She knew that he was watching her, focusing on every rise of her bosom and smile that was stolen from his very heart and lingering across the room to him like smoke rings in the dark.
It was the small things that she learned along the way of twenty years of adventures and travels of places wonderous and unimaged. Her cerulean eyes watched him from the reflection of a half-full glass of Clairet. Every time she lifted it up to her ruby lips, she saw his translucent figure from the base stand of the elegant crystal glass. Without giving a hint of anything being amiss, she had quietly set up the table so that she could see everything about her, just like she … he had been trained. Perhaps she had only been a spectator - no one knowing she was even there - but she remembered the lessons. How to observe a room, finding all the reflective surfaces, and situating one's self in the area where you would have access to all of them. To always keep an endless watch over everything around you at all time. Complete and total awareness of your surroundings. In particular, in nice restaurants such as these, cropping up everywhere in the countryside with London, York, and Leeds, being afire every night. They would not risk their status as an up and coming, their expanding list of important cliental, by denying a female guest – and certainly not a great lady - her request of a certain place in the dining room.
He was at a table behind her, surrounded by men in starched suits, slicked hair, and uniforms. She couldn't imagine that was even possible – not the man she knew, the man she loved. It was easier to think of him as he had been twenty years ago than imagine him as he was tonight. It seemed almost like she was in some strange alternative universe, or perhaps she had been hit in the head again and was seeing strange visions. Was there a world that was possible for a once ardent Socialist, the IRA Revolutionary, to be in a restaurant with a dress code, a house band playing, and sharing a drink with British Officers and representative of American Capitalist Millionaires? But perhaps it was the sight of Tom Branson in a uniform that caught her so completely off guard.
She remembered his chauffeur livery. In fact, it took rather a long time to get used to him without it. But she never thought she'd see the avid pacifist, who was ever against any personal violence, wearing a military uniform. However, there was a part of her that fought the urge to smirk at the thought that even if he was wearing the uniform, he still insisted on his principles that he would not wear a British one. Indeed, the dark navy, silver, and gold, of the "Titan Corp." with the silver art deco Sea Falcon wing on each arm and engineering pin on his breast, all looked rather dashing. The navy-blue double-breasted livery with silver buttons, gold stitching on the seams and matching single stripe down the side of the legs of navy trousers that muffin over tall black boots.
A part of the woman was proud that in this great struggle, the man she loved had saw that this was not a clash of imperialist empires. A slaughter of insecure and childish monarchs who allowed their Granny Victoria and 'Uncle Tum-Tum' to pit one another against each other in a family spat that cost millions of young men's lives. In this war they were truly fighting against the naked aggression of what was increasingly the evils of the very things that both her husband and she had once so avidly supported in their youth. Now they both had lived long enough – or perhaps he had at least – to see their socialistic idealism come to its inevitable conclusions. The Germans so rapidly taking swaths of territory all over the Continent - committing atrocities wherever their blitzkrieg motored them next. The Soviet's mass murdering millions of their own people, starving the helpless in Ukraine for a decade. In all of this horror, the young woman wondered if Tom felt obligated to do something. Perhaps he would not fight, unwilling to bend his principles and murmuring heart as to kill another man. But he had offered freely and passionately his skill with machinery in aid to George and his men in this losing war. Had it been in recompence and guilt for their blind advocacy for those same ideals in their infancy that now threatened everything and everyone they held dear?
Sometimes she thought of her own lecturing and bullying in those days. Oh, how inflated her own virtuous ego had been. Now, after twenty years by her boy … George's side, she was ashamed of it, of herself and her insufferable self-righteousness of youth. Having now seen so much of the world and witnessing its various people in interaction with George, she wondered how anyone could've stood to be around her. And worst of all - more mortifying than anything else - was that pig ignorant, hardheaded, know it all, was what her loved ones remembered her for most. They had sainted that little fool that had so much more growing up to do before she gave it all up for the most beautiful creature … no … no – not now.
There is time for that soon.
Yes, she wanted the vote for women … but not necessarily all women. She supposed she didn't think about it too much. She felt so involved, so completely righteous in her cause, that she never stopped and read what they really wanted. Those she followed down the street, wearing their sashes and chanting their chants. Did she believe that Hindu and Oriental women were mongrels? That they were not who they meant when they wanted women to vote? It was a horrible thing to say … but if it got women the vote, her the vote, then perhaps it was something they could discuss afterward – lighten such a stance. When they asked - of course, she didn't support abortion! A child, any child, was a blessing! But when those women she admired looked at this beautiful and young teenage girl, they simply scoffed at the poshy naivety of the toff's daughter. They said 'Well, not all babies' with a condescending half smirk. She didn't understand what they had meant. Were they teasing her?
She had never heard the word "Eugenics" before till she joined the suffragettes. She knew it as something that Edith and Mary broadly agreed with and made Matthew very cross at the very idea of it. They argued about it sometimes, especially when he first arrived. Matthew found the whole idea of a "Superior Race" absolutely abhorrent. Mary found his opinions not only very unscientific but proof that he would never be 'one of them'. To this, Matthew countered that if that was what she believed than he would take it as a compliment. She remembered the comment had stung her sister rather deeply. For several days she was quiet and irritable, ranting at odd and random times about how Matthew was a middling solicitor and by what right did he have to lecture someone like her about class politics? But even then, Mary still looked out the windows wistfully toward the village, and a pang of hurt was ever in her face when she thought her baby sister couldn't see it.
When she asked Tom if he believed in the popular sentiments of their movement involving genetics and races, she was surprised to see him suddenly shrink at the very question. Of course, he danced around it at first. But eventually he rationalized that once they won, then they could have those debates. But that day she saw that Tom was more in line with Matthew than he or she had first thought. The Irish were not incredibly open nor tolerant people, and she had seen her then friend, their family chauffeur, have his moments of intolerance. But overall, he had been fair of mind. Any lapse in character around others that didn't look like him or her came from his unfamiliarity with those that were not a part of his future wife nor his own homogenized upbringings. But the two lovers remained the exception of the rule in their own supported political faction.
The Socialists – in particular their support for the National Socialists – wanted a state for only their own race. Ireland for the Irish and England for the English. It wasn't like America with Grandmamma and George, where being an American was cultural, accepting and living by a set of values set about by a Constitutional Bill of Rights. Tom and her supported political ideals abhorred Imperialism like the Americans. Yet, unlike the Americans, their political ideology did not believe culture was the defining value of their civilization. A London born Indian could walk and talk like an Englishman, go to Oxford and Cambridge, and still the Socialists and the Suffragettes would maintain that he did not belong here, that he should go to Delhi. They presumed that some great suffering or injustice of the oppressive upper classes led him to this place and life. They believed that he and his future children would only be happy with those of his own race, in their own areas of the world. It was a kinder face to the otherwise unspoken but certainly underlining want for him as well as all Hindus, indeed, all other races, to leave England. They used compassion for the injustice of Imperialism as a shield to hide their own prejudice and racism.
In truth, despite her front, the young woman was not sure what to believe. There was something that did not sit terribly well with the whole business, especially as she got older. Ironically, over the years, she rather fell out of love with politics as she fell more and more in love with Tom Branson. The Great War had been quite the education. And from it, the youngest daughter of the Earl of Grantham lost the stomach for not only unpleasantness but for compromise in pursuit of greater goals. When one sees, every day, the mangled bodies of young men who were but proof of consequences of such thinking, such blind idealism became an evil to be despised.
