The Bygone Days

by phantomwriter05

In the Blitz of 1941 - Two star-crossed couples are reunited 20 years after their tragic deaths. Now, amidst a world afire they must navigate change, remarriages, and dark secrets while a long lost father attempts to help a once heroic son - haunted by his failure during the Spanish Civil War. Yet, in the shadows, a traitor deep within the House of Grantham helps plot its downfall.

11. Yesterday - Part II

The last time that Lady Mary Crawley had tread upon a blade of Grantham County had been nearly six years past. It was a dark and dangerous moment in time, filled with mistrust and frail temperament. The entire county had been mobilized then. There were camps outside of the village, male relatives and friends lodged in local homes or at the "Grantham Arms". It was a siege - though no one called it as such. The mood of the business had chaffed the family, fore it had felt as if they were trapped in their own home. Even when Lord Grantham had called the mobilization, no one really listened to him … nor trusted him. The Earl of Grantham was a member of the Royal Court, and so was Lady Mary. Also was there ever suspicion of 'The Big House', fore, with the exception of Tom Branson and a few staff members, they were all avowed monarchists at Downton Abbey. While, usually, that might not have bothered anyone, in those weeks …

That was as good as being a traitor.

In the New Years of 1929, on a grey morning - filled with so very little light one might not have told where morning, noon, and afternoon started and stopped – there came a company of Yorkshire Hussars that rode down the street. They had come with orders to take the young Lord of Downton into custody. He had committed assault upon Mrs. Mirada Pelham at Brancaster Castle. Grievous injury was given to the older woman that had been rushed to St. Bethlehem in London with third degree burns on all her back and most of her arms and legs. It was a grotesque and painful fate for a woman of such moral uprightness.

But all of it was a façade, for everyone knew the real reason that they had come for George Crawley.

On the night of the King-Emperor's Holiday Address to the nation, a rogue had slipped unseen and unlooked for into Buckingham Palace. His penetration into the Royal House had gone so far that the youth had broken into the Queen's own treasure room. Out of all the riches of jewels and gold, the young thief took only one thing: A diamond necklace that had been given to Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg by the East India Trading Company. For nearly two centuries had this necklace of great worth, and even greater beauty, been a sacred heirloom of the Germanic Queens of the British Throne. Some said that Queen Victoria herself cherished the masterwork above all the Royal jewels in the Hanoverian vaults. And in many portraits painted of the long reigning monarch was it ever at her breast.

It had been a sacred object to a dynasty of Sikh Princes that was worn as a show of divine right of rule. However, at the end of the eighteenth century the private armies of the large corporation – sanctioned and subsidized by the Hanoverians – destroyed that ancient Indian Kingdom. In their sacking had they brutally raped and murdered the beautiful Princess and her two young daughters. But of her husband and their father, the Prince, did he escape by some unknown and accursed reason. From that point on, the genius inventor and scientist would live the rest of his unnaturally long life as a 'Science Pirate', disappearing into the depths of the ocean for centuries afterward. Ever did he withdraw himself from humanity and scorning forever their barbaric and animalistic species in recompence for the loss of all he loved

But now, on a snowy night in the bleak December of 1928, the necklace had been stolen by a young man in hooded sable cloak that bore the 'Eye of Horus' upon its back. Girded to his side was carried a familiar Sikh saber. However, when it seemed that he would escape unseen, the Page of the Backstairs, a Mr. Wilson, caught sight of a young figure creeping slowly down the long-windowed corridor of the South Wing. The boy had taken great pains in his stealth, and with his ancient Egyptian cloak and suede like jacket had he thought to have been camouflaged from all men's sight wherever shadow lay. However, fate was stronger than even the greatest precautions, and it had been by ill-chance that the moon broke through the midnight clouds. Cold and pale luminous beams pierced the crystal hall of windowpanes and caught the beautiful masterwork in its light, causing the great treasure to twinkle and gleam.

The guard was roused, but the boy – drawing his rune etched blade – fought his way out of the palace. Three royal guards, including the old Page of the Backstairs himself, were slain. Many of the royal and palace guard were wounded in the fight, including the young thief himself. But still had he escaped without a trace, taking the sacred necklace with him. Of its fate nobody could say, fore the Royal House would never see the heirloom again. But it is said that the young thief had returned it to its rightful owner …

A Science Pirate that had taught the young swordsman all he knew.

Not a month later, humiliated and enraged - knowing full well who it had been that had stolen his grandmother's favorite necklace and why such retaliation was visited upon the Royal House - the King-Emperor himself wanted the 38th Lord of Downton – the insolent little punk – to pay. And the Yorkshire Hussars would be that arbiters of that divine justice given on high from Windsor Palace. However, If the soldiers had gone straight through, they might have had more success. However, the main problem that these men on a sacred mission faced was simply that they didn't know, exactly, where to go. See, there was and had always been quite the amount of gossip about George Crawley. But, indeed, had such talk had as equally very little truth about him that could be considered fact. Therefore, the men found it very hard to arrest a young rebel swordsman … when they didn't know where he actually lived.

So, it was, in an attempt of mending such an error, that they decided that they would compound it with an even bigger folly by arrogantly assuming that Royal Decree meant something this far north. Openly, and certainly without thought, had the soldiers began questioning the denizens of Grantham County about where they might find their beloved young lord and where they might hold him until they're given orders to take him to internment. Within half an hour of getting no information, they heard of an angry mob forming on "Cora Street" from the opposite side of the village. People with shotguns and pitchforks. Once more, either not realizing their peril or woefully smug in errand for the King-Emperor, they rode to meet what was assumed to be a deputized company to help them.

Tom Branson, who had gone for a morning pastry on his constitutional, was crumbling up the stained wrapper, licking the glaze from his fingers when he saw what was about to happen. Quickly, he had tried to stop the young and green Sandhurst graduate from going down there. If there was anyone who knew the pulse and mood of the county it was the man that strained to keep its peace for two years. When he heard that they had come to arrest George, and that a 'Deputized Company' was forming to 'help them', he knew that it would be a cold day in Hell.

However, the young and entitled son of a Viscount and daughter of a Marquess ignored the Irishman and ordered him restrained. The inopportune sight of Tom Branson being manhandled by mounted Royal cavilers in a rather rough manner had only worsened the temperature. Alerted of the incident, rumor spread amongst the mob, and rumor to lies. And suddenly - as was the case in those days after the death of Caroline Talbot and under the rule of Lady Mary Crawley - the mob surged down the street after the invaders that 'keel hauled' Mr. Branson from their saddles and wanted to murder their young Lord.

Horses cried in fear, men shouted, rocks where flung, and shotguns cracked and boomed. The third son of a Lord was badly beaten when he ordered his men to charge the mob that was flinging rocks at them. But at the last second, the men rolled carts of hay in front of a spear wall of pitch forks and poles. The horses broke and riders flew into the angry mob of Northmen who began beating the Royal Soldiers. It was by some chance that Thomas Barrow had been caught up in the riot and had helped the young Leftenant out of the scrum and, with Tom's help, led the remaining company to the safety of the Downton Abbey stables. The staff and the family tended to the soldiers while Lord Grantham had tried to settle the mob. But all that did was cause an enraged cry of "traitor" to be chanted and gnashed.

However, in luck – and emasculation – an arrow from a longbow struck the ground just a pace from the feet of a mob that was a hairsbreadth from rushing Lord Grantham. In that moment George Crawley – looking every bit the ranger in cloak and gear - had appeared from the Haunted Forest with Japanese Longbow and quiver worn on the small of his back sideways. The boy had been out hunting for a twelve-point stag that had alluded him for the last year when he heard the distant clash and had crept back to see what was happening.

Though they barely spoke five syllables to one another a month, there was something ingrained in the blood about the way that the young boy took up for his cornered grandfather. With the draw of an arrow from a Samurai bow – a strange sight in Northern England – he told their men to disperse, to go home before they football chant themselves to Transportation. He waited till they were gone before the boy turned to his grandfather. He was unsure what had happened, but he told his Donk it would be best to go back to Downton, that he nor any at the Abbey were safe on the streets. The Earl wanted to thank the boy for his help, but his pride wouldn't allow it.

The sight of his grandson, his heir, in strange garb, a queer bow and odd quiver … it quietly boiled his blood. Whatever or whoever this ranger of the wild, this 'Wizard's pupil', had been, he was no Grantham. But still, in private, the man would chastise himself gravely for such horrid knee jerk prejudice against one he was just as quick to remember he loved. And, to Lord Grantham's credit, he would send Mr. Bates to Crawley House to inform the boy to keep away from Downton for his safety. Though, still, even in repentance, he instructed his valet to tell the boy that this concern for his safety came from Lady Grantham and not himself. Ever did Robert hide desperately his daily and nightly worry and longing for a beloved grandson – Matthew's boy – out of spite of dreams of attending graduations at Eton, Oxford, and Sandhurst that would never come.

But once again, in Lord Grantham's absence, and the inaction of Mrs. Hughes, the situation escalated. Being allowed to use the phone in Mr. Barrow's pantry, the young Leftenant, beat-up and pride kicked-in, greatly and dangerously embellished the situation and what happened to his superiors. Not mentioned was that he had no legal documentation, that he ignored Tom Branson's warnings, and that he ordered a cavalry charge at civilians. Too late had Thomas Barrow came flying in and hung up the phone. Suddenly, a scuffle broke out between the butler and the Leftenant, then the footmen and the sergeants. The entirety of downstairs was about to turn to violent chaos when Lord Grantham and Tom once more came to keep the peace. But the highborn Leftenant had no allies when Thomas told his lordship what the cavalry officer said to his commanders. To the surprise of everyone, Lord Grantham ordered the officer and his men to be locked into the wine cellar under guard.

A flurry of telephone calls from Downton Abbey to the War and Home office were traded over the hour. But it did not stop the entire regiment of Hussars to be deployed. They rode in column, armed much better in order to put down a mob and see the King's Justice done. But instead they found not a group of local villagers but entire hamlets and work forces of tenants and their farm hands arriving by the bus and truck full. Shotguns, rifles, scythes, and axes were brandished behind barricades. Ambushes were rumored to be set up all over the road. If they wanted to reach the Village of Downton, they would have to pay a blood toll.

The fuse of a powder keg that was filled two years prior was now lit.

