In the late winter of 1936, the fall that the Aristocracy had spent eighteen years trying to stave off had come … and it came hard.
It was called many things, 'The Rising of '35', 'The Grantham Civil War', and simply 'The Rebellion'. Whatever colloquial name one knows it by, had it spelt doom for the old and established order in the height of the "Slump" in the Imperium. Fore a rebel army led by George Crawley made up of Northmen, Highlanders, and junior Peers – Honest Country Boys, Old Tommies, and Brabble Rousing Tinkers - had crushed the Tyger Watch on the fields of Grantham County in the week of Christmas 1935.
And it is so here marked that the London based mercenary group would survive its devastating defeats at the battles of "White Fields", "Grantham Hill", and "Downton Town". But it would never again rise to the greatest heights as it had in the late-1920's and 1930's. Moreover, would it become in all its long permutations synonymous with henchmen to evil and villainous plots. And though their relevance to this tale comes now here to its end, this would not be the last time that the iniquitous and heartless soldiers of fortune would cross blades with the future Heirs of the House of Grantham in the century to come.
But the war for the Grantham Estate, the retaking of Downton Abbey, and the bloodshed to quell the tyrannical reign of Lady Mary Crawley, was but the aftermath of the true devastation. Fore war was inevitable on the night of Samhain on the last day of October when the Lords Convention came to a hung decision. And upon that very night did a dying King-Emperor – having now become aware of Ms. Sybil Branson's evil plight – reneged all nine years of hatred and fear and named George Crawley "Lord Leftenant". With a snap of the royal fingers the once outlaw - most wanted and dangerous man in the Imperium - now had authority to raise a volunteer army with Imperial sanction to quell the injustices committed in Grantham County … and to their beloved Sybbie. Of this decision was it denounced in the "Court Circular" as the likeness of when the Roman Emperor named Attila the Hun "Magister Militum" of the Western Empire.
And, indeed, in early November was breakfast at Downton Abbey interrupted when news came that George Crawley had raised the ancient banner of the House of Grantham in open rebellion against his Lady Mother. Raising an army outside the Highland city of Inverness, upon the grounds of the ancient standing stones of "Craigh Na Dun", the young Lord of Downton had staked his challenge against two hundred years of Grantham legacy. Reports came streaming in of hundreds of young men from the County Grantham disappearing overnight through the Tyger's guarded snares to Scotland. Moreover, Lady Hexham was raising the entire Northumberland levy of her lands to join her warded nephew. While many Highland Lairds and their men were coming down from the glens … for no discernable purpose other than not wanting to be left out of a good fight.
Of this was the nightmare scenario for Lady Mary Crawley. For whatever it could be said of the woman in those days, her love for her son vastly outweighed the perceived hatred for him that never truly existed. With all her heart, Mary did not want to fight George. Yet, in the end, her broken humanity and nihilistic apathy - now fully fallen under sway of the lustful greed of the "Grantham Blood Curse" - would not allow her to yield forth her family home, her domain, her estate. Thus, against her heart, did she find war against her son for Downton Abbey a tragic but acceptable reality.
Charles Blake and Lady Mary immediately rushed to create logistics in order to move the combat battalions of the Tyger Corps from African postings back to Blighty. Yet, when the Tyger Legions arrived in London a fortnight later, the Estate Corporation had found its coffers emptied of their money. By then, with the Swiss divested from the venture, and the German's providing only supply of weapons and munitions, Charles and Mary were forced to lobby the "Carnmore Copper Company" for additional funds to move their army from the London Port. But when Charles Blake and Lady Mary Crawley went to London to seek out the offices of the Cornish Smelters, they were taken completely by surprise … and despair.
For the offices of the "Carnmore Copper Company" were located in the editorial board room of Lady Edith Pelham's magazine, "The Sketch". And there, waiting for Lord Blake and Lady Mary was Lord Atticus Aldridge, Earl of Sinderby, Mr. Charles Murray, and Hugh MacClare, Marquess of Flintshire. The three represented a decorum of the directors of the "Carnmore Copper Company". And it was then that the real coup-de-grace was shown. The debates, the Lord's Convention, and the war to come, was a feint to what they were really after.
Conspired in the rustic kitchen of Nampara House did George Crawley, Lord Sinderby, Mr. Murray, and Lady Edith, outsmart Lady Mary Crawley and Charles Blake. Using captured Swiss gold from a pirated German freighter in the North Sea, the conspirators quietly bought majority shares in Lord Blake's Corporation, using his own secret capital provided by the Nazi Party. In doing so, had they taken control of the very businesses of the foe that enslaved Grantham County. And it was then, in November of 1935, that the directors of the "Carnmore Copper Company" were also the new board of the Estate Corporation …
And thus was it unmissed irony that when Charles Blake entered the offices of "The Sketch" he was looking for money to move an army, and when he left it was as a penniless waif voted out of his own company for 'misappropriation of funds".
Thus, it was in the final days of 1935 that the Board voted to dissolve the institution and liquify its German assets to pay the rebel army of the Lord of Downton. The results were catastrophic to the many investors in both Grantham Estate and the corporation built around it. Most of the oldest families in England lost their fortunes overnight - leaving them with nothing but sinking debt and questions of their loyalty to the Imperium. The German War Machine was set back by some years, with their weapons plans and designs sold to American defense contractors for nickels on the dime. Many Lords and Ladies of Robert and Cora Crawley's generation committed suicide rather than see their ruin.
Lady Mary Josephine Crawley fell from one of the most beloved figures in the history of the British Upper-Classes to perhaps the most notorious of them all. Her humiliation would be long remembered for being thoroughly check-mated and outwitted by a teenager even before a shot was fired, and her grave hubris leading to the destruction of a way of life she was born too, loved deeply, and only ever known. And it was said that there were many nights in that first year of imprisonment that Lady Mary wished that her boy she lay next to in bed had let her hang in the stone court yard of Bodmin Jail, fore she would not have to live with the shame … which, perhaps, was George's purpose all along.
In this fallen society that many of the aristocracy woke up to on the day after Christmas, they would find the world changed. For months would they come to see estates and London homes that belonged to the oldest families in the Imperium be for sale and their possessions auctioned to pay for debts they couldn't begin to fathom. For those who did not kill themselves in those early weeks of 1936 did they come to suffer even greater injustices in their own mind.
Now that their money, their influence, was gone - they had become vulnerable. And ever in the distance did they hear the horn of the hunter … yet, for the first time, they found themselves in fox fur. For it had never occurred to anyone in the most upper and exclusive classes of British Society, in the slow melting of years - one to the other - that there would be repercussions for the things they did. That the gift of Lady Mary Crawley and Ms. Sybil Branson's bodies to their many carnal and degenerate fantasies would come at a steep price that they would have to pay in fear, pain, and, indeed … blood.
