Mr. Green
The whole business of Lord Gillingham's valet had disturbed him from the beginning. Such men, Mr. Carson thought, ought to be strung up, without appeal. The matter was a troubling one from any perspective, but it appalled him that such a crime had occurred at Downton and to someone he knew. These elements were unsettling enough, but there was something else again that preyed on his mind, and Sergeant Willis's return to the Abbey that afternoon brought it to the surface. Perhaps it was time to get to the bottom of this. And so he took his concerns to Mrs. Hughes's sitting room, as he often did at the end of the day.
"What's wrong?" she asked, turning from her desk where she had just made a final entry in her logbook. There were so many signs that something was amiss. He had knocked, entering as he did so, then collapsed heavily into his usual chair as if carrying a great burden, and he had brought no sherry, or anything else, with him. It must be something big, she thought, as she moved over to sit opposite him at the side table.
He didn't quite know how to put it. "Nothing wrong, exactly. It's just that I don't know that I've ever heard the whole story about Anna and ... well, what happened," he said carefully.
"What's brought this up?"
He sighed. "Oh, the endless police parade."
Well, she understood that. "Do you really want to know?"
He didn't. But what he wanted and what was necessary were often two different things. "I think I'd like to know why Scotland Yard is so persistent in their inquiries with regard to Anna. And I'm not asking you to betray a confidence. The thing is in the public domain now."
She knew it wasn't prurient interest on his part and thought perhaps there was an argument to be made that he should have all the facts, as they existed. So she told him. The house party. Dame Melba's concert. Anna and Mr. Green downstairs. And the aftermath. Anna in her sitting room, begging for her help, petrified lest Mr. Bates find out.
"And you did help her."
"I did. I found her a dress to wear. I made excuses for her to Mr. Bates. And I tried to comfort her, as much as it was possible to do in those circumstances." This was not a memory she liked to revisit and yet it would not go away.
"And ... how did that work?"
There was an odd note in his voice and Mrs. Hughes did not quite know what to make of it. "Well, it was a ... bit of trouble keeping Mr. Bates out of it."
"But he did find out. How was that?"
His questions rattled her. The deliberate way he was eliciting information reminded her of that highly unpleasant experience she'd had of cross-examination in Mr. Bates's trial for the murder of his wife. She squirmed a little. "I told him," she admitted. "He made me do so!" she added sharply, not quite sure why she felt defensive before that guarded look on his face. "He said he'd leave Downton and Anna if I didn't tell him. So I did."
It had been a very difficult conversation, first trying to resist Mr. Bates's demands for the truth and then actually telling him what had happened. It was always going to be awkward, but she couldn't anticipate the depths of his anguish until she'd seen it. He didn't cry in front of her, although he cried later - she'd heard him in the passage - but tears were not necessary to convey his grief to her there in that moment.
"And then he brooded around here for weeks and then finally gave some thought to killing the man, only persuading himself at the last minute that he could not do so."
That wasn't quite how she would have put it, although Mr. Bates had done just that."Well, he didn't, and that's the important thing. And he made it up with Anna, too, which went a long way to helping her to heal." She sighed with relief. There. He knew it all now.
"You think that, do you?"
"What?"
"That those were the important things? That Mr. Bates didn't in fact kill Mr. Green? That he and Anna recovered from it as a couple?"
It was one of those situations where the questions were set up to elicit a 'yes' answer when it was perfectly obvious that the correct answer, or the one he thought correct, should be 'no." She frowned at him. He'd asked to hear what happened and she'd told him, expecting his great heart to be overcome with grief for Anna and bittersweet gladness that love had triumphed between those star-crossed lovers once more. But he was staring at her with the least sympathetic look she'd seen on his face since she'd asked him to include Mrs. Patmore's nephew's name on the war memorial.
Mr. Carson was not as hard-hearted as his officious manner made him appear. In fact, the more he knew about this incident, the more distraught he became. It was only through the long-practiced habit of emotional reserve that he'd been able to contain himself thus far, and he did not think that could last much longer.
