Hidden Like Shameful Letters
.
It began quite simply, on a cold and sunny day of March.
The house was bustling with wedding fever, her inputs both disregarder and half-felt. Edith was perhaps happy for her sister, but there was no denying that she couldn't be happy for herself. It is a very rare ability to derive joy from somebody else's, when in truth it only makes your own misery all the more prominent.
As she wished Mary all the happiness she could and should have, Edith took her canvas, brushes, and colors and left for the hill – a scene that, from that cold and sunny day of March on and for the next months, would repeat itself with loyal consistency.
He had been there on that first afternoon. Both too jealous and too fond of a spot they considered their own, those first few days they shared the space and the view - companionably ignoring the other's presence.
He wrote, she painted.
Sometimes he'd just lie on the grass and sleep; he'd read, pens and papers scattered around him; or he'd simply stare ahead, the same wide view of the rural country she tried to render on canvas. She noticed he wrote with his eyes shut close, the pen swaying on the notepad almost on its own accord.
The pencil sketch was almost done when he spoke to her.
"Do you have a pen?"
She froze, startled. It was easy to forget his presence, sometimes.
"Excuse me?"
"A pen. To write."
"I know what a pen is for." A pause. "Isn't a writer supposed to carry his own?"
"Who says I'm a writer?"
If she was taken aback by his forwardness, not a rudeness but a bluntness she was not used to, Edith tried not to show it. Instead she threw a pen at him, and reminded herself not to blush when he'd inevitably thank her. She was done with falling for kindness.
He did not thank her.
"You're welcome."
"I owe you one." He mumbled, his eyes already closed as her pen hit the paper sheet.
Edith tried to go back to her drawing with a shrug. Still, his lack of propriety irked her. These were the moments she damned herself for thinking What would Mary do?
"I don't think we've introduced properly."
He looked at her, and smiled for the first time. "We haven't."
"I'm Lady Edith Crawley" she prompted.
"Nice to meet you, Lady Edith." His eyes were sparkling with something she couldn't identify, and she was unsure whether his amusement came from mockery or something else entirely. Annoyed, she turned fully toward him and asked "Do you have a name?"
"Yes."
"Care to share it?"
"No."
Edith humphed unladylikedly, and turned her attention back to the scenery she was determined to depict. Their mutual silence was back, but she couldn't feel alone anymore.
March turned into April, watercolor brushes covering her light pencil sketch as the landscape bloomed with Spring.
She didn't know when it began. At first it was a few words, at times bitter, at times curious, and they died as easily as they had sprung.
It shifted gradually, but she didn't call it friendship. Sometimes they talked for hours, sometimes they worked in silence and parted without a sound. Sometimes she studied art-books as he snored lightly on the ground, a book on his face, ink on his hands. Sometimes they listened, and sometimes they asked questions.
She forgot her elder sister was getting married, she forgot her younger was having a baby, she forgot dining tables with long conversations in which her silences were ignored as much as her words, and she forgot about her broken heart too. He – for she did not know his name, and did not care to ask – was never polite, never tender. He didn't have Patrick's softness, sir Anthony's sweetness or Mr. Drake (John) 's blind admiration. He was blunt, honest, he never flattered and never judged, he was not deceitful as gentlemen ought to be, and she felt her heart was safe from delusion, safe from falling. The civil falsehoods that keep society running make each of us a riddle to the other, a polite puzzle. She'd always felt a spare piece, hers a world made of rules she could never grasp and yet always abode by, and with no rules to follow she felt free not to interpret the puzzle he was. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes she liked it, sometimes she was annoyed by it. And it was quite simple, really.
May was coming up, and vivid colors took over the dim blues of March; her painting now changing with the seasons, alive and blooming, strong firm brushes of yellows and reds marking its new soul. Maybe it didn't need to be finished, maybe it couldn't – as soon as she captured it, reality slipped from her grasp with its inevitable change, and she let it dictate her art, tiny details finding their place on the canvas. She wasn't in a rush.
Her spot and his spot suddenly became theirs, and while she didn't know what it meant, she knew there was no point in denying it.
"One day she told me 'I hope I shall be put in my grave as soon as I'm dead; I don't want to walk about so'. Sometimes I think dying was her best option."
"She had been reading too much Charlotte Bronte."
It often went like that. A thought would come out of the blue, even non-consequitur, but they'd voice it nevertheless.
Lavinia had been hunting her thoughts. Edith hadn't known her, not really, not outside her role of Matthew's fiancée, and she wondered if that's what Lavinia had become, a character of herself. A life that has no story is really a life of death. She sought her path, wondered if she had one, because, like Lavinia, she didn't want to walk about so. She spoke again:
"Death suited her."
"It wouldn't suit you."
"No."
"You're as keen to tragedy as she was. You aspire to be not miserable instead of happy. There's happy, and there's unhappy. Everything else is purgatory."
"Everything else is reality. Life is not a pragmatic novel, however much you try to will it to be. Happiness is not the purpose of life, nor it should be, nor it can be."
"You're quite cynic today. So April was the month of long, lasting love and May is when you tell me feelings are rubbish, although you revel in them, feed them-"
"Love" she stood now, her eyes severe on him, "has nothing to do with happiness. And stop telling me stories about who I am."
"Then who are you?"
She stared at him in silence.
Social status told her she was Lady Edith Crawley, daughter of the Fifth Earl of Grantham.
She was a resentful nuance to her sister Mary; a kinder, unfinished portrait to Sybil; she was a lost cause to her mother, and a peculiar afterthought for her father; she was timid and heartbroken to her grandmother; she was an unforgiving schemer for her Aunt; naïve to P., lovely to sir Anthony, lost and useless to Isobel, praise-worthy to General Strutt. The task of defining who she was never in her hands. What was her story?
