A/N I have been having trouble with the outline of my other story Till There Was You. Somehow this one popped into my head. Wrote the whole thing over the holidays. Edith is different here and for the first few chapters you may not like her much. I have also made her older which also gives her an edge. Anthony too is different than in the series. He is confident and has no age issues and I have given him a past. In the series the only thing I learned about him is that he was rich, widowed, and owned a large estate. Nothing about him personally. So who is he really?
This is AU and takes place before Mary and Matthew are married. I don't own these characters, I just like having play dates with them at Julian Fellowes' favorite playground Downton Abbey.
Lady Edith Crawley had slowly become without anyone noticing, the most difficult of Lord Grantham's daughters. Always living in her older sister Mary's shadow, she had slowly emerged from it and had become her own person around 1912; shortly after Patrick Crawley, her cousin, and heir to her father Lord Grantham, died on the Titanic.
Patrick Crawley's death had hardened her, made her cold and more calculating even than her sister Mary. Edith had loved him. However, Patrick was intended for Mary, even though Mary didn't love him, would never love him and certainly didn't mourn his death. Mary's hopes of being the Countess of Grantham were now resting on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
After many weeks of searching, Matthew Crawley, a distant third cousin and a solicitor from Manchester (of all places), was named heir. Mary treated Matthew with distain, and noticing how rude Mary was, Edith set out on her scheme to get Matthew interested in her. What a coup it would be if Matthew fell in love with her and she, not Mary would wear the Coronet of the Countess of Grantham. But as always, Mary had already spun her web, and Matthew only had eyes for Mary. They became engaged before the war but Matthew called it off when he realized that Mary only wanted to marry him for the title. Edith smiled ear to ear when she found that out, but Matthew was no longer of interest to her. She was going after bigger fish.
Her total transformation happened around 1914 when WWI started. The war changed everyone, and it completely changed Edith Crawley. By 1920 at the age of thirty, she had spent the last ten years living her life pretty much as she wanted. Her family looked past her and through her, never really noticing her and who she was. She convinced herself that they really didn't care what she did. She never was sure exactly what she was to them and it was that knowledge, or lack of it, that led her to believe that because of her position in society, she was above the social conventions of the day and could do as she pleased. She became an expert at winding her father around her little finger and pulling the "poor little me" card thus getting his approval and money.
During the war she learned to drive and that alone scandalized the family. But when she got a job working for one of her father's tenant farmers, the tongues really started to wag. She enjoyed working, being useful, and it didn't take her long to notice that farmer John Drake had taken a keen interest in her. Their first kiss happened in the barn one night. Their next kiss happened the next day, down in one of his fields, and before long he was kissing and fondling her all over the farm. She didn't love him or even pretend to, but she loved the sensations that he sent through her body, and she would have gladly lost her virginity to him, if he had been of her class. But she pulled the "lady" card and "I am a virgin card" on him, and not wanting to raise the wrath of Lord Grantham, he stopped. However, she did manage to let him know that she liked kissing him very much and that she wanted to continue doing that. And they continued doing just that for the next few days until Mrs. Drake saw them and promptly sent a note to Lord Grantham thanking him for Edith's help and informing him that they were going to hire a new man to help on the farm. She knew that Mrs. Drake would never say anything because it would just be her word against Ediths; and Edith could always look demure and sweet if the situation called for it.
But with the end of the war, her parents were suddenly interested in her and her prospects. The sudden attention only made her laugh. They had tried this before in 1914 when they invited a rich neighbor, Sir Anthony Strallan to dinner as a possible suitor. She was twenty four then, and while he seemed nice enough, he wasn't someone she would ever be interested in. She was pleasant to him most of the evening and hoped that he would never call on her again. She informed her parents that thirty or forty years of married boredom with him wasn't for her. She wanted to be left alone to live her life as she saw fit.
Her seasons in London hadn't been very successful either. No one offered for her, but that was fine as far as she was concerned. She didn't want to be married. She wanted to live her life as her Aunt Rosamund did, independent and answering to no one. Yes, Edith Crawley at age thirty was quite the woman, but soon her life would not be her own. Change was coming.
After the war Edith wrote a series of articles about women's and veteran's rights. They were published in The Times much to her father's disgust. But her articles had caught the eye of Michael Gregson, the editor of The Sketch He invited her to London to talk about the possibility of working for his paper, and as soon as they met Edith in her conceited way knew that this relationship, working for him or not, was going to go places. She convinced her father to let her move to London and work for the paper. She was supposed to be under the supervision of her aunt Rosamund, but Edith soon got her own flat; after all she was over twenty-one and had a trust fund set up by her grandfather.
