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.

14. Sukiyaki - Part III

("Turpin Hero" – Jake Bugg)

In the Autumn of 1935, against many nets and watches set upon the shorelines and cliffs of the British Isle, George "The Comet" Crawley had slipped them all – as was his fashion – and landed in Cornwall in the days of mid-September. For weeks he wandered freely through England cloaked and cowled as a rustic and rugged wayfaring ranger of whom very few – and none of note – gave him notice. In that valuable time, often disguised, he engaged his family in passing to discover information and understand the situation he returned too after eight years exile. And it was said that he had fooled his family and the staff of Downton Abbey so thoroughly that, while in London, Anna Bates gave him a pittance of some ten pounds – convinced of the stranger's poverty.

He finally returned to Downton Abbey on a cold stormy night in the early autumn of that year. He had been admitted into the house by charity after helping members of the American Press find the estate when they had become lost in the Haunted Woods. Though against the wishes of the Tyger Guards and 'investors', Ms. Sybil Branson insisted that the young ranger - of whom she believed was a stranger - have a hot meal and a bed for the night per the House of Grantham's ancient tradition of hospitality. Dismissed to the servant's hall with sneering contempt by Lord Charles Blake – claiming with distain that this 'rustic' offended 'Lady Mary's' guests during a glamorous gala being held when he arrived.

While in the servant hall of Downton Abbey - among the rush and bustle of the now fully staffed Downton under 'new management' - there, old friends were reunited. Thomas Barrow had been directing the chaos of the grand and opulent gala upstairs when he was suddenly caught off guard when an orange was tossed to him. From the moment the butler caught the fruit, his eyes welled with tears when he looked up at the rugged figure. He did not need to see who was under the frayed and threadbare hood of the familiar Ancient Egyptian cloak.

In front of the new and temporary staff, to the confusion of Anna Bates – now housekeeper – they watched Thomas Barrow embrace the tall wanderer as if he were his very own child, long missing. 'You're so big!' the emotional figure of the immaculately dapper butler scoffed, bracing the shoulders of the youth of equal height in revelry of a young child of whom he once gave rides to on his back. Anna was confused when Thomas asked Richard Ellis – the now Under Butler of Downton – to take over, leading the young wayfarer to his pantry and shutting them inside. The long discussion that was had by the fire as a party of glamour and excess went on upstairs was both emotional … and troubling.

With a lit cigarette for Thomas and a smoking pipe with ancient symbols carved upon the chamber for the young master, they discussed the grave circumstances of the Downton Abbey their young heir returned home too.

Since the car bomb that went off at the Met during the opening of the London Season, no one had seen Lord nor Lady Grantham. Many believed that Robert Crawley was dead, and that Lady Grantham had hidden his body purposefully in order to create enough ambiguity to buy their grandson time to return. Others, including Thomas and Ellis, believed that Lord Grantham was alive – barely – and that Her Ladyship had stolen him away somewhere secret. When the hooded stranger asked of where his uncle, Tom Branson, had been all this time, it was revealed to him that he was imprisoned. From the very hospital where Mrs. Lucy Branson was forced to give birth to a dead son, the Tyger Watch came and took Tom away as a suspect in the bombing. He was currently in a Belfast Prison – locked away with the key thrown down the well. There was a shocking amount of hardness in the young master's voice when he asked honestly if his uncle was dead. The answer was no. Tom Branson's imprisonment was leverage used by "The Investors" to make Lady Mary and – especially – Ms. Sybbie do whatever they want.

Thomas Barrow warned his young master that they were all imprisoned in Downton Abbey – Lady Mary, Sybbie, Lady Rose, Mrs. Lucy Branson, Anna, Richard Ellis, and Thomas. In public and in the papers, Lady Mary was the front. Yet, in reality, she was as much their prisoner, their prize – trophy – as any maid that was free use to the Household guard. Charles Blake and Roger Sinclair now ran the Estate - the Tyger Watch their private army. Most of the production from the Grantham's holdings went to Germany, with much of the profit reinvested in the growing Nazi armament and rise of its new and futuristic war machine. There were powerful people from old families in England, Germany, and Switzerland, that were now heavily invested in the Grantham Estate. And Downton Abbey had now become their opulent holiday house filled with drink, grandeur, and lovely feminine company for all sorts of activity – day or night.

Thomas warned the stranger to leave, to go to Lady Hexham and Marigold in London, to find safety there. But the youth was quiet as he puffed thoughtful blue smoke rings from the corner of his mouth while looking into the fire. It had been eight years, but the Butler knew that old flash of lightning in the young man's eyes when he seemed calm to the rest of the world. The dapper man told his beloved master to leave Downton behind, to stand by, find his grandparents, and then take the matter up in the House of Lords. Thomas assured the youth that he would look after, protect, Ms. Sybbie. Ellis and he were already working on a plan to liberate her, to send her to Cornwall – to Nampara – where George could take her far away and never return.

'Don't wait, don't stay, Mi'Lord … not a night, not an hour more - I beg you! It's dangerous! Here, take this, it's all the money I have! When you get to Lady Hexham's flat, I'll wire you more! Please, Master Geo – Mi – Cap'n, they can't know you've returned! They have too much money invested here now! They won't allow you to live!'

Still, before parting, the ranger crept up the steps to Lady Grantham's bedroom to look for clues of her and his grandfather's whereabouts. There, in a room he once knew well – grew up within – the teenager was still familiar with all the secret places where Granny and Donk hid things from Baxter and the maids. Walking the Gallery and the halls of the West Wing, he was reminded of a childhood spent racing down the corridors in wild giggles with Sybbie. There also he remembered the empty revolver, the Sikh blade stained in blood, as he rushed through their darkened shadows - fighting and killing wandering Royal Soldiers of the "King's Own" that were also patrolling the hall for stragglers and survivors of the Fall of Downton Abbey.

But as he quietly entered Lady Grantham's bedroom, the cowled figure was suddenly stilled.

He could see the beautiful older woman in her nightgown, laying under the covers with orange juice, reading her daughter's column. He saw her grandchildren playing atop her legs, her feet the peaks of mountains their Sylvanian figurines climbed – Marigold in her arm, enraptured by the written words as the loving woman read softly their Aunt Edith's column aloud to The Babies. But the image was stolen away when the sight he beheld was that of a Nazi Diplomat from the German Consulate in York masturbating at the foot of the bed. His stately and overly plump partner had his tuxedo trousers about his ankles. With wheezing and laborious chuckles of pure ecstasy the fat Swiss youth was atop the Countess of Grantham's bed on his knees, grasping the bare hips of a young beauty on all fours. She was a dead ringer for the Countess of Grantham as she had been in the 1880s - matching raven curls and cerulean eyes. The silk skirt of her evening gown was pushed up to her diaphragm, her tight and shapely marble bum was bare – rippling forcefully against an overlarge gut in a tuxedo shirt that pounded against it. The girl's soft innocent whimpers and gentle moans where muffled by her own satin knickers that had been balled into her mouth. She was forced to look toward their Donk's dressing room by a fat hand that pulled her raven locks, while the other grasped her bare milky shoulder forcefully.

The sound of a blade's song cutting through the air and the wet sinew of cleaving flesh caused the great beauty to snap her eyes open. The Swiss Banker and the girl halted their sex as they both turned and saw a sudden look of surprise on the countenance of a blond haired and blue-eyed Nazi Party Member as his head rolled off his neck from the side. With his engorged phallus still in hand, the decapitated body thudded heavily to the floor. And there was revealed a hooded and cloaked ranger. His face was unseen and dripping in blood was the misty sheen of the Damascus Steel blade of the ancestral sword of the House of Pamuk – taken as trophy from the hand of the vanquished Alemdar, son of Kamal.

The Heir to the oldest Swiss banking family let out a terrified squealing scream. Scooting on his knees from out of the beautiful young princess's silken embrace, he attempted to flee From Lady Grantham's bedroom. But in his panic, he tripped over his own trousers and shorts and fell with a thunderous crash by the door to Lord Grantham's dressing room. When he looked up, he found the cloaked figure standing before him. The blade of the first Ottoman Sultan spinning backward and forward expertly in the young swordsman's hand. With his red cheeks, sweated brow, and frightened countenance, the heir to a vast global fortune got to his knees with effort and begged for his life in Swiss German. But there was no remorse in hardened cerulean eyes cowled and shadowed by tattered hood. The terrified young beauty watched from their granny's bed as the curved blade of the Ottoman sword came quick with a wheat reaping slash that took the fat European's head clean off in a single stroke. It fell to the floor like a dropped melon, rolling underneath the bed when it landed awkwardly upon the nose.

Feline eyes were shocked and dismayed, watching the blood drip from the smokey steel that gleamed in the lamp light. But her glance turned up to the hooded figure with his back to her, twirling the sword before he cleaned the blood from the fine steel with his leather gauntlet - leaving not a trace upon it as his hand passed. Then, he cocked his head just over his shoulder to look back. In the action she caught just a tease of silvery pupils reflected in the dim light under tattered cowl. She did not crawl away as he turned and approached her. But she shut her eyes and whimpered in despair. In that moment she did not fear death …

But longed for it with all her heart.