Words like 'retribution' and 'consequences' were terms and concepts that had never crossed Queen Mary of Teck's mind in relations to herself nor her actions that she had believed were within her right as sovereign. She went to bed every night for eight long years never dreaming that the King-Emperor of the British Empire would become so disillusioned that he would be past caring. That her own sons would be weak and vapid - cowering in fear from her defense. It simply never crossed her mind that the monarchy she had maintained through war and revolution throughout Europe for twenty-two years would be so incredibly ineffective that such words would find even her.
In the late winter of early 1936, The Dowager Queen Mary of Teck would sit in her bath, reminiscing of the woman, the goddess, that had once sat upon her lap within it. She'd close her eyes and think of the perfect pale back laying against the queen's bare chest, a hand rubbing and stroking the sinfully smooth alabaster skin of a softly sighing beautiful woman's slick sculpted belly under rose peddle water. But as she sniffs the lavender scent that she used to lather over her dolly's beautiful body, she would sense that someone was there. The Dowager Queen would tell them to put the towels down - she did not need anything else. But the presence would continue to stand by. The water would slosh in her tub as she turned to chastise her maid.
But she would find only a tall and dark figure standing in the doorway.
She could not see his face, only the silhouette of tumbling waves of tussled curls and a leather peacoat with the collar done up in the back. If she showed fear, he did not see it as she played neither coy nor dumb about whom it was that entreated upon her privacy and for what purpose. She simply dismissed him, saying in the ghost of a German accent 'she's mine, boy. And she will be as much mine tomorrow as she is now.' The water would slosh again as she turned and took out a cigarette from a tin case with the Royal Crest painted upon it. But when the shadowy avenger still did not move, the old woman would look back again as she lit her smoke. 'What are you going to do about that, eh?' She scoffed insultingly, exhaling the new puffed cloud through her nostrils in his direction defiantly.
But it would be in this moment that fear was felt utterly when she saw the silhouette answer her wordlessly. With a lift of his left arm, the shadowy figure showed her the hand that bore a steel gauntlet of a Knight's Templar. When he clenched his fist, an intense heat began emitting from a solitary symbol that began glowing a deep azure in the dark of the Royal Chamber. With another draft of her cigarette, the Queen would turn her back to hide fearful eyes in sight of the smoking ancient Adamic rune emblazoned upon the Knight's gauntlet. When the Dowager Queen was attacked, marked, in her own bedchamber in Windsor Palace - in her own tub … what hope did the rest of them have? The Baron of Neagh knew he was a dead man the moment the attack on the old queen made the papers.
They didn't say who did it, but the Baron knew … they all knew.
Lord Charles Blake – who was floated cash reserves by being Hitler's Lobbyist in the House of Lords – would make a brave stand by claiming that he would not be run out of London after losing control of Downton Abbey. However, his pride would lead him to become the 'vigilante's' favorite punching bag for many years to come. Being wealthy in money and information, Lord Blake's opulent life would often be interrupted by being assaulted in his home, face forced inches from the flames of his own roaring fireplace, or being held over his penthouse flat's balcony to the Soho streets far below. Then, having such a low tolerance and threshold for pain, Charles Blake would begrudgingly and in great terror tell the vigilante all he knew of whatever he wanted to know. Of this, would the short and dapper man lose much creditability from High Society as a 'snitch'.
From the information beaten out of the short Ulster Lord had he gotten names and events of which Lady Mary Crawley and Ms. Sybil Branson were the main 'entertainment'. He had immediately – on that same night - broken the new Earl of March's ribs in three places, warning him that if the Lord touched his own young daughter or her friends again that the vigilante would kill him. All of those that attended that same young Lady's birthday party a year past, the friends and family that went upstairs discreetly – some in groups – to visit Ms. Sybil's guest room during cake where hunted down and beaten to an inch of their lives. The Old Viscount of Shrewsberry - who took Ms. Sybil into his study to receive oral sex during the present opening of his granddaughter's party - would need a body cast for the next eight months. The old boy might even walk again … if he really put his mind to it.
As the weeks went on, the list of casualties mounted. Lord Gillingham had his bullock sack notched by the vigilante's knife, which abruptly put an end to his year's long affair with Lady Mary. The Dowager Duchess of Crowborough – who found pleasure in violence against a helpless young beauty tied to her bed – was flogged with the same cruelty and dropped down a laundry shaft of her Liverpool hotel. They said that she was found barely alive among the dirty towels two days later. Others did the work for him, taking their own life or fleeing to the Continent rather than face retribution for the things they did to the women the unnamed vigilante loved.
And at long last, The Baron of Neagh's time had come.
The bell's toll was in the form of the phone ringing in his Cambridge dormitory building to alert him of a family emergency. He took the Cambridge train to King's Cross and from there a cab to Royal Bethlehem Hospital. Outside the Intensive Care Unit, he found what was left of the once proud dukedom – now completely bankrupt after the "Grantham Civil War". Cook found his grandfather, the Old Duke, with his head in the oven when he came down to start Upstairs Breakfast. His Uncle had run off to be with his French Mistress who was a kept woman of a Danish Prince – she would pay both their way between her legs. In a matter of a Holiday Season he went from being the odd man out of his prestigious family to being just one more 'budgeted' peer like the rest of his brood. His cousin was absolutely furious and on a tear of the gross mismanagement around them when the Baron came upon his family. His anger was not, of course, for the maiming and traumatic injuries of a 'loved one', but that they put them in the most expensive room in the hospital – a luxury he could ill-afford.
When they found the Double Duchess, she had been thrown from the third story window of their family's London House. She had hit an arch on her way down and landed with a good crack on the snowy pavement. The fall had transected her spine completely, leaving her crippled. When asked about the missing teeth, the broken fingers, and severe contusions to her once famed and idolized face, the doctor said that it was not from the fall. In the former MI6 man's experience during the war it seemed to him that the Double Duchess had been tortured repeatedly and quite brutally, before she was thrown out a window.
Once more they did not need to guess who had done this.
The vigilante tied the twice dowager duchess to a chair and asked her a series of basic questions. Who? What? and how many times? In the background the reel she once played so proudly to anyone who would watch rolled and ticked. Every grimace of pain Lady Mary made upon the insertion - the Duchess lost a fingernail. When the marble cut goddess bit the silken pillow to muffle her cry – her son broke one of the old dowager's fingers. And for every jubilant cackle of exhilaration from the power felt in the buggery of Lady Mary Crawley – the vigilante cut out one of the Double Duchess's teeth.
