Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sybil sighed, tugging on one of her gloves. Whose idea had it been to make every room so hot all the time? 

Maude Tilney was still staring at her, mouth slightly open. She hadn’t moved a inch, even though Sybil had now tried every polite way she could think of to ask her to leave, or at least move off the end of her bed. 

Anna usually knocked. She ought to have knocked. Why had she forgotten to knock, today of all days? 

“She didn’t see,” Maude said, for the third time since Anna had left. “She’d never have thought—”

“—never is a long time.” And they must have looked guilty…though why they should be, Sybil didn’t know. 

They’d hardly kissed...Mary did more with young men in courtyards and gardens as often as she was able. Edith would do the same, given half a chance (though Sybil knew she’d never admit to it). They weren’t supposed to, but they did. Anna knew they did. 

She and Maude probably would do the same once they were out, so what was the harm in practicing with each other now? Maude was so terribly pretty and nicer than any of the men hanging around at the house party...it was a sort of game, really. Pretending at flirting and dancing with no music and learning how to kiss. 

They were children and it was a game and one day they’d grow up and do it all properly. Just like all games children played, it was practice. 

Only something about it didn’t feel like a game, and Sybil didn’t dare suggest it to Maude, whose eyes were still wide. 

“Can I see you after dinner?” she asked. 

No one was supposed to say yes to that, game or not. But Sybil wanted to. She bit her lip...they’d been cut so short...it was infuriating, in a way, to be barged in on in her own room. 

“I don’t know.”

“No one would think anything of it…”

“I don’t know,” Sybil said, swallowing back the irritation in her voice. “Please don’t badger me, Maude.”

Maude watched her stand before murmuring, “I wasn’t.”

“I need to see my sisters,” Sybil said, looking at one of the bedposts. “Excuse me...”

I need to see my sisters... she might as well send for the doctor now, saying such things...as if anyone ever really wanted to see Mary and Edith, let alone needed to…

She loved them, of course, but they really were both wretched company at the best of times.

House parties were never the best of times. 

Still, their self-absorption proved useful—they hardly looked at Sybil as she entered Mary’s room (and she’d have been knocked flat if one of them thought to ask how she was, even in a cusory manner). She didn’t matter during a house party, and so she could slip onto Mary’s bed and observe her sisters’ harsh chattering, letting it dull the knot in her stomach. 

Today, Edith and Mary had decided to argue about the footmen. Thomas had wrangled his way into being first footman, and it had been all Carson could do to convince Patrick to work out his notice in the face of a demotion. 

Sybil felt rather sorry for Patrick, who was perfectly nice, though she doubted she’d be asked for her opinion...

“It was about time, if you ask me,” Mary said, fussing with her necklace in the mirror. “He’s much nicer to look at.”

“And that’s all that matters, is it?” Edith sniped. 

“In a footman?” Mary smirked in a knowing way only eldest sisters could. “Absolutely.”

“Well, I think Patrick is friendlier,” Edith said, lifting her chin in a priggish way only middle sisters could. 

“Really, Edith, must you be ridiculous about everything? Who cares if he’s friendly? They’re not in the dining room to chat.” Mary went for her gloves, but stopped to pinch her cheeks, surveying the blush that came into them with a smile. There were easier, more lasting ways to achieve the same effect, but Sybil supposed Mary—above all else—needed to believe that everything beautiful sprung from her. 

Everything The Lady said was beautiful, anyway. 

“Well, I think it’s crass, to go on as if they’re only pretty faces,” Edith retorted, digging her heels in the only way she knew how. 

Mary lifted an eyebrow, finally pulling on her gloves. “You didn’t think so when Thomas danced with you first at the Servants’ Ball…”

Sybil didn’t know who the barb had irritated the most—Edith bristled, but Sybil suspected Mary hadn’t carried the observation around for the sole purpose of annoying Edith. She was, after all, used to being first...

“He is a good dancer,” Sybil interjected, wishing she hadn’t when the image of Maude trying to lead in a waltz came to mind.

“Light on his feet,” Mary murmured, another poorly contained smirk growing. The knot in Sybil’s stomach tightened, though she didn’t know why. 

“Really, Mary…” Edith sighed, and that didn’t help Sybil’s unease one bit. 

“What?” she asked, a part of her extremely grateful that Mary’s reply was only, “nothing, Sybil darling.” 

Edith didn’t seem nearly so keen to let the matter drop. 

“Mary’s talking about things she shouldn’t because she wants to sound clever,” she said, eyes never leaving the back of Mary’s head. “So nothing new.”

Mary stood, avoiding any glances over at Edith. 

“Edith’s already moaning about being ignored in the drawing room.” She pursed her lips into a miserable smile. “So nothing new.”

“Please don’t quarrel all night,” Sybil implored.

“Well, it wasn’t me who started it,” Mary said. 

“It’s always my fault, isn’t it?”

Mary finally looked Edith in the eye, one hand perched on the door handle. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”

Sybil stood as Mary left, though Edith remained in her chair, looking dejected. Mary took their quarreling as a game she was bound to win, but Edith was different. Some girls could pretend their futures were secure; Edith had never been one of them. She didn’t fight with an eye to win, but to wound. Sometimes she even managed it—Mary was terribly sensitive, far more than she let on.

It never seemed to be enough for Edith. 

Sybil approached, attempting an encouraging smile. 

“Henry Pearson seemed to like you—”

“—oh, don’t try and make me feel better by lying,” Edith said, standing sharply. “He liked Mary best. They always do.”

Sybil knew better than to say it wasn’t true.

There was no avoiding Maude at dinner, as they were seated next to each other, but Sybil was relieved to see that she was as determined as Sybil to pretend nothing was amiss. They talked of the things young ladies who were dying to come out talked about, and by the time Sybil left the drawing room for the evening, she’d almost forgotten about Maude’s proposition. 

Almost. 

This is mad, she thought, padding across the hallway, scrambling for what she might say if someone asked. 

I lent Maude a hairbrush, and I thought I should have it back... that wouldn’t work if it were Anna... can’t girls gossip with each other without asking permission?... she’d probably get away with it, though people were so on edge during house parties, and she was really getting too old for such things—

—I kissed Maude Tilney this evening before dinner, and I really couldn’t go to sleep without doing it again, so if you don’t mind—

She’d just have to hope no one saw her...

She stopped short before turning the corner, hearing voices in the hall to her right. They were hushed, but she felt sure one of the voices belonged to Thomas—he had a certain way of talking when he was trying to sound proper, and he was putting it on more than ever just now. He was playing coy, his voice lower than his partner’s, whose tone had turned imploring:

“Surely you can’t leave just like tha—” 

“—I can, Mr. Pearson,” Thomas said. “If I want to.” 

The knot was back in Sybil’s stomach. She stepped closer, one hand reaching to touch the wall, as if it would help her to understand what she was hearing. 

“But you don’t, do you?” Henry Pearson whispered, his own voice turned coy. Flirtatious. “Say you don’t.”

“I don’t like to be badgered, Mr. Pearson…”

“I wasn’t...”

“I’ll come back down. If they let me.”

“But surely—”

The voices lowered so Sybil couldn’t make out any more. She didn’t think she needed to, wasn’t sure she wanted to have heard what she had. She certainly hadn’t been meant to…

Even a day before, her first thought might have been of poor Edith, who despite her protestations was hanging at least one of her hats on Mr. Pearson. He was a gentleman, though probably another couple decades out from inheriting a title...piles of money, Papa would settle for that, whenever the title came around...Edith pretended not to care about all that, but she wouldn’t be sorry to catch such a fine fish. 

But today, standing in her robe, sneaking off for much the same reason, Sybil’s first thought was of poor Thomas, who had all the hooks and bait he wanted, but wasn’t likely to catch a thing. Not when Mr. Pearson decided to stop playing about. 

He’d marry—whether it was Edith or someone else, he’d marry. And Maude would marry and Sybil would marry…even Edith was bound to marry, someday. 

And what was Thomas to do while they did? Whisper in doorways, keep playing the game forever and ever, with different players every time? 

And which was worse? To continue on with the game forever, or be forced to stop whether you wanted to or not? 

Sybil turned back around towards her own room. If Maude wanted to continue on with it, she could jolly well tiptoe over herself...

She didn’t, as it turned out. Sybil waited up for two hours before admitting what she’d already known—Maude had needed her to be the brave one, and she’d failed. 

Had Thomas? Sybil wondered, before drifting off to sleep. 

Chapter Text

The family hadn’t wasted any time since coming back from London. Three unmarried daughters, all of them with at least one season under their belt...Her Ladyship would be working around the clock to get them off her hands…

That’s why Lord Merton was here with his sons, no doubt, though Thomas hoped very much it didn’t come to that. He wasn’t keen on many of their lot, but Larry Grey was a particular thorn in Thomas’s side whenever he came to visit. 

He knew about Thomas—some men could sense it, usually the ones you hoped would be the last to work it all out. But he’d guessed from the start, and he took as many liberties as a gentleman was allowed (and a few, Thomas thought, that they weren’t) to let Thomas know that he’d guessed. 

Thankfully, it was Lady Sybil he was after, and Thomas wasn’t sure she intended to marry anyone, least of all Larry Grey. Apart from anything else, Thomas doubted very much that he’d want his wife out canvassing for the Liberal candidate…

He’d be sent packing if he proposed, Thomas was sure of it. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Grey seemed sure of it as well—he’d wrangled a seat next to Lady Edith, though Thomas noticed he kept stealing glances over at Lady Sybil during conversation.

For her part, Lady Sybil looked determined to ignore him. 

“Why is Larry so keen on Edith?” he heard Lady Mary murmur to Lady Sybil as he made his way around the table. “I thought it was you he was after.”

“I suppose he thinks it’ll make me like him better,” Lady Sybil said shortly, though she smiled at Thomas as she always did when he lowered the tray with the savories. Few parts of the upstairs dinner were entertaining, but watching Lady Sybil fight with herself on how many canapés to take was one of them. 

“What a stupid thing to do,” Lady Mary said. “Especially with Edith. He’d better watch out for her hooks…”

“Really, Mary.”

Lady Mary didn’t look at all sorry for the barb. “Still: I hope he hasn’t hurt your feelings.”

Lady Sybil bristled—she had a bite to her, one Thomas thought the rest of them didn’t pay close enough attention to. “Of course he hasn’t. As if I don’t have better things to worry about.”

Lady Mary raised an eyebrow. 

“Like what, I wonder?” She laughed to herself, but Lady Sybil looked more annoyed than ever. 

“Don’t start,” she grumbled. She glanced over at Larry, who was laughing at something Lady Edith had said. It sounded false to Thomas, though perhaps that was why Lady Sybil seemed so annoyed by it all. 

“It’s so hot in here…” he heard her mutter, before moving out of earshot. 

Lady Edith was crowing, oblivious to the truth—there were girls raised by farmhands who had more sense of self than she did. She drank up whatever attention was offered her, and snatched up anything unclaimed besides. 

“—of course, we haven’t been in ages,” she chattered away, beaming over her plate. She hardly glanced at Thomas, though Thomas felt Mr. Grey’s eyes burning into him as he approached. 

“Then you haven’t been at all,” he said. “Someone was telling me—who was it, now…?”

He pretended to consider, waiting for Thomas to hover just between them before coming to a supposed realization: 

“Henry Pearson, that’s who it was…” He didn’t have to look at Thomas for his meaning to be understood, though he did anyway, as the tray was lowered. 

“Funny chap...” he murmured. Thomas had the feeling he enjoyed the moment all the more for the fact that Thomas was determined not to give any sign that he’d heard. 

“What did he tell you?” Edith, senseless and obtuse as usual, broke the silence.

“What?” Mr. Grey blinked. 

“Mr. Pearson? What did he tell you about the galleries?”

Mr. Grey’s laugh was a hollow, cold thing—Thomas didn’t know how anyone could stand it. “You know, I can’t remember now. That’s the trouble with Henry, he’s not got much presence.” 

“Really?” Edith straightened in her seat, eager at the prospect of drawing attention to the fact that she’d once spoken to another man above ten minutes. “I always find him quite interesting when he comes to stay.”

“Oh, he has stayed at Downton before, hasn’t he?” Mr. Grey grinned, eyes drifting just past Thomas. “Perhaps this house brings forth hidden depths…”

Edith scoffed. “I shouldn’t think a man who lives in London...”

Thomas willed himself not to hear any more of their conversation. If Carson caught him glaring or red-faced or any of the things Thomas knew he was on the verge of, he’d really be on his way out. 

Which, on a day like today, didn’t feel like the worst thing that might happen to him. Bowing and scraping and serving a man like that...he’d rather dig ditches. 

Thankfully, it hadn’t come to that yet. He’d learned enough tricks to handle Larry Grey—at least for long enough so he could stomach the next visit. 

“Your Ladyship, might I have a word?”

Lady Grantham stopped at the bottom of the staircase, and Thomas pinned on as pleasant and unassuming an expression as he could. Lady Grantham had a need to think of herself as pleasant and approachable, and she heaped all kinds of favors on those who gave her no reason not to be. 

She smiled in a way that told him she regretted being caught alone. 

“Very well, though I really should be going up, poor O’Brien must be pacing the walls by now...”

Thomas nodded, stepping forward, his hands behind his back. Now that he’d secured her attention, he adopted a look of pensive concern. 

“I don’t know exactly how to say it, but I think it’s only right I should…” He paused—their kind loved gossip, so long as they were the ones to sanction it...

Sure enough, Lady Grantham’s brow was already knit. “I’m listening.”

“Only I think perhaps Mr. Grey might mean to tease Lady Edith.”

“Tease her?” Lady Grantham looked behind her, stepping forward. “What do you mean, tease her how?”

This part had to be done carefully...

“I heard him talking, m'lady…” Thomas swallowed—he didn’t have to feign too much of his nerves. “It’s difficult. Only he said things that were impertinent, m'lady, and I wouldn’t like to repeat them.”

Beautifully done... her eyes were like saucers, her mouth agape. 

“But who would he feel comfortable speaking to in such a way? In this house, as our guest?”

Thomas hesitated. He had planned for this, though he’d hoped to avoid it. The more names in the mix, the higher the likelihood of it all falling to pieces.

“I shouldn’t like to say, m'lady.”

“Even so, I think you must.”

Thomas nodded, hoping he looked sufficiently bewildered by the answer he was about to give.

“He was talking to Lady Mary, Your Ladyship.”

And what could be easier to believe than that? He saw her face fall; for a moment, he almost felt sorry for her. 

“I see,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t know what I can do about it, but I see. And Thomas—I don’t want a word of this repeated downstairs, for Lady Edith’s sake.”

“Of course, m'lady.” He waited until she’d half-turned to go before putting his last pin into place. 

“Only I’m sure Lady Mary didn’t mean any harm, m'lady.” He almost smiled as she turned on her heel. “That is, she might not have heard, really. She looked to have her mind on other things in the drawing room.”

This cheered Lady Grantham. It was also the closest thing to the truth he’d said so far. Lady Mary had spent plenty of time eyeing Mr. Crawley—she must have noticed that already. It would make her happy, to think he’d seen it as well…

“Thank you, Thomas,” she said, with an air that suggested he was bordering on impertinence, though she was smiling. It had been worth it. 

Happy people didn’t tug at strings. 

Lady Grantham made her way up the stairs, and Thomas smiled to himself. Time would tell what it meant for Larry Grey, but he’d planted the seeds. 

Perhaps Miss O’Brien could help him plant a few more, if he let her know...though he’d have to come up with another reason for his annoyance...and what good had any of her plans done him lately?

He nearly jumped when he saw Lady Sybil come out from behind one of the doorways. She looked about before approaching on light feet. 

“Did Larry really say that?” she asked. “About Edith?”

Thomas straightened. If she were a proper lady, she wouldn’t be eavesdropping on conversations...

“I’ve been asked not to discuss it,” he said stiffly. “As you might have heard. M’lady.”

Lady Sybil didn’t look at all deterred by his coldness, or by the truth that was staring her in the face: a footman had made up a lie about the son of a baron. 

“I think he probably did mean to tease,” she said. “Whether you heard him say so or not.”

Thomas blinked. 

“He’s terribly nasty, really,” Lady Sybil continued. “I don’t think I realized how much until tonight. Mama won’t have him back in a hurry, now that she knows.”

Which was the plan, though of course she wasn’t supposed to know that…

“I don’t know; Lord Merton is a family friend,” Thomas said blankly, staring to the left of her shoulder. 

“Still, she’ll manage it.” Lady Sybil eyed him, a smile on her face. “You’re clever.”

“I only did my duty.”

She shook her head, looking more amused by the second. It was infuriating, really…though Thomas supposed better that than anger or distrust.

“Protecting silly girls from unworthy suitors is hardly in the job description for a footman.”

She was charming, more than her sisters, more than most ladies he’d met (or seen , rather, men like him didn’t meet ladies like her…). But Thomas just now was determined not to be charmed, not with so much at stake. 

“Do you need anything from me, m'lady?” he said. “Or shall I tell them you’ve gone up?”

“I’m going up, but it’s so late, tell Anna not to bother. I can manage.”

Now it was his turn to be stopped before he’d quite turned around. 

“Thomas—”

“—yes?”

She paused, though she was still smiling. 

“We’ll all be better off having a few months free of him, though I suppose I shouldn’t say so.” 

She’d keep his secret, whatever the reason. Not the main secret, of course, she’d despise him if she knew that bit...but this secret was theirs. 

Larry Grey wouldn’t be marrying any of the Crawley girls in a hurry, and only he and Lady Sybil knew it was because of him. 

“Good night,” she said, and he thought her smile grew still wider when he finally managed a reply. 

She was a strange girl and no mistake...Thomas bit back a smile of his own before making his way back downstairs. 

Chapter Text

Someday, Sybil would have to put her foot down over the constant invitations that were really orders. If Cousin Matthew weren’t visiting, she would have. (Not that she really needed to come to dinner to see him. He was stopping off in the village for days, and he'd be back again before his tour of Yorkshire was over). 

She could see him any time. But then, it wasn’t about seeing Matthew or Miss Swire or Mary’s new beau, not really.

It was about making sure she was still theirs, somehow. That ‘Nurse Crawley’ was a title she held during her shifts—shifts that somehow never disrupted the normal ordering of things—and she’d always come home again and be their darling Lady Sybil. 

Perhaps that’s how it would turn out, in the end...but Sybil was far from convinced she wanted it to. Wasn’t it better to be useful, to have a title that she’d earned? 

Branson, at least, agreed with her—though today, Sybil supposed he was just as happy to have a car ride with her, whatever the reason.

She hoped he would keep it to himself. He hadn’t said a word about his feelings since dropping her off in York, and Sybil was eager to keep it that way. 

They were friends; she didn’t see the need to spoil it with all that. Not when there was a war going on. Anyway, Papa would never approve, and she didn’t want to lose him over a man she wasn’t sure she liked in that way. 

Even if she did...Mary and Edith weren’t married, yet, were they? She was the youngest, she’d have her turn. Just not yet. 

She didn’t have to think about that yet. 

She got her wish: seeing Corporal Barrow at the hospital had soured Branson. Sybil wasn’t sure why, particularly. They didn’t get along, that much was clear—perhaps Branson resented him serving for the British army (though of course he was British, and it wasn’t as if the empire was built on bandaging legs up). 

Or maybe Corporal Barrow disliked Branson’s grandstanding—servants weren’t expected to have political opinions, much less share them in the way Branson did. Thomas had been so smooth, as a footman...perhaps he’d clashed with Branson’s splashing. 

Whatever the reason, Branson started grumbling as soon as he started the car. 

“He’s got a lot of nerve, coming back here…”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

Branson didn’t answer, though his hands clenched tight around the steering wheel. The car fell silent, and Sybil was just about to change the subject when he spoke again. 

“You know he did it to himself? His Blighty, I mean.” He shook his head, his voice as bitter as Sybil had ever heard it. “Bullet through the left hand...that’s not a coincidence.” 

Sybil blinked. She hadn’t thought about it, really...men were injured every day, and you always prayed it was something clean, something that might be overcome...but something that would keep them home, at least for a little while. 

If they prayed for luck here at Downton, the men in France must have resorted to making some of their own by now. 

She didn’t blame him, Sybil decided, even if it were true. He was still working, wasn’t he? Still helping the war effort, which was more than Branson was willing to do. Branson had his principles and reasons, of course. He felt no loyalty to England, and Sybil didn’t blame him.

But was it so difficult for him to understand that other men might have their own conditions surrounding loyalty? 

“That’s so unkind,” she said, feeling rather feeble for not being able to muster more than that. It didn’t help that Branson smiled after she spoke, shaking his head. 

“You wouldn’t say so if you knew him.”

She sat straighter in her seat. “I’ve known him longer than you have.”

He looked back at her, still grinning. 

“But not as well as I do.” 

He could be so patronising...

“So tell me.” She sat forward, hands on her knees. “What’s there to know that I don’t?”

Now it was his turn to look uncertain. The car fell back into silence, but Sybil wasn’t about to let the subject drop just because he didn’t want to say what he meant. 

“Surely you mean to tell me?” she cocked her head to one side. “Otherwise why mention it at all?”

He hesitated for another moment, and in that hesitation Sybil saw what he was thinking, the secret that he’d never tell her. 

Thomas Barrow prefers the company of men, didn’t you know, m’lady? You don’t know what I mean by that? Well, I’ll let you think on it...my, but your eyes got wide just now...

Yes, it is shocking, m’lady. I’m sorry to say it, but now you know. 

Now you understand, don’t you?

The hesitation decided her before Branson uttered a word. 

“I know he’s a bully,” he said. “And a coward, as all bullies are.”

Sybil bit the inside of her cheek, looking out the window before speaking. 

She was going to get it out of him. 

“What’s he afraid of, do you think?” Voice light, as if she agreed with him already. 

Branson frowned. “What do you mean?”

She turned back towards him. “Well, if he’s a bully because he’s a coward, then he must be afraid of something. What is it?”

“How should I know?”

She raised an eyebrow. “I thought you knew all sorts of things about Corporal Barrow.”

“Corporal Barrow... that’s another thing,” Branson said. “You know he only joined up when he did because Mr. Carson was ready to sack him?”

She hadn’t expected that. 

“What for?”

“Stealing.” Branson lifted his chin, perhaps aware he’d finally said something that intrigued her. “He’d been sneaking wine from the cellar—so you can add drunkard to the list…”

“But he never seemed drunk.” Quite the contrary—Thomas had been meticulous, careful, always in the right place. The picture of what a footman ought to be. 

“Did he seem drunk downstairs?” she asked, knowing immediately that the answer was no —Branson’s lips were pursued together, his hands gripping the wheel too tightly again.

“I never noticed,” he admitted. “He must have drunk it after we’d all gone to bed.”

Sybil sat back, feeling suddenly dizzy. 

“But why would he do that?” A leading question...there were only so many reasons someone would drink wine before bed—and that list only grew smaller and more desperate if that wine was stolen. 

Branson was resisting the same conclusion: 

“Suppose he might have been fencing them…” he pondered. “Though I’m not sure it makes sense, carrying out a bottle or two at a time like he was...”

“Didn’t anyone ask him why he was doing it?” Sybil pressed. Surely that was the first thing to consider, the very first question someone had to ask? 

Branson laughed. “How would we do that?”

“'Hello, Thomas—we’ve found out you’ve been stealing wine, and we wondered why.’ Something like that.”

He took it as a joke, a clever quip...Sybil found herself smiling back even though she didn’t really find anything about the situation funny. 

“You and your reasons…” Branson chuckled, as if she’d claimed to be a fortune teller. “Suppose he stole it because he’s a nasty piece of work?” 

But that’s not a reason, she wanted to scream. Nasty or not, people do things for a reason, and I know what this one is—I’ve known it before you even showed up here. You know it too, you said it yourself.

He’s afraid. 

She couldn’t risk Branson laughing at her anymore, not over that...

“But who did it hurt, except Papa’s pocket book?” she said, trying a different avenue. “I should think you’d see it as a kind of protest.”

Branson shook his head. 

“I don’t like your father’s politics. I don’t approve of how he’s got his money. And if Thomas were stealing to make a political statement, it’d be different. But there wasn’t anything principled about it. And the fact is, stealing like that only makes it harder for the rest of us.”

That still wasn’t a reason. Sybil sighed, staring back out the window. They were nearly there, now, anyway...

“Why do you care so much?” Branson asked, breaking the silence. 

“You started it,” Sybil retorted, avoiding giving a reason of her own. 

“Fair enough.” Branson grinned. “We’ll drop it, then. But watch out for him, that’s all I’m saying.”

All he was saying, maybe. But it wasn’t all he meant. 

Sybil would have to manage the distance between the two on her own. 

She’d come back to the hospital later than she wanted. It wasn’t Carson’s fault he’d taken ill, of course, and she’d been glad of the chance to help...but she would owe Corporal Barrow a few favors after this. 

Many of the beds had gone quiet, though there were pockets of chatter here and there. The lull in activity during the evening hours made Sybil more aware of just how many people were around her, quietly stirring, coming to terms with a new kind of life. 

She had to help them do it. Nursing wasn’t just about bandages and dressings and watching for fevers. She had to help them see through to the other side of things once all the rest had healed. 

Corporal Barrow had pulled a chair up beside Lieutenant Courtenay’s bed. He looked to be finishing up a letter for the lieutenant, handing the piece of paper off to him and guiding his hand to a place on the page so Courtenay could sign it himself. He laughed at something Courtenay said—surprising, given Courtenay’s melancholy since arriving. Sybil had hardly managed a smile, let alone a joke...

“—make sure it’s in the first post?” she heard Courtenay say as she approached. “Only I don’t want her to worry.”

“I understand, sir.” Corporal Barrow caught Sybil’s eye, giving her a non-committal smile before returning his attention to Courtenay. “When I was injured, I spent every day in hospital wondering what my mother would have done, if she’d lived to see it all...”

Courtenay smiled—close-lipped and pained, but a real smile. 

“It would be different, if they were allowed their say, wouldn’t it?”

“Right you are.” Corporal Barrow looked as surprised as Sybil at Courtenay’s reaction, and twice as pleased. “Maybe they’ll get tired of us making such a mess of things...we’re all due for a scolding, aren’t we? We should let them get on with it—they’ll talk some sense into the world, and we’ll all get off easy.”

“It’s too late for some of us.” 

Sybil closed her eyes. Corporal Barrow looked mortified, though his voice, at least, recovered quickly. 

“Well...I’ll be sure this goes out first thing, don’t you worry about that,” he said cheerily, standing up. “Are you settled otherwise, sir?”

“Yes, thank you.”

She saw Corporal Barrow open his mouth as if to say something else, but he thought better of it, walking away with a distinct daze in his eyes. He pocketed Courtenay’s letter, giving the room a sweeping look before consenting to Sybil being in his path. 

“You’re back,” he said. “We wondered if you’d bother before the morning.” 

“Why?” Sybil said sharply. The last thing she wanted to be was someone who decided when and if they might be bothered ...Lady Sybil, playing nurse, except when she wanted tea at the big house…

Corporal Barrow blinked, his mouth tightening. 

“You’d only planned to be away for dinner, Nurse Crawley,” he said, a note of defiance in his voice. “And it’s well past. That’s all.”

He would know. And he’d been the one holding everything down while she’d been away, of course he’d wondered...

He isn’t the person I’m upset with, she reminded herself. Corporal Barrow hadn’t yet asked her whether she really enjoyed it all, or if she found it too much. He wasn’t the one calling her back to a life she wasn’t sure she’d ever been suited for, and he certainly wasn’t the one laughing at her before she’d finished a thought. 

He deserved a little credit, at least for now. 

“Of course, I’m terribly late,” she said. “Thank you for covering for me. I’ll get them off my back eventually. They’ll have to get used to the fact that I have a proper job sometime…”

He nodded stiffly. “I was glad to. And I hope Mr. Carson’s not too badly off.”

He didn’t sound like he meant it, though Sybil didn’t sense any malice in his voice. No amusement behind the eyes or satire tugging at the corners of his lips. The words were a recitation; he thought she expected him to say it, and he didn’t dare appear out of step. 

She’d almost rather have found the seeds of a joke. 

“He’ll have to stop working himself so hard, but it’s nothing serious,” she said, giving an equally banal answer. Corporal Barrow nodded blankly, and the conversation died. 

They were neither of them very good at carrying on like that—you needed at least one person skilled in talking nonsense to make the whole thing go. 

“Do you ever go up to the house?” Sybil asked. “Since you’ve come back, I mean?”

Corporal Barrow stared at her for a minute, as if searching for the question she was really asking.

He was right to search. Sybil was fishing again, this time for answers from the man who’d—according to Branson—jumped from Downton before he was pushed. 

“Once,” he said, lifting his chin. “And I’ve some friends in the village.”

He’d guessed the real question, then. Sybil smiled. 

“They must be glad you’re back.”

He considered this—a thin, brittle layer of amusement shielding her from seeing the inner workings. 

“I should hope so, Nurse Crawley.”

Chapter Text

Thomas’s first thought after getting his Blighty was that he’d die before he ever saw England again. He’d be shot for cowardice, sepsis would set in, he’d be killed in transport…

In hindsight, he was surprised he hadn’t died of fright. He didn’t like to think how many people had seen him stuttering and shaking, weeping and panicking all through the ordeal. He had some pride, whatever people thought. The pain had been nothing compared to the embarrassment of having to rely on so many others to get him home in spite of it all. 

If there’d been another way...he’d been half out of his mind when he’d done it, and it was only now that he was starting to come back to himself. 

Maybe that was why Lieutenant Courtenay was able to pull on heartstrings that Thomas himself hadn’t known existed until recently. He was still soft, somehow. Too soft for his own good. 

“It’s healing up nicely,” he told Courtenay as he finished applying new bandages over his eyes. “They’ll come off permanently tomorrow.”

Courtenay flashed a crooked smile. “Not that it makes much difference to me.”

The nurses hated those kinds of jokes; truthfully, they set Thomas on edge as well. Still, taking Courtenay’s feeble attempts at humor too seriously seemed like entirely the wrong course of action, so Thomas laughed softly, shaking his head. 

“Oh, not when you’ve complained of them every day, sir…” he said. “I won’t have any of that...”

Courtenay’s smile widened into something more sincere, less unsettling. 

“No, you’re right, I’m unfair,” he said. “You’re a saint for putting up with me.” 

If he knew, if he had any inkling, of how such words affected Thomas, he wouldn’t say them. He’d recoil from Thomas entirely, and Thomas would consider himself lucky if it ended there. 

Was it lying, he wondered, to not tell someone, when knowing how he felt would change everything? Was it wrong, to go on as if they were both ordinary blokes, when Thomas pondered over his every word late at night, as besotted as any romantic heroine put down on paper? 

Was there something deceitful about talking of his eyes finally being free—healed of all but their sightlessness—when the first thing he wanted to do when the bandages came off was take Courtenay’s face in his hands and kiss it senseless? 

Could it hurt anyone, if it was a secret? Thomas had long maintained that it couldn’t, but there was something about Courtenay that terrified him, made him feel at once fragile and devastating. 

He sat up at night thinking of how to explain it all, how to justify it to Courtenay so he’d understand (and he would understand, Thomas thought, if he only found the right words). How to make him see that love was a beautiful thing, that it was meant to be shaped by more than one person, and Thomas would let him help shape it however he wanted if he’d only reach out and touch it, just for a minute—

—soft and soppy, that’s what he’d become. Thomas shook his head, taking a drag of his cigarette during a rare break in the afternoon. There’d been a lull the past few days, which meant there was bound to be a great wave coming their way. 

He intended to enjoy himself before it did...

“Do you mind if I join you?” 

Thomas looked up from his chair to find Nurse Crawley staring down at him. She was squinting in the sun, one hand shading her eyes, the other holding a basket—probably one of the lunches Lady Grantham kept sending that she kept refusing to sit and eat. 

It wasn’t like her to sit down during the day. She had a funny thing about breaks—she treated them like a test of willpower. She seemed to believe that if she sat down for above ten minutes, someone would declare her unfit for service and haul in a replacement. 

If only it were that easy…still, Thomas didn’t mind Nurse Crawley. If he hadn’t served her for four years, he’d never have guessed she’d never worked a day in her life before now. She put in her time, just like everyone else. That warranted some respect. 

She’d never said an unkind word to him, either, and that warranted his tentative loyalty. 

“‘Course not,” he said with a smile. She plopped down in the chair beside him. Now that she was in the shade, Thomas realized her grimacing hadn’t been entirely caused by the sun. 

“Something the matter?”

“No,” she huffed, digging through her basket to procure a neatly wrapped parcel of tiny sandwiches, cut into perfect squares. This seemed to irritate her further, and she bit into the first one with a distinctly unladylike scowl on her face. 

Thomas raised an eyebrow at her denial, but said nothing. If she wanted to tell the truth, she knew how…

It didn’t take long. Before a minute had passed she sighed, turning towards him. Thomas braced himself. 

“I’m tired of being talked to like I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “Yes, I’m new. Yes, I’ve never done anything like this before, but I—”

She stopped herself, staring at him with a flush of embarrassment crossing her face. She’d remembered who she was, then: a lady who hardly spoke to someone like him outside of niceties. And here she was, stooped over a pile of finger sandwiches, grumbling to a man who’d used to serve them to her. 

She straightened in her chair, looking at the grass between her feet. 

“I’m spoiling your break, I’m sorry...”

Thomas shrugged, putting out the end of his cigarette before reaching for another one in his pocket. He decided against it—it felt odd, somehow, smoking in front of Lady Sybil. Improper, even here, even when she called herself Nurse Crawley and spent all day with men who were uncouth without a second thought. 

“Not much to spoil,” he joked. She smiled, just a little. It surprised Thomas how gratifying the reaction was. “Anyway, don’t take it personal—you saw how Major Fredericks was to me this morning?” 

Not that his testimony was proof it wasn’t personal—he was a working class man who’d been in service before the war, still waiting on men who saw his lot as wall ornaments. 

It made less of a difference than it had before the war, but that wasn’t saying as much as the upper classes thought it did, seeing how everything under the sun had been about class back then. There wasn’t really another direction to go...

“But they’re in pain, so we have to give them some allowances, don’t we?” he continued, giving Nurse Crawley the same excuse he gave himself, when the officers turned gruff. “Don’t let that put you off: you’re doing well. They like you.”

She raised a brow in doubt, and Thomas leaned towards her. 

“They do, all of them,” he insisted. “And even if some of them didn’t, Major Clarkson likes you, which is all that really matters.”

She smiled, though she didn’t look entirely convinced. 

“When I was six years old, I kissed Clarkson on the nose after he came to treat me for the flu. He has to like me.”

“Not if you gave him the flu, he doesn’t…”

She laughed in a way that made Thomas wonder if he’d ever really heard her laugh before. He must have, in four years...but he couldn’t place it, just now. Not how clear it sounded, even in the wind, or how she ducked her head towards her lap as her nose crinkled up. 

Perhaps he’d just never cared to notice, or perhaps she’d been afraid of laughing like that in the dining room or over tea. A little of both would do it, Thomas thought. 

He’d remember it from now on. 

Though she hadn’t finished with her sandwiches, Nurse Crawley went back to rifling through her Downton basket, pulling another cloth out and unwrapping it eagerly. She sat back in disappointment upon uncovering a Chelsea bun.  

“Do you want it?” she asked. “They always forget I don’t like currants. They’re Mary’s favorite, so we always have them, and by now Mama thinks everyone likes them...and all because Mary used to eat the whole plate when she was twelve.”

Something she wasn’t doing nowadays, Thomas was willing to wager...he reached for the cloth, not bothering to look apologetic. Mrs. Patmore’s cooking didn’t leave room for apologies. 

“If it’s to go to waste otherwise…” he murmured. 

He felt uncomfortably observed as he started in on the pastry. It had never been exactly comfortable sitting elbow-to-elbow in the servants’ hall, but at least there everyone’s first focus was their own plates.

She didn’t mean to do it, of course—she was used to having people standing around while she ate. Meanwhile, she could probably count on one hand the number of times she’d seen Thomas so much as sit down, and most of them had been in the last week. 

Did she feel the strangeness of it as much as he did? 

“You do a fine job, you know,” Nurse Crawley said. “All of the officers like you.”

“I don’t know about that...”

“I do; I think it suits you.”

She believed it, too. 

“Well, thank you for saying so,” Thomas said, his voice low. 

Everyone had gone on and on about Lady Sybil, ever since he’d started at Downton. It had irritated him—of course the pretty daughter of an earl was lovely and sweet and all the rest...what else was she supposed to be? The whole world had been sanded and sculpted and shined just for her. Was he supposed to be impressed that she smiled at the likes of them? 

But she was more, wasn’t she? She understood more than he’d given her credit for understanding. Lady Sybil could stand on her own two feet in a world that was ugly and inconvenient and downright wretched...and she could demand that the world make use of her. 

And still she was kind. He envied that. 

“I used to steal these…” he said, picking off another piece of the Chelsea bun. “Well, not steal them, they were leftover...but I always made sure to be there when they came back down to the kitchens. Mrs. Patmore shouted at me every time.”

He chanced a glance at her, and thankfully she was smiling, though her brow was also knit in puzzlement. 

“Why did she care, if they weren’t for anyone in particular?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? Thomas settled on an answer that was probably true, but kept his worst fears carefully concealed: 

“I’m sure it was the way I did it,” he said with a grin. “I’d swipe it off the tray like a beggar, run back out...no manners at all.”

Nurse Crawley leaned forward. 

“I always think it must be livelier, downstairs. Happier, somehow.”

Happy for some, maybe...though Thomas wasn’t sure who. They were content, most of them. Well treated, comfortable...but happiness? That was ambitious, even for men who weren’t like him, men who didn’t have to wonder if today was the day everyone would stop pretending they didn’t know...

“It’s lively.” 

“But you weren’t happy?” She sounded sad, but not especially surprised. 

“Lord Grantham is fair.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what I asked. Are you happier now?”

Not leaving any room for denial...she was sharp, and yet somehow it didn’t make Thomas nervous, to think of her that way. Most clever people came under immediate suspicion, in his book—it was a relief, to finally feel that someone might be bright and reliably on his side. 