What she feared was the hate, the judgement, and the disgust in the gaze of who she knew it to be before her. The beauty could not bear to see the face of the man she loved in sight of the evil and wicked creature she had become. That she would defile this sacred place that they both dreamt of in their darkest hours and whose comfort they longed for in the many nights and days of their sojourn far from these faerie halls of their once golden childhood. Yet, the gentleness of the fingers that pulled softly the satin knickers from her mouth and the hand that trailed her fair cheek caused her to sob softly. She took the hand of the killer and pressed it hard into her cheek, kissing it and crying silently. She could not see his face, but she felt his hand tremble with emotions as his fingers traced her wetted cheeks. And with desperation did she nuzzle to his touch with such a childlike and desperate love.

But suddenly, in the moment that she got to her knees and reached inside the hood to draw it down – to look upon the face she had loved his whole life - the door opened. The Household Guard had heard the Swiss Heir's scream from their gallery posting. When they entered, both Tygers were taken aback to see two of the most important guests in the entire gala lying in bloody pools - decapitated. Then, they saw their client's most prized possession with her arms about a hooded and cloaked stranger, their faces inches apart and an ornate sword in his hand. They drew their machetes from their belts and shouted for the cloaked figure not to move.

The cavernous reverberation of conversations from the glamorous gala within Downton Abbey's Great Hall was stilled when a Tyger Guard fell from the Gallery and through the punch table – his body nearly cleaved in twine.

And it was said that the hooded stranger's rage had been so pure, so black, that nothing and no one could stand against him that night. On other such occasions, the Household Guard of the Tyger Watch could just muster as match for the highly trained young Outlaw in marshal skill. But in Downton's hall with a sword in hand – it would've been a lot less trouble and so less painful for the 'War Pigs' to have simply slit their own throats. The long-exiled Lord's rampage across the Gallery and down the Grand Staircase of Downton Abbey would be a nightmare that played on repeat in the living memory of all the guests that were there that night. For he cut through the most hardened and skilled of the Tygers as if fencing with amateurs.

Eventually, with Damascus blade in one hand and Tyger machete in the other – both covered in 'War Pig' blood – he reached the shocked and terrified crowd of the rich and powerful. A handful of the Household Guard stood between them and the hooded swordsman. But when he savagely smashed sword and reversed gripped machete together with loud and ringing reverberation through the Great Hall, the rest of the well-dressed mercenaries fled like startled crows in intimidation … leaving their high-end cliental to their fate.

Without a word, the cowled ranger stalked ardently toward them, parting the fancy and opulent crowd like the Red Sea. He did not stop till he reached a wide-eyed and horrified Lady Mary Crawley who, despite it all, stood her ground in her own home. The ranger placed the point of the bloody sword to her long pale neck and demanded to know where Lady Grantham was. Her eldest child, with a cold and superior look, tilted her chin above the sword point and demanded haughtily to know who it was who asked. in that moment – against everything that Thomas Barrow begged – With fingerless gauntlet of worn leather, the young man drew down his hood to reveal tussled shoulder length raven curls, cerulean eyes, and a face fairer than any young man had a right to have in those dark days.

'George Crawley – 38th Lord of Downton, Heir to the Earl of Grantham and Royal House of York, Captain of the Grantham County Militia … and Master of this house!

The reveal caused a clamor of dismay from the onlookers and his mamma – who would know that fair face at any time of his or her life. Once more, he asked for the location of Lord and Lady Grantham. The crowd tensed when he moved forward aggressively, his arm bent as if to give force to the sword he was about to push through the throat of a mamma he had not lain eyes upon in eight long years. It was then, with tears and fallen countenance, that Lady Mary replied that she did not know. Fore, her ignorance of the knowledge as to where her papa's sick bed lay and the mistrust of her own mamma to keep it from her, wounded Mary gravely - nearly to the death. It was her shame that she could not give her child, her last child, her only boy, such information that she truly wished to know and give to him heartily.

Yet, it was in that moment that Richard Ellis had stepped forward. He did not restrain the young master, fore he knew him not. But he did see great worth in but a glance of the rustic ranger. Having been a Color Sergeant in the "King's Own" the night of the Fall of Downton Abbey, Ellis had seen the then young captain order his men superbly and fight more fiercely than many a grown officer had on the countless muddy fields of battle that the Under Butler tread. Also, having loved Thomas Barrow for many years, he had grown fond of the young Lord of Downton from afar – cherishing the memories of the Butler that he relayed in fond revelry over the years in their private councils.

He did not relay if he did or did not know where Lord and Lady Grantham resided, yet, never-the-less, he instructed the young ranger to follow him. For now, the guard had been roused, emergency signals flared, and surely an armed company would be at Downton's doors any moment. And indeed, even as the young Lord of Downton lowered his trophy blade, there came a pounding upon the main doors and shadowed figures with German rifles were seen filing in at a trot. Telling the new servant to shield his eyes, George Crawley took his mamma in his arms and held her in front of him as hostage. With a flash of misty steel had the blood-stained Ottoman sword found the supple white neck of Lady Mary as a dozen Mauser rifles were pointed - their cocking echoing throughout the Great Hall.

The Tyger Captain was screaming with a slurred Spanish accent for the rustic to release Lady Mary from the threat of the regal and ornate blade at her throat. His mamma tried to defuse the situation by claiming that she would willingly go with her child to wherever he wished – ordering her men to stand down in sudden and fierce maternal protectiveness in her son's embrace. Yet, suddenly, as Charles Blake counteracted such orders, the youth reached under cloak and leather peacoat and threw a breakable orb at the Tygers' feet. When smashed, it released a thick vaporous haze that choked the air with an insidious pepper miasma which watered the eyes and dulled the senses. After a torrent of coughing and wheezing from guard and guests alike they found not a trace of the Prodigal, the Under-Butler, nor Lady Mary Crawley.

Later in the dawn hour of early morning, after a night of the entire Tyger Corps being roused and patrolling thickly through the misty forests and rolling barrows, they found Lady Mary Crawley. She had been tied to an old tree outside Oakfield Farm. She looked to have been weeping, for her makeup was running – yet there was no mark of physical injury of any kind.

The Baron of Neagh had heard the story while in the library up at Cambridge. It had spread like wildfire through the town and was all anyone was talking about in London. George Crawley had landed and was making a play for Downton Abbey and the Grantham Estate. Rumors were a bound wherever he went in those days. The Aristocracy decried that he had killed dozens of Tygers and that he must face consequences. The middle- and working-class blokes claimed that he killed only a dozen – at least – and that they were trespassing in his home. 'And if a man don't a've a riought to defend him and is'own, then what do'se he have, eh?' No one disputed that "The Comet" killed a great deal of men, it was only the intent that seemed to begrieve many in the dispute.

The Nazis and the Swiss were angered by the death of their diplomat – son of a high-ranking member of the Fuhrer's cabinet – and the heir to one of the richest banking family's in the world. They wanted justice. But it would not come. Fore, it was, that British Law stated that a man had a right to defend his home and – if need be – slay a guest in defense of his family. The Lord of Downton claimed that the Diplomat and Swiss Heir were violating Ms. Branson. Though refuted initially, to preserve the innocence of "The Little Princess" – perhaps afear of the King-Emperor's wrath should he hear of his precious ward being sold to the rich and powerful and side with the Lord of Downton – the accusation was supported by the guests. Thus, the first chink in the armor went with the withdrawal of funding from the world ranked Swiss Bank. Yet, quickly did a Cornish venture – "The Carnmore Copper Company" - buy up the Swiss shares as well as made offers for more. Of what a smelting group from Cornwall wanted with Downton shares they could not say. Yet – none-the-less – Charles Blake coined it all under 'any port in a storm' and allowed the new players a seat at the corporation's table.

And in Autumn of 1935, George Crawley had proclaimed himself heir to Matthew Crawley's half of the Grantham Estate. Therefore, naming any and all such investments by both the Nazi Government and the shareholders that bought stock from his mother to be fraudulent. This plunged London and the stock markets into chaos. In October of that year many in the House of Lords and Commons became utterly enraptured by the Lord's Convention assembled to overhear and rule upon the young Lord of Downton's case against Lady Mary and the Estate's shareholders. Due to illness had the King-Emperor declined to be present and by the Prince of Wales owning shares in the Grantham Estate was it considered a conflict of interest that the Windsor's make a ruling. Thus, was the upper-classes and many in the middle pre-occupied by the grave matter of officialdom. Fore there was not only financial repercussions for the aristocracy but also the diplomatic as well in this conflict. If George Crawley was named his father's true heir, then the German war machine would be set back by years and tensions between the Imperium and the so called "Third Reich" would intensify.

Thus, were the hearings in the Lord's Chamber often filled with shouting and yelling, arguing and shaking of rolled papers at one another. Charles Blake refuting the arguments of the Marquess of Flintshire, George Crawley making a cutting jest at the expense of the Prince of Wales that made half the hall roar in laughter and the other half decry treason. Lady Mary Crawley nor Lady Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham, were allowed to argue against or on behalf of the young Lord of Downton. Yet, their private and hateful glares at one another from across the spectator's gallery were as sharp as their very own fencing duel. Below those poison feminine darts, the lords debated the legality and legitimacy of Matthew Crawley's scribbled note as a Will. They argued over the right for Lady Mary to sell the man's shares of Downton to outside investors without official verification of Mr. Crawley's inheritance. And then there was the accusations of corruption and graft during the reign of Lady Mary Crawley as chairwoman of the Estate Board with many ethical derelictions of her way of doing business.

