This is a modern Downton AU that follows the premise of the movie The Holiday (with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet). It will be primarily Tom and Sybil with some Matthew and Mary mixed in. If you haven't seen the movie, it's about two women who decide to trade houses for a week. I've changed things up a bit to fit the Downton relationships, so Sybil and Matthew will be the characters swapping homes. In this AU, Matthew is English, lives in Ireland and does not know the other Crawleys, though he shares their last name. All other details will be revealed as the story goes along. Not my first fic, but my first about Downton, so be kind!
Sybil
Sybil Crawley was done with Larry Grey. DONE! She'd put up with more than most reasonable women would be willing to do. She'd had her reasons for staying so long, of course, but no more. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. The end. And hallelujah.
As Sybil watched the embarrassed blonde she recognized as the receptionist from Larry's office try to disentangle herself from the bed sheets while Larry, shameless as always, asked Sybil why she was back from her medical conference two days early—"Don't you always ring before you come over?"—it occurred to Sybil that she did feel a measure of heartbreak, even regret. But mostly, she was overwhelmed with relief.
The Larry Grey experiment was over. After months—years, really—of small disappointments that her parents continually asked her to look past, here, finally, was proof that the guy was a first-class wanker. Not even her parents could deny it now. Not even they would force her to stay in a relationship that had probably been doomed from the start.
Larry Grey had been a compromise. A lifetime of rebellion had left Sybil with so little to connect with her parents about that when they invited her childhood friend, the son of her parents' closest friends, to her welcome home from university dinner after her first year away, she decided to go along with it. It was an obvious set up, but did she really have room to complain? Her first 19 years hadn't offered much in the way of relationships or love. In truth, she was absolute rubbish when it came to talking to members of the opposite sex. Larry had been sweet as a child. He was a bit conceited now and already out of university, but not wholly without charms. Her parents loved her and wanted her to be happy. So Sybil decided to go along with it.
She had disappointed the Earl and Countess of Grantham Robert and Cora Crawley with her liberal politics and constant attendance at local rallies, once even ending up on the front page of a Yorkshire paper—to their utter horror—with other protesters calling for more aid to Africa. She had disappointed her parents with her decision to turn down Oxford and go to university in the United States instead, choosing her grandmother Martha's alma mater, Yale, an institution whose name could not be mentioned without an eye roll from her father. And she had disappointed her parents with her decision to study public health, rather than follow the family into law. Sybil never regretted any of those choices, but she knew they alienated her from her parents, and whatever their differences, she loved them dearly.
Given her track record with love at that point, there was no reason to turn down a well-meaning suggestion, especially when it made her parents so happy. Larry's a bit of a prat, but how bad could it possibly be? she had thought back then. Famous last words.
The first year, was full of letters and calls and e-mails—even a visit from Larry to New Haven. His prose didn't exactly sweep her away, but it was nice to know that someone was thinking about her. In retrospect, of course, she could imagine what he got up to and with who when he wasn't writing her. In truth, that the relationship was long distance for its first three years probably accounted for why it lasted as long as it did.
The second year was more of the same. More letters, more calls, two visits and dinners with her parents when she was home on break. They were so pleased that she didn't mind that Larry wasn't exactly attentive with her when they weren't around. She realized just how much holding out on sex was annoying him, so she relented and he warmed up a bit, but not for long. She knew that sex wasn't what movies and romance novels made it out to be, but when they did it she couldn't help but wonder if something was missing. She wondered if Larry felt it too. Still, the "experiment" marched on.
The third year, her last in America, there were fewer letters and fewer phones calls that didn't end in him cutting her off because he had important things to do (when the background noise clearly suggested he was out with friends) or him wondering why she didn't just quit school and come back to England where he could support her and she didn't have to work. There were several times she thought she'd heard a woman with him, but she'd soon be back home, she thought, and surely things would be different then, right?