“I shouldn’t say I’m happier, not with a war on.” 

“But aren’t you?” Nurse Crawley didn’t wait for his answer, barreling on as if they’d finally landed at the thing she’d wanted to say since sitting down. “I am. I feel like my life has a purpose, for the first time, and I’m not sorry to say it. I wish it didn’t take a war to make me realize it, but I’m glad I have.”

She sounded almost breathless with excitement—a desire to be understood—and Thomas wished he had it in him to say, yes that’s it. That’s it exactly. How did you know? 

But that sort of earnestness was too deeply buried to bring forth on a whim, even for Sybil Crawley.

“You like it more than canvassing, then?” Thomas teased. 

“Oh, that...it feels like ages ago,” she laughed. “I don’t know that you can compare the two. People aren’t so interested in politics now, but that’s what decides everything, whether we care about them or not.”

“That’s true enough,” Thomas said, barely containing a shrug. 

She was still studying him with an intensity he’d forgive in few other people. 

“Are you very political?” she finally asked. Thomas almost laughed. 

“Not really,” he said. She fell back, just a bit, just enough for Thomas to feel embarrassed at the answer. He stiffened about the shoulders. “I have my opinions, of course, like anyone...but I don’t see the point when no one’s asking for them.”

She blinked.  “Well, if you’re waiting for an invitation, then I agree—there isn’t much point.” 

She managed a dry expression for only a moment before breaking out into a smile, laughing over her own quip.

“You’re not nice, whatever they say…” Thomas said, feeling almost foolish at how amused he was, sitting with Lady Sybil Crawley, talking work and politics and pastries.

“But I mean it!” she said, taking a deep breath in an unsuccessful attempt at sobering herself. “Things are going to change, after the war. For all of us. And as horrible as it is now, we’ll come out of it wide awake and ready to ask real questions, find real solutions. So we must be prepared to say what we mean. Ask for the things we really want, whether they want to listen or not.”

She said all this while looking through her basket one last time, pulling out another parcel—a neat cube that had her grinning before she’d even opened it. She peeked at it before closing the cloth hastily and placing it back in the basket. 

Something she didn’t want to share...

“If everyone were like you, I might believe that’s true,” Thomas said, pretending not to notice. 

“But it doesn’t have to be everyone, you know,” she said, gesturing to her leftover sandwiches before pushing them into Thomas's hands. “If enough people are like you and me, it will be true, eventually. I should get back…”

She stood. Thomas picked up one of the sandwiches and considered her words. 

You and me. He liked it, more than he should, more than he had any right to. 

But how impertinent could it be, if she’d said it first? 

Before she could quite turn away, Thomas pointed at the basket now in the crook of her arm. 

“Where’s that going?” he said, leaning back in his chair. 

“Away, for later.” She cocked her head to the side in amusement. “You’re not taking my cake, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“How frightening I must look...” Lieutenant Courtenay gingerly touched the pads of his fingers to the skin about his eyes. Thomas tapped his elbow to stop him doing it. 

“No, I think it’s healing up nicely,” he insisted. “I mean it—it’s just some scarring...it’ll feel worse than it looks. I swear it.”

“And don’t touch it so much, not yet,” Nurse Crawley said from the end of the bed. She didn’t really need to be there, but Courtenay was attached to her, too (which made Thomas jealous, which made him guilty, which made him all the more grateful that Nurse Crawley encouraged him spending so much time with Courtenay). 

“Tell me the truth, Nurse Crawley,” Courtenay said, a smile on his face. “Is it very bad?” 

“Not at all. From over here where I’m standing, you can hardly see anything. Just some redness, but you’re still healing, like Corporal Barrow said.” 

Courtenay nodded, and Nurse Crawley exchanged a fond look with Thomas. They were managing it, between the two of them—bringing him back to himself, helping him feel at home in a world that had changed so much, so quickly. 

Nurse Crawley wanted to take him out walking, so he could learn how to manage with a stick. 

“So you must help me to convince him,” she’d said, so charmingly Thomas had agreed before considering whether Major Clarkson would even let both of them take such a task on. 

He smiled at Courtenay before standing with a sigh. 

“Well, I’m glad you believe someone, even if it’s not me,” he said, shooting Nurse Crawley a teasing look. 

They were managing quite well, all things considered...

Chapter Text

Courtenay didn’t have many belongings to pack, and Sybil took her time finding a place for all of them. 

“Try and think of it as a good thing, going to Farley Hall. It means you’re moving forward, getting stronger.”

Courtenay hadn’t spoken since Sybil had started—he sat on the edge of his bed, shoulders slumped, one hand running across the mattress behind him as if he were searching for a weak spot he might burrow into, so deep no one could pull him out. 

“You sound like Corporal Barrow,” he murmured. 

Of course—no one could tell Courtenay anything that Corporal Barrow hadn’t told him better. 

“And what does he say?”

“That I’m not a victim, that I should stand on my own two feet and fight for what’s mine.”

“And he’s right.”

Courtenay frowned. “But that’s the trouble—I don’t think any of it is mine. If something can be taken from you, just like that...it wasn’t ever yours. That’s what I’m beginning to understand.”

If only his family would stop sending those horrible letters to him...Sybil was tired of reading paragraphs on paragraphs of excuses for writing Courtenay out of his own life. He was perfectly capable of managing, with just a little extra help, some adjustments here and there. 

They were adjustments his family had no imagination to make. When he first arrived, he’d complained of not being able to shoot anymore, and Sybil hadn’t truly understood why until she’d read the letters and realized that shooting meant more than the act itself. Its importance was both symbolic and entirely invented, by men born long before any of them; Edward Courtenay couldn’t hope to dismantle the whole thing without a fight. 

Corporal Barrow was right in telling him to fight it anyway, in telling him he could win...but who could face such a fight without trepidation? It meant taking a hammer to the foundation of everything he was. 

“And the people who take them from you, they weren’t yours, either,” Courtenay continued, a mounting frustration in his voice that worried Sybil. “They’re somewhere else, they’re…”

He waved a hand in front of him, as if that might express something his words couldn’t. 

“...everything’s so far away,” he finished miserably.

Sybil bit the inside of her lip—she and Corporal Barrow had felt the same gut instinct that morning, and she was surer of it every moment she spent with Courtenay. 

It was wrong to send him to Farley Hall, and any good that came of it would have to either be won by force or happened upon by accident. 

“It isn’t, really,” she said softly. “It just feels that way right now. But it will change. I promise it will.”

He shook his head. “I’m falling backwards, that’s what it feels like. I don’t know why, exactly...except I can’t stop it. I don’t know how.”

She set down the undershirt she’d folded, moving to stand closer by his side. 

“You aren’t falling, backwards or any other way. Here…” She placed a steadying hand on his shoulder, trying not to be alarmed at how he was shaking. “We’ll write to you, and when the war’s over, you can come and visit us all again.”

He tried to smile, but the effort didn’t seem worth the result. 

“If someone will take me,” he said, words dripping with bitterness. 

“We’ll come and fetch you if they don’t.” Courtenay closed his eyes at that, ducking his head towards his chest, and Sybil pressed her hand more firmly against his shoulder. “Corporal Barrow and I—well, he won’t be a Corporal then, but anyway—we’ll come and steal you away.” 

His breathing was ragged—Sybil felt sure he was going to start crying, but he seemed determined not to. 

“Isn’t there any way—?” he breathed. 

She squeezed his shoulder. 

“Give it time.”

“Right.”

“—and someone must write to the family—”

“—we sent a telegram.” Major Clarkson looked between Sybil and Cousin Isobel. His posture behind his desk had changed overnight, like so many other things. He was deflated, defeated by a problem that he’d dismissed the reality of until it was too late. 

That was the worst part—the wondering. Could they have kept him from Farley Hall, if they’d tried? For how long? Would he have lived if they had? 

No one knew. No one could ever know. And while Sybil had spent all night tossing in bed over it, Major Clarkson hadn’t really wondered until this morning, when there was nothing to be done. 

He was trying to find something anyway. 

“Now, the most important thing is to keep an extra eye on the other patients. These kinds of feelings can spread, especially in an environment like this one.”

“Corporal Barrow and I—”

He stopped her with a hand, and Sybil bristled at the irritation in the gesture. 

“Let’s leave Corporal Barrow out of any plans for the time being. I don’t know how helpful he’ll be, under the circumstances.”

Which seemed unkind, to Sybil, but not—perhaps—untrue. 

She wished she’d been the one to tell him, but he’d stumbled on the scene early in the morning, and it had been Nurse Greer on duty. She was prone to hysterics at the best of times, so Sybil was sure Corporal Barrow had been told in the most frightful way…

She poked her head into his room. They weren’t really supposed to go into the men’s quarters, but hospitals weren’t anything like great houses—so long as it was in the daytime and the door was propped, no one caused much of a fuss. They saw men every day, in all states. 

Some things didn’t matter as much in this new world, even though they still had to pretend they did. 

His eyes were red, though he wasn’t crying when she entered. He was sitting forward on the edge of his bed, hands clasped together between his knees, eyes staring blankly at the wall. He didn’t look up as Sybil approached. 

“I’ll be up in a minute,” he said.

“Major Clarkson said there was no need, if you aren’t up for it.”

Mentioning Clarkson was a mistake; she knew that at once. 

“That’s not what he said yesterday, when we were all so very busy, was it?” he said, voice low but furious. “Too busy to talk anything over, too busy to care if something wasn’t right.”

“I’m sure he’s sorry for what’s happened.”

“What good does that do now?”

For Courtenay, not much...but of course they couldn’t move forward with that thought in their heads. 

“Things might change,” she said. “I know that doesn’t sound like much just now, but it will matter to the next person, if we can get things right.”

While she was speaking, she saw him cock his head to the side, considering her answer as she gave it (though the narrowness in his eyes made her sure he was preparing to argue). 

“How is it going to change, just like that? When it couldn’t change for him—for one person who everyone knew needed it? How is it supposed to change for everyone else?”

Sybil pondered the question, bolstered by the energy in his voice. Even if he doubted...what mattered was that he cared. That was the main thing. 

“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “But we’ll talk about it, and—”

“—we won’t be doing anything,” he said, and his talking over her in such a way was proof enough of how muddled grief had made him. “ They’ll talk about it and tell us what to do. And it’ll be wrong, and we’ll have to do it anyway.”

Sybil didn’t have it in her to defend against such an accusation, not when it could very well be true. It didn’t matter, just now. They’d have days and weeks and months to talk about the hospital and convalescing and what to do about the next patient who didn’t want to be sent away.

They wouldn’t have as many chances to discuss Courtenay. 

“You cared for him better than anyone else could have,” she said, setting the conversation on a different course. 

“No, I didn’t,” he said, so quickly Sybil could hardly believe he’d really heard the words. He was being contrary because he was heartbroken. 

“You did,” she insisted. “You were patient, you knew how to talk to him.” 

“Not more than you did.”

“Much more than I did.  You were so alike.”

This he considered, brow still furrowed. 

“Not really,” he said, a question still in his voice. “We’d never have spoken, in peacetime. He’d never have looked at me.”

“That doesn’t mean you weren’t alike. It just means all the rest got in the way.”

He shifted in his seat, looking almost guilty. 

“Yeah, and he’d have been better off if it had stayed that way,” he said. Though his voice was hard, Sybil didn’t feel he was fighting with her, not really. 

He was fighting with himself. 

“I don’t agree,” she said. “You read his letters from home—no one understood him there, he’d never have been happy going on with his life the way it had been planned.”

“Because he was living out his dreams here…”

“It wasn’t here that was the problem.” Sybil stepped forward. “It wasn’t even his eyes, not really. He was managing so well, you saw how proud he was.” 

He stared at her like he might pull the answer to his question out of her without speaking. 

“So why?”

He asked a question that was impossible to answer—they wouldn’t really know, not ever. But Sybil gave him her best guess anyway. 

“We let him be proud, you and I,” she said. “And stubborn and sad and brave and perfectly wonderful. And he didn’t know if anyone would at Farley Hall, or when he went back home. Probably because no one ever had before.”

She watched his face fall as he accepted the weight of her theory. He’d read the letters, just as she had, and Sybil was sure he knew more than she did about the way the words inside had pained Courtenay. They’d had such a bond.

Still, she watched him try and brush it aside, shaking his head and straightening, just a little. 

“Yeah, well...he was daft, then, wasn’t he?” he said, adding in an unconvincing shrug. “It’s the people at Farley Hall’s job to do all that, just like how we did.”

He was still afraid, and Sybil was too tired to try and find ways around it, not now. Not when they were living through all the reasons why you had to face the truth and walk right through to the other side. 

He’d never know not to be afraid if she kept being afraid right along with him. 

“I don’t think anyone at Farley Hall was going to love him the way you did.” 

He didn’t say anything, just sat there like he hadn’t heard. Except he must have, for his jaw had gone tense. 

“It was wonderful,” Sybil prompted. She could ease him out, now that they were both in the center of it. 

But something in his face went cold, too quickly for her to stop its cooling. 

“What was, exactly?” he said, a painted-on wrinkle in his brow that he lifted his chin to show off. He still wasn’t really looking at her. 

“That you loved him.” She persisted, despite the way her heart was leaping in her chest. “The way it made you care for him.”

With every word, she tried to push through enough sincerity to warm him back up, to bring him back to a place where he knew her. Because he did know her, already. Better than most people had ever managed. 

All she wanted to do was return the favor. 

“I did my job, Nurse Crawley, the same as you,” he said, looking entirely unswayed. “Which is what I’ve told the nurses who’ve asked about you making eyes at him every day...said it must be in their imagination. I wouldn’t like to think I was wrong.”

It was so obvious and futile a tactic that nothing about it should have stung, yet Sybil felt something in the pit of her stomach twist. 

“Don’t be nasty.” She hated how her voice shook. 

“Is it nasty, to say so?” Corporal Barrow said—whatever lay behind his eyes had turned icy. “Seems perfectly ordinary to me. Why shouldn’t you fancy him? He’s a gentleman, you’re a lady—or you will be, when the war’s over. Back to normal.”

“I—”

“—if all goes well, you’ll be married right on schedule, or just about. Plenty of other fish in the sea.” 

She was a threat, and he would say whatever he needed to in order to make her feel small enough to be manageable. 

It was working too well, from where she stood. Better than he could possibly realize. 

“That’s not what I want,” she said, with a fervency that shocked her. Even an hour ago, she’d have admitted to putting it off, to thinking that marriage was a wasted concern just now...she wanted to do other things, before she settled down. She’d find time for it later. She’d stop playing silly games eventually, if they only would give her more time…

But looking into Corporal Barrow’s cold, proud stare, all she wanted to do was scream that she didn’t want those things, not ever, didn’t he see that? Wasn’t that what it was all about, what it had been about from the beginning? Their conversations, the way they’d worked so well together, Lieutenant Courtenay…

Courtenay had needed more help than they did, he’d been worse off than they were...he had been the canary they’d shared between them as they marched through the dark, an assurance that their movements weren’t kicking up anything dangerous. As long as he sang, they were safe. 

Only now he’d stopped singing, and they both knew why. 

I’m not happy, either.  I can’t be happy, going on as they’ve told me I must. I’ll die, don’t you see that? 

But he didn’t see it—how could he, when she hadn’t seen it herself before a moment ago?

“Not yet, it isn’t,” he said, lips turning up at the corners. He smiled like Mary did—tight-lipped and miserable (were any of them happy, really)?

“No, I mean—” she faltered in the face of his impassivity, in the way he seemed to think he’d won a battle she’d never meant to start. “Never mind. You don’t want to listen.”

“To what? The latest from the suffrage move—”

“To me!” she shouted. “To me, to how I feel, what I’m trying to say to you…”

But what, exactly, was she trying to say? She pressed a hand to her forehead...it was too hot, and she was too angry to think just now...except that whatever she meant to say, she wasn’t going to say it this way, she wasn’t going to scream and cry her way through to the truth, not to a man who was sneering at her, she wasn’t…

“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered, taking a shaking breath. “You don’t care.”

The air had gone from the room. He was slack-jawed, hands open on his knees. He hadn’t moved, but there was something lighter in his posture, like he was getting ready to catch her in case she fainted. 

“I—”

But he didn’t say anything else, just stared at her with wide eyes that looked more afraid than ever. 

“It’s fine,” she said, sniffing away the tears that she wished more than anything would go away. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll go. You can stay here and think I’m stupid and silly and-and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”

His eyes had settled somewhere near her knees. “You keep saying that.” 

“Oh, stop it,” she snapped, before turning on her heel. 

She gave herself three minutes to dry her tears and wash her face before getting back to work. 

By teatime, she wondered if she’d made it all up—the feeling that she couldn’t get married, that she’d been born into the wrong life, that a sense of doom hung over her every move…

She’d have been better off minding her own business. Corporal Barrow’s feelings were his own affair, and he knew what he needed to manage them without her help. 

He might even have been right, about her being keen on Courtenay...she hadn’t thought she was, but of course that would explain why just now the thought of being married off to anyone seemed so frightening…

It would pass. She’d feel better, and the panic would pass. 

They were going to try turning Downton Abbey into a convalescent home—Cousin Isobel had come up with the idea so easily that Sybil wondered why no one had suggested it before. (The answer, probably, was that Grandmama and Papa would take some convincing...not too much, Sybil thought, but enough to scare off the faint-hearted). 

They were going to have to bully their way in, but things would be better once they did. It was a real solution, one that would work...so Corporal Barrow hadn’t been right about everything…

It was as if he’d heard her thoughts—Sybil spotted him trudging through the grass, over to the spot she’d landed without realizing: the corner of the yard where they’d taught Courtenay to walk, as best they could. 

As he drew closer, she knew what he was going to say, what he was going to ask her to do. He was squinting into the lowering sun even under the brim of his hat, looking as cowed as she’d ever seen him. But she wasn’t angry with him, not anymore...maybe she hadn’t ever been. 

No, she thought, even as she smiled to herself. She’d been terribly angry with him, and he’d been angry with her, and neither of them had known what to do with themselves. 

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t learn. 

“It’s still hot,” he said once he’d reached her. He fiddled with his front pocket, and Sybil wondered if he was really thinking about lighting a cigarette, or if it was a force of habit. Whatever the case, he eventually dropped an empty hand to his side, taking in a breath before looking up at the sky. 

“Owe you an apology.”

Sybil turned the toe of her boot into the grass, shaking her head. He did owe her one, really, but that was only a single piece of what they had to talk about, now that they were in the center of it all (they’d found it at last). 

“I know I frightened you,” she murmured. “I thought it would be worse to feel it alone, but if I was wrong to mention it, then I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry, but of course that’s what I was doing.”

“You meant to be kind,” he said. “You are kind—kinder than anyone I’ve known, and that’s the truth.”

Sybil’s breath caught in her throat. Of course, it wasn’t a secret or a shock that he would feel apart from most people, that he’d been pushed to the margins out of a disgust Sybil had never understood. But her mind had acted as a buffer—it had softened the edges of his life and his loneliness because she’d so badly wanted to believe that she wasn’t the first person to tell him the truth.

“I didn’t know how to think of it as kindness, at first,” Corporal Barrow continued, his voice low. “People don’t talk like that. Not to me.”

“Then they ought to.” How could it be possible that no one had? 

They would, if they’d only seen his smile when Courtenay seamlessly dodged a chair set in his path for the first time, if they knew how nothing had made him happier than to circle the best parts of the morning paper to read to Courtenay when he found the chance (“so as not to waste your time, sir,” he’d always said, and Courtenay had always broken out into a grin before telling him to hurry up, then).

There was nothing frightful about it, nothing at all, when you took out all the pages and pages of rules that hardly anyone could bear to follow. It was the rules that frightened everyone—what it meant to break them—not the things themselves (and certainly not the people: few men she’d met were less frightening than Thomas Barrow).  

 “I meant it, you know,” she said. He gave a small smile.

“I don’t think you’re one for saying things you don’t mean.” He fiddled with his pocket again, this time pulling out a pack and his lighter. 

“Talking of which…” he murmured as he lit up, his eyes meeting hers with an expectancy bolstered by knowledge. 

“What?” she said, grinning at his widening smile. “I don’t know if I want to get married. I don’t know if I could ever like somebody enough to do it.”

It felt true, saying it to him now. True and not at all frightening. 

He wanted something else from her, but Sybil wasn’t sure she could say it, not without his asking. 

“It’s probably for the best,” he said, his feigned indifference unconvincing. 

“So where’s mine?” Sybil asked, tilting her head teasingly to one side. 

“Your what?”

“My apology.” 

“Oh, that…” He took a drag of his cigarette and blew smoke at the ground before speaking. 

“I am sorry, Nurse Crawley,” he said. “The trouble is, I do say things I don’t mean—or things I don’t want to mean, anyway. But you didn’t deserve that. Other people might, but they’re not here. And I am sorry. Truly.”

It was enough. Sybil reached into her pocket for the peace offering she’d been holding onto since luncheon. 

“Here,” she said, handing him a Chelsea bun wrapped in cloth. “They sent another basket, today. I think they must have heard.” 

“Haven’t you told them yet that you don’t like them?” he asked, taking it from her. 

“But you do,” Sybil answered. 

Thomas grinned at his shoes. 

“If I were nicer, Mrs. Patmore would make me up my own basket,” he said ruefully, unwrapping the pastry. 

Sybil raised an eyebrow. “She wouldn’t.”

“No, she wouldn’t…” Thomas laughed. 

A breeze had started, and the air was cooler. Sybil watched Thomas, wondering if she should tell him. She’d wanted to tell someone, and he was someone who might understand…

It might even make him happy , she thought, if he knew. 

“Do you remember Maude Tilney?” 

Thomas frowned. “Not really, no. Why?” 

Sybil paused, shading her eyes to look up at the sky before speaking. 

“We were friends, back before the war. Since we were girls.”

Sybil took Thomas’s silence as evidence that he’d just about guessed what she was going to tell him—she didn’t dare look at him, now.

“I kissed her once, at a house party,” she said to the clouds, swallowing back a sense of dizziness that had come over her. “She kissed me, really, but I let her. I wanted her to do it.” 

Her eyes came back to earth and found Thomas watching her with an expression she couldn’t read (though just now, she didn’t think she could read much of anything...her heart was pounding dreadfully). 

“What are you thinking?” she asked. 

Thomas smiled—he was happy, she could see that even now...

“I’m thinking how some people have all the luck, and Maude Tilney’s one of them.”

Had she sat and thought about it all day—every day since it had happened, even—Sybil couldn’t have thought up a more delightful answer, nor could she have imagined how it would feel to have someone say it to her. 

She had to stand on her toes to reach his cheek, but she managed it, one hand resting on his arm to steady herself. She thought she heard a soft, ‘oh!’ when she kissed his cheek, and she could feel the proof of his smile before she pulled away to see it. 

“Careful, Nurse Crawley, or people will say we’ve gone soft…”

“Surely you can call me Sybil now?” 

“I don’t think that’s going to help,” he teased. 

But he did start calling her Sybil, at least some of the time. 

Chapter Text

Thomas hadn’t expected to pay most of them downstairs much mind upon returning to the Abbey. They weren’t the ones who’d gotten him the job, and he didn’t answer to any of them. He meant to try giving Mr. Carson an order or two, just to see how it sat, but in the day-to-day he’d be concerned with running a convalescent home. He was a sergeant, now—that would do the gloating for him. 

It didn’t take long for his resolution to falter—just long enough for him to remember what it felt like to live there. 

People were like clocks: indifferent in regards to where they were placed, so long as they were cared for properly. Move them into the parlor or the library...left wall, right wall, hanging next to a bird’s nest in the oak outside...the clock didn’t care about any of that. It was the inside that mattered, the delicate mechanisms that needed to be maintained.

He was Sergeant Barrow, now, but the title was only an embellishment on an ill-used piece of equipment. Something about the house wound him too tightly, past the point of comfort. He didn’t work as he should, with their eyes all on him. 

It would be one thing if they realized, if they were doing it on purpose. But Thomas knew it was ignorance—a lack of interest—that made their movements so coarse and ineffective. Mrs. Hughes looked at him as if he were eighteen again and liable to start snatching up the silver. Upstairs, Lord Grantham did the same. 

Mr. Carson did his best not to look at him at all, and much of the staff took their cue from him. Anna tried talking to him from time to time, but she was carrying around her own burdens, and the conversations never went anywhere. 

Though Thomas didn’t like to admit it, Miss O’Brien wasn’t helping anything. She didn’t know how to leave things be, and Thomas’s return had her crowing. He’d enjoyed it at first—they got along, always had, and it was nice to feel he had a friend in the house. 

The thing was, no one else liked her, which meant trouble every time she pulled attention to him. Trouble he’d never wanted, trouble she insisted wasn’t her fault...

The whole thing was beginning to wear. 

Sybil was one of the only bright spots in the house. He still couldn’t quite wrap his head around calling her that: Sybil, and that was all. At first, the only way he could manage it was by pretending Mr. Carson was just around the corner, having a coronary over his sanctioned impertinence.

Time made it easier for Thomas to believe that their companionship was made of more than a sense of transgression, and the name came to mind more easily. 

She was still Nurse Crawley in the halls and in front of the patients. Though Thomas kept the title up faithfully in front of her family, he knew they’d rather he still think of her as Lady Sybil.

But if he could catch her alone from time to time, the titles faded away. They spoke to each other as Thomas and Sybil, and the rest of the house grew inaccessible and immaterial. 

There was a dressing room at the end of the old bachelor’s corridor that had never been used in all of Thomas’s years working at the house. New maids and hall boys were always told a story that the room—the smallest of its sort in the house—was haunted, and that was why guests stayed away. The hoax had never lasted very long: Mrs. Hughes now made a point of telling new staff the truth early on. 

Sybil had taken over the room as a little girl, wanting a place away from the nursery (and her sisters, Thomas would wager). Lady Grantham, the American, had indulged her—the room was Sybil’s, so long as she slept in her own bed and stayed away during house parties. Sybil, in turn, had negotiated full ownership of the space—no man had occupied it since the turn of the century. 

She still found refuge there, tucking herself into a green armchair that was big on its own, but to a child must have seemed magnificent. The books in the room were hers, and she’d filled the tables and narrow window sills with trinkets that caught her eyes—a collection of pretty glass bottles and porcelain figurines with broken tailcoats and fans. 

Thomas was welcome to join her, if he was willing to settle for the chair next to the wardrobe, and if he didn’t mind the quiet that might fall over the room if he walked in while she was busy writing up a letter or finishing a page in her book. 

That day, she was tearing through a novel, her feet tucked up under her. She smiled when he entered, and her eyes only briefly returned to the page before she closed the book, using her index finger as a placeholder. 

“You changed,” he said. She’d dressed for dinner a time or two since coming home, so he hadn’t quite forgotten what she looked like out of uniform, but Thomas didn’t think he’d seen the red cardigan she was wearing since before the war. 

Sybil sighed. 

“Isn’t it ridiculous?” she said, sitting forward. “Mary bullied me into changing my shift because she said she needed someone to go into Ripon with her, and apparently I ‘took too long’ so she went on her own. She didn’t even bother telling me.” 

“She didn’t take Lady Edith instead?” Thomas said with a devilish grin. 

Sybil shot him a knowing look.

“They’re better than they used to be, really,” she said. “Edith especially. She’s looking for a real purpose, and I think she’ll find it, if she keeps it up. She really is clever, when she lets herself be.” 

“And Lady Mary?”

Sybil frowned. “Mary won’t admit to looking for anything, and that’s the problem.”

“Older sisters never do. Not to us, anyway.”

Sybil surveyed him with interest. “Do you have any?” 

Strange, to think they’d spoken of so many things, but not that...much of their relationship had happened backwards and inside-out. He knew secrets about her that no one else did, and she knew secrets about him that no one else dared speak aloud. They could talk each other through harrowing nights and impossible days. 

Yet he’d never thought to tell her he had a sister. 

“I do have one,” he said. Though it wasn’t a happy story, Sybil’s smile buoyed him into giving more information than was sensible. “Almost two, really...there’s Margaret, that’s my real sister, then her best friend was a neighbor girl. Phyllis. She was always over at our house. Family troubles, though I was never told exactly what.” 

“How lucky for her, to have somewhere to go.” 

She had been, too. Lucky and favored in the Barrow house. Thomas had never understood why—she always put on like she was ready to faint away at the dinner table, but somehow she found her nerve when one of the older boys at school slipped her a note. 

One day, someone was going to notice. 

“Lucky for her…” he said. “Not so lucky for the little brother whose sister had a better playmate always hanging about…” 

She laughed. “How terrible for you.”

She didn’t mean anything by it, but Thomas drew back at the realization of just how much more he’d have to tell her before his story could be called the truth. 

He moved to change the subject, pointing at the book she still held in her hand. 

“What’s that?”

By the way her face brightened, Thomas knew she’d already half-forgotten about Margaret Barrow and Phyllis Baxter and all the rest. He’d been spared, at least for the moment. 

“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Have you read it?” 

“Not that one, no. I’ve read Wuthering Heights.” (He’d liked it, though not enough to go around advertising the fact). “Started on the other one...got to where the little girl up and died, and I thought I’d had about enough of the Brontës.” 

(Truthfully, he’d put Jane Eyre back on the shelf for a number of reasons. Angelic children fading away on the pillow was tiresome, but he’d learned to accept their inevitability. However, from the very start, Jane Eyre had given him a wretched ache in his jaw; Helen Burns had been the final straw. He’d been sixteen at the time, and from all he’d managed to gather, the book wasn’t going to improve with age or experience). 

“Oh, but Anne is different,” Sybil said. “You can’t compare her to the other two at all. She’s the youngest, so she’s on our side. And she talks about real things, real troubles people have and how to solve them.”

Already, Thomas supposed he’d enjoy hearing Sybil talk about the book more than he’d enjoy reading it, but he smiled as encouragingly as he could nonetheless. 

“I’ll give it a try.” 

“Sybil!” Edith burst into the still open doorway, nearly barreling into Thomas as she did. He had to jump back half a meter to avoid her. 

She hardly seemed to notice. “Sybil, do you remember where we were keeping the wheelchairs that weren’t being used?” 

Sybil looked between Edith and Thomas, a bemused look on her face. 

“I don’t know, but I’m sure Sergeant Barrow will.”

Edith blushed at her pointed words. 

“Of course.” 

The servants’ hall wasn’t always a bad spot. Sometimes, if he could forget everything else, all the other barriers between him and all the others, Thomas liked having a place where he could be with his own sort. The patients upstairs were officers, and the rest of them were lords and ladies and such. But the working class ate down in the servants’ hall and they slept in the attic, same as he still did.

There was comfort in sitting at that long table, watching the maids play cards and hearing Mrs. Patmore’s voice carrying across the servants’ quarters. Knowing Daisy would come in with the tea, that O’Brien would sit down next to him with a story to tell. 

He understood the place, and that made up for a great many deficiencies. 

“—but no one’s ever been able to beat Thomas,” Anna said in passing, as she gathered up the cards after trouncing the other maids. 

It was a thoughtless slip, and Thomas had half a mind to leave it be, unless it became a habit. O’Brien, however, had other ideas. 

“It’s Sergeant Barrow,” she snapped. “It’s only our job to keep titles straight. Anyone would think you’re doing it on purpose.” 

Anna—who seemed to hardly have realized she’d said any name at all—looked between them. Thomas stared at his gloved hand on the table, saying nothing. Perhaps his reticence provoked some embarrassment, for Anna shuffled in her seat. 

“It’s just that he was Thomas for so long,” she explained. 

Thomas looked over at her as he tapped his cigarette over an ashtray, unable to help himself any longer:

“Don’t remember you saying it much,” he griped. Anna lifted her chin. 

“So you don’t want to play this round, then, I take it,” she said, before turning back to the cards and shuffling them up. 

They were always doing things like that, pretending he’d refused invitations that had never been sent.

“Some of us still have work to do,” he mumbled, outside of Anna’s earshot, but not outside of Mrs. Hughes’s, who Thomas realized too late was coming up behind him. 

“We all have work to do, thank you very much, Sergeant.” 

Thomas bit the inside of his cheek, furious but not knowing who was most to blame. 

Before he’d quite decided to have his smoke outside instead, O’Brien gestured at the book in his lap. 

“What’s that, then?” 

Thomas brightened, chest swelling as he did. 

“Nurse Crawley’s lent me a book,” he said, setting it on the table. 

Sybil had found a second copy of Wildfell Hall and pressed it into his hands earlier that afternoon. 

“You can keep it, if you like,” she’d said. “And if you don’t, you can give it away to someone who will...though I hope you do like it.” 

It was a fine copy, with Sybil’s name signed in the front cover. To have two copies of the same book, that you could just give away one with your name written inside…and she’d given it to him, on the blind faith that he’d appreciate it the same way she did. 

Thomas was determined to like the novel, now, no matter how many angelic Victorian children gasped their way through a final sermon...

“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?” O’Brien said, the sneer in her tone trying and failing to diminish Thomas’s pride in the gift. 

Anna peered over to glance at the book before turning back to her cards. 

“I always think the Brontës are so gloomy…” 

“But how are they with irony, I wonder?” Thomas mumbled, putting out his cigarette. 

 In time, Sybil found most of Thomas’s own hiding places on the estate. His favorite corners in the yard to have a smoke came with no accompanying ghost stories or precocious little girls demanding their own private bachelor’s room, but Sybil sought them out anyway. She sat at the same workbenches where he’d passed whole afternoons ministering to clocks, and despite every instinct he had, Thomas was flattered by her company. 

It wasn’t because she was a lady, he told himself, but because she was charming and kind and companionable, and she’d decided to be his friend. 

O’Brien didn’t like it one bit, though Thomas couldn’t see what it had to do with her. He was alone more often than she knew or cared about, but now that Sybil came to the yard twice a week, O’Brien acted as if she were encroaching on something sacred. 

It was just as well—Sybil didn’t like O’Brien either (though she never said so, exactly...but Thomas could see the effort it took her to pretend she understood their friendship). They were never going to be a team, the three of them. They didn’t need to be—plenty of people had different friends for different occasions. Thomas had usually found it safer to share them, but in this case there was little danger. Whatever O’Brien thought of Lady Sybil, she wouldn’t do more than grumble and insinuate, for fear of Lady Grantham taking her daughter’s side over her maid’s. 

For her part, Sybil seemed content to leave the matter of O’Brien alone, for which Thomas was grateful. He had a feeling that if she voiced all that she thought about the subject, he’d be forced into a reckoning that he wasn’t ready for, not when the war O’Brien had willed him through was still raging around them. 

He owed her something, for keeping him company in the trenches. His memories of that time were still too raw for him to decide—without bias—just how much he owed her, and what form it was supposed to take, but he owed her something, sure enough. 

He owed Sybil something as well, though he felt more joy in repaying her. He understood the terms, the back-and-forth that made them both feel more at ease.

Knowing that he could do that for Lady Sybil—that he could do it for anyone— was reason in itself to be forever grateful to her, to keep her as close as the world would allow. 

What would it allow, after the war, he wondered? Sybil didn’t want to go back to the way things had been before the war, but Want had only a tentative, passing influence on the course of reality. Thomas didn’t want to go back into service, either, but if he couldn’t find a way to make it happen, he’d be back in a livery whether he liked it or not. 

The war had them circling their cages, dreaming of what would happen when the door opened, Sybil more than anyone else. 

“I’m not staying here, when the war is over,” she said, standing in the yard next to Thomas. She’d nearly gotten into a row with Lady Grantham over changing the bed layout to accommodate more officers. The design had really been Thomas’s idea, who had been given the new numbers by Major Clarkson, but Lady Grantham saw Sybil carrying furniture out of yet another dressing room, and she’d become the target of her frustrations at not being told well enough in advance. 

“No one ever goes in there!” Sybil insisted, at which Lady Grantham had started a history lesson about the “pieces” in the room that needed to be handled with greater care, not “tossed about like we’re in a shipyard.” 

Sybil had been on the verge of boiling over ever since, and it had pushed her into wanting more ferociously than ever. 

“Where will you go?” Thomas asked lightly. 

Sybil looked almost amazed at the question, baffled at thinking past her own want, past the childish but overwhelming desire to simply Run Away. 

“I haven’t decided,” she said, her tone high-handed in a way that might have impressed every dimwit in a London ballroom but didn’t fool Thomas one bit. “I don’t even know if I’ll go far, really...but I can’t stay here in this house, I can’t.”

Thomas nodded, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette.

“Could I try?” Sybil asked, lifting her chin even as her fingers tapped anxiously against her apron.

Thomas blinked. 

“You won’t like it.”

“You do.”

“And I’m sorry for it every day.” He grinned, tapping out two cigarettes and handing one to her.

“Go on, then…”

She watched him light up, and he could see her fingers adjusting their grip to match how he was holding his own. He thought about holding it funny, just to see if she’d try it, but she’d have enough trouble as it was trying to get the thing lit, so he kept it firmly between his index and middle finger. He even threw his thumb into the mix just so she’d feel she’d been given license to use it. 

Her eyes widened when he handed off the lighter, though he could see a resolve in them. Before he could utter a word of advice, she had it lit with a steady hand. 

“You’ve done this before, is that the trick?” he said—though of course she couldn’t have, not the way she was hardly letting the smoke hit the back of her throat before tossing it out again. 

Just as he said it, she began to cough. She’d tried inhaling, that time...

“I haven’t, just watched you,” she finally managed. 

“Well, that’s your mistake. I’m very practiced. If you take in less…” he took a shorter drag, and she followed suit, to much better results. “There you are.”

Just as she was beginning to get into a rhythm, she dropped her hand almost to her side. A bit of ash fell onto the ground at the movement;  she took its cue and tapped her cigarette against her finger to clear away the rest. 

“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t like it much.”

Thomas was almost sorry, though of course what had he expected? Lady Sybil to start smoking in the dining room? 

She was better off not catching the habit.

“Put it out, then,” he said, indicating the wall behind them. 

“I’m not going to waste it,” she insisted. She smiled at Thomas’s look of incredulity, taking her next drag with an air of cheek.  “I don’t dislike it, really. But don’t you get tired of always holding it?”

The truth was, he could manage most things with a cigarette in hand, so long as they weren’t too fiddly. Still, with an eye to showing off, Thomas tucked his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, blowing smoke out the other side. 

