It was just an autumn day—a little overcast, maybe, but not unusually so. Evelyn had no way to know that today was the day his life would change forever, in tragic ways, yet ultimately for the better.
He walked from his flat to the office, as usual. The office was dim and smelled of cigarettes, as usual. His boss, Charles Blake, had beaten him to work. As usual.
"Evelyn I want you to look over some of the estates mentioned on page three. See if any of them are worth including in our study." Charles thrust a newspaper in Evelyn's chest then walked off. This was not unusual.
Evelyn was in no hurry to read the article. Well, that is to say, of course he was busy, but things were never quite as urgent as Charles always seemed to believe. So he poured himself tea and found a scone to eat, and then he sat to read about the estates on page three.
It was a York paper, which meant Charles intended to go up north at some point. On the front page was the picture of a man Evelyn had met one time at a dinner party eight years prior. And there, just above this picture, was the newspaper caption that changed Evelyn Napier's life:
Heir to the Earl of Grantham dies in tragic motoring accident.
Evelyn read on, feeling a mix of sadness, horror, dread, and one other emotion that he didn't want to name.
Oh, dear God, no. Not Mary. Not him.
They had a son—an infant son. He didn't know they'd had a son. He had fought in the war, in the trenches—that much Evelyn already knew. But it was painfully ironic that one of his comrades (albeit quite an indirect comrade) should live through that horror just to die in a car crash.
"So what do you think? Shall we add those estates to our studies?"
Evelyn broke away from the front page. Charles was back. "The estates? Oh…of course. Well," he blushed slightly, "as it turns out I learned from the front page that a family friend died just this week, so in truth I haven't even glanced at those estates yet."
Evelyn expected that Charles would be annoyed—not angry, but annoyed. That was sort of Charles's thing. He was not expecting his boss to laugh. But he did, for a moment, then as if he realized just what Evelyn had just said (death and all that) his face became quickly sober. "You have my condolences, my friend. Shall I leave you for a while, or can I go over the estates in question with you now?"
Now Evelyn was the one annoyed, but he wasn't about to let that show. "Now is fine. But you know we won't have a chance to go north for some time, probably months. We have several estates lined up to study already."
"Of course I know that. But look here…"
As Charles droned on about estate management and death taxes, Evelyn thought about Mary Crawley. He thought about her smile, and her eyes. He thought about how warm she had been in her letters to him—and how cold she was to him from the moment she set eyes on Kemal Pamuk. Evelyn tried to remind himself that this was a widow, that she was most certainly beside herself with grief. And here he was trying to push away this annoying feeling of hope.
He thought of Mary Crawley into the evening and into the nighttime hours. He tried to tell himself that these were thoughts of sympathy but he knew there was more to it than that. Mary Crawley had haunted his thoughts and his dreams for eight years.
The last time he'd seen Mary Crawley there was no war on the continent, only rumors. Dozens of his school friends were not yet dead. And they had both been so damn young.
He had told her about his broken engagement, said that it was "probably better this way, in the long run." And had that been a flash of hope in Mary's eyes? For years he wished that he had asked her that day if she would ever reconsider him. But instead he had forged on with the mission to clear his name as the instigator of her own set of ugly rumors, and, frankly, who wanted to talk of romance after that? Instead he had kept silent and those unsaid words would not let him go.
Once, during the war, he sent her a letter asking if he could convalesce in her home. But he couldn't, there were rules about these things, and that was that. The war ended, he recovered (physically, at least—the rest took longer), and she got engaged to a newspaper magnate and then after that her cousin, her father's heir.
It seemed like all things in life had worked out nicely for Mary Crawley and Evelyn believed her dark eyes and his unsaid words would stop haunting him. And for eighteen months they nearly had. Until today and that damn York newspaper.