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The blow fell by degrees.
It began, she supposed later, with the moment she dropped her teacup. From that moment on, Mary was uneasy in her own skin. The chill didn't leave. She felt nauseated from the moment she woke until the moment she fell asleep. Her hands shook, she dropped things, she jumped at sudden noises. She was irritable, she perspired. It went on for days.
There was no reason to think anything was wrong. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. She rose, had breakfast, helped out, had luncheon, walked, had tea, dressed, had dinner. Nothing had changed.
Except she was so cold.
Things moved quicker once they received news of William.
There was still no word from Matthew—no letter from him and no telegram from the War Office, three days after she dropped her teacup.
Nobody else had an inkling—and truthfully neither did Mary—until Mr Mason wrote to Mr Carson with news of his telegram. William, gravely wounded, was on his way back to England, specifically to Leeds. Mary had been present when Carson relayed the news to Papa and she saw the question flash across Papa's face and the way his gaze turned to her, just for a moment.
This time she was holding her teacup with two hands and barely a quiver. Her equilibrium, such as it was, was back under her control—even if she did shiver while sat next to the fire.
The others exclaimed their sorrow for Mr Mason and about the shame that William couldn't come to Downton to be treated. Mary stayed quiet, keeping her chin up and the teacup still, even as Granny made plans and Edith followed like a faithful puppy and Papa and Mama said out loud that they were sure Matthew was well even as their eyes said something else.
Matthew was probably safe and well in France—as far as possible—he was just busy. With William injured, Mama reasoned, he would have so much more to do, and so much responsibility to shoulder for his men and their families. Perhaps there hadn't been time to send a letter before, Papa suggested, or perhaps he was with Isobel in France or even Lavinia in London, but Matthew would know they'd have heard about William and he would send word. News would come with the evening post, even just a quick note, they were sure. After all, they hadn't had a telegram.
For one more afternoon and evening, Mary endeavoured to believe them. They had been here before after all, only months ago, in a state of dread until Matthew and William had strolled into the concert and Matthew had locked eyes with her from across the great hall and joined her in a duet. It had been a fantasy straight from a wartime dream, and it would be so again before long.
William was on his way home, and word of Matthew would follow.
It didn't arrive that evening, nor with the morning post the following day, but Granny had pulled some strings and by the afternoon William was dying in a temporarily vacant bedroom. (Mary was briefly pleased for him that Isobel was not here to object too strenuously to a room not being used for one of the system-sanctioned officers. It was a great comfort to Mary to know that Granny still had the absolute power to command things to her liking even in the face of sprawling modern bureaucracy.)
William was being attended and nursed by Edith, Mrs Patmore and the kitchen maid—Mary couldn't immediately recall her name but made sure to ask Anna after the gong—but Mary wished to speak with him in private. Before dinner on his first night in the house, when Edith was with Anna and the kitchen staff otherwise occupied, Mary knocked at his door and slipped in.
William sought to push himself up his pillows in lieu of standing but Mary shook her head. She waved off the pleasantries as he greeted her with, "Good evening, m'lady."
Perched in the chair recently vacated by Mr Mason, Mary wanted to tell William he looked well. She searched for some small word of comfort for this boy she had known for half a decade—this boy who loved his mother and horses and his country, and was his father's only living child. William's face was more grey than white, the same colour as his pyjamas, and each breath was an audible effort. Nothing honest and still kind bubbled to her lips and she would not insult him by wasting what precious time and energy he had left on empty platitudes.
She took his hand with a smile that she meant to be kind; war had only further honed that innate skill of her class. "Do you have news of Mr Crawley, William?"
Mary was struck by the wheezing effort as William gathered enough breath to speak. "You've not had a telegram then, m'lady?"
Mary swallowed. "No, nothing to say all is well, or…"
William wheezed again. He looked so tired. It felt contagious.
"He was in front of me, m'lady," he said, struggling to manage more than a few words together, "when the shell hit." William's hand flexed in hers and Mary realized she was holding it too tightly. She let go.
"Where is he now? Was he wounded?"
"He—" William started, but was interrupted by a fit of coughing that seemed to rattle his bones.
Mary looked about for the ewer and poured a glass of water, and helped him to drink when his struggle eased. When he lay back against the pillows again, his face was paler still. Mary didn't suppose she looked much better; her eyes stung like she'd been walking headlong for hours into a January gale.
"I don't know, m'lady, 'm sorry, I don't."
