The library was quiet, just the crackle of the fire in the grate breaking the silence. Mary looked pensively across at Tom on the sofa opposite, more relaxed in his stance now everyone else had retired to their beds for the evening and it was just the two of them.
'So, you're set on this Boston adventure of yours then?'
He switched his gaze from the fire to her face. 'I am. You know I am.'
'Why? Are you so very miserable here?' she asked, part of her dreading him saying yes.
'No, of course, I'm not. But it's a good opportunity for me. I can make something of myself in America.'
'You've made something of yourself here,' she countered immediately.
Tom acknowledged that with a small tip of his head. 'I know, but this would be something I've done on my own, not because the boss is my father-in-law.'
'Don't be silly, Tom. You're the best agent we've ever had. You've brought the estate kicking and screaming into the 20th century, and you've done it mostly against Papa's will. I don't think it's overstating it to say it's because of you that Downton hasn't already gone to the wall like so many other estates like ours,' Mary said firmly, noting how he shifted uncomfortably at her praise. 'You know, I think you are quite the cleverest man I know.'
'Oh, I don't know about that, Mary, kind of you as it is to say so,' Tom said, deflecting the compliment.
'You're certainly the most well-read man I've ever known. I can quite safely say I've never known anyone who is quite as voracious a reader as you.'
'I believe it's important to educate yourself, open yourself to ideas and innovations. Don't you?' Tom asked, even though he knew Mary was not as avid a reader as he was.
'Do you know, your reading habit was one of the very first things I knew about you,' she mused, thinking back to when he first came to Downton before the Great War. 'Every time I opened Papa's ledger in the library to sign out a novel, there you were, whole lists of books with your name next to them. Branson, Branson, Branson, Branson, Branson. I always wondered where you found the time to read them.'
Tom smiled, remembering those days. 'I had a cottage of my own and no-one to talk to unless I stayed for dinner in the servants' hall. All I had was time. And I always had a book stashed in the car when I drove any of you anywhere. I could get through whole chapters when you were in Madame Swann's.'
'So, you were broadening your mind while we were buying dresses and fripperies,' Mary said, gazing thoughtfully across at him. 'I wish I'd known you better back then.'
Tom chuckled, not buying that for a moment. 'No, you don't. I was no more important to you then than a hat rack.'
'I'm sure that's not true,' Mary said, indignantly, raising an argumentative eyebrow as Tom gave her an amused look.
'Oh, come on. I was just the man who handed you into the car and drove you around. I doubt you even noticed me half the time. Do you even remember the first time we had a conversation that didn't centre around 'Where to, milady?'' he asked with a soft smile.
'I do actually. It was when Sybil got knocked out at the count for the Ripon by-election and you came to get me.'
'Yes, that's right,' Tom said, surprised she remembered that.
'You asked me to let you know how she was after you brought us back from Crawley House. I should have guessed then that you had designs on my sister.'
Tom gave a small laugh. 'I think it's overstating it to say I had designs on her then. I admit I was already attracted to her by then. I thought she was extraordinary as well as beautiful, but I never for one minute thought she would look twice at me, never mind return my affections. Not back then.'
'I suppose Sybil didn't see you as a hat rack, even then,' Mary said, dryly.
'No, she didn't. We started talking about politics very soon after I arrived. Well, I started talking to her about votes for women and she responded,' Tom said, his face going soft with the memory. 'She said a revolutionary chauffeur seemed unlikely and I told her I was a socialist, not a revolutionary, and I wouldn't be a chauffeur forever.'
'And you were right,' Mary said quietly, something approaching pride in her voice.
'Yes, but not in the way I thought it would happen,' Tom replied, taking a sip of his whiskey. 'None of this happened as I thought it would.'
'No, I suppose not,' Mary said, staring back at the fire, thinking of the twists and turns of both of their lives. 'Do you ever wonder…'
'Wonder what?'