"What are you getting at?" Mrs. Hughes asked, almost irritably. Mr. Carson was behaving oddly and she did not like it. Had she ever seen him like this?
"How could you have been so foolish?" He spoke in a low voice, and the expression on his face was one of disbelief.
She only heard one word. "I beg your pardon!" she said indignantly, flaring right up. No one called her foolish and got away with it, least of all him.
He wasn't at all affected by her reaction. "Foolhardy, then," he said sharply. "Reckless. Senseless. Not to mention inconsiderate, negligent." He offered these words up to clarify his meaning. Once he got going he realized his concerns were manifold and all of them were serious.
Was it shock he felt? Anger? Astonishment? Was it necessary to name all the feelings churning through him?
Mrs. Hughes was stunned. Was this her Mr. Carson? The man who professed to love her? Whose eyes so often spoke of his adoration for her? As far as she could see, it wasn't even Mr. Carson, the formal butler of Downton Abbey. "I don't know where that's coming from, Charles Carson, but if I were you I'd start apologizing fast, and close the door behind yourself when you're finished!" Never, in all her born days, had anyone directed such a litany of pejoratives at her. When he did not move, but continued to stare at her with such a profoundly disdainful look, she stood up. "I think you'd better leave."
"And go where?" He spoke with an unsettling calm, something that took all his self-control to assert. But he stood up, too. "This is a conversation that we need to have."
"Not while you're addressing me with such terms, Mr. Carson!"
He took a deep breath and nodded. "You're right. Names or, rather, adjectives, are useless. Let me put instead a question. Please," he added, gesturing to their chairs once more. "We need to talk about this." With some reluctance, she returned to her chair, and after a moment's hesitation, he did, too. But he did not sit, as he often did, with his back to the wall, turning instead that he might rest his forearms on the table and look directly at her. And when his eyes took in the form of the woman there before him, the woman he loved more than anyone in the world, and he thought about the incident they were discussing, he could only shake his head in stunned disbelief.
"What on earth were you thinking of in colluding in such a conspiracy of omission?"
Despite his calm, there was a hard core to his words. She couldn't remember his ever speaking so severely. She was astonished at his lack of understanding. Clearly she had to put it to him more bluntly. Now she turned to face him, learning over the table toward him herself.
"Anna had been ... assaulted in the most ... heinous manner! I did what I could to help and protect her in those circumstances, and I am more than surprised at your insensitivity to all of this, Mr. Carson!"
"That's just it," he said coolly, not engaging with her on emotional level. "You didn't help and protect Anna. And in the process of not helping her, you were negligent in your duties and you put this entire house at risk."
Oh, the blessed house! "I don't suppose a woman's reputation and peace of mind means anything to you next to the reputation of Downton Abbey!" she said crossly. "I would've thought you'd want to hush up such a thing for the benefit of your precious house!" Apparently he wasn't going to leave until they'd had this out, so she turned away from him again.
He frowned at her, not understanding why it was she did not comprehend his concerns. "The house has no meaning here in that way, Mrs. Hughes. The important thing is the people who live in this house. And by your actions you put a large number of people - women - upstairs and down in danger. And why? To help and protect a single woman. You are the housekeeper of Downton Abbey and an intelligent and level-headed member of society. Your duty in this case was clear."
"And that was?" she demanded defiantly, glaring at him. All she could see was Anna's bruised and tear-stained face, and the thought that Mr. Carson could be so callous ... Well, he hadn't been there, had he? If he'd only seen her for himself, then he would have ... "I suppose I should've summoned the men of the house and pleaded for protection! As if between you, you and Lord Grantham could have handled the whole situation!"
He took a deep breath. She was trying to provoke him, and though he could be led by his emotions, especially where she was concerned, he called upon his capacity for self-discipline to maintain an air of calm. "It was your duty to call the police."
His words intruded upon her and she growled in exasperation. "Anna was completely against it. She was hysterical with terror, Mr. Carson," she said, with a frosty note in her own voice. "She did not want ... what had happened ... to become public knowledge, both for her own sake and for Mr. Bates, and I agreed with her completely."
