GETTING MARRIED

Chapter 11 The Ties of Family

Still Your Sister

Mrs. Hughes used her bedroom for sleeping and changing her clothes and little else. Occasionally, very occasionally, she tried to read a book after she'd gotten into bed, but as much as she enjoyed a good novel, reading usually led to sleep. She didn't know why she had a small writing table and chair in the corner of the room, given that she had a perfectly serviceable desk and more space in her sitting room below stairs, not to mention better lighting for correspondence. But she did know. In her letter-writing, as in almost everything else, Mrs. Hughes liked to separate her personal and professional lives and, however limited the former might be, she still preferred to accord it its own physical space.

She had sat at this desk to write letters to her mother, while her mother still lived. In more recent years, she had made out the monthly cheques to St. John's House and Refuge for the Mentally Deficient in Lytham St. Anne's for Becky's care. And she penned what letters she wrote to Becky herself from this small sanctuary as well.

She had two letters to write tonight and had excused herself from Mr. Carson's invitation for a sherry to do so. He'd been disappointed. It was their last opportunity to engage in this long-standing ritual as Mr. Carson the butler and Mrs. Hughes the housekeeper. Tomorrow night, as tradition - and superstition - demanded, they would not see each other at all, conventional wisdom holding that it was unlucky for a groom to set eyes on his bride the night before the wedding. She did not hold with such things, but Mr. Carson did, and they each had special arrangements that did not involve the other in any case. And then, the day after tomorrow, they would be married. They might still have a sherry together in the evening, as husband and wife, but there would no longer be restrictions on where and for how long they might be together. They could as easily have their drink in their own cottage before retiring - together - to their bedroom. Their bedroom. The thought sent a thrilled shiver up Mrs. Hughes's spine and she quite determinedly turned her attention to the task at hand and the letters that had caused her to put Mr. Carson off.

The first was the easier of the two, a formal notice informing the administration of St. John's House of the impending change in her personal status and that correspondence from her would henceforth bear the signature Mrs. Charles Carson.

She dwelt for a moment on how the nuns who ran St. John's House might receive the news. She had fancied, over the years, that she and the Sisters shared a bit of a bond in their celibate lives devoted to service, albeit to different masters. They had little enough in common otherwise. But now she was breaking faith with them. She thought they wouldn't really mind.

She also attached a cheque to the letter and paused for a moment over her name. Elsie Hughes. That was a more sobering consideration. She wanted to become Mrs. Charles Carson, with everything that entailed, but surrendering Elsie Hughes was still a bit of a challenge. That was who she was. And more, from now on the cheques would be drawn on a joint account that she would share with Mr. Carson and his money would help pay the costs, lessening her financial burden even as it imposed something of a personal one. In marrying her, Mr. Carson was taking on Becky as well. He did so with his eyes wide open and with a man's determination to attend to the needs of his family, but she chafed at the idea of placing this obligation on his shoulders, even if only in part.

The second letter was more complicated. Ever since Christmas Eve, Mrs. Hughes had been pondering how to tell her sister that she was getting married or whether to tell her at all. Becky would notice no difference, one way or the other. Mr. Carson would never become a reality to her. Although he had asked a few questions, expressed a polite interest, Mrs. Hughes was resolved to keep these aspects of her life, and these members of her family, apart.

But Becky was her sister and had as much right to know about this development in her life as anyone else did. More, in fact.

Dear Becky.

Becky could read and at slightly more than a basic level. That was Mam's doing, hours and hours of painstaking work. Literacy was, in Mam's mind, a critical skill, even for someone like Becky. Even if, in itself, it did nothing for her. Becky had never needed it for a job and did not enjoy reading for pleasure. But it was a marker that other people understood. It set Becky apart as teachable - educable was the word the schools used, those special schools that had begun to emerge in the late nineteenth century for people like Becky. Knowing how to read set Becky apart even now at St. John's House. Being literate secured her more respect.

Mrs. Hughes wrote to her once a month. Every letter struck that fine balance between keeping her sister up to date and falling short of overwhelming her. The letters were always brief. Too much text taxed Becky's attention span. She could read the words, but she didn't always want to make the effort. And her pride - because Becky was proud, too - led her to reject the Sisters' offers to read the letters to her. She often preferred the pictures her sister sent to her, cut-outs from discarded magazines. Becky favoured pictures of horses, flowers, and great houses. As magazines and appropriate pictures were hard to come by, they were always a particular treat.

