A/N: Written for the RLt Spring Gift-fic Exchange as a gift for Ersatz Einstein.

* Directions to the student *

Mr. Carson, at the head of the table, cleared his throat sonorously, and the chatter in the servants' hall died away as if by magic. He had the household post in his hands; Gwen caught sight of a square envelope among the rest and felt her heart miss a beat in what was half terror, half anticipation. It couldn't be — not so soon — could it?

"This is for you, William." A smudged letter on cheap greyish paper: the young second footman shot to his feet, all elbows and knees as usual, and took his post with pink cheeks and a murmur of thanks. He still got homesick, Gwen knew. Those few scrawled lines from his father up at the farm would be carried round until they fell apart at the fold.

"And there's a package for you, Gwen." Mr. Carson smiled down at her benignly, and Gwen bobbed to her feet in turn, reaching for the brown-paper packet with an eagerness she couldn't hide.

"Thank you, Mr. Carson." One glance at the address — "Miss Gwen Dawson" beautifully inscribed in a regular copperplate hand — was enough to tell her that this was the correspondence she'd been waiting for. She'd sent off the postal order barely a week ago: gone in to Thirsk on her half-day to hand the money in through the window at the big post-office there to avoid awkward questions.

But she hadn't expected to get a reply this morning. She wasn't ready...

Everyone round the table seemed to be staring at her. Gwen could feel her face going as pink as William's in the way that she hated, an unbecoming colour that clashed with the carrot-red of her hair. She'd been teased about that hair often enough at school. At least at Downton it was always pinned up out of the way behind her housemaid's cap.

Not that it had stopped Thomas passing a few choice remarks about it when she first arrived. His good looks and devastatingly agile tongue had kept her in awe of him for weeks, until the glamour had worn off and she'd started to notice that for all those brains of his the senior footman was bone-idle and not above petty dishonesty where their employers were concerned...

Not above a little idle malice, either, when it came to personal secrets. His eyes were quick with curiosity, and Gwen slid the packet hurriedly into the folds of her apron beneath the table.

"It'll be the gloves I left at home, come Mothering Sunday. Mam said she'd send them on when she laid hands on them." Gwen knew she was pinker than ever, but she'd have to hope Thomas hadn't got enough of a look to distinguish the black ink of that fine office hand from her mother's straggling capitals.

Anna, sitting next to her, was giving her a funny look. She knew better than anyone just where those gloves were — she'd helped Gwen dab a stain out with milk only this Sunday, and lent her some paper and a fold of lavender to put them away in a drawer of their shared little bedroom — but she'd cover for Gwen without question if she had to. The two of them had worked together more than long enough for that.

"I'll take that up to our room, if you like," Anna offered quietly as the buzz of conversation around the table began again and attention ebbed. "I've finished breakfast, anyway — I've got a moment before we do the drawing-room."

As head housemaid, she wouldn't be questioned. Gwen nodded and slid the precious package across into Anna's lap. She felt rather guilty at not sharing the secret — she was sure her friend was expecting confidences later — but the fewer people at Downton who knew what she was doing, the better. She didn't think she'd have the nerve to go through with it if they all knew.

Even kind Mrs Hughes would say she was getting above herself, and no wonder. The housekeeper had been in service all her life, since she was no older than Gwen. She would never understand how anyone could feel trapped by this life that they led, or aspire to more than a ring of keys and the rule of a house full of staff...

Gwen Dawson had been born with nothing. She wasn't like William, the only son of a small farmer with stock and fields of his own, and the apple of his parents' eye. She was the eldest of seven, brought up in a tied cottage with her brothers and sisters by a father who was a common labourer — an unlettered farmhand who came in each night too tired to talk — and a place as maid at Downton Abbey was the best chance she'd ever had. She got her wages and bed and board, and a room shared with Anna instead of four little sisters... and it was wickedly ungrateful of her to want more.

But she did.

* Long vowels *

It wasn't until hours later that Gwen herself managed to snatch enough time to slip away up the back stairs and break the seal on the big manila envelope. Anna had left it on her pillow, tucked discreetly beneath the smoothed-down counterpane. Too hurried and excited to be careful any longer, Gwen pulled the flap open and caught up the thick sheaf of papers inside. The elaborate letterhead of the Phonetic Institute swam up from the page before suddenly dizzy eyes.

So it was real, then. She'd paid, and they'd accepted her on their course. She was going to learn shorthand. She was going to be a secretary.

