AN: This chapter contains spoilers from the previews of 3:4. I have not seen the full episode, only the previews, so I might have got some things wrong.
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When he left the church, he was careful to keep a straight face. Holding back his tears until he was outside where no one could see him. He didn't want anyone to tell her that he had cried when he left her.
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After that he had spent his wedding night praying and crying.
Praying for Edith, as he had promised her to do. Praying for her to get over what he had done to her, to be able to be happy again. Praying for her to stop loving him. Praying for her to have a full life, to have a happy marriage to someone more suitable than he was, someone younger and healthier, someone who loved her just as much as he did. Praying for her to some day have some children.
He wasn't crying for Edith, though. Even if he was fairly certain that she was crying too, and that hurt to think about. But what he was really crying over was his own lost life. The life she had given back to him, the life he had thrown away.
He had been crying and he had been praying, but he hadn't been regretting. Because he was sure what he had done was right. As things had turned out he had done the only possible thing left for him to do.
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Just before morning came he suddenly happened to think of Larry Grey. And that was the first time Sir Anthony had had any regrets about what he had done to Edith. Grey was a young chap with his life ahead of him. Grey was a man with the use of both his arms. But still he was so definitely not what Anthony wanted for Edith.
Come to think of it, what he really wanted for her was someone very much like himself. An Anthony Strallan that was twenty or at least ten years younger and had two good arms. A man who loved Edith more than he loved himself. A man who was ready to sacrifice everything he had for her sake.
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The next morning Sir Anthony let the young girl they had hired as a lady's maid to Lady Edith go with half a year's wages. He could afford to be generous now, his estate was well kept and there was no chance he would ever have a family to support.
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As the days and weeks passed by he became more resigned to his fate. He sat in his library and went for long walks on his estate. He let his staff take care of all his contacts with the outside world, just like he had done during that first year after the war, when he had let no one know of his injury. The difference was that now he didn't get any invitations to turn down, not a single one.
That invitation for tea from old Lady Grantham had been the first he accepted since he came back from the war. He had seen no harm in it then, having a chance to talk about Edith with one of her relatives, but now he regretted going there. Even if it had been so lovely seeing Edith again. Even if it had led up to the happiest months of his life.
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He nearly choked on his tea when he was reading his paper one morning. Edith had written an article in the paper about women's suffrage! It was well-written and well-argued. He felt very proud that the intelligent young woman who had written that article had once loved him.
Before throwing away the paper that morning he cut out Edith's article and put it in the drawer where he kept the few things he had left from his courtship of her. Dinner-invitations to Downton, tickets for concerts and the theatre, among them the tickets to that concert in York. A couple of photographs. The few letters and notes she had sent him during their time together.
He took a very long walk in the fields that morning, it was a warm and sunny day. This was the first sign he had had that Edith was able to occupy her mind with things other than his abominable behaviour towards her.
He had, at last, a very unusual feeling of peacefulness.
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A couple of months later he got a letter from Edith, postmarked in London. It took him more than two days before he dared to open it. He even considered throwing it into the fire unopened, but at last his curiosity got the better of him.
Dear Anthony,
I write this from London, where I am going to stay for some time, maybe forever. I write because I want you to know that you can go out in the village and Ripon without the risk of meeting me.
I hope you read my article in the newspaper - in fact, knowing you, I know you read it - and I hope you liked it. I am in London because I have accepted to write a regular column in the paper. It will give me enough money to start living an independent life. Please be proud of me, because most of my relatives are not very proud of me at all.
As you can see I am trying to do what you wanted me to, get on with my life, and I think you ought to do the same.
I think what you did to me was wrong, but I have forgiven you. I know you didn't do it to hurt me. And I have not turned into a miss Havisham, because I know that you are so definitely different from the man who jilted her. I know you did what you did for my sake, because you thought it was best for me. But you were wrong. I am a grown up and have the right to make my own decisions and mistakes. The fact that you didn't let me do just that is perhaps a sign that our marriage might not have been very successful in the long run.
Don't answer this letter. What was between us is over, you have seen to that. I wish things had gone differently, but I still think you are the nicest man on earth.
Best regards,
Edith
He cried for the first time in weeks. He had accomplished what he wanted, she had managed to move on and away from him. Not in the way he had expected her to do, perhaps. But he was really proud of her, he had always known she was exceptionally intelligent, that was part of why he loved her so much.
Things were changing after the war, and it stung a bit that she didn't think he had cared enough about her opinion. She was right, of course, and he had been wrong letting her relatives decide what was best for her, instead of letting her do it herself.
He had always prided himself of being a modern man, and when it came to agriculture and new inventions he was just that.
But his private life he had conducted like the world hadn't yet left the Victorian era.
He had never felt older.
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AN: This is the end of this story. I wrote the last chapters to analyse and try to understand what JF did to this couple in 3:3. And I think I am a little better able to see what led up to it all now, although I still feel that it is very much out of character for Anthony.
The acting in Edith's and Anthony's wedding-and-after scenes in the series is so very good and heartbreaking. So in a way I really like those scenes. Which is a little difficult to admit, since I so desperately want this couple to be together.
And I guess you should not expect too much logic in the characters' behaviour in Downton. Downton is very much a part of the English tradition of Charles Dickens, with all its exaggerations, and not of the English tradition of Jane Austen, with the fine psychological nuances.
And happily ever after doesn't make very good television, which is amply proved in Downton by all boring Mary/Matthew scenes. There are good reasons why fairy tales usually end with the wedding!