“Well, but then you can’t talk...or can’t you?” She looked to be trying to remember if she’d seen him do it before.

He grinned. “I can, if you don’t need an orator.”

She laughed, and Thomas wished everyone were so easy to please. He’d spent a long time fooling himself into believing people might be happy with him, if he tried hard enough. Just be good at everything, he’d thought, and no one could be disappointed. The cleverest, the handsomest, the best dancer. Be the best in school and at rugby and at playing cards and at helping in your old dad’s shop and don’t drop anything ever. 

If you did all that, someone might smile at you, or laugh at a joke you made. They might even mention how Terribly Something you were...and that was enough, for a minute or two. Until you realized that the compliment hardly survived long enough to burrow in your chest before dying off and leaving you with a festering need. 

People didn’t want to be reminded of Need--not that kind, anyway. People liked organic Need--things they called desires or dreams or hopes. The heart had made all of that up, whenever people had been invented, and everyone had a taste for them now. 

They didn’t want whatever was kind of Need sat inside of him--that clinging, clawing corpse that asked why? at inconvenient hours. Willful, temperamental, ungrateful, impudent Need. People didn’t know how to feed it, and they certainly didn’t want to be reminded of its existence. The best he could hope for were those quickly passing strikes of fancy: a smile over a job well done, a laugh at the table over a joke he’d made. 

It was different, with Lady Sybil. He laughed with her because he was already happy, and so the feelings didn’t die off just as soon as he recognized them. He could hold them in his chest to look back on, and they stayed just as bright as they’d been at their inception. A whole place in his heart that worked just like a greenhouse, and it had sat there, empty for too long. 

He was getting used to poking his head in, nowadays, and seeing the blooms. 

“Put it out, you’re wasting it anyway…” he said with a smile. This time, Sybil listened, though she walked all the way over to the ashtray on the bench to do so, holding it away from her body as if it might bite her. 

The cigarette had hardly left her fingers when Mr. Carson rounded the corner, and she threw her hands behind her back at his approach. The laughter in Thomas’s chest died as Mr. Carson’s eyes landed on him, replaced by a mix of anxiety and annoyance. 

“Sergeant Barrow,” he drawled—Carson could wring the pride out of anything. “We've had some boxes arrive from a Miss Amelia Walker. Donations, I believe—I told the driver you were the one to speak to.”

Thomas stiffened. “What does he want to speak with me about?”

Carson was the consummate butler—he knew how to direct conversation without ever once looking like he was really in the room. The ghost of a smile on his face told Thomas that he’d hoped for that very question. 

“I didn’t ask, as it was hospital business.”

Sybil was looking at her shoes, gnawing on her bottom lip. She caught Thomas’s eyes as he glanced over at her, hardly able to conceal his irritation. 

“I don’t think he expected to wait very long,” Carson added. “Sergeant.” 

Thomas wished he could bore a hole in Mr. Carson’s chest and see what sat inside. Rattle it, kick a few things over, see if it made any difference…

“I know Amelia,” Sybil said, hastening over. “We came out together. She should have sent a note, we could have had her for tea...she really only sent the driver, Carson?”

Whether Mr. Carson liked it or not, her charm worked on him. He softened as he turned towards her. 

“I believe so, my lady,” he said fondly, even begrudgingly amending himself at her raised eyebrow. “That is, Nurse Crawley.” 

“She’s so disappointing,” Sybil said, suddenly as light as any lady in London. “I’ll send a note back with the driver to scold her—can we make him up some tea, please, Carson?”

“Of course.” Sybil didn’t wait to watch the bow of his head, hurrying around towards the front door. 

“Golly, he can be a snob,” she said once they were out of earshot. 

Thomas willed himself to pocket the comment for further admiration later, sensing that Sybil might back away from the criticism if he agreed too strongly.

“Do you really know Miss Walker so well?” he said, even as he fought to wipe the smirk from his face. 

“Oh, yes, she lives just on the other side of York, we went to all the same meetings…” Sybil glanced at the car parked in front of the house, but there was no one around except the nurses grabbing up boxes. She shook her head distractedly, glancing down at the path in front of her. 

“I don’t think she’s in the area just now,” she continued. “Last time we talked, I told her I was a VAD, and she said she was joining up as an ambulance driver. I don’t know where they’d have sent her.” 

“Now there’s something for Lady Edith to do,” Thomas said, tugging open the door. 

“Don’t suggest it, or Mary will pay for the course herself.”

Chapter Text

When she’d first started up nursing, Sybil had sensed that her family viewed it as an exercise in imagination, a game of pretend that would tire her out before the war was over. Something she could look back on in thirty years, laughing to her husband as she said, “do you remember—?” 

Over the months, she’d noticed a change, at least in a few of them. Mary and Edith took her seriously, in a way they never had before. She felt a woman in their eyes, a person with skills and strength and something to teach. Now that she was home again, Mama didn’t cling to her so terribly, either; Sybil could feel her stepping back to watch. 

“You do that so well, darling,” became her refrain. From anyone else, it would be patronizing, but mothers had to be given some allowances. 

Granny was impossible to work out, as usual, which meant she was also impossible to impress except by accident. She seemed to believe that being a nurse was admirable—even necessary, for a young lady in such times—but the realities of living as a nurse eluded her. 

“Well, but why can’t she come to dinner every night, if she’s staying at the house already, and the officers are all past danger? I mean really, what could be keeping her so busy? Fetching cups of water? Leading a book club? Is she refereeing a nightly table tennis tournament?”

Still, Granny’s pride was worth just as much as her understanding, and Sybil knew she had plenty of the former. 

Papa was the hardest nut to crack. He’d let her train, perhaps believing she’d tire of it before finishing (Papa always hoped such things, and he was always wrong). He seemed bewildered that she hadn’t given it up yet, though of course it was becoming less and less convenient to say so. Still, she’d managed to impress him a time or two, and that would help her work her way towards convincing him. 

Matthew’s injury and William’s death had changed everything. The war had struck too close, and the industrious hope that had surrounded the house dissolved, almost overnight. No matter how many officers they housed, no matter how many benefits they held, Cousin Matthew wouldn’t walk again. William Mason was dead, along with dozens of officers who’d slept under Downton’s roof until they were well, only to be shot down weeks later by a bullet with a truer aim. 

“So we’re fattening them up,” Mary growled one morning over breakfast, after a letter from Major Harrison’s mother came in the post, thanking them warmly for taking such good care of her son, who had made it back to England before he died (which was a mercy). 

They were weary of the war, which meant they were weary with Sybil. She was beginning to feel the old pressures creeping back in— don’t talk about such things, darling, it’s ghastly...you’re too young for all that, aren’t you?...goodness, what did we do, I wonder, to give you such a morbid turn of mind? 

She saw through the lie, this time. They didn’t believe her to be delicate or innocent or needing protection. They needed her to be those things, and if she could not be them, she should at least have the decency to pretend. For their sake. 

She told herself she wasn’t going to make any such concessions, but the resolution was proving difficult to keep up. How was she to separate her own wishes and beliefs and movements from theirs? Broadly speaking, it seemed easy—they wanted her to stay; she wanted to go. They wanted her to find a husband; she had little interest in the subject. They believed her passion for work was temporary; she knew it was not. A clear and undeniable divide, right through the middle. Clean and simple. 

It was the little things that tripped her up. She’d grown up alongside their dreams and desires, which meant that some threads would always linger within her, no matter how she tried to rip them out. 

She loved them, too, which meant she wasn’t always sure she wanted to rip out anything. What would be left, if she didn’t have them? Her own dreams and desires were grand, but could they keep her standing on their own?

She was afraid they couldn’t, and even more afraid that she’d never find out. The fear made her work harder than ever before, so that no one but her would suspect any weakness, any faltering. If she became invaluable, there could be no question of her strength, of her ambition’s necessity. That would be the core, that would be who she was to everyone around her...until at last one day she’d believe it herself. 

When she was tired of it all, she sought out Thomas’s company; she didn’t need to prove anything to him. 

He seemed to believe in her already. He talked of “when” she’d leave Downton, and he asked for her opinion on things.  Listened to it, even. Took it seriously, countered it with his own and expected her to understand. 

She usually did, even when she didn’t agree. He was clever—efficient, with a good memory and a head for numbers. And—though he occasionally said things to shock—he had his feet planted somewhere sincere. She trusted his instincts, if not always where they led.

He’d been wasted as a footman. Only a fear of embarrassing him kept Sybil from asking Thomas what he planned to do after the war...she felt sure it couldn’t be service. Who could go back to serving tea cakes and standing in doorways when they’d done real, useful work for people who needed it?

He could make something of the chance, if he only took it. 

She worried that he wouldn’t. He’d hate her for noticing, but Thomas seemed just as afraid of the future as she was. 

His energy had taken a restless turn—Sybil found him lingering in the small library after a meeting with Major Clarkson, picking at the trinkets on the shelves. 

“Did it go well?” she asked. Thomas hardly turned to her before nodding briefly. 

“It was all the usual. They say it won’t be much longer, now.” 

If that was the usual, Thomas had never mentioned it to Sybil before. He paced slowly across the length of the bookshelf, stopping in front of the end table that held Matthew’s gramophone. He stepped closer. 

“That’s Cousin Matthew’s,” Sybil said. “Mary thought it would cheer him up. I’m not so sure.”

A few of the records sat beside the gramophone—Matthew’s collection was still small, but carefully chosen. He was fond of show tunes, modern pieces. Love stories written in everyday language, he said, was the future of music. 

“It’s what Shakespeare did in his time, and we must do it again.” 

Thomas picked up one of the records, surveying it before turning to Sybil. 

“You don’t think he’d mind?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Which Thomas already knew—he was halfway through setting the gramophone up before she’d finished. 

It was Lavinia’s favorite— a show tune called, “They Didn’t Believe Me.” She thought the lyrics were clever, “just as if it were two lovers talking, don’t you think?”

If that were how two lovers talked—all soft and infatuated over every little thing—Sybil was less sure than ever that she wanted anything to do with it. Romance was about ideas, about sharing a sense of purpose...passion went into it somewhere, though she hadn’t decided where, just yet. That part came later, she supposed, once you were already well into it. 

Thomas didn’t seem to be listening to the lyrics. He was tapping his toes against the floor, a smile growing on his face. 

“Did you ever learn the foxtrot?” he asked.

Some of the girls who lived in London had talked of it—though such things took ages to make their way through to the upper society of North Yorkshire. 

Imogen had shown her some of the steps (well, she’d shown all the girls the steps, really, but she’d pulled Sybil in as a partner). Despite their best efforts, it hadn’t caught on during any of the balls. 

“I hardly remember it now,” she said, pushing down how embarrassed the memory made her feel. “It feels like a decade ago, all of us standing around talking about new dances.”

“Did you like all that?” Thomas asked.

“Not all of it,” she admitted. “But I did like the dancing, yes. It’s romantic.”

Thomas raised an eyebrow. 

“Not like that…” She fiddled with the cuff of her sleeve. “But it’s wonderful, that we thought up dancing. We’re so fine, when we want to be.”

He considered her before nodding, one ear still cocked towards the gramophone. 

“We can be.”

Did he feel the same way she did, about love songs? Somehow, she doubted it. He looked to be halfway around the world, standing there and listening with a pensive brow. 

It must be terribly lonely, she thought. Having no one to dance with. 

“Do you want to—” Sybil said, at the same moment Thomas said, “Well, would you like to—”

Thomas looked delighted at her interruption. 

“Go on, then,” he said, placing a casual hand on the end of the table. “Ask me properly.”

The word “properly” jolted her into a sudden awareness of herself, of her situation. She was a woman—a woman who might have been married by now, if not for the war—and Thomas was a man. A proper man, just like any of the officers or the men she’d danced with in London. 

Sometimes she forgot, when they were around each other. Or at least, she didn’t feel constantly reminded of it. She approached him as Sybil, and he approached her as Thomas. She gave him bits of her packed lunches and copies of her favorite books, and he taught her new card games and how to get the scuffs out of her own shoes. 

He wanted to dance, and she hadn’t thought anything of asking him because she knew it would make him happy.

For the briefest moment, it felt more complicated than that. Not from anything he’d done—anything he’d ever dream of doing—but from a space inside Sybil that had been nurtured a certain way before she’d become aware of it. 

“I’ve never asked somebody to dance before.” 

“Well, you will once you’ve finished asking me.” Thomas looked undeterred. Perhaps he’d been asked before...Sybil would have to get the story out of him, sometime. 

Somehow, knowing that he thought nothing of the difference between them made it easier for Sybil to return to her first instinct. 

“Would you like to dance with me, please, Thomas?” 

He smiled as she took his hand, a smirk in his eyes that she couldn’t place until he said: 

“You know you’ll have to lead, now?”

This sounded like a made-up rule to Sybil, who protested on the grounds that she’d never done it before and would make a terrible mess of it. 

“All rules are made-up,” he said, placing a hand on her arm. “And you’ll have to practice, so you’ll be ready for when you go away. Who knows how they’ll dance wherever you’re off to?”

“I don’t think there’s anywhere women lead.” 

“Some of them do, even in Yorkshire.” 

The quip—said with such certainty—made Sybil’s heart skip in her chest. She half-wanted to stop their dancing and pull Thomas into the nearest seat, to make him say what he meant by it. 

She knew, distantly, that she couldn’t be the only girl in the world who felt as she did. But the idea of finding another one seemed impossible enough...the thought of ever meeting enough of them to have an idea of how they were, how they moved in the world...how they danced….

How do we do it? Sybil wanted to ask him. How do we find people like us? 

She wasn’t sure that Thomas knew the answer any more than she did. Just now, he looked content to have her lead him in a small circle on the carpet, sometimes murmuring the steps to her or tapping the beat out on her arm (how did he know it so well, she wondered?). 

She’d never been especially musical. Mary was the singer and Edith played well. With an aim at fairness, they always called Sybil the dancer, but all that really meant was that men wanted to dance with her. That wasn’t the same thing as being any good at dancing—or at least, Sybil didn’t think it should be. Having a pretty face or charming smile weren’t substitutes for real accomplishments—anyone with sense knew that. 

Except, like everything else in her life, the details came through smudged. Was that all she was, really? Wealthy and pretty and well-situated? Could she manage without being those things? 

She’d found freedom in a daily uniform, in covering her hair and leaving off her jewelry. Working with men who needed her help, whether she was lovely and charming or not. She knew more about what she was capable of, when all the nonsense was stripped away. 

Leading in a dance felt much the same—it helped separate what was true from what she’d been told, and what was solid from the shadows she’d been afraid of. 

She wasn’t an especially good dancer, but Thomas was grinning from ear to ear—he insisted that he kept looking down at his feet more than she did. He was sparing her feelings, but he was also enjoying himself and wanted her to know it.

She wasn’t a good dancer, but she was good company. And she wasn’t good company because she was well-dressed or wealthy or had a certain color in her cheeks. Thomas didn’t care about any of that, and he still wanted to know her, still wanted to dance with her even if she stepped on his toes. 

And Imogen chose me, too. Of all the girls, she chose me. For some silly demonstration on the foxtrot that she’d tripped her way through, and there’d been nothing romantic about it all (in that way or any other).

But it had been such fun...

“Sybil.”

Papa’s voice stopped them in their tracks—Sybil hadn’t heard him come in over the music. Thomas pulled away as if she might burn him. He needn’t have bothered—Papa’s glare was scorching enough. 

“Your grandmother is coming for tea,” he said, one eye still on Thomas. “I told her I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to find the time to join us, being as busy as you are. She was disappointed, of course, but if you have work to do…”

Sybil looked down at her shoes. He knew how to embarrass her so efficiently...no one could do it quite as he could. 

“M’lord, Nurse Crawley was helping me with the—”

“—I believe I saw what Nurse Crawley was helping you to do, thank you, Sergeant.”

Thomas opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked petrified—Sybil wondered at him speaking up at all. It would never have done any good. He hadn’t seen Sybil and Thomas dancing for the fun of it. He’d seen his youngest daughter dancing with a man below her station.

Papa’s stare was relentless; Thomas had no choice but to mutter an, “excuse me,” before hastening out of the room. 

It wasn’t until the door shut behind him that Sybil found her bearings. 

“That was rude.” 

He knew she was right—she could see a discomfort in his eyes as he moved to shut off the gramophone. He didn’t like being short with staff (not that Thomas was staff, not anymore); it didn’t fit with his own image of himself as well-tempered and even-handed. 

Still, he stepped towards her with an air of someone ready to tell a lie to themselves. 

“Darling, I hope you won’t think I’m overstepping a mark in suggesting that if my home is to take on the role of hospital, perhaps the people purporting to run the whole thing shouldn’t be dancing a jig in the middle of the day.” 

“We have breaks. We have lunches. Whole days off, sometimes, if you can imagine that. He’s not your footman anymore, you can’t talk to him as if he’s run by a bell.”

“And what about my daughter?” Now they were getting somewhere closer to the truth, infuriating as that truth was bound to be. “You’ll agree I have some say, while she is still unmarried, living in my house?” 

No, I don’t actually. I’m only here until it stops being convenient, and that day’s coming faster than you think. 

“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” she said, feeling her face turning hot. 

“I didn’t say you were, darling, now don’t jump down my throat.” As if he hadn’t been the one to frighten them both by implying exactly that. “But it wasn’t my choice to have Thomas come back into this house, and I don’t know how comfortable I am about him paying you so much attention.” 

“Paying me attention...we were having fun, Papa. That’s all.” 

Did he know, she wondered? About the sort of man Thomas was? Something about the way he considered her words made her think he did—he nodded, seeming to concede a point she hadn’t really made. 

“I’m just saying, I wouldn’t encourage him.” He placed one hand in his breast pocket, pulling out his watch. “And I’ll tell you another thing: none of them downstairs were sorry when he left. I’ve heard he’s unpleasant, when among his own sort.”

“Listen to yourself: his own sort. How can you possibly care about all that now?”

“Darling, you’re starting a fight I don’t want to have.” He pocketed his watch again, stepping forward. “Now: may I leave before I miss my train, or would you feel better about it all if I were stuck in the station for a few hours?”

She fell back on her heels, feeling suddenly tired. “No, go.”

But he walked slowly, lingering just in front of the doorway before turning back around. 

“You’re sure you don’t have anything else to scold me about?” 

She bit her lip to keep herself from reflexively returning his smile. “Don’t tease me, not when I’m angry with you…”

He laughed, stepping back towards her. 

“Suppose I do miss my train, say it was an accident, and we have tea wherever they’ve decided we can squash together this week?” 

He looked positively jovial, now. It was so annoying, how easily he could decide not to be upset. 

“I can’t possibly change.” 

“I don’t ask you to, my dear. Only to grace us with your presence for an afternoon.” 

He so hated someone being angry at him...Sybil couldn’t blame him, she supposed. Who did? And he was her father and she loved him and he really was fair, most of the time. Especially when she compared him to her friends’ fathers—terrors, some of them sounded like. 

She didn’t want him to be angry with her, either. Or to worry about her or think she was drifting off where he couldn’t follow. 

It would hurt him, when she left. She didn’t want to start it all now. 

But Thomas would already be hurt, and so she’d have to find time to mend that as well. 

“One minute…” she said, hurrying towards the door. “I’ve got to find wherever Sergeant Barrow landed after you tossed him out the window…”

“Sybil—”

He stopped short as she turned back around, and she almost laughed in his face. 

He thought she was planning on inviting him to tea...and he’d deserve it, too, after the way he’d acted. If it weren’t for how miserable it’d make Thomas...

“—as if I’d dream of it after what you said.  But he’s not unpleasant to me, Papa.”

She thought he looked proud of her, though she couldn’t say why or whether she really wanted him to be, at that moment. He’d been so irritating...

“No, of course not,” he said. “How could he be?” 

She ran into Tom on her way to tracking down Thomas—he was leaning against the outside of the garage, frowning down at the pamphlet he was reading. He jumped to attention when he noticed her, and it was all Sybil could do not to sigh and walk in the other direction. 

She liked Tom, when he was just talking to her, when they could exchange ideas and jokes and dreams. But lately he’d gotten so soft in the eyes, always acting as if her leaving Downton meant she would go with him to Ireland. 

He’d said she loved him and just didn’t know it, yet. Sybil didn’t see how he could be so sure when she’d never even considered it, but that sort of question just got her a smirk and a “you can’t hide these things, not forever.” 

She didn’t like to say it—as Tom was a friend and probably just very honestly mistaken—but it was starting to get on her nerves. 

“What’s got you so upset?” he said, as she begrudgingly slowed her pace. 

“I’m not upset.”

That got her an eyebrow raise. “Sorry: am I supposed to pretend I don’t notice, like how your lot does?”

He was honest—Sybil couldn’t fault him for that. Nothing frightened him. He could face everything, head on, and she respected him for it. He made it easier to feel the things that she sometimes felt inclined to tamp down.

“I’m just thinking of how angry they’ll be with me when I leave,” she admitted. 

That earned her the smirk…

“When you leave?”

“Oh, please don’t be like that,” she said, shading her eyes. “Not now.”

“You’d like Ireland.”

“I daresay I’d like a lot of places, but I’m not really planning an itinerary just now.”

“But you’ll have to, if you’re really going.” Said like a challenge. 

Sybil went quiet, feeling sure that if she gave him any more encouragement, he’d go back to saying something really impossible. She wasn’t going to encourage him—Mary thought she was, but she wasn’t, she hadn’t said anything—

—perhaps she had to take the whole thing more literally. 

Tom sighed, jerking his head down the path. 

“He went that way.” Sybil started off, muttering a brief, ‘thank you,’ as she passed. 

“I still don’t see why you’re bothering with him,” he called after her. 

She almost said, because he doesn’t badger me about Ireland, but that felt too close to an encouragement.

“I suppose you’d think it unfair if he said the same thing about you.” 

He stepped forward, away from the garage. “And would you listen to him if he did?”

He was trying to sound teasing, but there was a real concern in his voice. A fear that Thomas might be the one poisoning the well, thwarting his chances with her. 

She did wonder, actually, what he’d say if she told him that Tom wanted her to leave Downton with him. If he’d agree that she was trying to hide from her own feelings. She felt, somehow, that Thomas might have something more productive to say on the subject than Mary would. 

“I make my own opinions; you should know that by now,” she called back, before turning around towards the path. 

He was with O’Brien—Sybil heard them talking in the yard before she caught sight of them. She slowed when she heard her own name, giving in to a desire to eavesdrop that she usually tried to keep a tighter hold on. 

“—here I was thinking you wanted to stay out of trouble…” O’Brien said. 

“I’m not in trouble.”

“Yes you are, if His Lordship decides you’re a bad influence on his precious daughter.”

“He won’t. Her Ladyship likes me—she’ll put in a word, if it comes to it.”

“You think they’re on your side? Any of them? She talks to you because she’s bored, and she encourages you because she doesn’t know any better. But they’ll teach her, alright, once the war’s over, and she goes back to being a proper little lady.”

She spat the words out like they were poison. 

“I didn’t think you minded her so much.” Guarded, but enough to tell Sybil that he wasn’t angry with her, that he hadn’t stopped in the yard to gossip about her with O’Brien. 

She felt silly for wondering if it were true. He did the same thing, when O’Brien came up in their own conversations. Very afraid, somehow, that they’d decide they disliked each other more than they liked him. 

She’d always been careful not to make him worry on that score. 

“She’s a fine young lady, of course,” O’Brien conceded, which surprised Sybil, a little. “And I don’t fault her for anything she hasn’t got by right or by nature...but she’s not one of us. She’s not your friend.”

Sybil stepped into view, and O’Brien almost dropped her cigarette. She and Thomas exchanged obvious looks, and Sybil stifled a laugh. They could have been in a pantomime, the way their eyes widened as they gaped at each other. 

“I’d better go back,” O’Brien muttered, hurrying past her with a nod. 

Thomas put out his cigarette with his boot, eyes firmly on the stones under his feet. 

“I’m sorry for what happened,” Sybil said.

He shook his head, reaching for another cigarette. 

“It’s not for you to be sorry…”

“He shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”

“Why not?” he looked at her, finally, lighting his cigarette before continuing. “He’s an earl, he can do whatever he likes.” 

“No, he can’t. Or if he can, he shouldn’t.” 

He smiled, but in that tired way that told her he was more grateful than convinced. “Maybe not…”

The silence that fell seemed unnatural, even after the awkwardness in the library. It was O’Brien’s doing—she’d made him afraid, made him finally aware of who he was and who Sybil was, and the distance between them. 

Perhaps, if Sybil tried to be generous, she could believe that O’Brien had meant it as a kindness, as a way of protecting him from disappointment. 

If she tried just a bit less hard, she thought it was probably something nastier that had pushed her to say it. Something honest, even. She could believe that easily enough. But something nasty, too. 

The two could go hand in hand, she was beginning to realize. 

Sybil looked behind her before stepping forward. 

“Can I ask you something? Do you really enjoy talking with her?”

She didn’t like the way the comment made his hand twitch, dropping ash onto the ground, or how he swallowed back his first answer. But she had to ask, if O’Brien really was making things more difficult for him. It wouldn’t be right for her to leave it alone. Not if she was his friend (and she was his friend, whatever O’Brien or anyone else thought). 

“She’s been a friend to me as long as I’ve been here,” he finally managed in a low voice, said half to the ground. And it wasn’t really an answer, but it told Sybil enough. 

“I have those kinds of friends, too,” she said, stepping to stand beside him. “Or I used to. Girls I did the London season with. We had nothing in common, really, except wanting to get into the same doors and knowing all the same rules. It’s funny—we all knew some of us would get the biggest prizes and others wouldn’t, and we still all tried to cram ourselves in together because it felt worse to do it all alone.” 

Some of the girls hadn’t been as friendly as they’d pretended—most of them were lovely, but some of them had really only wanted to keep Sybil on their arm so she couldn’t snatch up the same boy they wanted. 

“Oh, don’t you think Fred looks so handsome? He’s sure to ask you, and you must say yes even though it’ll turn me green...if only he’d pay such attention to me,” they’d say, always pretending they weren’t really eyeing someone much better situated than Fred. 

She’d thought it was funny, really, because she was always just as happy to dance with Fred as she was anyone else in the room. 

But if she’d been serious about it all, such friends might have held her back from the very thing she needed. 

“‘Misery acquaints us with strange bedfellows…’” Thomas said with a half-smile. 

The Tempest . She’d never read it before meeting him; she had never taken to Shakespeare on the page. It was meant to be performed, not read. And it was dull going, slogging through monologues and trying to remember who was an Antonio and who was an Alonso. 

“Most of it’s just poetry—read it aloud, it’ll catch on better,” Thomas had said. 

It worked. She’d taken to memorizing passages, hoping to beat him at his own game. He peppered in quotes more often, now, enjoying the challenge of finding a play she couldn’t place. 

He still won, more often than not. But she was gaining, and it was only a matter of time before she caught up. 

“‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown, and what strength I have’s mine own,’” she quoted back. 

“ ‘--which is most faint.’” He finished the line with a grin. “Can’t leave that off...it changes the meaning.” 

Sybil knew she wouldn’t get any more out of him on the subject of O’Brien. She hoped, at least, that she’d reminded him of what was true. 

O’Brien and Thomas could work out what sort of friends they were, but she was his friend as well. She wouldn’t be bullied out. Not by Tom, not by Papa, and certainly not by O’Brien.

“What do you suppose happens, when Prospero becomes the Duke of Milan?” Thomas asked, relaxing back against the nearest wall. “I never thought he was up for it, really.” 

Thomas did that sometimes—ask strange questions about the books and plays they read. He seemed to think of the characters as real people, with concerns he needed to puzzle out. It was sweet, in a way. 

“He doesn’t become the duke,” Sybil said. 

Thomas frowned, taking a short drag as he considered the comment. 

“You think he doesn’t really mean to?”

He was so funny about these things...

“No, I think he does mean to,” Sybil explained. “He takes it quite seriously...but he never leaves the island.” 

Thomas scoffed. “I think he does, unless the poor bloke playing him’s tripped through the whole thing.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Sybil insisted. “We set ourselves free by clapping—we aren’t characters in the play, so we can go wherever we like, be whoever we want. We can leave the play behind. Prospero can’t. He will always be on the island, every time someone reads The Tempest or goes to the theater. He will never, ever be the Duke of Milan, no matter how many times he asks us to let him be.” 

This seemed to be beyond Thomas’s powers of imagination—he stared at her for a long while before saying: 

“Well, surely you’re meant to imagine what happens afterwards.”

“You can—but whatever you imagine isn’t The Tempest anymore, and it isn’t Prospero doing it. He must be the same every time, or else he’s nobody.”

“Yeah, but it isn’t the same every time, is it?” Thomas said. “Look, the play’s on an island; what does that island look like? We couldn’t decide just between us on how tall one single tree in one single scene should be. Now think: there’s a whole world of people and hundreds of years between us and Shakespeare...there must be millions of islands by now. Millions of Prosperos running about. Surely a few of them got to Naples.”

He wasn’t wrong. Sybil didn’t know what to make of the argument just yet—it didn’t seem right, somehow, that a story went beyond what was written on the page—but he wasn’t wrong, either. 

“So what happens when he gets there?” she asked, conceding the point, at least for now. He’d earned it. 

He grinned. “That’s what I asked you.”

Chapter Text

It had rained all day, but the stars came out during Thomas’s walk back from the village. If he were superstitious, he’d have supposed it was his mother’s doing. She’d thought the stars could tell tales like no one had ever heard—tales of the future and the past, tales of what sat in someone’s heart and what they were pushing away. If someone listened closely in just the right spot, they could pick up some of the whispered pieces. 

As a boy, Thomas had determined to pull a star down for his mother. It had been a tricky business, and Thomas had needed to promise it could shoot right back up again once his mother had heard a few stories. The star was temperamental and demanding, requiring the strictest privacy and discretion in order to complete such a favor. But they’d made a deal, sure enough, and when Thomas had asked his mother if she’d gotten his present, she’d assured him that she had. 

“There was not a star in your bedroom!” Margaret had insisted. “There couldn’t be! We’d have burned right up!”

“Well, I saw it,” she’d replied. 

Thomas had sat up straight at the breakfast table. “What stories did it tell?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell them nearly as well...you’ll have to listen for yourself.”

“But I only gave it enough for one visit!” 

Margaret—who always needed to be just too too clever—had rolled her eyes. 

“He’s gone and tossed his pocket money into the air...well, you aren’t borrowing any of mine…”

“What’s a star going to do with that, stupid?” Thomas had snapped back. “I told it I’d give it all my wishes from now on. But that’s only good for one trip, so it won’t come back down now that it finished the job.”

His mother shook her head. “Oh, it promised me it’d come back down again before too long.”

This didn’t match with Thomas’s dealings at all, but he’d accepted his mother’s word as true. 

Well, maybe mothers get more credit.

He’d been wrong, of course. Mothers got the least credit out of anyone—his had, anyway. Maybe she really had talked to the stars...it’d explain why she’d slipped away so easily, when he still needed her. Maybe she had wanted to listen to their stories more than his...she’d been so exhausted, by the end of it. Not solid enough to hear what he wanted to tell her. 

Perhaps she was strong enough to grieve it, now. Or perhaps his own grief made him pretend she’d found new strength somewhere, that she’d use it to reach him. 

At any rate, he was grateful it had stopped raining. 

He came across O’Brien earlier than he expected—she was well out of the way of her usual smoking spot. Perhaps the clear night had enticed her...she was funny, sometimes. Almost a romantic, though she’d snipe at him for saying so. 

“Where have you been?” 

“The delivery came early.” A stroke of luck if he’d ever had one—he was at Downton on borrowed time, now that all the officers had left. The quicker he could start making his money back, the better. 

“And?”

“Looks good.” He’d got it all sorted, like a proper storeroom. Everything inventoried, price sheets made out...he’d done his research, made the numbers go in his favor. He’d be established before long. His own man. 

“Why’re you out here?” he asked, as they made their way back to the house. 

“Do I need a written statement to go outside, now?”

He grinned. “Don’t be sour, just because I’m making my way in the world.” 

“If I’m sour, it’s because Mrs. Hughes—” She stopped dead in her tracks, eyes trained on the garage just in front of them. As she stepped forward, Thomas heard voices coming from the open doorway. 

“—what?” Thomas hadn’t moved. He didn’t see what it mattered. Branson wasn’t half as interesting as he pretended to be...

O’Brien hushed him, stepping forward yet again. The gravel cracked under Thomas’s feet as he followed her, and she sighed. 

“Do you want to be heard from the moon?” she murmured, as he came up to her side. 

“What’re we doing?”

“That’s Lady Sybil in there.”

Thomas looked from her to the doorway, an anxiety he couldn’t place running up his spine. O’Brien took another step, leaning on her toes to get a look in. Thomas followed on lighter feet than before, though he kept himself standing straight—she’d tell him if there was anything worth seeing. 

Her face went stony—even in the dark, he could see her eyes glittering with the start of a decision. 

“Her Ladyship won’t like that,” she whispered. 

“Like what?” Thomas asked, even as he leaned in for a look of his own. 

She was touching Branson’s face with a gloved hand. 

“Keep out of it,” he breathed immediately, feeling O’Brien unhitch from the spot before she’d taken a step. He hung back in the shadows as she moved into the light streaming from the doorway, her head held high. 

“M’lady,” he heard her say. “Were you needing the car? I can have one of the maids fetch a coat.”

He heard the murmurings of an excuse. O’Brien never broke her impassive stare. 

“Oh, I don’t think that will be possible, m’lady, not with Her Ladyship going into York all afternoon,” she said. “If it’s something to pick up, I can—”

She was interrupted, and in another moment Sybil hastened out the doorway. Thomas stepped back instinctively—he hadn’t thought ahead to that bit. He looked down at the ground, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. 

If she saw him, she said nothing. 

O’Brien returned to his side, looking smug. Thomas lit his cigarette in silence. 

“Better get back inside,” she said. “It looks like it might start up again.”

If O’Brien’s interruption had unnerved Branson, he didn’t show it in the servants’ hall. He sat in his seat, proud as ever, talking about how the new voting act must be only the beginning for England. 

Still, he seemed aware of the unacknowledged business between them—he lingered at the table long after everyone else had gone up, until the three of them were left alone. O’Brien savored the weight of the silence before catching his eye. 

“You’ve got some nerve,” she said, voice low. “Seducing a lady in this house.”

Branson looked between them—Thomas kept his eyes on the magazine Madge had left on the other side of the table. 

“I haven’t seduced anyone, nor have I done anything to be ashamed of.”

“Really? So you won’t mind me telling Her Ladyship?”

“I couldn’t stop you even if I did,” Branson said, puffing his chest out. “But I think you’ll find it’ll hurt her more than it’ll hurt me.”

“How do you figure that?” O’Brien scoffed, looking to Thomas for support. He inclined his head in her direction, but gave little indication otherwise that he’d heard. 

He wanted nothing more than to forget he'd seen any of it. 

“I’m not going to be a chauffeur forever. But if you bring their guard up, you’ll be trapping her in this house forever.” He was looking at Thomas, now. “She deserves more than that.”

O’Brien was right about one thing: Branson did have some nerve...

“And you’re the more, are you?” he said, finally looking Branson in the eye. 

“That’s up to her,” he said with a smile, finally standing from his chair. “Goodnight.” 

Neither of them said a thing in reply, and he shrugged as he walked out. 

“I’ll have to tell her,” O’Brien said, shaking her head. “I don’t know how, but I’ll have to tell her.” 

“What you should do is keep out of it.”

“And if she runs away with him and we said nothing?” For the first time since it all started, he heard a note of real fear in O’Brien’s voice. Not for her job, but for something deeper. Thomas didn’t know how or when it had happened, but O’Brien was just as much wrapped around Lady Grantham’s finger as Lady Grantham was wrapped around hers. 

“She won’t run off with him,” Thomas said, confident before checking in on himself. “She wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I forgot,” O’Brien sat back, surveying him. “She’s your special friend. Did she tell you, then, that she’d gone soft on the chauffeur?”

Of course she hadn’t. 

Thomas had known they got along, in their own way...but Sybil got along with everyone. He’d even noticed Branson looking at her, but that was nothing out of the ordinary, either. She was a beautiful young woman, men noticed her...

Neither of those things meant she was planning to run off with Tom Branson...Thomas didn’t know what their conversation that night had meant, but so far it remained a mismatched detail in his accounting of things, a piece of a puzzle with no accommodating spot. 

“We don’t know if she has gone soft on him,” he said. 

O’Brien gave him a withering stare. 

“Sometimes you have less sense than a rat in a trap.”

She went up to bed herself shortly after, leaving Thomas alone with his thoughts.

The fact was this: Sybil had told him she didn’t want to get married. She’d told him about Miss Maude Tilney besides. She’d all but told him that they were the same. 

It seemed she might’ve told Branson something different. When O’Brien had confronted him, he’d had every opportunity to make an excuse, to give another reason for her behavior, and he hadn’t. There was no reason for him to pretend, was there? 

And Thomas had seen her touch his face, hurry out of the garage embarrassed...there weren’t many other explanations for those things, not when taken as a whole. 

She was lying to someone, and Thomas—recalling the disdain in O’Brien’s stare—wondered if it really was him. 

He found Sybil in the boot room the next morning, working away on her own riding boots. She still insisted on doing them herself, which had the effect of holding up everyone else’s work—none of them felt easy about working alongside her. 

Thomas wouldn’t have minded, but he didn’t clean shoes anymore, except his own. He’d already finished his work for the day—Mrs. Patmore had her supplies, and he’d have cake and his first paying customer come the next morning. 

The new day had eased some of his fears—Sybil and Branson were still both right where they were supposed to be, and, after all, it was easy enough to misunderstand a scene from a distance. O’Brien was only certain of her own explanations because she didn’t know Sybil half as well as he did...surely that counted for something…

They didn’t see each other as often as they used to, even with them both living in the same house. Sybil dressed like a lady again, was back to an old routine of sitting in drawing rooms and going to charity meetings. Thomas, meanwhile, had no routine at all now that the war had ended. Everyone noticed, and Thomas suspected some of them had been laughing at him. He took himself elsewhere more days than not...and it had paid off, hadn’t it? 

