A/N: This is the first properly "romantic" story I've ever really written. Well, that's an exaggeration, but I really don't do romantic resolution. The second half was like squeezing water from a stone! Hooray for Downton Abbey, getting me out of my writing comfort zones! Should also say that I can see how the characters might appear in some respects OOC though I really hope they aren't, but please make allowances for the passage of time, war, age etc. I am fortunate in that I have never felt the effects of war in my own life; I can only say that I hope that is not too obvious in the story!

Nostos

Ulysses answered, "Telemachus, you ought not to be so immeasurably astonished at my being really here. There is no other Ulysses who will come hereafter. Such as I am, it is I, who after long wandering and much hardship have got home in the twentieth year to my own country."

As he spoke he sat down, and Telemachus threw his arms about his father and wept. They were both so much moved that they cried aloud like eagles or vultures with crooked talons that have been robbed of their half fledged young by peasants. Thus piteously did they weep.

Mary was thirteen when she first read the Odyssey and her favourite part was the sixth book.

The descriptions of the councils of the gods bored her, the long passages on Ithaca were passed over and she was not allowed to read any of the bits involving monsters. The story of the plucky young princess on the cusp of adulthood meeting weary, ship-wrecked Ulysses on the beach and taking him back to her parents, however, appealed to all her fantasies of romance. It was almost a disappointment to her to realise that Ulysses would not stay with Nausicaa but return to his tediously patient and middle-aged wife. Perhaps, Mary had daydreamed, his son Telemachus would marry her one day and she would still get to be queen of Ithaca, and married to a hero only, what was even better, one closer to her age. It was the sort of thing that would have happened if the Odyssey had been set in England at the turn of the century anyway.

When Mary next picked up the Odyssey she was nineteen years old and was allowed to read the whole thing. How had she never noticed the true heroine of the work? In the face of so much passive acceptance of the subservient lot of women, one character bucked the ancient trend: the goddess Minerva. She obeyed no man, she acted for herself, she chose her own favourites, she was brave, clever, resourceful and cunning. She was the only character who could be at all considered Ulysses's equal. It seemed a great shame he could not marry her. Mary decided that when she married she would name her first born daughter after the goddess. Lady Minerva Crawley: it sounded well enough. It was a pity that she was unlikely to be a beauty if related to Patrick, but one could not have everything. And who knew? Perhaps she would not have to marry Patrick in the end. Maybe she would marry nobody. If Minerva needed no man, then neither did Mary Crawley.

Mary was twenty-six years old when she read the Odyssey for the third time and things were rather different. For a start, she was not reading alone. This time, she had twenty-three young minds to share it with, twenty-three young minds that had not had any motivation to concentrate on their spelling or arithmetic for the two weeks since the announcement. Mary had despaired.

"Why should they be in school anyway?" she complained to her mother. "They should be at home with their families waiting for news." As should I, she added silently.

"They won't hear anything more quickly for sitting at home doing nothing," replied the Countess. "Besides, not all of their fathers will be returning to them. Spare a thought for them, my dear; I think they would appreciate the distraction." As would you, she added silently.

Mary stood up. "Very well. The school stays open, but don't expect me to teach them sums. I don't think I could bear it even if they could!" Her voice caught.

"Oh, my darling. Why don't you bring them back here tomorrow? Your father would not mind you giving lessons in the drawing room, I am sure. The schoolhouse is so cold at this time of year, poor dears! And they would not be in the way of the nurses there."

The following day, seated in an armchair by the crackling fire, Mary stared down at twenty-three expectant faces looking up at her from the floor.

"I'm going to read you a story today, children. It's one of my favourites, and I think you will like it too."

The younger ones looked pleased by this, but some of the older ones rolled their eyes. They thought they were too old for such babyish excuses for bad schooling.

Mary continued, "It's a very long poem by a writer called Homer who lived over 2000 years ago and wrote in Ancient Greek. Those of you who go to the grammar school when you are thirteen will have the opportunity to learn Greek and read it in the original language."

Ethel Pilkington raised her hand and asked, "Will I get to learn ancient Greek, Lady Mary?"

Her elder brother gave her a shove. "Not you! Girls don't learn Greek, silly."

Mary shushed them. "I think you should learn Greek if you want to, Ethel. Times are changing for women now that there's peace and we don't know what is likely to happen."

