A/N: Managed an update this week when I didn't think I would! Whether that will happen next week, with 4th of July activities taking up precious writing time remains to be seen (Lady Violet would not approve at all of featuring in a story written by an author who celebrates American Independence!) but next chapter, whenever it appears, will see our characters back at Downton. All our characters...
As usual, many thanks to everyone who read and reviewed the previous chapter. I'm overwhelmed by your enthusiasm for this story. Though the most enthusiastic of all is my unflagging beta reader, Ju-dou, who is more appreciated by her Dark Lord than she knows.
10. The Drive
"I hope you girls will forgive me for taking you away from the ball at this unfashionable hour," says Papa as he slides onto the leather seat after Edith, and Aunt Rosamund's chauffeur-or Richard Carlisle's informant-shuts the door behind him.
"Afraid the Fiat's going to turn into a pumpkin?" Mary raises an eyebrow at her father from the seat opposite his, pleased with the command she has over her own voice, which remains low and steady amid the wild beat of her heart and the clamour in her head.
"I thought it best we take the early train home tomorrow," Papa replies, raising his voice over the roar of the engine.
Mary smoothes her skirt where the organza became crumpled as she and Mama arranged themselves on the narrow seat with some difficulty in their evening finery. "Yes, you have urgent matters to attend. Tell me-will we have the honour of hosting the future Earl of Grantham's wedding at Downton?"
"Mary!" Mama hisses at her in rebuke, but the bulging blue eyes go to Papa, as do Edith's brown ones.
"Cousin Mathew is...getting married?" her tone is as genuinely stunned as Mary's was, though it is the mid-sentence hitch in Edith's voice, the pause-no, the stumble-over the words, that really piques Mary's interest. The poor girl actually hopedthat all those walks through country churches with the lawyer from Manchester might eventually end at the altar. Mary could almost feel sorry for her sister-if Edith weren't so keen on seeing her fall from grace.
Though Papa looks at her quite as if he has seen it, asking so tightly his lips scarcely seem to move, "Where did you hear that?"
Mary lifts her chin. "Sir Richard."
"That meddling, presumptuous fool!" Papa scowls at the window as the car comes to a stop at an intersection, as if he were driving it himself and jammed his foot on the brake in reaction to her. When the motor rolls into motion again, he swings his head back to scowl at Mary, his voice raising as he fumes, "Is Carlisle a newspaperman, or a private investigator?"
"I think generally they're one and the same. In this case, he's just a friend of the fiancée's father."
Mary presses her lips together against a smirk of satisfaction at how the cramped confines of the Fiat force Papa into restraint. If she'd waited till they were back at Rosamund's, he'd be stomping about as he spluttered. He deserves to squirm. She sits up a straighter in her seat, her chest swelling a little with vindication.
A very little. No sooner as the thought flickered through her mind than her lungs close in on themselves again, her corset seeming unbearably tight, the boning pressing in on her like the bars of an iron medieval gibbet.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asks. "Afraid I'd be heartbroken that he chose some little nobody to be the Countess of Grantham over me?"
Out the corner of her eye, she catches Edith tucking her chin tight to her chest. Mary seems to be the only one who notices the younger girl's feelings-or even that she is here at all. She almost wishes someone wouldtake notice of poor old Edith, who spent the night spying to distract herself from an empty dance card. But instead, Papa's pitying glances are all for her.
For Lady Mary Crawley, to whom Sir Richard Carlisle confessed to pining for a waltz for the better part of the past six months. And then he had kissed her.
"Perhaps not heartbroken," Papa interrupts the memory of Richard's arms around her, his mouth covering hers, as surely as Edith interrupted the actual kiss, "but hurt, yes. You've been spending so much time over at Crawley House lately, getting to know Matthew and Cousin Isobel, I thought-"
"You thought I'd been duly chastened and submitted to your indomitable will." Mary doesn't know whether to laugh because he has no notion of how mercenary her reasons have been for calling on the Crawleys, or to cry because he truly believes she could be hurt by Matthew for not giving her the inheritance her own father is too spineless to fight to make hers. "Are you sure it isn't your heart that's broken at Matthew's choice of bride?"
Papa's mouth falls open, his lips forming words but producing no sound.
"He's known Miss Swire for a long time," Mama steps into the gap. "He met her father while he was studying law."
