This has taken quite a while to publish, as mistressdickens can probably tell you. I am indebted to her, and superiorbiscuits, for taking a look at a very rough draft of this canon-divergent AU that begins with S6ep1.
When drafting the third chapter (first chapter written), T.S Eliot's poem, The Waste Land, immediately came to mind. The poem dictates the tenor of every chapter of this fic. Please enjoy my first foray into a true canon-divergent AU that's taken almost half a year for me to write and feel comfortable enough about posting. Consider it as a branching off from S6ep1. As to whether it rejoins canon for good - well, you'll just have to read along!
Late February, 1925. Set during the middle of S6ep1, beginning with the afternoon of the day Anna and Mr. Bates are cleared of any wrongdoing regarding Mr. Green's death.
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
-The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
Morning. Downton. Downstairs.
Uncharacteristically, Elsie Hughes stumbled upon exiting the boot room that morning after the staff breakfast. But the loss of her surefootedness wasn't new. If she pressed herself, she could roughly pinpoint the steps that led to losing her sea legs.
In the course of a year and a tumultuous winter, culminating in something as unthinkable as Charles Carson daring to ask for her hand in marriage, it was increasingly unfathomable for her to consider managing frothy waves and softly sinking sand. That magical summer day seemed very far away from her winter of sleepless nights.
Now, the season was on the verge of giving way to spring, and Mrs. Hughes could scarcely consider traversing a dammed stream at the foot of a snowcapped mountain on the verge of melting in the warm light of day.
But Mrs. Hughes was the mountain, the stream, the gathering lake, and the dam that kept it all at bay. The pressure built, a dam of increasingly weakened fortitude struggled to keep control of her emotions, churning and far from settled.
For the gathering truths hiding behind the dam were not sedate as a still lake. Long before Christmas Eve, 1925, the waters grew in magnitude as her emotions defrosted from decades of keeping them frigidly in check, despite her warm heart beginning to beat for Charles Carson alone.
The resulting rush towards the weakening dam took a perilous route, however. The stream towards deciding if, and how, she would be married to Charles Carson was fraught with turbulent currents and eddies only hinting at underlying issues that had yet to be addressed, let alone resolved. Though Mr. Carson's breathtaking confessions were meant to eliminate the hazards amidst the stream, they only muddied the waters. In the resulting obscurity, minor issues could not be extricated from the weakening dam itself.
Elsie Hughes paddled desperately above these murky waters, unable to decide if she should stay afloat or be pulled under. She found herself on a rare and shining afternoon, meandering through the maze of downstairs, with an unanswerable question on her mind.
But her internal clock kept her a capable housekeeper, and a silent alarm went off at the thought that the family was soon to depart for the auction. These minute details provided helpful, albeit brief, distractions from herself. But Mrs. Patmore would soon be alone in the kitchen, and Mrs. Hughes needed counsel, once more.
Sending Daisy on her way was automatic; her swirling thoughts were not. So usually capable of instant analysis and confident decision-making, Mrs. Hughes was amidst an emotional paralysis. Days before, she had barreled into the kitchen with curiosity and determination to hear what Mrs. Patmore had sought to learn from Mr. Carson. Now that she was privy to the nature of his marital expectations, her gait was far less driven.
Mrs. Patmore had expertly avoided steering her in a given direction, despite being moved by the depth of emotion Mr. Carson had apparently displayed.
If only Mrs. Hughes had not chosen to communicate through an emissary. If only she had witnessed her betrothed's moving display to allow the mysteries of her own heart to be solved.
In the wake of the family's trip to the auction, Mrs. Hughes assigned her maids tasks that would keep them occupied for the afternoon. As for her own whereabouts, Elsie Hughes intended to spend part of that time locked away in her bedroom under the guise of "fixing" her day dress.
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That afternoon. Servant's Quarters.
The lock slid into place, and she drowned the sound out with a resounding sigh. Dust filtered through the afternoon light, crossing through it to sit before her dressing table. The mirror reflected back a conflicted woman—beautiful to her betrothed, but unable herself to look beyond the lines, the gathering darkness formed over hours of lost sleep.
