Into my arms: part II


"the bright day is done, and we are for the dark." Anthony and Cleopatra – William Shakespeare


There were still times when he simply believed he couldn't do it anymore. The prospect of his lonely future seemed so bleak and empty that he almost wished himself ill if only it meant that he'd no longer have to bear the nightmares and the visions of what he had yet to live.

He couldn't marry. He couldn't burden himself to any woman, least of all one he loved, and he wouldn't marry one he did not; he did not wish the unfortunate duty of caring for him on his worst enemy and would not subject anyone to it. He could never produce a child, never fulfil his duty to Downton by siring a son to continue the line, and now could barely look Robert in the eye- afraid and ashamed of the disappointment and resentment he was so sure he'd find there.

One day, when Mary, Edith and Sybil were all married and settled, his mother and cousin Violet had passed, Robert had gone and Cora had left, he'd be left as the reclusive and lonely Lord of Grantham, surrounded by nurses and servants, with no friends and no family in sight. He didn't want that life- this life- but the promise to Mary bound him to it and he wouldn't break it, no matter how much his despair drove him to wanting to.

"I shall have arms like Jack Johnson if I'm not careful."

Mary's voice from behind him snapped him out of his petulant reverie and brought him back into reality. The cool breeze whipped gently through his hair and sent a slight chill underneath the fabric of the uniform he still wore.

"I can wheel myself you know," he said, only a mere hint of the residing sourness in his tone.

"I'll be the judge of that," she quipped, knowing he wasn't quite being entirely truthful about the matter. His recovery was admirable for someone with that level of injury, but his trauma had inhibited it significantly- keeping him in bedrest longer once he'd been allowed home and prolonging his hospitalisation when he'd first been sent back from the front.

There were still times when she looked at him and saw the man lying still and muddied on a coarse stretcher, moments when she couldn't help but be reminded of how he had been when he'd first arrived home. He was better now, steadily on the road to recovery, and his relapses, though still painful and terrifying, were becoming fewer and further between, but she did still see it often- the mud-caked skin and the un-opening eyes.

She could remember everything so vividly still. He looked so cold. Beaten and broken beyond an inch of his life, never mind the unseen scars that were not visible to her now- whether they lay beneath his soaked through and stinking uniform or if they were imprinted on his mind, memories and horrors that he would never be rid of. She swallowed the lump in her throat, compelling her trembling legs to follow her sister over to the bedside where he was placed, taking the brown paper label that was knotted to a button on his jacket between her shaking fingers and reading it with a voice so unsteady and unsure, wondering with a raging and yet frozen mind how Sybil was so calm.

It hadn't taken long for everyone to clear away, Clarkson had found that there was little to be done until he regained coherent consciousness- nothing other than to clean him and dress his wounds. She found her next movements innate, moving the screen around his bed, fetching warm water, towels, iodine solution and bandages. Sybil was moved to another patient and so she took care of him on her own. Her fingers shook, removing his layers of blooded, muddy clothing to reveal scars- old and new- and open wounds that were irritated and sore. Whatever care he had received on his way over had been haphazard and careless, ignoring cuts that might have become infected, overlooking symptoms that should have been spotted long before he got to her. She washed him with precision, slow and careful with shaking hands and concentrated eyes. His face was scratched, skin a deathly pale with large red circles rimming his perpetually shut eyes. She shifted his pyjamas on, the blue-green silk slipping softly between her fingers, trying desperately to think about anything other than the large purple bruises the lined his back over his spine.

Probable spinal damage.

She busied herself to take it from her mind, clearing away after herself and leaving the screen surrounding the bed, intent on fetching Clarkson to re-examine him. She was sure she'd spotted the beginnings of a fever, the slight sweat that sheened over his forehead, the heat that emanated from his skin that looked so frigid with cold.

She sat back down in the seat by his bedside after that, having done everything she could think of from extra blankets to fresh flowers on his cabinet and resigned to stilling in her work, taking his hand in between two of hers and squeezing it lightly. She watched his still form, the body beneath the blankets too stiff and straight to pretend he was simply sleeping. It was hours before she saw his eyes flicker beneath his lids- a sign of dreaming, or so she'd heard, and she should have leaned in to wake him, but she didn't, choosing misguidedly to allow him to sleep a moment longer. she regretted it, for when his eyes finally did open, they looked panicked and afraid. She watched him as his body tried to lurch upward in fright and her breath faltered in unabated sadness when she saw he couldn't do it. He jerked uncomfortably, heart racing and breathing quickening, unable to settle or put stop to his horror before Mary intervened. The hair she'd washed hours ago was stroked back away from his eyes, her palms cupping his jaw and wiping the tears from beneath his eyes.

"It's alright. You're at Downton. You're home."