"Obviously," he said drily. "But a crime is not a matter for personal opinion, Mrs. Hughes. It is an offense against society. You cannot just hide it like a broken toy and hope it will go away."
It was not often that Mr. Carson held his temper and she lost hers, but this was a matter that could not be discussed with equanimity, and the fact that he was still so calm was an indication that he did not understand at all and clearly never would. "You are trivializing a very important matter, and I'm quite sure I don't want to have any more discussion on this topic!" She didn't know whether she was more angry or shocked at his relentless lack of sympathy. "It was an excruciatingly personal matter, and if Anna did not want to make it public, that was her choice."
"You are wrong," Mr. Carson said firmly. "And so was she." He ignored the indignation in her face and pressed ahead. "It was natural for Anna to feel the way she did and to want to hide her ... shame – I say that from her perspective," he added quickly. "It does not reflect my view of a woman who has been so abominably ... violated. And only natural, too, for her to be concerned about Mr. Bates's reaction, given his history. No woman, and no man either, can be trusted to act rationally in such circumstances." He paused. Though it might not be apparent to Mrs. Hughes, he had a tremendous empathy both for Anna as the victim of the attack and for Mr. Bates in his helplessness to protect her. He took a deep breath and focused on Mrs. Hughes once more. "That is why it was all the more essential for you to act responsibly. You let them down, Mrs. Hughes. You let us all down."
"What would you know!" she said scathingly. "You weren't there."
Mr. Carson did not want to persist with this conversation. It could not end well with regard to his relationship with Mrs. Hughes. She could not help but be angry with him and he had a very low tolerance for her disapprobation. But neither could he ignore the imperatives of his decades in service and the responsibilities that had come with his position as the senior staff member in the house. No matter what one's personal feelings, it was necessary to do the right thing for the community, even at the expense of the individual. Furthermore, he was astounded that she should connive to conceal a crime of such magnitude.
"I don't have to have been there to know what the right thing to do was. When you chose not to contact the police, you let a criminal go free, imperiling the safety of every other woman in this house on his return visits, not to mention the women everywhere else the vile man went. We know that Anna was not an anomaly. We know that there were other victims. You had the opportunity to put a stop to that by bringing his actions to the attention of the authorities. Even had he not been successfully prosecuted - and I understand that ... charges ... of that nature are very difficult to prove - his general society would have been alerted to his predatory nature. It would have been more difficult for him to ply his habit in the future. At the very least, Lord Gillingham would have discharged him, thus eliminating some opportunities for his despicable pursuits."
"But..."
He didn't allow her to interrupt. "And there is the matter of the Bateses themselves. First of all, Mr. Bates had a right to know what had happened to his wife. Again, her judgment was understandably confused, but you ought to have known better. And..."
"She was afraid Mr. Bates would kill him, Mr. Carson! She couldn't take the chance of him learning of ... it ... and risking being hanged!" What was wrong with the fool that he did not understand that?!
But Mr. Carson went on tenaciously. This was something about which he felt passionately, although it had only just come to him. "Mr. Bates would have been beside himself, as any man would be. But he still had a right to know. There are things that you can't keep from the people you love, Mrs. Hughes. If someone means something to you at all, then you must share both your sorrows and your joys. Else your relationship with them is not what you think."
He had called them back, inadvertently, to the time when she'd had that cancer scare and hadn't confided in him about it. They had both endured their own agonies waiting out the test results on that one, she in her self-imposed isolation and he in an affected ignorance of her trial. She didn't think she'd been in the wrong there. That episode had revealed the changing nature of their relationship, but it would have been quite inappropriate for her to have presumed that fact ahead of the experience. Although he recognized it as a watershed moment as well, he felt the confidence of it would have made their relationship.
"Much damage might have been averted by honesty. Knowing that Mr. Bates knew, the local police here and we ourselves could have helped monitor him until his equilibrium returned, as it would have done. As it did. Knowing that Mr. Bates knew, the vile valet himself might have been more circumspect in his behaviour. It is almost never a good ideal to conceal..."