Outside the chambers was there as much tension as there was inside. Standing guard and in use of assistance for Lady Mary and those in her corner where the cadets of the "BUF" – "The British Union of Fascists". Fore it was in the years of being a public figure of some iconic recognition of traditional English heritage that the glamorous and statuesque great lady had fallen in friendship with the famed – and notorious – Mitford Sisters. And of recently, since her retirement from Royal Service, had she become in vogue in the circles of Sir Oswald Mosely – leader of the 'BUF'. And while she had not picked out her black uniform and red beret, Lady Mary and Ms. Sybil Afton Branson were seen sitting through many of his fiery speeches and attended many more dinners beside Diana Mitford and her beloved Sir Oswald. Inspired by Hitler's example in Germany, the "BUF" leapt at the chance to aid the Nazi foothold in England via the Grantham Estate by any and all means necessary. They provided manpower and security to Lady Mary and her allies at all times while in London. Often did they hold rallies in support. Sir Oswald giving rousing speeches against "The Comet" and his 'alien ways' that were wholly un-British.

And, indeed, was there a greater hindrance for open support of George Crawley upon his return. Fore, the youth – personally valiant and honorable to a fault – lacked the traditional characteristics of a figure easily rallied around by the people of England. The youth was a Catholic convert, an unpopular and prejudiced denomination by the common Englishman. Also was he classically liberal in his politics, a Constitutionalist, a Republican in the American sense that clashed with the British understanding. He disavowed and would not break bread with a socialist – offending them greatly by openly sweeping them into the same pile as the fascists and declaring it all filth. Thus, between his Catholic faith, his disdain for the Royal Family, and his hatred for socialism, was there a consorted disservice to the enemies of the BUF and the Aristocracy that might have supported him.

For years had he been the outlaw, the wolf's head, an unnatural occurrence in the gentry that threatened their already precarious future. In truth, no one in the peerage liked the Royal Family – no one – but they would never be so damned fool to say it aloud nor to pick a fight with the Royal House of Windsor. Yet, while condemnation in the late-Victorian generations of the Aristocracy felt scandalized in the young Lord of Downton's break with protocol and tradition. There was a growing movement of the younger generations – absent of fathers who died in the muds of France, Jungles of Africa, and the deserts of ancient Judea – that found a rather kinship and admiration in the young Grantham's defiance and rebellion.

There was a boldness of swiping the prized Royal Jewel - bloodying the nose of the pompous King George and his awful Heir - that spoke particularly to the fatherless young men of a lost generation. In a childhood reared by Grandfathers stuck in the age of Edward that expected them to follow their outdated footsteps. Their mammas' - who cared more about finding their own meaning and worth in the world as "Modern Women" than taking the time to help their own sons find theirs. George Crawley's adventures seemed to speak to the young men of his generation. Thus, as the years went by, the manhunts and bounties coming to naught, there grew a certain fondness for "The Comet" in the eyes of many … more than willing to admit.

No one could accuse the Aristocracy of liking the boy – a Republican, a Papist, and ungentlemanly mannered – but there came a rather quiet endearment to his legend. A lord at the London breakfast table with his paper, slightly smirking when he announces to his daughters that they hadn't got him yet … came close, but not yet. In his tone, the Lord's children couldn't help but note a certain deference and pride in the cleverness of the allusive enemy he was supposed to be against.

Also was there a surging support among the common and everyday workmen of the British Isle. They were the Tommies of Flanders fields that had been wounded or survived only for the Government to withhold their pensions earned in blood and tears on their King's chosen battlefields. The industrialization, the modernization, that drove them from the countryside into the cities, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. Now there was no factory that would take them, no Lord's Estate that needed a farm hand. Among these men of worth, pride, and dignity there was an anger unmatched. Beaten, downtrodden, and helpless in their poverty – waiting in lines day after day for jobs and food. These men of the Royal Army who fought for a King and Country that did not support or care for them after they did their bit.

They watched the powerful toffs getting richer from the Grantham Estate - Lady Mary walking about on graces in her fine clothes and superior look that did not see anyone outside her high-end shops. And it made them want to fight. Perhaps it was not a fight they could win, but it was better than sitting around and doing nothing, watching their lives drain away in these dark days. And thus, these soldiers, these forgotten patriots, rallied to George "The Comet" Crawley. They did not heed their Anglican upbringing of prejudice against Catholics. They did not care about his Americanized politics. And they were unconcerned of the unpopularity of his lot in high society. The Comet was a fighter, a leader of men. He slew mercenaries – rich men's soldiers - like pigs and bloodied the nose of the pompous toffs at the highest levels of the government. If they followed him, they knew they'd get their fight, their chance to be heard and felt as they once were in France, Africa, and Palestine before.

Thus, while lacking a robust or even fashionable following in his bid to retake his family home. There was an ardent coalition of vocal young men of every generation that was joined by the salt of the earth common man that had suffered greatly in the ongoing "Slump" that plagued the lower British classes. They were few in number, but were loud, making a racket wherever they went – drawing crowds. They represented the independent spirit, the rugged individualism of the era of which they lived. Those who knew King and Parliament would not save them, did not care. And thus, had they refused any longer to stand in lines with empty bellies and fools hope sold in propaganda posters. They were young men abandoned by the young war widows turned "Modern Women" and the workmen left behind by society to be mopped away by changing times. They were those who embraced 'the Adventure' - self-reliance and accountability to one's self, family, and community. Those who resented the leftist radical screaming for more government control – their government control. And the bastardized militarization of the indoctrinated youth from Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, marching in black uniforms with lightning bolt pins like a poor man's Mussolini. The dregs of the Continent's radical political philosophy, treating the common man and his middle-class neighbors of the Clapham omnibus like some lost relic of the past – Britain and her history – an exhibition in a museum.

Of these who listened to Churchill's wireless program every week, who read Chaucer and Marcus Aurelius, and looked upon Imperium with endless possibility – this vanguard who would make up the Thatcher Coalition one day – did they gather outside the chambers. Sons of the middle class and self-made men, old soldiers in their tattered uniforms, jeering and chanting against the passing Charles Blake. Sir Oswald Mosley's speeches on the steps interrupted by bagpipes and drums of old Highland Guard leading young men and old soldiers down the street waving Union Jacks and old knightly heraldry of "Lionheart" and Edward IV's days. Clashing with BUF and their 'new and better' Britain were those who rejected the new Continental National Socialism cloaked in bastardized traditionalism. And it was the observation of Lady Edith Pelham in "The Sketch" that England in those days played out their own version of "The Meji Revolution" of Japan's more recent history. With George Crawley leading the old Samurai class against Lady Mary Crawley and Charles Blake's reforms to restyle the Imperium into a contemporary European state of the modern 20th Century.

However, such things, six years later in 1941, were far from the mind of a driver that rode quietly through a dark and narrow hollow in the woods.

There was a blue tint to the light of the moon that hung in a half-crescent above the spires of tall soldier pines that stood stalwart. The hue of the milky sheen in the night sky that obscured the star fields came down like mist that fell thickly among the canopies of the ancient trees of the Yorkshire forest. Yet, like a light soot of stardust, the dim coating of light could not pierce the shadowed base of the forest. Darkened into invisibility were the trunks and undergrowth below the last limbs of yew and cherrywood that twisted and gnarled in odd shapes upon the twilight where light met dark. Leaves skittered and scattered, hither and dither, with a rattling slush like a long train of a wraith following in the hazy dark as a fine motor blew by in the witching hour of Mab.

There, in the open air, a sudden gloom and wariness came over the driver of the fine motor car that slipped through the dark chasm like a knife. The golden headlights of the MG Roadster pushed away the foaming misty light that accented the dark twisted shapes of the driver's purview and periphery. The longer that he traveled through the swirling minutes of the midnight hour, the more he became aware of the stillness of the night. After a long time, he began to realize that everything had gone quiet … especially his partner.

Several times he had gave a small chortle, as if thinking of something fun to say, and turned beside him. But the beautiful great lady did not turn nor notice his intention to break the silence. Her cerulean eyes were drawn to the sight of the darkness of the forest floor, shunning both headlight visibility and milky light hazily spread in the dark canopies above. When they left the cinema, they had been giggling and jogging for the Roadster hand in hand. When they got inside, she had been all smiles and charm. The Baron had asked her where she wished to go next. And, with an enchanted huff of youthful energy at the ending of the eleventh hour, she told him that she didn't know – anywhere but home.

When she got inside her house, with her family, she would remember that there was a war, what she and everyone had lost. But right now, for a night, they could forget about all of it. She only wanted to focus on what was important. Then, taking his hands again, she looked him straight in the eye and asked if he could do that for her. Could he help her remember what was important? The mark twitched when her expression, her eyes, reminded him of that perfect sad goddess so long ago. And as it was now as it had been then - he didn't hesitate.

But now, half-an-hour later, she had not said a word. She wore a shifting veil of shadows from tree limbs cast upon her beautiful pale countenance. But he noticed a growing intensity, a frown, as her eyes darted unconsciously from tree to tree, covered in a pervasive gloom that had seemingly affected her humor of late. The longer they slipped deeper and deeper into the veil, the graver she became. The wind rushed through her long curls, trailing her perfect tight ringlets of photoplay magazine glamour into loose tendrils that slunk down her thick white neck. But she did not seem to care. Her mind was now occupied by what he assumed was whatever terrible and despairing memory that she had been so desperate to outrun. And a part of him felt a sudden and deep kinship, knowing that his own night was haunted by his own self-inflicted wound amidst this moment of positive change in his life. A sudden kinship rose in him as he double took at his lovely aristocratic date that did not seem to remember he existed.