Though Sybil smiled up at him, anxiety flickered in her eyes, eating away at Thomas’s carefully tended hope. 

If it had really been nothing, she would have half-forgotten the entire matter by now. Anyone could be made to feel embarrassed by O’Brien’s glaring from the shadows...but if she couldn’t meet Thomas’s gaze in the light of day, then there was more truth to the story than Thomas wanted to believe. 

“You should give those to Madge,” he said, snaking his way to the back corner where she was sitting, stopping every so often to straighten something on a countertop. 

“Why should she have to do them, when I can manage perfectly well on my own? It’s not as if I don’t have the time.” 

He heard a bitterness in her voice, by the end. A boredom that he recognized. He’d felt it himself, working as a footman, standing about and staring at the same walls every day. It hadn’t occurred to him that the people upstairs might get to feeling the same way. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I hardly see you anymore.”

“Well, we’ve been busy, haven’t we?”

“Not me,” Sybil said, setting her right boot down and picking up the left one. “I feel I’m always getting up to a day where nothing’s going to happen.”

Thomas couldn’t help himself. “Is that so?”

His meaning wasn’t missed. Sybil pursed her lips.

“If this is about last night, you should know that I haven’t promised him anything at all. And he’s asked me enough times...” 

“Has he?” Thomas supposed that if he were to ask Branson to run away with him, Branson would come to understand the value of listening to a person’s first answer…

So Sybil had been placating him, that was all...but she was still staring down into her lap, looking as if she were trying to puzzle out the next part of her thought. Thomas tamped down his relief. 

“You know, he says I’m in love with him. He's been saying it for years.”

“He says…” If they were all given thruppence for every time Tom Branson had offered an opinion that was neither relevant nor helpful, they wouldn’t have to worry about whether Mr. Matthew would ever give the estate an heir. 

“At first I thought he was only being full of himself, but I've been thinking about it...and maybe he’s right, in a way.” 

Thomas felt ill all over again. “How do you figure that?

She took a breath, seeming reluctant to finish the thought she’d started. “I’ve never been in love before, and if I’m afraid of what it would mean—what I could lose—couldn’t the feelings be trapped, somehow?”

The desperation her in voice tugged at Thomas’s sympathies. She didn’t believe it...she couldn’t possibly believe something so absurd…

She needed talking out of it, that was all. 

“Did you love that girl?” he murmured. “Miss Tilney?”

Sybil hesitated; she looked over at the door. 

“We were friends, we were good friends…and I felt a certain way, I did—just like I told you.” Reassurance in her voice. “But I didn’t love her, I don't think...I didn’t...feel all of that. Not in that way.”

Something about the crease in her brow made Thomas think she was making quick work of editing her memories. Whether she realized she was doing it or not was the question...

“Were the feelings trapped that time too, do you think?” 

Try as he might to make the question sound innocent, Thomas couldn’t hide what it meant for Sybil’s own internal logic. She flinched from it, shaking her head almost immediately. 

“I was too young to be in love then. It was a game, really…” Her eyes widened as she caught his stare. “No, not a game, that’s not what I meant. It was...we were young, we were trying to learn how to do everything before we grew up.”

Thomas blinked. 

“Before you grew up.”

He thought she was holding back a sigh. “That’s not what I—”

“—you keep saying that.” 

“Because I don’t know how to say it.” Sybil looked towards the door again before continuing. “But you understand.”

That’s what they always expected Thomas to do. Understand. Accept that they were going to marry someone and leave him in the shadows. They’d carry their own shadows with them, always, but they’d have no more dealings with his little corner. They didn’t dare, once they’d given him up. 

Perhaps he wouldn’t find it so difficult to understand if anyone had ever decided it was worth it to stay. If anyone pretended to take his own choices seriously. 

"You don't know what it's been like, since the war ended..." she continued. "I know now that I can't just expect them to understand what it all meant. Even if I leave tomorrow, I’ll always be a girl to them if I’m not married. Now that the war's over, they want me back right where I was before...like none of it mattered. And that's not what I want. More than...more than anything else, I don't want to go back. But once I marry, that part of it is over. I’ll have made a choice that’s final, whether they like it or not.”

So Branson was an invitation to shut up...there was an irony in that…

“And how did you decide Branson’s the one?” Because you’ve admitted it’s got nothing to do with love, he only just held back from saying. 

“I haven't decided anything,” she said pointedly, perhaps hearing the words he hadn’t spoken. “But I don’t think I would mind being married to Tom. We get along, we have the same ideas about the world...we could be happy. And it would be my choice, not theirs. I can travel, I can still work...it’d be nice to have children. A family that’s my own.”

Thomas’s sympathies—already brittle—snapped. 

He was so tired of this part...

“Yes, I suppose it would be.”

He could see her turning her own words back in her mind, biting the inside of her lip as she did. 

“Thomas—”

He stopped her with a shake of his head. 

“You told me to listen to you,” he murmured. “And you never believed any of it. It was all pretending...I knew it, too. I knew it all the time, didn't I?”

She stood, looking so miserable that Thomas was forced to look away again. 

“It's not like that—”

“—still, we’ve all got to be moving on, don’t we? Now that the war's over? I’m glad for you, if that’s what you want." Thomas stared down a mark on the wall behind her head. “I’ve made my own investments, so it’s only a matter of time before I’m off as well.”

“Where will you go?” 

“Oh, not very far, I shouldn’t think,” Thomas began his way back towards the door, fixing her left shoulder with a single pointed stare before leaving. 

“I’m not all grown up yet,” he said, voice shakier than he’d have liked. “It’s best if I don’t wander.” 

He walked out with his chin high, privately knowing that even if Mrs. Patmore bought out his entire shed of goods, he wouldn't be any less miserable for it...

He'd have the money, soon enough...except it didn't matter where he took it. He didn't know and he didn't care, and neither did anyone else. 

If having all that was what Sybil meant by being grown up, Thomas felt sure such an accomplishment was already lost to him. He wasn't going to pretend, whatever they all asked him to do. He wasn't.

It would have to be enough. He would make it be enough. 

Thomas staggered to the nearest box in the shed, collapsing onto it as he accepted that his anger was exhausted for the moment.

Nothing to do about it, anyway...they’d taken him for a fool, and they’d been right. It was all rubbish, every bloody box and bag and bottle...

“How much did he get from you?” O’Brien stepped into the shed, avoiding the shelves he’d knocked onto the ground. 

“Every penny I had, and then some.” Thomas put his cigarette to his mouth, but his breath kept choking up with sobs, so lighting the damned thing had been just another waste of money, just another worthless thing to toss into the room once it had burned out. 

“What are you going to do now?” 

He hadn’t seen O’Brien look so soft since Mr. Lang had left...and if that comparison wasn’t just the perfect way to sum up his failure and inability…

But Mr. Lang had somewhere to go…

“I don’t know. I don’t bloody know.”

Then his hands were shaking like Mr. Lang’s used to. O’Brien reached him, plucking his cigarette from his fingers, her other hand dusting off the nearest sleeve of his jacket. 

“Now…” she murmured, and that was enough to set everything off. 

It was stupid— might have been the stupidest thing he’d ever done—but he started crying properly, like he hadn’t in ages, not since something worth crying about had happened. O’Brien was perched next to him, holding him in something that might have been an embrace if either of them had really practiced it much...and he couldn’t stop crying. It just kept on and on until he was tired of doing it, could hardly remember why he’d started it...then he’d think of another reason, and the crying would get worse all over again. 

He pretended all the time that he understood everything, but the truth was he never knew what people were talking about, he never had...they spoke in a language he didn’t understand, told stories he didn’t know the meaning of...every bit of his cleverness was guesswork, piecing together what people seemed to care about, what spoke to them, what they wanted from him. 

And he told himself he was good at it, told himself it was all going so well, that he could get himself out of anything…

All he’d really done was spend his life squeezing through holes that were too small for him, darting up stairs with jagged edges...always ending up just a little worse off than he’d been before, but telling himself that it didn’t matter, whatever he’d lost was worth less than what he’d gained...only there’d never been anything at all, had there, except the loss and him running from it? 

Running wasn’t a skill, not the way he did it--it took no cleverness, no art, no sense of purpose...and it had worn him down. 

I want to go home, he thought stupidly, though he couldn’t place where that would be. 

O’Brien was the one to tell him when to stop. She pulled away, a gloved hand darting up quickly to dab at her own eyes. 

“Alright, now…” she said, hand going back over his sleeve. “Now it’s time to stop, clean yourself up, and think what you’re going to do next. You’re sure there’s nothing you can do at the hospital?”

“Do you think this was for a laugh?” Thomas gestured helplessly. “Of course there’s nothing to be done at the hospital, there’s nothing to be done anywhere, not when you’re…”

the kind of fool who’d do something like this.

She shook her head at the beginnings of new tears in his eyes. 

“You’re going to cement yourself in here doing that…” she said, laughing softly. 

“It’s not funny.”

“It is, you goose.” She leaned her shoulder against his. “Come on, now. It’s not so bad as all that. It’s only money—we never have much of it to start with, and we can always find more, if we’re smart about it.”

“How?”

Her eyes were sharper than before. “That’s what you’ve got to find out. You will, one way or the other. Things never stay as they are, good or bad.”

“Aren’t you the philosopher…”

“That’s called common sense,” she said, lifting her chin in amusement. “You ever heard of it?”

She stood, beckoning him up with her hand. “Come on…I’ll buy you something nice on the way home, seeing as you’re a pauper, now.”

She brushed the back of his coat as he passed her.

“I can manage that,” he insisted, undercutting his own words with a sniff.

“Not on your own, you can’t.”

The words sat in his chest, taking on a meaning O’Brien had never meant (she really was a philosopher, then…)

Thomas knew where he had to go next. 

The door to the dressing room in the bachelor’s corridor was slightly ajar, and no one answered his knock. Sybil was sitting in her green armchair, her hair loosely braided. She stared at nothing with eyes that were red and puffy. Madge had told Thomas she’d gone up early the night before and had hardly been seen since. 

Thomas felt, just for a moment, that’d he deserved everything he’d gotten and more. He was the only person she could talk to, and he’d hardly tried…

He could do better, this time. 

“I do understand,” he said softly. Because he did, really...he told himself he didn’t, all the time. Because that was easier, wasn’t it, pretending he didn’t want children or a wedding or a family like other people had...easier and also a lie, just as much a lie as any of the rest of them told when they got married and had children and pretended they were happy with it all. 

She stared up at him, shifting so her foot sat atop of her other thigh. One hand reached up to wipe her eyes. 

“I understand, and I still don’t think you should do it,” he said, twisting his hat in his hands. 

She nodded slowly, not in agreement so much as in contemplation. 

"It didn't feel right, going on with it, whatever I told myself...that's why I kept putting it off...it's only that I get so afraid of being stuck,” she said. “And I don’t mean that I think you’re stuck—”

“—I know,” he said. “I know.” (Even though he was stuck, at least for the moment…) “But no matter what you do, you won’t be stuck, not forever. And you’re young. Plenty of time to pick someone tolerable if you decide that’s what you want.”

He thought it was a worthy effort, but Sybil ducked her head suddenly, taking a few ragged breaths before looking at him again. 

“She’s getting married.” Thomas didn’t need to ask who. “She wrote last week.”

“Oh.” 

She’d known all the time, then, about being left behind. 

“I still don’t think I…” Sybill stopped, shaking her head. “Or if I did, I—it doesn’t matter, because it’s not about her. It’s only that I always thought...it’s like what you said. It was all pretending. And I feel silly and useless for thinking it wasn’t.”

Thomas stepped forward. 

“It’s not pretending. Not to me.”

She stared at him hungrily, leaning forward. 

“How do you do it?”

It was all Thomas could do not to laugh in her face.

“I do a pretty bad job; you don’t want my advice,” he said, looking down at his shoes that were still dusted with the proof of his failure. “There’s not much I could do worse, really...you’ll know better than me without trying.”

Sybil shook her head. 

“I don’t know how to feel things the way you do.”

And how could that be true? 

“But you do," he insisted, "more than most people. You don’t even know it, it comes so natural to you. So you’ll be alright, if anyone like us ever is.”

Thankfully, O’Brien had just given a demonstration on what to do when a person started crying themselves into a puddle. Sybil even made it easier for him—she stood and flung her arms about his neck, without him having to move a single solitary inch.

“Now…” He patted her on the back awkwardly, his other hand resting on her shoulder blade. Sybil was much quicker about pulling herself out of it—she hardly let off more than a couple good sobs before wiping her eyes on her sleeve as she pulled away. Her hand still lingered on his arm. 

“Why do you have flour on your collar?” she asked, brushing it off with a smile. 

“It’s mostly plaster, actually,” Thomas admitted, watching it fall to the floor. 

Her eyes widened. “Why?” 

“Because I haven’t got any sense at all, that’s why,” he said, finally smiling at it all. 

She looked ready to ask him a thousand questions, and Thomas was ready to answer them truthfully, however ashamed those answers made him.

“When I go—wherever I go—we’ll still be friends?” she asked, meeting his eyes.

He hadn’t expected that question 

“Of course we will.” 

A flash of realization sparked in his mind, a whisper of an idea that he couldn’t have heard before standing in just that spot. 

“I’ll even come along, if you’ll take me with you.” 

She leaned back on her heels, beaming. “Of course I will.”

Chapter Text

By the time she’d dressed for dinner, Sybil felt as if the past few days were only fragments of a quickly vanishing dream. 

She’d been bored, and she’d decided the only way to stop being bored was to marry Tom Branson and live in Ireland...somehow she’d believed she would be happy even if she had to spend her whole life lying about the things she wanted...and love was an entity that could hide from her most earnest self-examination, yet had been apparent to Tom from almost the start. 

None of it fit, once she’d woken up to the truth. 

The dream, in some ways, had been sweeter. It had bent the rules of both logic and sentiment in order to reassure her, and she’d come close to accepting its rules. Not believing in them, really—something about dreams could never be believed, even when one was flung right into the middle of them. 

She’d come close to accepting, and Thomas had jolted her awake. At first, she’d felt only a sense of loss about the dream’s illusory promises. Next came a creeping fear of falling back asleep and not realizing. How was she to trust herself, or anyone else?

Thomas’s answer hadn’t been entirely reassuring. 

“You’ll do a lot of guessing.”

“What, about everything?”

“Nearly. They talk a different language, and then they never teach us ours. Don’t ever take them at their word, that’s the main thing.”

That had been the trouble with Tom. He’d told her a lie (whether he knew it or not, Sybil still hadn’t decided). Perhaps Mary or Edith would have recognized it sooner, having loved men before. Back when she’d been dreaming, Sybil had thought of how Mary had loved Cousin Matthew before she’d really realized it herself. 

But Matthew—to her knowledge—had never needed to tell Mary that she loved him, had never felt the urge to insist on it over and over…hadn’t accused her of being unfeeling, of being disappointing, of wasting her time on everything that wasn’t him. 

Those things weren’t in the ordinary way, Sybil realized, now turning them over in her mind with new eyes. They were abrasive and upsetting and not at all romantic. 

She cobbled together the little she knew of her own language, and it helped her see still more clearly. Maude had asked Sybil if she could visit her room, and Sybil had asked her to leave it alone; there’d never been another word said about it. Thomas had been so gentle with Courtenay, so careful even in his sincerity. They’d never know, now, whether he’d understood all of what Thomas had felt towards him....but surely he’d sensed that he was loved. 

Sybil didn’t feel loved, when she thought of Tom. She felt wanted, she felt desired...but could she say she was understood? Respected, listened to, given space to speak on her own terms? 

As far as she could tell, these things accompanied love. Or at least, they accompanied the only kind of love worth accepting. 

She didn’t need to tell Tom all of that. But she’d have to tell him something, and it would need to be taken seriously, this time. 

Thomas—who spent his days running errands for Mrs. Hughes that Mr. Carson ignored—took his paper outside on one of the workbenches.

“If he gives you trouble…” he said through his cigarette.

Sybil doubted that she’d need such an intervention (and she didn’t believe Thomas was especially eager to be a part of one). Still, she was grateful to him for his help. He’d already talked O’Brien off of the ledge of suspicion, buying Sybil time and discretion that she couldn’t have done without. He’d answered the many questions she’d asked, listened to her talk herself out of her own spell.

She wanted to manage the next part on her own. 

Tom looked as pleased as ever to see her, his enthusiasm undiminished by the anxiety that must have been written across her face. 

“Good news, I heard.” Sybil’s heart jumped in her chest, before she realized he was talking of Matthew’s recovery. “I was glad to hear it. I like Mr. Matthew.”

“It’s been such a weight lifted,” Sybil said, her mind still on a weight of her own that she hoped to remove in short order. 

“He’ll be marrying Miss Swire after all, then?”

Sybil avoided his stare. He always found a way to fish…

“They’re talking of getting married at Downton.”

“You wouldn’t like that, would you?” She heard him step forward. “All the fuss and flowers?”

She frowned. “I like flowers.”

She glanced at him, then, and for the first time she thought she saw real doubt in his eyes. 

“Well, doesn’t everyone?” he said, grinning even as a flush entered his cheeks. He turned back to the car, vigorously polishing away at one of the mirrors. 

“Tom.”

He stopped, and Sybil felt all the fear go out of her at once. He knew, whether he’d accept it right away or not. 

I only have to explain what I want to, she reminded herself.

“After everything, you really mean to stay here?” he said, voice low. 

As if her refusal to run away with him could only mean one thing. His powers of imagination seemed to encounter such limitations only when it came to her...

“Of course not. You know that’s not what I want.”

He set his rag down, fully turning to face her. 

“But I’m just one step too far, is that it?” he said, stepping forward. “They might let you get away with the politics, maybe even let you keep on with nursing. But marrying the chauffeur is too much difference to bear.” 

He kept tilting his head in the direction of the house, and Sybil saw more clearly than ever what the trouble was.

She could be his or she could be theirs... it had never occurred to Tom that she could stand with herself, that she spoke a language foreign to all of them. 

“Not to me,” she said. She didn’t wait for Tom’s gaze to soften before adding:  “To me, you’d be just the same as all the rest of it.”

Tom blinked. “I don’t understand.” 

Relieved at finally reaching such an admission, Sybil straightened about the shoulders. 

“I’m not getting married,” she said, tossing the words like dice across the floor. “Not to you or anyone else. That’s my great step, and yes: it will cause trouble. For the rest of my life, I imagine. But I’ve made up my mind.”

If he heard the triumph in the words, Tom pretended he hadn’t. 

“You can’t make up your mind about something like that.”

She’d determined not to get angry, not to point the blame at anyone. They’d confused each other in the past, she’d reasoned, and once she put a stop to it they could part as friends. 

But now he was still tugging on threads she’d explained the source of, and she was finding her resolution impossible to keep. 

“But I can make up my mind about being married to you for the rest of my life?” she snapped. “How does that work, exactly?”

Tom shook his head, returning his attention to the car.

“If you’re trying to spare my feelings by saying I’ve lost against no one, then it isn’t working.”

Sybil stared at him, dumbfounded. “That’s not at all what I said.”

“Then what are you saying?” He sounded for all the world like a man kept in the dark. 

Except Sybil had told him exactly what she meant, and he’d called her a liar for it. 

“I thought I was perfectly clear: we aren’t getting married.” She didn’t flinch from his hard stare. “You clearly don’t believe me about anything else, but you’ll have no choice but to believe me about that.”

He lifted a shaking hand and ran it across his mouth, looking about the garage aimlessly, as if another argument might pop out of one of the corners. 

“Are you through shouting at me, now?” he finally said, voice hoarse. “Or is there anything else you’d like to throw at me before I leave?”

Sybil—who would have at least considered shouting if she’d known she’d be accused of it anyway—almost smiled as she refused the bait. 

“Are you leaving, then?” she asked coolly. Tom opened his mouth before painfully swallowing back his words. 

It was enough for Sybil to pocket her frustrations. 

“You’ll be happier, in Ireland,” she said, softening her voice without letting her guard down. “Fighting for what you believe in.”

He didn’t look at her, the last shred of defiance leaving his voice as he told her: “I know I will.”

It wasn’t the ending Sybil would have chosen, but she’d played her own part faithfully. If Tom could say the same, perhaps it was the only ending they had any right to expect. 

Thomas hadn’t moved from the bench, though his paper seemed to have taken him miles away. He came back by stages, first smiling vaguely when he noticed her approach, then running his finger down the page, as if that would help him mark his place. Only then did he look up, brow slightly creased. 

“How was it?”

Sybil looked up at the sky—the air was calm and clear, and though the promise of spring lingered in the air there was no hurry about it coming. The best and brightest springs were made from steady crawls, blossoms peeking out on a crisp morning. 

She looked back at Thomas, a smile growing on her face. 

“I don’t like him,” she said, plopping down next to Thomas. “I don’t like him at all!”

A laughter began bubbling up inside of her at the realization, at the assurance that she’d woken up, finally and forever. She put a hand up to her face to hide it. 

Thomas didn’t. 

Tom left Downton without giving notice; Sybil had no such choice. 

The rest of the house was starting to notice new addresses on letters meant for her, the way Sybil’s eyes glazed over in the drawing room. Strange books signed out of the library in her name, and ink on Sybil’s fingers in the afternoon, before she’d bothered with scrubbing it away. 

“Is there something you want to tell me?” Mama perched on the edge of Sybil’s bed, and Sybil tried not to sigh at the way she followed Sybil’s expression in the mirror. 

She wanted them to notice her preparations; she wasn’t exactly ready to account for what it all meant. 

“We live in the same house,” Sybil said with a shrug. “You already know everything that happens to me.”

Mama smiled, undeterred. 

“If only that had ever been true…” she laughed. “But Edith says you’ve been feeling restless. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I don’t know why Edith is telling everyone my business…” Sybil said, feeling uncomfortably like Mary as her eyes darted away from the mirror. 

Mama noticed. She sat forward, eyes intent on the mirror. 

“I know how much you like solving your own problems, but you know you can come to me if something feels like it’s getting too big to carry on your own?”

Sybil nodded, tugging at her right glove until she was sure her fingers were going to start poking through. 

“Because you don’t stop having a mother just because you grow up.”

Sybil stopped tugging. 

“I know,” she murmured. 

“And you are grown up, all of you….” Mama stood to come up behind her, now looking at Sybil’s reflection with an admiration Sybil didn’t quite understand. Winter and boredom had turned her pale and dull. The shine came back during industrious afternoons spent studying in the garden or her dressing room, but by dinner it felt all sapped away again. 

“You’re all proper women, now,” Mama continued, not seeing any of it. “You were before the war, and now it’s staring us in the face. You’re simply too old to be living the same way you did five years ago. It’s no wonder you’re pacing the walls by now...”

She was seeing the truth and getting entirely the wrong idea from it...Sybil would have to redirect course before she got too far in the other direction. 

“I want to go ahead with working,” she said. Mama’s eyes met her own in the mirror, her mouth agape. 

“As a nurse, you mean?”

She was shocked, but Sybil had imagined it sounding far more ridiculous when said aloud. 

It didn’t. 

“Eventually,” she said. “They’re talking of starting a registry, soon, so my training won’t be enough. But I don’t mind—I’d like to study, learn something real.”

“You mean schooling?” Doubt in her voice, but none of the poison Sybil had feared. Nothing that nullified the possibility that she was right, that she could manage it all. 

“Lots of women go to universities nowadays.”

Mama frowned. “Maybe, but I can’t think of anyone in our circles who has…”

Sybil turned around to look up at her, seizing the moment of consideration and making it hers. 

“But there’s no reason I couldn’t, is there?” she insisted. “If it’s alright to be a nurse—even Granny says so—and they’ve changed the requirements, then how can there be anything wrong in my going?”

“Darling…” Mama looked reluctant to topple over Sybil’s logic. She was an American, and thus had a fondness for spirited reasoning. “The thing is, the war changed everything. There won’t be as many men during the season, and—”

“—oh, I don’t care about all that.” It spilled out of Sybil’s mouth so easily that she forgot to be nervous about saying it. 

“That’s only because you’ve forgotten what it was like,” Mama said, smiling. “All that excitement.”

She meant well, but Sybil wouldn’t assent to going backwards. 

“I haven’t forgotten, and it wasn’t all that exciting.”

Mama blinked, losing her smile for an instant before affecting another one. She didn’t, however, manage to think of anything to say. A sense of meaning settled conspicuously in the silence. Sybil turned back around to the mirror. 

“And the thing is—the thing is, I’m not going to get married.” She took a breath before looking in the corner of the mirror, not quite seeing her mother’s face. “You might as well know that now. I’m sorry if it makes you angry, but I know it. I won’t change my mind.”

The silence grew. Sybil glanced at the clock on the mantel. They would be late going down…

“Sybil.”

She couldn’t glean from the word what Mama had understood and what she hadn’t, and Sybil wasn’t about to make inquiries. The main thing had been said. 

She took a deep breath. 

“So I think it would be useful for me to have a skill, so I can support myself,” she said, standing up. “Don’t you think?”

“Support yourself?” There was a note of panic in her voice, now. “What do you mean? You have this house, you have your family…”

“You just said I was too old to be pacing around the house. And I am. I need something to do.”

“Of course you do,” Mama stepped forward. “Of course you do, but we can talk about it later…”

Sybil bit the inside of her lip, finally turning around to face her. 

“We don’t have to talk about it at all, if you don’t want to,” she said. “But I will go, once it’s all settled.”

Mama studied her with more care than Sybil usually gave her credit for. It was all Sybil could do not to look at her feet.

“You’ve had plenty of time to think about it.” The panic was gone from Mama’s voice, though it had left a kind of sadness. 

Sybil would feel sorry for it later. 

“So you agree with me?” she pressed. 

“I don’t know yet.” Mama looked towards the door, perhaps thinking of everyone else who’d have their say before it was over. “But you know I always want to? I’ll always try to?”

Sybil was willing to take it on trust, for now. 

Edith tightened her grip on the bedpost. 

“But don’t you have to know things in order to get into university?”

Mary rolled her eyes as she adjusted the length of her necklace. 

“I do know things,” Sybil said evenly, determined not to provoke a fight between them. “Not enough, just yet. But I’m learning everything I can, and soon I’ll be ready.”

Soon was a relative term, and Sybil was constantly assuring herself that it would be Soon Enough. As long as she kept moving forward, that was the main thing. 

“Don’t tell me you’re going to sit one of those horrid examinations…” Mary said. 

“Well, how else are they supposed to know I’m qualified?”

Mary turned around in her chair, clutching the back of it with a gloved hand. “You worked in a hospital for years, what could prove your qualifications more than that? I mean, really...they should be grateful you’re bothering with it at all.”

“I think it speaks well of Sybil, that she doesn’t want to take shortcuts,” Edith said. 

“Spoken like someone who’s never found any…” Mary said with a raise of her eyebrow. 

Sybil interjected before the two of them really started in on each other. 

“Can you drive me to the station on Thursday?” Sybil asked, sitting next to Edith. “I have a meeting in London. I’ll stay the night at Aunt Rosamund’s.”

Mary and Edith exchanged a rare look of understanding. . 

“Mama told us she’s planning to steal you away…” Mary said. “I don’t see why you’re in such a hurry to run off. Especially now—I wouldn’t stay in London for all the world.”

But she went to visit often enough...Sybil wondered when at last they’d be free of Sir Richard. 

“You talk as if no one’s ever had the flu in Yorkshire,” Sybil said, leaning back on her hands. 

“Well, I haven’t since you gave it to me the last time,” Mary drawled, “and I don’t plan on getting it now.” 

Sybil shook her head with a smile. 

“So can you take me?” she asked, pressing Edith again. 

For all her posturing about Sybil’s work ethic, Edith looks unsure about actually wanting to help anything come of it.

“Only if Papa has really said he doesn’t mind.”

He’d said no such thing and never would, Sybil supposed, until she’d gone and saved a duke in surgery or something equally improbable. But for the moment, he’d realized there was more risk in digging up the seeds Sybil had planted. 

She might sow them elsewhere the next time. 

“He doesn’t think I’ll manage it,” Sybil said, “so for the moment he’s decided to indulge me.”

Mary shook her head. “It’s a bet he never wins…I wonder he keeps trying.”

Sybil grabbed Edith by the hand. “So will you?”

Mary sighed at Edith’s continued hesitation. 

“Oh, please say yes before I learn to drive her myself.”

Edith shot her daggers. 

“I’ll drive her. I was always going to,” she said, nose in the air. 

Mary only smirked. It reminded Sybil of what she’d forgotten to ask: 

“And can Barrow come along?”

“Is he still hanging about?” Mary stood, fixing her hem. “Carson’s more generous than I am—”

“—which isn’t saying much,” Edith sniped. 

“He’s taking the same train,” Sybil said, pushing through their asides. “Will you?”

Edith—who still looked as though she wanted no part in the plan—seemed about to dispute the addition to their company when Mary, halfway to the door, said: 

“Have you told him Edith’s driving?” 

Edith stood as well, the tips of her fingers curling into the beginnings of a fist. 

“I’ll take him,” she declared, more to Mary than to Sybil. “I don’t mind at all, if I’m already going.”

Sybil stood to kiss her on the cheek before following Mary out of the room. 

“You’re wonderful.” 

Edith hung back even as Mary slowed to let Sybil catch up to her. 

“You know she only agrees to spite me?” Mary said in a low voice. 

Sybil—who knew that and more about why her sisters behaved as they did—only smiled as she looped an arm through Mary’s.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t make it so easy.”

“I know, I know…” Mary rolled her eyes. “But she’s always been so irritating. I’m sorry for it, sometimes. I don’t think she does it on purpose. But she is, and it’s always been that way. I suspect it always will be.”

Sybil tightened her grip on Mary’s arm as they walked to the dining room. Edith was still lingering a few yards back. 

“Do you think I’m silly for trying?” Sybil asked, eager to hear what her sisters really thought. They were both truthful—and bright and thoughtful besides—but you could never get it out of them at once. They had to be taken in turns. 

“It would be if you weren’t so clever,” Mary said, hardly pausing to consider the question. “I’d feel ridiculous doing it, but of course I’d look ridiculous as well. You won’t, darling, and that will be the difference.”

Mary could never look ridiculous doing anything, and everyone but her knew it. Sybil wished she could tell her so and be believed. 

“You’re wonderful, too, Mary.” 

Mary pulled back the edges of her smile, which Sybil hated, but her eyes were brighter than before. 

“Whatever anyone else says, I’m glad you think so.”

No one went to London on Thursday. 

Overnight, the house turned nightmarish, teeming with discordant, ghastly scenes behind every corner. Sybil, in her nursing apron, tending to her own mother, praying to anyone who would listen to make her well again. O’Brien, colorless and frantic, muttering secrets Mama couldn’t hear, secrets Sybil didn’t dare overhear. Thomas, serving dinner in his footman’s livery, looking more in charge of the house than ever. 

Wedding presents stacked, never to be opened. The guests would be sent a second notice, this time of an entirely different sort. 

The world had bent their expectations of the future until they all broke apart. Sybil didn’t have time to pick up the scattered pieces, not while her mother’s fever kept climbing. Even Lavinia’s death felt unreal—as fond as she’d been of Lavinia, all Sybil could feel was fright as she faded away.

The only thing that made it bearable was the knowledge that she could be useful. The last time Mama had been ill, she’d been useless...trying to smile her way through the day and shutting herself up in her room when she couldn’t bear pretending any longer. Just don’t be any trouble, she’d thought. Don’t make it worse. 

It was better by far to be useful. And when Mama’s fever finally faded for good, Sybil’s exhaustion felt earned, almost gratifying. She cried, just a little, wiping her eyes before anyone could comment (if not before anyone had noticed). 

“You did so well,” Mama said, reaching out a hand to her as the others trailed out of the room. Only O’Brien lingered, making slow work of clearing everything away. 

“I wish I hadn’t needed to,” Sybil admitted.

“But someone always will, and that person should be you.” 

Sybil looked over her shoulder. O’Brien wasn’t paying them any attention, but Sybil still felt watched, somehow. 

“We don’t have to talk about it now…”

“We do.” Mama squeezed her hand. Her head hadn’t left the pillow, but she was practiced in pulling people closer with her gaze. Practiced and intentional.

Sybil held her breath.

“I know," Mama whispered, eyes never leaving hers. "I knew.”

Sybil’s first feeling was guilt, that somehow she’d made her mother worry over something that was Sybil’s burden to bear, her business to sort. 

“How?” she murmured, even as her mind filled in a million things, all the pieces Sybil herself was only beginning to put together. Her quirks as a girl, how different she’d been from Mary and Edith...it must have shown more than Sybil had realized. People had noticed. 

“Because you’re so special,” Mama said, her thumb running across the back of Sybil’s hand. “You always were. And I don’t want you to be anything else, you understand? Not for anyone.”

Sybil nodded vigorously, hoping that it was enough.

“I won’t,” she breathed, hardly letting the words out before shutting her lips up tight for fear of what might come out of her next. 

“And you’ll always be my baby, no matter how far you go,” Mama said with a smile. “So don’t you worry about that.”

A weight Sybil hadn’t noticed before lifted from her chest. 

Everything could fit, now. Everything that mattered, anyway. 

She caught Thomas peering over the balcony—if he was planning to be a footman again, he’d have to be prepared to break those kinds of habits…

Sybil—beckoning him down into the hall—hoped he wasn’t. 

“Miss O’Brien said Her Ladyship’s out of danger,” he said by way of greeting. “We were all glad to hear it. Especially after...”

The wedding decorations were still up in the hall, so he didn’t need to finish the thought. 

“I liked Miss Swire.”

“She was lovely,” Sybil agreed, stopping to look at one of the roses that had begun to wilt in its arrangement. Her finger traced the edge of the browning petal, which still boasted a blushing pink on the inside. 

“What is it?” Thomas asked.

“We can’t get used to this,” Sybil said before turning to him. 

Thomas glanced down at his shoes, hands pulling behind his back. 

“They’ve said the job’s mine, if I want it.”

And after weeks of searching, she couldn’t blame him for snatching the opportunity. 

“So they should,” she said, stepping forward. “And there's no harm in taking it, for now. But we’re still going, when the time’s right.”

She hadn’t thought it was as radical a pronouncement as Thomas’s wide eyes made it sound. But then, he hadn’t just been given a speech by his mother. 

“I missed my appointment,” he said, (though Sybil had never thought he was all that interested in the London job to begin with…). “They’ll have found someone else.”

“Then we’ll find something else,” Sybil insisted, smiling at Thomas’s sideways glance. “We’re not going backwards, not either of us.”

Chapter Text

“We’ll let you know.”

Thomas didn’t need a letter in the post to guess what that meant. 

He’d been mad to tell Sybil that he’d come along with her...or perhaps it hadn’t been mad, then, when he'd nothing to lose. It was certainly mad now that he already had a job. Not the job he wanted, of course, not the job he’d expected to have after years of proving that he could manage so much more than opening doors and carrying up trays. 

He shouldn’t have bothered—all that striving hadn’t worked the first time. What reason did the rest of the world have for noting potential when his own family hadn’t given it a second thought? 

It always came back to his father, somehow...the bastard had cheated him out of everything. Thomas had done all that was asked of him and more, and still he’d been tossed out on his ear. He’d fallen into service, and no one had inquired as to where he’d fallen from. He was an unusual sort of footman, that was all.

And what work an unusual sort of footman was supposed to find, Thomas didn’t know…Sybil had all these ideas about turning him into an administrator of something or other, but London remained less than convinced. 

A day off wasted, then...though a few hours wandering London wouldn’t go amiss. Thomas had missed the city and all that came with it—the chance to slip into a crowd and become a stranger, to see and explore without being observed or cared much about. 

There were advantages, to say the least. 

Not that Thomas was planning on seeking out anything more fascinating than an interesting storefront...he spent so much time worrying about the future that he sometimes forgot he had a body at all, let alone accompanying desires. So much the better—there wasn’t a lot to do about them when he did remember...

The war had thrown everything off course, and all Thomas could do was hope it would settle back into place once he found his footing.

In the meantime, he thought, stopping in front of Haley’s Books & Ends, he’d earned something for trying.

He was charmed by the window display that gave the suggestion of a recently vacated sitting room. Not like a sitting room at Downton, but a proper, cosy one. His mum had kept two or three novels stacked just the same way next to her knitting, and the rocking chair might have been the same one his father had banned Thomas from so much as touching after he’d tipped it over three days in a row. He could remember being happy there, at one time. 

He entered the shop. 

While not terribly busy, the shop seemed designed to feel snug, as if it could never really be empty. The shelves, though not themselves very tall, had Thomas craning his neck up to see the ornaments and baubles lining the top of each bookshelf.  Painted constellations dotted the ceiling, which seemed to sit higher than it had any right to sit. 

While Thomas suspected none of the trinkets on the display tables were worth very much, he still would have balked at leaving such pocketable items sitting out. Even still, he smiled at the porcelain figurines scattered amongst an arrangement of Austen novels. Two girls whispering to each other beside Northanger Abbey, a pianoforte next to Emma. ..dancing couples on either side of a battered edition of Pride and Prejudice. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Thomas registered a frantic, distracting motion. He turned his head to find a small girl jumping in front of the bookcase to his left, her hand outstretched as she reached for the book she wanted. Her braids were flying in the air—one nearly hit the woman nearest her. She paid the girl no mind, except to purse her lips more tightly. 

A man across the way fully turned to shush her, at which the girl shot daggers from her eyes before stopping her jumping. She waited for the shushing man to turn back around before standing on the tips of her toes and reaching her hand as high as it would go.

The woman next to her sighed. The girl dropped to her heels and sighed louder. Thomas, laughing inwardly, stepping forward.

“Do you need help reaching?” Something in him was taken aback by how intently the girl stared up at him. 

“Yes—the lilac one, please!” she said, pointing up. And now Thomas saw the collection of Lang’s Fairy Books, carefully ordered according to color. There were quite a few more than when he’d been small—he’d certainly never had a Lilac Fairy Book…

She beamed as he handed it down to her.

"Thanks!” she fondly traced the gold lettering on the spine. She began rifling through the gilt pages, and it occurred to Thomas that little girls weren’t really supposed to be wandering shops by themselves—it couldn’t be good for them or the merchandise. 

