Work Text:
“When did you arrive?” Mary asked as she stepped into the room, striding with the false confidence she had been taught to use since she was small. She kept her nose high, not wanting to show any weakness or anger, or even grief.
Her grandmother lifted her head, breathing in. “Yesterday evening. I spent the night before in Southampton and an entire day on trains,” she smiled ruefully. “So I’ve come hotfoot.”
“If you’re here to reprimand me about Edith, please don’t,” she pleaded, moving to stand behind the chair opposite of her grandmother. She hardly wanted to look at the matriarch for fear of seeing disappointment. “Tom’s already torn me into strips.”
Tom, Tom, Tom. He was all she could think about these days! She didn’t even know why, much less how to make it stop!
“Why did you do it?” Granny quietly demanded.
“I don’t know! She was so —” She extended her hands and made a face, unsure of how to describe her sister. “Anyway, I’m sorry now.”
“You should be!”
“With Edith, I just say things, and then they can’t be unsaid.” Mary sighed. She was in quite the pickle and she hadn’t the foggiest of how to get out of it.
Her grandmother wet her lips. “Tom believes you’re unhappy. That’s why you lash out as you do.”
Mary scoffed. “Look, if this is about Henry Talbot, you should be clear he hasn’t much to offer. Bertie Hexham is lost, but not Henry.” She moved from the chair and paced to the other side of the room. A wave of irritation flooded her body. “He’s wellborn, but there’s no money or position. He’s not even a countryman — not really. He grew up in London!”
“He shoots?” Violet asked.
“Yes, he shoots! Like every social-climbing banker shoots,” she cried. She thought back to Tom being excluded from some of those events.
“Well, let’s leave his credentials to one side for a moment and concentrate on what is important,” she said slowly. Despite how smoothly she usually transitioned into difficult topics, this one seemed to be an issue for her.
“Which is?” Mary asked impatiently.
Violet took a deep breath before continuing. “Tom says that he is in love with you, and that you are in love with him.”
The dirty backstabber.
Mary would have to throttle him the next time she saw him. At the moment, she wasn’t too worried about losing his friendship. With the way he was treating her, he was already doing it himself.
Trying to keep calm, she asked, “Do you believe him?”
“Do you deny it?” She gave her an incredulous eye.
“Henry Talbot is the last person I want!”
Violet sighed and lifted her hand to stop Mary from continuing. “You misunderstood me, my dear,” she said, closing her eyes. “While he may believe you are in love with Mr. Talbot…” She trailed off for a moment and shook her head. “Well, I’m afraid you may want to sit down.”
Mary scoffed. She felt like having a toddler-sized meltdown. “For what? I’m not in love with Henry. I never will be! Why is that so hard for Tom to understand?” she growled, throwing her hands in the air.
“It’s not that simple. In fact, it’s rather complicated.”
“How, exactly, is it rather —?” Mary asked as she turned her head back, sucking her teeth. She opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn’t: Hauntingly sharp eyes bore into hers.
“It’s rather complicated,” Violet said slowly, “because it was Tom who confessed to being in love with you.”
“No,” she breathed. Her knees buckled. She barely made it into the nearest chair — that sentence couldn’t have been right. “You aren’t serious, Granny…”
“I am quite serious. I’ve even brought the letter to show you.” Violet bent down and picked up the folded paper Mary hadn’t even noticed had been by her foot. She flipped it out as soon as she had it.
Mary was barely able to take the paper from her grandmother. It suddenly became very hard to breathe. “This is from Tom?” she whispered. She recognized his script. It was quite obvious whom the letter was from. Why had she even asked?
“Yes, it is. You needn’t read the whole thing; the paragraph I’m speaking of is near the bottom.”
She nodded. She swallowed. “Yes. Yes, alright.” She scanned the page immediately, looking for some kind of indication rather than a blunt statement. There was no way this was real. There was no way this was happening, not now — not after he spent nearly every waking hour trying to force Henry on her. It would have made no sense. None whatsoever. Granny was just confused, that was all.
But still, despite her best efforts, she saw what she was trying not to.
…and even though I’ve fallen in love with Mary, I believe she, herself, is in love with Henry Talbot. They can be very happy together — if only she was brave enough to let it happen…
The page became blurry.
She brought a shaking hand to her mouth.
“I have no intention of upsetting you, darling, but I simply couldn’t let this go on any longer,” Violet’s voice came distantly. “You’ve both been so dreadfully unhappy, rowing all the time! Letting him push you toward a man you are unsuited for is just intolerable.”
“I had no idea,” she said, voice breaking. She stood up, putting a hand to her chest. “I truly had no idea…”
A skeptical glance. “Didn’t you?”