"Penny for your thoughts?" He called over the rush of the wind.

She did not answer.

"Are you okay?"

"…"

"Miss … uh, huh …" He suddenly paused with a sobering shake of his head. "You know …" He called over the open top Roadster. "I haven't even asked your name yet." He laughed to himself. "How odd, don't you agree?" he offered.

"There's still time." She said, all semblance of the flirtatious and witty high-born girl went away. Now there was a rather stern decorum to her heavenly voice.

"Alright then …" He pieced out with a playful frown, trying not to be shaken by the drastic change in her tone and demeanor - in case this was some prank or game she chose to play on him – especially in these ghoulish surroundings.

"What's your name?"

"Pull over here."

"Odd name, was your papa a motorist?"

"Pull-over-here …."

"Right."

The silence was deafening in the still of the forest as they ground to a halt on the side of the road. Here the tree limbs arched and bent, creating a corridor of whose floor was obscured by foaming mist that thickened at the feet. After the rushing of cool spring air through their hair and ears, the sudden stop of motion was jarring to the senses. The roar died to the calm creaking of crickets and the rare hooted call of the owl in the distance. The nightly chorus of the unseen and hidden misty hollow echoed through the blue hued darkness that besieged them. It was hard for the Baron not to feel a sudden loneliness, a deep and panicked isolation. He unconsciously rubbed his arm before he turned back to his companion. But he was suddenly startled – though he could not say why – when he found that after half-an-hour of paying him no attention, she was now staring intently at him. Her blue eyes shimmered a cold silver in the sharpened phantasmal light that was stalled above them. But what made him jump was the strange intensity that was directed squarely to him. For a moment, he had a sudden flashback to that empty street in Cambridge - the night reflected in the stained glass, and the tall and dark figure standing under the light of the streetlamp waiting for him.

"Is there something the matter?" He asked with a dry swallow.

The woman frowned. "I …" She looked off a moment. "I've been preoccupied lately." She said distantly as she turned back.

"Yes, I've noticed." He replied.

"I'm sorry, I hope you didn't think me rude." She apologized.

"Not at all …" He was quick to excuse her. "I, myself, find the hour to be a pensive one." He commiserated.

"Indeed …" She smirked. "In truth, I was thinking of you." She admitted.

"Oh." He did his best to act like he was not surprised.

"Yes, I don't know how Ladylike it is these days to admit such things to a man I barely know." She looked away shyly.

He went for the Queen's Gambit. "I think it shows quite a bit of bravery." He carefully slid his arm behind her. "And good taste." Then he put it about her. He felt his heart skip a beat when she did not protest. Instead she scooted closer.

"I've never done this before." She once more looked away - more conflicted than shy.

With tenderness, feeling he had nothing left to lose, he reached up and touched her delicate jaw. "Neither have I." He whispered. "But when its right, it's right." He turned her to face him. And in that moment, he leaned in to kiss her. Yet, as he went forward toward her, the Leftenant felt something hard press up against his diaphragm. It was cold and metallic. He frowned, the sudden pressure against him was a foreign feeling he couldn't quite place.

But just when he was about to look down to see what on earth it might have been, they heard a rumble of a motor. He let out a grunt when the object pushing against him was removed when his date quickly turned away and looked back behind her. She squinted and held her hand up against the intrusive bright light on their private moment. They both reacted defensively to the twin headlights that rounded the corner of the loop. Suddenly they were bathed in light as the motor came closer. It seemed to slow for a moment. To this, the Baron cursed inwardly at the thought that on a lone stretch of forested road in rural Yorkshire that they should find the last Good Samaritan in England – especially when he was about to kiss a beautiful woman. But luckily, after slowing, with the couple visible in his headlights, the driver continued on - speeding up and passing them. For a long beat they watched the red taillights throw neon shadows down the hollow and then disappear.

When the sound of the engine dissipated into the woods, the Baron turned back. But by then the great lady had slid away - back to her side of the cab. And the man could've screamed at the motorist who had scared her away. He cleared his throat and moved toward her again. Reaching out more confidently to touch her silk covered shoulder that shimmered in the ghostly forest light. But instead his date reached for her handbag that was already opened. When he saw her take out her lipstick, he smirked, deciding to allow her the time she needed with the idea that they would start anew in a moment.

"It's funny …" She said pulling out a compact mirror.

"What is?"

"This."

"Us or the situation?"

"Both."

"In what way?"

"It reminds me of a story."

"Is it a good one?"

"Bloody good."

"Me and Mr. Owl are all ears."

Carefully she reapplied her lipstick - her silvery cerulean eyes reflected in the mirror from his vantage point.

"When I was in Mandatory Palestine, I was Batman … or would it be Batwoman?" She asked.

"I don't know … I thought you said you were a nurse?" He asked.

"When he needed me to be." She said distractedly.

"The man you served during the Arab Rebellion. The one you were in love with?"

"No, I loved him. Still do – madly. But I wasn't in love with him. There's a difference." She continued.

"But he never knew you were there?"

"Leftenant …" There was chastisement in her playful voice as she looked up from her compact. "You surprise me." She teased. "For people like us, you know a good servant doesn't need to be seen." She tutted him as she went back to her make-up.

"But you're a titled lady, why would you lower yourself to be his Batman - woman?" He frowned.

"I told you, I love him."

"Yes, madly …" He felt a sting of jealousy at her matter-a-fact tone of stony assurance of a rather deep love for another man. Yet, also, a sense of foreboding he couldn't explain. "Does he have a name, this beloved and gallant, Sir …?" He drew out in anticipation.

"Oh, not Sir – he's not knighted. Never will be either." She chuckled to herself in private amusement at such an absurd thought.

"No?"

"No. But he is an Earl."

"An Earl?"

"Yes, The Earl of Grantham."

Everything within the Leftenant froze inside him. His breath came short and his eyes affixed in a sudden shocked and haunted countenance. For a moment he was on the street, shadows swirling about him in violence, screams of agony from his mates. Someone was telling him to run – run for his life. Then, he heard a bone snap and there was nothing but a roar of blinding pain near him. Above, professors and shop owners were peaking from their windows down upon the ancient stone street. But they dare not help, not him, not the Baron. The Professors were afear of the stories and tales told of the phantasm's hatred for intellectuals – Socialists and Marxists. And the shop owners - the backbone of the British middle-class - were on the shadowy avenger's side. They'd say that if 'he' was after you, it meant that you had something to pay for that you thought you'd get away with. That feeling of being stalked, being hunted – the terror and helplessness – it never goes away.

"You were … "The Comet's" Batman?" He pieced out, watching her touch up her make-up.

"Does that shock you?" There was something knowing – almost sinister – in her tone as he saw her eyes find him in the mirror's reflection, popping and smacking her lips.

"No … I, uh." Sweat began to pour down his face as his hand trembled. "I just wasn't expecting …" He drew out.

"What?" She smirked darkly to herself.

"You're a Titan?" He asked.

The woman frowned a moment in thought – as if it never occurred to her. "You know …" She twitched her head inquisitively. "I rather think I was." She nodded in mock graveness of stalwart marshal integrity. "Now that I think of it, I might even be one of the founders … technically. I was there in Spain and when George and Edith reformed them in the ruins of Carthage." There was a playfully smug superiority in a private nod as she went back to her makeup.

"But you're not now?" There was some relief at the prospect.

"No, not now …" Her shoulder's slumped slightly. "I would love to join … officially. But I don't think he would let me." She shook her head.

"The Comet?" He asked.

"Yes." She replied.

"Why not?"

"He's very protective."

"Of you?"

"Oh course, my love is certainly not one sided."

"But you said he didn't notice you."

"Oh, well, he jolly well does now, I assure you."

A pale look came over his face and for a moment he looked away. A fire of jealousy, shock, and fear overwhelmed in an instant as his mind and heart were awash in a torrent of conflicting emotions that cancelled one another out or created new ones in their mixing – like neon colors. But above all of them, the Baron of Neagh was taken by the dominate voice in his mind that awoke the basest of animal instincts within. And that was when danger was near. He looked about his surroundings and realized how stupid he was. And he flinched like a rabbit that hears a twig snap when she placed a sudden hand on his arm.

"Oh, right, the story." She closed her compact. "You wanted to hear it?" She asked.

He cleared his throat, trying to assess behind a pleasant smile if he was in a pit with a cobra or a gentle and soft bunny. "Uh …" He looked around. "Of course." He replied stronger, convinced that having a date and a little tumble in the backseat with Captain Crawley's 'mistress' wasn't going to call down the thunder. He even got a little closer, put his arm back around her. She smiled and snuggled in.

"So …" She started. "We were in Mandatory Palestine during the Arab Rebellion."

"Ah, of course, as you do."

"Hahaha!"

"Heh …"

"Anyway. So …" She lightly smacked his rib for making her laugh. "We're in Jerusalem, and the whole place is a mess. Arab Jihadists are throwing grenades at Jewish children going to school. The Germans are deporting entire towns and city blocks of Jews and sending them to the Holy Land. Thousands of immigrants from the Continent flooding the Ports at Tel-Aviv and Acre. And there's no Colonial Official atop the situation."

"So, they hired "The Titans"?"

"Actually, it was the Jewish landowners that hired them – us – to come in and protect the settlements. When the Ottoman's surrendered the region, the Arabs and Jews came under British Common Law, which did away with centuries of Islamic edict – since the Romans and Crusaders were pushed out. Suddenly, overnight, the Jews and Christians were equals to the Muslims."