But luckily, once again, the black line had been broken. This time it was kicked by Shrimpie Flintshire who came rushing down with orders for the Hussars - who were already balking at fighting a battle - to return to their garrison. Also, unlike the mounted soldiers, Lord Flintshire had in his hand a document from the House of Lords saying that their arrest of the Lord of Downton was illegal and without basis. That the King-Emperor needed cause and a warrant, sighting the Magna Carta. The Colonel might have torn it up, Marquess of Flintshire or not, had it not been for the sight of a growing armed populace that was waiting for them down the road. So, with a great reluctance – and later a sigh of relief – the Hussars went home.

That night, Lady Mary and the Dowager argued bitterly with Lady Grantham and Lord Hexham. The first thing that Bertie advised when Edith and he came hot footed from Brancaster was to mobilize the county. Not just the militia levies, but, indeed, the County Regiment. Cora and Edith backed him, and even Lord Flintshire – a government minister – quietly acknowledged that it had come to this. No one denied that this wasn't over. The Windsor's would be back, with more men … and a commander willing to do battle. Mary, frightened for her son and guilt ridden over what she had forced Sybbie to do that led to this, proclaimed the whole thing as absurd! The Dowager agreed, saying that George should turn himself in. With cocksure certainty had Lady Violent informed her family that if Shrimpie was confident that the Royals had no basis, then they'd 'break the bank' on the best Barristers in the Imperium to see him acquitted.

Finally, frustrated with his sister-in-law and his beloved wife's grandmother - after years of enduring their 'nonsense' - Lord Hexham called both women's opinions 'simpleton talk'. He rolled over their shocked expressions and snapped at them for not seeing anything clearly. Both Edith and he had been in Africa, saw what happened there, was a part of it – deeply involved. Whither Mary and Violet believed it or not did not matter. Bertie had been in London, was close in orbit with the Royal Court. The Prince of Wales was out for blood. He wasn't interested in arresting George, of sentencing him to Transportation. He didn't just want to kill the boy; he didn't just want revenge for separating him from his golden "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed". Their future sovereign wanted to destroy George completely! If their nephew surrenders, he would never make it to internment! Lord Hexham turned to his father-in-law and looked Lord Grantham right in the eye. In that glance it was confirmed that Robert knew he was right.

Whatever was going to be said in rebuttal by his mamma was halted when Robert held his hand up. In that moment he turned to the odd choice that had shocked everyone when he brought her home forty years ago. The woman he had married for her fortune, who was spectacular to look at naked, and who he fell completely in love with on the waters of the Nile. Soon the entire Library looked to Lady Grantham when she slowly paced to her husband's side. Worry and sorrow was on her fair countenance as she said not a word. She simply placed her hands on his elbows and looked into his eyes. It was the slightest of nods and the squeeze of his arms. Two sides of a whole were as one when the decision was made.

The entire county military would be mobilized for defense.

The plan that Bertie Pelham put in place, with the help of Shrimpie Flintshire, seemed fool proof on paper. While Lord Grantham would organize a defense of the village and estate, the Marquesses of Hexham and Flintshire would call a Lord's Convention to rule upon the King's accusations against George. With any luck, the high-profile situation among the most important Aristocrats of the land would handicap any military operations. In the meanwhile, the situation in Grantham County was simply a war of logistics and corralling the men to make sure the regiment and the levies don't kill each other out of boredom till the whole thing was resolved.

However, treachery among the women of the House of Grantham would ever be its weakness. Fore, the Dowager, angered and insulted at Robert's spurning of her advice for Cora at the critical moment of their family's fate, would not easily let go of her scheme. Fore it was fear, the fear of death, that troubled the Dowager Lady Grantham. She did not have long for this world. The idea of faltering, of fading, when all of it, her life's work, was about to come crashing down awoke a strange fey behavior that overtook her. Thus, it was through intrigues and long friendships that Lady Violet began trading letters with the Queen and other courtiers. Never had she been more convincing than to a frightened and panicked Mary whose chief concern was to see George safe. Never once had her beloved and waspish granny's sage like advice and actions let Mary down. And so, it was that she also began to help her, keeping her own friends in Court abreast of the situation from the inside. And opportunity seemed within striking distance.

Fore militarily, the whole thing went against Lord Grantham immediately.

As Lord Leftenant, Robert genuinely assumed he would be in charge of the operation. And at first it seemed that no one disputed it. But when Lord Grantham tried filling in spots for the militia command, he was immediately rebuffed. Inexplicably, the county militia had already elected George to be their captain. To this, Robert thought he had lost his mind. George? His grandson was a boy! A boy! They wanted a boy as their captain. What experience did he have? But to this, George - deeply angered by his Donk's dismissal of his own battles on the frontiers and in the wilds - asked the same questions right back … but in reference to Robert. What exact battle experience did Robert have? He had fought in the Bore War - true. But he got captured along with Bates. Their big claim to fame wasn't in battle but escaping the concentration camp in Victoria with Churchill. With venom did George claim that the only thing Lord Grantham knew about warfare was how to lose and escape any consequences. The two had to be separated when they both shot out of their chairs. It was a preview of things to come.

With or without permission from Robert, George was bestowed the rank of Captain and was given command of the militia. It was a position of which Lord Grantham would contest throughout the next month, dismissing the boy's presence at officer's calls and arguing with him at strategy meetings. The boy's out of the box thinking – a product of a worldly experience of different cultures' warfare – clashed with Robert's Sandhurst Victorian Imperial military education through manuals. But both styles chaffed with the medium stratagems of the Colonel of the County Regiment whose military career knew only trenches and rushing the guns through No Man's Land. It was three eras of warfare - past, present, and future - that had not a voice of reason to meld them into compromise. It would be but one more role that Matthew Crawley was sorely missed. And in most things, when Robert Crawley felt that he was unwanted, he simply faded away. Brooding within his library, ranting and complaining to Mary and Violet. From this had information found its way to Buckingham Palace.

But while disunity was inherent in the Grantham command, diplomatically things were against the Royal House. Shrimpie Flintshire, an expert politician and statesmen, had rallied a coalition of Lords against the Royal Family. It was a simple sale. If they allowed the King-Emperor this concession, if they allowed the rights of George Crawley, 38th Lord of Downton, Heir to the House of the White Queen and the Earl of Grantham …

Who is next?

If your wife is bedded by the King and you protest, who is to stop Royal retribution? What if you're son is engaged to the daughter of an Earl and the Prince wants her for himself? What recourse do you have when the Queen threatens your life to your mother at a garden party? Regardless of what their opinion was of the young adventurer, George Crawley, did they really think that it would stop with him? That emboldened by prejudice against an odd and eccentric young fellow, that the Prince of Wales would not try it again the next time someone else in the convention crosses him? And when he is to be King would he not launch propaganda against each one of them to get what he wants? The choice should be simple for any man worthy of his title and claimed intelligence.

To most the choice was simple and no number of Royal bribes and clumsy politicking from the Prince of Wales could muddy it. Shrimpie Flintshire was masterful in oratory, while Bertie and Edith seemed simply paragons of virtue and morality. Stalwart and upright was Lord Hexham who would not defend his mother in public nor the actions she did in private. He had loved his mother, had allowed her to guide and steer him all his life. But his love for Edith, and especially for his beautiful and golden little Marigold, was stronger than the ties that bound him to his authoritative carrot and stick. She had threatened his family, had tried to harm his little girl, and he would not have it. Along with Shrimpie's speeches, Bertie's siding against Mirada was enough to cast a great doubt on the Royal House's case against George.

And thus, immediately - with many concessions to mother and father's requests – did the Prince of Wales rush to beat the verdict of what would amount to a crushing and humiliating political loss.

The die was cast when Mary was summoned to her Granny's for luncheon. She would never forget walking to the Dower House that mid-morning. There, in the street, George was laboring with his men, erecting a barricade. As if attracted by her presence, sensing her nearness, the boy with golden locks of grown out waving curls looked up. Their eyes met as the beautiful statuesque woman passed. Her heart quivered and a deep emotion came over her.

The last time they spoke had been in the library of Downton. It was at the delivery of the King's letter of ultimatum in December. It had ordered George to foreswear his testimony of all that happened at Brancaster or face imprisonment at Carfax Asylum as a threat to the safety and wellbeing of Sybbie and Marigold. It had been delivered by Maude Bagshaw herself to the hand of the heir of her House. George had refused to sign it. He was no liar! Papa, Mamma, nor Edith could get him to see reason. He would not yield, showing his resolve by ripping the royal decree in two. And it was at this warlike action, in a fear that went soul deep, that Mary had lashed out at the person she loved most in all the very universe.

She had claimed that George had killed Matthew, had killed Caroline. Then, with certainty, did she announce that George was, in fact, not Mary's son at all. That he was most likely a bastard of some teenage girl's lost virginity that Isobel swapped with her real son out of misguided charity. And the only reason that Mary had not disowned him till now was that she could not prove that he was not hers. But certainly, with his provincial stupidity, in face of direct orders from the King-Emperor, he was no child of Matthew Crawley. She closed the whole awful business by saying that she did not care if he died, only that he did so out of her sight.

What hurt the most, even more than the vile words she spoke in hatred that shattered her very soul, was that George did not say a word back. He simply accepted it, took it as true – perhaps as a repudiation of not wanting Mary as his mother either – and left Downton Abbey with a bow to Mamma and Papa as if they were his Lord and Lady and not his grandparents. And most of all intentions and inspirations for George going to Buckingham Palace to steal the necklace, beyond retaliation for the threat against him in Royal Decree, had been Mary's evil words that day which awoke a reckless fey aggression inside him.

Of the vile and terrible thing said, had they earned her a violent and powerful slap from Edith that sent Mary falling atop the library sofa in shock. It also earned her a fortnight in exile by Mamma who claimed that she would not have any woman who says such things to her own child in their house, and that till she remembered whose daughter she was, Mary will not be under any roof that Cora shared. For many a day did Mary sit almost comatose in her Aunt Rosamund's sitting room, wondering how she could say what she had to a boy who had once been a baby she would allow no other woman to hold when he was born.

His cerulean eyes that day on the street would haunt her, for it would be the last time she would look upon them for eight long years.

