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The carriage pulls away down the road. Beside her Mary and Edith are frozen, hands buried their skirts and biting their lips in imitation of the adults. She clutches Sybil to her chest who seems to sense her anxiety. The baby fusses and her face crinkles, preparing to wail. Cora rocks her daughter anxiously, trying to calm her. She should give Sybil over to the nursemaid, Nora, who stands in line with the rest of the servants (waiting for her to move first before they return to the house) but she cannot help but cling tighter.
Robert is in his prime age so it was rather inevitable that he would go. The British are under siege and reinforcements are badly needed. Not to mention that, like nearly all aristocratic families, the Crawleys laud their ancestors' military achievements and their young men look to emulate them. It is his duty to go. And yet, he had embraced it with so much more enthusiasm than mere duty. It seems the only thing that can easily raise an Englishman to express any kind of emotion is his queen and country. (Even after he had admitted to finally falling in love with her, the words of affection did not come easily from him. It's gotten better over the years but sometimes it still feels like a struggle.)
Now she is left in a house where, even after 11 years of marriage, she is still an outsider. A house that has only belonged to Robert and herself for not quite a year and a half now.
Sybil pays no mind to her mother's attempts at soothing and begins bawling. Cora awkwardly tries to shift her daughter in her arms, but Sybil waves her hands, kicks her legs and arches her back in a proper tantrum. To her horror she nearly drops the baby but then Nora is standing in front of her with Sybil, gamely struggling with the girl while whispering soothing words into the girl's ears.
Cora feels her heart drop right out of her, feeling almost abandoned with her daughter taken out of her arms and her husband on his way to war. She feels like bawling herself - but a Lady must never show her distress. Violet's disapproving glare burns into her skin. That she cannot control her own children is a horror, an outrage, inexcusable. Proper English children are apparently silent unless spoken to from the moment they leave the womb.
She tries to understand her mother-in-law, she really does. Losing her husband was certainly unspeakably painful, and the decision 6 months later to move to the Dowager House and give up the house she had been in control of for 34 years must have been a huge adjustment for the older woman. Add to that seeing her only son march off to war... None of the understanding in the world makes the cold disapproval any less hurtful.
She had thought she had learned to deal with the barbs; grown a bit of a backbone, confidence, thicker skin; earned Robert's love, support, and intercessions; overall reached a kind of uneasy equilibrium with the Countess... now Dowager Countess. The shift of control over the house had ruined that equilibrium. Now, as unladylike as it is to admit it, she is terrified of the prospect of controlling the whole household on her own with Violet breathing down her neck and without Robert's support.
She gathers her composure, murmurs her thanks to Nora, and moves to take Mary's hand to lead her girls inside. Mary rigidly shakes her off and marches back into the house on her own. Cora's heart clenches again and she follows her independent, stubborn, proud daughter inside (missing Edith behind her, anxiously waiting for Cora to take her hand). Nora, Violet, and Carson follow them inside, the butler shutting the doors behind them.
Robert is officially gone. She is on her own for the foreseeable future. (She refuses to think it is a possibility that it might be for the entirety of her future.) Cora stands up straighter. She will prove that she has as good a stiff upper lip as any of them.
The End.