After fifteen straight hours - tormented into unconsciousness and beaten back awake - sleep deprived and unmanned, she begged not to see her filthy movie with Lady Mary any longer. She could not stand it. Fore she knew that when it restarted, she'd lose another tooth, another finger would be broken, and she would be punched awake to see it all start again. And so, she talked. All the questions he asked, Who, What, and how many times. She sold out her sons, her sisters, her best friends - half the Lake District's society. She would tell him whatever he wanted to know. Who sodomized his beloved Sybbie, who suckled cream off his Lady Mother's pink nipples, and who liked 'getting rough' with both of them. She would say anything to make it stop – that awful movie. In the end, he didn't even have to hit her. The simple sound of the projector reversing the reel sent the Double Duchess into a frenzy of panicked terror. And on the last occasion she screamed about the night of the shareholder's meeting … the night that Sybil Branson was raped. It made the Vigilante pause and his eyes narrow perilously.
'What did you just say?'
The Baron of Neagh was pale as a corpse when he saw the branded symbol on the old woman's cheek. With slurred speech did the Double Duchess curse her most adored grandchild. For telling the truth of what he did that night … and her grotesque response to it, had earned her the marking that was seared onto her cheek. Her evil apathy was the reason she was thrown from the top window of the very house that once was the most important in all of London Society – before Cora Levinson came. A section of celluloid film from her horrible movie had been stuffed in her mouth. The dark avenger spared only a moment for the old pervert and pedophile, in which he spat upon her beaten face in passing as she lay crippled upon the snowy street.
Yet, when the Duchess's daughters asked Scotland Yard what was to be done of this. Commissioner Dennis Nayland-Smith simply sniffed and responded that they were looking into criminal charges … against the Dowager. At the outrage of the aristocratic daughters of the broken old woman, the Commissioner reminded the Ladies that both sodomy and homosexuality was a crime. And in his very hand was proof of an assault of a 'criminal nature' made upon Lady Mary Crawley and her body. In the arguing of which they claimed, 'the whore' was a willing participant in the 'bit of buggery', the Baron walked away to the notice of no one. For he knew now that most of Scotland Yard - the Commissioner himself – was on the side of the dark avenger.
There was no help for him now.
Of the fate of the Double Duchess here is marked that she was found smothered with a pillow in her hospital room. As it is now, as it was then, it remains unknown who murdered her. Some say it was her penny-pinching grandson – the new head of the family that had not the funds to provide care for a broken and crippled old woman. Others believed it was a conspiracy by her own daughters - afear of the further ruin of the family by a criminal scandal should the images of the old woman abed with Lady Mary at the Ritz be leaked to the newspapers. But the less thought of, yet, most believable, was that it was in fact one of the woman's nurses in the night. Fore, upon the Double Duchess's very cheek remained the marking of an ancient judgement.
The Baron fled that place, fled that city, always looking over his shoulder. The cab drivers, the trolly men, and other commuters stared queerly at the collegian chap whose eyes watched the roof tops and over passes in fear. He rode out of King's Cross with his back to the corner of his train compartment, flinching at every shadow or passing traveler. When he got to Cambridge, he immediately made for his mates before he went to his own rooms. They asked him what was wrong, why he was in such a nervous and terrified state. But he could not answer them fully. Instead, he told as much of the truth as he dared. Speaking only that his grandmother had been attacked like Queen Mary and that the 'masked man' was now after him. His fellows were astonished by such an admission. But once more he refused to speak why 'the beast' was after him. He needed their help, their guard, while he packed his things and went to his holdings in Ireland to wait it out. And to their credit - or youthful arrogance - his mates agreed to help with whatever they could.
Of these young men were they those of privilege that had titled relatives but whose inheritance came from self-made fathers who married the daughters of Earls or Marquesses. These Edwardian financial arrangements, in vogue post-war, would shore up old families and grant to the newly rich access of upper-social mobility that would be otherwise closed off to them without a high-born wife. Their children were those raised with the pretentions of aristocracy, carrying with them their mothers' manner and upbringing of the old worlds they were born too - paying respect and homage to the rigid imperial class system. Thus, had the fall of the old noble names rarely affected them beyond having a maternal granny or aunt now living in their father's purchased country estate. But they also refused to leave school to join the rebel army of George "The Comet" Crawley like many of their contemporaries in the military academies or the middle-class scholarship holders – raised on the aristocratic prejudices against either Catholics or the Comet himself. And they resented the accolades and adoration of their return from the northern battlefields of the County Grantham with tales of courage, strife, and comradery. Thus, were these hybrids outraged of both the fall as well as the hunting and brutalizing of those who they were raised to believe had made the Imperium what it once was.
These attitudes and believes fueled the contrary and foolhardy justifying and doubling down of any action taken - no matter how dark or immoral - by a titled relative or friend. That whoever this vigilante, 'Man in the Mask', had been – of which most had a good idea - he had no right to judge, criticize, or to hold to account greater men and women than him. They were a breed apart, with their own customs and rules divorced from normal men, and no one ordained the dark avenger the arbiter of a lower, baser, morality than those born to rule. And in such thinking as they were raised to believe in cutthroat family politics of snobbish mothers and greedy fathers, had the Baron told them what he had done … it wouldn't have mattered to them. He could've raped Sybbie Branson a dozen times and it would not change their opinion that he had such a right to do so. Their basis being no other reason than tribal contrary emotions of the simple way 'that vigilante' now operated with impunity against 'their kind'.
There was conviction in their steps, their stride - hooting and making a racket down the quad as all brazen young men did in rushed emotions of masculine fearlessness in the company of other lads. They spun passing girls in half dance, banged on walls, and openly called their challenge to the vigilante if he 'dared' show his face in their school. Other students queered at the commotion, or blindly cheered them on with no context, just simple admiration for their boldness. Some supporters of their club or otherwise sympathetic toward their purpose on that night, gave them ovation as they announced in passing that they were going to 'do something' about that masked menace who beats on Lords and old women.
The only one not saying a word was the Baron. Fore he alone had seen the state of his grandmother, heard the tales of "White Fields" and "Downton Town". They said at the climax of the final night of that war some of the more fanatical Tygers had shut themselves in Downton Abbey, took Ladies Mary and Rose, Mrs. Lucy and Ms. Sybil Branson, and the staff, hostage. With conviction had they claimed that they would kill all inside Downton if they saw one rebel soldier on the Great House's lawn. The man who he knew to be the vigilante's response was to arm himself with only a sword and a hooded cloak. Then, without being seen, he entered the Abbey alone … and bolted the doors behind him. Not a Tyger left Downton Abbey alive in that final hour.
The privileged elite of Cambridge rugby and football were by far no match for what would find them that night.
