"Mama is insufferable." His sister storms past him towards her room, knocking him out of the way.
"What happened?" He hates it when his mother and sister fight. He likes Rosamund very much and he is sure that it is their mother's fault that she comes to visit so infrequently. And so he follows her.
"Don't you start," she snaps at him and shuts the door in his face.
"Rosamund," he calls and hopes that she will let him in. She used to talk to him about her troubles with their dear Mama, but that was when they still lived in the same house, when neither one of them had been married, when in fact, they had both still been children.
She opens the door, looks at him with a rather pitiful expression and says "Robert, I know you want to help but in this you can't. Please just leave me." With that she gives him a peck on the cheek and then closes the door again.
"Women," he mumbles. He does not understand them. His mother and sister have fought for all of his sister's life. Edith and Mary have been at each other's throats since the day of Edith' birth. Sybil always was so wild, a character trait very much mirrored in Sybbie's insistence on calling him 'Donk'. And Cora flirts shamelessly with another man and thinks that they are back to normal after he found that man in their room. He sometimes wonders how women's minds work. He asked Carson about it the other day but the butler only said "I'd very much like to remain in Mrs. Hughes' good books."
He briefly considers talking to Bates, but the man seems downcast and so he holds his tongue. He decides however, to go the library before dinner and have a drink before he has to play the referee, sitting between his mother and sister through a three course dinner.
To his utter astonishment, his wife is in the library, sitting at his desk, writing something. He decides to ignore her. She does not deserve his attention. Bricker that idiot said that Cora deserved to be noticed. He'll show her what being ignored means.
"Drinks before dinner, Robert?" she asks. He does not want to answer her. But there is so much mirth, so much unjust mirth in her voice that he can't stop himself.
"Rosamund and our dear Mama had a fight. And thanks to your seating arrangements I have to sit between them at dinner. I think I deserve a drink." He looks at her challengingly and dares her to object.
"That you certainly do. What did they fight about?" Why does she care? They are not her mother and sister.
"What do they always fight about? I don't know and Rosamund wouldn't say." Against his better judgment he sits down on one of the sofas.
"Well, I don't know who is worse off, you or me."
"What?" How can she say something like that? She shattered his heart into a million pieces, she makes him sit between his fighting sister and mother and she thinks she might be worse off?
"Don't look as if you were going to eat me alive. All I meant was that both my mother and brother have written to me, bitching about each other as if there was no tomorrow." He fights the chuckle building in his throat.
"And of course they want me to tell them that they are right and the other one is wrong. That is all they ever want from me. To play the referee, to support them against the other. Neither one of them asked how I was in their respective letters. But I suppose that's just my lot." She sighs and turns back to her letter. He wonders if that was Simon Bricker speaking or if it really was her, if she really feels that being overlooked is 'her lot'.
"What are they fighting about?" He doesn't know why he asks and she looks a little surprised when she turns to him again.
"Some lady friend of my brother's. He says her name is Linda, my mother has a few other names for her." He can't help but grin. He can very well imagine the names her mother has chosen, Cora used to let him read letters like that for his amusement.
"Do you know anything about her?"
Cora gets up, walks over to the sofa and sits down on the footrest in front of it. It drives him mad. She has already changed for dinner of course and she looks stunning. He wants to tell her that but of course he can't, she does not deserve that kind of attention.
"No. But seeing as she has already been on his yacht with him alone, I think it is safe to say that she is a slut."
"Cora," he says, slightly more shocked than he really is. Cora does not think very highly of her brother, and to be fair, neither does her brother like her, and thus she sometimes has a few choice words about him or his lady friends. She only ever talks like that to him and only if no one is around.
"What? It's not as if anyone heard." This time he can't keep the chuckle down.
"It's true," she says and begins to chuckle too.
The door opens, Mary pokes her head around the corner and says "Mama, we are going in." When they get up, his and Cora's hands touch and on a whim, he squeezes her hand, which makes her smile at him. A true smile that is reflected in her eyes, the kind of smile she used to give to Simon Bricker, the kind of smile that used to make him happy when it was directed at him and made him furious when it was directed at another man.
Now it causes his stomach to feel as if he had just fallen of a rather high cliff. But he ignores that feeling. Or rather he tries to ignore it until he watches Cora walk away from him. Even from behind she looks stunning and he fights the urge to catch up to her and to grab her from behind. But he won't do that, he found another man in their bedroom. Although she obviously did not invite him there.
He sits down between his mother and sister and the tension is so thick, he thinks he could carve it with one of his knives. They are fighting with him in the middle, about things he can't follow. Somehow Marmaduke seems to be one of the sore points, which does not make any sense to him as the poor man was shot in South Africa 25 years ago. They also fight about children, his mother telling his sister that she has no idea what having children means, something he finds rather unfair of his mother. She might be right, but it certainly isn't his poor sister's fault. He has always pitied her, he even prefers the pain of having lost Sybil to never having had children at all.
"Robert, say something!" his sister says and he has no idea what to say. Instinctively he looks at Cora who only shakes her head.
"I don't know what to say," he says and wants to leave it at that.