It soon became a clash at the very heart of her marriage, fore Tom was as of yet to relinquish such notions in his revolutionary fervor for Irish Independence. She knew that he shared many of the misgivings of their overall political cause as his young beautiful wife. Yet, he could not let go of the greater goal, convincing himself still of a higher nobility washing away the grime of the unpleasantness they did in its pursuit. Then, he helped burndown Drumgool Castle, turned out Lara and her family as it burned. He saw a fair and helpless woman holding her children tightly, afear and in tears, as everything they owned was gone forever. He was forced to leave the woman he loved, heavy with his unborn child, as he fled in the night like a coward. It was only then, at the end, when extreme ideology and moral compromise to it reached its inevitable conclusions – like now – that the man she loved joined his wife in political agnosticism.
Yet, it wasn't till now, that she had so wholly chucked her political activism, fore her memory was seared forever by the shocking things that she witnessed.
One could not aptly describe the serenity of death, nor, truly, the divine assurance of the greater plans and workings of the universe that was in every luminous spirit upon passing from the Circles of the World. Yet, when revived into the mortal plain – a exceedingly rare feat – this great knowledge was lost in mortality. Thus, the things seen and experienced by those loved ones they protected remain in flashes of memories but devoid of the serenity of a timeless knowledge. And thus, what remained of these memories were funneled into the conscious mind of a fallen guardian angel through human perception and emotion. Every fear, sorrow, and trauma of the one they protected from the heavenly plain became tactile, real, as if they also had been there to see it, feel it, with all the dark and horrible trappings that placed them right there with the one they loved in their suffering.
For the beautiful young woman at an opulent dining table of a fancy restaurant, she remembered the Ku Klux Klan rally in New Orleans. She remembered being with George as he went undercover. Together had they strayed through the crowd. Her hand – which he could not feel - was upon his shoulder with a deep maternal protectiveness of which he could not sense. She saw the tiki torches all about, their flames shading the myriad of faces - most of them women. She remembered the boy being stopped three separate times, being asked in suspicion what he was doing there. They had been made aware that spies and infiltrators from a rebel outlaw band in the bayou might show up. Yet, George was casual, almost dismissive, in his explanation that he was looking for his mamma. And the woman remembered reaching down to squeeze his hand. It caused the youth to lift it and flex his fingers with a puzzled frown at the sudden strange sensation that he quickly forgot – as usual.
They settled together by a tree, the youth crossing his arms and leaning a shoulder against it as he stared up at the podium surrounded by a throng of women - some wearing their old suffragette sashes from years past. She remembered George being stone faced, his eyes cunning and observant as he quietly watched the spectacle of the coordinated marching of men in white robes and hoods, the burning of a cross. They held a mass prayer for the deliverance of their country from the stranglehold of the Jews and their banks, to protect their heritage, culture, and their women, from the pollutant Negroes, Chinamen, and Catholics.
There was a madman's passion and violence in the Grand Wizard's rhetoric that was spit with such evangelical ferocity that she was afear for George. But the boy - who was both Catholic and had Mamma's Levison features - seemed undaunted, fearless, in standing in the very heart of darkness of those who wished to kill him, and everyone like him. She knew he was counting, how many men the chapter had, what their strength was, and trying to piece out who was who. There was a Federal Judge, two state senators, and even the Mayor of New Orleans himself. The mission was to see how deeply imbedded the Ku Klux Klan was in the city, state, and federal governments … and the answer was shocking.
But the woman was less interested in the undercover reconnaissance of the foe, and more horrified by what she saw. Woman after woman that she had known by name, quoted endlessly in her own youth, and whose arguments she used in debate with Papa and Matthew, took the stage as honored guests. And it was then, in their own words, that she fell completely out of support for everything she once held dearest in her beliefs. Her once heroes railed passionately against other races. Told the women, the wives and daughters of the Klansmen standing behind them - their arms crossed and stance wide while in formations – that it was their duty to uphold the values of Suffrage. It was their duty to help root out the poisonous and noxious weeds in the form of the 'degenerate races' that would choke out the flower of their new freedoms that the women before them struggled for so mightily. The Negro Male, the Trickster Chinaman, the rich businessman in New York, they were the evil Republicans that labored endlessly to put women back in chains, to make them subservient to their patriarchal corruption.
Perhaps, it was that she was older - not in appearance but certainly in her years. But where once she might have been taken in by the charisma of these female speakers, hanging off every word in youthful enthusiasm for a cause. Now, the ageless beauty ignored the rhetoric and actually listen to what they said. And it was then that she found the youthful excuses of not thinking much about this or that was long played out. The war had sapped the once army nurse of her idealism. Motherhood had conditioned her with reinforcement of intrinsic values she wished her daughter … and her boy, to life by. And it was then that she learned to trust her gut, which for many years rebelled against the ideology that had never sounded right nor sat well within her heart. She could never imagine giving even a tuppence to the type of vitriol and hatred for anyone, much less someone who did not look like her, as these once idols of her youthful politics struck their very reputations upon in this post suffrage world.
But the nail in the coffin came next in such horrible and gruesome fashion. Fore before the last of them left the podium, there was an example of their conviction to a slogan that the youngest daughter of an Earl once wore on her very own sash – "Justice for Women". She remembered all her attention being drawn to George. His face fell from a bemused arrogance at the hysterical snarling of old racist biddies in their play sashes right to sudden alertness. For upon the stage two men in white hood and robes brought up a black man. The wild looking fellow was skinny and bearded. His suit was ragged and worn, his tie threadbare, and there were holes in his shoes. Tramping up the creaking beams, the old man stumbled about. But when a noose was tossed over a tree limb, she remembered George quickly jerking away from the tree trunk with razor sharp reflex. Immediately, the beauty stepped in front of her boy. 'Darling!' She said with maternal caution, reaching out and barring him. Her alarmed tone, thunderous and worried, reached him as a small voice in the back of his mind that controlled his gut.
With shocked eyes, she shielded George's advance as both boy and woman – so similar in face, eyes, and hair – watched. They claimed the black man had robbed a liquor store, pistol whipped an old woman, and stole everything in the register. Such a crime like this, amidst the worst year of a crippling economic worldwide depression, could not be tolerated. Yet, they claimed that this was what they should expect from those of 'his kind', especially now. That they must show these degenerate races what to expect if they attack female businesses.
However, the truth of this supposed crime was that there was no truth in it at all. Both George and his angelic bodyguard both knew that they had found some poor drunken hobo near the rail lines that no one would miss. They needed to send a message to rally their base support and a nameless and broken-down old fool seemed just the ticket. The drunk homeless man did not even seem to know where he was, much less what was about to be done – thanking kindly the men helping him up onto the stool to reach the lynching noose.
A shuriken throwing star with ancient kanji engraved with a holy symbol slipped out from underneath George's jacket sleeve and into his hand. But once more, the beauty stopped him, grasping his wrist with a deeply maternal protectiveness. 'No, Luv!' She said forcefully and with alarm. There was a hesitation in his motion, a caution that echoed in his mind with a strange soft luxuriously husky voice of an angel. They both knew that if he interfered, if he attempted to save this man from the lynching, George would never make it out alive.
At the time it was all so easy. With the timeless knowledge of the fate of the universe and how the Music of creation all weaved together and interlocked to bring about a greater fate, a greater plan, than any mortal could comprehend. But now revived, divorced of all memory and, indeed, assurance of God's plan. The woman found the idea of doing nothing, letting that poor and muddled drunk man die, the hardest pill to swallow in mortal and earthly sobriety of consciousness.