He didn't even hide from them, didn't lurk in the shadows. Down the historic main street of shops and professor's apartments above, a single silhouette leaned casually against a flickering gas lamp pole … waiting. The group of emboldened youth saw his tall and massive shadow thrown against the stone wall of the university bookstore before they ever saw him. The dark of his nightshade fell over the group of young men when they turned the corner. Their juvenile and boyish howling like a rowdy young wolf pack hushed. They suddenly found the street was deathly silent – not a figure stirring or seen. In the distance was the rattle of a bottle and yawl of an alley cat. The air was stiff and sullen with the scent of the winter's last snow. Their first glimpse of him was not his face – unmasked - nor his tallness, but the amber glow of embers from the chamber of his pipe that reflected in his cerulean eyes.
The light's dancing shadows giving a brief phantasmal glimpse of an elemental nature of sheer steel that were narrowed perilously and affixed with all that thunder and lightning on the Baron. Some of their number back peddled intrinsically as the embers died slowly. All they could make out afterward was the hazy shadow of blue smoke exhaled coldly into the night. Then, from the darkness, there came a single soft light that grew in intensity till it was all they could see. It was a simple rune of Pre-History, wreathed in azure light, and hotter than the furnaces of Hell. It was then that the brazen young men of privilege from a minute ago …
Could not find a thing to say.
Now, five years passed, Tom Branson and Lady Sybil Crawley looked down upon the consequence of that one violent night. In the bright white gilded concentration of the headlights on the Baron's fine motor car they saw a red and throbbing brand mark of ugly and horrific welting on the young man's collar bone. The rune was that of an alien and ethereal calligraphy that no hand of man nor that of the Eldar race could recreate. Not an artist of the earthly plain could comprehend the many elegantly curving and concentric lines – like the silvery highways of the Infinite itself – that moved and twisted with a streamlined and purposeful interlocking. Aside the single symbol made of many parts were there three dots on each vector that surrounded this divine mark.
Upon sight of it, without knowledge of why, both Tom and Sybil's hearts grew suddenly hot with revulsion and disgust – hate for this young man. Even if he had not raped their beloved little girl, they'd hate him all the same with no less diminishing. For the very sight of the marking stirred a sudden revulsion in the very heart of every human. For one does not simply receive it least they had done something of grave evil. And those few who had earned such a symbol, do they find their lives forfeit in the eyes of their fellow man once it is revealed.
Fore here now, entering into this tale for the first – but not the last - is the feared 'Curse' handed down by the Heirs of the House of Grantham to their greatest and most heinous of foes. Going back before the Tower of Babel's fall is this Adamic symbol – the first language of man – known by all when looked upon. And in days of Abraham and Isaac, when God was nearer to man, did he set his hand in punishment against the gravest of criminals and monsters that haunted the world in those days. Named so in the bible as "The Mark of Cain" - all those who bore it would find a life empty and meaningless, his neighbor's inhospitable, shunned by his family. And upon death would he find the Gates of Heaven forever shut to him till Judgement Day.
In the days of Christ, in the redemption of man upon the Holy Cross, did such angry and fiery punishments find their end in the benevolence of "The One". But not wholly had God's Wrath upon the wicked been fully forgotten … and somethings that should've been lost were unearthed. Fore in the secret vaults of where Solomon's Temple once stood, the Knights of the Crusade found a book that the greatest King of the Israelites should never have written. And once more, upon their greatest champion's gauntlet, did ancient and divine powers of judgement and mercy fall into the most valiant and most fellable hands of man. And yet, of how the steel gauntlet came into the possession of a young George Crawley in the days of Villas in Southern France and duels in ancient courtyards of stone in the Wallachian castle of "The Dragul" … does it not come into this tale.
But here in lies a warning from one who tells it now. In the century to come – decades passing like cold and starless winter's nights - many things of both value and beloved have been lost to the fallen House of Grantham. However, the Templar's Gauntlet has not been one of them. And here is wisdom to cherish to those of Windsor, Tyger, and the Necromancer himself - enthroned within Downton's halls that he usurped with shadow and flame. The holy steel of Crusader and the burning mark of God's Wrath is never far from the flesh of those who make war upon the unbroken line of Lady Elfstone and her Lords of Downton.
Fore, the Exiled Heirs of the House of Grantham never forget … and they never forgive.
And no one better understood this sentiment more than Tom Branson, of whom looked upon that branding with the utmost knowledge of its truth. It was as good as a receipt of the very evil that this … bastard had done to his – their - little girl. Their nephew was not a cruel young man, nor did he often brandish such a powerful artifact for no purpose. If he bore the Almighty's mark, if George gave it to him, it meant that it was true. That this … fiend had raped his daughter, his baby, the only part of Sybil he had left for so many years. He had hurt her in one of the worst ways that any woman could be. He had held her down and forced himself on her, inside her, till his churlish animal appetites were cruelly sated.
The Irishman let out a strangled and bitter cry of anguish into the blue hued night of the wooded hollow about them. It was anger, hate, and pain, insurmountable pain, that was let out in primal emotions that only men knew - only fathers of daughters who live through such a horrible and tormented nightmare in the reveal of the most hateful truths unknown. Tom was aware, at the restaurant, at the bar, that this filth had been marked. He knew it by the way he stood, the way he feared the uniform of the Titan Corps, and by the way that he kept touching his collar bone. He had assumed that it had been his nephew's handywork from his teenage years, his career as a vigilante – haunting the nightmares of bad and mad Englishmen by rooftop and streetlamp's shadow. Of what crime he thought the Baron committed, he could not say - though he guessed.
Those who bore the ancient symbol's brand were usually rapists with a predilection for young girls and boys. And those who had hurt the Crawley family - especially Mary and Sybbie. And Tom thought he might be sick when he excused Sybil's date with the man, telling himself that she was safe, that she would be unharmed in the cinema, despite wanting to rush in at the thought of her alone with that man in a dark place. It was lies and trivialness that comforted him. Perhaps the aristocratic lad had gotten drunk and forced a mother's lady's maid that came to George for justice she couldn't get while employed in an upper-class house. He even coped with the idea that he had been one of dozens of young men that had watched Mary bath over the years.
As terrible as it was, as much as he did not approve, Tom would not pry into his sister-in-law's private affairs. Even before George had been exiled, Mary had taken to a rather risqué tradition of being a raffle prize at Eton. For a dozen few lads in favor of a charitable donation, they would all go to a Roman style bathhouse to 'earn their manhood'. There they would find themselves audience for Lady Mary Crawley as she was in the bath. Always with a teasing smirk, always with slow movement and sloshing of sweet-smelling water, did she cleanse herself in front of a dozen young men that were simply about to burst. She'd act as if they weren't even there as she stood under a Grecian statue turned fountain that poured water over her tilted back head. The way it cascaded down a marble cut body left not a boy in her audience able to speak. Of course, that tradition came to an end in the era of Civil War – during the Lord's Convention.