"Mary?" His voice was groggy, drug induced and laced with confusion, but unmistakably, and irreplaceably his own. This was Matthew, and he was alive.

"Go to sleep. You're quite safe, just go to sleep."

She wasn't expecting it to work, but it had. His eyes had closed peacefully and he'd fallen back to slumber with his countenance relaxed. In his last movement, he'd taken her hand, a weak grip that held fast and their entwined fingers had laid together on his gently rising and falling chest.

"Can we stop?"

His voice brought her back to the present and she glanced down at the top of his head, hair smoothed back cleanly as normal. She nodded, setting his chair by the bench and moving round him to seat herself beside him. She dropped a hand to his knee, rubbing it softly for a few silent seconds before removing it to lay on her own. She'd forgotten he couldn't feel it.

She opened her mouth to apologise for her lapse, but, knowing what was coming, Matthew rebuffed it.

"That's better," he smiled. "I'd much rather see your face when we talk."

"How're you feeling?" She asked, her voice pleasant to override her mounting concern.

He looked abashed at the question, but answered it anyway. "Better than yesterday, hopefully not as good as tomorrow. Sybil is still exercising us all to the bone."

"I should hope so," Mary mused, "it doesn't do you any good to slack on your exercises."

"No, I suppose it doesn't." the laugh on his lips died at the thought of the conversation they'd deliberately bypassed earlier. Her trip to Hacksby had been earlier that day.

"So, will you buy it?" He asked, out of the blue.

Mary sighed. "Probably. He says he wants to steal Carson to come and run it for us."

A smiled emerged on his face once more, smirk-ish yet well intentioned. "I don't envy you telling your Papa."

"Suppose Carson won't do it?" She proposed.

"Since he'd open his veins for you, I don't think there's much doubt." His eyebrow was raised slightly, a forlorn attempt at an expression that, years ago, he would've worn well with conviction.

"I don't have to marry him, you know."

She meant it, meant it with all her heart and willed for him to say something other than the response she knew he'd give. Richard would keep her secret, he'd be a near appropriate match and had plenty of money to return for the place in society she could afford him. At the same time, she wondered if he knew what she was really saying.

I love you. I'd never be happy with anyone else.

He didn't understand her. He couldn't decipher the encryption she handed him, and even if he had, he would never subject her to a marriage of such missing substance and abundant despair.

"Yes you do." His words were solid and meant, no matter how much he wished they were not needed to be said. "If I thought for a moment I was an argument against your marriage, I should jump into the nearest river."

"And how would you manage that, without my help?"

Sensing a turn of inner tumult, they'd both resorted to hollow humour to cover the raw emotions that threatened to take hold.

"I'd get you to push me." His sad smile had returned. "Seriously," he started, "I can only relax because I know that you have a real life coming."

A real life. Matthew had no idea, none, and she longed to tell him yet knew she couldn't.

"If I ever thought I was putting that in jeopardy, I'd go away and never see you again."

"You don't mean that." She sounded calm, but she wasn't. She was well aware that he meant it, the way things had gone with Lavinia being evidence enough to prove it. For that reason, she would never say anything to the contrary, knowing he could disappear from her life in a split second was an unthinkable prospect and would be an unbearable reality. She saw her life unfold in a disconsolate and miserable rhythm of pretence. Faking her love for Richard, feigning indifference toward Matthew, falsifying happiness for the rest of her days because her mistakes had led her to this. If she'd never let Pamuk… if she'd never given in, she could be with Matthew now- happy. Beautifully and tremendously happy. Perhaps, they'd even have a child by now.

"But I do." He stated plainly. "I am the cat that walks by himself and all places are alike to me. I have nothing to give and nothing to share. If you were not engaged to be married I wouldn't let you anywhere near me."

She snapped. Her sympathy for him still mingled with her own despair, but he'd wallowed long enough and he should have known that Mary was not one to indulge such dalliances in self-pity.

"You mean just like you wouldn't let Lavinia near you?"

He was taken aback by her outburst, visibly shocked yet remaining stationary as he always would. His pale cheeks were still slightly sunken with his under-indulgent diet, his body too thin and frail looking so early on in his recovery, but she saw his blue eyes flash with something- anger, retaliation, bitterness, sorrow – whatever it was if showed he felt the same as she did. Woeful in the restraint that tied them to their respective unhappiness.

"I can't marry. Not like this. I won't."

"And if someone should just want to be with you? On any terms?"

It was the second time she'd repeated the sentiment. And the second time he hadn't understood its full capacity.

He shook his head, they'd been through this before.

"You know I can't subject anyone to that. I can't offer anything! I'm barely the man I was, barely a person anymore. Mary, you can't understand- and god knows I'm glad of it, but I'm a monster now and you should barely be able to look at me."