This had been a misguided remark and threatened to completely disrupt the children's concentration. Mary quickly quietened them.

"I am going to read to you from the Odyssey. Now, be quiet and pay attention. Are you all warm enough?"

They nodded and shifted closer to the fire and she resumed. "The poem tells the story of the great warrior Ulysses who left his loyal wife and son to fight the great war at Troy. Ulysses and his friends fought at Troy for ten years, ten whole years, before the Greeks were victorious, thanks to his trick with the wooden horse. He set out for home a great hero."

All the children were now hanging on her every word.

"This is not the story of Troy, however, nor of the wooden horse; this is the story of one man, who became a hero, and of his return. Ulysses did not reach home immediately, you see. He had angered the great god of the sea, Neptune, and so he spent another ten years wandering the oceans and having adventures in fantastic lands. Yet all the time back on Ithaca, his wife Penelope kept his home ready for him, defended herself against all the suitors who hoped she would declare herself a widow and marry one of them and never ever gave up hope that her husband would return, even though he took so much longer than the rest of the men." She looked at children pointedly. "She never stopped willing that he might be alive, and one day, just like that, he returned, as she always knew he would. He was poor, and in disguise as a beggar, and weary, and she was the last of his household that he met, but none of that mattered in the end. None of it mattered to Penelope."

She swallowed a sudden lump in her throat and opened the book at the place she had marked. "I'm going to read you one of many reunions between Ulysses and members of his family and friends. This one's with his dog."

One of the girls giggled, and someone said, "Aww."

"Why are you laughing?" cried Mary. "What is more faithful than an old dog?"

She began to read.

"As they were thus talking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Ulysses had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any work out of him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Ulysses standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Ulysses saw the dog on the other side of the yard, he dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaeus seeing it, and said, "Eumaeus, what a noble hound that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?""

Mary heard the door of the drawing room open but she did not look up. It would only be Anna, not knowing the school had come to Downton that day, or perhaps one of the patients, sufficiently recovered to leave their bed. Let them listen if they liked: she was afraid if she stopped reading she would not be able to start again. Sometimes she felt as if her heart would burst with longing, and the only thing that kept her at her work was the knowledge that her young charges felt just the same as she did in their own ways.

""This hound," answered Eumaeus, "belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Ulysses left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him. Servants never do their work when their master's hand is no longer over them, for Jove takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him" As he spoke he went inside the buildings to the cloister where the suitors were, but Argos died as soon as he had recognized his master."

Mary closed the book. "And so you see, children, Argos had lain there for twenty years waiting for his master." She was alarmed to find that her voice was not as steady as she wished it to be. "His only mortal desire was to see Ulysses one more time, and when he had done so – he died, his life complete."

She finished speaking and looked down at her lap, where her hands were clenched round the book.

"I don't understand why he had to die!" said Peter Farbridge. "Couldn't Ulysses have just got his dog back?"

Mary opened her mouth to try to answer this most unpoetical of butcher's sons, and saw a ghost standing just inside the door. The little colour in her cheeks drained completely away, her lips parted into a round 'o' of surprise, and for a moment she just sat there, unable to believe what she saw.

The apparition that looked like Matthew Crawley stared straight back at her. It looked like him, but was not quite as she remembered him. He appeared leaner than before, had a rough beard of some three days growth, his hair was longer and flopped all over with no attempt at sleekness, but most noticeably he had a small but distinct red scar running almost vertically down his right cheek.

For a long moment there seemed to be a vacuum of total stillness in the room, save the ticking of the grandfather clock and the crackle of the fire. Then the soldier in his dusty, muddy uniform lowered his kit bag to the floor without breaking eye contact with her and said with a slight sigh, "We're all back."

His voice! His voice was as familiar as a well known perfume carried on the wind from an earlier and more respectable era. Mary rose almost without knowing what she was doing and cried in a voice that was not her own, "Go! Go, all of you! Go home! Go now!"

The children did not need to be told again. They jumped to their feet, grabbed their coats and satchels and ran towards the door. The soldier stepped silently to the side to let them past, but his eyes never left Mary. Only one little boy hesitated. He stood up more slowly and looked up anxiously at her. "Please, Lady Mary, must I go too?"

She recognized who he was and her expression softened into sympathy, and she placed a hand briefly on his shoulder. "Go to your mother, Terry. She'll want you now more than ever. Be a man for her; do you think you can do that?"