When Mary stood, smoothing down the blankets like William was an infant being tucked in by his mother, she felt heavier than before she sat, like the earth was pulling her bones down and she had to fight to stay free. She thanked William and wished him goodnight, slipping out as quietly as she came.
She fell apart silently on the landing, but she allowed herself only a moment before going down to dinner.
The following morning, Mary realised she must go to London.
Anna said that the insufferable Mrs Bates had been ranting and raving downstairs and threatening to expose Mary's shame to the newspapers. The thought was not as terrifying as it might have been, three days ago. Perhaps Kemal Pamuk had not been one of her foremost problems for some years now but he remained a threat. It was just harder to care.
Still, Mary Crawley was not now and never had been helpless, whatever might be happening in France, so she used what she had. She went to London.
She made her case to Sir Richard in his office. She told him the whole ugly story, leaving out nothing of importance. If she was almost preternaturally still and calm and pale and steady, it was only because she was frozen inside. The ice in her spine held her upright so she couldn't crumble. The cold numbed; she felt nothing.
When she returned, they still hadn't heard. Bates had gone and Anna was a ghost, but no news of Matthew.
A whole day passed before they received a telegram at Crawley House. Molesley brought it up and it felt like the world ended. It didn't end in August 1914, but August 1918.
Matthew was Missing In Action, officially, not seen since the first day of the battle when William was wounded.
Papa busied himself with the telephone, seeking more information, trying to reach Isobel. Edith wept for a moment but she had errands to run for the soldiers and arrangements to make for William's wedding later to the kitchen maid—Daisy—in the afternoon. Mama was always busy now, as was Sybil. So Mary walked alone in the garden.
As she walked, she thought.
She found herself in the spot where they quarreled at the garden party, lifetimes ago.
It was strange. She couldn’t have seen him for more than ten days since the beginning of the war, but there was a void now, a chasm in her family and future. For a few happy moments one evening in 1916, there had been hope—before Edith sprayed her venom—but Mary had had no claim to Matthew since the summer of 1914 when she hesitated and let him go.
So how could she feel so empty? What had she really lost?
She had been warned: tell him, tell him how you feel in case—
But she hadn't thought, she never really thought—
She pressed her hand to her mouth and crumpled into the grass.
That evening, Papa arranged to catch the last train from York to London to tell Lavinia face to face. Mary's family showed uncharacteristic tact by not suggesting Mary accompany him—even Edith held her tongue—but Mama suggested she send a note, and Mary agreed.
When Mary sat down to write—they weren't changing tonight, with only Mama, Edith and Mary for dinner after such a day—she could not find her words. What was there to say? In the end, she said nothing, and Mary couldn't bring herself to care about her mother's look of disappointment.
William passed before midnight, with his wife and father at his side.
Mary prayed for him. She prayed for all of them, and then she prayed for herself.
Nobody seemed to wear black any more except for the deepest bereavements, for sons and husbands—not cousins. Nobody had time for that kind of mourning—the ritual, rites and seclusion. It would feel callous to joke about the absurdity of it out loud, but some women wouldn't leave mourning for years at a time if they followed the old rules. Sybil was right—it did feel like every man they ever danced with was dead.
And yet how else could one express their sorrow? Months of black followed by further months of mauve and grey showed the world without having to talk about it. The formal, regimented letters and notices and the funeral disseminated that knowledge without anyone having to say the words.
Mary wasn’t certain that this was grief. The clenching of a fist under her breast was a constant companion but she wasn't sure it was quite grief, nor anxiety nor terror. Or perhaps it was some venomous cocktail of them all, and the antidote was news that may never come.
Mary wished she could mourn Matthew as a fiancé, as Lavinia would. In a world where everyone from the King to the lowliest kitchen maid or hall boy was bereaved, how could any one person show how special their man at the front was? This problem seemed the embodiment of all the jagged edges in Mary's life: that Matthew was gone, or maybe he wasn't, that he wasn't hers, that she was somebody else's now, and all that meant for her future.
(It was in the paper for Papa to spit at over breakfast on the morning after his return: Mary was someone else's fiancée now.)
Anna seemed to anticipate this quandary without Mary ever needing to articulate it. (Anna was mourning too, in her own way, for her snatched future with Bates, but Mary did not have the capacity for more than basic kindness just yet. It may return—with Matthew, she thought—but for now she would live up to her reputation and be selfish and cold. She lacked the energy for anything else.)