Slowly, audibly, step-by-step, there came clacking of Mexican Federales boots scuffling on the stone floor that echoed in the cavernous domed bathhouse. Scented rose oil was lathered slowly, sensuously, over a pearly toned body – an arrogant smirk of knowing they'd never forget her nor her naked beauty for the rest of their lives. But their eyes were not on two hands that gently massaged the oils on the sculpted cheeks of her bum that was half visible upon the water. The first young man in the back looked over his shoulder and fell from heaven when he glanced who was behind him. That teenage boy, quickly, clumsily, tapped repeatedly on his friend's shoulder till he snapped in irritation from anything that would draw him away from such a perfect sight. But then he gave a dry swallow and staggered toward his friend's side in fear. Eventually, in a slow chain reaction – like dominos falling - they all turned and with dismay and shock did they slowly back away. And once they realized that he was letting them go … they took off running, peeling away one by one like pieces of debris blown away by a dark tempest.
The self-satisfied smirk of the beautiful goddess was frozen on her face when she turned. Her slick and oiled body, her hair wet and sleeked back, a droplet of water dripping down her stately nose. But her amber eyes widened suddenly. Fore she saw not a gaggle of teenage boys ready to cream their short pants, ready to see a grown woman slowly ascend the bath, fully naked and glistening in all her glory. They had all fled in fear of the silhouette that leaned back against the bathhouse wall, leg drawn up, foot braced against the stone, and his arms crossed. Now, a young man with tussled grown out waving raven curls, a leather peacoat of mahogany coloring – collar done up in the back – and stern countenance, was Lady Mary's only audience.
He watched her from the shadows, his face unseen. Slowly, he paced forward, till he came to a portable wireless that was plugged into the wall. To classical music was her once a semester 'donation' done by. Lady Mary's muse, her imaginings, was of being a living and breathing "Birth of Venus" for her pubescent audience, the awakening of their desires from boys to men. She wanted them to see it, see her, as a work of art – something more than the crass and titillating pin-ups and pictures they hid from their governesses back home. But now her fear of being discovered, of the one person she never wanted to ever find out of the darkest side of her sexuality, was realized as she watched him walk over to the edge of the pool sized bath. The young vigilante lifted his foot and placed it atop the wireless that was playing Ponchielli.
For a moment, her eyes darted from the scuffed and worn boot to the shadowy face of a young man angry enough to murder. She didn't have time to speak, to cry out, to even get one last glance of the young vigilante she loved more than anything. With a push of his heel, he shoved the wireless into the water. Lady Mary flinched, squeezing her eyes shut, clenching hard in anticipation of the currents of electricity that would fry her dead. But after a few moments, when she realized nothing happened, she unscrewed her squinted clench. There, she saw that the wireless was pulled from its socket by the push of the youth's foot. After a sigh of relief, Lady Mary grew hot in outrage and scorn of the mind game played on her. But the anger quickly fell … and then there was only shame and mortification as she searched in vain for the young man that she loved …
Fore, suddenly, there was no one there.
Tom knew how ugly and awful Mary and George were to each other, how deeply and terribly toxic their relationship devolved into at times. And he wondered as he sat outside the cinema if that naval officer was a casualty of collateral damage between warring mother and son. But now he knew that he had done George a dishonor. He should've known better that his nephew knew better. For Mary's cruelty, even her worst and most monstrous manipulations, the young man would not go to such terrible lengths in their provocations. He did not use that Templar's Gauntlet on a whim nor frivolous matters of dominance over a captive mamma. He used it for what it was intended for – for those who committed the most grievous of sins against God and his laws for Men. And the sight of that marking, of the passion, the hatred, in one he loved so much – his idealized sainted Sybil – was more than he could bear. That some ugly and terrible secret had rotted and festered for so long that the woman that flinched at even hurting the smallest and pestilent of creatures could be drawn into this net of darkness to take revenge for a girl she did not even know.
Perhaps that was what tore Tom up the most. The idea, the sudden knowledge, that such a thing happened and that Sybbie did not tell him, that no one did. By this marking, it was clear that George knew, knew long ago, that this man had raped his daughter. Yet, he did not tell his uncle. And he fell to shame at the thought that his girl did not trust him enough to come to him when she was so terribly hurt. A part of him knew that it was not scorn that motivated his girl. He knew her well enough to know that in some dark way it was out of love that she did not speak out to him. Always, and for much of her life, Sybbie had felt that she had to protect her daddy. That she often thought of his pain first before her own. His daughter thought of him as some incorruptible and wholesome beacon of good in the world that she wished not to inflict herself upon.
For so long, for years upon years, they had been separated by a bastard old German Tyrant's envy and want of her for himself as a remedy for his failings as a parent. And in that long separation she never got to know Tom, not truly, not the way a daughter knows her father. The veneer, the childlike idealism of her daddy never got stripped away by time and exposure as she grew up under his guardianship. They never argued, never disagreed about politics or curfews, she was never told that she couldn't go somewhere with her friends nor that she was too young to go or do anything. They weren't together long enough to find one another's flaws, be shaken by them, and then overcome them.
From the moment they took her away to the time that she was returned to him, Tom was still her gallant and kind daddy that could do no wrong and had never done so in his life. She knew nothing of the burning of a Castle with the IRA, the bucket of slop he wanted to pour over a General's head, and how boorish and unkind he could be to her mummy when she delayed her answer to his proclamations of love. She never grew up to see his flaws, never believed he had any. And thus, she became self-conscious in telling her secrets, opening her heart, to her most cherished and beloved daddy. She could not stand his judgement, his disappointment, and always afear that she could do something that would make him hate her. She didn't know, never knew, that it was impossible for him to do so. That no matter what she did, no matter how awful, Tom could never stop loving his baby girl, his Sybbie.
But tonight, with the marking upon the Baron's collar bone, he saw but once more that she had trusted George more than her daddy. And his nephew's predictable retaliation was both violent and terribly lasting. There was a part of Tom that was resentful of this. It was his duty, his responsibility, as her father, to do something, to make his daughter's rapist pay for what he had done. And in some dark place in his heart he felt cheated by the youth he loved like his own son. Fore, now he could not inflict all the pain and anguish that this man had on Sybbie, for he had already been punished – beyond pain, beyond despair, beyond anything that Tom could dream of visiting upon this monster in hate. Now all that he was left with were answers to questions that he never got to ask and the burning sense of impotence as a father and protector of the most beautiful and perfect little girl in the world.
"What are you doing?!"