Success had been achieved by her granny. 'The King's Own' – disguised in foreign livery – would march into the county two days from now. There, she would negotiate the handling of George's surrender. But to this, Mary didn't understand. Everyone knew that the Royal House was about to lose at the convention. That they would not sanction nor hold up the King's charges against George. But the Dowager had spoken of a loftier goal of seeing to the future, in which the Grantham position would be set for the next century. George would be imprisoned in Australia, for a time, and then he would be released. By then they'd have a signed treaty that would timelessly recognize the legitimacy of the ancient titles of Lord of Downton - created during the Roman rule of Britannia – and the Earldom of Grantham that was created by the Last Stuart King. Violet, in her last days, afear of the loss of everything she had dedicated her life, only wanted her granddaughter, her heiress, to understand that she wanted their family to survive the incompetence of Robert and George's reigns in hopes that more sensible descendants were bound to be born someday.

And to Mary's everlasting shame, she supported her granny.

Neither conspirator was surprised when a letter arrived at Downton Abbey that day from Buckingham Palace. It was quite sentimental, written in the King's own hand – it should've been the first sign that something was not right. In it he acknowledged the near universal knowledge of The Royal House of Windsor's failure in the Lord's Convention and felt that it was time to negotiate a peace between them. It seemed like a bright light in such dark circumstances. And Robert – an unflinching monarchist - had given an eerily similar speech as his mamma about preserving the future of their family. Mary wondered if Papa would agree to any sort of imprisonment for George … which she certainly was not going too, hoping, instead, to renegotiate while in person with the Royals.

They were to throw a large state banquet and ball at Grantham House in London. Yet, the trick was how they would fool the men outside? Though Tom had explicitly told them that they must inform George, Bertie, Edith, Shrimpie, and especially their men of these developments, he was voted down. Compartmentalizing the situation, Mary had come up with the excuse that it was not their business. The banquet and celebratory ball were for after the vote of the convention, an entirely separate matter.

But it was Thomas Barrow who, with sour skepticism, inquired in suggestion of when exactly George should be informed? But Mary only said that if they did, the boy would only find a way to ruin everything. He was too close to the matter and he needed to leave such things to the management of people who only had his best interest in mind. But when Thomas - cutting in his pleasantness - replied that they were sending the wrong people for that. His mistress, finally having enough of him, told her butler that George was a child – her child! To which Barrow simply replied …

'Don't commit to anything you'll have to retract later, Your Ladyship.'

Afterward, it was shameful to the very soul - making Mary cringe in absolute horror to even prod its borders in her memory - how they escaped Downton to get to London.

She remembered the sneaking about, how they all dressed in black coats and hats. How, as a family, they all shuffled about in the dark and crept through alleys. Sybbie had giggled quietly as if it was all a game when she held Tom's hand while they all rushed from shadow to shadow. Papa, Mamma, Mary, Barrow, Anna, Bates, Tom, Sybbie, and Baxter, all pressed to the wall in a line – avoiding George's well-placed sentries. And when they escaped the village via the last train out for the night … they all felt as if they accomplished something. They praised their brilliance at the perfect family caper and had a good laugh as they toasted to peace before drinking it down with smiles. Betrayal, treachery, and cowardice had never been more wholesome and funnier. And as Mary looked out at the dark of the late train's window It would be the last that she'd ever see of the Village of Downton as it had been in her childhood and on her wedding day to Matthew.

That cringing pain in her soul of such behavior back then was worsened when she arrived in Grantham County, her home, for the first time in six long years. She felt her heart immediately burn with the yearning for sight of the rolling barrows and fair green pastures when she reached the borders she knew so well once. But what she found was a quiet and barren land that had been overgrown by many seasons of rot and disuse. In her heart, in her memory, she would pass barns and farmhouses of plantations she used to visit twice a week. Yet, all she found was ruins of scorched stones, blackened foundations where her memories used to stand. Tall weeds swayed and bent in the cold autumn wind, sprouting like cancerous cells over untilled fields whose lumped rows of sod were barely visible from the road. She saw not a flock of sheep nor group of pigs in their pens. Even scarcer still could she not find people – shepherds nor estate workers at husbandry in the fields and pastures. All through her journey into this dark and grey apocalyptic world of her nightmare had she driven through a vast empty wasteland of unpopulated hills and empty moors.

The unrelenting cruelties of the Royal Regiment had spared no sex, age, nor condition on their rampage through the Grantham Estate. They set to blaze the barns and storehouses, ran off the livestock, and murdered the workers and farmhands that were employed to manage them. They had broken into the private homes of the tenants, killing, raping, and stealing at will. Many ancient and traditional homes of the most loyal and prosperous farming families in the County Grantham were burned, some with the women and children still inside. None were spared in these 'clearings' of rebel dissent from 'insurrectionists' that had been too well armed and organized to be simple farmers. And as result had they depopulated and razed entire swaths and sections of the County Grantham so that a person could drive for many a mile through the Grantham Estate and her lands and see not a standing homestead, nor hear even a bird call.

But nothing could prepare her for neither the casual muscle memory of driving through the Village of Downton, nor the sight that had overwhelmed her. With a jam of her foot on the sleek and expensive motor's brake, the car's screeching halt echoed hollowly through the blackened stone and brittle windows. Her red tinted amber eyes were wide as saucers as she looked all about her with wonder and dismay of what greeted her homecoming. The village of her girlhood, the arbiter of many great and happy memory was now nothing but a dilapidated ruin of a ghost town.

The rows of medieval and Tudor buildings that she knew by the count of her own paces to and from Downton were now nothing but toppled blackened ruins of stone foundations. The cobbled streets that always had a certain unique sound that Sybil once pointed out to her while they ate luncheon together during her shift at the hospital were now scorched and cracked. Weeds and pungent flowers had broken through the spaces between the charred stone bricks. Of what stores remained standing in the small town's square were marked by damaged storefronts that had been riddled with dozens of bullet holes. Inside the abandoned shops – some Mary frequented weekly – were now dark and dusty abysses, their items ransacked, cobwebs wrapping the pitch-black interiors while vines crawled over the store signs and through the broken and brittle windows.

Of the small country hospital that had been such a center point of both local and family politics since Matthew and Isobel had come to live in the village, had it been completely razed. A cold chill ran down the beauty's spine at the sight, even from inside the motor, of a blackened human skull that lay in a stagnant pool of dirty water in the cratered remains of where the front gate of the cottage hospital had been. Long had the levies tried to defend the hospital, to get the patients out. But the onslaught of the enemy's lead companies in the initial assault of the burning village cut off their escape. A deadly stalemate had developed when several attempts to rescue the patients by George and his men failed. Yet, the Royal Regiment was as equally unable to take the building. Each assault was turned away with great loss by the deadly enfilade fire from county marksmen that the young captain had placed on the roofs of the village square's defense perimeter. In the end, in frustration and aggression of hateful war in his veins, the commanding major of the worst hit Royal company had his remaining men fire the building with all the patients, doctors, and militia men still inside.

Surrounded by the surreal and unbelievable destruction that enveloped everything she knew and dreamt of for so long, Lady Mary Crawley got out of the motor. Her breath was visible in the rainy evening as she paced about the empty and abandoned village. After some minutes – which could've been as equally years in her devastation – Mary found herself standing in front of the old war memorial. Her leather gloved hand traced the blackened stone where the tidal wave of flame that had consumed most of the Village of Downton and her people had broken, reaching the limit of its momentum. Quietly pacing about it, she found the opposite side unburnt. However, pounded by relentless bullet impacts and ricochets, the honored names were as equally obscured and pulverized.

Here had been the evidence of the desperation and intensity of the three-hour firefight between the remaining men of the County Regiment and Levies that George rallied. Under great odds, without hope of victory, the young lord and his men held the village square against the full weight of "The King's Own" for as long as they could. Their objective not being a victory through arms but counted by the number of lives they could save. The longer they drew the enemy's attention, blinded him to nothing else but the conquest of the village square, the more women and children could escape their nets. And, indeed, in the bloody fight for the heart of the Village of Downton, many innocents took their moment to flee into the countryside to live to see the red sun rise over the death of a way of life.

Lady Mary Crawley, with a sputtered breath of familiarity, walked quietly over to the spot where she had sat upon the memorial's unveiling. In the silence, the emptiness, the memories and emotions of so many small moments took to life, their ghosts all about her as if they were real. She remembered Papa in his uniform, George upon her lap with Matthew's service ribbons pinned to his little tweed coat. Sybbie was seated next to her, picking at a pearl sequence on Mary's skirt that she put a stop to by taking her troublemaker's hand and not letting go till the ceremony was over. When she looked down the street, she heard the phantom cries of the crowds that had gathered to cheer her carriage as she paraded down these same streets on her way to marry Matthew. She could still see their waving flags, the adoring crowd that had come to put such a satisfying accent on a marriage of a great and true love that had been destined by the universe itself. Now, there was a haunted quiet, an impenetrable stillness, that overcame the hollow and empty ruins of the Village of Downton. So many memories attached to a sight that was now filled with broken and scorched remains of what was and never will be again.

She walked the green park where the Hussars had been inspected by the King-Emperor, the dais built on one horrible night that they had to place the chairs in a rainstorm. Now, the park was overgrown, the grey glint of rusted shell casings from spent cartridges littered where an old Lieutenant Colonel led a flying company of the County Regiment in a delaying rear-guard action to cover George and their remaining men's retreat to Downton Abbey. Stacked high were the dead and wounded of the "King's Own" in the disciplined fire of the falling back twin lines that gave ground, foot by foot, covering one another in deadly rank volley. They all fell there in the park, fighting to the very last to cover their comrades – their old colonel shot through five times before finally falling among his brave lads. It was but one of many tales of great and desperate feats of valor unrenowned by many a county soldier, militiamen, and denizen on that terrible night. Man and woman, young and old, so many gave willingly in sacrifice to save the innocent, the very future - all that would be left of them when it was over.

Lady Mary Crawley had never seen it, the ruins of her home. She had been in London when the battle and massacre had taken place. And it was London that she, Sybbie, and Mamma, had been taken from to go to the palace. Since then, for over half a decade, the closest to home she had come was Harewood and Haxby. But now, at her lowest point, Mary saw the extent of the destruction, the total annihilation, that she and Granny's hubris had a hand in. In that hour, she saw, to the very death of her soul, that there was no saving it, any of it. The alley that Matthew would accompany her to the Post Office on his way home from work that had become a Friday tradition. It was now blocked from fallen rumble of a toppled stone wall of a burnt-out store. The place where the ball throwing tent on the fairgrounds had been, the spot where Matthew and she had talked seriously of her life and circumventing Granny one magical evening, was overgrown by weeds and stained with dried pools of old blood. With quiet tears she had come to realize in sudden despair that everything she loved, everyone she loved, were now gone.