When Mary's clothes were set out for morning or evening, they were understated, simple, half-mourning for Mary's half grief. It wasn't black crêpe de chine and jet jewellery, but it was mauve and grey and pearls, simple and modest, as far as any of Mary's wardrobe could be described in such a way.
As she adjusted her necklace in the mirror, the one she had worn to entertain the Duke of Crowborough during life before Matthew—she had had one, she reminded herself—she wondered when she would return to colours. She didn't long for it as she once had.
This disquiet in her soul made Mary feel as though she would float away in a strong gust, or sink into the earth with another blow. It was like not knowing if the sun would rise in the morning; she didn't know if Matthew was under a French field or in a field hospital or in Germany or England or on the moon. The basic forces of the earth felt wrong, off-kilter, even as life rattled on. With Patrick, there was an end date to prescribed grief, the anticipation of a return to normality, to life after. She suddenly, achingly longed for that clarity, for the certainty and regimented sorrow of before the war. She ached for truth.
Patrick was missing and never found, but at least they knew.
Except perhaps they didn't, because some chancing fool was tugging on Edith's swollen heartstrings and claiming to be Patrick Crawley, and Mary was suddenly wading across a river of rage that was almost a welcome relief from drowning in sodden anguish.
It would be so tidy, wouldn't it, if Matthew were to be displaced by a senior heir magically back from the dead? Papa hadn't summoned the new heir yet although he'd made enquiries. Like what felt like every man of their generation, he was away at war. Why bother if this new cousin was going to be blown up like—
Mary cut that thought off sharply. Anyway, she would not put up with this carpetbagging impostor with his trite fairytales of governesses and ponies, and his wanton disrespect to Matthew. It gave her a purpose, something to do with her time other than carrying linen, writing letters and waiting for the war to be over.
She poked holes, crafted arguments, trying to gouge her way to the truth, and it worked when the interloper eventually absconded leaving only some mysterious and ambiguous note. Edith moped more than normal but Mary didn’t care; she should have had the sense not to get attached, and not to believe such a hackneyed story. At least Mary had a real love to grieve, their real cousin—a true hero, not an impostor or a thief. Good riddance.
Summer ended and autumn came. Life continued, and they still didn't know. Papa received a letter from Isobel; she remained with the Red Cross in France, perhaps also searching the face of every man she met for her son.
Mary spent her days surrounded by officers, wounded in service of King and empire and now home safe, if not necessarily well. In every new batch of arrivals at the hospital or the Abbey, Mary peered into each face looking for Matthew's eyes. Every time, she was irrationally disappointed and she felt herself grow a degree colder, retreating just a little further from the world. The magma of her rage cooled until it solidified into rocks in her gut, crushing her from the inside and pulling her down into the earth.
The house was alive in a way rivalled only by the grandest of pre-war dinners. That elegant world of candles, crystal and silver felt a thousand years away in both directions, and that made her slow realisation easier to bear:
Downton Abbey may have been her home for now, but it would never be hers. Mary would now never be the Countess of Grantham—unless she married the chimney sweep from Solihull. That absolute certainty that had been the steel in her spine since she was a very small girl, since Grandpapa and Granny's time, was gone, melted away. First, there had been Patrick, then the Great Matter, then Matthew, but Mary had always known she would be Countess of Grantham until now.
Instead Lady Mary Crawley would become Lady Mary Carlisle. Perhaps one day she would be a peeress, but perhaps not. (Perhaps Matthew would have been Lord Chancellor, but life had denied him that and perhaps every other opportunity. Who knew what the future held?) The only certainty was that she would leave Downton and its centuries of history and go to preside over the empty carcass of Haxby Park as Sir Richard reanimated it in his vulgar fashion, all prestige, plumbing and penalties.
Would her family go the same way, she wondered, without Matthew, without Patrick, without her?
In the grief of everything else, of everyone else, the question of her future title seemed irrelevant, the zenith of meaninglessness, but it was something else to mourn for. A childhood certainty, blown away by a German shell.
The Battle of Amiens emerged as the beginning of the end. It became increasingly clear that the war was drawing to a close—that it would only be weeks or perhaps days until it was over. The end of the war felt like a day of reckoning for Mary.
She would have to set a date with Sir Richard for a post-war, post-rationing affair, but the nausea in her belly told her that they would finally know. If Matthew didn't come home, they would finally know.
The day came. Papa received a telegram that it was all over, giving advance notice of the exact moment of the armistice. On the morning of the eleventh, they gathered in the hall: every member of the family, every officer, every nurse, every servant. As the clock struck eleven, they bowed their heads and observed a moment of silence.
