My Dearest Darling

Chapter 40

An uneasy silence fell over the room after Edith left; it settled down like a thin, almost gauzy veil flittering down to the ground. They hid behind it to avoid talking about everything that was going through their minds.

Rosamund had told them about Robert's collapse earlier in the day, and Mary saw that her aunt had been right in all her concerns. The man sitting at her mother's bedside wasn't the same man she talked to when they refurnished the sitting room at Downton ahead of Christmas. The joy she saw that day, the excitement; it was nowhere to be found. Her father had been in high spirits when they returned from America; had played with the grandchildren even more than before, as if he was trying to make up for his wife's inability due to her illness. Mary had admired that man, the man who had recalled memories of times gone by so fondly at Christmas, who had reminded all of them about the good times they had all spent together. But in that jolly man's stead, she now saw a man so close to reaching his ultimate breaking point; a man walking the narrow tightrope of life, already turning his back on everything else he had always held near and dear. At that moment, as she watched him sitting there in the uncomfortable wooden chair, all she saw was a deeply troubled, heartbroken old man. Had her Mama not come through the surgery alive, she was almost certain her father would have followed her very soon.

Time seemed to stand still as Mary and Robert both sat on either side of Cora's bed, each holding onto one of her cold hands. It was as if father and daughter both thought this silence would be able to shield them from whatever was going on, as if it could protect them from the distress talking about the elephant in the room would cause. The silence shielded them from the world outside, the darkness that awaited there. The silence protected them from voicing their concerns. None of this was final, just as long as they only stayed silent.

Neither of them took notice of the nurse who came in once to bring two blankets and a pillow for the night and took their tea tray away to replace it with some fresh glasses and a carafe of water.

Robert watched her sleeping form, watched how her eyelashes grazed her cheeks and how her nostrils flared slightly with each shallow breath she took. He watched how her chest rose and fell barely noticeably underneath the thick blankets and he tried to prepare himself for the coming conversation with the doctor once she was awake.

After a while, however, Mary could not take the silence any longer. She interrupted his spinning thoughts, right as they were on the verge of drifting into the darkest, gloomiest corners of his subconscious again, and hesitantly asked: "Papa?"

After a while, quite absent-mindedly and without even looking at her, he replied: "Yes?". He was far too occupied keeping his vigilant watch over Cora to notice how his daughter was trying to come up with the right words to use.

"I've been meaning to tell you-"

Her father tore his gaze away from his wife's ashen face to look at Mary when she stopped herself mid-sentence and did not continue. He saw that whatever she was about to tell him was weighing heavily on her mind.

"Yes, what is it, dear?" he asked softly, sitting a bit more upright.

Refusing to look her father in the eye, Mary instead focused on the feeling of her mother's cold hand in hers and replied: "Henry came to speak to me a few days after you left for London."

"Did he now?" Robert grumbled, not entirely able to hide both, his surprise and discontent. A small part of him had hoped Henry wouldn't talk to her. A small part of him had wanted to seek revenge by having Mary very publicly divorce him after all the neglect and humiliation his daughter had to suffer in recent months. "Good for him."

"Yes, he did. And we talked. Calmly. Eye to eye."

Raising his eyebrows in surprise at this turn of events he had not anticipated, he inquired: "Well, what did he say?"