Bread and Roses
Sybil felt the cool damp of the late summer evening on her face and arms as she breathed deeply and closed the large front door behind her. Carson had looked rather baffled as she'd swept past him in the hall, but she had offered no explanation. She simply had to get out.
A line of cars was parked along the front drive. Sybil surveyed them for life, then noticed a glimmer of light out of her left eye. A group of young men were huddled near the abbey's walls, talking in muffled tones. Sybil thought the man she was looking for might be among them and walked toward them.
"Excuse me," Sybil said. Realizing who she was, one of the drivers threw his cigarette to the ground and stomped it out. All four of the men stood up straight.
"I'm sorry to interrupt, but do you know where Mr. Branson has gone?"
"I believe he went off in that direction, milady," said the chauffeur formerly with the cigarette, gesturing in the direction of the garage.
"Thank you," said Sybil as she gathered her heavy skirt in her hands and walked as briskly as she could around the side of the abbey.
She needed to see him, though if you had asked her why she couldn't have told you. The night had been going perfectly well before she'd left so abruptly. Her parents had been promising a party to some of the local families for some time, and even when it was decided that the invalid hospital would be moved to Downton, they decided to go ahead with the party "for the morale of the village," as Papa had put it. Sybil hadn't wanted to go to the party after a day that she'd spent from sun-up to sun-down in the newly converted hospital wing, but her mother told her in strongly veiled words that Sybil's presence was expected. Many of the officers from her father's regiment were in attendance, and they wanted to hear all about Nurse Crawley's exploits in the hospital. The idea of a lady acting as a nurse still had an air of the preposterous about it, it seemed.
Everything had proceeded as it had always done. Dinner was served, with dancing to follow. Sybil had no appetite and even less of a desire to dance. When she thought of all the men she'd known who would never dance again…
Sybil stood in a corner of the room set aside for dancing, halfway listening to Granny and one of the officers prattle on about the hospital and the inconvenience of it. Another couple nearby discussed how dreadful it was that rationing had made their cook unable to produce her famous lemon tart. Sybil knew she had to get out, to leave the inanity and the presumption behind.
"I'm going out for a walk," she announced to no one in particular as she escaped the hot and crowded room and disappeared into the night.
Flickering lamplight shone from inside the garage. As she rounded the corner of the house, Sybil could just make out a dark figure inside the garage, crouched beside a car. This is foolish, Sybil thought. What am I doing here? How will he fix anything?
She turned to walk back in the direction of the house but stopped when a voice called from the darkness, "Lady Sybil?"
She had been caught.
Tom Branson was standing in the door of the garage, his form outlined in lamplight, his jacket and hat on the roof of the car, his tie a bit disheveled. Sybil knew that he had gone to town earlier than night to bring Cousin Isobel and Lavinia Swire to the soiree. He must've been working on the car while waiting for the party to adjourn. "What are you doing out here at this time of night?" he asked. "The party can't be done already."
"No, Tom. I just needed to get out for a moment, go for a walk. You know how those parties can be." She had meant it to be a casual remark, something flippantly said in the course of normal conversation, but instantly she felt the stupidity of her words.
"No, I don't," Branson said with a gentle smile, placing the tool in his hand on the ground and approaching Sybil slowly. "But I can imagine."
"It just feels so hypocritical, you know, to eat and drink and dance when men are dying in another wing of the house."
Branson nodded. His expression was unreadable, his expressive blue eyes impossible to know in the darkness. Sybil wondered what he must think of her, approaching him in this way at this hour of the night. She knew that he'd once had feelings for her, but they had never, in all their years of knowing each other, met in this informal way. She was on his territory, after all. Papa would positively kill me if he knew I was out here, at night, unchaperoned, Sybil thought.
She needed steadying. Sybil walked over to the stone wall that protruded from the garage and sat. "You must think we're all hypocrites, people of my type."
"Not all. Not you." He sat beside her on the wall, close but not too close. Sybil smiled a bit to herself when she reflected that most of their conversations had been conducted with him three feet in front of her, her talking into the back of his head. Now they were seated equally, both staring out into the inky night.
