A/N: Inspired by a small passage from the book which really endears Hannah Thornton to me as nothing else does – I've kept it at the end. Title comes from an E. E. Cummings poem which I thought was appropriate.

Cookies to anyone who notices the Mary Barton reference. Please read and review!

If There Are Any Heavens

Margaret bowed her head, finally giving way to the sobs welling up in her throat as the hand she was clutching went limp within hers. Laying it down gently on the covers, she tried to absorb the fact that Hannah Thornton, one of the strongest women she had ever known, the mother-in-law who had just been beginning to truly accept her and befriend her, was gone. Was gone, and without even her son at her side.

John! A pang of fierce love shot through her as she thought of her husband, the son who refused to believe with a child's innocence that his mother could not be saved. How on earth was she going to break this to him? What could she possibly say to soften the blow?

'Margaret?' He had stepped in so softly that she had not noticed his approach. He had rushed up the stairs, but before he entered the room, some feeling, some premonition of dread had seized him so that even before he stepped over the threshold he knew.

She turned her tear-stained face towards him. No words were required.

'Oh.' He walked slowly over to the dressing table and withdrew three oranges out of his pockets and placed them there. In her illness, more than anything his mother had craved for fresh fruit, especially oranges, which were hard to find in Milton. He gripped the edge of the table until his knuckles turned white.

He stayed there so long in silence that Margaret opened her mouth to say something, anything. Then suddenly his sturdy frame shook with his overpowering agony of grief. She cried afresh in company, her heart going out to him. Standing up so fast that her chair toppled backwards, she rushed towards him and threw her arms around his waist, hugging him from behind as hard as she could.

'Oh John, please don't give way! Don't – I'm here – I love you – please look at me!'

Finally he turned and returned her embrace just as tightly, almost fiercely. His voice was choked. 'I don't know what I'd do without you.'

Somehow, they knew not how, they made their way downstairs to one of the sitting rooms, walking awkwardly down the stairs with their arms never once loosening their hold around each other.

For a while they simply sat breathing in each others' presence, each content to revel in the warmth of the other. Then finally he spoke. 'How did you go on, Margaret? How did you continue?' It was not a rhetorical question; his haunted eyes demanded an answer.

She thought for a moment. 'I had to,' she said simply, her eyes honest and clear. 'Fred and Papa were both overcome, and if I gave way, we would not have been able to manage. I had to go on, I had to live, for them.' She took his hand firmly in hers. 'John, you are not alone. You will always have both Maria and I by your side. And Fanny,' she added as an afterthought.

For the first time in days, John smiled at the thought of his beloved daughter, the little girl who could not understand why her Papa had been so quiet, downcast and worried, who had tried to calm his fears in the only way she knew how, by throwing her chubby arms around his neck and covering his face in kisses.

He squeezed her hand. 'Thank you,' he said softly. 'I don't know what I did to deserve you.'

Margaret could not help raising an eyebrow. 'Something terrible, I am sure, because now you are stuck with me tormenting you for the rest of your life.' She poked him playfully in the stomach.

He could not laugh at her attempt to lighten the mood, but he pulled her closer to show that it was appreciated all the same. 'It just seems hard,' he said, 'to have to lose first my father, then my sister, and now my mother as well.'

She was serious once again, as she twisted out of his arms a little so she could look up at him. 'Your sister? Whatever do you mean?'

He settled her back in his arms and gazed unseeingly at the fire, finally ready to open up that dark door in his heart. 'Fanny was not my only sister. When my father died, he left behind a wife and three children.' Margaret did not interrupt; she gave a gentle pressure on the hand within hers to show that she was listening. 'My sister Elizabeth was two years younger than Fanny – she was a year old when my father died. She was the baby of the family, so innocent and trusting, unaware of the situation we were in and completely confident that we would take care of her as always. Even Fanny had had some idea what was wrong, but Elizabeth couldn't know.

'She used to throw her arms around my legs when she wanted me to pick her up. It was for her more than for my mother or Fanny that I went from being a little boy who had lost his father to a man who could provide for his family. I could do anything but I could not betray her trust, could not shake her complete belief that I could look after her.

'She would have been grown up by now.' He gave a watery smile that told of such aching sadness that Margaret felt tears well up in her own eyes. 'We doted on her, Fanny and I. We used to devote every hour we could spare to her amusement. I tried to provide her with the best of whatever I could afford. The thought of her bonny face and merry laugh sustained me through many a day of toil. Her first word was my name; Fanny was so jealous, and Mother scarcely less so.

'That winter was one of the worst Milton had ever seen. Snow lay thick on the ground, bitter winds howled around and the cold sunk deep into our bones. There was no escaping it, not in our little house with the leaky roof and thin walls. Elizabeth fell ill. We hoped and prayed she would get better, tried to provide her with good food and warmth, and though we gave her the best of everything – lived on little more than our love for her, she grew steadily worse. It was only then, desperate, that I dipped into the meager savings I had been making from the wage I received. I fetched a doctor, only to be told that it was far too late, that nothing more could be done for her, that if I…'

He paused, taking a deep, ragged breath. 'That if I had come for him sooner, she might have been saved. If I had spent my savings on a doctor earlier in her illness, she would have been alive today. If I had not placed more importance on money – money, which I could have earned back a thousand times over – if I had not place more importance on money than her health, I could have saved her. Her last word was my name.'

Margaret was quietly sobbing now, tears running down her face as she hugged him so tightly that he couldn't breathe. 'I did not think it was possible that I could love you more than I did this morning, but I find that it is the case. And when I think of how cruel and thoughtless I was to you in those first few months of our acquaintance, before I truly knew you – when I think of how much more grief I must have caused you…'

He held her close and kissed her hair. 'That is all forgiven, you know that, Margaret. You are with me now, and that is enough.'

'How can I ever make it up to you?'

He smiled weakly. 'Just go on being the same Margaret and never stop loving me.'

They remained in each others' arms in silence after that, and although they never again talked about the sister who had so prematurely been snatched away or the mother who finally joined her twenty years later, they had reached a new level of understanding in their relationship; each comfortable in the certainty that come what may, as long as they had each other, they would find peace.

A little over a year later, Maria was given a sibling, a little girl with her mother's dark hair and her father's blue eyes; and a firm grip on whatever she was holding – whether her father's finger or a lock of her mother's hair – that came from neither parent, but rather from her Grandmother Thornton.

'What shall we name her?' asked the proud father as he held his beautiful daughter carefully in his arms.

Margaret did not hesitate. 'Elizabeth,' she said decidedly. 'I would like to name her Elizabeth.'

'Elizabeth it is,' he said quietly. And although he said nothing more, his eyes lingered on hers and something intangible passed between them. In that moment she knew, that they understood one another completely.

And her [Mrs. Hale's] filmy wandering eyes fixed themselves with an intensity of wistfulness on Mrs. Thornton's face. For a minute, there was no change in its rigidness; it was stern and unmoved. And it was no thought of her son, or of her living daughter Fanny, that stirred her heart at last; but a sudden remembrance of a little daughter – dead in infancy – long years ago – that, like a sudden sunbeam, melted the icy crust, behind which there was a real tender woman.

'North and South' by Elizabeth Gaskell

A/N: So how was it? Please do review with any feedback, corrections, comments, criticisms, etc.