She resumed her painting, and he didn't ask further.
They ate together sometimes, and she started to love talking to him even when she hated it.
She forgot what it meant to be bored.
"Everybody has their sine qua non"
"I don't."
"You don't want one."
"Everything is lost at some point, but you're left behind, and you live on."
It happened on the last Sunday of May. The family was heading back to Downton after the service; they had discarded the car in favor of a languid walk through the village, the sun shining on their new hats, Sybil's son crooning contently in his crib.
Edith heard his laugh before she actually saw him. They stared at each other for a moment, stopped dead in their tracks, unsure of what to do. It ended in a moment, the world around resumed its rustling and she passed by him with the rest of her family, without turning back.
"James get out of this reverie – will ya? You look like you've seen a bloody ghost."
"Maybe I have."
The rest of the conversation was lost to her, and the world shifted again.
James.
Mary and Matthew left for their honeymoon, Sybil and Bra-Tom went back to Dublin. Downton was all to herself, empty rooms and silent hallways.
Tonight, in the darkness of her bedroom, she let her mind wander to the pleasures her sisters had been initiated to, the mysteries she longed to unveil, fearing to ask, fearing to wish. She was jealous, she thought sadly, but only of a knowledge that was precluded to her. And yet it was her body that ached for it, something she itched to get for herself.
For the first time, she closed her eyes and let her mind stay vigil, as she had seen him – James, she tried on her tongue – do countless times. That's how you let imagination take control, that's how fantasy becomes your reality and you let it take the lead because that's how realities operate.
Her hands roamed on her body, lightly, tentatively, discovering.
At length she began what seemed a tale about herself, in a language so strange and in forms so shadowy that she would later wonder about the reality of this experience, knowing well that reality was undefined and indefinable. Her body was in two, ten, a hundred places and times. Her hands, James' hands, became bolder – any self-constraint (and fear, and shame, and clumsiness, and modesty) forgotten. One hand reached down, following the beating and the warmth spreading from there. She found a bundle of nerves, and stroke it with more pressure as, on their own volition, two fingers ventured further and into her. She was getting acquainted, she was saying goodbye, she was discovering and she was remembering as her palm covered her core, writhing under it.
James hands were warm, his long fingers calloused where the pen pressed on them, and almost always stained in ink.
She imagined that ink soaking in her skin, through her breast to her heart, marking her. She imagined getting a hold of the pen (never before in her hands, hers always a story told by others) and marking him, for he was hers as much as she was his, words flowing on his skin until the world slipped from her. A burning warmth spread from her belly as she felt it vibrating and liberating. Her toes curled in anticipation for a show she had never seen, the sensation both uncomfortable and exhilarating. Her soul laid naked, her spirit divided and one. She began to moan, then murmur as if holding a colloquy with a dividual self, until she surrendered to sensation and, with a last spasm, a cry dying in her throat, she collapsed on her bed (a renewed, solid presence), spent. The ghost of James' weight leaving her body, she fell back into her loneliness.
And yet she wasn't alone. She was her whole self, owner of her present, owner of her future, and suddenly it was enough – not to live for unmet expectations and old regrets; not to depend on rare admiration and cold judgments. She shut it out and sought this loneliness.
No one could tell the whole of her, none but herself.
She had loved without realizing it, and for the first time it didn't hurt.
It was the first Sunday of June. They stood side by side, facing the scenery that had changed with them, and considering the canvas in front of them. The painting was finished.
"What do you think?"
"It's not perfect."
"Nothing is."
He seemed satisfied with that, as he stepped behind the canvas, peering at its back. He then took his place by her side, studying the picture, frowning.
"You were not looking for a pencil sketch of yourself on the back, were you?"
"Didn't you know, I'm a romantic at heart. I'm not in the painting, I hoped I'd be hidden somewhere behind it. You know how writers think of themselves as the center of every possible world."
She smiles, because sometimes he's impossible, and she could never stand vanity until she met him.
"How could you be in it? You're by my side, out of the picture. That's where you belong."
"That's where I choose to be."
The silence that followed was loaded but not uncomfortable. The wind blew through her hair, and his hand brushed hers.
"I'm moving back to London."
He still stared at the canvas, his thumb on her wrist for a moment, and then away again, but close.
"Come with me."
She smiled at him, and he met her gaze.
She had been forced into prudence in her youth; she learned romance as she grew older. The natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.
He'd roll his eyes if he knew she'd been quoting Austen to herself, and her smile became wider. She nodded at him, and as he took her hand she posed her one condition:
"I'm driving."
And she did.
.
THE END
A/N: So. Writing this fanfiction was an unusual experience for me. Edith is a character I love, but have never written. I didn't exactly know where I was going with it, but I knew I wanted her to take possession of herself: her story, her body, her future. I hope it didn't come out as preposterous, or boring. I wondered whether I would've needed to highlight James' character more, but I wanted him to be a mystery. This was not a love story, this was not about him. It was her quest, her journey, and he was a passenger.
The Austen's quote Edith remembers of is from Persuasion. James looking for his pencil sketch on the back of the canvas is a reference to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, since I assumed they'd have insight jokes regarding the Bronte's sisters.
The title's comes from Anne Sexton's 'The Red Shoes'
I stand in the ring
In the dead city
And tie on the red shoes
They are not mine,
They are my mother's
Her mother's before,
Handed down like an heirloom
But hidden like shameful letters.
Please review, if you can. Being this fanfiction an experiment, I'm really unsure of its outcome and would love your opinions on it.