Chapter Forty Eight
A Pair Of Blue Eyes
Seated side by side on the cracked brown leather seat in the rear of the growling motor cab on their somewhat later than anticipated journey back to the Shelbourne Hotel on St. Stephen's Green, if Mary thought Edith to be uncharacteristically quiet, then she made no mention of it. In fact, to be truthful, she said nothing whatsoever to her younger sister.
It was no secret among their immediate family that despite, or perhaps because of, being sisters so close in age, neither Mary, nor Edith, liked each other that much; that there was certainly no real love lost between them. These days, the very best that could be said of their relationship was that since the war had ended, in the spirit of the times, Mary and Edith, metaphorically speaking, had signed their own particular Armistice; reached a tolerable modus vivendi for the sake of close family members - granny, Papa, Mama, and Sybil - taking pains also to ensure that they presented a united front to outsiders, and were equally careful, for the sake of harmony, to do their very best to maintain a wary tolerance of each other's continued existence, but nothing more than that.
For her part, despite all that had happened to them today, Edith took no notice of Mary either; nor did she herself attempt to engage her elder sister in any kind of conversation. Lost in her own thoughts, Edith gazed silently out through the window of the chugging motor cab. With unseeing eyes she saw the ornate lamps gracing the balustrades of the O'Connell Bridge, the imposing granite façade of Trinity College, the ever present blur of dark clad pedestrians and khaki clad British soldiers on the pavements of Dublin, the imposing front of the Mansion House which Tom had pointed out earlier to them from the upper deck of the tram, and the brightly lit shop fronts lining Dawson Street, before the motor cab swung onto the north side of St. Stephen's Green and drew gently to a stand outside the shattered grandeur of the ground floor of the magnificent red brick Shelbourne Hotel.
Was it possible that she could be mistaken?
Seated there in the darkness in the rear of the cab on their return journey to the hotel, after her moment of seemingly blinding revelation which had happened when she had been observing Sybil caring so tenderly for Tom, dressing his cuts and bruises so solicitously, back in the sitting room of her and Mary's suite, Edith now began to have serious doubts about what she had seen.
After all, was it really likely to be the case that darling Tom and the beaten, bloodied young boy she had glimpsed but briefly all those years ago lying on the cobbled yard of the stable yard at Skerries House were one and the same? Now that she thought more about it, Edith seemed to recall someone saying at the time that the boy was a distant relative of the family, but if so he had not been introduced to them, nor had appeared at tea or at dinner whilst they had been there. So that in itself seemed unlikely. Edith herself knew nothing of the family who then owned the house, for all she knew, they still did. But of course … She smiled inwardly to herself. She knew someone who undoubtedly would: granny. And she would ask her about that directly when both she and Mary returned to England after Tom and Sybil's wedding.
Thinking back again to what she herself had seen in the stable yard at Skerries, Edith could vividly remember the injured boy impatiently pushing back his mop of tousled blond hair from off his forehead just as darling Tom had done but a few hours ago, lying on the settee in their sitting room in the Shelbourne Hotel. Edith had also been struck by the boy's vivid blue eyes, something which he also undoubtedly shared with dearest Tom. And when darling little Sybil had said to the lad in the stable yard that he looked a mess, what was it the boy had said by way of reply?
"Don't I just" he answered with a lop-sided grin. And what was it Sybil had said to Tom earlier – that he looked a mess. And what had Tom replied?
"Don't I just" he had answered and ... with the very same endearing lop-sided grin.
But was that enough? Or was she herself just being whimsical?
After all, from time to time, in the British newspapers, there were reports that one or other of the five children of the late Tsar Nicholas II and his wife the Tsarina Alexandra had somehow contrived to escape the bloody hands of their murderers and so survive the massacre of the Imperial Family at Ekaterinburg in July 1918. Papa had scoffed indignantly at the reports, and to Edith herself they sounded too fanciful for words, even if in her heart she wished the fate of those five innocent children to have been anything otherwise than what it had undoubtedly been.
Surely, if she was right in her surmise, then given how close Sybil and Tom undoubtedly were, then darling Sybil would have realised something too. But, that apparently was not the case. And yet for all her nagging doubts, Edith knew she was right. So, what should she do? She had resolved already to say nothing to Sybil. So, should she vouchsafe her suspicions to Mary? Edith glanced briefly over at her silent elder sister. One look at Mary's imperious, regal profile in the darkened interior of the motor cab was enough to deter Edith from following that particular course of action. Mary would, thought Edith, scoff contemptuously at her notions, and dismiss them as utterly fanciful and ridiculous.
But for all that …
Once they had descended from the motor cab, leaving the liveried doorman to pay the driver, if not exactly together, then still side by side, they walked slowly into the brilliantly lit, albeit still wrecked entrance lobby of the Shelbourne Hotel, now slowly returning to some semblance of order. Here Mary announced in a somewhat peremptory tone to Edith that before retiring for the night she wanted to send an urgent telegram to Downton. Both Papa and Mama needed to be told that all of them here in Dublin, including Tom, had survived the explosion uninjured, before any garbled and lurid reports of what had happened here today at the Shelbourne Hotel appeared in the newspapers over in England.
"You go on up Edith. I shan't be very long" said Mary wearily.
Wordlessly, Edith nodded her assent to her elder sister, crossed the entrance lobby, and walked slowly up the grand staircase of the hotel, still deep in thought, passing on her way, on the first floor landing, a German couple who were descending, chatting to each other in their own language. It was that simple coincidence that, thought Edith afterwards, put her in mind of her German governess, Fraulein Schmidt, someone whom, if Edith was scrupulously honest with herself, she had not thought of in years.
In both her childhood, and indeed later in her life, one thing at which Edith excelled over both her sisters was her ability to speak both French and German. For her part, Mary saw no need to learn any foreign language:
"After all darling, anybody who is anybody speaks English".
As for dearest Sybil, she had seemingly never possessed either the necessary mental aptitude or the discipline required when trying to successfully master learning a foreign language. To Sybil whether a noun was masculine or feminine in French, or masculine, feminine, or indeed neuter, in German, was of little or no consequence whatsoever; indeed, to her, a singularly pointless exercise. Losing her patience on a very hot day up in the schoolroom at Downton, Lady Sybil Crawley, aged all of ten years, had also then lost her temper. Echoing, had she but known it, the very words of His Majesty King George V who also struggled with mastering German, exasperated with being continually corrected by their governess, earning herself a rap on the knuckles, Sybil had retorted tartly that:
"Der, die or das Sonne, it really is very hot indeed today Fraulein Schmidt".
Edith smiled fondly at the long forgotten remembrance from a shared childhood.
She would never have described herself as a fanciful person and it was now as she wearily made her way up to bed that Edith recalled minding something Fraulein Schmidt had once said to her, and which now confirmed Edith's latent suspicions regarding dear, darling Tom.
Quoting the words of her own countryman, the philosopher Friedrich Schiller, Fraulein Schmidt had observed:
"There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us mere accident springs from the deepest source of destiny".
Later, after she had retired for the night, having snuggled down in bed, Edith lay awake for a long while. Through her open window there came to her ears the gentle swish and whisper of the faintest of breezes rustling the leaves of the trees in the park on the opposite side of the road from the hotel. Just before she finally turned out the oil lamp standing on her bedside table, as she drifted somewhere between consciousness and sleep, she again smiled to herself; said softly "I was right".
