A Loveless Marriage

Chapter 28: Mary

***Content warning - this chapter discusses violence against women***

The truth was out.  Laid naked and ugly in front of Fred.  With my words, came my memories, tumbling through the blocks I had once placed in my mind.  My fears snaked around the empty silence and I waited for him to speak.  Fred's face remained a mask.  His expression, usually so transparent, was fixed and I was unable to read it.  

    "Tell me," he said curtly.

    "Tell you?"

    "What happened," he said.

I did not want to.  It was the memory that I tried most to forget.  I had taken the feeling and placed it in a locked box in my mind, buried it deep below the ground.  It was a memory that I wanted to take to the grave, with no-one else knowing it.  No-one, except Daniel.  Fred could not accept my silence.

   "You cannot just say something like that and offer no explanation." he said firmly. 

I took a deep breath.

  "It was two days before Harriet's wedding.  I'd asked him to return my letters and he'd agreed."

Those letters, ink-stained and tear-stained.  How I had poured my love into those letters to Daniel!  His letters were equally passionate and twice as long.  Full of tenderness and jealousy, hope and despair, poems and promises. 

I remembered the delicious secrecy of exchanging the letters.  A loose floorboard in the boathouse serving as our postbox. It was easy to slip into the boathouse on a daily constitutional walk, nobody would suspect a thing. 

   "There was a boathouse that the Mordaunt's shared with my cousins and that's where we said we would exchange the letters," I said, my face growing red.  "I wanted to burn them in the little stove."

   "Indiscreet, were they?" Fred said, raising his eyebrow.

I nodded miserably.

  "When I went to get the letters," I started and broke off.

Reluctantly, I allowed myself to remember.

***

It was foolish to meet him privately. I should have insisted we'd left the letters in the usual place, rather than face to face. The truth was that I wanted to have one final moment with him alone, a perfect goodbye to my perfect love. I had needed the final pain of ending.

He was there when I arrived, clutching my letters that were tied in a blue ribbon I had once worn on a picnic.  The sun poured through the window, lighting Daniel's hair like an angel. I thought that no man could ever be so handsome.

   "Well, Mary darling," he said.  "Here are your letters."

He did not hold them out, so I stepped towards him. Daniel threw the letters on the floor and grasped me by the waist.  His face was anguished.

  "Daniel!" I said, alarmed.

  "Don't burn them,  please," he said.  "Don't destroy my last memory of happiness."

 Both his arms were around me now, he pulled me close and looked down at me.  I shook my head, my heart raging with my head.  He went to kiss me but I turned my head.

  "We can't Daniel, you are marrying Harriet," I said, trying to push him away.

  "Marrying that spoilt brat?  On my father's command, on your command" he said angrily.  "Nobody cares that I don't want to marry her."