“No!” She stifled a sob. She started pacing back and forth. “Oh, that idiot!”
“It seems he lashes out in his own way, doesn’t it?” Violet gripped her cane and stood. “What do you think about this, Mary? Do you love him?”
“I —” She stopped, shaking her head in confusion. She kept rereading the sentence, trying to understand it. It bothered her and delighted her more than she would have liked to admit. “I don’t know! I don’t. Why didn’t he say anything to me?”
She touched her shoulder. “Because he was previously married to Sybil. I suspected he had feelings for you for quite some time.”
“How? He’s not shown it!”
“Mary, my dear, you mustn’t marry anyone if you don’t want to,” Violet said seriously. She was equally sad for her, and she appreciated it greatly. It was a balm for a burning blister in her soul — she had felt so much pressure. “Nothing is requiring you to. But what you must do is talk to Tom about this, now that you know the truth.”
“What do I say, Granny? ‘I know you’re in love with me, why have you been pushing me toward another man’?” she scoffed, sarcasm lacing her words as a tear fell. She wiped it instantly. She refused to cry over this.
Violet gave her a knowing look. “Something like that, only with a far more delicate manner.”
Mary looked back at the paper with the damning sentence. “The whole ordeal is rather…” She closed her mouth, not even sure what word could cover this mess.
“Whether your friendship with Tom survives this or not, Mary, you’ll be better off having been honest,” Granny reassured her.
She stared off into space. “Yes,” she agreed again. “Yes, I will…”
Mary, having wanted to apologize to her sister as soon as she could, decided she should let that follow through first. She had no intention of speaking to Tom about his letter to Violet until it was fixed, and frankly, she had no intention to even look at him unless it was necessary. Instead, she wrote to Bertie and had him meet Edith at the Ritz — that was all she thought about while she tried to move away from the disastrous thought of Tom being in love with her.
While she had waited to hear the news, she avoided him with every fiber of her being. The only thing she heard as he passed her was his reprimand:
“Don’t lie! Not to me.”
It echoed in her head as she moved through her own home. It whispered in the shadows of the children playing through the sitting room, having the privilege of ignorance to their parents’ silent quarrel. It sang through the rain that hit the pane of the windshield as she rode to the office she shared with him.
Sometimes, she would see him in the corridor. He would turn to her, trying to catch her attention without looking desperate for it. The awkward bumbling or silence would kill her, of course, but she had no reason to speak to him without justification. She didn’t want to run right back into his arms as if she was looking for validation.
Other times, Tom was in the office at the same time as her. He was trying to fix the hole he had helped her burn in their relationship. Only, there was really no way for him to know that his part wasn’t yelling at her — it was falling in love with her.
And then the letter, the one she had been waiting for, came to her. It was an invitation to the Marquess of Hexham’s home to celebrate the engagement of Lord Hexham and Lady Edith Crawley. It was the saving grace she had been praying for.
As soon as she had received it was the moment Tom burst through her door without so much as a single knock. As soon as he came in, he shut the door.
“What happened?” he demanded, but there was no bite in his words. He sounded surprised. His eyes were wide, filled with the same wonderment she had never realized had been there all along. Somehow, it hurt more than having her actions judged. “How did you fix this?”
She was sitting at her vanity, pretending to touch up her hair rather than seem as if she were reading and rereading the letter he had given Violet and Edith’s invitation. She had his hidden under Edith’s just for safekeeping. “I only sent a letter to Bertie and arranged for a dinner at the Ritz,” she said as calmly as she could. She tucked a pin in her hair. “You make it sound as if true love doesn’t fix itself. I’m not good at fixing things myself.”
She looked up to meet his eyes in the mirror. They both had a moment of understanding:
“You can’t stop ruining things. For Edith, for yourself! You’d pull in the sky if you could.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom whispered. “I didn’t mean to…”
“You meant what you said,” she said, dismissing it. She waved her hand and stared down at the folded paper on the vanity. She folded everything together and placed it in her drawer. “I was being horrible and I did what I could to apologize.”
He stood awkwardly. “You’re not a horrible person, Mary. You can still have a happily ever after, too —”
“Tom, for once in your life, would you trust that I’m not being dramatic?” she snapped quietly, turning toward him. She placed her hands in her lap, sighing with exasperation. Her self-pity would have won the day if she hadn’t decided she needed to squash Tom’s feelings for her before she inevitably ruined a perfect thing. “I have no feelings for Henry Talbot. I never will. He was a new shiny toy, and I’m sure he would be the first one to tell you that my love is fleeting and as common as dirt.”