When Sybil made no response, Tom continued. "You could've lived an easy life, all parties and new dresses and London seasons, but you wouldn't have it."
"You're kind, but I feel I've done nothing really at all to help anyone. I tend after the men but half of them die in our care and the other half are shipped right back to the front as soon as they're well. I'm not really doing anything at all for them."
"I disagree, milady," Tom said, the tenor in his voice rising. "You do an awful lot to provide those men some comfort in their worst days. Now look at me. I see something wrong with fighting a war for a country that won't let my people live their own lives and lead themselves. So I sign up to fight so that I can abstain from fighting… and I can't even do that right."
He laughed a little, but Sybil could hear a note of bitterness in his words. She knew how deeply his medical discharge had pained him. She placed a gloved hand on his arm in an attempt to reassure him.
"At least you tried, Tom. At least you live your life honestly, according to your own morals. Sometimes I feel as if I live in two worlds, and one of them must be a dream and one must be real, and I can't tell which one is which. I wonder if one day I'll have to choose between them."
Sybil grew quiet. She could feel Tom's eyes on her. When he spoke he did so tenderly. "I was reading the other day about some of the laboring people in America. A group of young women working at a mill thought they were being treated unfairly by their employers and so they went on strike. There was a sign one of them had when they were marching—'Bread, yes, but roses too.' It's a brilliant turn of phrase, I think. What I take it to mean is that we all need food and shelter to live, but that doesn't mean we don't need beautiful things, too, and you shouldn't feel guilty for having both."
Sybil sat still for a moment, absorbing his words. She knew he would say the right thing—she had known when she had run out the front door seeking him.
Sybil stood up abruptly and turned to him. "Do you dance, Tom?"
The driver smiled. "Depends on what you mean by dancing. Do I do whatever it is you fine folks do in your fine parties? I doubt it. But I've been known to have a turn or two at the country dances, when the girl is pretty enough."
For a moment Sybil's thoughts burned with the image of Tom Branson dancing with another girl—a buxom, red-cheeked Irish lass with a large laugh. She pushed the image from her mind and held out a hand.
"Will you show me what a country dance entails?"
Tom took the hand and stood. "I'll certainly try, milady."
"Sybil. Please, Tom."
She saw him take a deep inhalation. Perhaps he needed steadying, too. "Well, Sybil, show me how you stand to start one of your fine manor dances."
She guided him to the middle of the drive and placed his hand gently on her waist, her right hand in his left, a more-than-generous distance between them. Music from the house drifted through the courtyard, a slow waltz that was entirely unsuitable to the situation. They would have to make do.
"Right. Well. This is how the gentleman and the lady stand at a country dance." Branson reached his arm around Sybil's back and pulled her in close, their bodies together and palms gripping tightly. "You have to hold a lass close because you don't want to go flinging her away during the dance, you see."
"Of course," said Sybil, smiling. Be careful, Sybil, warned a voice in her head but she quickly silenced it. It had been a long and trying day. She and Tom were simply having a lark. It was all one could do, in the face of all the hardship and worry that surrounded them.
"Now, on three, we're going to begin the step." Sybil loved the way the word "three" sounded in Tom's mouth because of his accent. Sometimes when they were driving together she would go to great lengths to make him repeat the time he would collect her (three thirty, milady).
While she was daydreaming, he was speaking. "Just follow my lead, right? Right. One. Two. Three."
He took off at a gallop across the drive, carrying Sybil along with him. She laughed, stumbling along the steps but, feeling his strong arm across her back, certain that he wouldn't let her fall.
"Very good, Lady Sybil!" he exclaimed as he took another turn about the drive. "Now if you're feeling comfortable, I think it's time to attempt a spin."
Before Sybil had time to protest, Branson had spun her around, never letting go of her hand, then brought her back to him in one fluid movement. She laughed so hard she had to stop dancing and bend over to catch her breath. Branson grinned at her. "You make a very fine country dancer! I'll have to take you to the real thing one day."