But these hollow sights and empty sounds could not have prepared her for driving up to Downton Abbey.

Thousands of bullet marks still scratched and scarred the tan stone, their holes still punched in the glass of the upper bedroom windows. The frontal assault on Downton Abbey by the "King's Own" had been a bloody and brutal affair whose aftermath was still visible six years later. Twice had an all-out attack by the full might of the Royal Regiment in disguise been repulsed under withering rifle fire. However, on the third assault – with half the county riflemen pulled away from the front defense to the gallery after the Library fell – they had finally breached the front doors, though not without great cost. The gravel driveway had been covered with the dead and dying felled waves of Royal soldiers, their bodies strewn and tangled in the wire fencing about Downton's yard. Now, every day, Thomas Barrow started his morning by picking spent rifle cartridges out of the gravel, and still – after six years – Mary's shoes still trod upon stray casings.

There were no doors to Downton Abbey any longer. Heavy oak shielded by dense black iron double gates - four hundred years old - had held firm against teams of engineers and brutes with sludge hammers. The gravel of the driveway and stone entrance of Downton were blackened and scorched with carbon scoring from where the defenders dropped Molotov Cocktails – made from Lord Grantham's vintage wine stores - down on the battering teams from the windows above. But eventually, when the Library fell, the royal soldiers wheeled one of the Boer War surplus cannons they captured around the house and turned it upon Downton's doors. As the first light of day touched the soft glow of the sable violent night, the centuries old doors were splintered into dozens of pieces by two artillery shells. But when there was a primal and victorious roar from the Royal Regiment, surging into the breach in a bottle neck, they were met by firebombs thrown from Downton's gallery. Like a river of flame had the concentrated explosions of fire consumed the press of enemy soldiers – roasting entire platoons of veteran shock troopers alive in Downton's very lobby.

There was a quiet shattered look that was deeply frozen on the lovely freckled countenance of the pale woman as she slowly walked through the blackened stained foyer of the open doorway of Downton Abbey. There was no coat or hat rack any longer. The vase of flowers that was picked and changed out daily from the gardens was no more. The end table that it had sat upon still stood, but a deep gash was slashed through the two-hundred-year-old mahogany. Multi-colored autumn leaves, blown from all over the estate, crunched and fluttered at Mary's high heels on the weather worn and soot stained rug that still lay at the entrance. The glass paned inner doors still remained, though exposure to the elements of nature from its shielding had stained and frosted the glass. She paused a moment, her eyes drawn to a single bullet hole, and in small miniscule droplets had old blood crowned it. Mary's leather gloved finger dabbed the fossilized liquid in deeply morbid fascination before finally opening the door. And as she walked away from the bloody hole, she had put out of her mind the passing significance of all that remained of Andy Parker, their once First Footman.

Nothing was the same in the Great Hall as she quietly paced into the drafty and empty grey room. In her memory, in her dreams, she could still see the centuries of dowry furniture, the elegant pottery and vases, the gilded glint of the glow at night. She could still remember the feeling of Matthew's arms about her as they danced in secret to the most magical moment of her life. The hall of exquisite and opulent paintings that had once been the very draw of Downton Abbey by many of the highest to the lowest of born subjects of the Imperium.

But no more … no more.

The furniture, the chairs and sofa - Edith's favorite chaise lounge - it was all gone. The paintings that hung in the Great Hall for hundreds of years – the centerpiece of the Abbey's tours – they were also missing. When Downton finally fell, when the last of her defenders had been put to the sword and a wounded George – the last man standing- was dragged to safety by a young woman in a nurses uniform, a wild and shameful run was made at all of the Granthams' possessions.

In the aftermath of the bloody and brutal night attack that had cost the lives of many more of their men than they thought, the Royal Regiment rewarded themselves with all they could carry in plunder. Thus, had much of the valuables and treasures of the Crawleys of Downton Abbey been stolen by blood drunk soldiers whose disguise in foreign livery gave them license to commit a great many atrocities. Furniture, paintings, sundries, anything they could find, or carry was theirs to take. Even Lady Grantham's jewels, Lord Grantham's snuff boxes, and Lady Mary's wardrobe. Downton Abbey had been picked clean of anything of worth or even just perceived of it.

Cold was the wind that howled and rattled through the upper levels of the gallery like the fell whisperings of a haunted voice. As she looked up, Mary saw that the railing of stone was damaged, sections missing, leaving entire gaps without guard from the long drop to the ground floor from the upper level. The columns and coat of arms that had ringed the Great Hall - a history of great lineage of noble houses joined to the Granthams of Downton Abbey – were pocked and obliterated by bullet scarring. They had all been casualties of the intensity of fire from enemy riflemen who rushed the Great Hall only to be caught in a deadly crossfire from the defenders upon the gallery. And it was said that the "King's Own" might never have taken Downton Abbey if they had not finally overrun the downstairs defenses. They had used the servant's staircases to outflank the defenders that had slaughtered many of the invading foe like 'shooting fish in a barrel' from the gallery. And for the many great and unseen losses suffered in the storming of Downton Abbey, did the enemy inflict a crueler fate on all in the Gothic Castle that remained to the last.

Never, in all of Lady Mary Crawley's life, had she ever felt as hollow or empty. The devastation and destruction of her home, her purpose, the fairy kingdom left to her by Matthew and Granny, was total. She could not recognize it, could not see past the grey gloom of the chipped and smashed stone, the missing railings upon the heavily damaged grand staircase. This was not Downton Abbey. This was not the place she dreamt of for six years …

It was a tomb.

Indeed, what would long be remembered of the "Grantham County Massacre" was the wonton and needless loss of life in the mismanagement of the poorly thought out plot. George Crawley was not killed that night, nor any night afterward. It was a terrible blunder, the most pyrrhic of victories ever seen, and all triggered by the distant sound of Matthew Crawley's Webley Revolver renting the stillness of the night from the Dower House. The company commanders of the Royal Regiment were disturbed and shocked when suddenly from the top of the Dower House's roof, a horn was blowing.

'Fear, Fire, Foes!'

'They're here!'

"To arms, to arms, they're here!'

'Fear, Fire, Foes!'

A deep fear scythed through the ranks of the "King's Own' when they heard the alarm being sounded throughout the village, the church bell ringing wildly. The officers of the Royal Regiment, Cousins-in-Law and nephews were trying to get the attention of Lord Lascelles who froze in a sudden panic as answering horns were being blown throughout the Estate. From his vantage point on the hill they could see electric lights and lanterns illuminating windows from the houses below. Finally, with the entire command staff shouting and shaking him to decide, the King's son-in-law became bullhead in brute forcing his confrontation with fear. Thus, it was, against convention and sound judgement - in sight of armed half-dressed men running from the village to man the defenses and the deep bass sound of answering horns spreading – Lord Lascelles ordered a full military assault on the Grantham Estate and village.

Most of the Grantham Regiment had perished in the tidal wave of fire that destroyed the Village of Downton. But, suspecting treachery, George had repositioned the militia's defenses, thus many of the local levies had not been posted where Lady Mary said they were. The result was a much heavier resistance given then Lord Lascelles and his commanders thought or even dreamed. The casualty rate for the Royal Regiment in the ultimately illegal military operation was exceedingly, shockingly, high. It became a bloody and frustrating affair for officers that often found themselves charging head long into unprecedented and unlooked for hails of organized rifle fire. Of their enemy, had he been commanded by a young captain whose skill of leading men in battle had been woefully underestimated. By the end of the night, all plans and goals had gone completely astray. All that mattered in the end was taking Downton Abbey –

The one place that Lord Lascelles was told by his in-laws must not be touched.

It was a senseless and desperate battle that was bloodily perpetrated by military men who knew that if they withdrew at any point that they'd be indicted by the High Courts for murder and treason - despite their orders being given from the highest places in the Imperium. The storming and fall of Downton Abbey that cold night in early 1929 had been completed with no greater purpose than to cover one's own culpability in a scheme by men of power that did not lift a finger to their own dirty work. And it was as much fear as it was rage that was in the utter violence and cruelty that the soldiers of the Royal Regiment unleashed on Downton and her village.

But when it was over, the whole of the Imperium was shocked and dismayed by what was reported and seen of the smoldering ruins, countless dead royal soldiers, and the cruel barbarous mutilated corpses of Downton's fallen defenders. Quickly had many in the peerage turned on the Prince in horror and outrage of the gruesome incident. They were fierce in their anger - to be promised the beautiful "Star of the County Grantham" and her riches, only to find her estate in ruins and her treasures stolen by enlisted men. But their anger was dwarfed by the Prince himself, whose whole scheme came to not and all his orders and will unheeded. He cried in rage at the escape of George and the sacking of Downton Abbey as absolute and utter incompetence on a grand scale … though most believed that the condemnation of idiocy started at the very top with the Prince himself.

Eventually, they all were called by a new Lord's Convention to answer for the courtiers' many crimes committed at the Village of Downton and Downton Abbey itself. Of this Lady Mary Crawley bore witness at the Queen's side, immune from testimony and conviction by Royal Decree. But after a long trial of grandstanding and bitter argument, no charges stuck to the Royal Heir, his friends, nor his grievously wounded brother-in-law. Instead, it was agreed – contentiously – under the most ardent and disgusted protests of Bertie, Shrimpie, and a great many Scottish Lairds - that George Crawley and his men had acted in rebellion against His Majesty's authority that night. Thus, they conceded that the use of deadly force by Lord Lascelles was justified. But still, despite the ruling of the council, many in the Royal Regiment, veterans of the storming of Downton, were hung for thievery. The booty stolen from the great house of Downton Abbey was reacquired and confiscated ... but never returned.

Quietly, gently, Lady Mary paced through the drafty and barren Great Hall, riddled by scars and cracks, to the library. She instinctually reached for the door but realized that there was no door. It had been kicked open only to absorb countless rifle rounds from the gallery as bottlenecked soldiers in foreign uniform were cut down by crack marksmen of the County Levies. Cautiously, she stepped inside the room to find it an absolute mess.