“Er...is your mother around?” The sighing woman shot him a glare, which Thomas thought was excessive, under the circumstances. Because she’d cared so much about the poor dear...

“Oh no, she’s working,” the girl said, unbothered. 

“But you aren’t alone?” 

“No! I live here!” the girl laughed, before pointing at the front counter, where an elderly, bespectacled man was speaking with the shushing gentlemen. “That’s my grandpa.”

“Ah.” Thomas shot the sighing woman a triumphant look. She ignored him. 

“I’m supposed to reach the books myself,” the girl explained, “except someone took my stepping stool. It lives right here, see?”

She pointed at four indentations in the carpet just in front of where the fairy books were lined up. 

“But it’s gone…” she sighed, tracing one of the indentations with her toe. She looked up at Thomas glumly, who affected as sympathetic an expression as he could. 

“Well, I’m sure it’ll turn up,” he said, turning his hat in his hands, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. He wasn’t practiced in holding conversations with children. 

As it turned out, the rules were simple—the girl wandered away without another word, plopping down on one of the chairs in the adjoining room, where a collection of maps was kept. If Thomas had felt slighted by the gesture, he needn’t have: not five minutes later—while Thomas was perusing the shop’s play collection—the girl strolled up to him again, fairy book still in hand. She tapped him on the elbow, a wide grin on her face.

“Look at this…” she said, turning the book so he could see the book’s illustration right-side-up. “Her hair is green!”

And so it was, though Thomas wasn’t sure why in the world the girl wanted to share the information with him in particular. He was even less sure why it flattered him. Perhaps it was the way she eagerly pushed the book into his hand, as if it were a gift. 

“Why, how did she manage that?” he asked, hoping that was the appropriate way to accept such a present. 

“She’s a sea lady, you see?” The girl stood on her toes so she might point to the crab dancing next to the green-haired maiden. 

“Ah.” Thomas wished he could think of something else to say to the girl, but she didn’t seem bothered by his lack of wit.

“They all have lots of pictures, if you want to look,” she explained, turning the next several pages over Thomas’s thumb (he slumped about the shoulders so she could reach easier). “See?” 

“That’s very nice.” (Privately, Thomas felt that maybe Mr. Lang had stretched the fabric rather thin—what was wrong with Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella?)

 “You know I had the Blue Book when I was about your age?” he hinted. 

He might’ve told her he’d gone to the moon. Her eyes widened. 

“Really?” 

“Really,” Thomas said, cracking a smile at the way she edged closer to his side. “My sister had the Red, and we’d share them between us.”

He remembered those times more fondly than much of his childhood. Margaret and Phyllis and their Twelve Dancing Princesses...Margaret had read the story aloud over and over again, and Thomas had wondered how long someone had to dance for holes to start in their shoes.

“But of course, they didn’t have sturdy shoes like we do now,” Phyllis had said. But Thomas still marveled at all those pairs of shoes, falling to pieces every night. No wonder they’d been caught out. 

“What they should have done is take them off,” he’d said. But this—he was told—would have been quite inappropriate for a young princess to do. 

He wondered if the girl standing next to him would agree...he felt, somehow, that she’d have taken his view of things. She stood right at his side, now; Thomas felt almost afraid to move for fear of startling her away. 

“These books aren’t really mine,” she explained, “I just borrow.” 

“It’s lucky you’re able to.” 

“Yes,” she agreed, surveying him closely for another moment before darting off. 

“I’ll be back!!” she called, leaving Thomas with the book in his hand. 

When the girl didn’t return in short order, he tucked the book under his arm and returned to the shelf in front of him. He’d just pulled out an edition of Lear that looked promising, when he sensed someone approaching. Someone who was, unfortunately, a good deal closer to him in height than the little girl. 

“Oh, that is one of his best,” the aging shopkeeper remarked, coming up to Thomas’s right side. “Have you read it?”

Thomas, who couldn’t decide if he was about to be in trouble for something, shut the book quickly. 

“I have,” he said, more defensive than he needed to be. If it bothered the old man, he didn’t show it. He only peered at him over his glasses, a pensive look on his face. 

“What is it you like about Shakespeare?”

Thomas blinked.

“He tells a proper story, doesn’t he?” 

The shopkeeper nodded. “No one does it better. Except for Mr. Lang…” His eyes drifted to the book Thomas still had tucked under his arm. Thomas removed it, clumsily stacking the Shakespeare on top, as if he’d be called a thief otherwise. The shopkeeper grinned. 

“My granddaughter says you kept her from having to climb the shelves,” he said, stepping forward, hands behind his back. Thomas swallowed—he didn’t look angry, but some men hid that until they’d gotten everything set in place. 

“She’s misplaced a stepping stool.”

The shopkeeper laughed. “Oh, she hasn’t misplaced anything. It’s been tripping people up, so I popped it behind the counter. She’ll find it and put it back before the day’s out…” 

He winked, and only then did Thomas suspect he wasn’t about to be scolded. 

“Well…” he breathed, almost wishing that he were. He felt almost mistaken for someone else, the way the old man was smiling at him. 

“Well, indeed,” the old man agreed. “Agnes says you’re the only kind-hearted visitor today—that was her precise assessment.”

He waited a beat before continuing, but Thomas couldn’t have managed a word if he’d tried. 

 “She’s a dear little thing…” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the next room, where Agnes was already back in her seat, this time coaxing a cat onto her lap. “Head all the way up in the clouds, of course, but that’s our way around here. You might have noticed?”

He was grinning at Thomas with a fondness that made Thomas desperate to confess that he’d really only offered to help because everyone else had been insufferable—sighing and moping about nothing at all—and he didn’t know what, exactly, had possessed the poor girl to think he was all that sweet-tempered, when just that morning he’d been snapped at over breakfast for being “a natural carper, and it’s high time you mended the habit, Thomas.” 

As if he were a child himself...

But none of that was the bookseller’s concern, and Thomas was in London, not Downton. 

Maybe that was the difference. 

“I’ve never seen anything like this place,” Thomas said. “The displays, and the window…”

He trailed off, more unable to explain what he meant than unwilling. The shopkeeper raised an eyebrow, his smile wider than ever. 

“You like the window, Mr—?”

“—Barrow.”

“Barrow.” He considered this, a knot coming into his brow. He shook it out. “George Haley. You know, I used to change the window display out, make little scenes...that’s why I wanted this building, at the start. Spectacular window, I thought. But for some time now, I’ve had a feeling that’s all it needs.” 

“I think you must be right.”

That seemed to be about the end of it, but Mr. Haley kept on with observing Thomas. 

“Would you indulge me, Mr. Barrow, if I play the part of a worried old man for the moment?” Thomas nodded slowly. 

“I ask every young man the same question nowadays, in case it’s slipped everyone else’s mind—how are you managing?”

“I manage,” Thomas said, well before he had a chance to consider whether it was true. “I work.” 

Mr. Haley nodded. “And that’s something to be grateful for, yes?”

“It is.” Thomas caught the sigh in his chest before it came through. “I’m lucky.”

“He says as if he’s walking to his death…” Mr. Haley sat back on his heels, chuckling. “Where do you work, Mr. Barrow, what do you do?”

If Thomas had more than a passing, ill-advised hope that he’d landed a different job that afternoon, he’d have said so in a heartbeat. 

“I’m a footman,” he admitted. 

“Oh, that’s hard work,” Mr. Haley said brightly. “That’s very hard work. I admire that. But it isn’t for you?”

Thomas shrugged. “If I can’t find something else it’ll have to be.”

Mr. Haley seemed nice enough, but the questions were turning tiresome. He’d only stopped in for a book…

Mr. Haley wandered over to a display case next to the bookshelf—this one, at least, looked kept under lock and key. Perhaps the ribboned Venetian masks inside were more valuable...or more tempting for curious hands to pick up and spoil. 

“Mr. Barrow, something like this...could you manage it?” he asked, turning back towards Thomas. “With all your experience arranging things in a house?”

“I have an eye.” Though Thomas wasn’t about to credit Downton for it…. “My dad made clocks, and there’s an art to it, outside of all the mechanics.”

Loath as he was to admit it, his father had taught him plenty about what made the world lovely. Symmetry and precision, an eye for the whole. Clocks told stories, his father said, beyond what time it was. They told tales about their owners, about their makers, about the room they sat in. 

Thomas had believed him, had learned everything he could from watching his father’s delicate, even hands. He remembered his father’s sketches, the measurements scrawled across straight lines and steady curves. How easily his father had taken the picture and turned it into something real, something perfect. 

He’d envied the sketches. 

“Clocks, eh?” Mr. Haley stood straighter. “Now that you don’t hear every day...so you know about that old boy up there?"

He pointed to the cuckoo clock on the far wall. Its design—a labyrinth of leaves and vines and singing birds—would have driven his father to madness. He’d had no patience for clocks that pretended to the level of sculpture or painting. 

Thomas rather liked it. 

“I do.”

“And you can use a needle, I’ll wager.”

“I can.” 

Mr. Haley nodded, and Thomas looked down at the books in his hand, a suspicion growing in his chest. 

“This place runs on charm, Mr. Barrow. You see that? Not the books or trinkets themselves, you can find those anywhere. Could you manage it? Would you want to?”

“You’re offering me a job?” Thomas felt ridiculous even asking the question. He was a customer in the shop, he hadn’t so much as given Mr. Haley a reference…

But Mr. Haley nodded, looking quite serious. 

“I need someone else—I want someone else. Getting on, and I can’t convince my daughter to do it. I would have had more children, if I’d known how stubborn they were going to turn out…” he laughed. “My sister was cleverer: she has three, and they all work together to make sure her word becomes law”

“And she’s not told them to come help you?”

Mr. Haley stuffed his hands in his pockets, shaking his head. “No, they’re not the sort for this kind of thing. Not as a profession anyway. More’s the pity. It’s what people need now…”

Thomas couldn’t say that wasn’t true, not when he’d felt pulled inside himself. 

And the shop was in London...if the pay and the hours were a step above what he had now…

“Could you be persuaded, Mr. Barrow?” Mr. Haley pressed. 

Thomas surprised himself by saying: “I might.”

“You might…” Mr. Haley broke out into a wide smile. “And Agnes thinks you’re...Shakespeare and clocks...this is good, this is all very good…do you have a place to stay, if you come to London?”

Thomas shook his head, still baffled at the direction the conversation had taken. 

“Of course you don’t, why would you...my head isn’t on straight, Mr. Barrow, but it’s all there, I promise you that…” 

He turned back in the direction of the front counter, beckoning Thomas along. 

“Now, if you’re working anywhere this corner of London, you’ll want Mrs. Porter, trust me on that…I’ll get you the address, you tell her George Haley sent you. She’ll find you a room.”

Thomas was afraid to speak, as if another word would jolt him out of whatever strange, comforting dream he was currently wandering through. He stared, mouth open, as Mr. Haley wrote out an address in a neat hand on the back of a business card. 

“She’s been here longer than I have,” he remarked as he wrote. “And she pays a good deal more attention than I do—any questions, you ask her...she hasn’t steered me wrong yet.” 

“Thank you,” Thomas finally managed, as Mr. Haley pushed the card across the table. 

“And if you’ll be kind enough to jot down your current address just there.” Mr. Haley passed him another card. “I’ll send you all the details of the work. You can think it over and decide how you’d like it.” 

“You’d want a reference?”

“Yes, yes...I’ll put it all in the letter,” he assured Thomas, picking up the copy of Lear he’d set on the counter. “And you mustn’t forget to take this home with you...lovely edition…”

I’d be mad to take it. But Thomas smiled as the bell above the door rang out his departure, clutching the card in his hand. 

“It’s really marvelous luck.” Sybil’s eyes scanned Mr. Haley’s second letter again. He’d adjusted the offer upon receiving Thomas’s reference. A better reflection of worth, he’d called it, adding that Thomas could add a commensurate sum of gratitude for indulging the offer in the first place. 

Thomas—who had always supposed jobs were something you tricked people into giving you—had spent the last week in a daze. Try as he might, he couldn’t piece together how the letter from Mr. Haley could exist in his pocket even as Mr. Carson seemed to inwardly groan at every reminder that Thomas still worked at the house. Surely at least one of them was mistaken. 

He’d rather it were Carson, but Thomas knew the simple odds weren’t in his favor.

“I still don’t understand it,” he admitted to Sybil, as they stood in the doorway of her bedroom. He wasn’t meant to be lingering upstairs, but as he was one final letter away from giving his notice, the sense of himself as a footman was already beginning to fade. 

“I do,” Sybil said, handing him back the letter. “He thinks you’re a perfect candidate, and of course he’s right.”

That was someone who knew him better than Mr. Haley who’d vouch for him, anyway...

“It’s not like the jobs you were circling.” Jobs that would have had him managing far more than a collection of books, a couple of old clocks, and a little girl’s stepping stool. 

“But none of those jobs were right for you, were they?” she said. So entirely sure, and so pleased for him in spite of the fact that her own pursuits were more ambitious by far. 

She was going to be a proper nurse, and Thomas wasn’t convinced it would stop there. Her preparations had her swallowing every bit of information she could get her hands on, and it was sticking. 

Thomas had always known she was bright—anyone could see that—but Sybil was more than that. She was determined, unrelenting. She studied, not as someone looking to convince a university to let her be a nurse, but as someone who’d given herself permission to master anything she wanted, depending on the hour. 

Thomas had always thought of himself in such terms, but when he watched Sybil it felt as if he’d only been pretending. Trying to prove something, putting on a show. 

She could really and truly be great. 

“You’re aiming so high,” he said. She understood his meaning, dismissing it without a thought: 

“I aim for what I want. Is this what you want?” 

Thinking of how Mr. Haley’s eyes had brightened when Thomas mentioned the window, he nodded. 

“Then it’s like I said: you’re wonderfully lucky, and you must promise to pass some of it on to me,” Sybil said with a grin. “Now: will you please go over my words with me?”

She moved to her bed, picking up a stack of paper cards from her pillow and handing them over to Thomas. He frowned, shuffling through the deck of medical terminology. 

“What’s that?” he said, stopping on a particularly nasty looking word. 

“If you’d read me the word, I could tell you,” Sybil teased, even as Thomas turned the card over to peek at the definition. 

“It’s Anastomosis…Oh.” 

Something out of Frankenstein, then...

“You worked in a hospital.”

“It’s a different thing, when the person’s right there,” Thomas said, tucking away the offending word. “But you start thinking about it…”

Sybil raised an eyebrow. “Well, who would want their doctors to think?”

She laughed at Thomas’s vexed expression. 

“I’m going to be sick,” he said, affecting a curt tone, “and then you’ll be sorry for being so unkind to me.” 

She shook her head, still laughing. “Fine—I’ll make Edith do it. Give them over…”

Thomas was just about to say that Edith wasn’t going to like the task any better, when Mrs.Hughes did a double-take upon passing the open door. She turned back around, and it was all Thomas could do to hide a sigh at her look of disapproval. 

“Thomas—did you know you missed the door not five minutes ago?” she said. “One of the maids had to let them in. I’d hope Mr. Carson doesn’t find out if I were you.” 

“Well, how could I hear it from this room, Mrs. Hughes?” Thomas said, brow knit in innocent confusion. Sybil was biting back a smile, staring up at the ceiling to distract herself. 

“Then perhaps there shouldn’t be a footman in this room,” Mrs. Hughes said sharply. 

“No, I suppose not,” Thomas said, following her out. He grinned knowingly at Sybil before turning the corner, and she began to laugh again. 

They were really and truly getting away. 

Mrs. Porter—a kindly wisp of an old woman—let Thomas choose the room with the largest window.

“It’s colder at the end of the hall,” she warned, but Thomas promised he didn’t mind.

“And we’ll get you new curtains,” she said, hushing Thomas’s insistence that she didn’t need to bother. “No, they’re ratty things, look at ‘em. They spoil the view.”

Once her son had put the new ones in—blue and bright and sturdy—Thomas quite agreed that they made all the difference. 

He’d never been late for anything, never in his life...but of course Mr. Haley didn’t know that, nor would he care much, Thomas expected. 

But Mr. Haley didn’t scold him, didn’t say a word until the shop closed for the evening. 

“Come for breakfast tomorrow,” he told him. “I always make too much.”

“About this morning,” Thomas stammered. “It won’t happen again. I just—”

—am used to being run by a bell. 

Mr. Haley looked at him over his spectacles. 

“Now, we both know it might, Mr. Barrow. But you’re learning a new way of living. That takes a few tries.”

“I know, but I—”

“Come to breakfast,” he pressed. “Just let yourself in. We’re up nice and early, so don’t worry about that...”

The living quarters upstairs were snug for three: Mr. Haley, his daughter (a Mildred Stephens who worked as a secretary), and Agnes—who stood next to Thomas with a piece of toast in hand, occasionally prancing all the way around the table with an energy Thomas wished he could summon at any hour, let alone so early in the morning. 

He liked it more than he’d have guessed. 

“Grandpa, is Mr. Barrow allowed to come to breakfast every day?” Agnes asked, as they made their way downstairs to open up the shop. She’d grabbed him by the hand halfway down the flight of stairs, and Thomas found himself wondering how many of the morning’s tasks he might accomplish with one hand. 

“Mr. Barrow is welcome to come for breakfast any day he likes.” 

Sybil used the season as an excuse to stay with her aunt in Belgrave Square. Her parents, she explained, weren’t ready to admit the change might prove permanent, but they could accept a chaperoned summer in London. 

Lady Rosamund, however, did not follow her niece to Haley’s Books & Ends for tea on Sunday. 

Sybil was ushered upstairs by a delighted Mr. Haley, whose excitement appeared to stem just as much from the fact that Sybil was a friend of Mr. Barrow’s as it did from the fact that she was the daughter of an earl. They made easy conversation, though this came as little surprise, as they were two of the most pleasant people Thomas had ever known. 

“He says you’re studying anatomy, medicine, all that.” 

“I want to be a nurse.”

“Oh, that’s a fine occupation. I have a niece…”

Agnes behaved as if she were in the presence of a fairy princess. As the afternoon wore on, she found a place at Sybil’s feet in the sitting room, piping up every so often to tell Sybil a fact she’d learned from a book. Her mother had to tear her away so they could make their trip to church. 

“We always go on Sunday, except we go when no one else does…” Agnes said cryptically, finally clinging to her mother’s hand and waving them goodbye. 

Sybil wanted a look around the shop, and Mr. Haley shooed them down while he tidied up, protesting Thomas’s offer to help. 

“You must show off for your friend,” he insisted. 

Not that there was really much to show off—small repairs, well-maintained shelves. He was still getting his bearings, still letting Mr. Haley show him how things were run. 

“—and enjoying it, I think,” Sybil remarked, inspecting one of the displays. 

“It’s not like anything I’ve ever done,” Thomas said. “He’s mad, you understand…”

Sybil smiled. “But you like him.”

“I do. We get on,” Thomas agreed, registering a flash of ginger fur out of the corner of his eye. “That’s Crackers.”

“I don’t think it is, really—” Sybil noticed the cat pawing at the front door. “Oh.”

“Agnes named him.”

“She’s awfully sweet. And her father?”

“Dead, best I can tell.” Thomas approached Crackers, who dropped down on all fours and started pacing instead. 

“And you shouldn’t be down here…” he said, though the cajoling note in his voice did nothing to soften Crackers, who stiffened as Thomas tried picking him up. Then came the squirming, the sharp whining meow…

“He doesn’t like you,” Sybil laughed. Thomas was about to insist that he did, really, only he hated being caught...when the bell on the front door jingled. 

Thomas turned on his heel, the disgruntled cat still trapped in his arms. The young man standing in the doorway took in the scene in pieces, only shutting the door and taking off his hat once he’d gotten the measure of the room. 

There were handsome men, and then there were men who seemed too handsome to be allowed—the gentleman placing his hat on the stand was of the latter variety. Madge would have said he should be in the pictures, and she’d have been right. 

“Can I help you?” Thomas asked, just as the man opened his mouth. He winced inwardly, though the man gave a closed lip smile. 

“Could you tell me if Mr. Haley’s in?” He neatly pulled off his gloves, eyes only leaving Thomas to grin at the grumbling cat in his arms. “I know you’re closed, but he’ll be expecting me.” 

Thomas nodded blankly. The bloke was Yorkshire, from the sound of it...but Thomas had spent the better part of ten years in Yorkshire and never imagined they made anyone like that...

“Mr. Haley’s upstairs,” Sybil answered. 

“Thanks.” The young man nodded to them both before heading up. 

“I can tell him—” Thomas called up weakly, too late for the man to hear. Sybil was staring at him in amusement. 

“Well,” he said with a shrug, avoiding her gaze. 

“Who’s that?” she laughed. 

“How should I know?” Thomas said, a snip in his voice. It’d been some time since he’d played the fool in front of a man. He dropped Crackers, who darted away. 

Meanwhile, Sybil had done some darting of her own, up the stairs. 

“It might be private…” Thomas complained, following her up. 

But if it was private, neither party was taking any pains to keep it that way. The door into the upstairs quarters was still ajar, and both men were talking just in front of it.

“—don’t know what you want me to say, it’s all been settled,” Mr. Haley said, sounding as near to irritated as Thomas had heard since arriving. “I thought your father had found you a place.”

“He did, of course,” the young man said. “Only I’m not convinced it’ll work out. Can’t you—?”

“--tell the perfectly nice young man who bit when you didn’t that he should pack up and go back to where he came from? That’s hardly fair.”

“Well, you did ask me first,” he said, a brightness in his voice that Thomas wasn’t sure would prove successful. 

“And you answered second.”

“Come on, Uncle George...I thought you of all people would understand a bit of absentmindedness…”

“Absentminded people forget their spectacles on their heads and leave tea out to get cold, and yes, I do count myself among their ranks. You, my boy, are a connatural dawdler, and as charming as it can be, I don’t think it would suit you to work here. Whimsy requires a certain energy. A sense of direction. Mr. Barrow understands that, and lucky for both of us he did. He’s just what we needed.”

Thomas hardly had time to feel flattered, as the nephew’s response came without hesitation: 

“Then surely Mr. Barrow can find another offer if he’s so impressive.” There was a sulk in his voice, now. 

“I thought you wanted to be a valet, that this place would be a waste of your time and talents.”

“I’m sure I never said that…” But the young man’s laughter fooled no one, least of all his ‘Uncle George.’ 

“Look, the man’s insufferable,” the nephew pressed, trying another tack. “If I told you what he...I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I have some pride.” 

This made Mr. Haley pause, and Thomas’s blood went cold for an instant. 

“And so you should, at your age,” he said. “I suggest you find another job before it fades. But my love, I’ve given this particular job to someone else. I’m sorry, but that’s what’s happened.”

“Right.”

“What are you thinking of?”

“Nothing at all, apparently,” came the miserable response. “I should be going back.”

“You should come for tea, when you can.”

“The thing is, this was my afternoon off for the month. And I’ve wasted it.”

Thomas had almost forgotten he was on the landing until the nephew’s shadow loomed in the crack under the door. 

“Go, go…” he breathed, pushing Sybil along in front of him. 

The nephew wasn’t in any hurry, and—though they were breathless and frantic when he entered the shop again--he didn’t appear to notice. He hurried past, only stopping to grab his hat off the stand. He looked about, brow furrowed. 

“Where’s the cat?” he asked. Thomas blinked. 

“He’s…” Thomas gave a half-hearted swivel. “Well, he’s…”

The nephew raised an eyebrow, stepping back into the shop with a grin. He made a straight line towards the curtain in the window display, pulling it back to reveal Crackers sitting under the rocking chair. 

“There you are!” he cooed. “Yes, I know…”

Crackers didn’t give him any trouble as the nephew scooped him up and out, speaking to him fondly about nothing at all. 

“Do you want me to take him up, Mr. Barrow?” he asked—and if he’d meant to mortify Thomas by dropping his name, he’d certainly succeeded in doing so. 

“No,” Thomas stammered. “No, that’s...that won’t be necessary.”

He reached for the cat, who thankfully, blessedly, didn’t protest being handed off. 

“That’s what I’m told,” the nephew said, the bitterness in his voice carefully clipped. Even still, he nodded at Thomas and Sybil before leaving. 

He lingered on the stoop, door still open, long enough for Thomas to notice a second figure standing there—a woman with a cigarette in her hand and a cap on her head. 

“—what’d he say?” he heard her ask. She passed the cigarette to the nephew as the door closed and the bell jingled. 

Thomas turned to Sybil, who was standing with her mouth open. 

“What?” Thomas asked, even as she darted over to the window in the next room. The nephew and his companion walked by it, deep in conversation, still passing a cigarette between them. 

“That’s Amelia,” Sybil murmured as they passed. 

“Who?”

Sybil looked half in another world as she answered. 

“Amelia Walker.” 

Chapter Text

“M’lady—there’s a Miss Walker for you in the drawing room.” 

Which, of course, Sybil knew already—she’d been keeping an eye on the square from her bedroom window for the past hour, her gaze darting from it to the mirror as she fussed with her hair.

Amelia Walker, in London...Sybil supposed it wasn’t any great surprise, really, given the time of year, though Amelia had spent their first London Season assuring everyone who would listen that she wouldn’t marry anyone before testing them out in the country anyway, so what was the point? 

“‘Testing them’ is about right,” Mary had sneered when Sybil told the story. “I’ve never seen someone so capable of making the waltz look like a wrestling match.” 

An unkind assessment, if not a wholly inaccurate one. Amelia stuck out in a ballroom, and though she wore the same frocks as everyone else, fixed her hair up in the same style, none of it sat well on her. She’d been gangly and freckled as a girl, and age had not seen fit to reconceive those qualities. Her nose was perpetually sunburnt, and the callouses on her hands formed a pattern that wasn’t caused by cross stitching or piano playing (though she did play, Sybil remembered, and rather well). 

Sad, everyone lamented, that she should make such an unpromising start, when her sisters were all great beauties. 

But Amelia Walker never looked sad to Sybil. She was a jolly chatterbox with a bright idea a minute, and Sybil had always believed she was quite as pretty as her sisters, when she was given a chance to do something other than stand uncomfortably against a wall. 

She’d been different, and what was wrong with that? How dull, for them all to go along in the same way, Sybil had argued. And any man who didn’t want to dance with her was a fool, really, when she was so strong and lively and—

—when played back in her memory, it hadn’t taken Sybil long to suspect that her own feelings had been built on more than sheer principle. 

She’d written a note to the Walkers’ London house accordingly. The response had been so quick to arrive that Sybil half believed it would be someone writing to suggest she was mistaken, that Miss Walker certainly had not been tramping about London, and they were very sorry to hear that she’d been mistaken for such an unbecoming figure. 

Thankfully, the note was from (a very eager) Amelia: 

You have caught me out! the letter read.  I am transformed into layabout here in London—you are an angel for attempting to wrest me from my own listlessness. Thursday suits me very well, so if you’ve only asked as a courtesy, you must tell me before I batter in the door!

“Lady Sybil…” she beamed, standing from her chair upon Sybil’s arrival in the drawing room. However she’d looked on the streets of London, she was now dressed the part of a respectable caller. Always in fashion, no one could fault Amelia for that. She seemed to demand that everyone notice how well she followed the rules (and what little difference it made). 

“Oh, you do the loveliest things with your hair,” Amelia said, preempting any formal greeting. “I’d forgotten...now I’ll have to go right back on coveting it.”

But Amelia’s shining blond curls, which now sat no lower than her jaw, looked so light and jaunty that Sybil had half a mind to lop her own tresses off that very night. 

“I should think you’re more in fashion—Mary’s always talking of cutting hers.”

(But Mary’s would never curl that way, not for longer than an afternoon). 

“Oh, of course Lady Mary would,” Amelia agreed, which somehow made Sybil feel quite jealous. It faded as Amelia swept her away in conversation—a feat which was one part talent, one part luck. 

For the first time in their lives, they both had interesting stories to tell. 

“They really sent you to France?” Sybil said, setting her tea cup aside. 

Amelia nodded. “FANY Corps. And it was about time. We’d had girls there from the start, but the army wouldn’t have us for ages and ages, so it was all volunteers.” 

“And they had you driving ambulances?”

“They had me doing whatever I could catch,” Amelia laughed. “But yes, that too.”

The stories she told, pulled along by Sybil’s questioning, made Downton’s venture as a convalescent home seem awfully feeble. She’d cried at spending two months in York, and Amelia had gone clear across the channel, straight into the thick of things. She’d had to learn to do everything on her own—no baskets from home, no visits from her sisters.

Though Amelia seemed eager to hear about Sybil’s experience (“I wish I could have seen the place! Mama did send the things I asked, didn’t she?”), Sybil couldn’t think of any stories that might counter the ones Amelia was telling. Stories where women found new ways of being useful, where they pushed into spaces no one wanted them to go. 

“I never knew just how much women were doing, during the war,” she admitted. “I think so fondly of my own contributions, and I forget how small they were, really.”

Amelia sat back in her seat, her brow knit. 

“Well, I’ve put my foot in it if I’ve done that…what beastly company; you’ll never ask me back.”

Her chuckle was unconvincing—Sybil had offended her, made her feel boastful or ungracious...she could kick herself. She’d been glad to play host, but it was dawning on her now that there was more to it than she’d realized, that Mama or Granny or Aunt Rosamund knew tricks and social graces she didn’t. 

“Oh, no! I just mean it’s so inspiring, hearing what women can do,” she said, valiantly striving to push the wagon out of the mud herself.  “I felt so lonely, back at home, being the only one pushing the rock uphill. It’s nice seeing someone up ahead.”

This seemed to do the trick. Amelia’s eyes brightened—they were so good-natured, even when she was disappointed, and just now Sybil felt a flush come into her cheeks as she earned their approval. 

“Ahead of you, Lady Sybil?” Amelia grinned as she sipped her tea, though it must have gone cold already. “Not likely...I know you were the first girl I’ve ever heard use the word ‘canvassing’ in conversation...first person at all, come to think of it. Cleverest girl in every room, and we all knew it. King’s College had better be ready.” 

This made Sybil want to ask her a thousand questions, none of which were about the war or canvassing or anything not to do with the way the dimples in Amelia’s cheeks deepened when she talked of Sybil. 

“Well, you were the best rider,” Sybil said, aiming for something that might make Amelia feel as admired as she did. “You tried to teach me, and I didn’t have a talent for it. You were so kind not to say so, but I knew.”

“Oh, good old Dragon, I remember…” Amelia laughed. “That was bad luck, having a lapdog for a horse…you won’t miss the country, then?”

“Not that part, so much…but some of it. I can always go back, though, when I want to.”

“It’ll never be the same, though, will it?” Amelia remarked, before grimacing at her own words. “Crikey, I’m made of lead today…I meant to be so lively and interesting.”

She fixed Sybil with an apologetic look that demanded immediate reassurance. For a moment, all Sybil could notice was the freckles dotting the bridge of her nose. 

“Oh, but you are!” she managed, breathlessly. “So interesting! And you’re right—it won’t be the same. But it wasn’t the same before I left, either. I’m not the same as I was before the war.”

She felt at once that she’d given too much away in the words, and the way Amelia stared wasn’t helping. 

There was something thrilling in it. 

“No, you couldn’t be, could you?” Amelia said, a smile growing on her lips. 

Not for the first time, Thomas’s eyes flitted to the slit under the library door. He had a keen sense of when a butler or maid might be “listening in.” This time of day, he told Sybil, was the worst time for eavesdropping, “as no one’s got anything to do.” 

Such comments—and the accompanying suspicion Thomas wore on his face—hadn’t endeared him to the staff at the house. But then, Thomas seemed tickled to be in a position where such resentments didn’t concern him. He was a guest, and he delighted in being treated as such. It had been all Sybil could do not to laugh at Aunt Rosamund when she’d patronizingly suggested it “might be awkward for the man” to visit. Sybil could think of few things less likely to embarrass Thomas. He could be terribly haughty, when he wanted to be. 

As a lady, Sybil would always plead that there were worse sins in the world than that...

“I think she fancies you…” Thomas said, after being assured that no one was creeping about the door. 

Perhaps no one was listening in—and Thomas had spoken in a low voice in any case—but the room still felt too wide, somehow, to let such words tumble about where they pleased. Even here, in the room Sybil had transformed into a blend of study and sanctuary.

“We can’t know that.”

“But we can think it,” Thomas smirked. 

A reassuring remark, as Sybil had done little else but think since Amelia had left. Thinking things that made her feel guilty, as if she had caught Amelia in a trap. She felt, somehow, that she was lying to Amelia. Would she have come to tea if she’d known that Sybil’s aim was to finally recognize the butterflies in her stomach for what they were? 

Sybil hadn’t been prepared for how that recognition would make her feel. People always talked of the frustrations and fears that came with still-unreturned romantic feelings, and Sybil supposed those bits of it might be on their way. 

But was it only people like them, Sybil wondered, who also felt joy at realizing they could feel that way at all? A giddiness, a sense of having a perfectly marvelous secret tucked up in a newly found corner of their chest? 

She’d wanted to see Amelia again as soon as she’d left, just so she could grasp at that feeling again. 

“She’s so…” she teased her lip, unsure of how to explain it to Thomas. Unsure if she needed to, or if he might already know. 

She thought, perhaps, the latter was more likely, though he encouraged her anyway. “Go on.”

“She was talking about her car—how she’s fixing it all up—and I don’t know the first thing about cars, nothing at all...and I wanted her to talk about it for ages, just so I could watch her. Just so she wouldn’t go home.”

For an instant, Thomas looked so forlorn that Sybil was sorry she’d said anything at all. Insensitive of her, to go on about a girl when—as far as she knew—Thomas had been alone for...well, she didn’t know, did she? They both knew, but they didn’t often talk about that side of things. And when they did, it was usually about her. 

Would he tell her anything, she wondered, if she asked? 

“If you don’t mind my saying so, I doubt very much that Miss Walker really wanted to talk all that long about her car either…” Thomas managed, recovering an easy grin. “She was too eager to keep talking to you.”

He spoke with confidence Sybil couldn’t share, not yet. 

“I don’t know how I could ever tell for certain.”

Thomas’s eyes fell on the door again. “People give signs. What did Miss Tilney do?”

“Apart from kissing me?” The words echoed too much for either of them to find much humor in the quip. “I don’t remember...I suppose I knew afterwards what she meant by certain things...but girls are so fond with each other.”

“There comes a point,” Thomas said. “You just have to get to it.”

Sybil sat forward. “How?”

“Just keep edging closer, see what happens. It goes wrong, back off.”

“And do what?”

“Lie.” 

The word fell like lead. Something furious flickered in Thomas’s eye, and Sybil hated whoever had put it there. Thomas stared into his cup, the fingers on his left hand forming a nervous, fidgeting fist. 

“But I’m not one to ask for advice,” he said softly. “So you’re probably better off—”

“—you know more than I do,” Sybil insisted, even as Thomas shook his head. “No, I’m serious: I don’t know anything at all. Everything that happened with...well, it feels like it was an accident.”

“It might feel like that, but I’ll bet it wasn’t.” Thomas’s mouth twisted into a smile. “Is Miss Tilney the only one, then?”

“That’s a thing to ask…” 

But then, she’d just been wondering how much he’d tell her about his own past. 

“Yes,” she admitted. “Do you think that matters?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, if that’s what you mean,” Thomas said, looking at his cup. “I just wondered.” 

There was a tightness in his voice that made Sybil suspect his wondering was anything but idle. 

“Why did you wonder?”

Thomas shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

Not a denial. “Then tell me.”

Thomas considered his words. “I just had thought...maybe...Gwen might have...well, I don’t know, do I?”

Sybil blinked. Somehow, the name felt unexpectedly, inexplicably, correct. 

“Why?” she said, too quickly. “Did she say something to you?”

Thomas stared at her, mouth slightly open. 

“No, she wouldn’t have,” he said slowly. “She didn’t like me very much.” 

Though she understood where the twisted pride in his voice came from, Sybil couldn’t pretend she always enjoyed it. Not when she knew that other people’s dislike often didn’t sit so easily as he pretended it did. 

“She told me that you didn’t like her.”  Which was more or less true, though perhaps Gwen hadn’t been all too anxious to mend the situation...

“I hadn’t realised you’d talked so much about me.”

“Oh yes, we spent hours and hours doing it…” Sybil joked, even as her heart began to pound uncomfortably. “But why did you think of her?” 

Thomas shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, if I was wrong.” 

But a part of Sybil wondered if he was wrong…

“It matters to me.” 

Thomas swallowed—he seemed much less eager to go on with it now that it had turned into an examination of his own thoughts. 

“She was always going on about you,” he murmured. “And then you told me, about...well...and I started wondering if there’d been more to it all.”

“There wasn’t anything more to it.” And a good thing, too...all Gwen had wanted was a job and some help, nothing more. 

“Would you have wanted there to be?” Thomas asked, studying her face and seeming to find something Sybil hadn’t realized was there. 

Who could say, so many years later? It was probably for the best that nothing had ever come of it, that Sybil had channeled her energy into helping Gwen fit her dreams into reality. Dreams that were far better than anything Sybil could have offered out of her own hand. 

“Maybe; I can’t really remember, now.” She ran a hand along the back of her neck, feeling suddenly warm. “I suppose that happens more often than we like to admit.”

Thomas gave an almost imperceptible shrug, and the library fell into silence. Sybil could hear voices coming from the other side of the door, and this time both she and Thomas watched until they faded. 

“What about you?” Sybil finally ventured. 

“What about me?” he said lightly. 

“How many men have you kissed?” 

Thomas looked away so sharply that Sybil thought at first she’d offended him. He turned back in short order, and the only word Sybil could think to describe him was “charmed.”

“Well, can’t I ask?” she insisted, even as a blush came into her cheeks. He was trying desperately not to laugh at her, and of course he would be laughing at the thought of talking over kissing in the library. He was older and a man and—well, Sybil didn’t quite know the other reasons but she was sure there had to be several. 

“You can ask,” Thomas said, trying and failing to bite back his grin. “I’m not sure I’ve kept track.”

This seemed impossible to Sybil, but she didn’t want to pry if Thomas wasn’t keen. 

“Well, you can boast…”

“I’m not boasting. Just saying.” But he looked smug enough. 