"Which I'm sure they were not pleased."

"No, not at all … but the Arabs grew even angrier when the Jews began buying all the land under the new capitalist system. Under the old Ottoman mercantile system, only Muslims could own land. Under ours, anyone with money could. The Arabs thought they were entitled to the land, because, they were Muslim. The Jews simply pooled their money together and bought it. When the refugees from Germany and Austria came, the natives began building settlements for them, starting new communities. The disenfranchised Arabs that were pushed into the desert put together lynch mobs and armed "Death Squads" of Islamic Supremacists and Nationalists and began attacking the new settlements of immigrants and native farmers."

"So, they hired the Titans."

"When the Royal Army refused to do anything."

"I remember this … something to do with leadership problems."

"Which brings me to my story."

"Ah …"

"So, Captain Crawley and I went to Jerusalem to untangle the web of military mismanagement that was going on in the province. When we got there, we ran into Hugh MacClare, Marquess of Flintshire – an old friend of our … Captain Crawley's family. We come to find out that many key official both in the diplomatic and military liaison office were dead."

"Murdered?"

"Mm … that was the million-dollar question, Leftenant. These men were found in back alleys, at the doorway of taverns, and outside The Wire of military instillations. All of them reeking of alcohol, their head stove in, and their wallets missing."

"So, they were drunkard Toffs that were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Sounds quite a bit like London in better days."

"Indeed."

"But that wasn't the case in this story was it?"

"Well, what Lord Flintshire believed was that we were dealing with a Thief's Kitchen … but Captain Crawley and I had a different theory."

"I see."

"We examined several of the bodies and it all fit. The bludgeoning, the smell of Alcohol, and the missing affects …"

"But?"

"But I observed – before George, mind you – that all of the blunt force traumas were done postmortem."

"After death?"

"Leftenant, you impress me."

"I dabble in the medical novel from time to time … it was a long way to South America, you know."

"But what George found was a rather bittersweet smell to the lips of the corpses."

"Not you, the trained combat nurse?"

"I, uh, rather had a cold that day."

"Right."

"Oh, shut up … anyway, there was a bittersweet smell to the corpse's mouths. And, so, Captain Crawley tested the bodies. And turned out that they died of curcurbitacin toxicity."

"What?"

"It is a chemical found in Squash, Zucchinis, and melons. All of them have it in low doses, but if grown improperly, and treated with a binary agent. Even the most delectable melon becomes deadly."

"All these men - important men of Empire - were killed by … improperly grown fruit?"

"No, a serial killer, actually."

"Like Jack the Ripper?"

"If Jack the Ripper was a fourteen-year-old Arab girl with nationalist dreams, vehemently anti-semitic, and had a kitchen garden – then, yes."

"You're having me on!"

"No, I swear it."

"Get off, really?"

"…"

"…"

"Do you want to know how she did it?"

"Please."

"Well, first, she had a little garden in the back of an old dilapidated mosque."

"Holy fruit?"

"She believed so. Grown in the consecrated ground of Allah to punish the blasphemous Dhimmi that forget their place."

"Get away with you!"

"No, I'm telling you the truth! Then, she mushed up the toxic melons into a drink."

"A drink?"

"Of course."

"And how did she get them to drink it?"

"…"

"Go on."

"Well, she'd wear a silk dress that she spent every penny she earned behind the officer's clubs with her knickers about her ankles. Then, she'd go and talk up the important men."

"How did she know they were important?"

"Captain Crawley is fond of an old American Indian saying that goes – "Follow the cigar smoke and there you'll find the fat men.""

"How rustic … and how very true."

"Yes, well, sometimes the men in the officer's club saluted the higher-ranking officers, and other times the arrogance of these colonial officials would make the Duke of Connaught blush."

"Well said."

"She was fairly pretty, striking – in the eyes. I remember her every so often. She was very charming, irresistible – certainly to the higher ups in Colonial Postings. Horrid little men who think themselves only under God when it comes to the native populations."

"Careful, My Lady, your Titan sensibilities are starting to show."

"Perhaps. But whether it was her lack of age, her conversational skills, or how she looked in that silk dress, they always followed her back home."

"But they never got there?"

"No … she led them to an olive tree grove at the edge of the Jewish Quarter – her favorite spot in the whole city. She gave them a story, a tale, about not wanting to go home. That her father would beat her if he caught her in a western woman's dress. Sometimes she simply told them that she felt lonely and wanted their company. And so, she took out a bottle from behind a tree and asked them if they wanted to try some of her homemade fruit juice."

"What ever happened to this Jihadi fruit killer?"

"George put a bullet in her head."

"How terrible … what made you think of that story?"

"Only that I don't have any fruit juice …"

The Walther PPK pistol in the young woman's handbag clinked against her metallic lipstick casing when she drew it out and placed it to the Leftenant's head.

"But I have plenty of bullets to spare."

In that shocking revelation, the confusion and fear were masked by the strange satisfaction of realizing what it had been that was placed at his diaphragm. The hard and cold metal that had been pushed up against him when he had leant in to kiss her – it had been her pistol. He suddenly realized that if it hadn't been for that motor that passed, he would've been dead already. It took the Leftenant a moment to process what was happening. He tensed; his eyes nearly crossed as he stared at the gun placed against his brow. The metal was uncomfortable upon his skin and the cold was biting. Against the hard material it felt like his skull was delicate and easily cracked, like an egg.

He did not panic at first, only slightly making an amused noise of discomfort, his motions small and cautious. Surely this was a joke, some bit of play acting. Was she pranking him, teaching him a lesson about being so forward? The lady before him did not seem the type, however. She bore an air of a deep kindness and empathy, even if her eyes held it deep within their depths. Though he hoped, the Leftenant did not trust to it – the beautiful woman did not seem the type to have a sense of humor of neither juvenile nor cruel revels.

Thus, it came into his quivering heart that she must be a thief. Some Lady's Maid who had lately fallen into hardship. Fore she surely had the manners and the speech of a high-born lady of great quality. But hers was of the old way – a woman more fitting with his mother and aunts' generation than modern titled women. Perhaps she had been a member of trust in the household of a dowager or old gentry. Her sublime artform of Edwardian manners and etiquette learned from an aged mistress. And of such a story – fabricated in context clues and imagines from her personal and inner beauty wed to such exceptional kindness – did his heart refuse to begrudge the circumstances of which he found himself within.

"There's no need for this." He said slowly, compassionately.

"Is there not?" She asked with a dark and angry sarcasm. "How heartening." She snarled.

"I'll give you what you want – whatever it is." He motioned to his inner breast pocket.

"And what is that, pray tell?" She asked.

"What you're after – I assure you." He nodded – his voice rational and overly calm.

The woman glared hatefully at him in a way he did not know she was capable of. She slowly turned and reached into his pocket. The force of her intrusion into his uniform caused him to lurch into the gun pressed against his brow. Her silvery cerulean eyes never left his as she rummaged inside his pocket a moment longer. But when she found what he assumed she was looking for; the woman only rolled her eyes. A tiresome and insulted attitude came over her lovely countenance as she slowly withdrew a fold of Pound Notes fastened by a gilded clip with the Ducal signet of his grandfather's Great House. She showed him the fold of his own money with a glare.

"It's yours …" he replied. "All of it." He nodded.

"This?" She asked holding it closer to his face, pressing her gun harder into his forehead. "You think this is what I'm here for?" She asked rhetorically behind gritted teeth of a growing anger.

"Is it not?" He asked in confusion.

The woman looked down at the money notes and fanned it in bitter thoughts. "What will this buy me, do you think?" She asked facetiously, tilting her head.

"Whatever you like …" His voice was still calm in lordly decorum on the onset of the assumption of dealing with a maid, not a lady of aristocracy.

"Whatever I like …" She repeated thoughtfully, softly, her mind straying a moment.

And for just a breath he believed that he had achieved some small bargain that would open a larger negotiation. But she turned back to him with a dark cloud of flashing lighting within her eyes. He watched as she chucked the money over her shoulder and out into the closed in dark hollow about them. The action shocked him, for there could be not found a greater sum of money for one in destitution. And yet, she threw it out as if it were a trifling amount – as if she had seen and known a greater wealth in her lifetime than the Baron could imagine.

"What do you think I'd like?" She asked.

He moved back, away, as she began climbing closer. Her handbag clattered with all her fine cosmetics into the footwell of the passenger's side. The car wrenched as she angrily, aggressively, threw the parking brake into function. Out of pure instinct, the Baron of Neagh, tried to keep some distance between them as he retreated. He opened his car door and slipped out. For a moment he thought of slamming it shut as she was passing, but she was too close and so she followed him out. The gravel of the old country road crunched as his dress shoes and her high heels met the ground aggressively. She was shorter than him by near half a foot and she allowed him some distance in order to keep her advantage over him at full height.

"What are you in need of?" He asked in confusion and a growing fear.

"Absolution …" She said poignantly. "forgiveness …" There was emotion in her voice. Then after a long pause her eyes seemed to harden in their look – and he feared it greatly.

"Vengeance." She nodded.