Here had been where Downton Abbey's defenses had been weakest during the assault. When the Grantham Family had absconded without warning, Mrs. Hughes – against Mr. Carson's promise to Lady Mary to remain silent - had sent word to George of the strange tiding. Suspecting treachery, George, now senior Lord of the County in his grandfather's disappearance, ordered Downton Abbey fortified as a 'fallback position'. Mr. Carson, who took over as Butler in Mr. Barrow's need in London for a Royal Banquet, refused to turn the Great House he had work in all his adult life into a Fortress. But he changed his tune when the young Lord of Downton and Captain of the Militia drew his blade on him. Then, with grave reluctance, he oversaw the fortification. Two eighteen-pound cannons from the Boer Wars surplus were wheeled through the garden and place within the Library of Downton Abbey. Their guns had complete command of the open ground in front of the Roman Gazebo at the end of the Gardens. For most of the last day Andy and Albert helped fill sandbags and baskets on the patio. Mr. Carson had been sure that Lord and Lady Grantham would murder him when they came home to find the Library turned into an entrenched artillery position.

But by the end of the night, they would never see each other again.

When the village had finally fell and the Levies and what was left of the County Regiment fell back to Downton Abbey, the best riflemen where placed at the sandbagged and basket position among the artillery pieces. Being the weakest and most exposed position in the House, where most of the heaviest fighting would take place, George naturally took command of the position personally. And when the first assault through the gardens came, led by the best companies in the Royal Regiment, they were surprised and afear when the roar of large cannons lobbed shells at them from Downton itself, ripping devastating holes in their lines. When they came again, and got into range, the crews loaded nails and metal bits from the maintenance sheds on the Estate into sacks and stuffed them in the guns. When the whistle sounded for the charge of the Royal Companies, the gun crews let them have it. Those in the advancing royal front ranks simply evaporated into moist pink mist of tattered cloth, while those behind screamed in horror as nails and shrapnel tore into their bodies, leaving them riving on the manicured lawn as those who could fall back did so.

But eventually, when the frontal assault on Downton's doors had gone nowhere, Lord Lascelles arrived in order to rally and provide reinforcements to make a coordinated push to take the Library and the cannons. Then, with one last massive charge, which had cost them dearly, the royal companies eventually reached the defenses. In the assault, Lord Lascelles was carried from the field, taking a near mortal wound in the groin - some said from George himself. Many officers and soldiers perished by nail and shrapnel or volleys of pinpoint accuracy from expert riflemen. Finally, surging across the lawn, over their dead and dying comrades, the "King's Own" reached the outworks of the defenders. Climbing over the sandbags and baskets they fought the country boys and enlisted soldiers of the Grantham Regiment in brutal and desperate hand-to-hand combat.

Those that had been there that night would never forget the madness, the hatred, in another man's eyes as they stabbed with their bayonet or swung the butt of their rifle like a club. Men rolled about on the porch and atop the rugs of the library. They punched, clawed, and bit their foe in feral animalistic fighting. Royal soldiers were torn to pieces by point blank firing of shotguns through torsos and chests. Knives glittered in the frigid night, as ever could there be heard the sound of clashing blade from Sikh Rajput against thrusting bayonet or officer's saber. And among them were dozens of hands lifted from the floor, the wounded whose cries for help was ever underscored to the battle. Meanwhile the dying could be heard praying for their loved ones, for God to protect and deliver them from this horrible night, knowing what cruel fate awaited them if Downton were to fall. However, seeing the enemy reserve being brought through the garden, George - with bloody Rajput and his father's Webley Revolver emptied – called for his men, whoever was left, to pull back to the gallery.

Six years later, Lady Mary's chocolate locks fluttered in the open chill of a gentle breeze that whistled through the broken glass of the patio doors to the gardens. Books were taken off their shelves and stacked on the ground. Meanwhile, over in the distance, there was a discard pile of other books – or what was left of them. Tomes and novels, hundreds of years old, all had bullet holes in them. A first edition Jane Austen had been shot through so many times that it had been split in half. It seemed that someone was trying to reorganize the library … perhaps Edith. Her sister always knew her way around it and looked after it when she lived at home. Mary noticed the throw rug where once, Sybbie and Papa had played board games, where Isis and Teo had lay at Papa's feet at his desk. Now deep black lines stained upon it where wheels on cannons had rolled back in recoil when they fired out upon the garden path. There were singe marks from where superheated spent artillery shell casings had fallen.

'If you've come bent on thievery, I'm afraid you've missed it by some years, friend."

Mary had recognized the voice. Though she wished it had belonged to someone else. It was tired and worn under the burden of woeful years. Its speech was dignified and educated, but horse with illness. Slowly, with tears in her eyes, Mary paced over to the fireplace of the small library. The red plush furniture – the first thing that Lady Cora bought as the new Countess of Grantham – was still where it had always been. But now it was old, the material faded, and feathers were peaking from frailed and threadbare material on the cushions. But between the two sofas, there sat a tall backed armchair in front of a low burning fireplace. As Mary approached it, her heart quaked in a pained sorrow that had only been felt twice in her life.

Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, Lord of the House of the White Queen, and Heir to the Royal House of York, sat alone by the fire. He seemed smaller than Mary remembered, leaner, and sallow. His bearing was tired and withdrawn - eyes filled with a melancholy that leached the life out of him. A face that had never not been cleanshaven all of Lady Mary's life now was bearded by hair that was white as snow. His once plump and jovial countenance were now shrunken and thin in malnourishment. A blanket wrapped the man in threadbare suit as he stared blankly at the low burning fire in his bullet scarred and damaged hearth. If he knew that someone was there, it did not seem to matter to the now old man that sat alone in the ruins of his house. The cough he let out was hacked and troublesome as he wrapped himself deeper into the folds of the tattered blanket that was placed about his shoulders. For a long time, Mary watched her beloved papa's distant and broken eyes that looked sickly and empty.

For years, Tom, Edith, Bertie, and Lucy, had tried to convince Robert to stay with them at Brampton or London. Rosamund had insisted and rancorously fought her brother to live with her, to at least open Grantham House. But he would not do so, not under any circumstances. Downton Abbey was his home, the house that built him, that had inspired him to go out into the world. If it wasn't for Downton, he would never have met Cora, would never have married her, and would never have fallen in love with his soul mate. Everything he was and is was due to Downton Abbey, and nothing would make him leave it.

At first it had been pride that had kept him there. He would not allow anyone, be it slanderers or murderers, to run him off from his own home. Then, he thought it his responsibility to stay and help his people. It did not matter that they cursed him to his face, that they would not take charity from his own hand. The survivors of the massacre blamed Lord Grantham for what befell. They accused him and the rest of the family of treachery, of having a hand in the murder of their sons and husbands, the rape of their daughters and themselves. Fore it was well known that while the Royal Regiment ran riot through their burnt streets and Downton Abbey fell, Lord and Lady Grantham, and all of their House, were feasting with the very Royal Family that ordered the execution. That while they fought for their lives in the burning hellscape, the Grantham Family was hosting a ball of many a fine and fancy folk dancing in gown and tail. And of all that wounded Lord Grantham the most in his later years it was the belief that he had betrayed his own grandson for Royal favor. Even long afterward, it was not fully believed by anyone - even George - that Robert had not a hand in his mother and eldest child's scheme.

Yet, in the end, it was for that reason that Robert Crawley stayed in Grantham County, why he lived in the mangled ruins of Downton Abbey. He would wait, for however long it took, for George to return home. It would be then that he would not stop till his grandson, his only boy, knew that he had no hand in the treachery against him and their men. He would tell him how very sorry he had been for what had transpired between them after Caroline's death and beg for forgiveness of one he had loved so greatly that had been exiled so far away.

Robert Crawley would not move from the damp and deathly chilled bones of a house in which he raised a family with the love of his life. He would not move to warmer or safer environment. He would catch and overcome any sickness, for fear of not being there when they all came back. His wife, his daughter, his granddaughter, all taken from him. But someday they'd come back home, come back to him. And when they did, he would be right where he had always been, where he belonged. Then, they'd know that they had not been forgotten, that the man that loved them most in the world had thought of nothing else all these long years.

'Papa …'

Robert Crawley had ignored Mary's voice, shuttering with visible breath in the autumn chill. It broke his daughter's heart more than anything had in so many years. Fore, it was not that she was ignored. It was the knowledge that Lord Grantham had heard his daughter, his wife, his granddaughter, and grandson's voice so many times in his mind or in hallucination. Now, to keep hold of his sanity, he no longer acknowledged them when he thought he heard them. A single tear fell down her pale freckled cheek as she slowly reached out a leather gloved hand and placed it upon her father's threadbare shoulder. But still Robert Crawley did not stir, refusing to immediately whirl about hopefully. He slowly collected himself, tempered expectations to meager mundanity, and then turned. It would be then that he would see Thomas Barrow, Richard Ellis, or John and Anna Bates - the sole remainders and compliment of the staff of Downton Abbey. But their faces did not replace that of his daughter's.

'Papa, it's me …'

'Mary?'

'Yes.'

'Ma-Mary? Oh, God, is it really you?'

'Yes, Papa, it's really me, I've come home.'

Tears and sobs melted Mary's countenance as she unburned herself in her shell-shocked father's arms, falling upon her knees and burying her face to his chest. It wasn't till Lord Grantham saw Princess Mary enter the library with Anna that he finally allowed himself to believe it. Then, he kissed his daughter's forehead and clung to her tightly, crying in a joy so painfully bought. It was for the first time in years, that Mary felt both safe and the worst of her guilt that would always chase it. Her strangled sobs were a wordless and emotional admittance that she had failed, failed all that she loved, failed her children.

"I'm so sorry …"

She turned into the hand that cupped her cheek, the warmth of it. And she remembered that grey and cold day as if she was still there. Long since, with the use of Royal capital gifted to her by the King and in the investment of other peers and, later, … Nazi corporation, had Downton Abbey been renovated and returned to its former glory. But in that dark and terrible yesterday that haunted the study of Nampara House, everything felt and dreaded had come alive again in vivid memory of the devastation she first laid her eyes upon. Yet, the difference was that the hand that touched her in comfort was the only one in the universe that would've made it alright…

The only person in the world who would've saved her.