“Anyone recently?”

Thomas finally laughed. “No, of course not…”

“Why, ‘of course not?’” Sybil pressed. “You have your job, you’re all settled...there’s no better time for a man to start looking.”

“For what, exactly?” The charm hadn’t yet left Thomas’s eyes. 

Sybil raised an eyebrow. “Well, you’d know better than I would.” 

My dear Lady Sybil,

You’ll think me selfish for taking up so much of your time, but I must beg for your company again before waiting my turn. Lucy has suitors tramping in and out at all hours, and it would be such a change to have a friend of my own to pass the time with. I don’t know how you were with the other nurses during the war, but I got so used to having more friends than I knew what to do with, staying up all hours with the girls in my unit. The war wasn’t worth one man dying, but oh we had such good times! Why can’t that part stay the same? I feel so dull without it. 

Anyway, I’m free as the wind most days, so if you pity me at all you’ll stop in. Now, I must go and post this—Hazel is threatening to eat my hand if I don’t serve her dinner soon. She’s quite the little princess, you’d never know she’d been to war!

Faithfully,

Amelia Walker

Hazel, a terrier mix, quite small, did seem to have learned something from her (entirely unauthorized) years in France. She didn’t yap at Sybil’s arrival, just stood in the entryway with her head cocked to one side, waiting for Amelia to call her over.

“She’s showing off,” Amelia said adoringly, picking her up. “She’s a naughty thing, really...all this proves is she does know what I’m asking…would you mind if we took her for a walk?”

Sybil didn’t mind what they did, so long as it meant Amelia wasn’t at risk of watching the clock. 

“It’s just as well,” Amelia assured her, after remarking how nice it was to see the sun at last. “This way we might avoid one of Lucy’s admirers…and as for Hazel, the poor dear can’t walk very far anyway. More of a sprinter.” 

Hazel waited to put her talent on display until they came back in sight of the house. She’d refused to run at the park, biting disdainfully at the grass before pleading with one of the ladies to take her up in their arms. 

“You’re embarrassing me,” Amelia cooed, relenting at last. “I’ve bragged about you being a war dog, you know…” 

But Sybil found it endearing, and Hazel got the last word anyway—she sped off with a bark as soon as they turned the corner onto the Walker’s street. She’d been too lazy for Amelia to think of putting her back onto her leash, and now she was reaping the rewards. 

“Hazel!” Amelia shouted. “Oh, gosh…Hazel!”

She darted off, leaving Sybil to hurry along behind her—she wasn’t nearly as fast as Amelia. By the time she caught up, Amelia was already in the middle of a conversation with the young man Hazel had been after: it was Mr. Haley’s disappointed nephew, who looked as if he very much wanted to let the scrambling Hazel jump into his arms, but had rightfully decided it would turn his suit into something of a disaster. 

“—getting on better, but he’s at it again…” Sybil heard him saying, before he caught her eye and clammed up, glancing at Amelia for an explanation. She hurried to smooth things over. 

“This is Lady Sybil Crawley, the Earl of Grantham’s daughter,” she said, grinning at Sybil’s grimace at the title. “She’s pouting at me for saying all that because she’s one of the few lovely people who really believes it shouldn’t matter. This is Ellis. He works for the Barnstons, just down the way—”

The front door opened, and Lucy Walker stuck her head out. 

“Amelia, Mr. Gregory’s in the parlor—”

“—well, I can’t come now, can I?” Amelia called back, gesturing at the scene. 

“But I don’t want to be alone with him!”

Amelia rolled her eyes, shooting Ellis a knowing look. “Two minutes. Time me.”

At the raise of his eyebrows, she reconsidered. “Alright, five minutes. Not a second more, I promise on my life! Come on, you silly thing!”

She scooped Hazel up and hurried into the house, leaving Sybil and Ellis standing uncomfortably just in front of the stoop. 

He was a handsome man. Sybil could tell that much, and Thomas had seemed to tell it even more when they’d run into each other in Mr. Haley’s shop. Thomas wouldn’t like her for saying so, but it was the truth, as far as Sybil could tell. 

“How do you know Miss Walker?” she asked, realizing too late that the question—while innocuous enough in a sitting room—might carry quite a different weight when directed at a man who worked in service. 

If it offended, Ellis was graceful enough not to show it. 

“I worked for her cousin,” he explained. “Moved here, there she was again. We both found it funny.”

This introduced far more questions than it answered, but Sybil could hardly blame him for being guarded, under the circumstances.

“My uncle didn’t tell me he knew an earl’s daughter,” he said, glancing across the street before meeting her eye with a smile that didn’t quite hide his discomfort with the situation. 

“Mr. Barrow’s a friend,” Sybil said.

“Mr. Barrow seems to have a lot of those,” Ellis said, squinting up at the sky. But—just as she’d felt in the bookshop—Sybil didn’t think he was angry at Thomas, really. Angry with someone, but not him. 

“Do you like it here in London?” she asked. Ellis’s pause told her enough. “You don’t, do you?”

“It isn’t home yet,” he admitted. “But it’s where to be, if you want to get anywhere.”

Sybil tugged on the thread eagerly. “And where do you want to get to?”

Ellis hesitated. 

“Mr. Barnston’s in Parliament,” he said. “On his way up, too.”

Perhaps Thomas could have passed such an answer off as valuable—instilled with some pride, buffed it up with a careful tilt of his chin—but Ellis couldn’t. And Sybil wasn’t going to let him off that easily. 

“But that’s Mr. Barnston,” Sybil pressed. “What about you?”

Ellis smiled at that, pressing his lips together as though to mute the expression. It didn’t work. 

“Well, that’s the trick of it, isn’t it,” he said. “It all depends on where Mr. Barnston goes.” 

He tried a little harder than before to put some heart in the words, but Sybil didn’t believe he cared one whit for what happened to Mr. Barnston...though it didn’t help that she’d overheard him begging to be rid of the man. 

Was he planning on taking his uncle’s advice?

Before Sybil could think of how to find out the answer, Amelia was hastening down the steps towards them, looking thoroughly relieved to have gotten away. 

“Gosh, I’m sorry about that...Lucy is such a baby about these things, he’s a man not a bloodhound…though I’m afraid I mentioned you, Lady Sybil, so you’ll be expected to make an appearance…someday I’m going to get myself into some real trouble, talking before I think...”

She shook her head, turning to Ellis. 

“So what’s he at again?” She sighed at Ellis’s hesitation. “Oh, Lady Sybil won’t blab.” 

But whatever it was, Ellis clearly didn’t intend to talk about it with Sybil present.

“Surprised you didn’t hear him, being outside,” he said, affecting a vague smile. “Wind’s blowing in the right direction…suppose it echoes more’n it carries…”

If he had been ill right then and there, Sybil wouldn’t have been surprised—something came over him as he spoke, turning him pale and a touch wobbly in the knees. He stared out at the street in front of him as if lost. 

Amelia placed a pitying hand on his arm. 

“You know, I’ve said if you want me to—”

“—no.” He shook his head, shrugging her off as if she’d dug her nails into him. “No, I’m working it all out. It just takes some time.”

“You’ve given it time.”

“I haven’t given it enough,” he retorted, catching Sybil’s eye and quickly looking away. “I should get back.”

And off he went, leaving Amelia standing stunned. 

“He’s not usually like that,” she said, following Sybil up the steps. “He’s such a dear, really…”

“He wasn’t unkind,” Sybil said. “And I’m afraid I made him nervous.”

Amelia shook her head. “Life makes him nervous, not you. Sometimes it shows, that’s all.”

“Was it the war that did it?” 

Something flashed in Amelia’s eyes—she fiddled with the lock on the door longer than she needed to. 

“I think the war changed everyone, made us all afraid,” she said. “But then, I suppose we were all frightened before, weren’t we? Of something or other...hard to imagine…” 

She laughed humorlessly before turning back to Sybil. 

“Now, Mr. Gregory thinks he knows everything, and of course we know he doesn’t…” she said, inspecting herself in the hall mirror before shrugging. “I’ve promised Mama not to say a word, but I’ll not hold you to such a promise. In fact, I’m quite hoping he’ll start trying to brag about something medical...it’d be naughty of me to bring it up on purpose, wouldn’t it?” 

She winked at Sybil, who wondered at once if that was a step closer to the edge...

“I don’t think so,” she replied, moving closer to Amelia’s side. “But we should think of Lucy. Even if we don’t see Mr. Gregory’s charms, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” 

Amelia studied her, and Sybil made sure not to drop her gaze. 

“No, you’re right,” she said. “I’m very unfair. Just because I’m not so easily taken in by men…”

She paused, and if that wasn’t a suggestion, Sybil didn’t know what would be. 

“I’m not either.”

Amelia’s eyes widened--Sybil didn’t think she’d imagined it--and she turned to the parlor before saying:

“Well, that should be enough to carry me through the visit.”

Chapter Text

Agnes pressed her nose harder against the pane of glass next to the door as the thunder boomed again. For the third time in as many minutes, Thomas dropped the pencil he was holding. 

She acted like she’d never seen rain before, he grumbled to himself, watching Agnes pull back to trace the path of a rolling raindrop. 

“Agnes, come away from the window before someone flattens you with the door.”

He kept the improbable—but no less striking—fear that the thunder’s rumbling might shatter the glass to himself. He was always getting such mad thoughts in his head, with Agnes around; it was highly disconcerting. 

“I’m watching them race,” Agnes said, unbothered. 

They’d crossed a threshold, he and Agnes—she no longer felt compelled to hang off his every word and opinion, and Thomas no longer wondered why people said children were exhausting. What was precious on Sunday turned tiresome by Tuesday afternoon. 

Thomas had adapted accordingly. 

“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug. “I’m putting in the bookmarks.”

Agnes’s head swiveled towards the front counter. The “bookmarks”—meant to easily label the books and trinkets held for customers—comprised Agnes’s favorite daily ritual. She delighted in sticking them in the front covers, making sure the name stuck out just so before tucking everything neatly away under the counter. 

“Wait!” she cried out, hand still on the window, one eye still on the racing raindrops. 

“But I’ve finished my bit,” Thomas said, tapping the stack of paper slips importantly. “I don’t see why I should wait, when I can just—” 

“No!” Agnes cried out, racing over to him. “Wait, see I’m here, wait!” 

She ran past the front of the counter, rounding the far corner to find where her stepping stool was kept. She heaved it up in her arms, pressing it clumsily against her chest, before running all the way back around to the other side of the counter. She dropped the stool at Thomas’s feet, breathing heavily. 

“I’m here!” she announced, clambering up and wiping her brow. 

Thomas—who had kept the first slip looming dangerously over a copy of devotionals—handed the paper dispassionately over to his companion, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. 

“About time.”

The thunder dropped off after a few minutes, though the rain still pattered against the windows—it wasn’t expected to let up any time soon, which spelled a slower day than usual. Thomas himself would rather have stayed curled up in bed with a hot drink, though he had no room to complain. He hadn’t been granted so many days off since being in school...and as fond as he was of Agnes and Mr. Haley, it was a blessing to know that his evenings and nights were his own, that he could leave them behind until the next morning. 

If a little thunder was all he had to complain of, then he had no right to consider his current circumstances anything but a success. 

The bell on the front door rang out, much to Thomas’s surprise. They’d hardly been open a minute…

The waterlogged figure wiped his feet on the mat before taking off his hat—it was Mr. Haley’s nephew (who, he’d since learned from Sybil, was called Ellis and was “quite nice, really,” though of course she would think so). 

“Dickie!” Agnes said, leaning across the counter with an outstretched hand, bouncing on her heels in a way that threatened to topple over her stepping stool. 

“Morning to you, too…” Ellis said, taking off the glove from his right hand before squeezing Agnes’s. “Did you know your bows are two different colors?”

“Yes,” Agnes said, swinging their hands out as far as she could reach. “Because I like green and I like blue.”

“Fair enough.” 

Thomas cleared his throat. Ellis turned towards him, trying and failing to look at ease. 

“Good morning, Mr. Barrow. Well—” he nodded towards the window, “it’s a morning, anyway.” 

It was infuriating, really, to happen across one of the handsomest men he’d ever seen and know he would snatch Thomas’s job out of his hands if he could. How was Thomas to approach the situation objectively, especially with Sybil’s endorsement rattling in his ears? 

It was common sense not to trust him. Good sense. No one who knew the facts could say otherwise. 

But then what was the reason, Thomas pleaded with the universe, for Mr. Ellis to have such an engaging smile? 

“Mr. Haley’s stepped out, Mr. Ellis,” he said, using the excuse of the next bookmark as reason for averting his eyes. “He shouldn’t be long, or I can take a message down, if you like.”

“Actually, I was hoping to talk with you, Mr. Barrow, if I could.”

Thomas paused, blinking slowly before meeting Mr. Ellis’s eye. 

“About?”

Surely he wouldn’t try anything very nasty while Agnes was around...though Thomas still braced himself for a veiled threat or an insinuation. He’s after my job, he reminded himself, even as Mr. Ellis paled, his hand fidgeting on the countertop.

“I know the last time we met, I was...discomposed.” The word fell unnaturally from his lips, as if he’d read it just the other day and had determined to use it whether it suited or not. 

If he was going to play it that way...

“Were you?” Thomas frowned. “I don’t remember...but then, we hardly said two words to each other. You had business with Mr. Haley. Not me.”

Mr. Ellis didn’t mistake his meaning; Thomas could see him scrambling for something else to say. He let him take his time, assisting Agnes with the next bookmark placement while he waited (“Now, make sure you put them in facing that way...”)

Mr. Ellis was the one who had wanted to talk; he could decide what he wanted to say. 

“Can Cousin Dickie do the last one?” Agnes asked, as if they were all chums. Thomas couldn’t see a disadvantage to her believing it, so he smiled as he passed her the last slip. 

“‘Course he can. If he wants to.”

Mr. Ellis took the book, nodding along to Agnes’s precise instructions. It gave Thomas time to observe him, to gather his frustrations and sort them. 

He couldn’t say he wouldn’t have asked the same thing, if Mr. Haley were his uncle. And he had no proof, yet, that Mr. Ellis was still after his job. Sybil seemed to think the opposite, from her conversation with him. She believed he was determined to make it as a valet after all. 

But there was something so uneasy about him, something unsettled and fragile. Thomas didn’t know how to place it. He had little patience with men who—as Mr. Haley called it—dawdled about things. 

What he did have—what he’d always had, since his mother had drilled it into him—was a sense of obligation towards those who truly needed a hand. 

He didn’t know, yet, which one Mr. Ellis was. 

As Agnes popped down from her stool to tuck the last book under the counter, Mr. Ellis caught Thomas’s eye. 

“The thing is, Mr. Barrow, is that I wouldn’t want to think there was any quarrel between us.”

This was coming closer to an admission Thomas might respect, though he felt the need to press a little further, just to see what the man was made of. 

“Why would there be a quarrel?” he asked, taking no care to clip the irony in his voice. Mr. Ellis was back to playing with the brim of his hat on the counter, though he didn’t look away from Thomas.

“I think you know why,” he said, shocking Thomas into silence.  “And you’d have every right to start one. But—”

“—all done!” Agnes proclaimed, before racing from behind the counter to her spot at the window.

Mr. Ellis smiled vaguely at her departure, and Thomas felt himself fighting a grin of his own. 

“Go on,” he said, less defensive than he’d been not a moment before. Mr. Ellis nodded, though it took him a moment to get on with it. Thomas waited, feeling—for the first time—free of judgment about the man; he wasn’t dawdling, he was taking his time. There were only so many chances to get something right. 

Thomas hoped that he would. 

“I don’t want to take anything from you or anyone else,” Mr. Ellis said. “It doesn’t sit right with me that I asked. I wanted you to know that, in case you...well, in case it had gotten back to you that I felt otherwise.”

He was avoiding accusing Thomas of snooping, though of course how else would Thomas have heard? Mr. Haley wasn’t likely to have blabbed about it. Thomas was rather charmed by his attempt at delicacy, though he pushed it back for the time being.  

“So you’re happy to be a valet, then? Just like that?” he said, mounting a final challenge (he couldn’t be so easily taken in). 

Mr. Ellis’s face fell. He shrugged. 

“Maybe not,” he admitted. “But I’ll be happy to think we could be friends.”

In an instant, Thomas was decided. 

“Well, I can’t fault you for wanting to get out of service…” he said, allowing himself a smile. “But if you start sorting the shelves, Mr. Ellis…”

He hadn’t noticed how tense Mr. Ellis was about the shoulders until they dropped as he treated Thomas to another of his grins. 

“I won’t.” 

Common sense or not, Thomas believed him. 

Mr. Ellis didn’t look to be in any rush to leave—he spoke to Mr. Haley with more animation than Thomas had seen yet, and he happily let Agnes show him her favorite stories from her “fairy books.” He kept insisting that he’d have to leave “soon,” but so far he’d made no real moves to do so. The rain provided a convenient excuse—who wanted to run out early during such weather? 

If it were up to Thomas, he’d stay for ages. Now that he’d determined Mr. Ellis posed no threat, he was free to indulge in new, lofty thoughts about Mr. Ellis’s motives. 

He came all the way here to patch things up with Me, Thomas thought, resisting the urge to stop by the mirror next to the memoirs. He allowed himself a quick enough glance for assurance that it was both premature and unnecessary to start preening. 

He’d never needed to fuss, anyway (though sometimes it added to the fun). Back when he’d been a footman, interested men had fallen into his lap, drawn by something Thomas hadn’t fully felt ownership of. In time, he’d learned to break it in, take hold of the reins...but never had he needed to do much more than stir to get the reaction he wanted. 

He was a bit older, now, but not much...if Mr. Ellis was so inclined (and plenty of men in service were), Thomas didn’t expect much difficulty in sussing it out. 

Still, he wasn’t going to get much further in the middle of a shop, with Mr. Ellis’s family about. His best bet was to be as interested and capable as he could and hope it was enough to keep Mr. Ellis’s eye on him. 

It wouldn’t be difficult—both things were undeniably true. Thomas spent ten minutes trying to quiet the buzz of excitement in his ears after Mr. Ellis had called him a “proper artisan” in passing, after observing the repaired grandfather clock. Had he misinterpreted the glint in Mr. Ellis’s eye when he’d said it? 

Thomas was still returning to solid ground when a woman’s voice came from behind him, pulling him away from the shelf he was arranging. 

“Thomas?”

It took him a moment to place her—it had been ten years—but Phyllis Baxter didn’t appear to have given a thought as to whether he recognized her. She stared at Thomas, mouth open wide, eyes beaming. 

“What are you doing here?” she exclaimed. 

“I work here,” Thomas said, grateful that his tone was sharp enough to obscure the blankness the words implied. 

“Well, I can see that…” she laughed, fondly grabbing a hold of his upper arm. Thomas only just resisted the urge to pull away. “But no one told me you’d moved to London!”

No one had told him that she’d moved to London, he was tempted to say...the difference there being that Thomas had long since given up his family telling him anything about anyone. 

“Should they have?” 

“I just thought Maggie would mention it in one of her letters.”

One of her letters...Thomas was reminded of why he’d always been so bitter about Phyllis’s frequent visits during his childhood. It was all he’d needed—another bright, pretty, pleasant little girl to further drive a wedge between Thomas and the rest of them. 

“You still hear from her?” he said lightly, hoping it wouldn’t occur to Phyllis to ask whether he heard from Maggie. In all likelihood, she’d make the assumption—just as she always had—that everything outside of her gaze was just as perfect as the things on the inside. 

Sure enough: 

“I do.” Proud as anything. “Your family was always good to me; I’ll be grateful all my life for it.”

Before Thomas could begin to think of how to reply (his mother would scold him for even thinking of being as nasty as a part of him wanted to be), a man slunk up beside Phyllis, hands deep in his pockets. 

“What’s this?” Though he was smiling, there was a sneer in his voice. “Don’t go making me jealous...she’s such a tease, isn’t she?” 

He spoke with an oily familiarity, and Thomas knew without carrying the conversation any further that he disliked the man. Clean-shaven and not a blessed golden hair out of place, yet something seemed askew about him—maybe it was the way his shoulders slouched. Was he trying to hide his sheer height, Thomas wondered, or how lanky and underfed he looked? 

It wasn’t working. 

“Peter,” Phyllis scolded, a flush coming into her cheeks even as a kind of delight flashed in her eyes. Still the schoolgirl chasing after the approval of nasty, ill-mannered boys. “This is Thomas Barrow.”

Peter’s eyes traced over Thomas. 

“Oh, yes, the Barrows,” he grinned. “Pretty little house on the corner, one boy and one girl, everything ship-shape.”

Peter thought this was tremendously funny, though he didn’t laugh, merely showing all his teeth in a grin that Thomas very much hoped he never had to see again. 

“This is Peter Coyle,” Phyllis said. “He’s a footman, at Mrs. Benton’s.” 

She clearly believed he’d know what she meant. Thomas wished he could read one of the imaginary letters Phyllis believed Maggie wrote to him—they sounded quite dear and entirely unlike Maggie. 

“We’re on an outing,” she continued, impervious to any of the flashes of contempt or confusion that must have been crossing Thomas’s face. 

“Unauthorized, strictly speaking,” Coyle added. 

This time, Phyllis’s blush wasn’t accompanied by any delight. 

“That’s not true,” she insisted. “I asked Mrs. Norton, and she—”

“—oh, did you really?” Coyle laughed—the result was as hollow and disarming as Thomas had expected. “Always has to check, doesn’t she?”

Thomas didn’t laugh. Phyllis, finally noticing that Coyle was making a poor impression on Thomas, looked visibly agitated when she said: 

“Anyway, she gave her permission, so I don’t think it matters, now.”

“Well, that is fascinating,” Thomas drawled. “Excuse me—”

He pushed past them, hardly caring if they thought him rude. They felt uncomfortably familiar to Thomas, stifling in their resemblance to a past Thomas would rather forget. 

He glowered from behind the counter as Coyle chatted up Mr. Ellis, who seemed to know him. Thankfully, Mr. Ellis didn’t look all too friendly with him—he kept glancing back at where he’d left Agnes. 

He knows he’s a liar, Thomas thought, watching as Coyle picked up a tiny music box from one of the tables before almost certainly pocketing it. He’s too clever not to know…

Coyle strolled over to the front counter, hands still deep in his pockets. 

“You’ve got some shop, Barrow…” As if they were friends. He glanced over his shoulder at Mr. Ellis, who was helping Agnes select her next book.

In spite of himself, the glance piqued Thomas’s curiosity.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, it’s not for me to say…” Coyle said, that unnerving grin coming back on his face. 

“That’s not what it sounds like,” Thomas said, unamused.

“Well, you were in service, weren’t you?”  The grin grew. If Thomas could have slapped it off without anyone knowing, he’d have done so in an instant. “Some men like something after dinner…”

He looked back at Mr. Ellis again, and Thomas bit the inside of his cheek. 

“Well, you know…” Coyle said, voice lowering to a whisper. “I wouldn’t have said anything, ordinarily—”

“—you strike me as the picture of restraint, Mr. Coyle,” Thomas said fiercely, hoping to dissolve the thought before it took form. 

It didn’t work. 

“See, he nearly got himself into a twist after Christmas. A real tangle.” Coyle was making a meal that only he enjoyed, but he, at least, was enjoying it to a sinful degree.

“I was this close to feeling sorry for him, ‘til I remembered how he got into it,” Coyle crowed. “Career in perversion, that’s what it is to some of ‘em” 

“You know, I think you were right, Mr. Coyle. This isn’t the place.” Thomas’s voice was so tight he feared it might snap in a thousand pieces, along with everything else that was screaming for him to do something, anything. 

But there wasn’t anything to do, and Coyle knew it. 

“Nowhere’s the place,” Coyle said, with an affectation of moral outrage that wouldn’t fool a simpleton. “They say it’s against the law, but from where I’m standing, no one seems to give a damn. If it’d been me, I’d have—”

“—well, lucky it wasn’t,” Thomas interrupted, in what Coyle would never realize was an act of generosity, not letting him finish the thought. In a further act of sheer luck and mercy, Phyllis approached before Coyle could reply. 

“We should go,” she said to Coyle, shaking her head when he asked if they’d had what she wanted. “It was so wonderful to see you, Thomas. I was so worried, after the war..”

Her eyes traced over his gloved hand, and Thomas pulled it off of the desk. Of all the people in the world he wanted pity from...

“Perhaps Mr. Coyle would like to pay for his music box before you leave?” 

Coyle didn’t blink, even as Thomas’s eyes drifted to his pockets.

“Oh, I put that old thing back,” Coyle said, splaying his hands as if to suggest nothing else could be hiding inside. 

Thomas had seen the game played enough times on the schoolyard to know what would happen next. 

She’d never learned. 

“Well, someone’s misplaced it. How about you, Miss Baxter?” he said, with a cool turn of his head. 

“Really, I don’t remember even seeing a music box…” she said, half-laughing as she patted her coat pocket. She stopped with wide eyes, reaching fearfully in to extract the miniature, oblong box, clutched tight in a white, shaking hand. 

“Thomas, I—” 

“—that’s alright, Miss Baxter,” he said, cutting off her frantic protestations. “I suspect Mr. Coyle likes a joke, that’s all.” 

He reveled in the flash of panic in Coyle’s eyes as Phyllis took in the words. 

“Now, see here, I never put anything—”

“—I don’t think it’s funny, Peter,” Phyllis hissed before turning on her heel and tearing open the door. She was halfway to the corner by the time the door swung back shut, the bell jingling in a most satisfying manner. Coyle was staring, open-mouthed, at the door, making calculations. When he turned back to Thomas, he was all smiles again. 

“You’ve put a fellow in a rough spot, you know that?” he said with a harsh laugh. 

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Coyle,” Thomas said, eyeing the next customer’s approach. She stopped just behind Coyle; Thomas tacked on a grin. “Do you want it in a bag?” 

Coyle frowned. “What?”

“Surely you meant to pay for it, Mr. Coyle?” Thomas raised his voice enough to draw the attention of the woman, who stared between Thomas and Coyle with a greedy interest. 

“Why would I pay for it if I don’t want it?” Coyle said, shuffling his feet. 

“Then what was Miss Baxter going to do after walking out with it in her pocket, I wonder?” Thomas said, his entire form dripping with innocent confusion. Coyle looked as if he might sink into the floor. “Mr. Coyle?”

Coyle sighed. “How much, then?” 

Mr. Haley came up beside Thomas, having heard the beginnings of a commotion. 

“Everything alright?”

“Ship-shape, sir,” Thomas said. “Mr. Coyle’s taking home the music box.”

“Oh, that’s a lovely piece,” Mr. Haley said, handling it as Thomas finished writing up his receipt. “You have a sweetheart you’re giving it too?”

“Mr. Coyle will have to find out when he gets home, won’t he?” Thomas said cheerily before glancing up at a glaring Coyle. 

He could still manage his business, when he needed to. 

The rain stopped not long after Coyle stormed out, and Mr. Ellis took it as his final cue to leave. His cheer when saying goodbye made Thomas reluctant to repeat any of what Coyle had told him. Clearly, he’d come to take a weight from his chest, and who was Thomas to put it back on? Suppose he already knew about Coyle, suppose they were both acting? Surely Mr. Ellis knew better than he did how to handle his own affairs…

Thomas tried only once, just before Mr. Ellis slipped out the door. 

“About Mr. Coyle…” he began, faltering at the widening of Mr. Ellis’s eyes. 

“Get under your skin, did he? He likes having people on,” Mr. Ellis replied, in a voice that hardly carried over to Thomas. “Little jokes.” 

“Right.”

And really, what had he expected him to say? 

Thomas blamed himself for the way Mr. Ellis’s shoulders tensed as he opened the door, the way the bell clattered and echoed in a manner that seemed to turn more heads than it usually did. 

Had it only been hours ago he’d been puffing himself up with thoughts of being so very engaging and desirable and in control? And why? Because he’d written a few love letters to a duke and slept with a couple of barons? Those things were practice for a particular kind of life, a life Thomas had resolved to leave behind. 

When it came to things that really mattered, he was still dull and unsharpened.

Sybil had asked him if it would matter that she didn’t have much experience before Miss Walker, but how could she fail to recognize how much more valuable her experience was compared to his? She knew people, she knew how to talk to them, how to get them to like her. How to tell them important things in a way that didn’t make them afraid. 

Love would come naturally to her, in any form. 

He was almost sorry she’d chosen today to come when the shop closed and keep him company while he tidied things. It had been a while since he’d felt so hopelessly inadequate when put up next to her. 

She had a way of making people forget such disparities. By the time Thomas was finishing up his final numbers, he was glad she’d come. Though he didn’t dare say a word about what Coyle had told him, it was a relief to talk to someone who didn’t censure him for complaining about Phyllis or boasting about the clock he fixed or wondering out loud how Agnes’s teacher was going to manage her in the fall. 

Even now, he felt used to the idea that most people, most of the time, were ready to judge him for whatever came out of his mouth. He’d grown up feeling such a sense of defeat about his own words. With Sybil, they never felt wasted. 

“—she wants me to go back with her to check in on Ida—her car,” Sybil said, tapping the counter with her fingers.

“And will you?” Thomas smiled, guessing the answer. 

“If I pass my exams—which I jolly well better,” Sybil laughed. “I’m this close to going cross-eyed.”

As if there could be any doubt...Thomas felt a strange sense of pride at Sybil’s impending exams. A curious advantage to having a friend—they could do all the work, and he could feel all the excitement right along with them. An efficient system.

“Which reminds me…” Thomas said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a box tied shut with a blue ribbon. “That’s for you.”

Sybil looked so delighted Thomas thought he might burst. Still beaming, she raised a teasing eyebrow. 

“Do you think it’s bad luck to accept any presents before I’ve passed?”

“I don’t see why we should wait, when we both know you’re going to.” 

Sybil didn’t argue the point. As she undid the ribbon, Thomas found himself standing on his toes to watch her—he hadn’t given many gifts in his life, and never to a woman who could buy anything she wanted. He’d told himself that wasn’t the point, but he didn’t entirely believe it. 

At first, Sybil only stared at the necklace, and he feared she’d forgotten. Without the story, it was next to worthless. 

“How did you find it?” she murmured, scooping it up in both hands as if it might fall apart. 

“It’s not the same one, of course,” Thomas said, feeling his cheeks turning warm. How could it be? Patrick Crawley could have bought anything he wanted, and what he'd lacked in looks and charm, he’d made up for in gifts that caught the eye. 

Thomas had found something like it, that was all. Something costume and cheap. 

“Oh, but it must be…” Sybil shook her head. “I remember how it…” she dangled it in the air, holding it open at the top by splaying her fingers, watching as the three blue butterflies danced and shimmered on the chain. 

She’d been only fifteen when Thomas had arrived at Downton, and she’d still been fifteen when Lady Edith had stolen her gift from Mr. Patrick to wear out (Lady Mary had mocked the broach he’d gifted Edith so relentlessly that Madge claimed she’d tossed it against a wall, whereupon the gilded flower had shattered). 

Edith had lost the necklace—some claimed one of the maids must have stolen it, but the rooms had been searched and no one had ever found it. Mary claimed that Edith was hiding it in a jealous rage. Edith had tearfully claimed over dinner that the clasp must not have been done up correctly, and it was terrible luck that she’d been all over Haxby on Saturday, she’d asked the maids to look and it might still turn up...

Poor Sybil had insisted she didn’t mind, really, that the gift was in Patrick giving it to her. Edith hadn’t meant to, she insisted to Mary. But Thomas had caught her wiping her eyes before going into the drawing room—the truth was she’d doted on the necklace, one of the first truly grown-up things she’d ever owned. 

He couldn’t remember, now, if he’d felt very sorry for her. But he hadn’t forgotten. 

“You remembered it exactly,” she said, transfixed by the piece. “And that was ages and ages ago, I don’t know how you…”

“Well, you know how servants like to gossip.”

Her eyes snapped back to look at him, and Thomas’s own gaze dropped to the counter as her expression softened. He heard her coming around the counter, moving Agnes’s stool to the side with her toe as she moved to kiss his cheek. 

“Oh, I do love you,” she said, hugging him briefly about the neck with one arm. Just as quickly, she was back over on the other side, fumbling with the clasp. Thomas—whose heart had stopped at her easy admission—scrambled for something to say. Surely he was supposed to say it back? 

But the words wouldn’t form—when was the last time he’d said them? Not on paper, not in his mind, but to a person standing there in front of him? 

He must have looked so stupid, standing there with his mouth agape, saying nothing after Sybil had been so kind, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. 

“This is just the loveliest thing in the world,” she continued. “And now every time I wear it, I’ll remember this time of my life, and how much happier I am now than I was then.”

She beamed at him, and Thomas felt sure that she understood, whether or not he found himself capable of speech ever again.

The necklace sat more easily on her now than it had back then; she was right. It was a reminder of how she’d grown, how they both grown. And they’d done it together. 

It was down to her, of course. She’d been brave enough to stop him from lying, brave enough to tell the truth about herself. Because of it, Thomas now had a true friend he could point to and name, and she had the same. 

He’d been so afraid when she’d met him, all those years before. He’d still been afraid when they’d first started talking during the war. A child, well past the age when childhood sat comfortably. 

He wasn’t nearly so afraid anymore. He couldn’t repay her for that, not with a hundred necklaces. The best he could do was try and assure her that it had been worth it, that he was half of the things she thought he was. That the goodness she put into the world—into him—had mattered. 

I could share it, he realized. I could share it, like she would do. Even if he didn’t know how, even if he wasn’t sure what to say. 

If Sybil could do it, then he could at least give it a try.

The housemaid who opened the backdoor would probably have let him all the up into the upstairs drawing room if he’d asked nicely enough, but Thomas insisted on waiting outside rather than the servants’ hall. It would be hard enough telling Mr. Ellis what he needed to say without being introduced to the entire staff beforehand. 

It had been worth it, to write ahead. Mr. Ellis had been granted time to prepare, and that meant Thomas received a proper smile with his greeting. 

“Mr. Barrow.” He shut the door without glancing behind him, and if there was anxiety in his eyes, there was also interest...an excitement Thomas hoped he wasn’t imagining. 

Don’t be selfish, he told himself. He wasn’t there for that. Not yet, anyway. He couldn’t skip anything. 

“This is nice,” he said, indicating the courtyard. “Grantham House never really felt finished, even halfway into the season. Well, these parts never felt finished, anyway.” 

“They don’t get home much,” Mr. Ellis said, indicating an empty bench. He sat on the same side as Thomas, facing the outside, which gave Thomas’s stomach a jolt before he realized the position allowed for a better view of the courtyard. 

Don’t skip. 

“Ah,” he said, trying not to notice how handsome Mr. Ellis looked in profile, his face shaded but his right leg outstretched so his shoe caught the sun. One of his arms rested against the table behind him, his fingers dangling near Thomas’s own arm. 

He was tense and trying not to seem so. 

“I don’t know much else,” he said, smiling again. “About the house.” 

That was his cue, wasn’t it? To say what he meant...Thomas paused, watching Mr. Ellis’s eyes scan over the courtyard, as if someone might be hiding behind a shed or stack of boxes. 

“About Mr. Coyle…” he began, grateful when this time Mr. Ellis picked up the thread. 

“What did he tell you?” 

“He says you…” Thomas looked down at his shoes. “Well, that you got into some trouble over Christmas. Of a certain kind.”

If he’d had any doubt, the panic that flickered across Mr. Ellis’s face would have dispelled it. 

“That’s Peter for you,” he said, tacking on an unconvincing laugh. 

“Is it?” Thomas said, steeling himself for what had to come next in order for Mr. Ellis not to misunderstand his meaning. 

“You know, your uncle said he thinks we’re something alike.”

Mr. Ellis didn’t look exactly surprised, more like he’d recalled something he’d halfway forgotten. The memory, from the way Mr. Ellis shifted in his seat, wasn’t altogether pleasant. 

“Mr. Barrow—”

“—and I don’t think you find it funny, either.” 

Mr. Ellis sighed, a humorless laugh mixed in. “I never said I did.”

So he was one of those sorts… “But you know what I’m saying?”

He closed his eyes briefly. “Yes, I know what you’re saying, Mr. Barrow. I know.”

“Good.” Thomas let the moment settle before continuing. 

“So what happened?” 

Not the most graceful way to broach the subject, but it was enough. Mr. Ellis glanced at him, looking away quickly. 

“Just a close call,” he said, scanning the scene again. “It’s been handled.”

Which hadn’t been Thomas’s impression of the situation. 

“Aren’t you worried he’ll cause trouble?”

“Nothing to be done about it,” Mr. Ellis shrugged. “And these things usually fade off, if you don’t get caught. Rumors in the wind, that’s all.” 

Thomas blinked. “That’s all.”

“You don’t think anyone knew at your old place? Someone always knows,” Mr. Ellis said. 

Thomas wondered at how he managed to say something so frightful without sounding frightful. Condescending, perhaps, but Thomas had started it…

Anyway, Mr. Ellis was right, wasn’t he? Half of Downton had known by the time he left. 

“Yeah, well,” Thomas murmured. 

“Just have to accept some discomfort,” Mr. Ellis said, “when we’ve been handed lives we can’t live.”

There was such casual harshness in the words that Thomas could only stare, baffled, for a good long moment. He didn’t pretend to know what other men like him thought about and when, but that seemed especially bleak to toss outside on a sunny day. 

“We’re living it now,” he said, finally. “And no one’s been having a good time of it, lately. War and disease makes people equal that way.”

Which wasn’t exactly the encouragement he’d been hoping to provide, but it felt honest, in the moment. Something Mr. Ellis might listen to. 

“You can’t pretend it wouldn’t be easier.”

“How would it be easier?” Thomas frowned, sitting forward. Mr. Ellis blinked, considering the question. 

“You might have a sweetheart you could write to. Keep a picture of during dark times.” That smile again...Thomas swallowed. 

“So you have a sweetheart you can hold hands with at the pictures, what does that mean?” he said, reaching in his pocket for a cigarette. He offered one to Mr. Ellis, who took it after a second’s hesitation. “Suppose she goes off and falls in love with someone else, suppose you get your leg shot off and she breaks off the engagement, suppose she dies of the flu soon as you come home…”

He took a heavy drag, letting the words sink in. Beside him, Mr. Ellis did the same (though, Thomas noted, he didn’t breathe in quite so deeply). 

