May you be in heaven half an hour
Before the Devil knows you're dead
Somewhere in him, equal parts soul and anger, he'd always known it would come to this.
All wars were the quarrels of the "great men" – the wealthy and the aristocratic, the blue-blooded and the powerful – but all wars were waged by the poor: the lowborn, the unwashed and the uneducated, the workers and the dredges alike. They were reaped from the fields and the slums, cast as messy and impermanent cogs in a grinding and merciless machine that manufactured only vanity and worthless words. The aristocracy bought their blood with tarnished silver and tawdry ribbands.
Tom Branson was never in any doubt as to which side of the line between the two he stood on. As if he could ever forget it.
Not this morning, with the thick envelope crying conscription. Not ever.
Of the divide, he has daily proof – the elegant motorcar he drives, but could never afford; the glittering castle in whose byways and underground rooms he lives his life; the blazing blue eyes of a woman who he loves, but cannot hold. Each day, one tied to the next, brings more evidence of how little he has, and how he does not control a solitary acre of his life.
He turns the green notice over in his hands.
More proof. He is poor. His worth is in the bullets he can stop and the guts he can spill, the industrial engine he maintains by the turn of his mind and the strength of his back.
How long had he known it was coming? How long had he known the Devil in Army drab was chasing him down? He remembers the surreally perfect August day when this mess officially began. A half hour after he'd seized the hand of the woman he loved (and loves), Lord Grantham had spilled news like pitch onto the brightness of the party.
It was inevitable then. Thirty long months he's been dreading the last reminder of what he was. Two and a half years.
It was stolen time, and he had been greedily thankful of it. Every day he was not putting his life on the line for an empire that treated him and his kin like scum was a victory against a cruel and unjust system. Every day he woke in a cottage in the middle of the English countryside was another day sharper and another day stronger, another treatise read and another idea for the future. Every day of those two and a half years had been one more day in Sybil's orbit – another smile and another few words, and a heart made steadily full with the smell of violets and incendiary declarations.
He meant to have left, after a year or two. He was infatuated within six months, in love within a year. As the spring of 1915 came around, and his family's letters became more insistent, he stared and stared at his trunk and valise, neatly stacked by his cot. He'd scrimped and saved; he could go back to Ireland. But his heart was stubborn and it was like an addict and the needle – the days without her were so strangely empty and dull, bordering on the painful. He loved her, with all the stubbornness and rashness as his soul possessed.
His harpooned heart kept him in Downton, in the end. He couldn't leave because of her, and he hated himself for it. 1915 had left without a word of protest from him. 1916 had come and gone – he could have spilled his blood and brains in the streets of Dublin, and he would have died a happy man. Instead, those were weeks he lived out in comfort, waiting. He was, by his lights, subtle; it wasn't for months yet that he was blunt. He resented her for playing him false, refusing to answer him one way or another in the months since then. But he has never loved her less.
It couldn't have gone on much longer. He'd had the Devil's own luck then, but luck runs out and now the tables are turned – the Devil has him. He hadn't run fast enough, but, in the years since 1913, he'd hardly been running.
He is damned, one way and the other. The Devil's laughing at him as he looks down two doomed and ragged roads. Go to prison and be branded; go to war and be killed. Sybil is a quicksilver dream that vanishes before his eyes, leaving a faint trace of brimstone and a crushing, cold emptiness. A bitter, black humor is curdling his blood.
It weighs nothing, the notice – there is nothing to it but paper, eliding every choice, every breath, every will and every love he might have.