'How things would have been if either or both of Matthew and Sybil had lived?'
Tom looked down at his glass, silenced for a moment by the weight of that. 'Of course, I do,' he said eventually.
'I suppose we sort of know what things would have been like if Matthew had lived. We'd started on the road to that. You and he would have worked together on the estate and I daresay that would have continued after he became the eighth Earl of Grantham.'
Tom nodded, watching her carefully. 'I suppose so. That seems a reasonable assumption anyway.'
'My life would have been very different though. I wouldn't have been joint agent with you. Matthew would have held that position or you'd have done it alone. I would have been the little wife in the background, I suppose.'
'I don't think there was ever a chance of that happening, Mary,' Tom said, with a chuckle. 'You're not cut out to be anyone's little wife. I suspect you'd have been the power behind the throne, directing things with a bit of pillow talk or a few words in the drawing room.'
'I might have been too busy with the children,' Mary said, the firelight catching an uncharacteristic sheen in her eyes. 'I think Matthew and I would have had more children. The heir and the spare. And maybe an extra spare or a daughter.'
Tom rose to his feet, crossing to sit on the sofa beside her, silently taking her hand. Mary squeezed it, fighting against the emotion thickening in her chest.
'Do you think you and Sybil would have had more children?' she asked, casting a quick glance at him.
Tom bit his lip, thinking about that. He shook his head. 'I don't know. Only if she had wanted to. I think if she'd have survived the eclampsia, I would have been terrified of her getting pregnant again.'
Mary nodded, lacing her fingers with her brother-in-law's, thinking back to the dreadful night her sister died gasping for breath only hours after giving birth to her daughter. 'I completely understand that.'
They sat in silence for a while, their hands still clasped, Tom taking another sip of whiskey.
'Do you think you would still be here at Downton? If Sybil had lived,' Mary asked, her mind going off on tangents.
'Quite possibly. We couldn't have gone back to Ireland. Perhaps the Dowager would still have suggested I become the agent for the estate. I think it's more likely we would have gone to London, though. I could have got another job as a journalist. Sybil might have returned to nursing.'
Mary looked at him in surprise. 'Even with Sybbie in the picture?'
Tom shrugged. 'She loved nursing. If she'd wanted to go back to it, we'd have found a way to manage. I can't imagine her as a lady of leisure. Can you?'
'No, I suppose not. Not Sybil.'
'And you work, even though you have George.'
Mary gave a gentle snort. 'You say that like I have any choice in the matter.'
'Of course, you have a choice. I could run Downton if you wanted to step back and do less.'
'Is that your way of telling me to back off and leave you to it?' Mary frowned, feeling a little hurt.
'No! Of course, it isn't,' Tom said, thrown by what she'd taken from his words. 'I love working alongside you. All I'm saying is that if you want to be a lady of leisure or rather a woman who works less, we could find a way to make that a reality.'
Mary pursed her lips, slightly mollified by that. 'Well, I don't want that. Working for the estate, it gives me a purpose, a reason to get out of bed every day. As hard as it can be sometimes, I love the challenge. And the satisfaction when we succeed in overcoming an obstacle or find a way to improve things, well, I don't have to tell you how good that feels.'
'No, you don't,' Tom said, his smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.
'And I love working with you too,' she said softly. 'But you're leaving, so even if I wanted to step back, I couldn't.'
Tom looked sideways at her, squeezing her hand. 'I won't leave you high and dry. I'll find a replacement before I go.'
Mary shook her head. 'I don't want to replace you, Tom.'
'But that will mean you doing more of the work yourself. You'll be busier than ever.'
'Then I suppose I had better knuckle down and get on with it then because there's certainly plenty to do,' she said with a sad smile. She tipped her head, studying him. 'You know, of all the things that have happened to us in the last five years, that is one of the things I wouldn't change if I had the chance.'
'Being joint agent with me?' Tom asked, in surprise.