“But we don’t have to suppose,” Mr. Ellis said. “And there’s no getting out of it.”

This whole business of cheering him up would be easier if he wasn’t so right about everything....

“Maybe…” Thomas pondered aloud, trailing off as the thought escaped him. 

“Maybe what?”

The curiosity in Mr. Ellis’s voice—sincere and interested—pushed Thomas to answer, whether he believed it or not. 

“Maybe there are parts we can’t see yet,” he fumbled. “Maybe there’s a reason.”

“You believe that?” Thomas couldn’t tell if he meant it as a criticism, so he did the generous thing and took the question at its word. 

“I want to believe it,” he said. “But you can’t always.”

“Yeah.”

They were—more or less—in agreement, then. Thomas smiled, watching Mr. Ellis smoke for a moment before speaking. 

“Might be easier, having someone to talk to.”

Mr. Ellis raised an eyebrow, his smile returning (his smile was present, Thomas was noticing, more often than it boasted...in his eyes, or in the tilt of his chin). 

“Someone, meaning you?”

Thomas’s own grin was much less subtle, he was sure of that. “If you’d like.” 

“I’m not much company, most days. I used to be.”

“Then you’ll soon be again,” Thomas said cheerily, reminding himself of how he’d been in the convalescent home, and before that. At the hospital, talking with—

“You know you don’t have to do it?” Thomas continued, grounding himself. “Any of it?”

Mr. Ellis tapped his cigarette, letting the ash float to the pavement. 

“I’m good at my job.”

“I was good at mine,” Thomas said. “Wasn’t a valet yet, but I could have been, in a year or two. But I didn’t like it. And Lord Grantham wasn’t a bastard, neither, like this one. I had a good place, but I was tired of it.” 

Mr. Ellis watched him as he spoke—Thomas had rarely felt so observed, especially by a man he was so drawn to. He took his time answering, eyes never leaving Thomas. 

“It’s just for once, I’d want to be what they expect me to be,” he said. “My family, I mean. They’re so patient. They deserve that.”

Family, the reason for all manner of sins...

“Deserve what? They don’t have anything to do with it. What does it matter to them?”

“They think it’ll be easier for me,” Mr. Ellis said. “Less time on my hands, people don’t ask so many questions when you’re in service…they wouldn’t worry so much. And some places...well, it’s understood.”

What he meant was that you could throw a stone in any great house and hit three men like them on the way. 

That wasn’t the same as being understood. 

“Does your uncle know?”

“Uncle George, you mean?” Mr. Ellis blushed at Thomas’s mocking look. “Yeah. He thinks it’s all a waste. Says I’m young, I should do what I want. But I have this feeling, that if I can just make it all fit, that…”

“...it’ll all fit,” Thomas murmured. He’d had plenty of experience in that part of his mind. 

“Basically.” Mr. Ellis bit the inside of his lip, ducking his head towards his lap. “But then I...I’m afraid of it fitting, somehow. I could have a place in Buckingham Palace if I only asked. I have a cousin. But then what? I do that until I’m spent? My life’d be over.” 

“So you’ll get spent here instead, shuffling your feet.” Mr. Ellis didn’t look amused at his sense of irony. 

“There’s no way out of it,” he said. “Not when this is all.” 

But he sounded less convinced that he had a minute ago. 

“Who says it’s all?” Thomas leaned closer, pushing Mr. Ellis to look back up at him. Thomas’s breath hitched in his throat. He thought, maybe, that Mr. Ellis’s had done the same. 

“You’ve got grand ideas,” he smiled. “Uncle George is getting to you.”

“Life’s gotten to me.”

The words startled even him. 

“Has it?” Mr. Ellis had leaned still closer. The hand that had dangled from the table had dropped to the bench, and Thomas stared at his splayed fingers for an indecent amount of time before looking back up. 

“Look,” he said, catching his breath. “You have a family who wants to help. Would that we all had that, Mr. Ellis. That doesn’t mean they’re right. Be grateful to them, thank them all you want...but bad advice is bad advice.”

Mr. Ellis nodded, taking a final drag of his cigarette before dropping it onto the pavement and stamping it out with the toe of his shoe. His heel tapped against Thomas’s own foot. 

“Say they know more than I do?” 

“They don’t know more about you.”

 “And you do?”

And with Mr. Ellis as close as he was, there was no hiding the suggestion in it. Thomas pressed his lips together, willing himself to be as comfortable and smooth as he knew he could be...the way he used to be, before everything. 

“I didn’t say that, Mr. Ellis—”

He shook his head. “—now, if we’re to be friends, you’ll have to call me Richard.”

“Not Dickie?” Thomas teased, laughing at how Richard wrinkled his nose. “Thomas. And I didn’t say that I knew you better than—”

“Mr. Ellis?” The voice of an anxious footman interrupted them—Thomas was grateful he hadn’t yet decided on placing his hand on Richard’s.  “There’s a stain on Sir Wilfrid’s dinner jacket, and I—”

“—yes, I can help.” Richard interrupted, too loudly. He pulled away from Thomas, standing slowly. The footman was looking between them, though with more nerves than suspicion. Perhaps Thomas’s frustration at the interruption was showing on his face. 

It wasn’t on Richard’s. He smiled as brightly as ever at Thomas, shaking his hand before departing. 

“You’ve brightened my spirits,” he said. “You have, you don’t know how much.” 

Thomas looked at his shoes. All that, and he’d still managed what he’d come for…perhaps his life really was changing. 

“If I have, I’m glad to hear it.” 

As he watched Richard amble away, nodding passively along to the footman’s frantic ramblings, Thomas wondered if he’d mind him telling Sybil the whole story. 

Chapter Text

Thomas had warned her that sitting the exams would be the worst part; Sybil hadn’t really believed him. If she knew the information well enough, she reasoned, the examinations would only be a means to an end. A few hours of time spent proving what she knew. 

But what a tedious means—it was hot and stuffy in the room, making her mind dull and listless. She left feeling that she’d passed, but no particular excitement accompanied it...she only felt that her hand was tired and she’d like a nap. 

She’d recovered sufficiently to celebrate her results when they came in the post, though a part of her was most relieved about having a break.

A break that included two weeks in Yorkshire with Amelia Walker. 

“Well, you’ve earned it,” Thomas said, while looking over his ledger. “Though two weeks is a long time, if the Walkers aren’t good company.”

“We won’t have to worry about that. They’re all staying behind in London.” Sybil wouldn’t have minded in either case, but she had the distinct impression that Amelia wanted very much to get away from the rest of them. 

Thomas looked up, his lips pulling together into something that wasn’t exactly a frown, but was close enough. 

“The whole two weeks?”

“Is that a problem?” He couldn’t think it was ill-advised, not when both their families approved (more or less). Amelia had been all the way to France during a war. Between the two of them, they could manage a trip to Nether Poppleton…

“No,” Thomas said, too quickly. “It’s quite lucky.” 

“It is.” But Thomas was properly pouting, now. He did it less often than he used to, but it was unmistakable even in its mildest forms. “Why are you making that face?”

“I’m not.” The pout tightened. 

“You are. Why?”

He hesitated—she could see that his teeth were worrying at the inside of his lower lip. 

“I’m just wondering what that’s like,” he said, voice hardly above a murmur. “Going off, without anyone thinking anything of it”

He’d given it enough thought for Sybil to believe he didn’t mean it as an accusation...but he’d also given it enough thought for her to believe that in some respect, it was one, whether he wanted it to be or not. 

She understood his bitterness generally—the law was absurd, nothing new there—but she didn’t see what it had to do with her. And anyway—

“You know it’s only because women aren’t taken seriously.”

“So you’d rather have it the other way ‘round?”

She thought of asking him the same question—would it please him to have an unjust law applied more extensively?—but what would that accomplish but more of the same? 

“I’d rather have the world be fair, actually, but yes, if you’re wondering, I would,” she said. “Plenty of women have been put in jail fighting for their rights; it’s not as if we couldn’t manage it if we needed to.”

Thomas blinked. His pout was fading, but without a replacement to keep his face from growing blank, it didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment. 

“But we aren’t fighting,” he murmured. “That’s the difference.”

“Maybe we should.” She’d often wondered why they didn’t. If women could do it, if the working class could...what was stopping them? People might say numbers, but it wasn’t as if every woman were a suffragette, was it? 

If they could argue for a better world, they might win it for themselves. 

Thomas wasn’t convinced—she could see it in his face. 

“What is there for you to fight for?” His eyes dropped as soon as they met Sybil’s. “I’m all for women’s rights, of course I am, but you’d only cause trouble, bringing that bit of things up. It’s better if they don’t start thinking it through, believe me.”

Because she really wanted to live a life half-hidden...the aims weren’t as simple, perhaps, as the vote or overturning a law, but the truth was something worth fighting for. Wherever it came from, however long it took. 

Things couldn’t stay as they were forever. 

“I don’t agree,” she said. “There’s plenty of progress to make, for all of us.”

“I know that,” Thomas sighed. “I’m tired of it.”

And envious, though he wasn’t going to say so...did it really make such a difference, her going alone? There’d still be the servants, her reputation at stake (Amelia’s as well, if she was the same)...surely he couldn’t think it was all sunshine as far as she was concerned. Not when he knew how difficult it had been for her...not when he’d been the one to help her through it all. 

But envy could be tricky to reason with.

“That’s why we do it together,” she reminded him. “It’s easier, that way.” 

“Right.”

But he looked lonelier than he’d seemed in a long while. 

Dear Thomas, 

Yorkshire is all in bloom—Amelia was almost skipping the second we got off the platform. She said it was because everything’s so green and open, and I’m sure it’s true. But I think she feels it in herself as much as she sees it in the world. That’s usually the order of things. 

The house is just steps from the river—I think I could spend all my time on the banks, if Amelia would let me (she won’t, of course, she has so many plans). 

There’s a kingfisher nearby—I can see him flying from my window. Do you know they don’t sing? They’re so pretty and I always expect them to, but Amelia says they don’t have a song. Just a chirp, every once in a while. I don’t think I’d want to be a bird if I couldn’t sing. 

That’s something you would say, and I’d ask why you’d want to be a bird at all. Then you’d be cross with me (but you still wouldn’t explain yourself). 

I’ve saved us the trouble, because I think I do understand—why someone would want to be a bird, I mean. They seem so pleased with themselves, so free...but I’m doing what Amelia was doing, aren’t I? 

Our last conversation was strange—I didn’t mean to start a quarrel, and I don’t think you did either, but I’ve upset you. I can’t say I’m sorry yet, because the truth is that I still think I’m right. That doesn’t mean that I think you’re wrong, exactly—it’s quite difficult. 

I trust you to understand your own life, and I trust you to believe that I understand my own. We are friends and we want to compare, to feel and be the same...but not everything is like or unlike. Better or worse. We’re ourselves before we’re anyone else. 

I do miss you. 

Your friend,

Sybil

It felt like playing house, with just the two of them and the servants. No one to care what they talked of at the table, no reason to turn at dinner or slog through a dull conversation in the drawing room. 

They spent plenty of time in the garage, Amelia tinkering away at “Ida,” never giving up her attempts to explain to Sybil how it all worked (though Sybil was sorry to say that most of it was still in one ear and out the other). 

The estate—which had been getting smaller for fifty years, according to Papa—was very near broken up entirely. But they had the house, and all the tranquility that came with living near the water. In Sybil’s mind, that little bit of land was worth more than acres and acres of hunting ground. 

People didn’t need that much space—or they didn’t need to own it, at any rate. The views were the same: the hills and the heather and the sun sparkling on the water. What did it matter who owned them? Much good it did them. Papa was always complaining of how much it cost to run Downton, but he wouldn’t entertain the idea of giving it up. 

Sybil hoped never to fall into such a trap, with money or with anything else. To mistake weight for importance, to decide that because something was difficult it must be righteous.

There was goodness to be found in tight spaces, in simple things—perhaps more than anywhere else. 

For even if Sir Andrew Walker’s estate was dying, Amelia’s world came to life in its remnants. She recognized no boundaries, only the Yorkshire countryside and the life it breathed into her. London and the rules she had to follow lived in another world, easily abandoned and ignored here. 

In her disposition and character she was the same, but everything that could be shed fell off, replaced by something more joyful, more eager. Even her gait was different—broader, more shoulders...she was fantastic, really. 

Did she notice? Did she mean for Sybil to notice as well? 

It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t, though Sybil refrained from commenting on anything that wasn’t brought to her attention first. Amelia’s driving, teaching Sybil how to fish, her love of boyish hats that “Mama would murder me for wearing”—these were all acceptable topics of conversation. 

Amelia’s walk, the way she rolled up sleeves without a thought for what it would do to them, how she insisted on lifting their luggage on her own—these were things Sybil felt unable to speak of, though she held them tight for safe-keeping. 

She meant something by it all, Sybil had little doubt of that. 

But was she supposed to wait until Amelia wanted to come out and say it, or was she allowed to take steps of her own?

And what steps would those be? Sybil wondered, staring up at the cloudy sky, sitting on the blanket Amelia had set out. She wasn’t like Amelia, she didn’t move as she did. She was strong enough, since the war, but she didn’t exactly like carrying things she didn’t have to haul around. She couldn’t drive, she wasn’t much good at fishing, and hunting wasn’t her game either. 

She just thinks I’m a girl, Sybil thought glumly, though up until now that had seemed exactly the point.

“So have they accepted you?” Amelia asked, falling back on her hands. 

“If there’s an opening, I might be able to start in the fall. Otherwise I’ll have to wait.”

Papa was counting on the latter. The news of Sybil passing her exams had rather alarmed him, according to Mary, though he was pretending otherwise. 

He thought you’d meet a man, Mary had written, and of course he’s blaming Aunt Rosamund for not pushing enough of them at you. You might at least have pretended for his sake, though there’s no point in it now, is there?

Mary knew all about pretending. Sybil wondered when, exactly, she planned on marrying Sir Richard. The date seemed to be pushed back every time it came too close. 

She wasn’t sorry to have left it all behind. 

“I envy you,” Amelia said. “You can go your whole life doing what you’re starting now, and even if people ask questions, even if they don’t like it, there’s nothing they can do to stop you. Because you can stand on your own two feet and say, ‘this is what I do now.’”

This seemed a highly generous way of describing days filled with waiting and asking and hoping...which would be followed by years of studying and grasping and proving herself. Then, maybe, she’d have a job, and who could say how steady she’d be by then? 

“So can you.” Amelia had already proven herself far more than Sybil. 

Amelia shook her, laughing humorlessly. 

“But I’m not, am I? I seem strong. I look it, at least I think I do. But none of it’s practical, I can’t do anything with it.” She scratched at her elbow, wrinkling her nose. It was frecklier than ever. “I was born to be a countryman. Fish and farm and shoot.”

That, Sybil could well believe, though she didn’t think she’d ever heard a real girl say such a thing. Girls in novels, sometimes, but they usually amended the statement by the time they were ready to fall in love. 

“So why don’t you?”

She shook her head. “Well, for one thing...I haven’t got the money. This has a few more years left, I’d say, and then we’ll all be packed in London. Or maybe we’ll quit England altogether. Some people are.”

As if it were all a matter of course; Amelia wasn’t easily shocked. 

“Where would you go?”

“If it were up to me?” Amelia surveyed her left boot, which was splayed out in front of her, her right tucked under her skirt. “America. But it’s not up to me. I’ve had my way the entire war, Mama says, and now cometh the reckoning.” 

Though she was smiling, there was misery in her voice. She didn’t need to say what her mother had in mind—it was the same as what all mothers had in mind. 

“She can’t make you get married,” Sybil said. 

Amelia had closed her eyes, head tilted to the sky. The air was cooling as if it might rain before long. “But she can make me miserable until I do, and she intends to.”

Sybil thought guiltily of her own mother, who knew and understood her better than almost anyone. First Thomas, now Amelia…was she to spend the entire two weeks being asked to consider how lucky she was, how little effort it took to be her?

“Granny’s convinced I have a beau already and I’m just keeping him a secret,” she deflected. Amelia laughed.

“Oh, how I wish I could make Mama believe such a thing...I could make up such terrific love letters and everything...I might try it.” She sat up straighter, smoothing her skirt. “Does she think it’s Barrow?”

Sybil smiled. Granny would never mention it, but Sybil doubted very much that she was as naïve as all that. “I don’t think so, no.”

Amelia nodded, eyes brightening at Sybil’s smile in a way Sybil hoped Thomas wouldn’t mind. Even if she knew (and she didn’t know, not quite yet), she wouldn’t whisper a word to Amelia about him.

She’d probably guessed, and there was no helping that.

“Mama thought I was after Ellis for a while,” she said. “He was so convinced she’d have his head on a platter that he wouldn’t talk to me for weeks, and I really can’t blame him for it.” 

“I never thought of your mother as scary.”

“She isn’t, really, but she doesn’t tolerate disappointment.” Amelia shrugged. “So I’m rather stuck.”

“You aren’t a disappointment,” Sybil insisted. “I’m sure she knows that. There aren’t many people who could do all the things you’ve done.”

Amelia looked flattered for only a moment before visibly shrugging it off.

“What did it get me?” Amelia said, staring off in the distance. “That’s how she sees it. What did it get Amelia Walker?”

In Sybil’s eyes, a great deal. Confidence, experience, stories to tell until she died…but of course women like them weren’t really expected to have all of that. Not in the way she’d managed it.

“Sometimes you have to live your life before they can understand the value of it all,” Sybil said.

“Is that what happened with your parents?”

“It’s what I’m hoping will happen with Papa...” Sybil smiled. “Mama’s an American, so she takes more on faith than he does.”

Amelia surveyed her. “More like you, then.” 

They’d gone some time without Amelia saying something that made Sybil blush—she must have gotten tired, waiting for an opportunity.

“That’s what people say.” 

Dear Thomas,

Thank goodness your letter was a decent size—I was so sure you’d tell me we weren’t in a fight and then fold the paper up and send it just like that.

You can be a grouch, but we all can be. And I’m not cross with you. It’s your right to be as jealous as you like, as long as we can be friendly about it. It’s not your fault and it isn’t mine. I do understand better, now that you explained it. I think we can both be right, don’t you? 

We’ve been summoned to Downton today, after nearly a week of having things just as we like them. I don’t know why I’m so nervous to go home, of all places, but I am. They’ll all be watching me closer than ever, and I’m not sure I want any part of it. 

I love them. But I wish I could take them, one at a time, through my own day. Let them see what I see. I think it’d do more good than my visiting. I’d be nervous, but it would feel productive. As if we were getting through something, finding a path to something better than before.

I don’t think I can do that at Downton. You know that better than anyone. 

I told Amelia what you said about Ellis (am I allowed to call him Richard, or is that just for you?) She says he sounds more like his old self, and that you’re quite wrong to suggest you had little to do with it. What am I always saying? You pretend to be an island, but no one with any knowledge on the subject will ever believe you. Me least of all. 

Mostly, I just wait for what you told me. About the line. You said it wasn’t helpful advice, but I’m clinging to it regardless, so I’m counting on the fact that you’re wrong. 

It does happen, sometimes. 

Your friend, 

Sybil

The Crawleys hadn’t expected Amelia to be driving.

Sybil didn’t see why it mattered, when they’d come in plenty of time to change.

Cousin Matthew, at least, was there to smooth things over—his manners were just as good as anyone’s, and a great deal less snobbish. Far more sensible, Sybil thought, than most people’s.

“Miss Walker, isn’t it?” he said—Sybil thought she saw his hand twitch, as if he’d considered reaching out to shake Amelia’s. She wouldn’t have minded if he had, Sybil guessed. “I think we met in…”

Mary was busy shooting daggers—she almost jumped in the air when Sybil wrapped her arm through hers.

“You aren’t still fighting, are you?” Sybil asked.

Mary blinked away her distraction. “We were never fighting.”

Sybil raised an eyebrow. “Just because you don’t call it that doesn’t mean you aren’t.”

“Well, if we are in a fight, it’s his fault,” Mary retorted. It hadn’t taken her eyes long to fall back on Matthew and Amelia. “Miss Walker seems eager enough, doesn’t she?”

“I don’t think so.” Friendly, perhaps, but in the way Amelia was friendly with everyone—especially men. She was confident, easy to talk to…nothing more than that. She didn’t want to be married any more than Sybil…though even Sybil had to admit that there were worse options than Matthew.

“Of course you don’t,” Mary sighed.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Sybil said, more irritated by the comment than she needed to be. “Just because I don’t want to play the game doesn’t mean I don’t remember the rules. But I think I know Miss Walker better than you do, seeing as how she’s my friend.”

If Mary were less preoccupied, she might have noticed something odd in the strain of Sybil’s voice. It seemed obvious enough to Sybil, who felt guilty for snapping at her sister over nothing.

But Mary was used to it, though not from Sybil—it would take more than that to raise her suspicions.

“Darling, there’s no need to snipe,” she said, voice cool as ever. “I was only saying that you give everyone such lovely intentions. It’s a compliment.” 

Mary had always been wretched at giving them, Sybil conceded. 

Upstairs, Anna wasn’t keen on talking of her troubles, either. Her responses to Sybil’s questions about Bates were brief, almost sharp, and she cheered up tremendously when Sybil allowed them to change the subject.

“How are you finding London?” she asked, pinning up Sybil’s hair in a way Sybil knew she’d never manage herself—though not for lack of trying. She was doing her best not to be tied to a maid, but there were advantages to having one.

“I think I’ll like it better now that I’m not shut up so much of the time.”

 “We were all very proud to hear you’d passed,” Anna said with a smile. She released her grip on a strand of Sybil’s hair, leaving it in the capable hands of a pin. Her eyes caught the necklace Thomas had gifted Sybil. “This is pretty…”

“It’s like the one Patrick gave me, do you remember?” Sybil said. “Years and years ago. The one Edith lost?”

Anna almost grimaced—she remembered, then…she traced the chain with a finger, lifting one of the butterflies.

“It is, now you mention it. Very like.”

“Thomas gave it to me,” she said, proud on his behalf.

“Our Thomas?” Anna stopped to glance at Sybil in the mirror. “He likes the shop, then?”

“He loves it. I wish you could see him at it, he’s taken to it so well.”

“Has everyone taken to him is the question?” Anna quipped, reaching for another pin. She caught Sybil’s eye in the mirror and blushed. “Forget I said that.”

But of course, such things were impossible. Sybil didn’t blame her, exactly…Thomas had been difficult, he’d admit it himself to the right person.

Still, she knew him better than most of them ever had, and she wasn’t about to pretend otherwise.

“He’s been a friend to me,” she said, softening her voice to account for Anna’s look of guilt. She wasn’t the trouble, not really…

“I know he has, I shouldn’t have said...” Anna faltered. “It was unkind of me.”

“It isn’t true,” Sybil corrected gently. “He gets along well with a great many people, nowadays. And if you knew how unhappy I’d be without his help…”

A dangerous line of conversation—Anna was understanding, but Sybil wasn’t ready to test just how much. Thankfully, she was smiling, thinking nothing of Sybil’s trailing off.

“I should think he’d say the same of you, m’lady,” she said. “If he wasn’t a bad seed—and I’m sure he wasn’t, really, if it’s as you say—it must’ve been bad soil. And you helped pick him out.”

They weren’t out of it yet, Sybil feared. Out of Downton (some of the time, anyway) and into the rest of the world…a world that had plenty of its own troubles to keep them occupied. They were peculiar seeds, of a particular variety—most soil didn’t suit.

Amelia rapped on the door before opening it, coming in all smiles.

“Thank goodness I had the right room, I was sure I’d mixed it up…”

She was cheerful company at dinner—even Papa was smiling by the end of it. The question of whether she presented as a proper lady or not faded away by dessert. She was Amelia Walker, and that was perfectly sufficient.

“I do like her,” Mary admitted in the drawing room, under her breath. “Though I can’t for the life of me understand why.”

Sybil shook her head, catching Mama’s eye briefly before looking away. The flash of understanding in them made the situation too real, realer than it had any right to be.

Please don’t ask me. Not yet.  

She didn’t, though Sybil went to bed with the unspoken answers rattling in her head.

Dear Thomas,

I think we’re approaching the line. I keep imagining myself reaching out and touching it. I think I could. But then my feet shuffle forward, and I wonder if it’s better to manage it that way, even if it takes a little longer.

But I’m tired of it. I am. I suppose I had to be, eventually, but I thought it might take longer than a couple of w

“I thought I’d take a walk, if you’d like to come,” Amelia said, poking her head through the door. As the second week drew to a close, the two of them had spent more time apart—the natural easing that came with familiarity, an assumed closeness that didn’t need constant reassurance.

A good sign, that they weren’t sick to death of each other, that they hadn’t fallen out or realized they had very little in common past a drawing room.

But it still wasn’t the sign, the thing that Sybil was looking for, the thing she wanted more than ever before.

She nodded as she set her letter aside, hoping that she might come back having to write an entirely different one.

Amelia’s walks were usually more like treks, but today she seemed in no particular rush, with no particular curiosity about what lay beyond the well-trod path.

“I’m sorry to leave it all,” she mused. “London’ll be more unbearable than ever. The only reason I’m going back at all is because you’re there. If you weren’t, I think I’d run away.”

The clouds were clearing, leaving space for the sun to dot the scenery. Sybil slowed her pace, sensing a chance to shuffle forward.

“I almost ran away, once,” she said. “Well, I thought I was running away. I was really running into something. Something I wouldn’t have liked very much.”

Amelia almost stopped entirely.

“What was it?”

Sybil blinked. It didn’t feel real at all, standing here, but it had been real, and not so long ago…

“I almost got married.”

It was silent for a long while, and in that silence Sybil felt the line leap closer to her.

“Oh.”

If she reached out…

“But I realized...I realized I didn’t want to,” she said. “Not ever.”

She looked at Amelia, who didn’t look away, though she was growing harder to read by the moment.

“Not even when you’re finished with school and meet a handsome doctor?” she teased.

“Not even then. I wouldn’t like it.”

Amelia turned back towards the path—she looked to be considering the words quite seriously.

“You are independent.”

She didn’t sound like she believed the words, more that she was giving Sybil (and herself) one more way to back out.

Sybil didn’t want to, not now that she felt so close.

“I am independent, in a way,” she said, slowly. “But I like being close to people. I like feeling understood. I don’t always need to be, by everyone. But I like it. I think I need it, from some people.”

Amelia nodded. “But you don’t need a husband to do it.”

It was too hot to be outside, Sybil realized. Much too hot.

“I don’t need a man to do it,” she said, not waiting for the words to settle before heading down the path, more quickly than before. Amelia followed wordlessly for some time.

“Oh, there they are!” she exclaimed suddenly, pointing at a bush of coral-colored roses up ahead. “Gertie said they were coming in…I wanted you to see them before we left.”

Sybil blinked. “Why?”

“You like the flowers so much, and these are some the prettiest we have, really. Or I think so, anyway.” She seemed almost embarrassed to say so.

Sybil approached the nearest bush. She held one of the roses up in her hand, inspecting the blush of orange on the leaves.

“They are beautiful…”

Amelia looked more embarrassed than ever.

“Well, anyway,” she said, laughing nervously. “I wanted you to see them. Sort of a surprise, for our last day. They bloomed just in time, so that was rather lucky—”

Her voice died in her throat as Sybil stepped forward, one hand brushing against Amelia’s cheek before she took the final step, pressing her lips against Amelia’s—soft and just for a moment.

“Gosh,” Amelia breathed. She’d closed her eyes as Sybil approached, but they were wide as could be now.

“I’m sorry—” Sybil began, though Amelia didn’t look upset.

“—don’t.” Amelia grabbed her hand. “Don’t say that. I’m not. I’m not sorry at all.”

She kissed her again, and this time Sybil let her own eyes drift shut.

This was where she wanted to be, always.

Thomas

I crossed it. Everything’s just right. We’ll be back tomorrow. 

—Sybil

P.S. Your letter came just moments ago, and I think you have something to tell me as well. I’ll let you go first this time. 

Chapter Text

All Thomas had needed to do was pretend. Smile and wish Sybil well, hiding all the bitterness until after she’d left and would be none the wiser. 

For some reason, that had been too difficult. For some reason, he’d sulked his way into an argument that wouldn’t solve anything. 

Nothing he hadn’t done before...but in the past there’d always seemed to be a better excuse for such bitterness. A job he disliked to hide behind, a sense that no one understood him, so what did it matter what faces he pulled or how irritable he was?

He could use no such excuse with Sybil, living the life he now had. They’d been lies, then. Distractions, at the very least, from the truth—that he was unpleasant and combative by nature, and no amount of luck or goodwill was going to stop it from coming out sooner or later. 

“You’re gloomy about something,” Mr. Haley commented, surely hoping to help but doing the precise opposite. He was fiddling with some of the figurines on a display table, as Thomas pretended to sort through receipts at the front. “What?”

“I’m not—” Thomas began, stopping himself when he realized how petulant he sounded. “It’s nothing worth talking about.”

Mr. Haley laughed. “I think if it was nothing, you would tell me. Like when Mrs. Lark forgot your name...you grumbled about that one...”

Thomas’s stomach sank as Mr. Haley let out another chuckle. It forced a question out of his mouth, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. 

“Am I very disagreeable? Sir?”

The amusement dropped off of Mr. Haley’s face. He stopped and stared at him, blinking in disbelief. And so he should have done—it was a ridiculous question to ask an employer, absolutely over the line. What was Thomas expecting him to say? 

“Disagreeable?” Mr. Haley repeated. “To whom?”

Thomas wished very much that he’d never broached the subject. He glanced down at the ledger in front of him. 

“To you,” he murmured. “To other people.” 

“Why would you say that, in particular?” 

Now he’d gone and done it...the last thing, the very last thing, they needed to be talking over was why Thomas wasn’t up to snuff. And he’d brought it up himself, no one else to blame…

The trouble was, he sometimes forgot about Mr. Haley being in charge. He’d never forgotten with Mr. Carson (never dreamed of forgetting with his father, either). 

He forgot with Mr. Haley, quite often. Between the breakfasts and the teas and the advice given without asking. He treated Thomas well, and so Thomas forgot that he chose to do it—that Thomas was neither family nor equal in position. 

Now he’d pay the price. 

“It’s like you said,” Thomas began slowly. “I can grumble over things that don’t matter. I—I’ve said things I shouldn’t say, sometimes.”

He hesitated, but Mr. Haley didn’t speak. Thomas felt his face growing hot. 

“Or I get...jealous of other people,” he continued. “I envy them, really. And it’s not their fault, but sometimes I make out like it is.”

He took a breath, recollecting how puzzled Sybil had looked during their conversation. If he had any other words, they were lost to him at the memory of how he’d failed one of his only friends in the world. 

This time, Mr. Haley filled the silence: 

“My dear boy, you’ve described the entirety of the human race.”

The words—light and unaffected—blew the vision out of Thomas’s head, bringing him back to the present moment. He smiled at Thomas’s look of disbelief, stepping forward with one hand in his pocket. 

“Perhaps once you stop worrying so much about what’s in there,” he pointed to the center of Thomas’s chest, “that ugly little thing that bothers you...you might look out and see that it’s here and there and—” 

His finger darted across the room before stopping on his own chest. Mr. Haley looked down at it as if upon some novelty in the shop. “It’s not so terrifying that way.”

“But that’s the thing,” he said. “I can’t see it in anyone else.”

Mr. Haley raised a disbelieving brow. “Not in anyone?”

“Not in good people, anyway,” Thomas amended.

Mr. Haley nodded. “Look a little harder, and you will. You’re in awe of good people, that’s the trouble. And a sure sign you haven’t met enough…” 

Thomas shrugged as an answer. He didn’t exactly like being characterized as “in awe of” anyone. 

“If you need to make amends with someone, then I suggest you go ahead and do it,” Mr. Haley said, observing him with some care. “That’s all we can ask of anyone. You can’t take that out, you understand?” 

He gestured at Thomas’s chest again. “You wouldn’t know yourself without it, and neither would we. Now, will you help me slide this table over to the other side of this shelf?”

Thomas blinked. 

“Yes, of course.”

It was as if he hadn’t told Mr. Haley anything he hadn’t already known and accounted for. All the tangled knots in Thomas’s stomach might be easily undone with time and understanding, but in the meantime could they please get on with sorting the shelves? 

Workplace or not, you didn’t find generous dexterity everywhere.

“And as it so happens,” Mr. Haley added, “it has never crossed my mind to think of you as particularly disagreeable.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” Thomas said, finding it easier to shrug off some of the weight on his shoulders. 

“Dickie tells me you’ve been a friend to him,” Mr. Haley said, taking the lamp off one of the side tables before Thomas lifted it. 

“You’ve seen him?” Thomas smiled broadly without thinking about it. 

“Just yesterday,” Mr. Haley said. “He’s got a sparkle back in his eye like I haven’t seen in years. You should have known him when he was younger, I’ve never met such a happy creature. I saw it again, in his face.”

Thomas knew what Mr. Haley meant—each time he met with Richard, the man looked more cheerful than the time before. He wondered if it would ever slow down, or if one day he’d stop by to find Richard turned into a literal beam of sunlight. 

“It’s down to you,” Mr. Haley added, which made Thomas blush. 

“I don’t know what I’ve done, really…” he said, even as he wondered if it might be true (and what it might mean if it were). “Though if I’ve helped, then of course I’m glad.” 

“You’ve done more than you know, Mr. Barrow,” he replied, straightening the legs of the table after Thomas plopped it down onto the carpet. “And don’t forget it in a hurry.”

Dear Lady Sybil,

I didn’t expect a letter from you so soon, or at all, really. I was going to write one myself, but yours came first. Believe that or not. 

You don’t have to say that you’re sorry. You’ve no reason to, except that I made you feel a certain way. I had no right to make you feel anything of the sort, but you probably know that already. 

The truth of it is, I was jealous. I still am. I know it isn’t fair, and I know you have your own troubles, but all I could see were my own and how you weren’t holding them. I don’t want you to have them. I shouldn’t want anyone to have them, but sometimes I do. Not forever, just enough so they’d understand.

You’re probably right, about us having to fight it out in the end. I don’t mean the two of us...I mean about the other thing. I wish you weren’t right. In the back of my mind, I’ve always thought that somehow the words would come, and that would be enough to convince people to see it our way. 

The right words haven’t come yet. Even the ones I think are there, in my head...they don’t come out the way I want them to. I know so many words on the inside, but most of them are words I can’t say, somehow. Maybe I’m already a bird that can’t sing. 

I’ve been talking with Richard (that’s Ellis, but I never call him that, now). He’s good company, I wouldn’t have believed how much. Mr. Haley says it’s my doing, but I can’t see how. He’s trying to find another job, out of service. That’s cheered him up, just thinking about it. You know well enough I haven’t been much help with that…

Anyway, all that to say he’s a bird that can sing. All sorts of things, as it turns out. I started out thinking I could help him, but I think he knows more than I do. I wonder if he’ll be just as happy to help me, if it comes to it. 

You’ll have a wonderful time in Yorkshire, and I’m glad you will. I mean it. I wouldn’t say it otherwise, you know me. I can be an awful grouch when I want to be. 

I’m sorry for it. 

Your friend,

Thomas

Mending matters with Sybil strengthened Thomas’s resolve just long enough to ask Richard back to his flat the next afternoon they both found themselves with some time to spare. Though he didn’t dare anticipate anything further than tea, Thomas felt a rush of excitement over the plan. He still wasn’t used to it—having a place of his own where he could ask someone he liked to stay. 

And he liked Richard very much—more and more, as time went on. He’d never spent so much time just talking with another man like him. Get right to the main thing, that was usually the goal. Hurry up before you lose your chance. 

Thomas wouldn’t object to such a chance, but there wasn’t any hurry. It was nice, even, to feel at home with his own thoughts and desires, to sit with them and know that even if Richard didn’t feel the same way, he’d understand them. There wasn’t any danger. 

It made a nice change. 

“Did you do this?” Richard had picked up a drawing on the countertop—one Thomas had forgotten about, or he’d certainly have put it away before the visit. 

“I did,” he admitted, as there wasn’t much use denying it—he lived alone and it was half-finished. 

“What’s it for?” The question surprised Thomas, until he remembered he’d written measurements in the margins—he wasn’t a real artist, after all. Just a man who knew how to make things fit into a space. 

“Nothing,” he said by instinct, blushing at Richard’s raised brow. “The window display, maybe. Or part of it. It’s really not finished.”

He hadn’t even decided whether or not he liked the idea—after all, the current window display was the very thing that had pushed him into the shop. It had reminded him of home, of belonging somewhere. All of it had felt so personal, so unlikely. He’d been given no choice but to walk inside. 

He’d gotten to thinking that different scenes might provoke the same feelings in others. 

“I like it,” Richard said, tracing the pumpkin with its carefully twisted stem. “You’ve taken a page from Agnes’s books.” 

It wasn’t exactly true—Agnes was too caught up with mermaids and serpent queens to really take an interest in stories about princes and balls and lizards turning into ordinary footmen. She was in possession of a quality of whimsy that Thomas hadn’t yet learned to understand. Perhaps it wasn’t for him to understand, at least not entirely. 

Still, she would laugh at having a pumpkin in the window, and so would the other children, dragged by the hand by harried mothers. Many of them were too young to care much for the books, and they were thankfully too small to reach the trinkets and baubles they eyed eagerly. Nevertheless, they were invariablyThomas’s favorite part of the day. He wouldn’t admit to any of them giving him a moment’s trouble—not when plenty of grown men and women fussed, asked questions without an answer, and left fingerprints all over everything. 

If the window were going to change, it would be for them. 

“Lots of children stop to look, so why not give them something to look at?”

Richard smiled absently. “Was Cinderella your favorite, when you were young?”

An innocent question, and one Thomas found himself irritated at being asked. 

“You’re very nosy, has anyone told you that?” he said, laughing as if it would mask the fact that he’d objected to answering the simplest, silliest of questions. Insulted Richard while doing it, even—he could see the puzzlement flash across Richard’s face before being overwhelmed by his perennial smile. 

“A few times,” he admitted. “But I keep it all close. Was it?”