Sybil returned his grin, but realized that the tenor of the air had changed.
"Tom, the music's stopped. I think the party may be over."
"Right," he said, panting slightly from their romp, disappointment visible in his eyes. "You'll have to get back then."
"Do I look all right? My hair must be a sight after the spinning!"
"You look beautiful," he responded quietly, tucking an errant strand of Sybil's hair behind her ear. At his touch Sybil felt all her barriers give way. She thought, for just that moment, that if she had to choose between one world and another, the second world—the world of caring for soldiers and talking politics with Irish drivers, the world in which she was not a lady but a nurse, a woman—might be the better option. Tom's eyes were large and bright in the dim lamplight and the stars were blanketing the summer sky and she felt for that moment a peace that she hadn't known in ages, or perhaps ever.
But the moment broke. From the front of the house there was the sound of voices. Sybil knew that no one could see them, the lady and the chauffeur, staring at one another in the starlight.
"I must go. Good night." She turned and walked briskly toward the house but Branson called after her.
"Lady Sybil! Before you go, I need to tell you something. Confess, really."
"Oh?"
"At dinner the other night, when I was serving and had to leave…"
Sybil nodded that she remembered. "Carson said you were ill."
"I wasn't ill." Branson put his hands in his pocket and stared at the ground. "I was angry at the discharge, angry I couldn't take my stand against the war. I was planning on doing something exceptionally stupid. I feel embarrassed to even think of it now."
Sybil walked toward Tom slowly. "What were you planning?"
Tom took a deep breath and said, "I was planning to dump a tureen of slop over the general's well-groomed head."
Sybil stared at Tom in disbelief, allowing his words to sink in.
Then, as if it were erupting from within her, she began to laugh. "You what?"
At first Tom didn't seem to know how to react as Sybil face broke into a wide smile, but soon he matched her laugh with his own.
"I told you it was stupid," he said, shaking his head at his own imbecility.
"It's not stupid to want to make a stand, but honestly, Tom, of all the ways to do it!"
"The stupidest thing about it is that if I'd not been caught and had succeeded in my brilliant plan, I would have surely been sacked, and I wouldn't have seen you again."
Tom stared intently at Sybil, who was suddenly engrossed in pulling an errant thread from her glove. After a few moments she looked at Tom with puzzlement. "But how were you caught? Surely you didn't tell anyone beforehand."
"I left you a note. Anna found it and let Mr. Carson know I was up to something." He shrugged. "I couldn't do something like that without asking your forgiveness."
Sybil looked at Tom. She knew the party was over, and that they could be interrupted at any moment, but she couldn't budge from the spot. He was still such a mystery to her at times—she so often wondered how someone could be so motivated, so intent on getting his way and speaking his mind, yet at the same time so selfless. On the cusp of performing an act that could get him fired, or even arrested, he had thought to ask for her forgiveness. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by him—by the enormity of his feelings. For the first time in a long time she allowed herself to think of his words as he left her for training: "I promise to devote every waking minute to your happiness." Her head spun in the wake of the memory, and she took a moment to collect herself.
"Well," she said at last. "I'm very glad you didn't succeed." She smiled at him, attempting to lift his mood. "Who would I have to teach me the latest dances if you were gone?"
He nodded but his face remained grave. "I need you to know that I don't intend on challenging my position here again. I've a well-paying job in a good house, and I'm grateful for it. I need you to be sure of that." He looked at her with wide eyes that sought absolution, and Sybil felt that she might be washed away in his need for her.
For half a moment she thought that wouldn't be the worst thing.
But the voices emanating from the house grew louder by the moment, and Sybil knew she'd have to be going, however much she wanted to linger.
She smiled gently and put out her hand. "I know that, Tom," she said as he took the proffered hand and held it briefly. "Good night."
"Good night, milady."
As she walked toward the house she remembered the feel of his strong arm across her back, guiding her, holding her as they danced.
Her country was at war. Every day she saw young men cut down in their prime, maimed and broken outside and in. She was sure of nothing.
But she was sure of him.