She took a long drink of water and the man watched her.
"I suppose you're here for me," she eventually said. Her assumption was correct and her voice cracked.
The man said nothing and continued to stare intently at her. His eyes glittered in the firelight.
"I'm to die then?" she asked. She was simply voicing the theory that had been slowly forming in her mind over the years.
He said nothing and his face did not move. Mary nodded. She didn't feel afraid. But she did feel tired. The little energy she had was quickly leaving her body and she fell back against the pillows. She hoped her mother wouldn't cry too much.
Her eyelids were lead and quickly closed. But before she fell asleep, she sensed another person in the room, a woman. Her hair was red and Mary thought she wasn't wearing shoes. Though there was not a word said, the two seemed to be having a conversation. Mary couldn't focus; she fell into a deep sleep.