Becky never wrote back.

I have some special news.

I am going to be married.

His name is Charlie Carson.

It will be like Mam and Dad, only it will be Elsie and Charlie.

She was hardly thinking of Mr. Carson by his first name in her own mind, let alone calling him Charlie, but somehow she thought it was the right name to use with Becky.

I have worked with him here at Downton Abbey for many years.

Charlie is a nice man. He is handsome. He has wavy black hair and big brown eyes.

He is the butler here and is a very respectable man.

She put that last line in for the Sisters. She knew that Becky would not be the only reader of this letter. It was a fact of life at St. John's House that everything that came from the outside, including personal letters and packages, were screened before delivery to the identified recipient. The Sisters claimed this was part of the careful scrutiny they provided as part of the welfare of every resident. Mrs. Hughes not convinced and she resented it.

Still, it was not as though she would be confiding in her sister about her marital apprehensions or her financial anxieties or any other personal issues anyway.

My name will be Mrs. Charles Carson now.

But I will still be Elsie to you.

And I will always be your sister who loves you so much.

She almost added that she would send Becky a piece of the wedding cake, but neither the promise to do so nor the cake itself would elicit the approval of the Sisters, so she forbore to do so.

That, she thought, was quite enough. She did not want to excite her sister's interest in the wedding itself, lest Becky get the notion that she was missing something and want to come. That was never going to happen and the Sisters would not thank Mrs. Hughes for the disruption even the thought of it might cause.

She signed the letter, With love and kisses from your big sister, Elsie xxoo.

Becky was the only person with whom she was ever so effusive.

As she sealed the letters in a single envelope, along with the cheque, it occurred to her that these were the only notices she needed to send out about her marriage. She had no friends or close relatives outside of Downton. There were a few cousins back in Scotland, but she hadn't kept in touch. Becky - or rather, reactions to Becky - had isolated her family even within kinship circles. Her mother had maintained connections because she continued to live among them. Mrs. Hughes had felt no such imperative. And she hadn't worked anywhere else in thirty years, which had taken a toll on associations she had made earlier. She supposed she might write and tell Joe Burns at some point, although what would be the purpose of that except possibly to hurt him.

As she set the envelop aside for mailing tomorrow, she pondered the lonely state in which she and Mr. Carson existed, neither of them with family to speak of. She had Becky to tell her news to. He had no one at all.

Your Loving Son

Mrs. Hughes had thought Mr. Carson alone in the world and she was right about it, although he did not see it quite that way.

On the ordinary occasions that he visited his parents' graves, he did so in silence. As he stood before the headstone in the church yard in Downton Village, tracing with his eyes their names etched in granite - Frank Carson, Margaret Carson (née Alderson) - he usually immersed himself in memories. Every time he came, he reached for something new, some fragment he had not focused on before, as well as a few more familiar ones, and in so doing over the years he had developed an archive of family recollections in his mind. If he had had children, he would have told them the stories of his parents and might even have written them down for future generations. In the absence of progeny, he had only himself for whom to keep these memories fresh and his mind was sufficient to that purpose.

But today was different. It was the morning - early morning - of the day before he was to be married. He had elected to rise earlier today and to come along to the church yard at this unaccustomed hour - mid-morning or early afternoon were his conventional times, when things eased up around the Abbey and he could run down to the village on business. Alone here now, without spectators to comment on his idiosyncracies, he did something he had never done before. He spoke aloud to his parents.

He wasn't one for conversations with spirits, but he did believe in the Afterlife. (The Afterlife, not an afterlife.) He had no certainty of what that Afterlife would look like, whether or not the dead assumed some corporeal form, but he believed they were somewhere, possibly nearby, and was confident that they would hear him somehow.

"Mum, Dad, I'm to be married tomorrow." He spoke softly but clearly, and to his surprise, did not feel a fool doing so. That suggested to him that it was the right thing to do. Nor did he question the logic that allowed for his parents to have some post-death presence and yet be in ignorance of the details of his life, as though they were confined to the limits of the church yard.

"That may surprise you," he went on. "I know it knocked the stuffing out of me. I'm still not quite sure I believe it."

"It's not what you expected for me, not what you did. But I think it's what you'd have hoped for. I'm marrying a good woman - her name is Elsie Hughes - and I'm marrying for love."