Mrs. Hughes wasn't a vain woman, or at least so she thought. But candid observation before a mirror – in her room, in the bathroom – was something she could hardly avoid in the past few weeks.
Words flitted about her mind, cacophonous to no one but herself.
In my eyes, she is beautiful.
Did he really say that, she wondered with a worried bite to her lip.
Mrs. Patmore had uttered the verbatim statement to her the night before. But it still required her to suspend her disbelief that Charles Carson had managed such unadorned yet breathtaking words. But these confessions were almost hidden behind Mr. Carson's intentions – his terms of the deal, as it were.
From what Mrs. Patmore imparted, the details were straightforward enough. Charles Carson wanted a full marriage - a wife in every sense. I'm not marrying anyone else, he'd boldly declared months before. And while that made things clearer on his end, her own part was hardly settled.
She also had decades of countervailing evidence, her own misjudgment of him over the years, and the whisperings of a household and village curious about the newly engaged couple marrying at their age. At their age.
Such whisperings from curious onlookers were registered and ignored (up to a point). The only detractor she would acknowledge in the midst of her indecision was herself.
These days. She had said it to Mrs. Patmore, proud woman that she was, with such desperation. These days, she worried over letting him see her in the altogether.
This was not a thought that hurtled from the hinterlands. In her worried mind, the gathering whispers of her own conflicted thoughts turned to a dull roar one afternoon outside the house and village of Downton.
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It was an odd anniversary, a trip into York to a respectable shop that catered to Mrs. Hughes's unique status as a housekeeper.
After a long year of fretting, over life and love, about Anna and Mr. Bates, she had managed to shed nearly a stone. Unable to avoid the discussion of needing new measurements for her utilitarian evening uniform, Lady Grantham had insisted on her purchasing a new frock. Thus, she was forced to stand in the York shop as two women measured her corseted figure with efficiency. Somehow she managed to avoid looking at herself for too long in the mirror, focusing instead on the details of the new frock that rested on a table nearby.
But when the gown arrived a few weeks later, those details were not what held her captive in her room.
If she had not been recently engaged and thoroughly confused about what married life would mean for her, she might have not spent so much time thinking about every curve, the skin that remained hidden under the flat neckline of her new frock. The times were changing, and she usually welcomed them.
She could have managed a small v-neck, to mirror the tips of the double collar. But that would invite scrutiny for which she was not prepared – from Mr. Carson, from anyone. From there, all thoughts of lower necklines were minor to what she contemplated. She had wondered if anything approaching tantalizing to Mr. Carson lay hidden beneath her corset, her shift.
And the reveal of her evening uniform left her more confused than ever about Mr. Carson's intentions. Even she could concede the new evening uniform was more suited to her slimmer figure. But her woolgathering delayed her work, and led her to rush upstairs to ensure the proper china was on hand for a last-minute change for the family's dinner.
She entered the dining room through the servery, the energy of fixing this minor detail propelling her every step despite her precious cargo.
He had known her tread anywhere, raising his head slightly without losing sight of the offending object on the table that had caught his now fixed eye.
"It's a good thing we're changing the set; this one is marred slightly. I wonder if it's cracked."
"I'll take a look, later," she promised, half-interested in whether he'd lift his gaze to her and her new dress.
It was the exact same moment Charles Carson was leaning over the table, a delicate piece of the family's china grasped by his capable hands. He looked up for a moment, his strong jaw slackening along with his grip on the crockery.
Eyes widening with alarm, Elsie Hughes emitted a gasp that did nothing to quell his own nerves as he managed to more firmly secure the precious china.
"It's alright now," he assured her as she came closer, the perilous moment passing.
But another moment was upon them, one she couldn't quantify.
She first looked upon him with concern, his unsteady hand quite foreign to her. But when his fingers brushed against hers as they traded china pieces, concern about his wellbeing disappeared from the questions clouding her mind. His eyes were clearly surveying her new dress, and that realization distracted her usually capable powers of observation.
His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn't had a drop of water for ages. "Your dress," he started and halted quite abruptly.