Perhaps she might be a senior Lady's Maid, but he was starting to realize that she was not bluffing about being a Titan. Her handling of the pistol was first rate - feet apart, her aim pinpoint. She held her firearm like a soldier – someone who had a great deal of weapon's training. There was experience in her eyes, in her posture. This was a woman who had seen battle, death, and knew the fear of it. And while it might have been that she had never taken a life – protected by her beloved Comet Crawley – he had no doubt in his mind that this beauty - inside and out - was more than capable of killing him where he stood.

"My Lady …" It was with caution that he decided to keep pretenses, in case addressing her in any other way than how she presented herself might offend her into violence. "If that is what you seek, then perhaps I could be of service." He offered, backing away again. But the sound of his shuffling feet in the gravel caused her eyes to widen in wordless warning that she knew exactly what he was doing – he would not take another step.

"Oh, I know you can." She chortled darkly. "There's no one else in the world who could give it to me." There was an entitlement, a condescension, in her tone that was purely of upper-class rearing that he could not deny. And for the first time, between her speech and her flippant attitude toward great sums of money, he realized that perhaps she was who she said she had been.

"Then, stop this nonsense, and let me help you!" He said compassionately. "You do not need to do this!" He begged.

"Oh, will you?"

"Yes."

"Help me?!"

"Yes!"

"Then, get on your knees."

"Beg your pardon?"

"Get-on-your-knees."

There was conflict in his eyes, his face twisted in puzzlement. He could not understand why she was doing this. He did not know her - never set eyes upon her till tonight. He could not think of any wrong that he had done her, done to anyone … in so long. Was this a case of mistaken identity? Was he in the company of a mad woman? Had a German bomb killed someone she loved, and it had sent her into lunacy? Or … had the Comet sent her? But he couldn't have, could he? He told the Baron long ago that he would not kill him, that the Baron would live long enough to see the consequences of his evil come to fruition – killing him would be too easy, too much of a mercy for what he had done.

"You've mistaken me, My Lady."

"No."

"I believe you have."

"I have surely not."

"I have not wronged you!"

"You have wronged me in the deepest way that any mother can be wronged!"

"Mother - I don't understand?!"

"Are you not the Baron of Neagh?"

"Yes."

"Grandson to the Double Duchess?"

"Yes."

"And did you not rape Ms. Sybil Afton Branson at Painswick House in October of 1935?"

"…"

"ANSWER ME!"

"Ye- … Yes."

Amidst the climate of great tension – and excitement for a young man – the Baron of Neagh found himself in London in the early autumn of 1935.

His grandmother had taken his inheritance – meager as it was – and had invested it in the Grantham Estate as many old surviving families had. At the time there was German assurance with Swiss funding, backed in gold – of which the Nazis were not saying where they found such a reserve of sudden wealth. It was a can't miss venture that was making all the right people in High Society very rich. However, with the return of George Crawley and the question of the legitimacy of Lady Mary Crawley's inheritance from her late husband's rather questionable Last Will and Testament, there was a panic within the investors. Quickly, some of the more prudent minds began looking to cash out of Charles Blake and Lady Mary's scheme. And it was then that "The Carnmore Copper Company" was willing to pay cash money for shares in the Corporation that was partnered with the Grantham Estate. With old family's going under and their houses quickly becoming 'institutions' controlled by the King's Government, many were willing to sell for cash to recoup what they felt would be a loss.

The Baron came from Cambridge at the summons of the Double Duchess to attend a share-holder meeting being held at Painswick House by the park in Belgravia. The home of Lady Mary Crawley's paternal aunt, Lady Rosamund Painswick, was a beautiful and elegant London house that befitted such a meeting of the rich and powerful of the Imperium. However, the location remained a black eye to the common cause of Lord Blake and Lady Mary. Fore, they had called the shareholder meeting in order to stem the tide of leaking capital that was being bought out and up by the Cornish Smelters. And without the Swiss backing them, leaving only the Nazi government, they would soon have to rely on their mysterious benefactors of who still had not taken their seat at the Board. But Charles and Mary's machinations alone were hurt by the fact that they could not have the meeting in the opulent surroundings of Grantham House.

The childhood home of Lady Mary Crawley – where she was born and raised till she was sixteen years of age – was now occupied by the foe. Fore, having easily eluded the watchers and hunters of the Tyger Guard by expert woodcraft, George Crawley had lately taken the house his teenage grandmother had built immediately after being engaged to the then young Lord of Downton in 1887. There had it become his abode and lair. Those who supported his cause to retake the County Grantham – Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Flintshire, and Lady Hexham – were now constant guests. The Lord of Downton, possibly even Earl of Grantham now, barred Lady Mary Crawley entrance to Grantham House as well as any others that remained loyal to his mamma.

Now being eighteen, a man grown - who had known the love of the most beautiful woman in the Imperium and had full facility of his finances - The Baron was given this exclusive chance to make a very grown up decision. Fore he had recently received an offer from the "Carnmore Copper Company" willing to pay full for his shares in the Corporation. And he had been left with a grave dilemma that consumed him by the hours in Cambridge. After years of being taken care of, being the charity recipient of his family due to his father's unfortunate lot in an old Dukedom's inheritance, he now had a chance of getting his hands-on real capital.

If he left his investment as it was, there was every chance of stability to his finances. Lord Blake had ensured it personally when he came to see him and Lady Mary at Painswick House earlier – before the large dinner party. But with The Comet's return, and the tide reportedly going against them, how long before his money would simply disappear if the Convention ruled against the Estate Board? Now was his chance to get his hands-on money, real proper money, that could get him out from under the thumb of his grandmother, to no longer live in a need of opulent pittance of a family that did not respect him.

Even as he stood in Lady Painswick's drawing room among the most elite members of society and Imperial governance, he was quite unsure what to do. But he dared not speak to others for their advice. It might look like weakness – something a child would ask. Also, he was not sure he would actually get a straight answer. Moreover, with this lot of cut-throats he was more likely to fall into someone else's scheme, moving him about like a chess piece with no autonomy of his own. But even as he was pondering if he should not take money from the "Carnemore Copper Company" for his shares, someone – for the first time that night – approached him and asked the same question that was rolling around in his mind. He suddenly recognized the voice and looked up quickly.

It was her.

Ms. Sybil Afton Branson was a vision in a navy backless mermaid gown - her luxurious glossy black curls pinned up under a net of silver with twinkling sapphires glistering in the soft crystalline lighting of Lady Painswick's marble halls. Her feline eyes were as luminous, haunting, and sorrowful as they had been when he last saw her at his uncle and aunt's house months ago. Since that magical afternoon and night, he had written her a letter that he agonized over for weeks to get just right. In it was all the feelings and emotions he had felt while they were abed, and what it meant to be with her, to hold her in his arms as she slept in tangled silk sheets. But, alas, he had not received a reply back. And for long months he was tormented, checking the post daily for any response to his first and only heart felt letter. But as of yet there had come none. And he was starting to lose hope.

Of course, now, in this environment they found their reunion in, he could not blame her. Since George Crawley's return, Ms. Branson was said to be guarded night and day. No one but Lady Mary, Mr. Sinclair, and Anna Bates – her lady's maid - was allowed to see her. She was kept in Yorkshire, at Downton Abbey, as far from London and George Crawley as she could be. But in need for support and to paint a picture of confidence, they had seemingly brought out their princess from her tower bedroom to London. Yet, since arriving, Ms. Branson - at all times - was surrounded by a company of armed Tyger guards. Six deep, with machete and luger pistol at their side, wherever the beauty walked had she been guided by a pair of guards both front and back and one on each flank. They were allowed only to stray three feet from her. She was not allowed to pass under gallery or elevated walkways. Always had they been afear that the Comet would leap down from above and take them in ambush - as was his fame as a three-dimensional fighter and strategist.

Indeed, had the larger goal seemed to be to keep Ms. Branson from falling into the hands – and perhaps the arms – of George Crawley. Fore if the investors and Royal Courtiers' proclaimed and preferred heiress of the Grantham Estate were to be reunited with her adopted brother and blood cousin, then it would all be over. Some speculating that the two would simply disappear and never return till the death of Lord Grantham. The most popular fear – and most telling – was the near gospel belief that the young Lord of Downton would simply take Ms. Branson as his bride. And when he had placed an heir in her perfectly sleek marble belly, Downton Abbey and her estate would be out of reach forever.

To this spoken fear, their marble cut mamma's answer was to slap Charles Blake across his face in reproach. Lady Mary Crawley would not hear any of such slander. He may be her foe - an enemy now clearly on the rise against her. But George Crawley was foremost and would always be her boy first. And she would not hear a word against him nor hear his honor besmirched by anyone – no matter how he felt about her. George Crawley was many things – Outlaw, Rebel, and Highwayman – but he was Matthew Crawley's son. And he'd never lay hand on a woman, commoner nor Great Lady, against her objections in such a way that threatened her virtue or conscious. And she would – rightly - maintain that such an evil was not in her son's character.

Yet, there were some in the Downton staff that pondered if such a thing was in their Ms. Sybbie's character. For even as children, the intrinsic and supernatural bond of deepest of loves shared by George and Sybbie never quite seemed natural. And, in particular, the staff of Downton Abbey disliked the way the two responded to one another. There was always something there, allusive but poignant, that was unexplored and left ambiguous between them in childhood that no one was sure how it would manifest as hormonal teenagers and surely as young adults.