Not really. Despite his insisting that he move in with her. Sybil got her own flat in London after graduation, close to her job. She was doing research on post-traumatic stress disorder with men returning home from Afghanistan. She loved working with the returning soldiers and their families and everything she was learning about mental illness and public health. Her job, she supposed, is what had made the last year with Larry bearable, but what distance had kept hidden, proximity made painfully obvious. Larry had wanted Sybil to be his respectable wife from a respectable family—someone pretty and smart he could trot out at dinner parties, not someone he actually treated like the person you'd want to spend the rest of your life with. So he led her on, but he didn't actually love her, not like Sybil had hoped she would be loved someday.
Her parents insisted that with him, she would be provided for. She could quit her job. She could do charity work, be a lady of society, as her title—Lady Sybil Crawley—called on her to do. That wasn't what she wanted, but the duty-bound daughter struggled with letting down her parents yet again.
Not anymore. Tawdry as the whole situation was—girl walking in on boyfriend having an affair with a work "friend"—Larry and his blonde gave Sybil the ultimate out. Robert Crawley was, even in the loving eyes of his youngest daughter, a backward-thinking man of pointless traditions, but he would not stand for her to be humiliated. This was one of the reasons she loved him. He was wholly unreasonable—until he wasn't.
So as Sybil left Larry's flat for the last time, she told him not to bother calling her again and to forget the New Year's ball at Downton this year. Sybil also told the poor girl she could do better.
Sybil immediately went over to her best friend Gwen's flat, and surprising both Gwen and herself immediately broke down in tears as she walked in. The tears were not for Larry but for herself. How had she wasted four years of her life on such a git!?
"We all do dumb things in life," Gwen said consoling her. "Yours was listening to your parents. They need to get out of the match-making business, I'm afraid. "
"They do," Sybil said between sniffles. "I mean I know they won't ask me to forgive him this, but I can only imagine they'll have someone else lined up within a week. Or worse, they'll want to talk about what I can do better next time."
"I suppose even in today's times aristocrats only care about marrying off their daughters—too bad for you Mr. Knightly's line probably died out somewhere around World War I. Maybe we can look for Captain Wentworth's great-great-great-great-grandson in the Naval recruiting offices?"
This made Sybil laugh. Gwen Carson, the daughter of the Crawley family's longtime housekeeper, had grown up alongside the aristocratic Crawley girls Mary, Edith and Sybil, but had none of the expectations and limits (at least, Sybil called them limits) that came with their title. The Crawleys paid for Gwen's education and loved her and her parents, Charles and Elsie Carson, as family. For Sybil, Gwen had been a saving grace many times over, especially when her older sisters became too much even for her, the sensible baby of the family, to handle.
Gwen loved Jane Austen and dropped references to her two favorite Austen men as often as she could. It was her and Sybil's mutual love of literature and reading that bonded them at an early age, though Gwen often wondered aloud if maybe Austen and her perfect gentlemen had ruined them for real men now that they were of "marry-able" age. Sybil, today at least, was inclined to agree.
They spent the rest of the night drinking wine and trying to rate Larry on the Austen scale of masculinity.
"To suggest that Larry is a Willoughby would be giving his looks and wooing abilities too much credit," Gwen said between sips.
"Could he be a Mr. Elton?"
"Maybe. Emma tried to set him up with a friend before she really knew him, but I wouldn't have given Larry the benefit of the doubt to that extent, even after just meeting him."
"You could have told me that!" Sybil exclaimed.
"I did!" was the retort. Sybil couldn't help but laugh. Note to self, she thought, listen to friend in matters of the heart, not parents.
"He's a Mr. Collins," Gwen concluded about Larry. "Your parents want you to marry him, but he is boring and you'd rather claw your eyes out."
"Perfect!" Sybil giggled, then sighed. "On my way here, I sent mum a message about the whole thing. I know she'll want to come over to talk about it. If only I could go away for like two weeks and then resurface and pretend nothing has happened."