He blinked. “Don’t talk about yourself that way. You’d be over the moon if you married him! He would be the luckiest man in the whole world for it, too.” He huffed and stepped closer, that scowl that had made a home on his face recently coming back. “Your love has to be the hardest to earn, but it’s in every way worth it.”
“Wouldn’t you know so well?” she sniped, standing slowly. Tom’s face fell.
She had broken through a wall.
She had broken through the wall.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he whispered harshly, trying to school his features. He put his hands behind his back.
“Let’s stop pretending Henry Talbot wasn’t your tool to live vicariously,” she continued. She moved closer, watching as he straightened and took a sharp breath in. She knew she had to be gentler with him. She didn’t want him to think she was laughing at him.
“Mary,” he warned. “You’re not being fair.” He stepped back and she stepped forward. His eyes flamed with fury.
“How is this not fair? You’ve been pushing me toward a man I have repeatedly said I couldn’t love, which is already unfair in itself.” She shook her head. She was being honest now. She might as well air all the dirty laundry. “The least you could do is defend yourself.”
Branson’s jaw dropped, though if it was because he had been caught or because he found this preposterous, she had no idea. “Defend myself? Mary, you won’t even say what I’m being accused of!”
She rolled her eyes. “You already know!”
“How could I possibly?” He was staring right into her soul now. “I can’t read your mind. I’m only human!”
“How couldn’t you? Everything you’ve done is a clear indication of it, including telling my grandmother whom you believe I’m in love with.”
All pretense left, panic replacing the denial he had worn so boldly on his person. “Violet didn’t say —”
“Granny told me, Tom,” she said quietly. He totally stilled. As she moved even closer, she hesitantly lifted her hand to touch his cheek.
He closed his eyes. He removed her hand ever-so-gently. “She told you what?”
“Let’s not play make-believe, Tom; this is important. She told me — showed me, rather.”
His eyes snapped open. She cupped his face again. Instead of removing her hand, he just let it linger. “What did she show you, Mary?”
He was as stubborn as she was. He was unwilling to let her make him say it. She wasn’t in the mood to say it for him. Instead, she whipped around and dug out the letter she had so neatly put away when he had barged into her room. She placed it into his hands and backed away. “The same thing I’m showing you.”
He glanced at it once.
He folded the paper up and tucked it into his suit.
Mary stood helplessly. “Well?” she asked. She practically demanded it, really.
“Do you believe her?” he breathed, his expression hollow. He looked like a kicked puppy, he had so much sadness about him. It took everything in her not to just kiss him out of pity.
Mary wouldn’t pity him. No one deserved pity.
“Do you deny it?” she countered. She felt the brief reminder of her conversation with Granny.
A beat passed.
Then two.
Three silent beats filled the air before Mary sat back down on her stool. Her heart pounded in her chest.
“No,” he finally admitted.
Mary stopped breathing for a moment.
Tom continued. “How can I?” He moved to sit on the trunk in front of her bed, burying his face in his hands. “I wrote it out; that much is obvious. You were never supposed to know about it. I suspect, if I hadn’t been so forceful with you, you never would have.”
“Only, I suspect I inevitably would have,” she tried, but in all reality she knew she would have fought him twice as hard as she ever would have against Henry. “I just found out before I was married off.”
“Are you angry?”
“How can I be?” She sighed deeply, staring at the floor. “I’m just confused, that’s all.”
“Confused about what?”
“I don’t understand why you’re in love with me.” The dreaded thing had finally been said out loud. “I’m far from perfect, and I know you’ve seen me at my worst.” She paused, thinking. Many things had been bothering her, but she had never given any of them a chance to voice themselves. “What I’m really most confused about is how you’ve managed to move on from an angel like Sybil to a demon like me.”
“I’ve always thought you were a beauty, Mary. Always. You’ve not managed to scare me off, yet, have you?”
He picked his head up the same time she turned hers. Bittersweet smiles were exchanged.
“I very nearly did,” she murmured.
“Nevermind it.” He scratched his neck and his smile faded. “What will you do now that you know?”
Mary bit her lip. “Henry absolutely has to stay out of the picture from now on,” she said. “But as for us… I’m not sure if I’m ready to be married.”
Tom sprung up, shocked. “Who said anything about getting married?” he asked, eyes wild. “Surely not so soon!”
Mary cracked a little grin. How easily he accepted her. He didn’t even need to think twice… “Yes, but someday.”
“Well, obviously…,” he started, then trailed off as he smiled and realized what she had inadvertently said. He walked over to her and got on one knee. She took his hands effortlessly. “Obviously, someday.”
“I think we should tell Granny first.” She couldn’t help but give a teary laugh.
Tom caressed her cheek, laughing with her. “You know, I rather agree with you.”