Mary was relieved, and she was disappointed. She had come to the precipice but had not fallen to the rocks below. She was still here. Matthew was not.
He smiled at her behind her closed eyes.
Eventually, in early 1919, they held a memorial service.
Isobel had returned home from her work in Paris. Lavinia came to stay. Mary could not bring herself to call on them beforehand, and they had declined Mama's invitations to dinner.
There were still soldiers in the house but they were drifting and dwindling away as their health recovered and their families claimed them. (P. Gordon had been the first to go.) People and newspapers spoke of a return to normality but Mary could not understand what they meant. She wasn’t the only one.
At the service in the village, Mary sat in the second pew of the village church, ensconced between Edith and Sir Richard. They had set the date; they would be married in July at this very altar, with Mary wearing white instead of black, and with arrangements of roses instead of lilies.
There was no further reason to delay, no reason left to hope. News wasn't coming. Matthew wasn't coming home. This service was in many ways a declaration that they had given up hope. There was no news, no body, and negligible hope. Perhaps weaker women might dream, but the women of Downton were not so frail—certainly not Mary.
They were not the only family who had no body of their fallen son to bury—no men had been repatriated since 1915; the only ones buried in England were those who survived long enough to come home—but the absence even of his confirmed death led to a service marked with some awkwardness, trying to walk a tightrope over a sea of uncertainty and ambiguity. It was just one more flavour of pain, as they sang their hymns and Papa gave a reading.
It didn't feel like a proper goodbye.
Mary sat directly behind Lavinia, who spent the service weeping into Mary's handkerchief, borrowed on the slow walk up the gravel path, and clutching Isobel's hand.
Mary had no hand to hold.
The following day, Mary called at Crawley House. She pretended she had come to repeat Mama's invitation to dinner, but mostly she had come to see Isobel. Lavinia was sleeping and Mary wouldn't wake her, but she sat with Isobel as they sipped their tea and said little. What was there to say? Mama, Edith and Granny might try to cajole Isobel out of her grief, but Mary had more respect for her than that.
"When your only child dies," Isobel said, "you're not a mother any more. That's what I'm trying to get used to." Mary was not sure who or what she had been, but she certainly understood the struggle to adjust.
Before Mary left, Isobel asked, "Would you like to take something of his?"
Mary didn't know what to say, but reflexive manners brought automatic thanks to her throat and she found herself climbing the stairs to go to Matthew's bedroom. It was an intimacy that was almost unimaginable, to pass that invisible but solid boundary of propriety and custom at the bottom of the stairs. On the landing, something in the thought that this was his place, the place where all that remained of his life was stored, sent her hand flying to her mouth and she pressed it there to hold the cry in.
Matthew's bedroom was tidy but lived-in, so clearly the room of a diligent, practical man who should have come home to his mother and his future wife and instead disappeared from the surface of the earth. There was a sturdy but unsophisticated writing desk against the far wall. Isobel stayed on the threshold as Mary crossed the room. Some of his effects had been returned from France and there they sat on the desk, a box of letters and his shaving kit and small framed photographs of Isobel and Lavinia.
Mary looked for her good luck charm. It wasn't there—of course it wasn't. She looked up to hold the tears in her eyes, not wanting to make a show of herself in front of Isobel. There, directly before her but unseen until then, was a neat row of well-loved books. Her eyes went directly to Ovid's Metamorphoses in two volumes without understanding the significance, and she took the first down from the shelf with cold fingers and it fell open in her palm. It was in the original Latin and indecipherable to Mary but her eyes were drawn to the words Andromedan and Perseus and she would have laughed if she was sure she wouldn't also sob. She took the other volume down too, incomprehensible though they may be, and returned to Isobel. Neither woman was weeping but Mary recognised the mirrored tears held back.
With a kiss on the cheek for Isobel and her sincerest thanks, Mary went home.
Mary had always been a pragmatist and she married Richard anyway. It wasn't everything marriage could have been, and he wasn't everything a husband could have been, but it was the best she could hope for in the wreckage of her youth—damaged goods, true love lost, desperately seeking a bearable future.
The wedding was grand but cold.
Matthew was there, wherever she turned, all day. He was in the sadness behind Papa's eyes as she came down the stairs, in Mama's lingering kiss on her cheek. Isobel was still in sober half-mourning and Matthew was present in Isobel's lilac dress and the way she dabbed her eyes at the service.