Why did it matter so much, Thomas wondered. It was only a story; most children liked them. He hadn’t been any different in that respect, not any different at all. 

“I can’t remember, really.”

Though if it had been his favorite, the pumpkin coach and the fairy godmother wouldn’t have been the reasons why. The ball and the prince and all the rest, they were only decorations in the story. A means to an end. 

The prince gave Cinderella oranges, and—still in disguise—she shared them with her sisters. When the time came for the slipper to fit on her foot, it wasn’t only the prince who realized who she was. 

She’d been permitted to forgive her sisters. Forgive us, they begged...when just two nights before she’d stood in front of their full-length mirrors, carefully fixing their hair and being laughed at for the trouble. 

To be asked for forgiveness...that was a fairytale if ever Thomas had heard one.

“I don’t know how you manage it,” Richard said, interrupting Thomas’s thoughts. His eyes were still on the sketch; perhaps he hadn’t even noticed the silence between them. 

“It isn’t very good...I have an eye for the proportions, but not much else—”

“—no, that’s not what I meant.” Richard shook his head. “I mean—how you think of things like this, with the world being what it is.”

Thomas blinked. 

“It’s nothing,” he said quickly, averting Richard’s gaze. “That’s nothing.”

“It isn’t.”

“No, it is, it’s…”

“It’s what?”

He was teasing Thomas, now, eyes sparkling. 

“It’s only a drawing, and not a very good one,” Thomas said. “I probably won’t even finish it.”

“You should. You bring such a lightness to things.” Out of the corner of his eye, Thomas noticed how Richard’ss head moved to one side in the face of his silence. 

“Does it embarrass you, for me to say so?” he continued, more quietly than before. Still a note of amusement in his voice. 

“Why would it embarrass me?” Thomas scoffed. “Anyway, you’re one to talk...walking about like the stars start in your eyes.”

Somehow, the words tumbled out with a different weight than the one he’d precisely meant...though Thomas wasn’t very sorry for the way Richard looked him up and down, his smile widening. 

He didn’t have to be afraid. 

“Maybe that’s them reflecting back.”

Thomas shook his head, feeling his cheeks turning warm. 

It was going to happen . And over the stupidest thing in the world...

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, biting back a smile. 

“That’s because you can’t see the whole picture of things,” Richard said, his eyes tracing over Thomas’s own. And what did his eyes look like just now, Thomas wondered? 

Wide and soft and soppy, probably...but it couldn’t be helped. 

“Then neither can you,” he protested, rather breathlessly. He didn’t mind if it was stupid anymore. 

Richard laughed. “Alright, then. So I can’t.”

Infuriating man. 

“Then now wh—?”

Richard’s hand on his cheek stopped him. A slight tilt of Thomas’s head, and Richard guided their lips together—soft, at first, until they both felt the urgency they’d been missing.  

It was Thomas who pulled away first, filled with a wild desire to confirm that it was real, that he was really there and it was really Richard and there was nothing to worry him at all. 

When he looked at Richard, he saw the same desires in his eyes (and a few others that might be settled later on...though not too much later, if Thomas had any say in it). 

“Do you see it now?” Richard murmured. His hand was still dangled about Thomas’s neck. 

“Do you?” Thomas teased. (Even though the answer was yes, yes he could see, now that there was something of himself in Richard’s smile). 

“I think so…” Richard said. “Let me try again…”

Dear Sybil,

It seems silly to tell you this because I can’t tell you any more besides it, but I know you’d want me to—I have news. Good news. 

That’s all I can write, like I said. I won’t go on further, but now you know you’ll have a story when you get back. I still hope to hear a few of my own. 

I know why you’re afraid of going home—you’ve changed, and you think they won’t understand. I haven’t been home since I left. Not once. I don’t think I will. It’s been too long. 

I don’t talk about it very much. I don’t like to. You must have noticed by now. I suppose I’m embarrassed, like it was my fault. It’s hard to feel otherwise, when you’re the piece that didn’t fit. 

Don’t let them bully you into thinking it. You know better, and so do I. I was there too, remember that. And I know you do all that you can for them.

If they deserve all that care, they’ll stand up for you when the time comes. 

Your friend, 

Thomas

He was lighter on his feet, he was happy even when he forgot why. Then he’d remember —Richard Ellis fancies me, and I know it— and it would make the world all the sunnier. The sky could fall in, and he’d make do with the pieces. 

The rain was light that afternoon, the lowering sun still peeking out through the gaps in the clouds. The shop had just closed; Mr. Haley was poking about across the street as he usually did at this hour, greeting his neighbors and helping them close up shop.  

“Somebody’s coming!” Agnes said, a hand on the window. Thomas looked up—he didn’t see anyone at all, except a few people walking the pavement. 

“Well, we’re closed for the night, so they can come back tomorrow…” Thomas said, closing up his ledger and heading towards the stairs (Mr. Haley liked the most important paperwork to be kept in his office). 

He lingered upstairs, as he often did, taking in the warmth and good feeling of it all, procuring a biscuit from the jar on the table. The ritual conjured aspirations for an otherwise foggy future—Thomas was lucky enough to have his own place to live, but he wasn’t finished yet. One day, he wanted something like Mr. Haley had—something homey, something with a past. Art and history on the walls and in the drawers, hiding under cushions and filling the space. 

I could have it, he thought, with an exuberant defiance. I could. 

He took another biscuit for Agnes and trotted down the stairs, stopping at the foot of them when he heard a woman’s voice coming from the next room. In another moment he’d placed it, though he only turned the corner once he’d heard her laugh and was sure. 

“—this one was always my favorite…” Phyllis was saying to Agnes, shuffling to a page in the book. “Imagine dancing all night?”

Thomas took a breath, straightening his shoulders. “Can I help you?”

Phyllis hesitated, and Agnes spoke for her: 

“I said we’re closed!” she explained, reassurance in her voice. “But she isn’t going to buy anything...she got my book down for me!”

“That was kind of her,” Thomas said, not looking away from Phyllis. “Agnes, have you checked that Crackers is upstairs for the night?” 

She darted off, exclaiming that Crackers was probably hiding but she knew all the places by now, so that was alright. Phyllis beamed as she hopped up the stairs, her smile hardly diminishing as she caught Thomas’s eye. 

“I was hoping to catch you.” In that pandering tone she used—Phyllis had never had a real brother or sister, and so she led with the notion that they were meant to be the best of friends. She hadn’t realized that she was only Maggie’s friend, only a neighbor girl who bore none of the weight in the Barrow household. It was easy enough for her to pander and pet and prod...

“Doing what, I wonder?”

“You’re silly,” she said, not even really pretending to be amused. “Maggie wrote me; she said you hadn’t told her you were up in London, so that explains why she hadn’t mentioned it.”

As if it were all a funny misunderstanding. 

“Does it?” Thomas put his hands behind his back, feeling a bitterness he hadn’t recognized all day coming to the forefront of his mind. “Well, I’m glad you’ve worked it all out.”

She blinked, her brow furrowing. “I gather the two of you haven’t.”

It had never been any of her business. She hadn’t cared to stay for any of the nasty bits, hadn’t wanted any part of a family that came with all of that “bother” attached. Just tea and outings and tales told over tools—instruments that Thomas was taking great pains to hold just right, even as she distracted his father (his father, not hers) with her incessant rambling. 

Now she had the nerve to act disappointed that they weren’t living out the rest of their lives according to her plan.  

“Was there something you came for?” Thomas said shortly. “I should think you’d want to be getting back. As it’s so late.” 

“Is it?” She glanced back at the clock behind her, staring for too long at the hands. As she turned back, Thomas saw it—what Mr. Haley talked about. The ugly thing that sat inside of everyone but had always seemed so particular to his own nature. 

It looked different from what he thought it would—he felt a strange urge to reach out and snatch it away, tear it out of her. 

Her eyes were distant, not noticing how carefully she was being observed. She never noticed things like that. 

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, hating the sharpness still in his voice, unsure if it suited the situation any longer. 

She almost jumped, staring at him with wide eyes. “Nothing. Nothing. I should go…”

She still hadn’t said why she’d come in the first place...though as Thomas’s eyes wandered from the clock in front of him to the table underneath it, he saw a music box, very like the one she’d nearly walked off with, thanks to Coyle. 

Keep her here, urged a voice inside of him. 

“I shouldn’t get involved,” he said, eyes back on the clock. She stopped. 

“What do you mean?”

Thomas shrugged.

“You know what I mean,” he said, hoping he’d pitched his voice low enough to sound convincing. “With Mr. Coyle.” 

She was shaking. 

“He’s troubled, since the war.” And even without the pause before the words, they didn’t sound all that convincing. 

“Aren’t we all.”

Another beat of silence. Thomas was starting to feel incredibly stupid. What did it matter to him what Phyllis Baxter did with her life? They were both grown and she’d always preferred Maggie anyway. They’d been friends, not him. And none of them had ever been family, whatever she’d pretended, whatever she’d decided in her mind was true as a girl...

He owed her nothing, and what’s more, he didn’t know how he could help even if he did.  

“Somebody’s coming!” Agnes called from halfway down the stairs—how she could tell it from there, Thomas couldn’t understand. But she’d been right the first time, and both he and Phyllis looked out the window in anticipation even as the bell rang out. 

Agnes recognized him first, half-hidden under an umbrella. 

“Dickie!” she cried, hugging his legs before he’d finished entering the shop. He grinned, meeting Thomas’s eyes.

He’s mine, Thomas thought, a heat coming into his cheeks.

“Is Uncle George here?” Richard asked by way of greeting. “I’ve got some news.”

His eyes landed on Phyllis, who looked as if she half-believed she’d already sunk into the floor, or perhaps gone quite invisible. In either case, she didn’t meet Richard’s gaze.

“This is Miss Baxter,” Thomas interjected, trying for a tone that didn’t paint him into any corner he couldn’t get out of. He still wasn’t sure what he was about, stalling for her. “I don’t know if you’ve met...”

From the looks of it, they weren’t exactly strangers. 

“I should go,” Phyllis murmured, “I didn’t realize…”

“You were here first,” Richard said, amiable as ever, taking off his hat. “I can wait upstairs, if—?”

He glanced at Thomas, who stumbled on an idea. 

“I don’t see why,” he said. “After all, you know Mr. Coyle. He quite relies on Miss Baxter, you see.” 

“We’re friends,” Phyllis said quickly. Her eyes met Richard’s, and Thomas knew without asking that Richard saw it, too. He was better at seeing it, much better. He’d know how to order it all. 

“Maybe you are,” Richard said. “But with him, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it?”

Phyllis said nothing, but Richard—like his uncle—didn’t seem to find such silence difficult to manage. 

“It shouldn’t be,” he said, his voice low. “If you’re really friends. It shouldn’t be hard to tell at all.” 

Phyllis swallowed. 

“Mr. Barrow…” Agnes had wandered into the other room. “Do you know that this curtain is broken?”

It wasn’t broken; it never was, only Agnes tied knots and bows in the sash. Mr. Haley swore he didn’t mind, and she could usually undo them herself. Every once in a while, she found it impossible—in these acute cases, Mr. Barrow was called in to investigate. 

He left Richard with Phyllis, pulling the nearest armchair close to the window and teasing the knot at his leisure. Agnes read him a story—the story Phyllis had shown her, about the twelve dancing princesses and their worn out shoes. 

“They should have taken their shoes off,” Thomas commented at the end, smoothing out the wrinkles in the sash. “Then there wouldn’t have been holes in them, and they wouldn’t have been caught.”

“But then the story wouldn’t ever be over,” Agnes pointed out.

Thomas had no rebuttal. He stood, poking his head around the corner, only to find Richard putting his hat on. 

“Are you going already?” 

“I’ll be back,” Richard assured him, grinning in a way that eased the knot in Thomas’s own stomach. 

“I thought you had news.” 

Richard straightened with pride. 

“I’ve got a job,” he said. “So does she, if we hurry.”

Thomas blinked. 

“Do I get any more of an explanation than that?”

He was halfway out the door, looking almost giddy. “Not just now, no.”

Richard slipped out, leaving Phyllis on the threshold. She turned to look at Thomas, her eyes slightly red and her cheeks paler than usual. She stepped forward.

“Thomas.” 

He found he wasn’t irritated by the softness in her voice, that it didn’t cloy as expected—as it always had in the past. 

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, unconvinced and unconvincing. She took his arm, sliding her hand down so that her fingers wrapped about his left wrist, grazing against his glove. 

She’d always accepted his presents, however small and silly. There’d been a time—he could almost remember it—that he hadn’t seen it as taking advantage. 

“How do you find the loveliest people?” she murmured, beaming at him.

And if Thomas only knew the answer to that...

“We’d better go now,” Richard said, poking his head back in. She squeezed Thomas’s hand before hurrying behind him, giving Thomas one last smile before letting the door close behind her. Richard held the umbrella for both of them, and Thomas felt something inside of him settle into place. 

“They didn’t even say goodbye,” Agnes said, in playful outrage. She took Thomas’s hand in both of her own, holding his arm up so she could spin under it. 

“That’s manners for you,” Thomas agreed. 

He thought he would change the window display after all, if Mr. Haley was agreeable to the idea. 

Sybil,

I don’t know what to say. Too much has happened. If you weren’t coming back straight away, I’d be forced to come and see you. 

It’s all good news, don’t worry about me. 

I don’t think I’ve ever written that before. 

The sun was out that day, and Thomas could take his lunch wherever he pleased. 

So could Richard. 

He was sitting on a park bench, surrounded by a few more pigeons than Thomas would have preferred. He soon saw why, spying the bag in Richard’s hand. 

“You’re one of those sorts…” he laughed, shaking his head as he sat next to him. A perfectly ordinary thing to do on such a day. Nothing to stop them at all. 

“What sort is that?” Richard asked. 

Thomas gestured at the birds. 

“I feel sorry for them,” Richard said with a smile. “They have to put up with all of us...it isn’t natural for them.”

“Not natural to have food scattered all over the ground?” Thomas raised an eyebrow. “You’re making them into pests…”

“Well, they don’t bother me,” Richard said, though he put the seed away. He took another bag from his front pocket. “This is for you.”

Their fingers grazed together as Thomas took the bag from him. 

“Why?” he said, as he looked inside, his lips turning up when he saw the Chelsea bun inside. 

“Because I picked it up for you, that’s why,” Richard laughed. His eyes lingered on Thomas for a long while before turning his attention to the pond in the distance. 

“Do you ever go to the sea?”

Thomas shook his head. 

“We should make a trip of it, sometime,” said Richard. “You and I.”

He said it as if it must be possible—quite easy, in fact. 

Maybe it always had been. 

He’d have to tell Sybil.

“I’d like that.” 

He must have sounded eager, for Richard looked charmed. “Would you really?”

He was awfully soft...though Thomas didn’t mind how it made him feel. 

“I don’t say things like that for show, Mr. Ellis…”

Chapter Text

“—if she’d only told us instead of wasting her time pretending about London,” Mary griped. “We should have known from the start she was planning on leaving us all behind. It’s exactly the sort of thing she’d do.” 

She surveyed herself in the mirror, irritated at how severe griping made her look. She’d once enjoyed it, back when all she’d wanted was to be taken seriously. Furrowing her brow and tightening her lip in the glass was a way of assuring herself that she was real, that she had opinions. 

Now that she had someone to take her seriously, catching herself in the mirror felt like catching a child pulling silly faces. The thought embarrassed her, though it did little to help in breaking the habit. 

Matthew would just have to get used to it. He’d promised he would, in front of God and Papa and everyone, so he’d have little choice but to keep his word...

He was doing a valiant job: 

“Darling, you nearly went to America yourself, not six months ago,” he pleaded good-naturedly from under the covers. 

“A mistake I was spared the indignity of making.” Mary smiled in spite of herself at the memory before sighing and inspecting the ribbon of her braid. “I suppose Sybil might prefer an American man. They always seem terribly loud-mouthed to me…”

“I don’t think she’s going there for the men.” 

Mary looked up to catch her own stare in the mirror before dropping it again. 

“If she goes at all,” she drawled. “But Miss Walker’s convinced her it’s a good idea, so I imagine she will…”

“And you don’t approve of Miss Walker?” 

Mary blinked. The trouble with being taken seriously was that she could never again rely on being misunderstood. 

“It isn’t for me to approve of her or not,” she said lightly. “She’s Sybil’s friend, not mine.”

If only that were really how it all worked...Mary had always cared more than she wanted to about the lives her sisters led. She thought it must have something to do with being the eldest—they treated her life as little more than a passing interest, something to take up some time over tea. She might have been a figure in a magazine or a novel—unattainable and not quite real, however sympathetic or loathsome she was on the page. 

Could they manage as she did, feeling as if their lives were carried on inside of her as well? 

She knew Sybil was pretending, and she knew most people would never know the difference. But Mary did, and it had worried her relentlessly since she’d stumbled upon what seemed to be the truth. 

Matthew understood her, and so he was stumbling into the truth as well. 

“Do you ever wonder…?” he said, voice fading off. 

He looked embarrassed to speak of it—though probably not as embarrassed as he should have been, Mary thought with some delight. She’d been quite lucky—so many things had to be guessed about before a wedding, and half of them one didn’t even think to guess about until afterwards...

She stood. “If Sybil wants to tell me something, then she will. And if she doesn’t, there’s no point in wondering.”

Though wonder she would, until Sybil saw fit to tell Mary the whole story about Amelia Walker and London. 

Sisters couldn’t help such things. 

“You’re right,” Matthew conceded.

“Of course I’m right,” Mary said, sitting on the very edge of the bed. “Now, come and kiss me.” 

He did, leaning across the bed to reach her. Though she always pretended that she wouldn’t, Mary met him halfway (or nearly, anyway), taking his face in her hands and thanking God that He’d seen fit to give her what she’d asked for since she was young enough to really believe she might have it. 

“But we’ll be on her side?” Matthew asked as she curled up in his arms. “Even if she does go?”

She lifted her head to look at him.

 “I like it when you talk of ‘we,’” she said, tapping his chest with her fingers. “And of course we will.”

If nothing else, Amelia Walker was proof that Sybil was learning not to fight an army’s worth of conflict all by herself...and as Mary could attest, that was half the battle. 

“—now he’s in business.” Sarah looked up at Alfred, whose height was still considerable when he sat (especially when he sat up straight, like he should, like it took most young men longer to learn. No one had learned it quicker, to her memory, except for—)

“—like as not, they’ll leave the shop to him when the owner goes,” she continued, brushing away the melancholy that had replaced her pride. “And even if they don’t, that’s real business experience. And he started here, just like you.” 

Had it been ten years ago? Sarah hadn’t realized how much time had passed until she’d opened the shop door expecting to see a lad in livery and instead had come face-to-face with a proper man, in a proper suit.

She’d been cross with Thomas for leaving, to tell the truth. Hadn’t written as much as she should. But he’d done just fine, and there was no shame in trying your hand at whatever opportunities life gave you. 

That’s what Alfred had to learn, and after meeting Thomas in London she was more determined than ever to teach him. 

“It is a lovely shop,” Anna piped up over her stitching. “And Thomas looked as happy as I’ve ever seen him.” 

As if she’d done much more than nod hello and race for the furthest shelf, gabbing about something for Lady Mary...

“There’s a new tune,” Sarah drawled. “They’ll never give you credit while you’re at home, Alfred, remember that.” 

Alfred nodded solemnly. “I will.”

Sarah smiled. He’d do well—she wouldn’t have stuck her neck out if she’d thought otherwise.

“Now that Lady Sybil’s on holiday, I imagine he’ll be turning up,” Anna said. 

Was that still going on? The war had been over too long for Sarah to make any sense of it—except for the fact that Lady Sybil and Thomas were both stubborn and contrary, determined to pretend that they really enjoyed each other’s company. 

What did they talk about? Thomas had never told her, and she guessed it was because he hardly knew himself. He was too easily flattered, that was the trouble. 

“Why would he?” 

“I don’t know,” Anna shrugged. “But he came around at Christmas, when she stayed.” 

As if the reason he’d come up from London was to sit uncomfortably in the servants’ hall while Mr. Carson waited for an opportunity to take a bite out of him...Sarah wondered, sometimes, if she was the only person on the estate with her head on straight. 

“He came with his employer at Christmas,” she sniped. “Mr. Haley has family in York.”

“I remember,” Anna said, biting back a smile as she turned back to her stitching. “His nephew came by the house.”

She thought she was clever, picking up on the truth, when anyone with eyes could tell that Thomas didn’t throw such smiles to just anyone at all. 

It was foolish, really, for him to go on so. Nothing good could come of it, not with the world as it was. He was a sappy, soppy sort when it came down to it, and Mr. Ellis walked and talked like more of the same. 

But what could you tell people that would stop them from trying to be as happy as they could in this world? And had it ever worked, Sarah wondered? 

“He seemed nice,” Anna continued, hinting further. Whether she meant well or not, it made it Sarah bristle. It wasn’t—after all—any of their business. Especially under the circumstances. 

“Very nice,” she conceded (because it was true, whatever else), “very respectable.” 

She turned to Alfred. “And he started in service as well. There’s room for people with skill and ambition, don’t let them tell you otherwise.”

She glanced over at Anna, who didn’t look up (she was getting better all the time about hiding her feelings...her husband’s influence, no doubt). 

“Now, if you want me to alter your sleeves, you’ll need to bring it down now, else I won’t have time until God knows when.”

Alfred popped up from his seat, hurrying away with a stammer that it would only take him a minute. 

Sarah smiled. It would be nice to have a friend in the house again...and this time, perhaps, he wouldn’t feel too grand to give her some credit. 

“He seemed pleased to see you, especially,” Anna said, still intent on her stitching. “Thomas. Very proud, I thought.” 

Sarah blinked. 

“Well, then.” 

Perhaps he had been, just a bit. 

“It’s as if they’re a packaged set,” Robert complained, turning down the covers on his side of the bed. 

“Well, I like her,” Cora said. “And Sybil likes her, and she needs her friends, now that she’s in London. More than she needs us.”

It hurt to admit it, though—Cora had been relieved to find out—not as much as she’d once thought it would. 

Children knew when they were ready to start out on their own adventures, and there was something marvelously exciting about it all. 

“Except our money,” Robert chuckled. “God knows she still needs that.”

Cora turned on her side, tucking a hand under her pillow. “But you’re proud of her.”

“Have I ever been anything else?” Robert said, looking disgruntled enough to tell Cora she didn’t need to answer the question. “Did she tell you she wants to go to America?”

Cora paused. “I don’t think she wants to go, exactly. Only she’s wondering if she might like it better.”

And why wouldn’t she? It was in their blood, whether they admitted it or not. They had family there, roots just as strong as the ones formed in Yorkshire. 

“And you’re for this?” Robert asked, leaning against the bed frame. 

“I’m for whatever makes our daughter happy, Robert, that’s all.”

“Do you think it would make her happy?” Robert said, turning towards her. “Really?”

That it just might was plainly incomprehensible to Robert. Downton and its way of life was in his blood—it was in Mary’s blood, and a good bit of Edith’s. 

But Sybil had always been different, and he’d have to learn it sooner or later. 

Not all at once, but sooner or later. 

“That’s for her to decide, not us,” she said gently. He’d get there, eventually. Robert always did. 

Robert shook his head. “Sybil likes an adventure, but I can’t see her settling so far away from home, from everything she’s known.” 

Cora only smiled. 

“Haven’t the last ten years taught you that we can’t see anything at all from here?”

The most important part of the day was after closing, when the figurines were sent off to bed. 

When Mr. Barrow was away, Agnes had to do it all herself—no small feat, especially with Mrs. Paisley and Mr. Parcel, who never wanted to shut their eyes for a single moment. Sometimes she had to check on them three or four times in the space of an evening, just to make sure they were behaving themselves. 

After she’d tripped down the stairs in the dark and chipped a tooth, Mr. Barrow had taken matters into his own hands. He assured her that he could manage them from now on—and he always did, speaking to them in such a manner that they quieted right up. It seemed to be a trick only people who were very grown up had learned. 

But when Mr. Barrow was gone, Agnes had no choice but to try. 

“—and you too, Mr. Parcel,” Agnes said, tapping the glazed figure’s top hat. “Yes, it is time, the same as always...you’re very silly to pretend not to know when the clock’s right there.” 

Grandpa placed a hand on her head. 

“Are they causing any trouble for you?”

Agnes waited—it seemed not. She shook her head. 

“Mr. Barrow taught me how to do it just right,” she explained (even though Grandpa probably already knew that—most things that went right nowadays were because of Mr. Barrow). 

“So he did,” Grandpa marvelled. “That’s very well done—you’ll make upright citizens out of them yet.”

Still, better for Mr. Barrow to do it, when he was able…

“Will Mr. Barrow be back soon?” she asked, knowing the answer: 

“That depends entirely on what you mean by soon, my dear,” Grandpa replied, guiding her to the staircase. “If you mean will he be back by Wednesday, then yes.”

She’d hoped his plans might have changed—sometimes that happened, if she wished hard enough.

“I miss him.” 

“That’s what happens when someone you love goes away,” said Grandpa, opening the door.

“I know that,” Agnes replied. “But, Grandpa, he was going to teach me how to make a princess tower.”

“For the window display, you mean?”

“Yes, and it will be this high,” Agnes said, hastening to the nearest chair and standing on it until Grandpa beckoned her down. “But it will only go in the window if it’s good enough.” 

“I have no doubt it will be,” Grandpa said. 

With Mr. Barrow to help, how could it be anything else? 

It had been her fault entirely—she’d told Aunt Rosamund the wrong time, and now Edith was left standing on the platform, looking ridiculous. 

She should be used to that by now, really…

The gentleman in the platform was doing his best to make her feel better about it. 

“I also feel in a haze coming up to London...I’m sure I’ll find out what I’ve forgotten when I unpack.”

He laughed good-naturedly, in a way Edith had missed without recalling where she’d heard it before. 

“Well, the truth of it is, I’ve been in a haze for the past several months,” she said, hoping it came off more charmingly self-effacing than downright pathetic. 

He smiled; it had worked. 

“So now you’re airing it all out, so to speak?” 

That remained to be seen. 

“My sister told me I’d like it better here,” she admitted. It had taken her too long to accept Sybil’s attempts at helping her, to understand them for what they were. If Edith couldn’t be first, she’d always been desperate not to be last, and Sybil’s urgings had only sounded like pity for the longest time. 

But it wasn’t a race, really. Not when the only real finish line was the grave. Edith was trying to convince herself of that. 

“And was she right, do you think?” 

“I don’t know yet,” Edith said, thinking of Sybil’s wide grin and confident posture on coming back to Downton. “I suspect so.” 

The kitchen was showing signs of disrepair—dust sat in places it never would have dared fifteen years ago. The people were in disrepair too, though Phyllis wasn’t making much progress in getting them to admit to it. 

“I wish you’d come and see it,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “He’d be so happy—”

“—to see me?” Maggie scoffed. “Not likely.”

They’d once gotten along—Phyllis would swear to it, whatever else they both pretended. They’d forgotten, that was all. 

“What could it hurt?” 

“Why don’t you ask him to come here, if you care so much?” Maggie complained. “After all, I’m the one with the husband and the children and everything else.”

“I did,” she said. “He thinks he isn’t wanted.”

He wouldn’t like her for putting it exactly like that...but he couldn’t say it wasn’t the truth. The more she talked with him, the more she’d realized how rejected he’d felt (and why). 

It was more complicated than she’d once imagined, but it wasn’t—to her mind—insurmountable. Not when it was family, not when you loved someone, when you knew them better than anyone in the world. 

You made allowances. You forgave. You found a piece of ground you could share. That was the only way good could come of a struggle—if everyone wanted it, if everyone tried to find where it might be hiding. 

Maggie sipped her tea. “Is he as sour as he was when he left?”

She laughed, and Phyllis hated the sound. 

“I don’t think he was ever sour.” 

Maggie raised an imperious eyebrow—the one she kept for childish conversations about how she was two months older, so she knew best. 

“That’s because you didn’t have to stay for the worst of it,” she said, lifting her chin. “Just you wait.”

If Thomas had been standing there, she’d probably be proven right. 

But Phyllis expected that—back in London—she’d be waiting quite a while. 

Amelia didn’t want to leave England behind, exactly. It was only that she felt herself slipping further and further away from the person she’d been during the war—someone who hardly noticed expectations and didn’t care much for them when she did. 

Getting away from it all had worked the last time—why not again? 

Sybil was pretending not to be anxious, and failing spectacularly at doing so. She saw and felt everything so clearly—it was no wonder she was out of sorts about Amelia’s waffling. 

“Have you thought any more about it?” she asked, perched on the edge of her chair as Amelia aimlessly tapped out a tune on the piano. Phrased to be gentle, but Amelia felt the impatience. 

“Of course I have,” she said, holding back a sigh and replacing it with an uneasy smile. “I’ve got thoughts coming in and out all the time...they just aren’t going anywhere.”

Sybil was too clever to be drawn in by Amelia’s attempt at being cavalier. She set her teacup down, clasping her hands together on her lap. 

“I’m sure they are,” she said. “Sometimes it seems like you’ll never untangle something, but all along you’ve been making it easier.”

“You’re right.” Amelia turned back to the piano dejectedly. “But I do feel so senseless, sometimes.”

She’d imagined that having a proper sweetheart would somehow erase everything else, smooth over the parts of herself that she’d never been at ease with. How much easier it would be with Sybil—so effortlessly lovely and passionate in every way—by her side. 

She hadn’t been wrong, exactly. But there were mountains still to climb, questions that remained unanswered. Sybil could only do so much, and the more Amelia thought of it, the more terrified she became. 

It was all so fragile, and the wrong choice would wound more than just herself. 

The whole thing would have been impossible with anyone else but her. 

“Dear…” Sybil sat beside her on the bench, wrapping her arms about Amelia’s waist and kissing her shoulder. “You know that you aren’t. Not to me, or anyone else.”

“I’m keeping you waiting—”

“—so keep me waiting. I’ll live through it,” she replied, grinning. “Now, play the one you were teaching me. I’ve been practicing my part.” 

And so she had been, her left hand moving over the keys with more ease than they had before. Her smile grew as they did, as they moved in conjunction with Amelia’s part—it was a simple tune, really something she should have learned long ago (and probably had only forgotten due to a lack of interest)...but from the excitement on her face, she might have been playing some great music hall. 

She was a joy. Whatever else had happened—whatever else would happen—Amelia didn’t believe that would change. 

When Sybil smiled up at her, Amelia kissed her—only briefly, hardly anything at all. Something she should have been used to by now. But Sybil’s playing faltered, and she blushed, staring down tragically at the keys. 

“Oh, now I’m all backwards…” she said, laughing breathlessly as her hand roamed trying to find its place. She waved away Amelia’s hand impatiently. 

“I’ll get it right this time,” she said, “if you don’t distract me…”

Amelia knew better than to challenge her again. 

Richard sat next to Thomas on the front steps of his parents’ house. The sun was coming out, though not enough to dry the dew on the grass. 

“They mean well.”

Thomas frowned as he lit his cigarette.

“What d’you mean?” 

Richard paused. He was stepping into something, though with Thomas it was often difficult to tell exactly what. 

“I just don’t know if they…well, I thought maybe they were bothering you,” he faltered, registering that Thomas’s brow remained furrowed. “It’s different from being here for Christmas, when there’s all sorts for them to focus on.”

The barrage of questions over breakfast had been over the line, though Richard knew they meant it kindly, that they believed they were taking an interest. 

Maybe they were, but Thomas couldn’t be expected to trust in that, when the alternative was usually closer to the truth. 

“Why wouldn’t I like them?” Thomas challenged—and Richard was at least grateful that the leap in logic gave him some insight into what was irritating Thomas. 

“I never said you didn’t.”

“Well, you thought you had to apologize for them…” 

“Because I know how they can be,” Richard said. Thomas stared at him quizzically. Did he really not understand? “Come on, you saw it...”

“You mean that they acted like parents?” Thomas shook his head, laughing humorlessly. “You think because I don’t have any family—”

Richard’s stomach twisted. 

“—you have family—”

“—that I don’t know what it all feels like,” Thomas finished, the lightness in his voice failing by the end of it. He stared down at the steps, and when he spoke again, his voice was strangely quiet. “But I did. I knew. Just lost it, for a little while.”

Richard chanced clasping Thomas’s hand in his own for a moment. When they’d first met, he’d believed Thomas was someone far ahead in the race, someone to be envied or emulated. 

It was more complicated than that, and far more interesting. Better soil for growing roots, when they both had things the other wanted. 

“You have family,” he repeated. “You made it, and it’ll be stronger for that.”

Thomas leaned into his side—he knew it was true, though it embarrassed him to admit it. 

But they were making a life together, and that was the truth of things. 

“I do like them,” Thomas said. “And their questions.” 

And why shouldn’t he? Richard smiled. 

“I believe you,” he said, looking out at the sky, Thomas’s fingers still loosely intertwined with his own. “What a view…”

The night air was turning brisker by the minute, but Sybil wasn’t about to pass up a clear night in Yorkshire. The stars just didn’t shine the same way in London, and Sybil was usually too busy to appreciate them anyway. 

She shut the door quietly behind her, propping the tray of leftover canapés on her hip as she hurried back to the lawn. 

Thomas had fallen asleep on the blanket, though he stirred as soon as Sybil sat down—lsowly at first, before sitting up wildly with a gasp. Sybil jumped. 

“It’s just me!” she laughed. Thomas stared at her with eyes like saucers for a good long moment before shaking his head. 

“I thought you went somewhere,” he murmured. Perhaps it was only the light of the moon, but he looked paler than usual. 

“I did, just to the kitchens—do you want one?” she held out the tray to him, expecting a joke but hardly meriting a glance in her direction. Thomas was staring straight ahead, looking perturbed. 

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Sybil sighed. “Are you going to say that every time, even though I never believe y—”

“—it’s really nothing,” Thomas insisted, finally looking at her. “I’d almost dozed off and got startled, that’s all.”

More like spooked...Sybil looked back at the house, biting her lip. She remembered being frightened of it, in the dark. How big it was, how likely to swallow her up. 

“Do you want to go back to the village?” she asked. “I don’t mind.”

“I’m fine. I am,” he insisted, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it in a shaking hand. “It’s funny, really. I thought you’d been carried off.”

Sybil frowned. “It doesn’t sound funny.”

“It is,” Thomas said. “The way I was thinking it, it was funny.”

He sounded as if he were convincing himself. 

“If you say so.”

“Because you were smaller, see,” he explained. “Head this high above the grass.”

His hand hovered about a foot above the lawn. “I don’t know why.”

“Were you smaller?”

“Hard to say.” Thomas turned behind him, squinting. “The gate was taller, so I think so.” 

He sounded quite serious; Sybil shook her head in amusement. 

“I still don’t think it’s funny.”

Thomas leaned back on one hand. “But you’re laughing at me.”

“Maybe it is, then.”

They fell into silence, the cool air erasing the warmth of their amusement before it could settle. Then Thomas spoke: 

“If Miss Walker does go to America—”

“—is that what you’re worried about?” Sybil said, sitting up straighter. 

Thomas took a drag of his cigarette, shaking his head. “Not unless she’s a shadow with claws, it isn’t.” 

He smiled half-heartedly, staring down at the ground. “Would you go?”

Sybil’s heart thudded in her chest. “I don’t know. I think I could, if it feels right.”

“That’s what I’m asking—does it?”

Sybil looked up at the sky, feeling nearly as small as Thomas had imagined her to be. 

“I think so,” she admitted. Thomas said nothing, and she closed her eyes, taking a shuddering breath. “I didn’t really want to talk about it yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because nothing’s sure.” 

Again, Thomas said nothing, and Sybil didn’t dare look at his face to see why. 

“I don’t want to leave you behind,” she said to the sky.

“You wouldn’t be,” Thomas replied. He raised his chin when Sybil turned to look at him. “I mean it. You know I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

Sybil shook her head. “You might.” 

“But I’m not,” Thomas insisted. “If you want to go...you should. I think you should.”

His voice was shaking, but even still she believed him. 

Stranger still, she found herself wanting to argue with him over it, to bully him into telling her not to go. 

“But I said I’d take you with me, when we went to London.” How she’d cried that day, how small she’d felt, how unsure...somehow, him being the same had made it seem better. 

“And you did,” Thomas said. “Changed my life.”

Sybil closed her eyes, biting her lower lip to keep it from quivering. 

“She might stay here.” 

“Maybe she will,” Thomas agreed. “Or maybe she won’t. Who knows what could happen? Point is, you don’t need to wait around for me. The truth of it is, I won’t ever be able to keep up.”

He held up a hand to stop her protest. 

“What I mean is, I like where I’ve landed,” he continued. “I don’t want to go anywhere else. Not for very long, anyway.” 

She knew that was true—never once had it crossed her mind that he’d come along with her again. Not with Richard and Mr. Haley and Miss Baxter and all the rest of them...he was building a foundation, and she knew that he wouldn’t leave it in a hurry. 

It was up to her. 

“I don’t know if I do, either.” 

“So find out,” Thomas said. “Find out, and when you come back—for a visit or forever—you know I’ll still be here.”

He smiled at her, and Sybil wiped her eyes. 

“You’re lovely.”

He looked away. 

“If I am…” he shook his head. “I don’t think I could be, without you.”

He was wrong, but Sybil’s heart was too full to argue the point. 

“I couldn’t be what I am either, without you,” she said. 

Thomas considered this before shrugging. 

“Maybe. But we’ll never know, now, will we?” 

On his ninth birthday, Thomas had decided he would rather not get any older—and he certainly didn’t want to be a grown-up. 

“I don’t think I’ll be any good at it,” he told his mother over a sandwich. 

“That’s why you have to learn,” she explained. 

This, of course, was entirely missing the point of the problem, the whole reason his stomach hurt when he thought of it. 

“But what if I can’t?”

Something flashed in her eyes, but she shook it away. 

“Everyone does, Thomas. Sooner or later.” 

After saying good night to Sybil, Thomas walked back to the village with his hands in his pockets. He’d see Richard the next day, and Sybil was going to try and make it into York if Mary would “let her.” 

To tell the truth of it, his stomach still hurt. 

But she’d been right.