Thanks as ever for the reviews! And thank you to mygirl1987 for the notes on the Irish language- I really appreciate it! It's Gaeilge from here on out.
Just one quick note: The timeline in the show makes no sense to me, so I'm using my own dates for 2x07/2x08.
Next stop, Scotland ;)
"I do."
"I do."
She does? She does.
Holy hell.
Sybil checked in at the hospital, with apologies for being a few minutes late, and spent the next two hours making rounds and tending to needs of the soldiers dropping off to sleep. By two-thirty, all was quiet and she took a seat the podium desk towards the door to the main room. Normally, the night nurse was tasked with trying to work through the mound of paperwork that piled up during the days when there wasn't a minute to spare- patient folders, medical records, reports to and from military headquarters, inventory, letters begging for more medicine, supplies, and manpower. Tonight, though, there was little in the inbox. The inventory was up to date, with morphine and iodine still in stock (that was something she hadn't seen since she started working). It was just as well; she couldn't focus on anything except four months.
Four months. At most.
Would all this really be decided by Christmas? Could she really imagine waking up Christmas morning in another country? In a flat in a city, in Dublin? She didn't know anything about Dublin, this place that could soon be her home. Maybe it wouldn't be a flat in the city, but a little house outside, maybe even by the sea. But then, what if Tom can't find work and she has no dowry and no one will hire her because she's not a real nurse and English aristocracy to boot. It's too much to think about.
Someone groaned from across the room. She snapped back to the present and made an easy decision: I need to be here for as long as I'm here.
He knew in his heart that it was true; he had known for some time. But he was never sure that she would admit it. And as the months- years- dragged on, he had started to doubt: maybe there was an affection, an attraction, love even, but he was just the chauffeur and she would have to be utterly, completely mad to surrender all she had been born into for him. But those doubts were no match for the echoes of that night:
"Tá grá agam duit."
"I do."
But days went by, then a week, then another week. No visits. She had completely vanished. Had she changed her mind? Maybe she had just gotten caught up in the moment and in the sober light of day realized she had made a huge mistake. Or had she intended it as a kiss off? A way to break the fall, a kind of consolation prize for two years of unrequited love that was destined to remain unrequited?
She did have the most empathetic heart and an affinity to impossible causes; it was one of the things he loved best about her.
September 1918
Then one afternoon she appeared, out of the blue, making small talk about engines, as if no time had passed at all. She became defiant when he commented on her rather conspicuous absence, argued with his assumption, and he was surprised to see a new sense of self- of surety- in her voice, her posture, the way she stepped towards him, up to him, even when he tried to stepped away.
"Just a few more weeks... So will you wait?"
He had never been happier to be wrong in his whole life.
She couldn't stay, she had to get back to work. But she did tell him, as she was leaving, that it's hard to think about Ireland; she's never even seen a photograph.
November 1918
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, the Great War limped to a finish. The papers that week showed photos of civilian celebrations in the streets of London, in Paris, in New York; for the first time in his adult life, he had no desire to read them. Sybil picked up the discarded Tuesday edition off the workbench and stared at the front page for a long minute. "Champagne," she commented with disgust. "Good God." She thew it back down.
He recalled a conversation between them in January, when he had very excitedly relayed that none other than President Woodrow Wilson was calling on the American Congress to approve suffrage for women and what an ally to have in the cause, and she had somewhat mildly shrugged it off, invoking that old canard about unity in a time of war. "Let me ask you something," he had challenged her at the time. "Do you think, if women had the vote, we would be in this war?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"If all the mothers and grandmothers, all the wives and fiancees and sweethearts and nurses, if they all had a say, if every politician's future employment depended on them, would we be in this war?"
"Your point, please."
"My point is that, in my opinion, we most certainly would not. And whenever someone says put we have to put politics aside for the good of the country, it probably means for the good of the people in power. Because it's only ever the people in power who say that."
She contemplated it for a moment before responding sharply, though without judgment, "It's possible. But who's seen more of this war, you or me?"
That had shut him up. He still believed in the truth of his proposition, but he suspected both their viewpoints had evolved somewhat out of that exchange.
That was the first of many old memories that sneaked up on him in the weeks he waited for her answer. Some prescient part of his brain had already begun packing up his past at Downton and reorganizing his memories involving Sybil from a work story to a love story; embedded in all the discrete, secret experiences they had accumulated in the past few years were lessons they would need to know to be good partners and friends and lovers to each other in the future.
Time became even more fluid after the end of the war. He got caught in another memory after breakfast, when Mr. Carson came to hand out the post.
"Mr. Branson, there's a letter for you." Mr. Carson passed it across the table and in front of the wandering eyes of the terrible two.
"Russia?" O'Brien announced to the table. "And just who do you know in Russia?"
"You working for the Bolsheviks?" Thomas chimed in. "Some kind of dirty spy? I might have guessed." He was even more bitter after the war, if that were possible, Branson thought.
He rolled his eyes and collected his letter and newspaper. Jane, who was seated next to him, exclaimed, "They've the same name!" She moved her index finger between the return address on the envelope and the byline of the front-page story about the teetering Russian All-Provisional Government. "Boggs and Boggs." Branson nudged her toward the connection with a look. "Oh!" she understood. "Gosh, a letter from a newspaper writer. And addressed to you personally!"
