Chapter Text
Loxley House
Emily hadn’t written to say she’d be coming.
She sent no telegram or herald of any kind. It’s a long-standing habit of hers, as she isn’t much for fuss and has never much liked a welcoming party.
Not since she was still a little girl, in pink percale and honey-blonde braids, impatiently waiting on those stairs, just there, for Mother and Father to return from their last trip—they swore it would be the last—to Jamaica. And Anthony, already a young man by that time, leaning his tall frame on the banister beside her, trying to amuse her with stories while they waited and waited for the scheduled carriage to come.
He knew all her favorites and did all the voices. At first, entertaining and then trying to distract her when they finally realized the carriage wasn’t coming.
And their parents weren’t coming back.
Emily suppresses a shiver, as always, as she looks through the doorway and catches sight of the Loxley staircase, too easily recalling her younger self there, and Anthony too, and the way their shared smiles faded away when they heard horse hooves galloping up the lane at a rapid pace that could only mean bad news.
The memory doesn’t cut like it once did. Years have worn down the sharpest edges. It’s more a dull ache deep in her heart now, sunk there forever, like a ship foundered by a hurricane in the Caribbean. With all passengers lost.
She doesn’t dwell on the too-apt metaphor.
“Answering your own door, Anthony?” she smirks, regarding her older brother with a fond and wry tease. She muses, “Your marriage must be in a shambles already.”
“You have no idea,” he mutters, almost too seriously.
This dents her mood just a little. Like a grey bank of clouds moving in on a fair day. She hears the genuine hiding behind his jest at once. It’s an easy thing. Emily has always been attuned to her brother’s moods and habits, his likes and dislikes—after Mother and Father died in that shipwreck, it was just the two of them. No other siblings, no grandparents left, no aunts or uncles to speak of. It was just them.
And so her smirk turns quizzical, and she regards him with more scrutiny.
But he’s shaking his head already, in a “forgive me, Em” sort of way, as if he’s made a joke that didn’t land. His natural, self-deprecating manner nearly sells it. He’s stunned that she’s here, that’s all. He recovers and waves her inside, swiftly changing subjects, “I thought you were in France? We didn’t expect you until later in the summer.”
“I was homesick for England,” she answers, handing him her bag, while retaining the bouquet of flowers. She gives the house her customary once-over, her smirk softening into a serene smile, the kind that comes with being at home. She turns back to him, “You couldn’t expect me to stay away for long, now could you? Not after receiving this.”
She’s been holding a telegraph message round the flower stems and now slips it away, as she holds it up for his closer inspection. He must know what it says. He’s the one who sent it, care of the apartment she keeps in the 7th arrondissement of Paris.
It’s dated more than a month ago, and contains news of his immediate wedding to Edith Crawley—yes, that Edith Crawley—and a request, wondering if she wouldn’t mind telephoning Father McFinley and asking a favor.
Not that she has many favors left with Callum McFinley. At least not after this. He may still owe her for the sake of what happened between them in their youth. And he may even still love her. She’s had her suspicions over the years. But he loves God more—didn’t he make that clear when he took his vows?
Yet, she did as Anthony asked. Of course, she did. The Strallan siblings retain an unbreakable bond, despite more than ten years between them. There’s not a thing on Earth she wouldn’t do for her brother and vice versa. He knows it, she knows it.
He sighs at that telegram. Perhaps he regrets sending it? Perhaps he regrets the marriage? She has none of the details and it seemed in such haste. She half-wondered if…? But Anthony has never been one to air his own troubles. Not even to his only sister.
Well, not without proper dragging it out of him anyway.
For now, he ignores the telegram, asking instead, “How’s Mr. Chetwood? And who are the flowers for?”
“Jonathan is in India, playing at whist tables and making friends with rajas and elephants and the exiled aristocracy. Or so I assume. We’ve recently fallen out of touch again, much as it pains me to say.” But Emily doesn’t seem too pained at all.
Her husband has his virtues, but he has plenty of vices too, and they’ve both mutually agreed that their marriage works best when they are separated by a continent or two, preferably with an ocean in between. So she knows something about a marriage in shambles.
Giving her brother a longer look, she decides whether she will confront him about his earlier joke now or later. His eyes warn her not to try it.
Very well, later, she concedes, but only to the delay. Besides, there’s more than one way to skin a fish. Or get the full story, as it were.
“The flowers are for your bride,” she renews her grin, giving a lift to her eyebrows that indicates she’d like to meet the woman as soon as possible.
Before you let her slip away again…
She won’t tease him about this, of course. She knows how much pain and heartache he’s put himself through on Edith Crawley’s account, descending into a pit of despair and dark moods that she hadn’t seen since Maude died.
For a while there, a year or so ago, she wasn’t sure that he’d ever pull himself out of it.
But she never had the chance to meet Lady Edith properly. Not on their first go round, nor even the second. Before the war, she was too busy bailing Jonathan out from underneath some heavy debts he’d accumulated in a London gentlemen’s club. She might have thrown her wedding ring in the Thames, had she not been forced to pawn it instead.
There was an invitation to dinner at Downton Abbey around that time that she regretfully declined. Although, she remembers telephoning the great house, giving Lord and Lady Grantham’s cook a tip on Anthony’s favorite dessert.
Apple Charlotte, by a country mile.
It was a predictable, steady choice for English gentry, but he truly loved it. Ever since he was a boy. And given how keen he was on the middle Crawley girl—he couldn’t shut up about her back then, how pretty she was, how sweet, how bright—and by all accounts, how keen Edith was on him, Emily decided to help play matchmaker and bring life back into her widower-brother’s house.
He’d grieved enough. And Loxley House was in dire need of cheer and children’s voices.
The war made mischief of those plans. But then she’d heard they rekindled their acquaintance after Anthony returned and a whirlwind engagement followed. Emily was to meet her new sister-in-law on the day of their wedding.
A hailstorm in Brussels followed by a motor car malfunction on the road from Southampton delayed her until the evening. She was sad to miss the wedding but arrived at Loxley with a grin, expecting to dine with the newlyweds before they headed on honeymoon.
Instead, she found her brother, grim and grey and very alone, brooding in his library, refusing to talk about anything that happened at the church that day.
When she finally got it out of him, she refrained from calling him a fool. Only because she knew he was quite aware of it already.
Emily never expected to hear the name of Edith Crawley in these halls again. But here they are, married. And more than a month already. The knot tied tightly and forever, evidenced by that gold band circling Anthony’s fourth finger.
And yet…
“Edith is…,” he begins, with a flicker of frown claiming his features, darkening them by a degree. But he detours from whatever he was about to say, and gives a friendlier smile at the daisies and lilies in her hands, “I’m sure she’ll love them, Em. Thank you.”
There’s more to this than he’s saying. But she’ll not pry. That’s not how this works. And she’ll get to the bottom of this soon.
For now, she merely hugs her brother, sinking into those familiar arms with warmth and murmuring a simple, “I hope she makes you happy,” without expecting or demanding a response, affirmative or otherwise.
As she expects, he neglects to give one.
“I’ll have one of the housemaids air out your room,” he grants instead, and she smiles broadly, ever grateful that he keeps her old room set aside for these surprise visits, ever ready in case she needs safe harbor.
With a husband like hers, it’s always a coin toss. A flip of the cards. A roll of the dice.
She pecks her brother’s cheek affectionately as she pulls back, buoyant at being home. And she’s soon off to the kitchens, to retrieve a vase of water for Edith’s bouquet.