He nodded gravely at her, picked up his satchel and, as if filled with new determination, half walked half ran towards the door. When he passed the soldier he looked up at him for a moment and the other gave him a nod, survivor to survivor.

"Good man," said the soldier briefly to the boy, and then they were alone together and there was nothing between them save an ocean of carpet.

Mary could not stop staring. She felt as a parched explorer might feel, lost in the desert and suddenly catching sight of an oasis, all the time fearing it was only a cruel mirage.

Again, he was the first to speak. "You – you teach the village school?"

She might not be able to believe it was him, but she could make small talk. It was, after all, what she had been brought up to do. "Yes. Since Mr. Cattering-"

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry. I should've-"

"It's all right."

There was another silence and then Mary made an effort of her own. "We thought you were – we didn't – you didn't write at the end! Thomas wrote last week and you didn't! Thomas!"

The soldier took a step forward. "Yes. Yes, I know. I thought perhaps, well, I thought maybe I would go straight to mother. I hardly knew that I was coming here until I found myself on the train with the other men. And then – then it seemed right somehow."

She took a tentative step herself. "Are you going to stay?"

"Actually, that rather depends."

"You needn't fear Papa," she said hastily. "He wants nothing more than to have you back. You must know how it grieved him, when you and cousin Isobel left after- well,left after, and went back to Manchester. And then you enlisted, just like that, and we had to find out in a telegram! But all he has wanted is to see you again, and to make things right."

He didn't reply for a moment, for he had looked away for the first time since arriving. Then he raised his head again and said, "I wasn't thinking about your father, Mary."

Her eyes went straight to his in alarm and the intensity of his expression unnerved her, as it often had before. "Oh," she said foolishly.

He crossed the room then in a couple of purposeful strides and took her unresisting hands in his. "Mary, I don't know what you have been through in the war; I never liked to ask- I should have done, of course- and you never wrote-"

"I did, you know!"

He frowned. "You did? But-"

"Oh, Matthew," she interrupted with a painful smile, using his name for the first time, "I never sent them."

It is hard to deny someone's very real presence when they are holding your hands in a firm, warm grip and looking keenly into your eyes. Mary felt an unfamiliar agitation and confusion that made her feel younger than her twenty-six years.

"I wish so much you had."

She only twisted her face away. "Not really: I was not always very kind to you in them."

"No! No, Mary, I would rather have had two lines of scorn from you than ten pages of sentimental nonsense from any other woman."

She blinked and looked back at him, feeling that she was really recognizing him for the first time. Only Matthew of all the men she knew could manage to combine complete honesty with heart-thrilling tenderness.

"Your cheek!" she cried, letting her finger hover over the scar.

He caught her hand in his and lowered it. "It's nothing. To return with only this... I am exceptionally fortunate."

They were silent, both remembering those who were not so lucky. William. Evelyn Napier. Mr. Cattering from the school. Edith's brother-in-law, Michael Strallon. Branson wounded. Mary then thought of all the men Matthew must have known whom she had never even heard of: nameless soldiers who had died so that he could return to her. Return to her for what though? So that they could stand there together and do nothing but stare like rabbits caught in the other's bright headlight?

Something shifted in the atmosphere: her eyes flicked briefly down, his followed, and then they were in each other's arms and he kissed her, briefly, fiercely. It was not so much a romantic gesture as an expression of mutual branding and recognition. Altogether, the moment seemed too momentous for passion alone: there was time for that later. They remained standing, locked in each other's arms, cheek resting against cheek, feeling their heartbeats slowly synch. Mary had rarely felt so wonderfully and humanly complete.

Eventually, her fingers curling on the nape of his neck, she murmured, "You really ought to shave before dinner."

She could feel his smile. He pulled back far enough to look at her. "You cannot imagine how much I am looking forward to a proper shave with hot water and a clean razor! Where is your father? I should tell him-"

He stepped back but she caught his hands again. "Stay with me a little longer! Please, Matthew. Papa has gone to Ripon for news; he won't be back until later anyway."

He made no resistance to being led to the sofa and sitting next to her, their shoulders touching, their fingers interlocked. Was this joy? wondered Mary. It had been so long since she had actually felt anything approximating to happiness that she could hardly remember what it felt like. Yet she felt no elation in the normal sense of the word and the prickle behind her eyes felt more like tears than laughter.