"Matthew… that simply isn't…"

"I've killed people!" his broken voice was almost a yell. "People like me, boys that signed up for a laugh with their friends, men with wives and children and mothers. I've murdered them and I take my penance for it."

Behind his eyes burnt with anguish, but he resolutely pushed the threatening tears back.

"Matthew, this is not a punishment. You did what you had to do, and you are right," she said, "I cannot imagine what it was like, but whatever you've done, whatever you've suffered, you need not punish yourself. You've hurt enough."

"I will pay for the rest of my life." He said stonily.

"Only if you make yourself pay!" she demanded back.

"I must."

"Then you are wrong." She glared at him, determined to make him see. "You deserve happiness. God knows I can never have it, and I will pay for my actions with my solitude for the remainder of my life, but you deserve it, Matthew."

"You more than I do." He leant back in his chair, his swimming eyes soft only when they landed on her.

She closed her eyes, shaking her head.

"Then you're wrong again."

"What can you mean by that?" A genuine query crossed his lips with mingled confusion and concern. He loved her, and wished for nothing more than her happiness, but unlike her, he didn't not think it was in his gift.

"I cannot tell you. You would despise me, and that I really couldn't bear."

He let her sentiment sink in with the heaviest of silences, but found it didn't take him longer than a split second to find fault with her words.

"I never would… I never could despise you."

Then what did she have to lose?

She told him everything. As hard as it was, she managed to expel the words from her memory into the air between them. She couldn't look at him. She didn't want to see his opinion of her evolve and demise before her eyes. she didn't think she could live through the moment where the love left his gaze, leaving barely concealed contempt in its place and allowing his look upon her to bear no more tenderness or fondness, no more affection or desire – to look at her as he might look at a friend who'd betrayed him.

Yet his behold never altered. His eyes clouded over slightly, but the anger she saw reflected there was not directed at her. She couldn't place his exact expression, but horror was certainly mixed somewhere in there.

"Why?"

The question she'd never expected burst from within him. She had no answer. No coherent one she understood fully enough to give.

He looked at her. Then looked away.

"Did you love him?"

"You mustn't try to—"

"Because if it was love—"

"How could it be love? I didn't know him!"

"Then why would you—?"

"It was lust Matthew!" His expression had changed when he looked back, eyeing her carefully and seeing the uncertainty in her conviction that even she hadn't been aware existed still. "Or a need for excitement or something in him that I… oh god what difference does it make? I'm Tess of the d'Urbervilles to your Angel Clare, I have fallen! I am impure!"

"Don't joke," he snapped. "Don't pretend to be something you're not. Not when I'm trying to understand."

"Thank you for that," she relented, quietly. "But the fact remains I am made different by it. Things have changed between us."

"And… he…" he pressed on, "Carlisle," he spat the name with such aggrieved disgust. "is blackmailing you with it?"

Her silence gave a better answer than any words she possessed could have done.

"You must not marry him!" He was defiant and resolute. Watching her pained expression with suspicion.

"There's something else, isn't there?" he pressed, his tone gentler now. She shifted, unknowing what his precise meaning was and yet feeling an uncomfortable inkling that whatever he was approaching was an area she'd tried to bury for years.

"Did he force you?" His jaw clenched, his blood ran cold, his heart burnt with an incandescent fury that sent sparks through his nerves. If looks could kill, Pamuk would be turning in his grave.

She shook her head. The answer she'd trained herself to give.

"I let him." She shrugged finally relenting her stoicism to replace it with a passive retreat.

He could see the tears in her eyes.

"But you refused him?"

"I don't know how he found my room, or even how it knew which one was mine. He pushed in. I asked him to leave, he refused. I told him I would scream, and he said it wouldn't make any difference. He was right, I would've been ruined if anyone had found him in my room." She gulped, pressing down the lump in her throat to will herself to continue. "He said I'd still be a virgin for my husband. That it wouldn't hurt. That is was safe." She closed her eyes. "He lied."

Matthew was frozen in horror.

"I let him." She repeated.

He shook his head. "He forced you."

"I let him," she said again.

"You felt trapped. It was rape."

She recoiled. "He never- he didn't force me, he didn't do anything like that…"

"He may not have physically forced you, but it's not the only type of coercion. Any man worth anything would never have done it. If you didn't want him to, it was rape."

She stared harshly at the ground before her. She shook with the effort of keeping herself held together, her hands trembling in her lap.

"Mary…"

His voice was smooth. His arms soft, warm and welcoming and she leant into the embrace he offered. With her face hidden by his collar, her eyes closed against his neck, she let him hold her together with his stable arms.

She'd sack Carlisle tomorrow.