His mother and sister keep on bickering, so much that it even seems to bother Mary and Edith who are the queens of bickering.
He looks at Cora again who rolls her eyes but then looks at his sister and says
"Rosamund, I wanted to ask you something about one of the dresses you saw at the fashion show." He stops listening at that moment, he couldn't care less about dresses shown at a fashion show, he only cares about the dresses his lovely wife wears, but he is very thankful to Cora for distracting his sister. He keeps on eating without saying a word for a while and when he looks up, Cora looks at him for just a second and he smiles at her. Her eyes begin to sparkle like pale blue diamonds, before she returns to her conversation with his sister.
Once he is left with Tom, he feels a weight lift of his shoulder.
"Your mother and sister are something," Tom says and grins at him.
"Tell me about it," he grumbles and Tom begins to laugh. They spend a quarter of hour discussing estate business and Sybbie's newest antics, one of which is to pull Isis at her tail. The ever faithful dog lets the little girl have her way and he thinks his dog deserves a treat for that while Tom thinks that Sybbie deserves to be scolded. "Well, Tom, you do the scolding. If I try, she'll look at my with her huge eyes and her lovely smile and my heart will melt and instead of scolding her, I will give her kiss and play with her."
"Just as it should be," Tom says and smiles. "You are her grandfather. She is supposed to have you wrapped around her little finger and you are supposed to indulge her."
He doesn't know what to say so he just stares at Tom. He has the feeling that he is making the boy uncomfortable, so he gets up and walks towards the drawing room.
"Let's save your mother-in-law from being ripped apart by my mother and sister," he says and Tom nods at him, finishes his drink and follows him.
To his great relief, Mary and Edith seem to involve Rosamund in one conversation while Cora talks to his mother about something else.
"Mama, she is right. He deserves to know the answer before you do. He proposed to her, not you." He wholeheartedly agrees with Cora and when his mother looks at him for support he says
"Cora is right. I think Lord Merton deserves to know first. He asked the question. Although I wonder how he can stand it. I'd go utterly mad if I was made to wait that long." He says this without thinking and then Cora looks up at him and says
"Well, you are lucky then I made you wait for only about a second."
"A second that felt like an eternity," he says and strokes her cheek the way he used to before Bricker occupied all her time. His mother looks at him and smiles but it is nothing compared to the expression that has just appeared on Cora's face. It is one of utter adoration, devotion and love. And in that moment he knows that she would have said no to Bricker, that if he hadn't hit him, she would have done so had that man come any closer to her.
He spends the rest of the evening discussing estate matters with Tom and Mary and their party breaks up rather early due to Edith and Rosamund both citing a headache.
He opens the door to her room without knocking, he never knocks, why should he, it is his room almost as much as it is hers. A smile appears on her face as soon as she sees him and in her mirror he can see that he is smiling too, although he feels a little foolish.
"I wanted to thank you. For keeping my mother and sister apart."
"You are welcome. They were horrible tonight. Although their fight probably stopped them from asking too many questions about your hand." He looks down at the bandage. He told everyone that he had fallen in Sheffield, although he knows that at least Edith and Tom doubt this, which probably means that Mary doubts it too.
"Does it still hurt?"
"Very much so."
"I am sorry."
"Don't be. It is worth the pain. He had it coming." For a second he is afraid of Cora's reaction but she looks at him and laughs and says
"That he did. If you hadn't hit him, I'd have done that had he not left on his own accord. Although I might have hit him somewhere less painful for me and more painful for him." She says that in her slightly detached voice that she always uses when she talks about something that she knows seems natural to her but might puzzle him.
"Cora," he says, takes of his dressing gown and puts it on her chair.
"What?" she asks with a twinkle in her eye.
"A lady does not say such a thing."
"I am not a lady in here." No, you are not he thinks. A lady would not allow him to sleep in her room every night. Or do the things she does with him. If she was a lady in the bedroom, they would not have shared a bed at all since her miscarriage because that had meant the end of all hope for future children. And thus 'doing their duty' had come to an end ten years ago. But nothing between them had changed. They had still spent almost every night together, just as they did the previous 24 years.
"Are you going to stay?" He realizes that he has not only taken of his robe, but also gotten into bed and climbed under the covers. As has his darling wife.
"As long as I am welcome." Cora looks at him and shakes her head.
"Of course you are welcome. And it wouldn't be unwelcome if you got out of the bed on the wrong side tomorrow morning." She gives him a peck on the cheek but before she turns away, he stops her and kisses her lips. He knows that this is it. He knows they are back to what they were, what they have almost always been. Two people in a very happy marriage and very deeply in love. They need no words, they don't need to say they are sorry, they don't need to tell the other that they have been forgiven, all they have to do is to make love in the truest sense of the word and that they have been able to do for almost three and a half decades.
AN: While I love the stories in which Cora and Robert have a heart to heart and tell each other how much they love each other (I have written quite a few of those stories myself), I think it is much more realistic that they just get over it, that they return to normal eventually. Although the romantic in me of course hopes for a make up scene that will have the world in tears on Sunday :)
Please let me know what you think about this.
Thank you!
Kat