AN: Thank you so much for all the support for this story. This chapter has no dialogue, but I thought it was a necessary chapter. Due to trying to write three stories at the moment, and do some important studying for work, I am afraid replying to reviews individually is on a brief hiatus, I will reply when I can between everything but I figured you would all prefer me to keep writing! Please leave the reviews, they keep me going, and please do know I read them all.

Chapter 4

The dinner was over early. It seemed easier to come back. I'm sorry if it's a disappointment.

It isn't. Mr Bricker was just leaving.

I'm not here at Lady Grantham's invitation.

Then will you please leave at mine?

Robert, let him go.

You can't be surprised. When you chose to ignore a woman like Cora, you must have known not every man would be as blind as you.

Her mind reels. She remains fixed in complete shock as the dressing room door closes behind him.

She can't decide which part of the last ten minutes she regretted the most.

She knew which one of the many emotions tumbling about in her head was going to take the longest to go away though, the guilt.

The look on Robert's face as he has entered her bedroom was not a look that was going to be easy to erase from her mind. The guilt that it stirred in her was likely to be her companion for some months if Robert's immediate departure to his dressing room was anything to go by. His stays in his dressing room were few and far between and the vast majority at her insistence. For him to retreat there himself, willingly, spoke more than any words could.

The guilt is sudden and all consuming. She takes a seat on the chaise, unwilling to commit herself to the bed that Robert had so recently punched Mr Bricker onto. It seemed tainted with his presence.

She breaths slowly through her nose trying to regain some control of her shaking hands. But she can't. The guilt that thrums with each breath and burns a pain in her chest is unwilling to relent.

A week ago when she and Robert had argued she had been trying to make him feel guilty. She had defended her behaviour without much thought about how her behaviour was being perceived by anyone but Robert. She knew and understood his jealousy, deep down she might even have been subconsciously trying to provoke it, in the hope it might awaken him to how isolated she felt.

She had never considered what Mr Bricker might have been thinking. He had simply been someone for her to converse with. Someone with whom she found her opinions were valued and listened to, she hadn't given any thought to how he might be perceiving her behavior. He flattered her, and he flirted and she knew she had not been discouraging of that – her own pride had been cultivated by it. But she had overlooked that he was a man and not all men were as blind as Robert had a tendency of being. He had taken her blushes of embarrassment and her laughs of denial as her flirtation in return. He had seen her enjoying his attention and had acted on it, assuming that she would reciprocate his desires because he had seen no reason why she would not. She had not turned him away, Robert had not asked him to go and he had been observing their marriage at a time when it was not at its best. She felt guilty that Robert had been more correct than she had given him credit for. She felt guilty that she had given him that impression and guilty that Robert had raised his concerns (in his way) and she had ignored them.

The guilt settles within her, heavy and sluggish, it was likely to be of long duration. She turns her attention away from those thoughts, there would be plenty of time to mull over those in the coming weeks and months.

Glancing at the floor, the rumpled carpet makes her anger palpable. Men! It was ironic that she had thought Mr Bricker was interested in her opinions and yet he had failed to actually ask for her opinions about him, or what she wanted! He had barged into her room full of assumption instead. His misjudgment might have come from her own behaviour, but his disregard for her feelings even once he was in the room, was all him. She had asked for him to leave and he had ignored her. Mr Bricker had even tried to persuade her something was happening between them, assuming her feelings must directly mirror his own. She would laugh if she didn't feel so much like crying.

The chasm she had felt eating into her marriage for some months had reached a climatic point this evening. Robert wouldn't forgive her easily, not when he had tried to warn her. Jealousy was one thing, but finding that man in her bedroom would not be something he would let go off quickly or easily. Having Mr Bricker there, in their space, had been her betrayal as far as he was concerned and it was not something he would let go of quickly. Her innocence in the matter would not be something he would find hard to believe, even more so when he had been trying to warn her of Mr Bricker's possible motive.

She knew her disappointment with Robert would increase as her anger with Mr Bricker diminished. How could he believe that she had wanted Mr Bricker's attentions in that way? Why had he not trusted her?