When the old suffragette herself - the angel's once hero - put her foot on the stool, George reacted by cocking to throw the Shuriken. With a snap of his arm, it would cleave the rope before it pulled taut. Yet, in one last desperate attempt, the young mother placed her hands upon his cheeks, blocking his view, as she put forth all her power and will into stopping him from that inherited Matthew Crawley instinct for heroism. To do what was right, no matter the cost. It was a rare moment, in the most dangerous of his own, that she ever so briefly took physical form from the Heavenly Plain. She blocked his view, restrained his arm, and squeezed her eyes shut in absolute defeat at the echo of a stool falling over and the creak of a rope tightening with the full weight of a human upon a tree branch. There was something very Mary that she could not shake about George's shocked face as the two stood together, the angelic woman looking over her shoulder to share the sight of the awkward twitching silhouette in the shadows of the torches that kicked and twitched only a moment more.
'Come on, Darling … come on!' She had said, taking George's hand. She had noticed that her boy's motion and the glint of the polished shuriken had caught some of the Klansmen's attention in the distance. They had been making their way across the crowd when the angel began pulling him away toward the woods that surrounded the clearing. Yet, even if no one had noticed him, she would have led him away anyhow. No child, especially the one she guarded since his very conception, should see such a horrid and gruesome sight. But what the woman remembered most in that moment, as the two fled hand in hand, was the round of applause and cheer that went up from the women when the lynched man finally died.
They spent a long few minutes crouching in the forest shrubs, watching from the darkness as two Klansmen with torches walked back and forth on the path, looking for a look alike pair they assumed were mother and son. Eventually, finding no trace of them - a hairsbreadth from being taken unawares by a skilled young ranger with knife drawn just a pace from where they stood – they went back to the rally. When they were gone, the boy walked out onto the path and breathed heavily in pent up emotions. He could've saved him! He could've, should've, done something!
Never before had the young woman felt more guilty about anything in her life than watching the youth punch a tree trunk in fury and hang his head in shame. She wanted to apologize, to comfort him, walking up and petting the back of his head. But it was too late. He felt not her touch nor her love. The worst of it was that he would not remember that it had been her that had stopped him, that stepped in to make sure he got out alive. For the rest of his life, George Crawley would believe that it was his own hesitation, his own self-interest, that cost that drunk man his life. He would hear the applause and cheer when that man finally choked to death and believe it to be his own fault for lacking the will to act.
It had been the woman's own Drumgool Castle moment. To hear all the things that she once believed now in service to something terrible, so antithetical to her own values. To see a horrific act, an atrocity, committed in the name of the cause she had once evangelized with such conviction. From that moment forward would she never again identify herself with the causes of her youth. She would never stop believing in women's rights, their equality in society. But to fight for it? Had it been a cause that was worth giving up everything? She saw firsthand what blind activism was and the terrible price of accomplishing such goals by any means. There were always ulterior motives and silent promises that were underneath the surface of any cause considered righteous, like a Trojan Horse. Forever after that night, would she become skeptical to all political movements and never wed herself to them again.
Across the restaurant, even now, that thought, such a revelation – one of so many in the last six months – made her miss Tom more than anything. When she died, he had been on the cusp of such cynicism, of realizing the world was not black and white, good against evil. Now, twenty years later, he had made that journey, dealt with and wrestled with the demons of their youthful idealism. More than anything she wished she could talk to him about it, to know how he dealt with it, and for him to help her find who she was now. There was nothing she wouldn't do to feel his strong arms about her again. To slip under the covers and lay her head against his broad chest and listen to his heart as he held her. Alone, within the four walls of their room, there was no expectations, no prying eyes willing and wishing for their class defying marriage to fail, their love to fade like the spring leaves in autumn. It was only two people that knew beyond any doubt or peril that they belonged together, that they were fated by God himself. Of that, even without the secrets of the silver streams of the infinite open to her any longer, she was of no doubt their devotion to be true.
But such a love, timeless and defining, was why she was here in this place … and why she could not face him in this hour when she must avenge what was taken from them.
The Baron of Neagh had believed that there was provenance in this night. He had only been back in Blighty for two weeks since they chased the German Pocket Battleship "Gaf Spee" to Montevideo, off the coast of South America. There had been some pride in delivering the first victory for England in this war when Germany's most effective naval vessel was scuttled rather than fall into British hands. Most of England and America would say that "Eagle Day" was the first proper victory. But any British Seamen – especially peerage commissioned officers – would be loathed to give it to them. Accounting the knowledge that such a victory belonged to the Titans.
The "Foederati" had racked up the most kills on that disastrous day for Goering's Luftwaffe - scoring a two-to-one kill ratio versus the regular Royal Air Force. Of what those Titan cowboys call the "Great Nazi Turkey Shoot" had been a humiliation in the eyes of many in the Admiralty's High Command. England's first victory - what they are now calling the "Battle of Britain" - had been won mostly behind the skill and ingenuity of mercenary pilots and mechanics from America and Poland - defectors from Austria and Japan. With bristling bluster, they would say with rancor that there was nothing remotely British about the Titan Corps And thus, the destruction of the "Gaff Spree" off the coast of Uruguay was allotted as the first true English victory – at least in the opinion of the Aristocracy and the Admiralty.
Of those in the English Upper-Classes had they rolled out the red carpet for the destroyer officers who were part of the Task Force that ran down the dreaded German Pocket Battleship. Finally, they had their own heroes, receiving standing ovations as they entered restaurants. The white and gold was such a cheering sight, true Englishmen - those of their own class. For many of the aristocracy, they had seethed privately watching the "Foederati" strutting about high street in their dark navy, silver, and gold uniforms.
For those who believed Britain to be the world's greatest Empire, the height of culture and civilization, it felt so terribly like the very idea of the Titans was a black eye. To see Jim Crow Negroes and Japanese Engineers, Texas Cowboys and Warsaw Street Urchins, sitting at the tables of "the Ritz", "the Criterion", "Rules", laughing loud and flashing about their American money. George "The Comet" Crawley's band of motley aeronauts and mechanics – the very saviors of the Empire. It was degrading to even contemplate, that Chamberlain had left them so completely defenseless and unprepared for war that their way of life was reliant on foreign mercenaries that had no tact nor class.
They thumbed their nose at Britain's traditional class structure, openly disrespected the Aristocracy, and dismissed the Royal Military. The specialist unit was divorced from the British Command structure, taking their orders from Churchill himself, their missions given by Bletchley Park – Codename: 'Ultra'. To the lower classes the valiant and daring fliers from all over the world – many acquaintances and friends made by Captain Crawley during his many adventures – were a revelation, a sign that they were not alone in this fight for freedom. But to the Upper Classes of the old order and world they were as good as an occupying force. For a Duke to be openly insulted by an American negro, for a Countess to have to wait behind an Irish Mechanic before she would be served. In any other era, they'd be horse whipped for the very cheek. But because they wore that dark navy, silver, and gold uniform, because, they tilted against the best of the Luftwaffe, the most important names in High Society were forced to endure this humiliation.