The Baron of Neagh was unsure of all that. But he was heartily glad to see her again. But as they engaged in conversation his heart recoiled gravely in his very chest. Fore as it all went on, he found that her words, her mannerisms, were very superficial in a way that both would recognize as something that anyone in the aristocracy would rely upon as common discourse with an acquaintance. There was not a hint of the desperate and trapped faerie beauty that was desperate for his arms, his love. She spoke to him in that hour as if they had met briefly in some other mundane garden party or conversed at a dinner party when sat next to one another. The more they spoke, the more his spirit fell as it became clear to him that Ms. Sybil Afton Branson did not seem to know him. Or worse, she acted as if she did not know him in front of everyone else.

This sudden slight, perceived deeply in his heart, twisted darkly as she was led away by her glamorous mamma to meet some other figure of more worth and importance to 'their' cause. And as she departed, there was no lingering look, no secret recognition. She caught on to his last second grimace of pleading in his stricken countenance. Yet, grievous then had been the insult she paid him when she turned back from Lady Mary's lead and queried of it. 'Yes?' she asked secretly. And in this had the beautiful young heiress wronged him twice. Fore in her face he saw a hopeful expression, cerulean eyes alight suddenly. But it was not him, not the Baron of Neagh, and his emotional attachment, which roused her heart.

It was, instead, the belief that the Baron – due to his age and anticipation throughout their conversation – was an agent or spy for her beloved 'Comet'. In her was the desperation and longing to hear even conveyed words from George Crawley that might instruct her or otherwise be sent to her, to give her an understanding that he was thinking of her as she was thinking of him. But before he could answer, Lady Mary – sensing the same thought – quickly ushered her daughter away before he could speak. And thus, came the second wrong that she dealt him. From that moment on, the Baron was locked out of vital conversations, shunned by other investors – men and women of power. Now they all believed that he was the Comet Crawley's man, a spy sent in to scout the stratagem of his mamma and her cohorts that found themselves on their heels.

Thus, in a night in which he felt that he was finally to be taken seriously, he was instead humiliated at every turn. And with each veiled insult or mockery sent his way across Lady Painswick's table – convinced of him being a saboteur of the enemy – his heart became poisoned with grim and hateful thoughts whenever he caught Ms. Branson's eye. A rage, black and perilous, grew like a wildfire with every hopeful and apologetic look she gave him. Thinking, believing, that he had some message or token of love for her from the Comet. Indeed, having no memory, or otherwise refusing to acknowledge their one magical afternoon together. And while it was often said that at these swanky London dinners that no one really drank their wine with every course. The Baron had two glasses for every serving and had three for dessert instead of the pudding.

Thus, it was, by the time that the Ladies had gone through, that the Baron had excused himself from the cigars and brandy – mocked endlessly in his leaving. In truth, he had very little memory of how he ended up in Lady Painswick's sitting room. But when the door opened to reveal a light-footed Ms. Branson who stealthily escaped her great-aunt's drawing room, she found a mostly drunk and terribly depressed young man. He was meandering off tune on a grand piano that was only ever played when Lady Hexham visited or when Ms. Marigold needed a private rehearsal to test new chorography. Ms. Branson apologized heartily for his treatment at dinner, for the mean words sent toward him unjustly. But he didn't believe anything she said. It was all pleasantry and graces to get to the one thing she wanted … a message from her beloved – and the Baron was not him.

It was heartache, rejection, and rage that flashed with the throwing of alcohol on the flames deep within. She had spoken fairly, openly, and truthfully of all she felt, all that was tormented within. And it was him, the lowlily Baron of Neagh – grandson of a tweeny stable boy – that she trusted everything she was secretly, away from the press, the royals, and the aristocracy. People just don't spill their heart out to strangers, to random people who walk into their aunt's bedroom for a shag like every other dirty old pervert that afternoon. What she told him, how he responded, and how they consummated that joining of emotions, it was real – truth in body and soul. He could not fathom how someone could just simply forget that, to treat it like it was nothing. And he could not and would not stand for such a grievous insult. In a life of charity and dismissal, this one moment of majesty and right that had ever happened to him would not be one more thing taken.

In all honesty, he didn't quite remember much of what happened next. It was a blur, a loss of control. She cried that she did not know him, that he had mistaken her for someone else. But this only made him angrier, an explosion of cruelty that knew no bounds as she begged her denial, begged him not to do it. But just like the old dowagers the afternoon they met, he recreated Lady Mary's awful reel with the Double Duchess atop Lady Rosamund's sofa. Her squealing sobs were muffled into his hand, her silk gloved fist pounding the cushioned arm rest in pain as he thrusted violently – snarling to her over and over again if she 'remembered now'. Then, only after he released all his fury in a growling and cruel cry of a small death did it suddenly occur to him what he had done. It was as if someone had flicked a light switch on in his brain when he drained himself clean inside the beauty.

A look of horror and sudden regret that kills a soul fell over him. The girl lay in a curled-up ball on her aunt's sofa. Her gown was torn and barely hanging onto her slender figure. Seed and blood mixed together and stained on the fine golden cushions of the sofa, running down from her pale bum that she was desperately trying to cover. The violated girl was sobbing with a mewling kitten like innocence that destroyed the soul to know he was the very reason for it. She covered her face with her opera gloved hands, shielding her eyes from her attacker. There was something tragic and horrible of knowing that a desperate and frightened young girl had alluded her captors and enslavers to meet in private with a young man all for just a moment of hope that he was carrying a message from her beloved – perhaps with a plot or plan to rescue her. Yet, instead, she had come into her Aunt Rosamund's sitting room only to be violently assaulted and cruelly sodomized by a young man she met and made love to in a narcotic haze that she had no memory of.

Sybil wept quietly with soft wails of pain. But when the deeply regretful and frightened Baron went to apologize, to make her understand that he was truly sorry for what he did, she flinched from his touch. She begged him not to hurt her again, the she was sorry that she did not remember him. And begged with covered face buried in her arms not to do it again – it hurt so much! It was in that moment, then, that the Baron wanted to die, to kill himself.

All his rage, all his anger, felt horribly unjustified - his action monstrous. Fore there upon the sofa, was not a sophisticated and cultured British heiress. Nor was she a regal and timeless fairy tale princess. Indeed, what he saw - who he raped - was a young girl that was, in truth, severely coddled and - due to extreme isolation and pampering most of her life – rather immature for her age. Stunted in neither growth nor beauty, Ms. Sybil Afton Branson was mistaken for a woman grown when she was, in fact, neither emotionally nor mentally. And she reacted to his touch as a lost and frightened little girl who hides from monsters with covered eyes till her mamma comes and rescues her.

And that, above all, was what the Baron of Neagh would remember of what he had done that night.

Not but a minute after he had slid his trousers back up had the door to the drawing room been thrown open. Tyger Guards spilled in with Roger Sinclair on their heels. Finding their prized Ms. Branson missing, and knowing both Lady Rosamund's grave mistrust of her nieces 'friends' and her sympathies for the Comet had made them panic. And they came in aggressively with the fear that George Crawley had infiltrated another one of their parties – as he had once more since Downton Abbey. When they found the Baron standing over a broken young Sybil on the couch, the youth was immediately restrained by hard and cruel hands that held up his head by pulling back his hair. And yet, what he remembered, even in such a precarious situation, was how none of them seemed to help nor care for Ms. Sybil. Instead, they held the Baron as if he were a thief caught red handed with a hand in the till.

'Thought you'd get that for free, did you?'

Sinclair was angry, insulted, and grim. He had punched the Baron once in the stomach, causing the youth to keel. But immediately the Tygers hauled him back up. Once more he looked over at a sobbing and traumatized young heiress, but not as a stepdaughter nor a girl – not as a human being. No, Roger Sinclair looked at Sybil Branson as a commodity, a product, to be sold for profit. Her youth, her innocence, and her virtue had been her main selling point. And it hurt business, hurt their brand, if it got out that just anyone could have a go at the prize of their top tier investors. That a Duchess or a Nazi official would pay full price for her delicious young body and then some nobody with a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere could have her as if she was a common Sally doing it for a drink. And when Sinclair drew the Tyger's machete from the guard's belt, he told the Baron that there would be consequences for touching without buying.

However, at the last second, his grandmother came to his rescue. There was nothing more shameful than to stand restrained, listening to a young woman's quiet pained sobs as the Double Duchess laughed the whole thing off. Once more, out of charity, the woman so flippantly – without care for whatever had happened – cut a check for her grandson's 'little indiscretion'. When Sinclair tried to protest, she threw in his face subtly that they would need good money soon and he couldn't afford to reject what she was offering. And just like that, with two snaps of the Hollywood Star's fingers, the Baron was released. He nearly vomited at the flippantness of his grandmother as she told Roger Sinclair not to worry, that 'Pretty Miss Sybbie' was tougher than she looked and would get over it – clapping the girl on the bare bum flippantly in passing with such grotesque familiarity. With that they left the dinner party early to go back to his grandfather's house. He would never forget waiting for the car, fore he received no lecture, no horrified reaction to what he had done.

'Oh darling, darling, darling. What are we going to do with you?'

His grandmother clicked her tongue, tapping him on the cheek with a sigh in endearing reproach.

That horrible and sick feeling six years now passed overcame him in waves of nausea that he had not felt in a long time . With shaken countenance did he look into the dark abyss of the Walther barrel trained on him. In the dark and misty Yorkshire hollow where he knelt upon the obscure country road, he was confronted with the horror of what he had done for only the second time in his life. When he glanced up, he saw the craze and primal hate in the silvery eyes of the beautiful great lady. Her veiled brow haloed in the blue hue of night, her black silk skirt disappearing in the mist that swirled about them.