'Not just being the agent. I'm talking about having you as such an integral part of my life. I wouldn't swap that for all the tea in China,' Mary said, clasping his hand harder in hers. 'In fact, I wish…'
'What?' he asked, curiously when she trailed off. 'What do you wish?'
'I wish I'd known when I met you how important you would become to me. What a mainstay of my life you would grow to be.'
Tom stared at her, complicated emotions beginning to stir inside him. 'Is that what I am? A mainstay of your life?'
Mary gazed back at him, her dark eyes serious. 'You know you are. I don't know what I'll do without you.'
Tom held her gaze. 'And if you'd known that back then, how would things have been different? Would you have let me and Sybil elope instead of chasing us down and taking her back home?'
'No, probably not,' Mary admitted. 'I still think eloping was the wrong thing for you to do.'
'Then I doubt anything would have changed.'
'Oh, I don't know. Perhaps I would have been brave like Sybil.'
Tom looked at her quizzically. 'What do you mean?'
'Perhaps you and I would have talked more on our car journeys.'
'Perhaps. Although, I can't imagine you and me talking about politics back then. What do you suppose we would have talked about?'
'I don't know, but I might have –'
Tom waited as she broke off again. 'Might have what?'
'I might have seen sooner why she fell for you like she did.'
Tom snorted in amusement. 'Ah, I see. The attraction was inexplicable until you knew I had a brain beneath the chauffeur's cap, was it?'
'No, of course not. I have got eyes you know,' Mary said, raising a teasing eyebrow. 'I know exactly why she found you attractive on a physical level. That much was blindingly obvious the minute you arrived in our lives. Sybil, Edith and I had more than one conversation about you very soon after you started driving us.'
'Did you?' Tom asked, startled by that snippet of information. 'She never told me that.'
Mary smiled broadly, amused by his surprise. 'Of course, we did. We were young women and suddenly we had a handsome, young chauffeur driving us around instead of the arthritic, old codger we'd had before. Of course, we discussed you. In some depth as I recall.'
'Well, that's... that's news to me,' Tom said, feeling a bit awkward.
'We all thought you were good-looking. We all rather appreciated the improved view from the back seat,' Mary said, enjoying watching him squirm a little with embarrassment at the thought of the three Crawley sisters discussing his physical attributes. 'But actually talking to the chauffeur, well, that was not how we were brought up.'
'And yet Sybil talked to me.'
'Yes, she did. I think she felt more able to kick against the social strictures than either Edith or I, certainly more than I did. Possibly because she was the baby of the family and there were fewer expectations on her shoulders.'
'Were there? I know she felt hemmed in by this life you all grew up in. Even before the war, she was interested in the wider world.'
'Ah, but Sybil never had her life mapped out for her. Not to the extent I did, anyway. Oh, I know she was expected to marry well and have babies like the rest of us, but I always felt she was freer than I was.'
'I'm not sure that's true, otherwise there wouldn't have been the hullaballoo there was when she and I fell in love.'
'Oh, Tom, darling, don't be so naïve,' Mary said, giving him a look. 'There was always going to be a hullaballoo when Lord Grantham's youngest daughter married the family chauffeur. But it would have been much worse if you'd married the eldest daughter, believe me.'
Tom grinned. 'Well, that was never likely to happen, was it? Not when you never even spoke to me.'
Mary looked at him thoughtfully. 'You know, sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had spoken to you. If I'd got to know you then as well as I know you now.'
'Do you?'
'Yes. I wonder if, well...'
'What?'
'I wonder if I might not have given Sybil a run for her money,' Mary said, glancing up at him through her lashes.
Tom stared at her, hardly believing what he was hearing. 'You don't mean that, Mary.'
'Don't I?'
'You would never have looked twice at me.'
'But I did. I did look twice. I've just told you that. You and your handsome face were the subject of much girlish gossip. I just never took the extra steps like Sybil did. Because that was not part of the roadmap of my life. I was supposed to marry the heir. First Patrick, then Matthew. My life was mapped out for me.'