It was why when the adulation that came on that first night that the officers of the destroyer group returned to England, one might have thought that they had single handedly won the war. And perhaps, in a way, they had. Fore, in the years after the Great War, there had been a rather fashionable turn in the upper classes toward the Admiralty. Perhaps it was viewed - after the terrible and filthy reality of Trench Warfare – as safer by many peers. Also, since both King Edward and King George had served in the Navy during the war, and showed affinity for it, they set a rather trend that made the Admiralty the destination for any Peer interested in service. But whatever reason, the most lauded was that the Royal Navy was perhaps the most British of all military institutions. Since the sinking of the Spanish Armada, England had prided herself on her fleet. Thus, in the coming of another war with Germany, there was a sense of patriotism and national identity with becoming an officer in the Admiralty. There was an elegance and stateliness to the seaman that contrasted with the grime of the lower-class infantryman grunt of the Royal Army, the short-lived RAF Pilot, and, certainly, the arrogant Titan mercenary. So it was that the scuttling of the "Graf Spee" was not just a victory for the Admiralty, for England …
It was a victory for the Upper Classes.
The kind of starry-eyed attention was something that a young man with a Northern Irish Barony had never been used too. The only son of a Duke's third child with a second wife had not much to boast of. Perhaps if he went to New York, he might have impressed some heiress with the idea of a title. But that was before the Depression, when the Americans were made of money. Now, they had only just gotten out of it – ironically by manufacturing weapons for England. Also, he was sure that whatever heiress he might have wooed would laugh him to scorn when she got one good look at the castle Granny left him. It was more of a ruin than an institution after the Fenians got through with it.
Only by continuous charity by higher ranking close family members had the Leftenant of the HMS Exeter's gundeck ever felt ennobled. He could never not remember being at High Table. Yet, he could not remember a time he had been there only because of whom some other family member had been, rather than who he was. It was a strong sense of family pride that he was never left in the dust. Always had his grandfather insisted that the Baron not embarrass the family, their noble house, with the unfortunate circumstances of the meager fortune and holdings left to his father – a child conceived before the morning stable bell rang. If the old Duke knew that his third son was not his, he did not seem to care, judging it all the lay of the land for people like them who marry for entail and not love. He had his heir and a spare, what his newest wife did at house parties was entirely her own affair – Victorian values at their finest.
After so many years, the Baron felt as if he hadn't earned anything in his life. He attended Eton, because, for the grandson of the Duke – in the mildest sense possible – not to attend such a prestigious academy was unthinkable. He had gone to Cambridge, because, it was absurd that a young man such as him, with such a name as he bore, simply attend the University of London. He could not think of a time, truly, that he had anything of his own that he had earned for himself. Perhaps, there was one time, a flash of a moment, when he was a teenager.
When he closed his eyes, he could still see her cerulean eyes – feline like, glowing in the dark like pale lanterns. He remembered the taste of her kisses, her lips pillow like and soft, and so criminally sweet. She had been made to be kissed. The girl had been the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, perhaps he would ever see. For so long, the Baron had tried to forget her, but it was simply impossible. Fore, every time he looked in the mirror, her memory lingered like a cursed scar seared upon his collar bone.
But when he thought that girl of his past was all he would have, the tragedy of that terrible incident would be what his life would amount too, he found himself redemption. Fore it was amongst the adulation of their homecoming, the heroes of the "Battle of the River Plate" that a young woman had singled him out among the crowd. A mane of luxurious dark glossy auburn hair glamorously styled, black silk dress with pink rose print, and lacy hand gloves. He loved the way she was not a skinny rail like many of the girls of their generation. She had curves. Not in the polite way that one would describe a plump girl. Instead, she had a healthy figure that one could not mistake as anything but the perfect pale lines of a goddess of antiquity in the masterworks of the Renaissance. But what he was attracted to had been her eyes.
They were cerulean, just like the girl of his most addictive nightmares. But they were different than the teenage queen. The girl he had not known but dreamed of every night had a deep sorrow in her glance. There was a stolen innocence that the faerie princess searched for in every person, hoping they would be the one to return it to her, to make her feel whole again. Yet, such a sorrow only enhanced and seemed to enchant her elven fair beauty. The woman before him had not been feline, nor did those hauntingly familiar cerulean gems seemingly glow in the dark. Instead there was almost a soul deep weariness of the world in this auburn-haired woman. A wisdom that was earned. But most of all there was an implacable hardness to them, a strength built from the witnessing and enduring many a horrible tragedy she survived. From the first moment that they met, he reached up and touched his collar bone. Fore it was not the girl that the eyes of the woman reminded him of, but, instead, there came an attack of trauma in a flash of searing pain of hot iron … and the man who wielded it.
She said she was a combat nurse. That she worked as an instructor at a training college in York. There was something about her voice, soft and luxurious, that enticed him. He couldn't say why, out of all the upper-class women throwing themselves at these heroes of their own, the auburn-haired woman enchanted him. There was something about her that seemed familiar, an eerie echo of both love and fear from his past in conjoining and kaleidoscope muddle that fascinated him in equal parts. She wanted to hear about the brave Leftenant commanding the Exeter's guns that cornered the Pocket Battleship. And he wanted to hear how the daughter of a Viscount – of which she didn't give the name of – ended up in Mandatory Palestine during the Arab Rebellions.
"A man, of course …"
"Of course. I hope he appreciated you."
"Didn't even know I was there."
"Was he hit by a shell?"
"Nearly. It was either that oh so reliable Jihadi aim or me that kept him out of it … why?"
"Well, one of those close calls must have blinded him if he didn't know you were there."
"Fair play Leftenant, that'll earn you at least one more round."
The woman was bright, cheerful, and there was a kindness in her that he couldn't explain. Even with all the world weariness and hardened eyes, he felt the deepest of compassion within her. And in that moment, watching her from the bar. All he could think was how she would make a wonderful mother. But as the Baron picked up the drinks he was suddenly approached by a man.
The stalky fellow was well built, strong, but old enough to see the endurance in that farmer's build starting to go. His once nutbrown hair was now half greyed, and there were age lines just starting to form on a handsome face that may have been boyish for most of his youth. When he spoke, the Baron knew the unmistakable accent of rural Ireland. It was diminished somewhat, polished after years somewhere upper-class. But it remained a part of him and his syntax, even all these years later. It was obvious that he was trying to engage him in a round of polite conversation while he waited for his own drink. And perhaps the man's jovial nature and openness might have attracted him … that was till he saw the uniform.
He was a Titan Officer.
Of the rivalry that formed between the Titans and the Admiralty, it was arbitrary to a point. The rank and file British sailor did not give a toss about it. Even many of the junior officers had no dog in the fight. Many times, naval task forces and battle groups coordinated with the Titans on missions to various degrees. The main rivalry between the Admiralty and the Titan Corps lay in High Command. In particular did Lord Mountbatten have an almost visceral dislike for the Titans, and in particular, "The Comet". There was a history there involving the Fall of Downton Abbey in which the late Lord Mountbatten and all but one of his sons had been killed personally by George Crawley that night. Now, years later, the social climbing aristocrat had become nearly obsessed with Lady Mary Crawley. He spent many a year since her children left England in 1936 obsessively pursuing the glamorous great lady to be his mistress and his lover, claiming to give anything for her to be his. But her son would have none of it.
Just before the so called "Battle of Britain", Captain Crawley had crashed an Admiralty dinner party. Holding Lord Mountbatten at knife point, the Titan commander warned the German born peer only once that if he even looked at Lady Mary again that he would lay him out right next to his father and brothers. Ever since that humiliation a year now passed, the head of Operations at the Admiralty had brooded. Often had he weighed the risk to reward of a defiance he knew he would never undertake. Fore George Crawley did not give out idle threats that he would not make good upon.
"Not a bad pull …"
"What?"
"The lass, over there, waiting for you."