"I gave Matthew my blessing," says Papa, his chest swelling beneath his smooth starched shirt and waistcoat, making his watch chain glint as the car pulls alongside the curb beneath a streetlamp, "and I will wish them both joy when he brings her to Downton next month."
Now it is Mary who sits stunned for a moment as the rest of her family move to disembark. "To Downton?"
Papa's eyes dart away guiltily as he gives her a hand down from the vehicle. "We're hosting an engagement dinner."
"The weekend of the hunt," Mama says, adding, with a too-bright smile Mary thinks must be meant to be encouraging, "Evelyn Napier's agreed to attend."
As Mary's feet find the pavement, she comes out of her stupor.
"To celebrate the engagement of a couple he's never met?" She arches her brow at each of her parents in turn, then turns and sweeps up Aunt Rosamund's front steps. "How meaningful for everyone."
The bed frame creaks, the mattress shifting with the weight of the other sleeper as she rolls onto her side, and Mary's eyes, just having begun-finally-to droop, snap wide open.
"For heaven's sake, Edith!" she cries, flopping onto her back, flinging back the coverlet which is only making the discomfort of having a bedfellow worse for trapping the body heat of two people beneath it. "Stop fidgeting! One of us may have a chance to fall asleep."
"You weren't asleep," Edith replies, mildly but for a sigh beneath the covers, which she has pulled up over her head, her pale face just visible in the dark as though peering out of a cave. "You won't sleep tonight. Not even if I lie here as still as a corpse."
A shiver courses down Mary's spine at the thought, but she tenses her body from her neck to the tips of her toes to stop herself, lest her grasping little sister seize upon the first hint of weakness. "How could anyone sleep, with you in the bed? In fact that's the very question that's keeping me awake. How do you sleep at night, being you?"
"Do come off it, Mary. We both know the only real enjoyment you get from insulting me is when you have an audience looking on to admire how terribly clever you are. Obviously I don't think you're clever at all. And anyway..." The soft swish of the sheet, and the movement of Edith's shoulder beneath the coverlet, tells Mary she's tracing a circle on the mattress with the tip of one finger. "Isn't it time we stopped the war? Joined forces against our common enemy?"
"Our common enemy?" Mary echoes. "Don't you think that kind of dramatic language is better left to the Balkan League in reference to the Turks?"
Edith's finger stills. "Do you read the papers now? Perhaps it isn't such a bad thing after all that Sir Richard Carlisle is courting you."
Mary is glad for the dark as her cheeks flush; she presses her hands hard against the hollow of her bosom, as if she can still the pounding of her heart. "Kissing me, anyway."
She is not sure whether she's being cagey with her sister about the nature of her relationship with Richard, or if she's rubbing Edith's nose in the passionate moment she witnessed.
The blanket slips down over her shoulder, revealing the high yolk of her nightgown. Wherever did Edith get such a thing, anyway? It makes her look like a maiden aunt. But there is nothing of an aunt in the shrewd gleam of her eyes as they catch the moonlight filtering in through the draperies
"Is that your way of saying you'll throw him over if somebody better comes along?" Edith asks. "Like Evelyn Napier?"
The heat deepens in Mary's cheeks, though not for the same reason as when she thought of Richard, and her heartbeat slows, thudding against her ribcage at the sound of her own unfeeling words from months ago spoken back to her in Edith's accusing tones.
"Is a viscount better than a newspaper baron?" Mary says. "Only one must take into consideration that Mr Napier is a bore, while Sir Richard certainly knows how to captivate one's attention."
"Surely being boring is preferable to a man who makes his fortune in newspaper scandal," says Edith, sounding-and, Mary imagines, looking, a good deal like Papa. "Don't you find it rather an odd coincidence that Sir Richard just happens to know our cousin's fiancée's father?"
"Oh, Edith-that one member of the nouveau riche knows another is hardly the stuff of conspiracy theories."
"I suppose." Edith rolls onto her back, drawing the bedclothes up over her chest, her hands clasping them at her breast very much as if she were lying in state. "It was beastly of Papa not to tell us about Cousin Matthew. Yes, us," she asserts, before Mary can even remark upon this, should she wish to. "I know you and everyone else seem to believe the world revolves around you, but all our futures are tied to this entail. And I like Matthew."
"Like him? Or like the idea of being the Countess of Grantham and taking precedence over me at dinner?" Mary can't resist adding, "A regular little Lydia Bennet to my Jane, are you?"