She thought it was a trick – the mere flickering of candles on the grand table. But his eyes glimmered with something she could not identify. Had she had a chance to glance at him in all his weaker moments (which were far more numerous than she realized), she would have recognized the flickering gaze as muted but growing desire.
Before the moment could extend further, Andrew was stepping from behind the folding screen. And the glimmer in Mr. Carson's eyes had extinguished.
It was as if the moment had never passed as he uttered, "I'm quite alright, Mrs. Hughes. You should return downstairs – the family will be in here momentarily." He didn't glance at her again as he turned on his heel to return to the drawing room.
And this momentary glimpse between terse language and abrupt departures only led to her continued discombobulation. Her confusion, etched in every pained facial expression behind a false smile, is what compelled Mrs. Patmore to finally corner the housekeeper in her bedroom a few days later.
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Banishing the memory momentarily, Mrs. Hughes began the transition from her daytime to evening uniform. She caught sight of her corseted waist in the glass on her dressing table. It was trim, not as trim as she was as a young girl, not like the young Alice Neal in that portrait Mr. Carson had kept for decades.
Keeping her eye on the glass, the creases at her elbow were exaggerated in her mind. And she wondered yet again on what imperfection Mr. Carson would fixate if he ever saw her like that. She grew brave enough to rid herself of her corset and shift, to angle the glass to critique her breasts and the soft plane of her stomach. Gulping, she saw she was not a young farm girl anymore. That was certain to her now, more than ever.
It was that conviction that ensured her attempted slumber the night before, after Mrs. Patmore finally imparted her knowledge of Mr. Carson's thoughts on his marital expectations, was quite restless.
The news was quite extraordinary, the cook had readily conceded. When Mrs. Patmore had shut the door to her bedroom, she had the wherewithal to insist Mrs. Hughes partake in a small nip of brandy.
But its effect was not immediate, the cook could had readily observed. She had thought her words would lead to the housekeeper's confused and pained countenance to blossom with the relief that comes with clarity. But she was met with silence, disbelief further muddling things.
After an extra nip of brandy, Mrs. Hughes had returned to her bedroom, finding the courage to secure her door and shed her nightgown and robe. The room was nearly dark, then, a single lamp providing ample light for the survey she hoped to conduct. Her hand had ghosted across her collarbone before wavering at her waist, fraught with the nerves that came with contemplating all Mrs. Patmore had shared.
Her fiancée's voice had echoed through her mind more often than she cared to admit over the years. But she could not conjure him saying she was beautiful, to anyone, much less her. And she could not place his gaze the moment he first saw her in her newest evening uniform. That inability to hear in her mind his confession of love, to remember his gaze and identify a trace of desire, did nothing to quell her fears as she stood in the glowing light of another sleepless night.
As she prepared herself for yet another formal evening at Downton Abbey, Elsie Hughes was more than aware of the prolonged tension between herself and Mr. Carson. It was now approaching an unbearable stage following Mr. Carson's vehement refusal to call Mrs. Hughes by her first name.
Interactions were strictly limited to household matters now. Prior to his conversation with Mrs. Patmore, it would have done little good to approach Mr. Carson alone. The chance of heaping additional frustration upon the considerable amount of confusion in her mind caused her to avoid his solitary company.
Amidst this atmosphere, a resolution of whether she intended to become Mr. Carson's wife in the truest sense was still absent. But Elsie Hughes felt obligated to apprise Mr. Carson of her contemplation given his recent revelations to Mrs. Patmore. She promised herself to not let the day end without at least informing him of her contemplation. It was the very least that she could do.
Yet in the fading light, she ventured another glance at herself. Standing in her corset, she chewed on her lip before staring resolutely away from the mirror. All hopes of finding any confidence, let alone any resolution, waned along with the setting sun.
To be continued.
Thank you all for reading. It's early days, but I'd still love to know what you think.
A/N: My eternal gratitude goes out to mistressdickens and superiorbiscuits for daring to look at a very rough draft of this story and buy in to a very different take on S6. Your comments were invaluable as this idea matured and became a more complete exploration. Thank you, truly.