She lays back on the chaise and clutches the cushion to her chest. The tears come now. Slow and silent. They would be all gone by the morning. Things would look better then. That was her saying. That was her belief. Right now though, as her lips quiver, she isn't so sure things will look better in the morning. The look in Robert's eyes had been so heavy and penetrating. His anger would turn into that deep-rooted disappointment that would follow her around for weeks. Yes, she was disappointed in his lack of trust in her. But the majority of her disappointment was turned towards herself.

She had been so stupidly naive. So childish. She knew Mr Bricker was flirting. She had known it and not turned him away. She had relished in it, in fact. Relished and enjoyed the attention she gave her and the pride that came with a man admitting that he found her attractive. She hadn't seen the harm in it because she had assumed that her noncommittal approach to his flirtation would eventually bore him. She had also assumed that he was going to ask her permission before inviting himself to her bedroom or attempting to kiss her or anything like that and then at that point she would have simply set him straight. But he had not. Her noncommittal stance had led to tonight. Her pride had been boosted but it had been at the expense of her marriage.

The tears come faster. She pulls her knees to her chest and continues to clutch the cushion to her chest. She had made an awful mess of things. She rolls onto her other side, turning away from the adjoining door and the rumpled bed to stare into the dying embers of the fire.

Things would look better in the morning.

She contemplates moving to the bed. But she can't. The energy required to simply move across the room is something she cannot conjure up. The rumbled covers on the bed keep her fixed on the chaise either way, she would not be sleeping in that bed tonight. She wouldn't sleep in a bed that Mr Bricker had laid on. She knew that was childish, but it just didn't seem right somehow, to lie where he had been. It brought her too close to the guilt that she was trying to rid herself of.

There was only one way forward now. It was time to give up her ill-founded intentions to make Robert somehow realise she felt rebuffed by him, and act to rebuild their marriage. Just as she had always done.

She had to be the strong one. She had to ask for what she wanted, he was a man, he was Robert, he was never going to notice her subtlety. She had always known that. She had tried to bury it, she had ignored her own knowledge of him and tried to force him into acknowledgment by attaching herself to Mr Bricker. In the process she had brought her marriage perilously close to the wind. They had borne their fair share of storms before: Sybil dying, Robert at war, her miscarriage. They would survive this one. They had survived the death of a daughter. They could survive this.

She pulls the cushion to her chin and curls her legs beneath her, curling her toes. Tomorrow the challenge of rebuilding her marriage would begin and she would need her strength for that.

Robert was a person she had spent more than half her life loving and learning to understand and she knew this was not going to be easy. But neither was it impossible. It was far from impossible.

The guilt would carry her through to the resolution just as it finally closes her eyes now.

He thinks it is his hand that is pounding. Indeed, the knuckles are bruised and red, and a crack is opening up to allow a steady trickle of blood to skate its way between his fingers. Turning his hand over he watches the blood settle in the creases of his palm. It makes him a little dizzy, but the thumping is from his head.

It ricochets.

He can't remember the last time he had felt this angry. He had flares of anger – Miss Bunting was a good recent example of that. But he knows this is different.

He had been married thirty-four years. More than half his life. In all that time he had never felt so much anger directed towards Cora as he feels now. Their previous negotiations of the thin ice that holds up most marriages on occasion, had never been based on anger. Grief had forced them apart, lack of attention to each other and war had all ripped their hands into their marriage and given it a good shake at various points. Anger sometimes resulted from these – if one of them thought the other one was being unreasonable for example, but anger had never been the source of these frictions.

He flexes the knuckles of his hand. Disappointment swells within him. He had come back from the dinner, eager to slide into the bed beside her rather than stay in a hotel. Spending time at anything related to war always brought back his memories of his time in service and with that the memory of how the thought of Cora had kept him going. It always made him want to see her and hold her, not every man had been spared to return to the love of their family.

He lowers himself onto the bed, unsure how to proceed. Bates was at home in his cottage, fending for himself with a wounded hand was not going to be easy. He could count the occasions he had to fend completely for himself on one hand, he was so used to having either had a valet or Cora. His gaze flickers to the adjoining door.