"He knew that I knew," she broke in. She was determined to derail his indictment in one way at least.
Mr. Carson was distracted. "Who did? Mr. Bates?"
"Well, yes, he did, too. But also Mr. ... the valet. I told him that I knew, that Mr. Bates did not as yet know, and that if he knew what was good for him, he'd watch his step." It was a satisfying memory. She'd confronted him, told him she knew exactly what had happened, and wouldn't let him get away with it when he tried to suggest that Anna had been a willing participant. Mr. Carson was trying to make them, she and Anna, out to be helpless women. Well, she had never been helpless in her life and the man hadn't frightened her either.
The silence from across the table caught her attention and she looked up to see Mr. Carson staring at her in slack-jawed horror. She had derailed him, but not as she had intended. This information had shaken him from the more aloof perspective of responsible household manager and brought it all down to the most personal level again. She had confronted the man herself!
"What?" she asked, a little belligerently, noting the stricken look that came over him.
He put a hand to his face, as if taken with a sudden headache. Not looking at her, he said, in a low voice, "You approached a man whom you knew to have violently attacked ... raped...," he used the verb deliberately, as distasteful as it was to say it, for shock value, "...Anna, and you confronted him with his crime."
"I did," she responded defiantly. "He needed to know he hadn't gotten away with it."
He almost laughed, but of course it was anything but a laughing matter. And now he did look up at her, incomprehension edging out the anguish this conversation had stirred in him. "But he did get away with it, Mrs. Hughes. You and Anna together, although more of the responsibility lies with you, did let him get away with it. And as for confronting him, all that did was let him know that his secret was, indeed, safe with you. That wasn't a deterrence. It probably emboldened him."
"And then there is the matter of your own safety." His practiced self-discipline made it possible for him to keep the trembling in his heart from his voice. "Did you have no concern for that?"
She waved dismissively. "I spoke to him in broad daylight, in the boot room, with two dozen people up and down the passage. What was he going to do to me?"
He raised an eyebrow. Wasn't it obvious?
This elicited an impatient sound from her. "He wasn't going to ... do that... to me. I'm not a vulnerable young woman."
She was so sure of herself, so completely oblivious to the dangers of this whole situation to all of the women in the house including herself. He did not understand her perspective on this.
"You are mistaken, Mrs. Hughes. Sexual allure, youth, vulnerability, these are not the things that make a man like that behave as he does, except in so far as such targets enhance the ... the thrill of the ...er... act. This is about power, not ... ." He almost said sex, but that seemed too vulgar a word to use in a conversation with Mrs. Hughes. "...erm...intimate relations."
The conversation, already an unpleasant one, had taken a highly uncomfortable turn for Mr. Carson. He had begun to muse of late, with increasing frequency as their wedding grew nearer, about the idea of physical intimacy with the woman who sat before him now. But his conception of relations between husband and wife was of something beautiful, almost sacred, and he recoiled from Mr. Green's too-near proximity to his own intimate life and to the woman at the centre of it.
"I didn't realize you were so knowledgeable about these matters," she said coolly, breaking in on his thoughts.
He gazed at her for a long moment. "I am a man, Mrs. Hughes. I know the creature from the inside. And ... although I have spent much of my life here in the cloistered halls of Downton Abbey, I am not quite the naif you seem to think me." He spoke quietly.
They were now treading on the rim of an entirely different conversation, one that they had never had, or come close to having, regarding their own personal histories. He had no desire to have that conversation hard on the heels of this one.
"The point is," he went on hurriedly, "that a man like that would hardly have hesitated to use violence or ... force ... against you to keep you quiet. Or merely to assert his dominance over you. You took a grave risk."
"Well, nothing happened."
"No, nothing happened. We can be grateful for that."
It seemed the anger on both sides was spent. They both leaned back against the wall, staring across the room at nothing in particular so long as it was not each other.
