Christmas Day 1890

"Come in," Cora called sleepily, waking at her maid's knock on the bedroom door.

"Good morning, m'lady," Miss O'Malley said softly as Cora struggled into a seated position. "A happy Christmas to you," she went on, passing her a cup of tea. Cora tried to smile in response, but she must not have quite managed it, for her maid's next words were, "Are you all right this morning, ma'am?"

Cora nodded, although the reminder of just which morning this was had made her want to cry. "Yes, quite all right. Happy Christmas." She'd been married nearly a year, and in her premarital innocence, she had assumed that Robert would have fallen in love with her long before now. Waking up alone on Christmas morning, with no expectation of anything more than a cursory greeting from her husband in the midst of a hectic house party, had never been the plan.

"Shall I fetch breakfast for your ladyship?"

"Yes, please. Thank you, O'Malley."

Once she was alone, Cora took a couple sips of her tea and then, feeling two sudden kicks inside of her abdomen, set it on the bedside table. Clearly, she wasn't the only one awake.

She placed her hands on her swollen belly and rubbed gently, feeling a slight fluttering in response to the caress. "And a very merry Christmas to you, too, little one," she whispered, using the form of the holiday greeting that she knew marked her as an American. "You'll be here to celebrate next year."

Her and Robert's first child was due in a mere six weeks, and Cora's eagerness to meet her baby went beyond a mother's natural urge to see her child, for she had begun to think that having the baby might mean that she didn't feel quite so alone here. While she knew that it would be years before she and her child could have a meaningful conversation, and even longer before their relationship could approach anything near friendship, a little son or daughter would at least make her feel that she was not completely unloved at Downton.

Which she certainly was at the moment. The thought made tears threaten again, and she reached for her tea, taking another sip to force herself to swallow them. She hated how weepy pregnancy had made her.

It was not that Robert was unkind. Far from it, actually—he'd been good to her over the past year, and given her anything she'd asked for, and been sweetly concerned for her comfort as she'd carried their child. But it was all from an appropriately English, aristocratic distance, and she could not help but feel that he spoke to her as he might a third cousin with whom he'd once or twice had tea. She wanted him to sit and talk with her, to hold her hand, to spend the night in her bed and fall asleep with her in his arms, to respond with something more than the embarrassed silence that had met her pronouncement of love on their wedding night.

Cora had always assumed that Robert would come to love her eventually, but the imminent birth made her feel as though her time were growing short for this to happen naturally. Because if she bore a son, surely that would make him love her—surely he would have to love the woman who had given him an heir—but how artificial that would feel! She did not want to think his love for her rested only on her luck in having produced a boy.

But on the other hand, if she bore a daughter (and somehow, although it might have been only her anxiety about the issue, she suspected she carried a girl), she could not imagine how he would ever fall in love with her. Surely if she failed so epically in her first attempt at this most important of all duties, he would think her far more unlovable than he already did.

Worst of all, she did not think she had much opportunity to induce his love in the few weeks she had left before the birth. If he had not fallen for her when she was slender and beautiful, how on earth was it going to happen while she was the size of a whale?

Cora's thoughts were interrupted by her maid's return with her breakfast tray, which she accepted with a soft smile that she knew did not meet her eyes. "Thank you, O'Malley."

"Will that be all, ma'am?"

"No, I've got a Christmas gift for you."

"But my lady, you've already—"

"I know." She had discovered that it was the custom at Downton for lady's maids to receive only fabric for a new dress at Christmas, and her mother-in-law had stared in thin, silent disapproval when Cora had asked if she might do something more. In the Levinson family, close staff had always been given far more personal and expensive gifts, and a few yards of dull material fell quite short of what she wanted to give the lovely Irishwoman who had looked after her so sweetly all year, drying more tears than she cared to count. "But I didn't think the fabric was quite…" Cora trailed off, not sure what to say without making her in-laws seem ungenerous. "It's in the drawer on the right in my dressing table. Would you mind getting it yourself?" she asked with an apologetic smile. Getting in and out of bed had become a strenuous endeavor this late in her pregnancy, and she had no desire to do it an extra time.

O'Malley chuckled softly. "Of course not, m'lady." She walked to the dressing table and removed a small, wrapped box, which she opened to reveal a gold chain with a single pearl hanging as a pendant. "Oh, my lady…"

Cora blushed, realizing how very fine this must seem in a house where maids expected fabric. "You've been very kind to me this year," she said quietly.

O'Malley shook her head, but she was smiling. "No, your ladyship is very generous. Thank you."

When her maid had gone, Cora was left thinking on the presents hiding in the dressing table's other drawer: Robert's gifts. She chewed her lip, wondering for the thousandth time if they were right, and suspecting yet again that perhaps they weren't. She'd gotten him two of the rare book editions she'd known he wanted for the library, and she thought that gift was quite correct: not too sentimental and not too intimate, yet not impersonal, for it did show she listened to him.

But then there was the other present. The one from the baby.

It had been a few months ago, she'd been in a very sentimental mood, and Robert had smiled at her in the way that always made her heart melt as she suspected he was just days away from declaring his love. And so she'd gone out and bought a small, ornate frame and had the words, "To Papa, Christmas 1890," engraved on it, intending it to hold a photograph of the child after it was born.

Of course, with a few more months of Robert's halfhearted interest in her, it had come to seem a ridiculously sentimental idea that would only push him further away from his daft, American wife. At best, it would surely make them both uncomfortable, and she had been toying with tossing it out for weeks. Yet it had been chosen and purchased with so much hope that that option always seemed too painful, and thus it sat wrapped up next to the books.