The hateful snarl in Sybil's voice defeated an already broken Tom as he threw the Baron back against the wheel well of his motor. She raised her Walther back into a firing position, though her finger had not yet touched the trigger. The man's fallen countenance was pained, his eyes squinted shut, and his chest heaved in an anguish so visible, so potent, that tears began to slide down Sybil's milky pale cheeks in unspoken sympathy for the man she loved. There were fiery and molten explosions that ripped through Tom Branson's breast as he stood still as a statue in the motor's headlights. Six years of emotions, dark, sad, angry, vengeful, and bitter, ran riot through him - catching up after long delay of ignorance. He even stumbled, to which Sybil darted closer to help him. But he held his hand out to her, not wanting to be helped, fore there was no counsel for what he felt in that moment. His hand reached for his heart and squeezed it as strangled cries fell from him.
"Tom …!"
"…"
"Tom, please!"
He did not answer. But eventually after a long moment, with panting breaths, he paced back in front of the concussed Baron that still lay on the sod of the wooded hollow, writhing blindly about in the mist upon the road. Then, with a weakened gait, he turned to the woman he still loved with every part of his crushed soul and broken heart. In that moment, in that look in his hazel eyes, she knew what he was going to say, what he already said without even speaking a word. She shook her head, huffing, teeth gritted, her gun lifted higher, caring not that Tom was in the way.
"No …" She shook her head. "No, Tom, don't …" She begged.
"Let him …"
"No!"
"Sybil, darling, it's over."
"It's not … it's not over till we say it is!"
"George already marked him!"
"I don't care."
"He has been punished already!"
"I-don't-care!"
"There's nothing left for us to …"
"I DON'T CARE!"
Lady Sybil Crawley roared in a sudden murderous flash of black temper that rivaled the howling rages of her late papa, Robert Crawley. Fore, of all his children and grandchildren, only Sybil and George bore such sudden and fierce anger, and in many ways, their manifestation of the black Crawley temper was much worse than Lord Grantham's had ever been. Robert was all bark but rarely showed any violence in his terrible temperament. Meanwhile, George had no bark and no preamble before his razor sharp, lockjaw, bite grasped the foe. As for Sybil Crawley, her kind and sweet disposition could be melted into screaming and the throwing of items. But of how violent it could be, had it never been tested. But now, with gun in hand and her daughter's rapist at her and Tom's feet, it was not known how dark it went. Would she shout down the gods - the thunder of Thor in her husky and luxurious voice. Or was she more like her nephew, her boy, who said not a word, yet, in a flash of lightning, could murder even the mightiest of men where they stood.
"He raped our daughter!"
"I know."
"Our little girl!"
"Sybil."
"She was so perfect, so small, in our arms!"
"I remember."
"And he hurt her! He hurt her, Tom!"
"Sybil, just stop!"
"No … No."
"Just listen to me!"
"He has to pay for what he's done!"
"He will, he has - for the rest of eternity!"
"Why are you protecting him?!"
"I'm protecting you!"
Her eyes slid up from the staggered figure blindly reaching into the wheel well of the Roadster and up at Tom. And her heart fell at the conflicted and pained countenance. The murderous Great Lady saw that it was killing Tom - maybe even literally - to be put in such a position he dared not imagine he would ever be – arguing for reprieve of the man who raped their daughter. There was a twinge of guilt that ate at her, an empathetic ringing like a gong that made her feel regretful, that made her feel the need to apologize for her rudeness, her bullishness. The old Sybil would've immediately stopped what she was doing, realize that something was amiss, that she was hurting someone she loved, and ask honestly what she had done - what she was doing that was wrong. But the woman that had seen twenty years of war and death, who had seen things, impossible and undreamed … the mother. That woman did not prostrate herself to such humble opened mindedness, not when every synapse in her mind was flaming with the need to protect her child from one who had harmed her and might even do it again.
"Darling, if you do this …" Tom held his hands out in caution. "You can't come back from it." He said with a buckled steel that held the world's weight against all odds.
"Maybe I don't want too!" She said with tears streaming down her face.
"Sybil …"
"You don't know me, Tom …!" She gritted her teeth, avoiding his gaze that was pained and broken, not having the strength to withstand it and go through with what she knew she must. "Not anymore!" She shook her head fiercely as if warding away the very voice of reason.
"Yes, I do."
"No, you don't!"
"I do!"
"No!"
Tom suddenly came alive, moving ardently toward her in sudden passion. "I do!" He staked his very soul on the claim that Sybil could not outbid nor out bluff. "I know everything there is to know about you, Sybil Cora Crawley!" He argued. "I know you're spoiled! I know you're a pain in the Arse! Mine, preferably! That you wait till last minute to tell someone bad news, so they don't have time to be angry! That you have to have the last biscuit in the tin, even if you're not hungry!" Even in such a tense and desperate moment, mirth escaped his throat in a love's revelry of a life that seemed to be had in another world. And Sybil's ferocity fell from her countenance suddenly stricken by the memories of that life, that perfect life, so long ago.
Tears began to form in Tom's eyes as he relived everything that he had tried to store away, that he spent so many years trying not to think about anymore. But now it came spilling out of him, everything that reminded him of the first and greatest loves he had ever known. It came to him every time they crossed paths in Downton's hall or in the town – sitting across from her at dinner. Twenty-one years had not dampened nor aged his love for that rare gem hidden in a race, in a class, he thought he would hate forever. The young beauty whose love changed him so fundamentally, who saved him in every way that was possible. He had a daughter, a business, a purpose, and a future. Without Lady Sybil Crawley, Tom Branson knew himself to be dead in some ditch, shot against a wall by the "Black and Tans" long ago. He was insulted by the insinuation that, somehow, he didn't know her, that he – Tom Branson - was ignorant of who Lady Sybil Cora Crawley was – this woman he worshipped all his life … for he could not remember a time before her.
"I know that you helped Gwen get out of Service when no one else in your family could think why, nor care for a single maid. I know you couldn't stand idle while men gave their lives for your country. I know that you ventured off on your own – the first in your family – to find your calling. I know that you went to the Catholic Church in Ripon to pray for my cousin when I told you he was shot in Dublin during the "Rising". You didn't know him, he was someone who hated people like you, and yet, you apologized. You took my hand and said that I shouldn't be alone in my grief. I know that you visited the hospice ward every night in Dublin after your shift ended. You'd sit by old women's beds and hear stories about the Selkies. Listen to old boxers talk about their big fights. And when they died, you'd leave a single rose on their bed. You did all of this without telling me, without telling anyone. Because you're a fine person, Sybil Cora Crawley! The finest I've ever met, ever known, and will ever know. And this, this is not who you are! You're not a killer! Not a murderer!" Tom Branson let out a sob of whose rippling nearly tore him apart.