"Oh, right."
"Know her long?"
"Her? Just met."
"Lucky you … it's not every day you get a fine lady like that on the draw."
"Well, its not luck, is it?"
"In what way?"
"Maybe it's more than luck."
"If you say so …"
"I know so."
Like a flick of a razor there came a sharp and intrusive tension that developed between The Baron and Tom Branson. It was more than a rivalry between the specialized unit and the Admiralty. There was something absolute and fundamental that went blood deep. Tom could almost sense an internalized explosion of emotion at the sight of the uniform he wore. And for a moment he could not fathom why. The Titan Corps colors were not in general use in any army, certainly not the Nazi grey, black, and white. The man couldn't have been antagonistic toward Tom, fore he did not know him. And above all, the Irishman was positive that the kid had no idea who the woman he was in long conversation and filtering with was, nor Tom Branson's deep and unabiding love for her that had been burning without end long before the Baron was even born. So, what was … it?
The Exeter's gun deck officer felt a bolt of genuine discomfort when there came a sudden glint of recognition in the man in front of him. It suddenly occurred to Tom that when it came to the Baron of Neagh, his hatred of the Titans was bore out of fear rather than pride. Every time that he saw that golden Art Deco patch of a phoenix's wing on the shoulders, he touched his collar bone. The searing pain, the way it went up the nerves of his neck, shot down his shoulder and arm into his fingers. It made him sweaty and nervous to see the navy-blue livery with gold stitching, the tall black boots, and gilded stripe down the outer seam of the trousers. The navy hat with the stylized silver four pointed star framed by two sea falcon wings - insignia of the Titan Corps - pinned to it above the black brim. When he saw a Titan Officer, he knew it to be a sign, a distinct possibility, that he would be near.
He would see those terrible elemental cerulean eyes, so cold, so filled with hate, as the azure glowing symbol gave off a stinging haze of hellish heat. The Baron could hear her sobs, her mewling begging for him to stop. She didn't want him to do that to her. But it was no good, he saw who she truly was, how she truly felt - she was his. The beautiful faerie princess had given herself to him before, she had looked into his eyes as he was inside her tight warm embrace of silk. How could he not have believed that they were forever after that night, that moment that they had died a little death as one? It wasn't fair, it wasn't right, for that phantasm to seer upon him the unforgivable curse, to hunt him like an animal, and punish him for a grievous crime of the evilest of sin. 'It was love! It was love!' Now that was all he could hear, scream in his mind and soul as a form of desperate repentance and reprieve whenever he saw that Titan uniform.
A deep and knowing glare came over the Irishman's face when he saw the small action. The lower tier Aristocrat touching his collar bone. He knew what it meant, why the Leftenant did it. There was a secret there, under his white coat with brass buttons. Like all who bore this secret he kept, had it ever been well hidden, away from prying or curious eyes. For all those who saw it would know it, know what it meant. In some places in Yorkshire, in the County Grantham, it meant that your life was forfeit. And God forbid you ended up in Carfax Asylum or Bodmin Jail with such a marking …
You would not make it out alive.
The Baron of Neagh was daunted and afear of the sudden burning eyes of a father of an elven fair faerie princess who suddenly guessed much in the simple touch of an aristocrat's collar bone. But suddenly, before anything could be done or questioned further, the woman from the bar came striding up. She took the place between the two men, shouldering the Titan's head engineer out of her way as one might expect from a great lady of the most upper of the English Upper-Classes. Though, it was never her nature to do so, it did not mean that the beauty was not capable of playing the role that society had expected her to be with such shockingly accurate precision.
Tom remembered it being a type of defense mechanism that she employed when they – he – were young. An impertinent question, a bold statement, even a teasing razzing of something she wore or said, and up came the posh attitude - the great lady airs meant to put him in his place. But all she got was a rue smirk, a smile, and a chuckle. She would always be offended, or play at it, at first. But eventually, she could never hold a cross face. The girl of his dreams would only place her hands on her hips and break into a giggle, call him a git for making her laugh as she looked away. But she always gave a private glance back with the most perfect of grins over shoulder as she walked away.
Her implacable cerulean eyes met Tom Branson's and between them was a wordless trade of muted emotions that exploded deep in their core like depth charges, giving only flash boiled surf upon the surface in geysers of facial ticks and telling body language. Tom knew it in a glance that she did not expect him to be here. Yet, the same was for him as well. Fore, he also did not expect the woman he loved … once loved … still loved … he did not expect her to be here either. A crowded posh restaurant filled with the cream of High Society looking for a safe place to put on airs where they won't be bombed from it. He could imagine Edith in a place like this at a time like this. Having her meetings with investors for her magazine, with her publisher, and a pitch to find more backers for the Titan Corp. In a place like this, Mary and Rose might thrive, be the fetching and glamorous guest of honor for some Admiralty dinner party with the High Command. But her, the woman of his dreams for nearly thirty years? This was the very last place in the world he imagined she ever wanted to be.
But the auburn-haired woman simply took the drink meant for her from the Leftenant. For a moment there was a pause as Tom got a closer look at the long silky hair that had Anna Bates's signature high end salon quality crafting. He had been in Cornwall for two weeks, seeing to and managing the retrofitting for the new parts to the P-40's sent over from "Hughes Aviation" all the way in Los Angeles. In that time, he had no idea that she had dyed her hair. Somehow, he thought it might make her look different, like someone new. But no matter if it was red, blonde, or nutbrown, to be around her again was intoxicating - painful and tormenting with every heartbeat that was fuller and richer with her back in his world. He forgot how beautiful, how perfect that she had always been. He could barely fight off the urge to just touch her, to make sure she was no illusion - a cruel trick played on his already broken heart.
"Is it me or is it getting crowded in here?" She asked, doing everything in her power to avoid Tom's gaze as she turned to the Leftenant.
"Entirely …" He said with discomfort trying also to ignore Tom who was standing by as if they couldn't see him.
"Perhaps we should get out of here. You and me." She took a slug of her drink in a way that Tom did not know she was capable of. Rudely, she shoved the empty glass into his chest as if he was a waiter.
"Where did you have in mind?"
"Oh, I was thinking of catching something at the cinema."
"Really, I thought you already caught something rather magnificent tonight, if I do say so myself."
"Perhaps, but I'd like to leave it in the ice-box before I gut it."
"Ice box? Did we take a time machine to the Edwardian days?"
"One could only dream, can't they?"
"Nostalgic for better days, Gorgeous?"
"Entirely better days. Secret snogs, holding hands … first loves."
Slowly, as if triggering something that she could not contain in the reference of better days. The red headed beauty turned and caught the confused and hurt glance of Tom Branson standing off to the side by the restaurant bar. In just the utterance of the words, both, as one, could almost smell the oil residue of the garage on the other side of the stables of Downton Abbey. The soft glow of the gas lamp in the green shed that boiled in the summer and froze in the winter. But still she had ever been undeterred in going to it night and day, whenever she had spare time.
In that drafty old shed was shared some of their happiest moments. It was their place, their sanctuary, where they could be who they truly were, not what society told them they had to be. In that place, sitting in the front seat of the old motor, they talked freely, expressing their joy and frustration, plotted and argued - all as equals. They lived their perfect world, ever permutation and addition to the home they dreamt of building in this better world they thought was possible after hours of idealistic dreaming together. Perhaps none of their greater plans for the world panned out as everything burned all around them now. But when it came to their personal dreams, their wants and desires for themselves, those were never in doubt. Fore they would always end with the two of them together, happy, and in love. In that cold shed in the dead of the night, when they should've been asleep, that had been truly their kingdom of dreams.
