It was two days before Bertie Pelham's wedding. The next day he and his mother were going down to Yorkshire to stay with friends at Castle Howard the night before the wedding. Then he was going to get married to Edith and after that he was going away with her on their honey moon.
But there was something else he had to do first. Marigold. He had to make the servants know that she was coming.
Edith and Bertie had decided that it would be best for Marigold to stay with her cousins while they were away. But Edith also wanted to have her daughter with her at Brancaster as soon as possible once they were back. It would still be the longest time Edith had spent without her little girl since Marigold moved to Downton Abbey's nursery.
...
So they had decided to let the two grandmothers decide how to get Marigold to Brancaster. They could do it at a time that was convenient to them, shortly before or after he and Edith returned to Brancaster.
It was strange for Bertie to think of his mother as Marigold's grandmother, stranger than thinking about himself as her father, but that was what she would become once they were married and the adoption had gone through.
Mother herself was - much to Bertie's surprise - enthusiastic about it all. Perhaps she had always wanted a little girl. Bertie couldn't help suspecting that Patricia would have played a lot more with him if he had been a girl.
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So Bertie called his staff together and told them.
"There is a little girl coming here to live at Brancaster after my wedding. She will be the adopted daughter of me and my wife. She will be called Miss Marigold by you, since adopted children are not allowed to inherit titles. But apart from that you will treat her just the same as any children the Marchioness and I might get later on."
He was quiet for a while, then he added:
"I will not tolerate any neglect or maltreatment of her if you want to keep your jobs. Miss Marigold will be a full member of our family."
That was all Bertie said about Marigold. He had wanted to tell his staff not to gossip about Marigold, but he knew human nature well enough to suspect that that was the most certain way to make them start.
...
Bertie's words didn't manage to keep all the servants from gossipping, of course not. And it definitely didn't stop them from thinking.
Most of them had the same theory about Marigold's parentage even before she arrived at Brancaster. And when they first set eyes on the little girl they knew they had been right from the start - the little girl was the image of her father.
"It's really a scandal", one of the housemaids told another in a loud whisper, many months later. "I feel so sorry for the Marchioness. How could he bring his illegitimate daughter here to have her brought up by his own wife? And she doesn't suspect a thing, treating the girl like she was her own child. I bet that will change once the baby in her belly is born!"
Patricia Pelham happened to overhear these words. At first she wanted to defend her son - he wasn't doing it to her, quite the opposite. But then she realised that it was better this way. She loved Marigold and she knew that a man is allowed to get away with a lot more than a woman is in that respect. And no one would dare to mistreat Marigold as long as they thought she was Bertie's natural daughter.
AN: Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment!
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Castle Howard, mentioned in passing in CS6, is actually the site of Brideshead Revisited. Bertie and his mother were staying in a very impressive house the last night before the wedding.