"You're the best of us!"
His words and the emotions in them, pure and unfiltered, cascaded over Sybil like a waterfall of cool and sweet water that doused the flames of her heart. Her eyes glistened in the blue hued night as she looked upon this man that she loved all her adult life with wonder and amazement. Fore, Lady Sybil did not know that Tom had known that. She did not realize that he followed her, watched her, and said not a word. That what was done at first out of worry for a beauty of gentle birth in a rough and divided city was continued out of enchantment. That Tom Branson followed Sybil quietly, watching her small good deeds, unspoken and unconcerned, with a deep reverence and worship of this angel that he often felt he had no right to call his own. Sometimes, he could hardly believe that he, Tom Branson, had won the very love of such a singular and extraordinary creature. A woman who would help complete strangers, better their failing lives for just a moment to lighten their burden and the Plutonian shadow that fell ever on their dwindling spirts.
It was then that the woman would've given anything to have that back, that simple life after the years of mangled corpses and punishing hours. She knew from the wards of her family's hospital that even the simplest gestures of comfort and kindness could alter a patient's condition for the better. That they'd know that for just a beat someone saw them, that someone was on their side. And when she first arrived in Dublin - the war still living in her mind - she had not diminished this small fact. Fore she cared, deeply, once, about the sanctity of life. In Tom's words, it came back to her that what she was doing now was not who she had been, what the war taught her. And she grew angry with Tom, with herself, in the shaky hesitation in her squinting eye, in the trembling trigger finger that had yet to touch the firing mechanism.
"I don't, I don't …" Her face fell. "I didn't ask to come back here, Tom!" She wept bitterly. "I didn't want too." She shook her head. "When I died …" She choked on a sob. "I had everything I wanted. I had a husband. I had a baby girl. I had my family around me. And a place to protect them, a place of safety and plenty to start our new lives." She nodded. "And now that I'm back, I don't have anything!" Frustration, perhaps 20 years of it, came out in a flash of fey rage.
"When I walk Downton's halls, it, it doesn't even feel the same anymore! It doesn't feel like home! Mamma and Papa are dead! My baby girl that I went to bed that night excited to see the next morning, she's gone, maybe forever!" Her voice, her very soul, nearly broke. "I, I, I don't even have you." All anger, rage, outrage left her voice. Then there was only a longing and tormented sorrow when she turned to look at the man she loved, a husband that had once been hers, with devastation in every meaning of the very word.
Tom Branson nearly crumbled like ancient columns broken and chipped in the erosion of years – centuries - without her, remembered in just a pained glance of the love of his life.
"I didn't get to hear her first words! Didn't get to see her first steps! I didn't see her read her first word or take her on her first pony ride! I didn't sit by her bed and make the monsters go away with a kiss and song! I didn't see her presented, or teach her how-to put-on makeup, or see her swoon for her first boy! I didn't do anything for her! I didn't protect her when she was molested by Edith's mother-in-law! I didn't hold her all the years she cried herself to sleep in her big empty Royal bedchamber! I wasn't there when her body was sold to evil men and women when they put you in prison! And I wasn't there to make her see reason when she betrayed George in Spain and got Papa killed!" Sybil unburdened her heart to the man she loved with such terrible anguish that came flowing out like a shadowy torrent of regret and primal sorrow that had been dammed up for so long.
"All I can do is this!" She suddenly, angrily, swatted the gun in the air as if to knock it into a wall - smack it for the insolence of the curse it sullied her slim hands with.
All things that George knew, learned, was a part of her. Perhaps, now it was more a part of her, held sway longer, than the Sybil that her husband, her family, had ever known. She had seen the Memphis Labor Prison on the freezing nights where young boys died of starvation and weariness. She had seen the horrors inside Dracula's Castle. The shadowy wraiths of the abyss beyond the Timeless Halls and Streams of the Infinite – summoned by the evil Stygian Sorcerer Kalemdai Rao and "The Serpent Ring of Set". After twenty years, Lady Sybil had seen and been exposed to so much darkness that she couldn't unsee it, felt it in every corner of even the safest and most wholesome room. The burden of a guardian angel brought back to a mortal plain with memories only half intact.
Like Tom just finding out about Sybbie's rape, she had only six months to process fourteen years of horror that came endlessly in flashes and violent memories that shake her awake to an empty childhood bedroom bereft of a husband and the whimsy of girlhood comforts. She never should've come back. Those who had such a loving duty in the heavily plain should never have to return to deal with the things, the traumas, that George had lived through. Now, after so many years of disapproving of his methods, his sometimes violent and brutish solutions. She knew why he did such things, the drive, the need, to protect the ones they loved the way he did.
"I couldn't be there for her when she needed me." She pointed her gun beside Tom. "But I can make sure that she doesn't have to worry about him." She motioned to the man that was slowly pulling himself into a standing position. The Baron paused when he saw a blurry firing squad of auburn-haired beauties, each pointing a Walther PPK at his chest.
"Sybil …"
Tom became suddenly calm. His voice, tired and wearied in sorrow, had a timber that Sybil could not ignore. Fore at the very sound of it, her heart cleaved in twine. In his eyes she saw a broken man that reflected everything that she felt so hotly, so freshly, that had burned through him long ago. Now all that was left was charred ruins and ivy-covered walls where a castle, a fortress, had been where his heart was held. And she realized that the crunching noise where she walked with a gun placed to an unarmed man was what was left of the largest and mightiest part of Tom Branson. What she loved him most for- what made her believe in him when it seemed that there was no saving him in his revolutionary fervor. His face was gravened and lined, his hair greyed in the light, and his countenance mingled with a missing purpose that he knew he might never get back.
"I have to, Tom! Please … you don't understand! I have to make him pay!" She shook her head arguing with his wordless expression.
"It won't bring her back."
"But she'd know! She would know that I didn't … I didn't abandon her! She'd know that I care! That I've always cared! That I never stopped loving her, that I didn't stop, not ever!"
The woman, the bereaved mummy of the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, begged him to understand, begged herself to understand, even when her pistol started lowering. She hated Tom for that look, that timber in his voice, that knowledge of her. That such a thing, such an injustice, was not who she was. It was not something she could ever be capable of committing. It didn't matter what deepest darkest iniquity that she had seen committed against Mary on a projector screen in the dungeon basement of Saltillo's Criminal Asylum. Nor the knowledge of the abuse that Sybbie had endured both mental and sexual in her long years separated from her family. In the end, she could not pull the trigger, take a life, no matter how justified she felt. One look from the wearied and heart sick Tom Branson, even after all these years, reminded her who she really was – who he knew her to be.