When Lady Mary turned, she looked into Matthew's crystalline eyes and basked in their love, their understanding. She wished she could've been like Papa and wrapped herself in them like his blanket. She clung to the way her heart yearned for such a powerful love that was a part of her very soul. In his eyes, in his touch, she knew the woman she could be, should be. And with all her heart she wanted to be it, to have been it. To relive the past and create that alternate future in which she would've done anything to get her children back. To find their son in bitter exile and go to him, be with him, to figure out how to get Sybbie back. Then, nothing else would matter, not Downton, not her life of luxury and glamour. She would have her children and she would live anywhere in the world just to make sure they were safe. That was what the mother of Matthew Crawley's child, his only child, would've done.

But that was not what Lady Mary Crawley did that day … the day that she gave up on her son, on herself, on everything, and surrendered to the darkness.

"No …"

Matthew watched in languishing compassion as his wife rejected his touch and comfort. The pain was excruciating and jointly felt as she turned away from everything that they both wanted. And when Mary walked away from him, it was as if his own right hand had been severed in their separation. Forlorn and in puzzlement did he watch Mary pace to the window again and look out at the late-night frosted imagery of Cornwall in the witching hours of Mab. Her eyes alight and aflame in tormented memories of years long past and the many deeds done within them when all hope had faded, and dark despair guided a nihilistic madness.

"Mary, please …" Matthew begged, his heart weighed like lead after all that Mary told of her captivity and empty freedom. "Let me help." He said running a hand over his mouth as his eyes sparked with sorrow and anger of all that befell in his absence, gaining a fuller context beyond George's angry words and accusations.

"Help?" Mary asked with a frown. "What possibly could you do to help?" She asked with pointed rancor.

"I …" He shook his head. "I don't know." He placed a hand to his forehead with eyes angled up in a mind suddenly afield in confusion of words and images that should not go together in this wholesome love affair.

Something black and angry knotted her belly as a sudden fierceness of frustration overcame her. "You know what I imagine could've helped …" She already knew that she was wrong to say it.

But she did anyway.

"Paying attention to the damned road, Matthew!"

"That's not fair!"

"Is it not? Are you so suddenly the authority of what is not fair in life?"

"You will not turn this around on me!"

"You wanted the truth, so I'm giving it to you!"

"…"

"You were not there, Matthew! That's the truth! You left me! You left me on the happiest day of our lives! And all I got was a scribbled note made at the last minute in your grubby little office! How could you possibly help when you're the reason this happened!" Mary shouted at the man who was suddenly cowed.

"Do you think I wanted to leave you? To leave George?!"

"Well, that's what happened!" She shrugged with venom dripping out of her very eye sockets. "And now there's nothing left to say, there's nothing left to do. You're too late!" She turned away, visibly wounded by the sentiment. But her parting sentence suddenly snapped her husband from a guilty and pained swoon.

"I don't believe it!" He strode forward in desperation.

"It's over, Matthew!" Mary said petulantly, a rage growing in the stubbornness of the man she loved to deny her the very satisfaction of destroying the life and future of the wretched and awful creature that was her reflection.

"I refuse to accept it!" He raised his voice. "I won't allow you to throw your life away, our life away!" He shook his head.

"What life, Matthew?!" Mary was desperate, flailing, burning with the desire to punish herself, to rake the skin off her beautiful face. She wanted him so much, she loved him so much, that it was killing her – killing her – fore she knew that she did not deserve such a deathless devotion. "That life was twenty years ago!" She lashed out.

"Not to me." He shook his head fiercely.

A shadow fell over her countenance as she put a hot iron to her own hand to spite her heart.

"This is my fault." Mary said so suddenly and so frigidly that a chill went up Matthew's spine. "I've led you on." She sighed closing her red tinted eyes in a private wince of what was to come. "See, I made you believe in this … in all of this." She began to explain.

"Don't, Mary!" Her husband tried to cut her off. "Don't you dare try that with me!" He tried to talk over her.

"It wasn't real, Matthew!" Mary said loudly. "I didn't mean it, any of it!" She shrugged again, her face so blank, a smirk of cruelty on her rosy lips. "I did it, because, I wanted to see what George was doing with the estate. You were a means to an end, Matthew! Nothing more." She shook her head.

"You're a terrible liar!" Her husband snarled emotionally.

"No …" She contradicted. "The Mary you knew twenty years ago was a terrible liar. I'm not that woman anymore." She assured him. "If she ever existed at all." There was a cold and superior tone in her voice that took authority, as a child who attempted to sound grown up and wise beyond their minimal years.

"Yes, you are!" He paced closer to her till they were in each other's personal space. "You always have been!" He grasped her by her shoulders and whirled her around to face him. "I've held you in my arms, Mary Crawley … look at me!" He shook her when she tried to turn away. "I've held you in my arms, I've looked into your eyes when we made love, I know the joy it brought you, every day, to have our child growing inside your belly!" He placed his hand to her flat and taut stomach as if to remind her of the happiest of their days together. "Don't tell me that I don't know you, that I can't tell what's real and what's fake when it comes to us!" He shook her. "I love you!" His voice cracked in the overwhelming passion. "And I don't care what you've done or what's happened! That'll never, never, change!" He reached up and cupped her cheeks.

"For god's sake, Mary … I love you! And I'm not going anywhere!" He shook his head as he handled her with such loving gentility in his palms.

All Lady Mary Crawley wanted to do was die. Tears streaked down her pallid cheeks and the ice cracked behind her red tinted amber eyes. There was nothing of her defenses left, no lies, no tricks of deceit could fool the man she loved. In that moment she wanted to go to him, to envelope him in her arms, to hide away from the world, from herself, and disappear into a cherished yesterday that could've been, that should've been in all the hard years they had been parted.

Matthew Crawley was everything that Mary had wanted and longed for since she first set eyes upon a strange fellow who was entirely full of himself. How he roused her to wrath by looking at her in that first glance like no man had ever done before. It was not lust, it was not stricken attraction … it was love, fated and doomed in their first glance. It was then that such a man, an interloper, angered and frustrated Lady Mary, fore she knew in one startled peer at her lovely countenance that her life would be changed forever. Now, seeing that same look. twenty-eight years later, she was angered and frustrated again. Fore she could not take it, the glory and eternity of the love that completed her.

The villain doesn't get a happily-ever-after in fairy stories.

"Oh, Matthew, you don't know what you're saying!" Her husband was stricken and hurt when Mary aggressively broke his grip on her with a forearm, turning her back on him.

"Of course, I do! Enough of this nonsense, Mary!" He placed a hand on her shoulder.

Quickly, scolded by the comfort and warmth she was desperate for, she shrugged away from him. "Nonsense?!" She parroted turning to face him. "You think all that has happened, all the things that I've done in twenty years, is nonsense?!" She was suddenly aggressive, a fey madness possessing her in a countdown to oblivion of self-destruction that told her to attack … to destroy.

"Do you know how Isobel died?" She asked.

"Mary … please …"

"She lost her mind, Matthew!" She stepped closer to him as he suddenly backed away. "She was old! Isobel should have retired years before. But she was so stubborn, so vain, that she worked in the Hospital long past her time. Then, on the day before Christmas Eve, tired and worn out from working a shift that younger staff wouldn't blink at - she mislabeled my daughter's medicine. She prescribed her an adult dosage! It killed Caroline, my Caroline! My baby girl is dead because of your mother!" Mary shouted.

"No … I, don- no …"

"The guilt drove Isobel mad! It was a painful and slow death by poisoned regret, till we had to lock her in our old sitting room in the day nursery! For years, she scribbled nonsense on papers in old hospital files and on the very walls! She paced around manically day and night trying to 'complete her work'. Trying to save a baby she couldn't even remember the name of! At the end, she didn't even know who George was!"

"Ah, oh, God …" Matthew paced away, covering his eyes, devastation and sorrow exploding in his chest.

Tears fell from Mary's eyes, knowing what she was doing was evil, yet, if her beloved Matthew wouldn't save himself from loving a wicked wretch … than she would.

"Do you think that I've waited for you? That you're the first person to touch me, to make love to me, since you died?"

She pursued her husband behind the desk, trying so very hard to bludgeon him, to hurt him, to draw his blood with her fangs. She wanted him to hate her, to leave her, so that he would not be caught in the wake of her failures, dragged down with the sinking ship of a life she was ashamed of. It was intrinsic, an old knowledge, of how to hurt, really hurt, Matthew Crawley. And it was to attack his weaknesses, the things he loved, truly loved. And that was his mother … and herself.

"Mary, stop!"

He held himself up on the desk, pained at the truth of Isobel's decline that George had kept from his father out of mercy and love. But on the heels of it, he could not bear to hear of the despoiling of his wife when he had no memory of their separation. To know of her carnal history was to feel as if she had cuckolded him, cheated on him, betrayed their marriage. It had been twenty years, but the mere knowledge of her indiscretions was like tearing out his very heart.

"Do you think that you're the fiftieth or hundredth person I've had sex with?" She shook her head, a deep self-hatred in every venomous word. "The things I've done would shock you, Matthew!" She cornered him as he tried to escape her. "I've lain in orgy with dozens of other men - and women! I've taken lovers two – three – at a time! I slept with Dukes, Earls, Kings, Nazi Dignitaries, and Head Boys from Eton! I've sold my body for material, for corruption, narcotics, and motivation to hunt down our son! I used to get methadone from a Hollywood maid who would perform oral sex on me as I shot up! And those are the ones I remember, Matthew!" She was mad, possessed, grabbing her husband's arm.

"Enough!"

Matthew shoved Mary against his great-great-grandfather Ross Poldark's desk and attempted to flee the room. There was a loud clatter of ledgers as she fell on top of it. But the woman, fey and suddenly cruel in her need, compulsion, to destroy this wholesome image, love, that Matthew had for her. She quickly - slender limbs taut and athletic - sprang back up and quickly cut Matthew off. Her hand shot out and smashed the door closed, checking him against it.