And there was nothing they would not do to have those nights back again.
"There's a Sybil Branson picture playing – the "I'm No Saint" remake. I heard she's simply to die for."
"Is there anyone in world more worth it?"
"Sybil Branson? Blast, I didn't know you were such a big fan, or I might have mentioned it earlier."
"Me? I live and die for her."
"Then what are we waiting for?"
"The right moment …"
Her tone was low and there remained something ambiguous and hidden in its depths that twanged the slightest but unmistakable chord of dark purpose. Invoking the sacred name, seeing him touch his collar bone at its mention. The lights shadowed just slightly over her face. No one noticed it, almost impossible to detect … almost. For at the mention of the name, both red-head and fighter mechanic looked up in unison, ever in hope. But when it passed, they both retreated back into the dark where it, where she, took them. The pain then was unbearable, the memory, the emptiness where a great and encompassing love was that had gone stagnate and stale, with nowhere to go.
In Tom Branson's shattered heart, he saw her only in photographs, still images of a shiny and happy little girl. She had been a troublemaker and a Priss - obsessed with being both the greatest of ladies and the world's finest engineer. In her heart she wanted to create singularly unique machines of wonder and amazement that shocked and inspired. All the time wearing the finest dresses, gowns, hats, and jewels, that had the same effect as her mechanical masterpieces. And who could say she couldn't do both? Did they not know that she was the daughter of Lady Mary Crawley? Forever there would she remain in her daddy's soul, untouched and unsullied. It did not matter what she had done in Spain and North Africa. His arms would ever be open to her, awaiting her return
But for the woman with glossy and rich auburn hair, she had no such memories. Once, and only once, had she held her in her arms, counted her perfect little fingers and toes. Then, came the torment that she only recently remembered. The nights of picking up a small baby boy from his crib, rocking him back and forth by the window. His little fingers pointing to the stars, as if he could name them, as if he knew which ones gave off the celestial dust that was used by a great love to create his little soul. But no matter how she tried, she could only look back over her shoulder at his crib mate as she slept. What she wouldn't give for once, just once, to touch her hair, kiss her brow, hold her. But she couldn't, she was not her charge.
Then, all she knew of her girl was the trauma, the sorrow, and the betrayal.
In 1928, a young girl with a made-up face lay nude. Her pale body glistened with lathered exotic oils, and a crown of roses about her head of long glossy tresses of raven. Her eyes were blank and broken, traumatized. The prettiest of little thing's wrists were marked terribly from days of struggling against the evil old monster that repeatedly tied her to her Aunt Edith's headboard. She remembered how George cut her free, but when he went to take her in his arms, she recoiled from his touch. Soiled, filthy, and wicked, was how she felt as she fumbled to cover herself with Edith's satin salmon comforter. She sobbed quietly, hissing with whimpered helplessness when she needed George's help in finding the silky faerie dress Mirada Pelham always made her wear before molesting her. Out of anyone in the world, the girl did not want him to see her in such a state of humiliation, of ruin, afear he would not want her as his best friend and adopted sister … that he would not love her anymore.
Eight years later the now young woman sat upon that same heroic young man's knee at the end of the Rebellion of 1935. They sat in the parlor of Nampara House, staring at the fire. Mary was to hang the next day. Tom had failed to convince him, Papa could not out argue him, and Mamma had clutched his ankle and let herself be dragged across the floor as she begged him in tears. At the end, as the rest of the family spent a sleepless night at the "Red Lion" in Turro, Sybbie returned to him after her own pleading had fell on deaf ears. But she had not asked him to save their mamma again. She only sat upon his knee as he watched the fire. He put his arm around her as she lay back against him, nuzzling his cheek and squeezing her eyes shut. She asked him quietly if he would come to love her less, abandon her, if he knew all the terrible things that she had done in the years that he had been in exile. If she shouldn't have her own cell in Bodmin Jail.
George had turned her to face him as she lay her head of luxurious raven ringlets upon his collar bone. With stern words that had conviction, he told her that he would never leave her again. That no matter what she had done, he would always come for her. She was all he had left in the world, the last good thing in his life. Quietly, she sobbed - mourning bitterly that there was nothing good left in her, not anymore. That they should hang her right next to their mamma. To this he did not respond, only wrapping her in his arms tightly, rocking her back and forth as she wept uncontrollably of everything that befell them in the near decade, their most formative years, that they spent apart. That when they were reunited again, he had found her as nothing but a broken and wicked creature that did not deserve love. But all the same, he whispered that he loved her anyway. And in this, and this moment alone, in the homely quiet of Nampara by the sea, was the reason that George Crawley gave Lady Mary reprieve at the very last instant.
And finally, there was the final fight, on the 'doorstep' of their hidden lair in the hills of Northern Spain in 1937. The stars shone brightly as she tried to confess all she felt for him, screaming at him to look at her. She saw it, saw him, saw their very future in her arms. She could tell George what color eyes he had, what color hair, mamma's eyebrows and jaw – a shared face with Lady Mary. But the young man would not hear it. He told her that she did not know what she saw. These visions of her past lives were not reliable, or were inconclusive, muddled by these women's experiences of which she had no context. That visions of the future could be manipulated, given falsely. That the last time he saw a vision of what he thought would come to pass it was but a trap by "The Necromancer" and the result was the death of Lillian … someone he cared for deeply.
He argued that she nor he were of the Eldar Race! Their fate and doom premade before they even came into the world – their destiny clear and irreversible as mere instruments of a grander plan. They were human, given the gift of death, free to make their own choices, choose their own fate. They were but exiles on this plain of existence, their souls not entrapped nor bound to the nets of this body of flesh nor this marred world. She could not control the future! But the young woman was never-the-less adamant that she saw him –
She saw their son!
Of all of this, the auburn-haired woman could not take. She had twenty years of sorrow and pain living inside her, tearing her to pieces. There was no memory of joy, of happiness, which her perfect and beautiful little girl lived. Fore, if there was no danger nor threat, then she was not needed. Thus, all she knew of the very baby she gave her life for and would gladly give again, remained only the worst moments of her life of which George had been there and seen. And from knowing what he did, she was aware that there was many, many, other, more terrible, things that befell her daughter that she only merely heard of. All of it, the heartbreak, the sorrow, and the helplessness swam in her very blood of which was pumped through her like liquid madness till she was filled with a reckless and fey rage that made her see red in all things. She wanted to scream in vicious anguish for the suffering of her girl. And it remained an infected and open wound that rotted, spreading its poison throughout her soul, till she could no longer think clearly.
"Is now a terribly convenient moment? We might still catch the late show for the servants if we make tracks."
"Mm … I dare say. Dinner, drinks, and a Sybil Branson movie, what else could a girl ask for?"
"Maybe we'll find out by the end of the night."
"One could only be so lucky …"
"And if I am?"
"Then, I'd hate to spoil the big surprise waiting for you."
The Leftenant gave George "The Comet" Crawley's chief engineer a rye and victorious wink, clicking his tongue at him as he turned to bring the car around. The woman he left behind took the man's drink and gave it one knock back. But the cool and sexy great lady with the movie star glamour and looks broke the veneer. She gave a sudden hard cough, making a retching noise as she stuck out her tongue. Clearly whatever the Admiralty Officer had ordered for himself had not agreed with her as she desperately took a handkerchief offered to her. Without question she cleaned her tongue off with it, shaking her head, fighting the after taste that made her pale belly feel so terribly green. She was never much of a drinker, not even of wine. She liked Soda Pop. She had been mad for it ever since she first tried it at the "Amusement Mile" around the old industrial works in London where her Uncle Marmaduke Painswick had his two textile factories. The only time she truly ever drank was on her wedding day. Now she rather wished she hadn't … she would've liked to remember that day a lot more clearly than she did.
