AN: This one was requested by Twinsfan725. It was for a scene of Cobert in the car on the way to the Dower House before the 'confrontation' with Dr Clarkson in series 3, episode 6. It fitted rather nicely with a one-shot I had already started for after the scene at the Dower House. So, this is a part 1 of 2.
I am sorry for the angst, but I do have some fluffy ones coming up too, I am just trying to place these between the more angsty ones so we don't have angst for endless chapters at any point!
This little one shot does also align with a scene I wrote about Sybil's death some years ago. If you have read that you might recognise the standpoint I give Cora from that story (Blame and Forgiveness).
For anyone following The Space Between that was updated on Monday. Views and reviews seem to be a little down and I wondered if it had got lost in the filters!
Please do leave reviews and PM me (or leave in the reviews) any requests! These can be pre and post-canon too as I am thinking of starting a separate story for those ones.
He hadn't been trying to flirt.
He had just wanted conversation and out of habit had fallen into saying the first thing that had entered his head. Those were the words he often chose when he wanted to strike up conversation when they were struggling in their marriage. He flirted, because usually it would make her blush and drop her eyes, even if she pretended to remain angry. But that hadn't worked today.
Nothing did.
He should have thought more carefully about the words he had chosen. But he hadn't because it had reached the point where any words were preferable to the silence.
She had dropped her eyes. But only for half a second, before she had looked back at him with a steely gaze, her eyes circled with tears and lack of sleep. Then she was gone, again. She had slipped out the door as silently as she had come, and taken with her the cobwebs of grief that seemed to stretch out behind her like a veil; enveloping than both in a cloud of darkness.
He was beginning to think that maybe his mother was right, maybe he should suggest that Cora went to America. Maybe that was what his mother was going to suggest to them in a minute.
He checks his pocket watch. The time had passed with Anna sharing her news of Bates and now it was time to get ready. It wasn't as if he was any good at getting any estate work done anyway. He sat at the desk, and he looked at things. But looking was all it was, if he picked up his pen it often got abandoned moments later without having written a word. It had been that way ever since Sybil had died. Thankfully Matthew was filling in for his hopelessness. He steps through the ante library into the hall and is pleased to find Carson is already waiting with his coat.
"Her ladyship is in the car my lord." He nods his head and takes his hat. Not at all surprised that she had not waited for him. He steps out the door, the sky emitting a dreary drizzle. He glances to the sky, it looked clear in the distance, it would pass. Weather changed, thank goodness, but he doubted the same miracle would extend to the black shadow over his life.
He steps into the car. She is on the far side, facing out the window. This was already strange. She usually rode on his right, the same way around they slept together. Clearly she didn't even want him having to push past her into the car.
He takes off his hat as the car pulls away. It wouldn't be a long drive to the Dower House, it was only a short distance out the other side of the village. It already felt like the longest drive imaginable though, and they hadn't even reached the end of the driveway.
He has to strain his ears to even check that she is breathing. When he glances towards her she is still staring out the window. He opens his mouth to simply utter her name but he shuts it again. She would only shake her head and twist her hands together, before letting her voice strain gently in a caress around his name that he knows doesn't match the hatred in her thoughts.
She was grieving and terribly, terribly hurt.
He had never been the most perceptive man. But he didn't need to be on this occasion to know what she felt, because he felt it too.
They had lost their darling girl. Their baby girl. Whilst Mary and Edith had always bickered and fallen out, maybe not helped by their young lives being somewhat peppered with the frictions that had existed as he and Cora had tried to conceive an heir. They had done their best to be good parents but it had always seemed somewhat of a struggle. Then Sybil had arrived and that had been easy. She had smiled and gurgled. Later she had placated her sisters, stopping their arguing and enticing them in to games. She had never rolled her eyes at Cora's American sentiments and ideas, something Mary (and sometimes Edith) had copied after seeing their grandmother do so. Sybil had been a marvel. She had lightened all their lives. Her smiles and laughter had filled their lives. He couldn't remember a time when she had been unhappy or spread unhappiness.
She also wouldn't want them to be unhappy. She had appreciated their loving marriage more than Mary or Edith. She had married the chauffeur. She had been a romantic. She would not have wanted them to be like this. He swallows the lump that rises in his throat.
"Cora..." She drops her chin and twists her hands together.