"I raised taxes six times on the Estate, on the county, just to renovate and restore Downton Abbey! I implemented a stamp tax and then required a nine pence service fee for anyone wanting to buy anything! It forced families to starve on mouthfuls of bread as I built the Town of Downton on their poverty! And when they couldn't pay the taxes, I threw them out of your cottages, and I burned their homestead houses and stole their land! Dozens, hundreds, of women and their children wandered the countryside homeless, looking, begging for food as I threw house parties and attended balls! And if I caught them poaching on the Estate … I'd hang them!" She gritted her teeth, snarling in Matthew's ear as she forced him against the door.

"I refuse to listen to this!" He protested defiantly, restraining his strength and want to lay a hand on his wife in anger.

But even this loving act drove Mary insane, fore she could not break him of his desire, his devotion, to a hateful and monstrous woman.

"I've hurt children, Matthew!" She screamed, tears falling freely. "I've executed their mothers and fathers, and their brothers and sisters! Left them destitute and starving in the ruins! I've called our son a bastard in public! I've denied he was ever mine to the House of Lords! I told him when he was a child that I wished he had died and that you lived, a child, imagine that, of God! I allowed him to take the blame for Caroline's death! I've manipulated boys and men into trying to hurt him … to kill him, since he was eight years old! I allowed his enemies to use my body shamefully for their pleasure to spite him! I allowed my little girl to be used like a whore, because, I was so broken and addled by sex and drug that I couldn't see it, didn't want too! I ruined my children, like I've ruined myself!" She screamed.

"Am I worth it?!" She shook her husband by the straps of his tank top. "Am I still the love of your life?!" She roared in blinding tears. "Am I still your Mary?!" She shook her head violently, despair in her broken voice as she wept bitterly of the hateful past of her evils that she regretted every single day and night in her endless imprisonment within Downton Abbey.

"Yes."

Her eyes were wide as Matthew's gaze met her fearlessly, without hindrance or guess. She looked down as she found his hands reach up and brace her pale arms tightly, desperately. Never had she seen anyone look so hurt, so conflicted, so tormented in that moment. Mary could see that he wanted to hurt her, to throw her across the room, to scorn and punish her for everything that had left her mouth. She was his wife six months ago, they were happy six months ago, and they had their entire future. Now, twenty years later, she saw that it had not dimmed, their love, their passion. It was then, after everything she had done and said, that Lady Mary realized that it never would. Their love today, yesterday, and all the days that could've been would never die, never snuff out in complacency. From the first day till their last, there was no one else on the planet for Mary and Matthew. It wouldn't matter what she did or how much she tried to destroy it, there was only one love of their life and nothing could change that.

THUMPH!

Suddenly, the door to Nampara's study was thrown open with a great amount of force. It sent both Mary and Matthew reeling and stumbling. Both husband and wife tumbled onto the middle of the floor on the old nineteenth century rug. When they landed, the old door of the smuggler's hold rattled violently. They barely had time to recover, to find themselves and what had sent them aground, when they felt a dark and ominous presence standing before their prone bodies. And when they looked up, both Mary and Matthew were startled to see that there was no intruder … only a forgotten host.

Cerulean eyes flashed like lightning and menaced like the boom of close thunder as a tall figure stepped purposefully into the study and loomed darkly over the fallen forms of his parents. George Crawley was incensed by the words he heard his mother utter in pride and hateful arrogance. For Matthew, he could compartmentalize, not fully feel, see, or even believe all that Mary spoke of in evil faux accomplishment of her many monstrous deeds used to bait him into tearing her from his heart. But the same could not be said for one who had lived through such things, who saw them happen, and knew what their affects had been. Of all the things said that night, did George have for each a memory, a regret, and an endless hatred of the consequences that fell upon the ones he loved … and on him.

"Chap, wait!"

"AAUGHCK!"

Matthew Crawley was chilled to his bones by the dark and frightening look that came over his son's fair and scarred countenance as his tall boots thumped heavily on the floor as he stalked and fell upon his mother. A tanned and callous hand shot out like a striking head of a serpent, an unblockable mirage of trained movement by a master swordsman. It was then that the young man's father watched his wife be snatched up by her long pale neck. Mary let out a gruesome and fearful hacking noise as she felt as if a wrought iron clamp had been fastened about her supple throat. With one effortless motion George turned and began dragging his mother across the floor by her neck toward the door of the study.

Quickly, Matthew bounded to his feet on the familiar family heirloom and rushed after their child. As he reached the hall out the door, he watched as George, wordlessly, continued to drag his mamma by her throat across the parlor. The woman's red tinted eyes were wide and panicked, one of her slim elegant hands was desperately clawing at her son's wrist, the other was flailing about, knocking over sundries and empty bottles in a vain attempt to catch hold of something, anything, to anchor herself against George's aggressive action. Her bare slender feet slid and slipped trying to gain footing as she stumbled backward in the momentum of her child's long stride.

"George stop!"

In that terrifying and chaotic time, the man did not know what would happen or what George was going to do with his mamma. If he banked on the idea that he would not hurt Mary, then he would think himself a fool. His faith in the idea that George would at least not kill her was challenged by the sudden look of dark hatred on his countenance and the pure murder in his elemental gaze. All the doubts, the conflicted faith, and the unfamiliar territory of being thrown into the middle of the toxic and obsessive relationship between George and Mary made him think that anything, truly, was possible between them. It was then, that Matthew felt that he had no choice but to try and at least stop his boy from doing whatever it was he had planned for Mary after she triggered the terrible haunting of their child's mind and heart with her careless and cruel theatrics.

FUMPH!

With thunderous rumble of heavy bare heels on stone, Matthew Crawley sprinted after their child in an attempt to rescue Mary. But as he was reaching out to restrain George, the young fighter, without turning, shot out a backward trained kick with a straightened leg like a frozen rope. It speared his father right in the solar plexus - traumatizing it. Matthew's whole body folded about his son's leg for a moment. Then, never breaking stride once, George continued to drag Mary through the parlor toward the front door. Meanwhile, his father collapsed on the corner of the rug, feeling acid burn his throat as he gasped for air in a torso that was paralyzed completely. He grasped the arm of the sofa that was placed adjacent to the stone fireplace, facing a love seat across the rug. He motioned toward and called both his son and wife's name in an indecipherable gasp as he weakly collapsed incapacitated on the parlor floor.

The quiet of the Cornish night, the close rattle of sparse crickets, the distant crash of waves from Nampara Cove across the rocky moor, was broken by the thunderous slam of the wood and iron front door of Nampara being flung open. The iron studs on the old stone of the Georgian cottage made a hard-warped sound when they met in aggressive impact. It was followed by long striding crunch of tall boots on grass and the shuffling of struggling bare feet stumbling backward that echoed from the stone fence about Nampara House. As clouds passed across the low hanging half-moon, the silvery light waxed upon a dark figure's stern face as he determinedly dragged a pale beauty in a long silk robe by her throat around the yard to the back of the house.

There, in a dirt courtyard between three buildings, was where a thatch roofed barn and matching storehouse was built into the stone perimeter wall of the homestead. The wood was ancient and a dark fossilized brown, worn and thin, though not rotted. In the old days, and certainly in Matthew Crawley's youth, there had been a stable in the barn where the Poldark-Crawley family's horses were held and maintained. They favored big black Irish stallions - quick and sure footed upon the rugged Cornish cliffs and shores. But now, under Captain George Crawley's ownership of his ancestral home, the stables had been turned into a makeshift garage where cars and motorcycles where kept. Indeed, if Matthew Crawley had cared to check, he would've found his old AC Motor that he had died under behind a green tarp – an abandoned restoration project undertaken by George and Sybbie upon his return home after the rebellion. But when the barn door was thrown open with a thwack there were other vehicles within.

It did not help Lady Mary Crawley's case that she had driven her MG from Yorkshire to Cornwall to be with her husband. She hadn't really given it a thought at all, it had been her car for many years. But George Crawley had been away for eight of them, and he did not see the MG as his mamma's car. Fore before it was Mary's, it had been Henry Talbot's. It was a gift he had given her during the divorce to remind her of their better times together, deciding to reinvent himself by choosing a new motor for the new chapter in his life. And if Mary Crawley had thought better, if she had conceived that her child would be at his house, she would never have brought it.

It was a long and well-known fact that there was no better way to anger George Crawley, to make him irrational in sudden fell mood, than to ever mention or remind him of that 'fucking coward'. Henry Talbot was not allowed to step foot on Grantham land nor property, to do so was to court a slow and utterly painful death. Ever did Tom Branson receive harsh ridicule - sometimes unjustly - for his part in playing matchmaker to Mary and Henry. Ever was it used rancorously as a reminder by his nephew to make sure that his uncle kept his nose out of other people's business.

Only once before had Henry broken the ban that George set down long ago and Lady Grantham enforced till her dying day. Running into Henry at a car show in 1936, Tom had dined with Henry after so many years. Without thinking, and later assuming that everything was water under the bridge, Tom had once more set up Mary and Henry for dinner in the Town of Downton - making sure that it would not break Mary's exile. It was then, in nostalgia and much drink, that Mary and Henry had remembered the good times - the old flames lit anew. That night, for the first time in nine years, they had slept together. Feeling the old emotions that had once brought them together, and the intimacy of the act that they both had only gotten better at over the years, Henry thought there was another chance for love.

And it would be a mistake that had nearly cost him his life when he came to Downton Abbey to stay the night.

Immediately, Lady Grantham told Henry that he had to leave, that George was downstairs in the servant's hall. Thomas Barrow told Mr. Talbot that if he valued his life that he would heed Her Ladyship's order. But Tom and Mary would not budge, saying that George had to 'grow up' and 'move on' like they all had. But they learned to regret such arrogance when the young man entered the library to announce that Sybbie had fixed the boiler. It was then that he came face to face with his former stepfather for the first time since he was a young boy.

An inch, just an inch, was the difference between life and death when George's knife slashed at Henry's throat. Thomas Barrow, Richard Ellis, Tom, Lord Grantham, Sybbie, Lady Rose, and Lady Edith all tackled and restrained a fierce and murderous George on the rug as he fought off their grappling to get at a terrified Henry Talbot who held his gashed neck. 'I'll kill you, you son of a bitch!' the teenager roared as he threw Rose off him and nearly got free, taking Lady Edith with him - whose performance of an arm bar hold seemed to have no effect on her ward. Immediately, with raised voice for him to flee, Mary shielded Henry out of Downton Abbey quickly. His luggage for the night was left never touched at the door by Mr. Barrow – who knew better than Mary and Tom of how this would all go. The hurried goodbye was the last that Mary and Henry ever saw of each other since.