What had she been thinking letting another man into her bedroom?

He was angrier knowing this had happened when he had specifically come home with the intention of trying to smooth things over a little with Cora. Their marriage had been cracking with Mr Bricker's presence and he had thought that they might talk about it a little more. Bates' words had hung over him – that Cora must have her reasons for accepting Mr Bricker's attentions. Being at the dinner tonight had reminded him of his time with Bates. He owed his life to John Bates. Bates was a sensible, intelligent man and he knew a thing or two about marriage.

If Edith hadn't knocked he would have hit that man straight across the face again. He would have continued to hit him until blood poured out his nose.

Staring into her eyes across the room he hadn't been able to make out her expression. She had said the right things. She had kept her eyes fixed on either him or the ground, not Mr Bricker, for the entirety of the exchange, but he had not been able to read them. Regret? Disappointment? Were those emotions there because she was unhappy about his early return or were they genuinely levelled at Mr Bricker? He didn't know. He hadn't felt this blind to her emotions since the first year of their marriage.

He curls his hand into a fist and immediately regrets it, a searing pain twisting up his arm. He stands, trying to shake the pain out his hand, and immediately regrets it, his head spinning with the anger and the pulsing of blood from his hand.

That bloody man.

Why did Cora like him? Why had she flirted? What was it about him that attracted her? What had changed?

He had thought until tonight that maybe he had been reading too much into it and Cora had just been being naïve. But now, it was seemingly obvious that he had been wrong. Cora had not been being naïve, it seemed as if she was doing it intentionally and tonight he had broken up her final act.

His heart shudders and a tear threatens in the corner of his eyes. It seemed their marriage had come full circle. She had starting in believing she would live out her life loving him with no hope of a return of affection. It seemed it was now his turn to have the unrequited love.

He shakes his head at his own thoughts. She still loved him, and to think she didn't was idiotic. It wasn't possible to simply fall out of love with someone, or at least it wasn't for them. Falling in was the thing that took the time, falling out was an impossibility. He knew he could never not love Cora. That was no longer an option. That had stopped being an option the moment he had admitted to himself that he loved her. The same would be the case for her. Goodness, he had heard her say how much she loved him enough times. But her not loving him anymore would be a much simpler way out of this. He could just blame her and have done with it. But admitting that there might be another reason for her behaviour, another reason why she had allowed Mr Bricker to merge so decidedly into their marriage pointed a finger not just at Cora, but at him.

You can't be surprised. When you chose to ignore a woman like Cora you must have known that not every man would be as blind as you.

His anger bubbles again and he clenches his fists together reflexively, instantly wincing. Why between Mr Bricker's words and Bates' suggestion the other week, is he beginning to feel as though he is partly to blame?

Why should it be partly his fault when she had been cavorting with another man in her bedroom? Their bedroom. The room in which their marriage had unfolded. The four walls of that room had witnessed every moment of their marriage. It was their sanctuary in the worst times, and the place they made love in the best times. There wasn't an emotion that hadn't been shown in their bedroom.

He had declared his love for her in that bedroom.

Now the thought of ever crossing over its threshold fills him rage. How dare she? How dare she pollute the space that was a symbol of their marriage as important as the rings adorning her finger? She could have as many reasons for her behaviour as she wanted, but he would never forgive her that. He would never forgive the taint she had added to the room that was most dear to him. It was his sanctuary as much as hers, and she had ruined it.

He pulls his pyjamas on quickly, eager to sleep and put this dreadful day behind him. His hand throbs but he ignores it, Bates can bandage it in the morning.

Things will look better in the morning.

He can even hear the words being spoken in her tone as they ring through his head. He almost snorts. There was no way this situation would look better in the morning. They would be worse in the morning. It was the cocktail party tomorrow, and they would have to present a united front whilst this chasm of betrayal sat between them.

I don't want to disturb you.

Don't be silly. You couldn't disturb me. Thank you, Baxter.

I wouldn't have bothered you.

I wish you'd stop talking like that and move back in.