"Robert." Her voice strains around the word in the gentle whisper that he had predicted. Her throat sounds scratchy, as if she has cried so much there was no fluid left in her body. "Please – "
"I just want to say one thing. We can't not talk forever. Sybil," his voice catches as he pronounces her name, "would not have wanted us to."
"What she wanted was to be alive." Her words are spoken softly, but the venom behind them is undeniable. They almost hiss themselves into the air. He closes his eyes, swallows and looks down. He traces the pale lines detailing his suit where it curves over his knee. It's fine and delicate, fragile even. Like everything it seemed. Life, love, they were all balanced on a tightrope and at the moment his tightrope was swinging frantically in the wind and he had nothing to hold on to.
"Sybil lived life with love. You know that. She would have wanted us to love each other in her absence."
"Robert, please stop. Please stop trying to use her memory to lure me back into your arms. It won't work."
"That's not...I don't want that. I'm not asking for that, or even your love, not yet. I know you won't give that. What I'm asking is that you respect me as her father and grief with me as her parent."
"I see." Her eyes finally lift up to his, but he knows she's not about to agree. She had hissed the two words from between her closed mouth, a slightly sarcastic edge to the sound. "So now she is gone you wish to be remembered as her parent. Yet when she was alive you wouldn't act to save her." He doesn't even open his mouth to argue. He knew the argument. He knew her points. They had been thrown through the air between them for the first time the same day Sybil had died. They had been repeated since. He didn't need to, and he didn't want to, hear them again.
His heart races in his chest. The heated debate of that night flashing across his memory. His grips the fabric of his trousers at his knee, pinching it between his fingers; anything to focus his attention so he doesn't start crying.
He sees Sybil's body writhing in the middle of a seizure. He hears Tom and Cora calling out to her. The words ring in his ears, the noises ring in his ears, and the smells from that room seep up his nose. His eyes start to sting. He blinks rapidly. Cora's voice suddenly cuts into his painful memories. Her voice is decidedly firm, she seems to have controlled her emotions.
"You know, I blame the world. The world that puts women at the mercy of men. I blame myself as much as anyone. I was stood there with Doctor Clarkson opposite you and Sir Philip and you both thought you knew best. You thought you knew best. You, who can't even bear basic medical details. What on earth do you know about childbirth for goodness sake?" Her voice reaches a crescendo, but he sees in the way her eyes flash and her jaw sets that she is a long way from done. "I should have fought harder. I am the woman who gave birth to your four children. Yet, my views, my opinions were squashed and ignored by yourself and Sir Philip. Because of course, being men with titles, you must know best. You must know more about it all, than a woman who had given birth. Doctor Clarkson and I brought your four children into this world Robert, you have been married to me for thirty years, and yet, that night you didn't listen to me and you ignored him based on...on what exactly? An odd misdiagnosis compared to the hundreds of babies he's delivered and the hundreds of patients he's treated. You didn't trust these two people in favour of a man with a title. I thought I was married to a better man than that."
If his heart had been racing before, it races faster now. It maybe even skips a beat. He had known she was living with the belief that if they had listened to Clarkson, Sybil might have made it, and he knew that she was cross he had sided with Sir Philip because he was fashionable. He had accepted it and he had understood. He hadn't realised though, that her anger with him stretched deeper and had wrapped itself around the very heart of their marriage. He had thought it was only scratching at the surface, and that time would heal the wound. Her words suggested that the scratches were more like gouges and they wouldn't be healed easily.
The air in the small car becomes humid and sticky, despite the drizzle outside. His thoughts race and seem to be exploding in his head so fast he can't keep up. His head was already in a permanent headache – the lack of sleep, nightmares, memories and worries all combining together. His marriage looms amongst them now, as a much larger issue than he had envisaged it before. He had thought time would reduce Cora's discontent and that eventually she might seek him to comfort her in her grief, as they had supported each other so many times before. But now he was less sure. Would they find their way out of this? Should Cora go to America to see if that would help? Was he going to be alone fighting his grief or would they find a way back to each other? Was this the end of the marriage he had known?
His thoughts only tear away from the endless ream of unanswerable questions when the car pulls up outside the Dower house. With his thoughts still in a whirl, he steps out of the car and into the house. He waits for her at the base of the steps out of habit but she ignores him as she strides past. They hand their coats to the butler before following him down the hall to one of his mother's sitting rooms. He moves to greet her but is stopped by the movement of another person in the room. He almost gasps, face to face as he was with Clarkson. The very man that seemed to be so intimately stitched into the whole web surrounding Sybil's death.