"What was that?!" She asked shaking her hands.
"Couldn't say …"
"Why not?"
"That was sitting there before he or I got here."
"Ugh!"
She furiously again wiped her tongue down with the handkerchief while the owner offered her another drink. Once more she took it without question, pure of instinct and trust. He advised her to take it slowly as she gently sipped it. The whiskey burned, and she dipped a little, her cheeks bloated as if she were hoarding nuts for the winter. Once more she fanned herself as she swallowed Gaelic dishwater. However, surprisingly, it did its job. The Irish Whisky was like a fire that burned out the taste of whatever alcohol she had mistakenly drank. Her tongue tingled and her throat felt funny, but the momentary numbness was somewhat pleasant as it passed over her brain.
"How is it George always makes it look so easy?"
"His pallet is built for it … God only knows what he must've eaten and drank to survive out there all those years?"
" Yes, God … and me."
"Did you partake?"
"Of course not! Do you have any idea what one is forced to eat to survive hard autumn snows while crossing the Smokey Mountains on foot?"
"Then you shouldn't jump to the end before you start."
For just a moment it was twenty years ago, and Mr. and Mrs. Branson were tilting over a young wife's entitlement to something that she never thought of before. Only the youngest daughter of the Earl of Grantham seemed to think that she was ordained by the Almighty himself to be good at everything from the moment she tried it. From nursing to cards, she was oddly confident in all things she did. She was not competitive, yet, she had a strange arrogance about her that made the young woman believe that if someone could do something so easily than she could as well. She was the living embodiment of questioning the established order … and sometimes logic in itself.
'Gwen can't leave service to become a secretary!'
'Why not?'
'You can't leave home to go to a college in York to become a nurse!'
Why not?'
'You can't marry the Chauffeur!'
'Why not?'
'You can't do a jig better than your cousin-in-law who had years of Irish upbringing.'
'Says who?'
'My Darling, my ma has made this stew for forty years, taught by me grandpa and his before him, you can't just simply watch her do it once and think you can do it better.'
'You just volunteered to peel the potatoes!'
'You don't know how to cook!'
'You don't know how to cook … see that's how you sound, now start peeling while I …'
'Boil the water?'
'Oh, shut up.'
Their gaze met and for just a beat they forgot every tragedy and loss that had come in the last twenty years, everything in the last six months. They had forgotten everything and believed, wished, that they were back at the beginning, husband and wife. Forbidden lovers trying to find common ground in their new lives. The sands were always shifting. A great lady and a chauffeur, a journalist and a nurse, and then fugitives from the Irish Authorities. They had never been able to settle on a life, on a balance. All they seemed to know was that they loved one another, that nothing could break them apart. Before she died, she had insisted they find something sensible and safe. She would not raise their baby on a foundation built on matchsticks and IRA Molotov Cocktails. Now, once more they found themselves unsettled, without label, or knowledge of what to do next. All they knew was that it was still there, the love, the certainty of their true devotion to this calling of the universe that brought them together once before.
But instead, she only, slowly, handed Tom back his handkerchief. It was not twenty years ago. It wasn't even six months ago. He found his stability, who he was, and made a life – the best he could – in her long absence. And she could not find the cruelty nor the desperation in her soul to bereave all he built. Her heart may have been broken, but it remained as pure as it had always been. Her love and devotion was shown in her absence, her distance, wanting only for him to continue to live the life that had sustained him and gave him purpose without her.
"I have to go …" She said with a quiet husky voice letting go of the handkerchief.
"Sybil …" Tom reached out and grasped her hand.
But he paused in their contact, his eyes falling over her in shock and surprise. Electricity, stinging and stimulating, ran through their veins and shot through their bodies upon the very touch. It was like the first time, in the garage. They had been arguing. She had been angry that he had been badgering her about the feelings that she had for him but would not acknowledge nor move upon. He had tried to stop her, bar her, his hand finding her waist. The moment they made contact for the first time it was as if they had been struck by some divine lightning that shot through their systems, weaving and interconnecting their very souls. As long as they lived, neither one would forget it. Even when she was gone from his life – believing it to be forever – he had not forgot that electricity, the divine spark, that powered the love, forever and seemingly deathless, that existed between them.
"Don't …" He swallowed. "Don't go." He shook his head with deep intimate eyes.
"I must." She whispered. No one could hear her over the ambient noise of the restaurant. Yet, Tom knew every word.
Slowly, the lacy black glove over her hand slipped from his grip.
"You've always been free with your 'musts'." He said as he followed her to the coat check out.
"I don't insist on much … only things that are important." She gave her ticket to a tween girl standing by.
"Is he so important?" She could tell that it almost killed him to ask such a question.
The woman thanked the girl as she took a navy Burberry coat. But Tom took it from her. She immediately tried to take it back, but he held it out of her reach. She strove against him in a staring contest of glared frowns.
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to get my coat back, I'm in a hurry."
"Where?"
"Where do you think?"
"But why?"
"…"
"Sybil …"
"Because, I … I want to see her. It's the only time, the only way, I can now." There was a pain in her sudden and heartbroken voice that tore the very life from the man she loved. "Sometimes when I hear her talk, deliver a line to the actress playing her mamma … I can almost imagine … I, I … I can almost imagine that it's me she's speaking too." Her voice cracked and tears began brimming in her eyes.
It was then that Tom did not relinquish the coat, but he did pace behind her. "I know …" He said softly motioning her to hold her arms out. "I seem to spend most of my furlough at the cinema these days." Slowly he slid her coat on for her. "Sometimes, when the audience laughs at one of her jokes, when they cry at her emotional scenes, and swoon when she gets her leading man … I don't feel so alone." He shook his head. "For just a moment, the whole world sees in her what I have her whole life, what I still do." His hand rested on the mother of his daughter's shoulders.
Sybil turned and gently placed her lace hand on Tom's cheek. He thought she might say something. She thought he might say something. But, instead, the woman leaned his head down and kissed his forehead deeply. He squeezed his eyes shut as he savored the feeling of Lady Sybil's lips upon him again, after twenty-one long years without them. It was an anchor, an assurance, that there was an understanding, a shared grief, between two parents who had lost a child. Everything good and hopeful that lived in that very moment that they sat in bed with a baby girl in their arms - before death and grief - lingered on, taunting them. Sybil's kiss remained a ghost of a memory, a whispered reminder upon a breeze of a golden dream lost, yet, not forgotten.
"Please … don't go."
"I must."
"Not with him."
"Why not?"
"Because …"
"…"
"He's been marked."
"Am I supposed to know what that means?"
"Don't you?"
"…"
"Sybil, please, he's dangerous."
"I can look after myself, Tom."
"It's not about looking after yourself!"
"Oh, then what is it about?"
"…"
"What, you're scared I'll do what Mary does? He's hurt my family, so I'll let him wine and dine me, take me back to the Ritz and take photos of him buggering me so I can send them to George in the hopes it'll finally push him over the edge and he'll kill me, cause I'm too much of a coward to do it myself?!"