"You know," said Matthew presently, interrupting her reverie, "all the time when I thought about home I tried to imagine Manchester and where I had grown up and where my mother is now, but coming back here, when I entered the village, and then saw the house from the drive, I knew that this was really home and where I belong, and-"

"Matthew," she cried, interrupting him, "if you really mean this, if you intend to stay here at Downton, then there is something you must understand first."

He frowned at her. "What is it?"

She glanced down at their joined hands and then forced herself to look straight at him. "Me," she said simply. "If you accept Downton, then you must accept me as well. It is who I am and, well, I do not think I will leave now, no matter who the master is."

"Let me finish then. I was going to say that however right it felt to come back to the village and the house, it was not until I opened the door to this room and saw you sitting there by the fire that I truly felt I had returned. You are Downton to me, Mary, and seeing you, I came home. So yes, when your father returns I intend to tell him that I accept my inheritance-" his lips quirked into a knowing smile, "and all that that entails."

She found that her breathing had quickened and she was gripping his hands more tightly. "Seeing me, you came home," she repeated slowly, hardly daring to believe it, a feeling of awe preventing her from responding to his pun. "Are you sure?"

"Sure? Mary, why do you ask me-" He broke off. "For the last four years I have lived such a life as- well, never mind that now. I don't expect you to understand it, but when a man is so far away from everything that is beautiful or pure or anything he can call home, he has to have something to fight for. That was you. I didn't care about how we parted, I didn't care that you never wrote; when the other men teased me and asked me if I had a girl back home, I said yes I had, and her name was Mary, and I wanted to return to her so much. And you can ask me..."

Mary blinked rapidly to ward off tears she had not realised she had been shedding. "No, Matthew, I think I do understand; at least, I shall try to." She took a deep breath. "Only, I am afraid that – that I am not the person you think I am, and I don't want you to be deceived. Not now."

He shook his head firmly. "I believe you are exactly the person I think you are."

"But I must-"

He kissed her again, more gently this time.

"You don't have much faith in my own judgement and desires, do you, my darling? I have never left off loving you and wanting you and as far as I can tell there are only two questions of any importance to be considered now. The first is, do you love me?"

"Yes," she replied.

"Then the second, will you be my wife?"

"Yes," she repeated. Curious how simple that word was in the end.

Her reply seemed to lift his entire countenance and she knew without a doubt that what she was looking at was joy. As for Mary, she felt struck and her hands trembled in his. The change in her situation seemed almost inconceivable. To have gone in so short a space of time from not knowing if he even lived to being engaged to him, something she had hardly dared think possible after all this time, was almost beyond comprehension. Yet still she felt the shadow of what Matthew did not know hang over them. It was strange that it should be so, after so many years of rarely considering it herself, but there it was.

"Everything else is secondary to that, don't you see?" He touched her cheek and made her look at him. "One day, not today, we will sit down together, and you shall tell me everything you want me to know, and I shall tell you everything too, for I should be glad of your confidence- if you can bear it, Mary, for I have done things in-"

He was unable to continue: Mary had kissed him with all the passion she possessed. His arms came round her and he pulled her close, content to put aside words in this new world of peace.

When [Penelope] heard the sure proofs Ulysses now gave her, she fairly broke down. She flew weeping to his side, flung her arms about his neck, and kissed him. "Do not be angry with me Ulysses," she cried, "you, who are the wisest of mankind. We have suffered, both of us. Heaven has denied us the happiness of spending our youth, and of growing old, together; do not then be aggrieved or take it amiss that I did not embrace you thus as soon as I saw you."

[…]

Then Ulysses in his turn melted, and wept as he clasped his dear and faithful wife to his bosom. As the sight of land is welcome to men who are swimming towards the shore, when Neptune has wrecked their ship with the fury of his winds and waves- a few alone reach the land, and these, covered with brine, are thankful when they find themselves on firm ground and out of danger- even so was her husband welcome to her as she looked upon him, and she could not tear her two fair arms from about his neck.

A/N

Nostos, n. (νοστος, -ου): return, specifically used of the return of the heroes from the Trojan war and most famously of Odysseus.

The quotations from The Odyssey are from Samuel Butler's 1900 translation, which is what Mary would be most likely to have read.