The wedding was Carson's last grand occasion at Downton. It was splendid and flawless and Mary found a moment to thank him before they left for their honeymoon. When they returned, Carson would be there at Haxby Park to greet them.
Richard spent most of his time in London and Mary was free to do as she pleased. All alone with plenty of money and a house in Eaton Square, she'd once dreamed. Close enough.
She purchased a painting of Perseus, Andromeda and Cetus. It hung in the library—she could hardly have displayed it in her private sitting room without comment. The first volume of Matthew’s copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was perpetually in her bedside table, the second was the first book in the library.
Her papa raised an eyebrow when he saw the painting but passed no comment. Carson cleared his throat and looked as though he had something serious to say when she came to inspect the fitters’ work. Mary thought that if she had dropped the mask for even an instant, to have given him the smallest opening, she would have been wrapped in his embrace as if she were a little girl again. It was wondrous, to Mary, to know that Lady Mary Carlisle still had the most stalwart of her protectors when so much else had been lost or left behind.
In the afternoons at Haxby, she looked up at the painting as she drank her tea. She wondered how she got it all so wrong. She had exposed herself to the sea monster in his London office and the ocean had slain Perseus, or at least swallowed him whole and swept him to foreign shores, never to return.
She put her tea down before she broke another cup.
O, you do not deserve these chains, but those that link ardent lovers together, said Perseus in Mary's new English translation.
In 1912, she had thought—
Oh, what did it matter now what she thought so long ago? This Andromeda deserved her chains.
I was foolish, and I was paid out for my folly.
In the autumn of 1920, a year into her marriage, she read in one Richard’s papers of plans to bury an unknown soldier from the battlefields of France in Westminster Abbey. She followed the story closely, turning the pages each morning until she found an update so it was the first thing she read as she ate breakfast in bed—but only once her new maid had been dismissed. Sir Richard did not need to know what she was reading beyond the fact that it was his newspaper.
(Carson continued to rule with an iron rod and Mary had absolute faith in him, but Mary's husband was suspiciously well informed about her activities.)
Richard had needled her, at first, about her sentimental interest in the story, but Mary saw through his sneers to the jealousy underneath. "You won," she spat. "If you want to be a gentleman, learn to be gracious about it."
She had realised by now that he would never learn to be a gentleman—Matthew had set her standards too high—but Richard dropped the subject and she saw still less of him that autumn.
On the morning of Armistice Day 1920, Mary read about the soldier's journey so far.
The body was in an oak casket from the trees of Hampton Court Palace and draped with the Union flag. It was drawn with full ceremony through France, accompanied by schoolchildren, soldiers, wreaths and music. It was saluted by Marshal Foch and the French Army as it was carried aboard the HMS Verdun, piped aboard with an admiral’s call, then escorted to Dover by six battleships. It was greeted in England by a 19-gun field marshal’s salute and transported by train to Victoria Station, London.
That morning, the casket would make its final journey through London. Mary would be among the crowds.
She went directly to the Abbey. The crowds were as dense and solid and black as the wet earth piled on a grave, but the crowd melted to allow her through and she found herself a perfectly unobstructed view of the Abbey’s entrance. (She did not qualify for entrance, Earl's daughter or no. She had not lost enough.)
Over the sombre noiselessness of the crowd, Mary heard the Field Marshal’s salute being fired from Hyde Park, and some time later she heard the rattle of the wheels of the gun carriage and the marching footsteps of the funeral procession. The King, his ministers and his family were at the unveiling of the new Cenotaph, which would be the final part of the procession before they reached the Abbey.
As Big Ben struck eleven, London was plunged into an unearthly silence. There were no birds, no motors, none of the general din and clamour of London. The only sounds were concealed coughs and a lone woman sobbing some distance away. A nearby kind soul muffled those sobs in the shoulder of their coat.
Mary wasn't alone in it—in any of it—for all that she didn't know any of her fellow witnesses.
The procession when it came was long and dignified, with all the glory and grandeur and respect that a prince might command, and Mary could not control her trembling as the organ started to play from inside the Abbey. Mary watched with all the solemn dignity she could muster as the coffin passed before her, flanked by its honour guard. It was carried into the Abbey, followed by the King and princes, and the carriage drove away. Inside the Abbey were one hundred women, each of whom had lost their husband and all their sons.
After the service, Mary joined thousands of others, filing past the grave and wondering—hoping—that it was her lost man, her Matthew, buried amongst kings.
It was nothing less than he deserved.