The crisp feel and faintly inky scent of freshly printed paper in her hands set her heart beating a little faster. Soon she too would be handling papers like these every day of her life. She wouldn't be up to her knees in the cow-byre like her father, or up to her elbows in dusters and polish like the rest of the maids here at Downton. She would be the first in her family to earn a living with her head, and not with the sweat of her brow. It was what she'd wanted ever since she was a little girl.

She'd been the best scholar in the village, everyone had said that. Even mean cats like Libby Thwaites, who'd pulled her hair and called her Carrots, had copied her spellings. She'd written the neatest hand of any of the girls, and in her last year at school she'd won the composition prize for her page on "Heroes of the British Empire". The Vicar himself had written on the flyleaf of the Prayer Book he'd handed her, and she'd stood up in the classroom in front of the whole school and they'd all clapped.

Gwen had always known that she'd have to leave and go out to work like all the rest of them. She'd learnt to read and write and figure, and that was as much and more as any girl like her needed. And she didn't want to be a woman student at one of the new colleges, aping the men and getting laughed at, or even a scholarship girl at Whitefriars High School, twenty miles away from home in the big town, where the other girls would all have pianos and parlours and look down their noses at a farmhand's daughter.

But she knew she was quick, and bright, and made for better things than a lifetime spent cleaning other people's houses. And she'd seen the lady secretaries at the rent-office in Thirsk, with their high-collared blouses pinned just so and their busy fingers flying across the page as fast as a man could speak. Vicar couldn't do that, for all his book-learning. Mr. Carson couldn't do it, and no more — the thought quailed before her own daring — no more could Lord Grantham, even if he was an Earl with land as far as the eye could see.

Gwen could. She was sure she could.

So when she'd come across the advertisement for correspondence courses from the Phonetic Institute in Bath, in that old newspaper she'd found in the boot-room, it had seemed like a sign. More than that — it had seemed meant.

A sudden clatter of hoofs echoed up from outside, carried on some fluke of the brisk March wind, and Gwen dropped the papers on her bed and scrambled over to the high dormer window in a momentary panic as to whether there were more guests arriving that she hadn't been told about. But it was only Lady Edith's grey being led round from the stableyard, stolid middle-aged Lynch, the groom, holding the mare as tight as if she'd been apt to bolt. Which she was not; even without knowing Lady Edith for a poor rider, farm-bred Gwen could tell a sluggish mount when she saw one.

Mr. Patrick had decided to join his Lordship in riding out round the estate, then. Nothing else could have caused the grey to be brought round in a hurry, when there had been no word of Lady Edith accompanying her father before...

It was a shame, really, to see the way she trailed round after her cousin when Mr. Patrick, kind as he was, never seemed to notice. Poor Edith. The middle daughter of an Earl couldn't do shorthand — she couldn't so much as boil an egg for herself. And she couldn't even win a man away from the older sister who didn't want him.

With a face and a sour tongue like hers, it wasn't likely she'd ever marry, Gwen thought. And marriage was the only way for a born lady to make a life for herself away from her father's house... Abandoning the window Gwen plumped back down onto her bed with a jangle of springs, and prepared to spend the last few minutes of her precious free time on the printed pages that were to form her own escape from Downton Abbey.

The top sheet was a standard letter thanking her for her payment. She discarded that. The next few pages seemed to be a long theoretical introduction... Gwen studied the small print with increasing dismay, as phrases like "imperfect and cumbrous instrument", "coincide minutely" and — worst of all — "explodents, continuants and coalescents" floated up from the rolling syllables under her eye.

Well, she didn't need to know all that, she reasoned. Shorthand worked. The course had said anyone could learn it in a year. It hadn't said anything about how it worked.

She put the introduction to one side and reached for the first page of the course. This was more like it. Exercise One: the nib, the notebook, the desk. Maybe she could use the top of the chest of drawers? The new nib she'd bought would be just fine.

The diagrams on the paper looked more like geometry than the pothooks she'd seen the secretaries writing. She flicked ahead to the end of the section she'd been sent, saw loops and hooks, and was reassured. That came later, seemingly... Puzzled but willing, she turned back past the rows of thick and thin strokes to the first actual exercise. "Write the first sound heard in the following words..."

Lips moving, Gwen Dawson spelt her way through the impossible list with a sense of rapidly increasing despair. She wasn't even going to be able to start. The whole page was full of trick words that took a head full of book-learning to read out, and she didn't know what half of them meant, let alone how to say them.

The final straw was the monstrosity that read "p-hl-eg-m". Gwen stared at it and felt the tears spill over. How could you say that out loud? How could you do an exercise that might as well be written in some heathen language? How was she ever going to be a secretary now?