Tom Branson would not soon forget the black eye he received from his nephew in the scuffle that followed when it was revealed that Tom was playing 'cupid' again between his former partner and his best friend. They had all been sure that George was going to kill Tom that day and Mary that night. But Sybbie had done much to temper the mood as she scorned George for punching her daddy and she scorned her daddy for knowing better than to ever invite 'that man' back into their home. It was not forgotten, but quietly forgiven in unspoken apology of the incident.

But it was on that day, and all the days since, that his family learned the hard way that George Crawley never forgets, and he never forgives.

This was the sentiment of the night, in the fierce hatred in his eyes as he dragged Mary across the barn to the MG. In the back seat of the car were all of Mary's cases and luggage. In the time that his parents fought bitterly, and Mary retold her tale of dehumanizing and objectification in Royal Obligation, George had packed up Mary's clothing and squared them away in her car. Already felled by the night's company and the lies told to his father of the past, the memory of Henry Talbot and his car polluting Nampara House had done no favors to his blackening temper. But when he reentered the house and heard Mary screaming in cruelty of every evil she perpetrated in the years of her wicked reign, she had boiled her boy's blood into molten lava. Then, in dark and hateful memory of all she spoke, he had finally snapped.

The beautiful woman's lithe and statuesque body slammed loudly with a metallic thwack as her son threw her against the hood of the MG. Her eyes were wide, her breath coming shortly, his grip strategically placed for maximum discomfort, but little in way of airflow restriction. A martial artist of novel fame, he knew pressure points and the difference between grips … and how it could be used to torment a foe. The light of the waxing crescent shown like a spotlight through the open doors of the barn's upper level, shining down at an angle upon the scene. For a moment Mary was entranced and frightened by the silvery light that framed only one quarter of her son's fair face, leaving the rest of him in shadows. Her gaze was transfixed by the deep and black inkvine scar that ran across her son's eye that was framed in the pale light as he loomed over his pinned mother.

"If I catch you with even one toe off the Estate's grounds ever again …"

George trailed off with a dark and gravelly voice that was utterly perilous. She flinched when there came a cold ring of sharpened metal from the young man's side. She jerked and made a helpless protest as a pale glowing dagger with runes of Westernesse slipped into sight in the dark.

"You die like every tyrant and monster I've ever fought …!"

She drew a deep breath through her nostrils in fear as George brought the ancient blade to her eye. She nudged her head away in wince when she felt the pin prick of it on her naked iris, willing herself not to blink least she slice her fettered lashes and lid in twine.

"By inches." He finished with a dark hateful promise.

Suddenly, it felt like there was too much oxygen and the world got suddenly lighter as the horrible pain about her neck went away. Mary squeezed her eyes shut and arched her back over the rounded hood of the MG. She panted, breathing normally, nearly fainting at the sudden change of her physical situation. Slowly she opened her eyes, ready to say something, anything. But the words died in her throat when she looked up to see nothing in the dark of Nampara's Barn.

No one was there.

Matthew Crawley had barely made it to the back door when he heard the revving of a motor from the courtyard. His legs wobbled and he thought that he was going to be sick. But slowly, with great pain, he was starting to get feeling in his torso and chest again. He leaned heavily on the dining table and the rustic hall to the back door. He was desperate to get to Mary and George, to stop whatever might be taking place. He felt lost in the dark, unable to grasp ahold of anything real or find footing in a world that did not make any sense. These were people he loved, who were his entire universe, and now he felt as if he did not know any of them at all. But over everything else, Matthew was pained by a deep and cumbering guilt of all that had happened, all that could've been avoided, if he had only been paying attention to the road on one glorious and happy day in the high Spring.

With a bang, he threw open the door just in time to see the bright neon of taillights spill over the dirt and rustic setting of the courtyard of Nampara, casting odd shadows upon the stone walls with its angled and slow movements. In the driver's seat, Matthew could make out a statuesque figure in long shimmering robe behind the wheel, the moonlight gleaming off her soft milky ivory skin. And in the distance her wash of tears glittered in gleaming silver light. Her head of silky chocolate hair was bowed as she leaned a tall forehead against the steering wheel. Her chest heaved as the sound of the motor engine swallowed her broken weeping. Nothing, in the whole wide world, tore Matthew Crawley apart more than the very sight in front of him.

"Mary!" He cried painfully over the protest of his injured chest and the loud motor of the MG.

Still, with a snap of her head, his wife sat straight in the seat. He could see her beautiful and haunted countenance in the rearview mirror as her amber eyes found him in the reflection. Everything inside him wanted to race into the yard when his appearance, his pained voice for her to stay, was met with the aggressive and audible shift of the gear stick. Matthew was blinded by the sudden intensity of the headlight's shine as the swift motor of a former race car driver obeyed its mistress's command. The engine roared to life and with a stomp of her foot, dirt and gravel was slung through the old courtyard as Mary floored the car through the opening of the stone and earth wall of Nampara's back entrance. Matthew stumbled down the old stone stairs as the noise of Mary's motor disappeared into the distance. Soon the breaking waves upon the rocks of the cove and the nocturnal noises of rural Cornwall resumed to serenade the dim midnight of the empty courtyard.

For a long time, lost in a haze, in a daze, did Matthew Crawley look out at the familiar back gate. He hoped, wondered, prayed, that he would hear the sound of the MG again. That Mary would return, to fight her corner, to repent all she said and did. But as the quiet and still night settled about him, the clouds obscuring the light like the draping of curtains on a final act of an ancient tragedy, he knew that his pining was in vain. Slowly, hauntedly, Matthew sat upon the steps of his ancestral home and stared at the open gate. Tears formed in his eyes, though they did not fall. All he could hear was the wild and broken admittance of all the evils that Mary had done to others, to their son, and to herself.

His mind and vision had been conflicted by the view of the Mary he knew not a year ago. She had been so happy, so full of joy. No one had ever seen a pregnant woman so in glee. There was wonder and love, pure and unimaginable, in her face as she held their boy in her arms, mesmerized and quiet as she studied the small newborn with devoted detail. There was sanctity and venerability in the way she held their first child, as if he were some holy relic and Mary the highest of priestesses. Now, he bore witness to their hatred, the fighting, the idea that same woman had told the world that he was not her son. That woman, quiet and in wonder, telling the baby she cherished above all else in the world that she wished that he had died instead of Matthew. But most grievous to his heart was to see that woman - who once lovingly looked into the baby's eyes - being dragged and tossed out of a house, his house, their house, by that baby twenty-one years later like a drunken deadbeat.

He did not flinch when a figure appeared in the yard, walking toward him casually. George stopped at his father's side, standing still in the darkness, sharing the view for a second. Matthew's face and heart fell in the nightshade when he heard the audible sloshing of rum in a bottle as his boy took a long draft of the Cornish specialty. George gritted his teeth against the burning as he wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, watching the back gate with Matthew. They were silent a moment, not a word known or uttered that would help to the emptiness that followed the devastation of the night. The dam was broken, the river unleashed. All that was hidden and kept secret from Matthew came rolling through, washing away everything he knew and held to in his world. Now, as the waters sat still, nothing remained.

CRISH!

Matthew jerked to alarmed awareness when suddenly - in delayed reaction to the emotions finally spilling out in the quiet stillness - George flung the half bottle of found rum at the back gate where Mary had driven away. It shattered sharply against the ancient grey stones and old moss. He watched with disturbed and sorrowed eyes as his child then paused, watching to see if the noise disturbed something, caught something … or someone's, attention. It was then, like his father, that George waited silently. For what? Not even he knew. Perhaps he also wanted Mary to return, so that he could kill her, fight her, kiss her, and love her.

There was something childlike in the way their son stayed, planted to his spot, waiting for his mamma to come back. It was then that a father became aware. It was brief, a split second between deep breaths, but it was there. The man before him did not blink, but Matthew could hear a small young boy quietly sniffling, warbling under his sobbing breath for his mamma to come back, not to leave him again - that he didn't mean anything that he had said. And it was there, in the silence of the Cornish night, after an act done in anger and frustration, that there came a deep and sorrowed regret of a son.

Something told Matthew that there was a childhood of this, of a young boy angry and alone, exiled far from home for many long years, who often looked despairingly for his mother down some lonely stretch of highway or from a prison cell in Memphis and Saltillo. Even if it was to kill him, to finish the job her friends started, it would show that she cared, that she thought of him. But Matthew saw his son hang his head as he had done every time such a sorrowed hope died in his heart. The handsome young aviator gave a deep breath, his fist clenched tightly with so many emotions, before he let it all out with a deep sigh. He turned back slowly, defeatedly, and headed up the stairs past his father. She wasn't coming back.

"Welcome home, Pop."

Matthew Crawley didn't flinch as the back door of Nampara House opened and then slammed shut behind his boy.

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END OF ACT I

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"Yesterday" - The Beatles

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Editorial Note

If you got to the end of this and was like "What the fuck happened?" I'll tell it to you as straight as I can.

It wasn't working.

I'm not gonna front with you guys, I love world building. It is one of my favorite things to do in writing. However, as I looked down the barrel of a six chapter – nearly story length – backstory of 1929 – 1934 I realized that the entire narrative was getting bogged down and that I need to economize the story and reedit the whole thing.

Also, the backstory was getting super dark and extremely adult, And even though I finished all six chapters, I felt that if I mainlined Mary's fall into numbed almost inhuman sociopathy leading up to "The Creggan White Hare" there actually would be no redeeming her character to any sort of satisfying conclusion. Also, with the exception of a website glitch that nearly deleted all of "The Wayfaring Stranger" the reason that I put "The Creggan White Hare" on hiatus in the first place was because it was about to get really dark - like super dark - when it came to Mary and Sybbie's lives in late 1935. And even though George saves them and brings them back to a wholesome life you see in 1941, I really didn't want to get into that super dark territory. When I finished the six-chapter backstory for this story, I realized that the entire thing had lost that Downton Abbey feel and became way too adult. So, I decided to scale it back to move forward.

So, everything you read previously is definitely cannon, and I'm sure you're gonna find that pervious material reworked and reused economically in this and other stories, but for now I decided to streamline the narrative.

Sometimes you got to step back to move forward.