Tom Branson screwed his eyes closed. The rash and sudden uncorked anger of the auburn beauty quieted when their area of the restaurant fell momentarily silent as posh side-long glances fell on their fellow aristocrat. But Tom's pained expression had very little to do with embarrassment. Instead, it had to do with the years of terrible decisions that Mary made and his everlasting shame of letting her get away with such blatant and selfish self-destructive behavior. Tom Branson had known of every plot against George in those days and had rarely stepped in to correct his sister, his best friend, much less stop her. How Sybil knew of such things, he could only guess – such as he guessed why George had the same mannerisms as Sybil, way of forming sentences, and even had a similar husky voice when he was young. There was always an unmistakable connection between Sybil and George - beyond their shared looks and coloring - that he could not quite explain but knew had always been there. And he wondered if the added tension and growing spats between Mary and Sybil had something to do with his wife … ex-wife … Sybil's eerie knowledge of her sister's transgressions in those evil days.
"I just don't …" He said quietly.
"Don't what, Tom?!" The memories, the disgust, the outrage of such evil schemes of the past had set Lady Sybil ablaze. And somewhere in that dark protective anger of maternal instinct a terrible purpose moved through her. Prodded by memories and suffering of her children, the woman chose not to wait for Tom to respond, instead she began storming away.
"Sybil … wait!"
"Isn't it time for you to call it a night, Chief Engineer Branson? I'm sure your wife is waiting anxiously for you to come home."
The mention of Lucy Branson, his wife of twelve years, was a low blow that seemed to cripple him. He was rendered speechless as he grasped at Sybil's coat as if it were the translucent wisps of a phantom's tattered garment. A deep and pervasive guilt ate away at him at the thought of his wife's green eyes and soft innocent smirk. Her gentle politeness and nervous anxiety around people. She could not harm a soul, was not capable of it. When he was frustrated and angry, she did not meet his anger with her own – she helped him. She gave him space when he needed it and sat upon his knee when he needed her. They had no kingdom of dreams, no special place of their own in or around Downton Abbey. Their love affair was in the letters sent back and forth, sometimes twice weekly. Quiet and meek in conversation, guarded in emotion, but Lucy Smith had so much to say in writing. One could not fathom of how deep her heart and mind go, how keen an observer she was. She saw everything, knew much more than she let on, and yet, had not the heart to ever take advantage of such things to any end, be it her own gain or someone else's.
He never feared to trip a land mind of terrible temper with Lucy of which he was always in danger of with Sybil. She did not rush out with her opinions, ready to fight a room verbally or physically with only half the facts and right on her side. She did not rush in by his side knocking their head against a barrier. Lucy was the perfect partner that Sybil had never got a chance to find her way to become. The only constant in their young marriage was the do or die stubbornness of a great love. For so long, Lucy had been a wife, while Sybil had become an idea. But now that she was here, returned from the dead, the idea had become real and tangible. She was the unrealized potential, the regret that had a chance to be righted. Tom Branson had a life to be proud of, a wife that a man could only dream of.
And yet, she was not Lady Sybil Crawley.
Tom's sight had been glued to the door where Sybil, momentarily, faltered. She leaned heavily against the doorway after her parting shot. He did not need to know what had happened. The idea of Mrs. Lucy Branson, the faithful wife of motor magnet Tom Branson, the dream partnership and golden couple that everyone complimented and set their courses by, was a knife in Sybil's already shattered heart. She had used it against him to break free of his reason when her dark and terrible purpose faltered. But it was a weapon, evil and cursed, that sapped her very life force with every piece she tore out of Tom with it. Lucy Branson had become a mythical and ancient blade that had to be fed blood every time it was drawn, whether it belonged to the foe or the wielder. She had looked back just a moment, leaning heavily, eyes glistening like wet stain glass. But she turned away quickly, afear that she would lose her drive to finish what she started.
"Chief …"
"Chief?"
For a long time, his sight lingered on the door that Sybil disappeared through. It wasn't till the second time that he was called that he shifted his attention away from the most recent time that the woman he loved had walked out on him. The bartender was waiting when he turned about. In his hand was a folded piece of restaurant stationary. Tom frowned as he saw that it was being held out to him. With a queering eye, the middle-aged man slowly took it in his grip. He was suspicious of it, knowing that as the Titan's Head Engineer and as the CEO of "Branson & Talbot Motors" - who was now manufacturing engine and fighter parts for the Titans - that there was always danger of sabotage and assassination from Nazi spies. Since the "Battle of Britain" the Germans had been looking for a way to disrupt the Titans operations and remove key pieces in the allied specialized unit's infrastructure.
The day that Sybil and Matthew came back from the dead, George and Atticus had met a large Nazi "War Party" from Denmark head-on with a massive aerial battle over Grantham County. They had penetrated deep into Yorkshire on a suicide run to bomb Ripon where Tom and Mary's production facility was. They thought the location of where the Titan fighter parts were being crafted had been a secret. But the most troubling to Tom and George remained that six months later not even Bletchley Park seems to know where the leak had come from.
Two months ago, a hostess had tried to murder Edith at the "Criterion". The would-be assassin had been a daughter of a Marquess, a relative of the Windsor's, whose family defected from the German Aristocracy to join Britain during the Great War. Both her father and brother had been killed by George at the "Fall of Downton Abbey" in 1929. She had been recruited by the Nazis by the pull of her German connections. She thought she would avenge the extinction of her family title by killing George's former guardian and helping the Nazi cause by assassinating the Titan's patron and British Government Liaison. Thank God for Laura Edmonds being there and sensing something not being right. But all these incidents had done was make Tom overly suspicious. Before even starting his car, Tom now had to check underneath, inspecting the undercarriage for anything being out of place.
"What's this?" Tom asked before he opened it.
"Note for you, sir." The Bartender replied as he continued to clean a glass nonchalantly.
"Obviously …" He replied tepidly. "But from who?" He asked.
"The Lady you were just talking too …" He replied, pointing his rag out to the door. "She gave it to me earlier when you first arrived. She instructed me to hand it off when she left." He shrugged. "I'm sure she told you already, but a promise is a promise." The man left Tom with a good-natured wink as he flapped the towel over his shoulder and motioned his head to a RAF pilot that was vying for his attention.
In less than a minute the door to the pop-up posh restaurant in the Yorkshire Countryside slammed open. A man in midshipmen uniform and two women in gold and purple dresses with veiled hats leapt out of the way of a blur in Navy uniform with gilded stitching. He rushed out the door, pushing the young sailor aside, jogging onto the pavement of the entrance. In the distance he saw the retreating taillights of a vintage 1931 MG Motor moving down the misty country road. The red neon glow was cast tall against the yew trees of a vast English forest surrounded by a deep hazy gloom.
Tom placed a hand upon his heart as he breathed heavily. In the distance he saw the figure of a young woman he knew anywhere sitting in the passenger's seat. As they passed another motor, for a moment, the headlights threw their shadows upon the forest branches. It was then, larger than life, did he see her looking back over her shoulder at him watching from the distance. But as the other motor turned into the makeshift car park, the woman he loved and the dangerous man she left with seemingly disappeared into the darkness of the country night.
Tom crumpled the note in hand before letting it fall to the floor. His boot stepped upon it unintentionally as he sprinted into the car park. With his boot print staining the header of the restaurant's watermark, the note was revealed by the golden glow of the restaurant ambiance and starlight.
Please, Forgive Me.
But He Must Pay.
Entr'acte Music
"It's Been a long, Long, Time" – Kitty Kallen