'And it would never have included a torrid affair with the chauffeur,' Tom said, trying to make a joke of it, lessen the tension suddenly swirling around them. 'That would have been quite the dramatic deviation from the roadmap.'
Mary glanced across at him, a hesitant look on her face. 'It might have if I'd got to know you then as I know you now,' she said, softly. 'If I'd seen sooner what Sybil did.'
Tom swallowed, nervously licking his lips. 'I wasn't the same man back then.'
'No, you were more of a firebrand then, I know that. You told me all about your thwarted attempt to chuck slop over the army general at the dining table, remember? But you still have fire in your belly now, even if some of your rough edges are smoother now.'
'Sybil… losing Sybil changed me,' he said, his voice low. 'You know how lost I was without her.'
'I do. And I watched you scrape yourself together and pick yourself up. I marvelled at how you did it. I still do.'
'You did it too,' he said, quietly. 'After Matthew.'
'Yes, I did, and it almost killed me. But I was surrounded by familiar things and familiar people. I didn't have to worry about anything except whether I could get out of bed every day. You didn't have that luxury. You were in a foreign world, with foreign customs, with nothing familiar around you,' Mary said, dipping her head slightly to catch his eyes. 'I can't tell you how much I admired you, Tom, for getting through it like you did. And you never once lost your sense of self, of who you are.'
'I don't know about that,' he said, casting his eyes down at his glass. 'I feel very different now to the man I was back then. I'm not sure he would recognise me anymore. And I can't help but think that he would not approve of me and the life I've built. I mean look at me now, working to save inherited estates instead of plotting how to tear them down.'
'You've done what you've had to do to survive, to keep going after losing her' Mary said, gently. 'For you, for Sybbie. Sybil would be so proud of you.'
'Do you really think so?' Tom asked, a sheen now in his eyes. 'Sometimes, I wonder.'
'I don't,' Mary said, rubbing her thumb over his. 'I know she would. She wanted you to move forward and that's what you've done. Look at how respected you are. Look at how Mama and Papa love you now, their Irish republican firebrand of a son-in-law. Look at how Granny – Granny, Tom – places her trust in you. Look at your daughter, your beautiful, sweet, happy daughter. If you measure your success by nothing else, measure it by Sybbie.'
Tom stared at her, emotion washing through him. 'Thank you, Mary. That means a lot to me.'
'I mean every word of it. And I mean it when I say I don't know what I'll do without you,' Mary said, her voice catching a little. 'You've been my anchor these past few years. Without you, I fear I may have become like a ghost haunting the rooms of this house, mourning my lost love.'
Tom shook his head. 'I don't think that's true, Mary. You're too strong a personality for that to happen.'
'Maybe, but it was you who helped me find my way back to life. You showed me the path.'
'I was just returning the favour,' he said, softly. 'You and Matthew were there to help me after Sybil.'
'We were,' Mary acknowledged, 'but you didn't need us the way I needed you. You found a way to climb out of the pit of despair with only a little help from us. You practically had to come down into my pit and drag me kicking and screaming out of it. And I will be eternally grateful you did.'
'I love you, Mary,' he said, simply. 'I don't want to see you suffering.'
'But that's just it. I don't think you did love me then. Not like you do now. I maybe wasn't the haughty, disapproving sister-in-law you knew when you first married Sybil by then, but we hadn't got to where we are now. But you still went out of your way to help me.'
Tom tipped his head back against the sofa, turning that over in his mind. 'Maybe that's true. I felt I owed it to Matthew to look after you after his kindness to me. But I also knew what you were going through. It was only just over a year since I lost Sybil. It was still raw enough for me to feel your pain. I couldn't stand by and watch you go through that and do nothing.'
