From the very first day she arrived, Ethel Parks knew there was something not quite right at Downton.
On the surface it was like every other posh household, only bigger than most and with a staff even more miserable than those she'd worked with before. But Ethel could feel something simmering beneath all of that, a sort of darkness fused with secrecy and if she could feel it, because she didn't care of a fig about the inner workings of Downton, just that it was one more step on the road to stardom, surely everybody else could?
But the second thing she noticed was that the staff, and the family, was curiously tight lipped. She'd never met a single person who didn't like a good gossip, but this house was the one exception. The younger ones weren't quite as bad – you got the sense they only kept their mouths shut to avoid a tongue-lashing from the housekeeper – but the older ones were hiding something, some big juicy secret she was determined to get her hands on and exploit, and why not? Ethel didn't want to waste her life at Downton, she deserved more, and if she had to stamp on the Crawley's to get it she would – use before you get used, that had always been her motto.
She applied herself in the meantime, besting Anna at every opportunity. She'd been head housemaid herself after all, she could fluff a pillow with the best of them and certainly better than the smiley blonde who would probably be much better at her job if she took her eyes off Mr. Bates for more than five minutes – now that was a man with a secret if she'd ever seen one before. There were others too. It didn't take her long to gather a list of suspects in the mystery that became even more thrilling to her day by day. Mr. Carson, Miss O'Brien, Lord Grantham himself – all fell under Ethel's suspicion, and she'd get them soon enough. But nobody would talk, let alone those she needed to talk, and she started to wonder whether there was some kind of curse on the house, like in some stupid fairytale, and once the spell was broken they'd all stop being such miserable, secretive sods. The war didn't make it any easier.
The only person that seemed to have any sense in the house was Her Ladyship, but she was a funny one too. She didn't seem the same as the rest of them, and not just because she was foreign; she was the only one of them that seemed to be living in the present and not haunted by the ghosts of yesterday. Yes! That was it. Ethel started to piece it all together in her mind – something had happened years ago, before the Countess had come along and only the older staff remembered what. And, whatever it is, it was big, a scandal she'd gleefully break and it was only a matter of time before somebody slipped.
There was only one thing she couldn't work out, something nobody seemed to know or refused to remember. It was the most enticing piece of the puzzle, locked away in Carson's pantry and glimpsed only rarely by those who had reason to be in there.
Ethel knew whoever the woman in the portrait was, she held the answers to everything.