It started with casual dinners, working dinners he called them. But Edith didn't know it at the time that Michael Gregson wasn't some country bumpkin farmer who she could flirt with and dismiss on a whim. He was sophisticated and more worldly than she was; and unknown to her had already made plans for their relationship. He was manipulative and played on her insecurities. He wined and dined her, gushed over her articles, and when holding her hand, always looked at her in a loving way. The first time he kissed her she thought she was going to catch on fire. Drake's kisses had been ardent, but Gregson's were urgent. He kissed her lips, neck, ears, eyes, all the while moving his hands all over her body. If this was love, than Edith Crawley was more than ready to fall in.
But marriage wasn't on Gregson's agenda. He told her that he loved her and wanted to be with her but there was a small problem. It seemed he was married, and his wife was committed to an asylum in Scotland. He told her that his wife didn't even know who he was anymore, and because of British law regarding divorcing an insane person, he could never offer Edith marriage. But that didn't mean he didn't love her, want her, need her and they could live together discretely , no one would find out if they were careful and even if society did, so what! She was over twenty one, could make her own decisions
Throwing caution to the wind, she agreed. She felt she was smart enough and clever enough to handle anything that came her way. She didn't move in with him right away, instead he stayed with her at her flat. She lived for their time together. He convinced her that she was everything he ever wanted or needed.
They were together about two weeks when one day at work she saw him and one of his secretaries kissing and fondling each other in the back room at the Sketch. Humiliated and berating herself for being such a fool, she knew then that he would never be faithful to her. She was smart enough to know that if they continued with their arrangement , she would ruin her reputation in no time.
She met him at his flat later that day and told him that she had changed her mind and that being his mistress wasn't something she was capable of. She tried to explain that as modern as she seemed, she was still the daughter of the Earl of Grantham and was raised with old fashioned values; one of which was not living with a man without benefit of marriage.
She never expected his anger to erupt the way it did, and by the time she made it back to her flat, her face was bruised, her lip split and her ribs and hip aching where he had pushed her into a table. But it was his parting remarks that chilled her to the bone. As he took her arm and threw her out of his flat, he told her that he wasn't finished with her yet; no one ever broke with him or played him for a fool, and the beautiful Lady Edith Crawley, daughter of the Earl of Grantham, had just put her and her family's reputation in jeopardy. He would wait until the time was ripe and then he would publish everything he knew about her and her family, and if his publisher wouldn't publish it, he would sell it to one of the gossip papers that were springing up all over the place.
He told her that he had enough information about the Crawleys to damage their good name forever. Oh it wasn't just about her and their relationship, no he knew about her sister Sybil and how she had run off with the chauffeur, moving to Ireland with him and becoming involved in his Irish politics. He knew all about her father's valet, Bates and how he had been convicted of murdering his wife, and he knew that Downton was in financial jeopardy because of mismanagement and poor investments by her father, but the coup was her romance with a tenant farmer. Somehow he had learned about that, and had paid Mrs. Drake a tidy sum to tell her story.
While Edith was concerned, she was confident that he was only bluffing. After all he was a nobody and she and her family were the Crawleys. The Earldom of Grantham had been around for four hundred years. Arrogant man! No one would ever believe him and she would have the protection of her family, or so she thought.
However, the straw that broke the camel's back came about one month later. To get over the Gregson affair, Edith went to Italy with some of her friends. All rich like her, the little group partied and drank their way all over Rome. Flaunting convention, Edith took up with Sir Reginald Pantene, the heir to the Earl of Laurelhurst. Pantene was following in the footsteps of his uncle, Charles Pantene, who had disgraced the family by getting involved with opium and having many affairs with married women while living in China and India and working for the English East India Company.
Sir Reginald Pantene at age thirty eight was rich, infamous, smart and somewhat handsome . Edith, as the daughter of the Earl of Grantham, caught his eye and he showered her with attention. After the nightmare she had experienced with Michael Gregson, Pantene was a relief. Flattered at first, she enjoyed being seen with him, after all he was of her social class, but as time wore on he began to get on her nerves. She came to the conclusion that the man had absolutely no substance. Here was a man of high birth frittering away his life. Even she was smart enough to see this. However, she wasn't smart enough to realize that all the escapades she had been involved in as a result of her friendship with Pantene, were slowly etching away at whatever reputation she had left.