Mrs. Hughes was shaken to her foundations. They'd had their disagreements, she and Mr. Carson, but never like this. They had taken opposing positions on a most serious matter and to her surprise, Mr. Carson had stuck to his views even in the face of her vigorous defense. He'd rebuked her occasionally over the years on professional matters, when she did not meet some arbitrary standard of house stewardship, which was practically the only issue on which he took a defense-to-the-death stance. But in more personal matters, while they might disagree without resolution - as in the matter of Mrs. Patmore's nephew - he had at least seemed distressed at crossing her. There was no semblance of regret in him about any aspect of this confrontation, however. That fact alone made her think.
Mr. Carson felt his heart racing. There was almost nothing he dreaded more, these days, than the idea of falling afoul of Mrs. Hughes. Did he imagine that she would stop loving him if they were not always on the same side? No. It was more that he thought they should always be able to find a common path because they did mean so much to each other. He did not feel comfortable going anywhere without her. But he could not agree with her on this. The story alarmed him as the butler of Downton Abbey, a position that made him responsible for the welfare of its inhabitants upstairs and down. It also frightened him to think that all the women in the house, some of whom to which he was more attached than others, had been at risk, especially as the man had returned to Downton at least twice after assaulting Anna. And it terrified him that Mrs. Hughes had confronted the brute. All this was important, and yet over everything else was a fundamental premise of law and order, that when a crime was committed, it must be reported. If she did not share this perspective with him, then they parted ways on a very critical matter.
He got to his feet and moved over to stand in front of her, silently cursing as he did so the restrictions that made it impossible for him to do what he really wanted to do, which was pull her into his arms.
"I'm sorry," he said.
This drew her attention at once. "What for?" She'd lost her belligerence. Now she was just confused.
"I'm sorry for the manner in which I've just spoken to you," he said. "I'm sorry for abusing you instead of explaining to you without recourse to name-calling. I was angry and frightened, and I let my feelings get the better of me. Please forgive me."
She stared at him, finding his contrition almost as startling as the things for which he was asking forgiveness. "I don't know but I should be the one apologizing, Mr. Carson. You've given me something to think about." She paused. "It may even be that you have a point."
He recognized a strategic retreat when he saw one and chose not to press the issue. "I know that you care for Anna, Mrs. Hughes. I know that you were only motivated by the best of intentions."
"Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say," she said quietly, looking away from him and feeling not a little sheepish. How had she let that man back into the house knowing what he had done? She still wasn't prepared to concede her own vulnerability where the vile creature was concerned, but there had been other susceptible women in the house and she had not done all she could to protect them.
Now, he smiled a little. "I don't think you've got quite that far, Mrs. Hughes." He stepped more closely to her and reached out to take the hand that lay listlessly on the table. It was getting late and he could not part from her in this way. "Come," he said.
The fight was gone out of her now and she didn't have the energy to resist, so she followed him. He put his head out the door of the sitting room to see if anyone was about. She might have rolled her eyes at his furtiveness had she been in any mood for amusement. Instead, she stepped into the passage at his signal, pausing while he switched off the light and closed the door to her office. It was later than she'd thought, their conversation having gone on interminably. Somewhat to her surprise, he did not relinquish her hand as he led her to the stairs. They met no one as they ascended to the landing where the stairs divided to the separate entrances to the male and female servants' quarters above. There he paused and she looked up at him.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked, the troubled currents in his eyes making plain his concern.
She sighed and reached up to stroke his cheek with her free hand. "Oh, Charlie. I'll not tell you you're right about everything, or anything for that matter, not until I've thought about it. But I think there may be more right on your side than mine."
He put a quieting finger to her lips. "Let's not go through it again, love," he said softly.
"Come here, then," she said and she slid her hand around the back of his neck and leaned up to kiss him.
He met her halfway and put an arm around her, pulling her against him. They kissed and then he released her hand and held her more closely for a long moment.
"It frightens me," he murmured in her ear, resisting the temptation to take a tantalizing ear lobe in his teeth.
She did not know about his distractions. "That whole business?" she asked, responding to his words.
"No," he said. "How much I love you."
It occurred to her to say that there were many things in the world more frightening than great love, but she bit back the words because she thought she understood what he meant. She tightened her arms around him.
"I know what you mean, my love."