"A man of the world we are now, are we?" O'Brien glowered, as Branson got up to leave. "If that's true, what on earth are you doing here then?"
He answered her with a smile. That, he had to admit, was a very good question indeed.
The second letter from Boggs was short and succinct and included the name and address of a former university chum who was now a deputy editor at the second-largest paper in Dublin, seeing as Tom Branson was Irish and, evinced by his letters, full of thoughts on the revolution now gripping his own country. "Send some samples to him, I've written ahead and told him to expect a letter from you." If Boggs had any trepidation about him being in service and lacking a university education, he didn't say so. Tom scribbled a note of profuse thanks in reply (although he still didn't believe it would amount to anything) and set to work on a new round of sample clippings.
He found it hard to concentrate, not usually a problem he had. But as he thought about Ireland, he kept flashing back to his first weeks in England, when he was looking for employment, living in a boarding house with a bunch of other immigrants and British nomads, and he had come back one night talking of a promising interview he had had with a Lord Grantham that afternoon.
The acquaintance, who was Welsh and whose name escaped him now, took a long drag of his cigarette and asked, "So he's got three daughters of age?"
"Yep."
"They pretty?"
"The one I saw was." Lady Mary, the eldest. "But they all look rather fine from the pictures on the table."
The Welshman burst out laughing. "Why in the hell would a Lord hire a young Irish rogue like you to drive around his pretty daughters?"
"You're right," he conceded with a chuckle. "He probably won't."
The next day he learned he had gotten the job.
What if he hadn't? Where would his life be now?
He couldn't begin to imagine. Which must mean it was never supposed to be any other way, he thought with a smile. He picked up his pen, ready now to write about Ireland, if not quite yet about its politics.
A few nights later, for the first time since the end of the war, she was able to visit after dinner.
They had taken all those late-night bull sessions in the garage for granted; "work" was the world's broadest and most effective alibi for anyone at the house who wanted to know where she was going to or coming from, she just lied her way around it and for two years, no one (well, except for Lady Mary) was the wiser.
The end of the work meant the end of the alibi. He resigned himself to evenings actually spent tinkering with the car until he was called to drive the Dowager Countess home; usually, by the time he returned, the light in Sybil's room was on, and he knew he could head back to his cottage because she wouldn't be coming by tonight. Neither of them was taking well to the forced separation; the slight nods of acknowledgement and barely-there smiles when they passed each other around the estate were downright excruciating. It was actually worse to see each other than not.
After two weeks, she had had enough apparently; he heard her footsteps on the gravel outside as he was changing the oil and smiled- sneaky!- wondering how she had managed to engineer a visit tonight. He turned round from the motor and whoa.
The end of the work also meant the end of the shapeless, gray uniform and its equally unflattering cap and while he admired all it stood for, he couldn't deny that his stomach was on the floor as she stepped into the garage in one of those outfits from the old days, with the bows and the baubles and all that. She seemed sort of embarrassed to be dressed so fancy, but pleased to see him admiring her. It struck him how completely that had changed from years ago.
She quickly explained that the clothes were old, she had to wear them out, seeming to want to assure him she hadn't reverted to dress fittings and frivolity. She wanted to know where he had been all day. She said it so urgently that he wondered if she had made up her mind. Ah, of course not; he was just being frightfully full of himself, as usual.
But then, to his surprise, she reached up and touched his cheek and looked into his eyes for a long while. When her hand dropped softly, he caught it in his. "I have something for you," he said, leading her over to the table, where he retrieved a brown leather-bound notebook, which he handed to her.
"What's this?"
"You said you've never seen a picture of Ireland. I don't have any photographs, and I've no artistic talent, but I wrote down what I remember. Maybe it will be helpful." She started to open it, but his hand closed over hers. "It's late," he cautioned.
"I know," she sighed. "I should probably be getting back. Except I don't want to."
She lingered there for a moment. "You have what I wrote you," he encouraged. "It'll almost be like I'm there."
Now, it was her turn to give him a once-over. "Oh, no it won't," she said in a way that left no question as to the difference and left.
Back in her room, in bed, she opened the notebook and started to read:
"The first thing you see on the boat ride west is not Dublin, but the peninsula of Howth- all mossy crags and rust-colored rock, cliffs tumbling into the sea. You can climb them (it's a short trip from Dublin proper) and when you stand atop them, surrounded by nothing but clouds, you feel higher and freer than you ever thought possible, completely alone in the world, which should be terrifying except it's strangely not..."
In neat, even script, on page after page, he walked her with words through his country, from the docks where the boat from Liverpool would arrive, through the neighborhoods where a nice young couple might inquire about a flat and where the hospitals were located, into the shops on the thoroughfare (noting, without comment, that two of them were bridal shops), along the grass at St. Stephen's Green and the banks of the river. Vivid recollections of wet stone streets and afternoon sunlight cutting through clouds, of seals that lapped on the shore, and eccentric characters from his childhood, priests (lots of priests) and older folks who ran pubs and curiosity shops, of making the trek west to see the cliffs that held off the Atlantic Ocean.
It was well into the next day before she fell asleep, halfway through, somewhere between here and there.
Four months. At most.
She could hardly wait.