"Which of us has taken up with an unsuitable man and made herself the object of censure and gossip?" Edith breezes on. "The title will go to someone. Wouldn't you rather it be one of your own blood than to-how did you put it?-some little nobody?"
Mary tries to picture it: Edith in Mama's place...going over the weekly menus...organising hunts...leading out the annual servants' ball...She tests her name in her mind: Edith Crawley, Countess of Grantham. Her heart hangs suspended in the cavity of her chest, not beating but aching as it compresses in on itself, shrinking down to nothing.
"What matters is that Cousin Matthew doesn't want you for his countess," Mary says, "so what makes you so sure Evelyn Napier will want you for his viscountess? That's what this is about, isn't it? You being a vulture, always lurking about to swoop in and sink your claws into my leavings?"
She turns onto her side again, back to Edith, jerking the tangled sheet up to her chest as she does so, unable to bear lying here so completely exposed. But she finds herself tilted back toward her sister as Edith pushes herself up on one elbow, the bed emitting another groan. Why could Papa not open up Grantham House for the duration of their stay, rather than force them to share a bed in Aunt Rosamund's pokey little house? They are eighteen and twenty, for heaven's sake, not eight and ten.
Though she supposes she ought to be grateful they weren't put in the nursery by Rosamund's housekeeper, who'd forgotten their ages and thought The girls will need a place to sleep, too meant that they were sweet young sisters and the best of friends who'd enjoy sharing whispered secrets together in the dark. Well, they are sharing secrets. Just not ones either of them enjoys.
"What else am I to do, I ask you?" A little mocking laugh tears from Edith's throat, aimed at herself or at her, Mary doesn't know. "You and Diana Manners and your ilk snap up all the young men-and now the not-so-young men, as well-and spit them out again...As if you're mother swans feeding their ugly ducklings. And do you know what the worst of it is?"
She sniffs, and the sheet tents above the sisters as Edith moves her arm, presumably to wipe her eyes. The bedclothes floating down over them once again, she goes on in a pinched voice, "My own parents think I'm beyond help, and give all their attention to you."
Much to Mary's chagrin, she realises for the first time that she isn't the only one of the Crawley sisters for whom the Earl of Grantham won't fight. Of course, finding a match for Edith may well be even more impossible than breaking the entail. She wonders how Sybil will fare when it's her turn-though her suffragist leanings may not incline her toward wanting a man to fight for her. So much the better.
"I don't ask for their help, you know," Mary says, quietly. Edith scoffs at that, but she goes on. "I wish Mama had left poor Evelyn out of it."
"Well, she hasn't, so if you're quite content to be your newspaperman's leg up to good society, I'd ask you to give me a chance to show Evelyn that I'm more than a wallflower at the deb balls."
There is more to you than that, Richard's words rumble in Mary's heart, so that she feels it swell once again within her breast, air rushing into her lungs.
Edith sighs. "If only you hadn't cared so much about getting Downton, and the title, Patrick might have seen how much I would have loved him."
Mary looks back over her shoulder at her sister, huddled under the covers again. "That wouldn't have changed anything in the end, you know. Patrick still would have died on the Titanic."
"But at least he'd have been properly mourned."
I'm not as sad as I should be. That's what makes me sad.
Turning away again, Mary says, "I'd no idea you were such a romantic. Perhaps I'd better leave Sir Richard to you. He talks violent love, too."
"He told you he loves you, then?"
Mary's gaze drops to her fingertips, picking at the eyelet edge of her pillowcase. "Not in so many words..."
She's surprised by her own honesty, but even more so when Edith doesn't take it as an opportunity to gloat, instead asking in genuine curiosity, "What's it like? To be kissed by a man?"
It's the sort of question Sybil would ask, sneaking into Mary's bedroom and climbing into bed with her after a ball, as has been her habit since Mary made her public debut. Suddenly she is gripped with missing her youngest sister, and glad they'll be home again tomorrow.
No doubt Sybil will want to know whether she met Richard at the ball, if she danced with him, and how many times, and whether her guess about the depth of his affection for Mary had been right. Would Mary protect the sixteen year-old darling from the rather untoward truth? Or would she flush in the dark and spare no detail of how he took possession of her the moment she stepped into the ballroom, of the insistent touch of his lips on hers, of the grip of roughened fingers around her wrists, of the rake of his voice telling her she deserved to be fought for?