The final act came one night as he was escorting her back to her hotel. Walking past Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, he grabbed her and kissed her, all the while making suggestive remarks and doing his best to fondle her. While trying to pull away from him, she caught her shoe in a cobblestone and fell backward into the fountain. Because Sir Reginald had been holding on to her, he followed and landed on top of her.
The whole scene had been witnessed by a number of people who knew who Pantene and Edith were, including a man sitting at a café across from the fountain. Running across the square he pushed Pantene off of Edith, and then reached down and helped her up and out of the water. Tears, anger, frustration, embarrassment, all ran across her face as she looked up to say "Thank You!" only to be looking into the blue eyes of Sir Anthony Strallan.
Good God! she thought. Of all the people in the world to be here at this moment it has to be someone from home.
Her embarrassment was acute as he gently led her back across the square to his table. He ordered an espresso for her and asked the waiter to please bring a dry tablecloth to wrap around her shoulders.
Pantene, climbing out of the fountain and noticing where she was , followed.
Sir Anthony Strallan, at 6'4" was taller than Pantene by at least five inches. Rising from his chair and looking down at Pantene he said in a slow measured voice,
"Sir, your evening with Lady Edith is at an end. I suggest you turn around and crawl back into the hole from whence you came. "
Pantene looked at Strallan and then at Edith and said through a sneer, "Lady Edith you will regret this evening, regret it for a very long time. " With that he smoothed his hair and clothes, turned and walked away.
Edith put her hands to her face and started to cry, more from frustration than embarrassment. She noticed that Sir Anthony hadn't said anything to her. He just sat there looking at her, waiting for her to compose herself.
"Thank you! Sir Anthony. Thank you very much" she finally said. "I am so sorry that you had to witness that, but I am glad to see a friendly face from home. I. . . . . .ah. . . . . .I've made a real mess of things it seems," she said as she stared off into space.
"When you have finished your espresso, let me escort you back to your hotel. Things will look better after a goodnight's sleep." He smiled at her reassuringly.
"Not these things, I'm afraid. I can't stay here. I have to go home and as soon as I can."
"Are you here with friends or a maid who can travel home with you?" he asked in a friendly tone.
"I don't know where my friends are at the moment and I didn't bring a maid. I have been using one from the hotel."
"Lady Edith, please forgive me for being so bold at such an awkward time, but I am traveling back to London tomorrow afternoon. I would be honored if you would consider letting me escort you. A young woman like yourself cannot travel alone, especially across Europe. You have an aunt who lives in London if memory serves, so I would be happy to deliver you to her house. It would give you time to. . . . .ah. . . . pull yourself together before you head back to Downton."
I have to do more than pull myself together, she thought as she looked at his sincere face.
"Thank you, Sir Anthony. It is kind of you to offer your assistance, but I am sure you know that by the time we board the train, I will be considered a scandalous woman and the gossips will be talking about us being seen together, especially since it is a two day trip." She said with some sadness in her voice.
"They will talk anyway," he said laughing as he helped her to her feet and walked with her to her hotel.
/ / / / / / / /
They didn't talk much on the way back to London . He had bought her some magazines to read and he was deeply engrossed in newspapers and paperwork. She didn't try to explain what he had witnessed and he had the good manners not to ask. He didn't talk much she noticed. When he did talk, he seemed uncomfortable and stumbled through what he wanted to say. She couldn't sleep and ate very little. All she could think about is what had happened and what would happen if Michael Gregson found out. When they arrived in London Anthony escorted her to her Aunt Rosamund's house and politely excused himself when asked if he would consider staying for tea. He wished Edith a safe and pleasant journey home, thanked her for her company, and left.
But Edith knew that her journey home would be anything but pleasant. Her time at her aunts only gave the scandal time to roar past London and head for Yorkshire as fast as the engines pulling the trains with the newspapers aboard could get it there.
Her stupidity regarding Gregson and the Rome escapade brought her back to Downton one week later to face the wrath of her father.
So it didn't come as a total surprise when she was called into the Library shortly after arriving home. She was probably going to get another lecture. They asked her to keep a low profile for the sake of her sister Mary; always Mary. That request alone irked Edith. Matthew had proposed again and he and Mary were going to be married in the spring. Her mother explained that they didn't need a scandal to deal with along with the wedding. While her parents didn't know all the details of her time in London and her relationship with Gregson, they had heard rumors. They were coming at her from all sides but what happened in the next few minutes brought her life to a crashing halt.