"There won't be children, of course, but I made that decision a long time ago. And it's been my experience that you don't have to have children to love them and be loved by them. Lady Mary's shown me that." Lady Mary had not been born when his mother died, and his father passed on without more than a glimpse of the child, but in the bizarre logic of this conversation he assumed they knew who she was. "And...I couldn't settle for less just...even to have a family."

"We won't have much time together. If I have any regrets at all, it would be that. But I'm not the same man I was ten years ago and we'll be better together for that. I'm a little less of a grump now, I think. And I know to make as much as I can with every day I do have with her. We none of us know how much time we've got, even when we're young. Look at Lady Mary and Mr. Matthew."

"I know you'd like Mrs. Hughes - Elsie - Elsie. I've lived in such a formal world for so long, it's difficult to get my tongue around her name. You'd both like her."

"She's got mischief in her, Mum, as you did. She's a spark." This had, on occasion, been an aspect of Mrs. Hughes that much exasperated him, but as he related it to his mother, he saw it as a virtue. "She makes me laugh as no one since you has done. She pokes fun at me, won't let me take myself too seriously. I...need that."

"And the whole downstairs revolves around her, Mum, just like our family did about you. I'm in charge, but she knows everything, and they all take their troubles to her. And she steadies me, too. She's seen me through sickness and sorrow and anxiety. And she leans on me, too." He'd seen how his parents had relied on each other and wanted to assure his mother that his marriage, too, would be one of give as well as take.

"We're not the same, but we're well matched."

His eyes rested on the dates of his mother's lifespan measured in mortal years: 1837-1880. Elsie was seventeen years older than his mother had been when she died, but he couldn't help but speak as though he were a young man introducing his girl to his mother for the first time. He was new to this, never having done it before. She'd known the girls in the village for whom he'd had a passing enthusiasm as an adolescent boy, and Alice had come after her death, and he'd never gotten near even the idea of bringing her home to meet his father.

"You'd like Elsie, too, Dad She's strong. You and I, we both like strong women. And she's a hard worker, and smart, too. She's...she's the kind you can share your life with, depend on. She doesn't give her heart easily, but when she does, she loves deeply. And she loves me."

He said that last with feeling, and with a slight sense of awe. He knew she loved him. He saw it in the way she was with him. The fact of it continued to thrill him.

"Elsie doesn't talk much, Dad. Like you. But I know that's only a disguise for her great heart. Because she is kind. She treats the downstairs staff, the young and the not-so-young, with the tenderness you used to show to the horses. She knows they're all individuals, that they're special in their own ways, and she takes that into account. Sometimes I forget that."

He looked out over the church yard to the eastern horizon and the sun now rising in the full bloom of morning and knew he had to be on his way. There was so much to do today.

"I hope we'll have the sun and warmth tomorrow," he said. "For Elsie. A wedding day should be perfect for the bride."

"Lady Mary wanted our reception to be in the Great Hall, and wouldn't that have been grand! But Elsie insisted it be in the schoolhouse, wanted it to be our day, and in the end I know that she was right."

"Mrs. Patmore's been in high dudgeon all week, which means the wedding breakfast will be wonderful. Her ill humour rises in direct proportion to the quality of the food she prepares. It's been a tempest in the kitchens, but it'll have been worth it." He'd had a lot more patience with Mrs. Patmore's temper these past few weeks, in part because he knew how much he and Elsie owed her, and also because he was well aware of the effort she was putting into their wedding feast.

"And...Lord Grantham's my best man, Dad! What do you think of that!"

His father had had a good working relationship with the late Earl, His Lordship's father. His Lordship had left a roomful of guests to visit his best groom on his deathbed. But they'd not been as close, could never have been as close as the current Earl of Grantham was with his butler. In this fanciful conversation, the son could not suppress the impulse to let his father know how far he had gone.

"And we'll have our own cottage on the estate after tomorrow. Well, after...our...the wedding trip." Inexplicably he felt a little self-conscious speaking of his honeymoon to his parents, even though they were dead.

And now he really had to go. "I've got everything I could ever want, Mum, Dad. But at the centre of it all is Elsie. It's beyond words, really, how I feel about her, about what a privilege it is to be marrying her. I've been blessed. And I'm grateful." He paused a moment more, remembering again how his parents were together. "Well," he said, "you know how it is."