Just then, when the Walther hit the dirt of the hollow road, there was a rattle and thud. When Tom and Sybil turned, they saw the Baron toss out Mary's handbag from the foot well of his Roadster with all Sybil placed inside. They landed with a puff of dust and a hazy disturbance of the misty sheen about their ankles. They both heard the engine suddenly turn, encompassing the entire misty woods about them in a deafening roar. When she heard the crank of the Parking Brake and shift of the gear, Lady Sybil moved without thinking. In instinct, not from memory of George's training, but from being his protector, the woman quickly - with no regard for her safety or life - left her feet to tackle Tom.
Just at the last second, a high heel that she had borrowed from Edith took the place of where her husband had just been. Both Tom and Sybil landed heavily in the mires of mist that rolled and rippled on their impact on the hollow's floor. Loose gravel was slung, and branches cracked while wheels spun on the country road. The former married couple's stacked silhouettes were shadowed by retreating red neon lights as the Baron floored the accelerator to escape what he believed to be certain death at the hands of a couple of absolute lunatics.
Sybil, upon seeing the fleeing of her daughter's rapist, had one last burst of savagery that overcame her. It wasn't a reneging of all she knew herself to be, held up by Tom's tireless faith in the beautiful young woman's character and heart. It was the notion, the realization, that he was running – the criminal, the coward, was running! She knew she could not call the police, could not hold him indefinitely – and she would not retread ground that would force her little girl to return to a horrific time of her life, all just for her mummy's sense of justice. But if she was going to grant this filth mercy, if his life would be spared, it was her decision, by her leave, that he could run off and die by German Torpedo for all she hoped and prayed. It ate at her that once more the Baron of Neaugh got to flee from responsibility of what he had done, the suffering that he wrought. And, indeed, the realization that the fiend was running away had fueled her with such a hate that she could perhaps match the Roadster's speed by foot alone and drag him out of that driver's side.
Slipping off Tom's chest, Sybil kicked off the last of Edith's designer heels. By stocking foot, she ran to where the Walther lay. With gritted teeth, she picked up the pistol and aimed it for the driver's side. In her sharp-eyed timeless youth, Lady Sybil could just make out the head of the man in his open top MG. In an instance of calculation that passed through her mind with precision, she measured distance, windspeed, and adjusted for recoil. She heard the voice of Captain Allan Quartermain instructing a young boy aiming with a rifle – a beautiful young woman unseen on his other side - how to hit a speeding cheetah bounding across the African Plain after a baby gazelle separated from its mother. However, the difference was that the boy had grazed the cheetah to scare it away from the newborn fawn – claiming cats need to eat, same as everyone else. As for Sybil …
She wasn't as forgiving.
But just as - for the first time that night - her finger found the trigger; something grasped the pistol.
"Sybil, no, no!"
"Stop, Tom, he's … he's getting away!"
"Let it pass, Darling! Let him pass!"
"NO!"
Lady Sybil Crawley knew three different ways to disarm an enemy – six if she was counting lethal. But it never once occurred to her to use any of them on Tom. Instead, they both struggled with each other over the Walther. There was no skill involved, having a more petulant and emotional back and forth than a true moment of combat. The gun fired twice into the air, stilling the night noises all about them in the shocked concussion of its renting. Eventually, no matter how skilled a combatant Lady Sybil could be, she had not the strength to ever match the big and broad Irishman. He ripped the freshly fired gun from her grip and shoved her backward. In skill of his own - perhaps now having been at war for two years - she watched Tom disassemble her pistol, removing the sliding chamber from the top of the sleek Walther's barrel. A sudden fey rage possessed her as she saw the Roadster and its rapist disappear into the mists of the hollow just as her husband removed the magazine.
With a shove and a punch to his chest, she went after him. At first it seemed that she was trying to reclaim the pistol that she stole from Edith's desk at "The Sketch's" temporary offices in Thirsk. But eventually, it just became about striking Tom, striking someone, something. Lady Sybil Crawley was filled to the brim of her soul with a hate and rage that she could not exercise from within. Twenty years of memories, terrible, dark, and twisted, pervaded her mind with flashes of horror that comes without end. And she saw it all about her, all about her child, her Sybbie, every moment. And the fear of it, of the world she returned too, made her angry and so filled with hate. Yet, in the end, perhaps all she really wanted was absolution in the one thing that she couldn't have.
She wanted her little girl back.
Tom Branson lifted not a hand in retaliation nor defense in the woman he love's rage induced explosion of petty violence, her fists ineffectual and untrained as they rained and pelted upon his chest ineffectively. Eventually, in the lulling of the ferocity that gave way to despairing sobs, Tom gave no quarter to her angry protests. He took the young woman in his arms slowly, heeding not her attempts to rebuff him. He shushed her as his wife socked his shoulder and tried to push him away weakly. And eventually, not being able to fight it any longer, Sybil completely reversed everything that she denounced and pleaded against. Passionately, desperately, she wrapped her arms about Tom and held to him fiercely as she let out horrible and languished cries of the most primal pain that anyone might never have heard nor wished too.
In that moment it was as if it had never happened. It was if she had never died. It was as if their daughter had not been molested, been broken, and not betrayed her family to a monster that defiled her while his hands were still hot with Papa's blood upon them. There was no amount of shopping trips with Mary and Rose, secretary work and late lunches with Edith, and evenings with her sisters, Marigold, and Vicki in Mary's bedroom before they all went down to dinner. There was nothing that could replace, could make better all that tormented her in regret and memory in these last six months. Yet, on the side of the road of some obscure and forgotten country hollow, she found her shield, her safety. As it had been once was it now more than ever proven that nothing, nothing in the world, would harm Lady Sybil Crawley while in the arms of Tom Branson.
It was everything that was missing, everything that made her who she truly was. For what seemed like years she felt that she was only half of who she could be, had been. At first, she thought it the aftereffects of whatever George and Mary had done to bring about this change to the cosmic order. Then, she felt that it was her severing of all mental and spiritual ties to George – something she might never be able to recover from. And at the last, in these terrible weeks of contemplating the missed opportunity that escaped her tonight, she simply thought that she did not belong in this world anymore. That she was not destined to live in it – the serenity and absolution of death and heaven stolen from her by a desperate Mary who knew not what power she held in her hand on a September night in 1940. But now she knew that what had been missing had been the one thing that had completed her when she was alive. And that was the arms, the kisses, and the love – the purest of love – of Tom Branson. And with all her soul, with all that was left of her, she clung to that safety as the unknown future ripped and lashed at her.
"Hold on, just, hold on to me, my Darling, Mo grá … I'll get you through it! Don't let go!"
And she wouldn't.
Entr'acte Music
"Sukiyaki" – Kyu Sakamoto