"So go on holiday."
"But where could I go right now? I don't really have money for a week hotel stay."
"Do a house-swap with someone—I know! Why don't you go to Dublin? You've always wanted to go see the James Joyce Center, right? Immerse yourself in your beloved Irish lit and come back a new woman."
"A house-swap?"
"Oh, it's perfect. Anna and John did it last year. You go on this website where people who want to go somewhere list their houses to kind of rent, and you pick one and switch houses with them for a week. They went to Wales, I think, but I'm sure there are lots of listings for Ireland."
"So let someone live in my flat?"
"Yes! The idea is that you both get to go somewhere without staying at a hotel. I'm sure they have rules and fines if you trash the place or something."
"I should hope so!"
"My point is you can get away now. That's what you need, and Dublin would be perfect. How can someone who loves the Irish as much as you do have never been to Ireland?"
Sybil blushed at this, but it was true. A seminar on Irish literature she took her first year at Yale had made her a devotee for life. She'd read and loved everything by Joyce, including Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man four times, and even started trying to learn Irish so she could read more traditional stuff in its original language. Her favorite, though, was "The Radical Chauffer," a novel that had been out less than a year at the time her lit professor recommended it to her at uni. The story, about an Irishman who falls in love with the daughter of a British lord and brings her to Dublin just after the Easter Rising in 1916, moved Sybil in a way that made her feel as if the writer was a long-lost friend. Nobody save her professor and her, it seemed, had ever heard of him, and no amount of Googling produced a photo. All she knew what that he was young, Irish and, in her humble opinion, marvelously talented. How she wished that he would publish something else.
"So what's it going to be?" Gwen asked pulling her out of her reverie.
Sybil thought it over. She had always wanted to go to Dublin. Her parents would be insufferable the next couple of weeks. She hadn't had a real vacation since she'd started work. Christmas and the ball were coming soon, and her family would certainly be unavoidable then.
"What would I have to do?"
Gwen let out a loud "YES!" and ran to get her laptop.
Sybil smirked at her friend's enthusiasm. "You're awfully excited to be rid of me."
"Only because I want Larry all to myself," Gwen deadpanned back. She paused and looked at her friend square in the face with her kind eyes.
"You need something good in your life, Sybil, but you need to find it on your own. Away from everything you know—even me."
"I did go away to school, you know."
"Yes, but Yale only pointed you in the direction you needed to go. Now, you have to actually take the journey."
Sybil still seemed skeptical, so Gwen took a different tack. "Do you remember how much you pushed me to apply for the job with Mr. Bromidge? I would have given up without even trying, but you kept telling me it would be worth it in the end, and it was. Now, you're being the cynic, and I get to play the role of the fool who is long from beaten. You will do this if I have to pack you in a box and ship you to Ireland myself."
She truly is the best kind of friend, Sybil thought with a smile.
"OK, so whose house can I invade in Dublin?"
Gwen started scrolling through the listings on the website her friend Anna had recommended, stopping on the fourth on the list.
Lawyer in early thirties looking to trade places with a Londoner for a week. Three-bedroom flat in City Centre. Furnished and clean. No pets, please.
"This is perfect!"
Sybil looked over her shoulder at the ad and the ones above it.
"Why that one? They all kind of say the same thing."
"Look at the name next to it."
"Matthew Crawley."
"He has your last name. It's a sign!"
Sybil looked at Gwen's big smile with skeptical eyes. "Lots of people are named Crawley."
"Yes, but how many are looking for someone who lives in London to trade houses with?"
Sybil took a deep breath. Ireland, in many ways, had become this special place in her mind where she retreated when life became overwhelming. A small, sheepish part of her wanted it to remain a fantasy. But Gwen was right. She needed an adventure.
"All right, Mr. Crawley, let's trade houses."
"Yay!" Gwen eagerly set her computer on Sybil's lap for her to type out her message.
Dear Matthew . . .