Mary studied his face, her eyes almost caressing his features. 'Do you ever wonder what our relationship would be like if Matthew and Sybil had lived?'
'No, not really,' he said, honestly. 'I'm not much of a one for what ifs.'
'I do, which probably surprises you. I'm hardly known for my flights of whimsy or sentimentality,' she said, giving a wry smile at his startled expression. 'But I think we would have been nothing more than polite in-laws, especially if you and Sybil had moved away from Downton.'
'Oh, I don't know about that,' he started.
'No, I think we would. Even if you'd stayed here as the agent, you would have been far more involved with Matthew than with me. I think we forged this bond we have now in the fires of grief and tempered it with the challenges we've faced together.'
Tom smiled at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling with affection. 'My, that's almost verging on poetic, Mary.'
'What I'm saying, Tom, is that as awful as the things we've endured have been, I am grateful that on the other side of it all, it's brought me you,' Mary said, earnestly, her eyes locked on his. 'My anchor, my partner, my best friend.'
'You know you are all of those things to me as well,' Tom said, his voice little more than a husky whisper.
Mary nodded slowly, gathering her courage. 'And is that all we are to each other, do you think? Or could there be more?'
Tom gazed at her, his heart pumping faster. 'More?'
'Between us,' Mary said, unnecessarily, moving slightly closer to him. 'Because the thought of you going to America is breaking my heart.'
'Is it?' he whispered, tightening his grip on her hand.
'Yes. Clean in two.'
Tom stared at her, his eyes raking over her face. 'We'll stay in touch, Mary. I'll write to you, I promise.'
'I know you will, but it won't be the same as having you here. Seeing you every day. Talking to you.'
'No, I suppose it won't.'
Mary gazed at him, sadness seeping through her. 'I feel like I'm losing you, Tom.'
He shook his head. 'No, you're not. You'll never lose me.'
'I will. You'll fall in love with some American girl and that will be it. You'll never come home.'
'I won't fall in love with an American girl.'
'You will. And you should. You deserve to be happy. I want you to be happy. I just wish you could be happy here,' Mary said quietly, that sheen back in her eyes.
Tom bit his lip, his eyes fixed on her. 'I won't fall in love with an American girl, Mary.'
'You don't know that.'
'I do know that.'
'You don't. You can't. And there'll be a queue of women waiting to snap you up in Boston, you mark my words,' Mary asserted, trying hard to keep her voice light.
Tom smiled. 'I doubt that. I'm hardly Rudolph Valentino.'
'I'd choose you over Rudolph Valentino any day of the week,' Mary muttered, her eyes firmly on her glass.
Tom turned his head to look at her, his pulse hitching. Mary braved a glance at him, and he squeezed her hand.
'I won't fall in love with an American girl, Mary, because I have a weakness for a certain type of woman and it's not American girls,' he said softly. 'It's dark-haired, upper-class English women.'
'Sybil,' Mary said, with a small sigh.
'Not just Sybil,' he confessed, taking a leap of faith.
Mary stared at him, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. 'Not… you… you… do you mean… do you mean me?'
'Well, as fond of her as I am, I don't mean your mother,' Tom said, making a weak joke as he wondered whether he'd misread everything and made a huge mistake.
'Well, no, because she's American, not English,' Mary said, inching closer to him. 'And I can't think of anyone else you know who meets that description.'
'Oh, God, Mary, of course, I mean you. We both know that, so if I've got this all wrong and made a colossal fool of myself, please tell me now and put me out of my misery,' Tom said in a desperate rush, caving under the pressure.
Mary moved even closer, cupping her hand under his chin. 'The only colossally foolish thing you've done is booking your passage to Boston when you should be staying right here with the people who love you the most.'
'The people who love me the most?' he asked carefully.
'The person who loves you the most,' she clarified, blushing slightly.
'And who would that be?' he whispered, hardly daring to hope.
'Me, you colossal fool,' she said, leaning forward to kiss him.