Mary has never been the type to bare her soul to anyone in the dark of night, but she wants to, now. Her mouth opens to tell Edith everything...Only to close again as she pictures Edith's sneer over Richard's shoulder, the triumph with which she spoke of Mary getting herself into trouble.
She throws back the blankets, tearing them off Edith in the process, and sits up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.
"You'll have to find somebody else to live vicariously through. I never kiss and tell."
The hall clock chimes as Mary, in hushed tones, asks the telephone operator to put her through to the Daily Telegram office. Midnight, she realises, just making out the numbers in the light that falls over the clock face from the window above the front door. She falters, and nearly replaces the receiver on the mouthpiece before the operator can scold her utter lack of etiquette in ringing anybody at this hour, when a masculine voice crackles over the line.
"Carlisle speaking."
"Oh!" cries Mary, clutching the cold metal base of the phone tightly in her hand. "You're there."
"Mary?" Richard's voice pitches lower than usual, and a little raspier-due, no doubt, to the time, though she easily envisions him hunched over his great oak desk, a cigar smouldering in a cut-crystal ashtray from which ghostly plumes curl beneath the warm glow of the green shaded lamp.
"You're not still at the ball?"
"I didn't have a reason to be there, after you left," he replies, smoothly, though not unduly so; his next words are more teasing, even tinged with sarcasm, than flirtatious. "And obviously not, as you're calling me at the office. How did you know I'd be here, and not at home?"
"A hunch," she says, because it's close enough to the truth. Which is that it never occurred to her that he'd be anywhere but his office. "Where do you live, anyway?"
"Knightsbridge." He places a lilt upon the last syllable, almost as if he's asking a question, though he could be smiling. Mary wishes they were having this conversation face-to-face, but he speaks again, leaving her in no doubt of his meaning. "Is that fashionable enough?"
"I suppose. For some people."
Static whispers in the earpiece as Richard's chuckle rattles through it, and she presses the receiver tighter to her ear, as if to feel the pleasant rumble of his laugh.
"I'm not married to it," he says. A creak-probably the sound of his swivel chair as he leans back in it-covers the sound, and when he speaks again, it has stopped altogether. "What can I do for you, Mary? Is everything...are you...alright?"
Of course he's thinking of his accidental revelation and her humiliating reaction to it-neither of which Mary wants to think of. Not now that she's made her mind up.
"Shouldn't you be asking what I can do for you?" she says, drawing up her shoulders, which briefly slumped. "Or do many people call you at midnight asking for help rather than offering scoops?"
"Most do both. It's all give and take in the world of newspapers. Do you have a scoop for me?"
"I do-Lady Mary Crawley Invites Sir Richard Carlisle to Yorkshire for Weekend at Downton."
A crackling on the other end of the line, for a heartbeat. Then Richard asks, "Will I be welcome in a house where my newspapers are forbidden?"
"Sybil still takes Lady Fair."
"Then I shall be sure to thank her for defying the Earl of Grantham to help keep bread on my table."
Mary snorts. "You do realise it's less an act of rebellion than taking advantage of Papa's being unaware that you're the publisher?"
"Having often exploited ignorance to my own advantage, I hold Lady Sybil in the highest regard." Abruptly, he shifts subjects. "What occasions this invitation?"
"Mama's organising a hunting party. In November."
"A fox hunt?"
Mary rolls her eyes that he must even ask. "What else?"
"I don't ride..."
It's the nearest she's ever heard Richard come to sounding self-conscious, and Mary wonders what gestures accompany the tone. Fingers tugging at the curling ends of his hair? A puff on the imagined cigar? A swig from a glass of whisky?
And when did these things become more interesting to her than his lack of breeding?
"No matter," she replies. "There's more than riding to amuse you for a few days in the country. An engagement dinner for Cousin Matthew-so I expect your friend Mr Swire will attend, too."
"It'll be good to see Reggie again."
"Don't you often?"
"Not these days, no." She hears a rustling sound, as if he's rifling through a stack of papers on his desk. "A weekend in November, you say?"
Mary gives him the dates. "Saturday to Monday-that's how these things are always done. Though I suppose you'd need to get back to the paper before Monday?"
"I think I've earned days off here and there when I want them," says Richard, the words enunciated a little more deliberately, so that Mary can imagine the defensive upward tilt of his chin. Had she meant to tweak him? "And I do want them-if they'll afford me the opportunity to kiss you again."
"You seem like the sort of man who creates his own opportunities."
"Then I'll look very much forward to seeing you in November, Lady Mary."