He could not fathom who she might be, or how she knew of the rape of Sybil Branson. Had the Comet told her? She was his Batman, his servant – perhaps his lover – had she seen his diary, that awful "Phantom Casebook" he kept of the more important cases he and Sybil solved. Or was it all of them, combined with the woman's certain idolatrized fandom of the heiress turned movie starlet. Whatever it was, it had hunted him down, trapped him, and now there was no escaping it. He saw it in her cerulean eyes, the recognition of his guilt. She could smell the actress on him as if he had freshly raped her.

And yet, her hand shook, her brow was sweated, and her teeth gritted. She hated him, wanted to murder him, wanted to tear him from limb-to-limb. Her finger touched the Walther's trigger, yet she could not pull it. The woman had the man she hated with her entire soul at her mercy, one who had harmed the girl she loved with every bit of her very living soul – a woman who died to bring her into the world. But still she could not find the hatred inside her to end his life. She had seen the most wonderous and terrible things that swam in her mind, battles of fire and sword, of horrors in halls of stone. She had seen men die, heard them dying, and smelt their ruin on the fields and sands across an Imperium. But still, in the eleventh hour, it was not in her to take a life – to murder. Lady Sybil Crawley helped the sick, healed the wounded, and put her life on the line for others …

She was not a killer.

"Sybil …"

The voice from the woods did not make her stir, her focus completely on the man on his knees, the conflict visible in her clenched teeth. But the man just on the cusp of being murdered in the backwoods of an obscure country road looked up to see a familiar figure walk out of the nightshade. He vaguely recognized the silhouette, but he knew the voice. The rural Irish brogue, the broad shoulders, and the masculine charm wrapped in a voice stricken with an old but primal first love. His dark navy uniform cloaked him in the shadows, yet the dim milky sheen of light glinted on the silver buttons and pins on his uniform breast. Tom Branson, the Chief Engineer of the Titan Corps, came into view as he slowly hiked down from the left side of a bramble and leaf strewn incline on the sloped ground of the hollow. The crooked limbs rattled and snapped from the trees as he pushed them aside and slid down smoothly onto the road.

"Sybil, darling …" he said gently. "What do you think you are doing?" He asked.

"What someone should've a long time ago." She responded, unconcerned nor surprised to see the man she loved there.

Indeed, Lady Sybil knew the instant that Tom was there for she recognized his motor the minute they exited the cinema. She knew that he had followed them for a long time after they left the car park. George's training had become her training, and though her husband and his IRA skills of tailing marks was top notch, she still knew he was there. In that loaded silence of the long drive she had guessed from the rear-view mirror how far back he was. She had caught just a hint of his headlights on precarious turns he couldn't possibly negotiate in the dark of the forest. And when he came upon them as the Leftenant was going in to kiss her, she stopped herself from discharging her Walther pistol.

In her mind, Lady Sybil was going to wound the monster mortally, disable the motor, and watch their daughter's rapist die a long and drawn out death of great pain and suffering. But when Tom's headlights came over her, and she knew behind that awful glare was the man she loved, the young Great Lady was reminded of who she was and not who she wanted to be. And for some minutes since she had tried to regain that savagery, that hatred - remind herself what this piece of filth did to her baby girl. But since seeing Tom at the bar, knowing he was watching her since, he brought out only the best of her, the purest Sybil – untouched by death and the dark days of George's many adventures and battles.

"Sybil, don't do this." Tom walked closer.

"Don't, Tom … don't come any closer!"

When he was just in range, reaching out to touch her extended arm, the young woman wrenched it from his grip and strode away from him. She still held the Walther PPK to the man on his knees, but she turned her head toward her husband. Her chest was heaving, her teeth gritted, but there was sorrow, despair, in her eyes. She wanted to kill, needed to kill him … but she couldn't. And it ate at her more than anything. Fore in Lady Sybil's mind it amounted to once more not being able to help her little girl. She could not be there when she scraped her knee, when Edith's mother-in-law molested her, when she was locked away in the Royal Palaces and Estates for most of her life. She could not stop her from being raped. But now, she had this chance, this one chance, of avenging a daughter, her baby girl, that she might never meet. Yet, in this critical moment, she found herself lacking, unable to do what would come natural to even the most basic of mothers.

Her mind was screaming for her to pull the trigger, yet, her heart recoiled at such a violent action. She had seen it done before. George had killed many men in his life – some not in the field of battle nor with dignity – and she thought it would be so easy. But now the ghosts of an old life, a more innocent time, haunted her reflexes. Sybil thought twenty years by George's side, seeing what he had, feeling what he did, would change her, maker her as hard and deadly as her boy. But now she was left frustrated by all that she could not do, even in honor of her little girl.

"Sybil, this isn't you."

"How do you know!" She shook her head. "You don't know what I'm capable of anymore. What I've seen!" It was as if Tom wasn't there anymore, his voice and love replacing her conscious, her heart.

"I may not know what you've seen, Darling …" Tom said with a quiver of emotion. "But I know what you're capable of … and I know this isn't it." There was conviction in his voice that drew her to him. But at the last moment she gave a savage shake of her head, trying to push away his reason and compassion as if it was a fly circling her ears – it's chilling buzzing sending a tingling of discomfort down her neck.

"You know what he's done!"

"…"

"He raped Sybbie!"

"…"

"He raped our daughter!"

The look of confusion fell to panic when the Leftenant looked up and saw that Tom Branson's face fell. The man could not believe - not for a second - that the woman holding him at gun point was Sybil Branson's mother – the two young women being almost the same age. But in the sudden stricken look on Tom's grave countenance, growing darker and angrier by the moment, had the Baron of Neagh realized that the Chief Engineer was more than in age to be the most popular actress in Hollywood's father. Moreover, it suddenly occurred to Sybil that Tom had not known that. In fact, Tom Branson, for six long years, was completely unaware that his daughter had been raped at all.

He had known of what Roger Sinclair and Charles Blake had forced her to do in order to keep him alive in that hellhole in Belfast. Not a day went by that the man did not agonize and languish in the knowledge of the selling of his daughter's innocence and body in order to preserve his own life. Often had he wished to speak out, to tell her and Mary – both making compromise of their virtue for his benefit – that his life was not worth such a price. But he knew that it was a moot point, that to voice such a thing after everything was said and done would only cheapen and create guilt and doubt in what they had done for the love of him.

But of the rape of Sybbie, had he only known of what Mirada Pelham had done to her when she was a girl, of which George avenged and led to the destruction of everything they had known for many years. But upon the revelation that not only had Sybbie been raped, but that it had been kept from him, both enraged and sickened him. For it was just one more horrible thing, traumatizing episode, in his poor little girl's life of which he was not there to stop, to make better. The idea that his little girl lived everyday with that in silence, trying once more to protect him as if he was still in that Northern Irish cell was more than he could stand. And the eyes that found the Baron of Neagh in that moment was nearly crazed in anger and hate – more potent than even his wife's.

"Tom!"

The Leftenant tried to get to his feet and run when he saw Tom Branson stalking forward with deadly purpose. Yet, he could not get far as his retreat from the road into the thick tangle of the hollow was thwarted by a root. He landed upon his face and slid smoothly down the rich sodded slope. Before he could find his feet again, he felt iron hands of a farm born working-class Irishman grasp him. He protested in fear, fighting a losing game of keep away as he slid onto his back when the Chief Engineer grabbed him by the ankle and began dragging him closer to the motor. He kicked at Tom Branson feebly as a child throwing a tantrum, trying to ward off Nanny. But that petulance did not fly in a real fight, especially with an aggrieved father of a wronged daughter. Once, twice, Tom Branson punched the man in the head. They were pure and clean strikes from big and strong Irish hands that had worked on car and fighter engines for thirty years. Blood was pouring from the man's nose, his eyes dazed as he saw the dancing silhouette of a beautiful auburn-haired Great Lady continue to hold a gun to him – but her grip slackened greatly on the pistol.

Dragging the man by the back of his officer's uniform, the Titan Engineer walked up to the Leftenant's motor and flipped a switch inside the cab. Immediately, twin lights from the front of the car beamed out onto the side of the hollow's road, cutting through the milky sheen of the blue hued mist. Twigs and loose gravel crushed and slid as Tom Branson dragged the concussed naval officer around his fine motor car and into the bright headlight beams. The man immediately struggled to shield his gaze in pained daze at the infernal glare that penetrated glazed and hazed vision. But as Lady Sybil walked around the cab to see what her love was doing; she heard a panicked protest that accompanied ripping fabric.

Tom took the man's naval uniform in hand and with aggressive and merciless anger did he tear the hated symbol of British power. Both the white and gold coat and tuxedo shirt underneath was torn away from the Baron's body, causing the man to jerk and struggle at the sudden feel of the night air on his naked flesh. But Tom Branson held him down as he gazed over at his bare upper body in the headlights. And when Lady Sybil came closer, she heard a sharp intake of air from the man she loved at what he saw.

The noise, the breath, was as good as a roar of hatred and anger from Tom that she knew well. It was for when Kieran was half a bottle in, when his aunt spoke openly about what she disliked about Sybil that hour, and when he got his hand caught in an engine piston. But now, the noise of barely controlled blind rage of pain – emotional or physical – was for the sight of an ugly red welted brand that was upon the Baron of Neagh's collar bone.

A symbol that confirmed everything that Sybil told him - everything he feared.