Author's note: we see nothing of any substance of either Charles or Mary between the awkward but delightful romance in Strong Poison and the lovely portrayal of spousal comfort in Murder Must Advertise. Here I have played with a few snapshots of their lives around the edges of the books.
As she and her husband motored slowly back into a London whose trees and parks were just starting to open themselves up to the warmer late April skies, Lady Mary Parker sighed contentedly. "I think everyone should be married in the early spring if they possibly can," she remarked.
Her husband's attention was mostly on the road - excited though he was to be bringing his bride home at last, he was also quite looking forward to restoring his brother-in-law's car to him - but he glanced briefly at his wife and smiled. "It'd cause a lot of scheduling difficulties for the vicars, I expect," he replied in a gently teasing tone, and then removed his hand from the wheel to lay it firmly on Mary's thigh. "But it is rather nice."
Their honeymoon had passed mostly in a haze of endlessly resurgent passion, and they were to find themselves in the slightly awkward position of being able to say almost nothing about the scenery or the historic sites in the place they had visited when asked about their holiday. Charles wondered every day how he had ever imagined life worth living before he had been married, and more practically how he was to be expected to get through the long working days to which he was so accustomed without gazing at or touching his wife.
London was further along its springtime unfurling than the North where they had spent their honeymoon, and the blossom-covered trees lining the streets seemed to Charles to stretch out their branches to bride and groom in welcome. He grinned at his own folly. "All this love and happiness has made me shockingly sentimental, Mary," he said as he turned the car into Great Ormond Street.
"You've always been sentimental," she replied, affectionately, "you've just had to keep it all bottled up until now."
"Hmmmm," Charles said in the already familiar noncommittal tone which meant that he knew Mary was right but didn't propose to talk about it any more. In any event, they were home. Charles turned off the ignition with relief, and walked quickly around to open Mary's door and help her out of the car. He kissed her briefly before picking up their cases and carrying them to the front door of 12A Great Ormond Street. His hand shook slightly as he unlocked the front door. "Welcome home, my lady," he said softly, and picking up the cases again, he led her up the stairs to the bottom floor of their flat.
There was no longer any sense of incongruity for Charles in his taking a Duke's daughter into his home, the home of a humble, hardworking commoner. It was as though he had not actually known her before they were married, when these thoughts had troubled him so much, though he had thought that he knew her so well.
The revelation had come to him when they visited his industrial hometown of Barrow-in-Furness on their way back down south. He watched Mary move with her usual fluidity of step around his mother's extremely poky sitting room as though it were a ballroom, or dance the Gay Gordon at the party his friend Jack had arranged for them in the ramshackle church hall that night with the same elegant lightness as if it had been a waltz, and realised that the countless hours he had spent with her in his arms and his bed had changed things: he no longer thought of her nobility as something intrinsic to her, but rather a circumstance of her life which was not itself the cause of any part of her grace or loveliness. She would have been as sublime if she had started work at a factory at the age of 12.
Mary smiled as she followed him up the staircase and he unlocked the door to their flat. She quite liked his habit of calling her his lady in moments of romantic significance, but still more she loved hearing him unthinkingly call her "my lass" in moments of passion when his native accent and idioms became stronger.
As though he had read her mind, when he had placed the cases neatly in the front hall he picked her up with practiced ease, carried her laughing over the threshold and kicked the door shut behind him.
"Charles, put me down!" she said in a mock-protest seriously undermined by the way she clasped her arms around his neck as he set off towards the staircase that joined the lower flat to the upper one. "Where are you going? I want to see how the wall-papering in the sitting room has turned out." The interior decorations had not been quite finished in time for the wedding and Mary had had to gratefully leave her mother a key and instructions as to the supervision of the final elements before they went away.
"'Im taking you to bed, lass," he said firmly, not interrupting his quick strides. "Time enough for wallpaper later."
"But Charles," Mary said delightedly, shifting a little in his arms so that she could gaze up at him engagingly, "don't you see that this is part of the joy of having no live-in servants? Nobody's due to come until tomorrow. The sitting room would do as well as anywhere else. And it's closer."
This last point hit home. Charles did as swift a volte-face as he could manage without knocking Mary's legs against the walls of the hall, and with the low groan of desire which Mary knew so well and which never ceased to thrill her he set off towards the sitting room.
It was Mary who reached down laughing to turn the doorknob and push open the door, given the difficulty for Charles in doing so whilst carrying his wife in his arms. The politely composed faces of her mother and brother thereby revealed were almost as unwelcome a surprise to her as they were to poor Charles, and it was many moments before she thought to look at the wallpaper at all. Charles's face turned an extraordinarily bright shade of red as he gently lowered his wife to the ground, and beyond that he seemed incapable of taking any action or of any speech.
The sang-froid of Lord Peter and the Dowager Duchess was not so easily disturbed, and of course the position was less embarrassing for them. "Delighted to find you in such high spirits, my good children," Lord Peter said genially. "I see that the airs of both the North and of matrimony agree with you."
Charles had recovered enough to shake hands awkwardly with Peter and the Dowager Duchess by this point, although not sufficiently to look either of them in the eye.
A different sort of woman would have pretended to have heard nothing of the conversation the lovers had had in the hall - this was certainly what Charles's own mother would have done - but this was not the Dowager's way.
"We should have thought to make more noise when you came in, my dears," she said imperturbably. "I thought I'd drop in with some provisions when you wrote to say you'd be back on a Sunday, Mary, remembering your arrangements about servants, since I'm up in town. I can see now that it isn't quite what you had in mind" - and her eyes twinkled in a manner quite excruciating to Charles - "but now that we're all here we may as well have tea, I think, if you don't mind, Mary. I've got everything so nicely laid out and I've embroidered you a tablecloth - it was your mother, Charles, who gave me the idea so I'm afraid you'll have a veritable cornucopia of tablecloths now, if one can have a cornucopia of non-edible things which now I think about it doesn't seem quite right, but then a tablecloth is connected to eating after all, so I dare say it will do, and it's really such an intensely satisfying word to say."
Mary murmured something unintelligible and passed into the kitchen to put on the stove for tea, in what her husband would later teasingly term a cowardly act of betrayal and abandonment. He remained to make stilted conversation in response to sincere enquiries as to his mother's and sister's health.
Peter came to his rescue by politely suggesting the restitution of his car keys, which Charles was only too happy to hand over with suitable words of thanks. "I trust that you've treated Mrs Merdle just as you have Mary," Peter remarked drily and Charles assured him that although he had taken slightly greater care of Mary than of the car, his brother-in-law could have no reason to complain of his treatment of either.
"Now, Charles, come and look at where my maid has stacked all the wedding presents," the Dowager Duchess said, steering him towards the back wall whose book cases were completely obscured by an enormous stack of presents. "Almost all of them will be things that Mary doesn't want, I dare say, but there you are."
Mary came back into the room, mistress of herself once again. "Oh, dear, it'll take simply ages to open them all. But the wallpaper's terribly nice," she said, pleased. "Just the thing for the proportions of the room. Thank you for the supplies, Mother. It's too ridiculous but I hadn't given any thought at all to what we would eat today."
"I wouldn't call it ridiculous, my dear, under all the circumstances," the Dowager Duchess replied, and mother and daughter exchanged a glance of perfect understanding. Mary came to stand next to Charles and automatically he placed his hand lightly at her waist. Mary smiled in perfect happiness, and she looked with great affection at both her mother and brother. All the same, she did not invite them to a second cup of tea.