A/N: All usual disclaimers apply, including blatant asks for R&R.
She is terribly lonely. She acknowledges it when she sits in front of the mirror, pinning her hair up. She has not friends, only people she works with. No family but the one she serves. She goes about her day quietly and efficiently. She lets herself only be heard when necessary. The only one she sometimes speaks with is Mr Carson. He is kind and sometimes she thinks he cares for her, but then there is the cold facade and she can touch it, but not break through.
Her hair is greying, there are lines around her mouth - from lack of use, she knows. From lack of smiling. She remembers she used to smile when she was a maid, when she was a girl in Argyle and she remembers the few smiles she gave Joe Burns the first time he asked and the second time as well.
Time goes by quickly when every day is the same as the next. Time goes slow when all you are allowed to think of is your life of servitude. When all you have to accompany you on quiet, wakened nights are your regrets and the dull ache of your heart beating in your body for only yourself.
Her parents are long gone, her sister passed away three years ago in the spring. Her sister's children have flown out: one to Kenya, one as a second housemaid in Wales where she caught 'the other scarlett fever'. She is alone in this world. If she is lucky, her employer will provide a place of residence for her when the time comes for her to retire. She will live in that house until she dies and she will be buried in the churchyard, only the vicar and the professional mourners standing by as they lower the casket into the grave.
A last pin, a thorough shake of the head for good measure. She plasters on her professional face, the stern look, the caring smile and she goes about her day. She has breakfast with the other servants. She takes inventory. She checks the linen rota and she speaks with her ladyship about the shooting party. She has lunch with the others but never engages in their conversation. She looks at Mr Carson, who is talking to Mr Bates.
Then there is tea and supper and all the tasks that fall in between and after. She sits in her sitting room, writing letters to suppliers. A complaint about a bulk of cotton for maids' uniforms. He knocks and they have tea, they didn't leave a drop of wine upstairs. Their conversation is easy. Familiar. Never goes in depth and after half an hour or so, she makes her excuses and goes up.
She takes the pins out of her hair, undresses and washes. She puts on her nightclothes and crawls into bed, the lumpy mattress and side-to-middle sheets uncomfortable, but they are all that she has. She gives the new maids the good sheets. There is no need for them to miserable. Even if their misery exists of homesickness and mooning over the butcher's boy.
She tosses and turns and feels hot tears prick behind her eyelids. Her mind turns to Joe Burns. She gave him up for a career in service. For ambition that left her alone in the dark, fighting against her tears. She gave up a life that seemed so stifling to her, so narrow. For a life in a grand house filled with opportunity. She had failed to see how it wasn't the grandness of a house that gave you your freedom.
She is by no means free. She is to work until she couldn't anymore. She is to care for twenty girls, none her own. She is to call herself 'Mrs' with not a ring or a church ledger to support that claim. Not that she thinks her life would have been better if she had married Joe. She would have born him children, no doubt and worked hard on the farm and become as lonely and miserable as she was now.
She had to tell herself this.
She has made her bed.
She must lie in it.
She sighed deeply and turned over.