DOWNTON 1926
Episode 5. Chapter 3.
Wednesday September 8, 1926
Bates, the Dowager, and Spratt
It was a maxim that familiarity bred contempt. Although Bates's experience had not led him to embrace this as a general principle, it was certainly true in the particular case of Mr. Spratt. At the door of the Dower house the butler greeted him morose look and led him, wordlessly, to Her Ladyship's sitting room. Bates realized that he was, in the butler's estimation, now beneath notice. This did not bother the valet in the least as he recalled that he had never thought much of Mr. Spratt either.
The welcome extended to him by the Dowager Lady Grantham was much warmer. She did not look markedly different from their last meeting. She was still frail, but so determined in manner that her fragility was not immediately apparent. It was only that he now knew to look for it. Her eyes lit up as they fell on him.
"What news, Bates?"
She had precipitated this meeting. No doubt the matter was preying on her mind. He would have waited until he had something more concrete to tell her.
"I made a few preliminary inquiries based on the information which you provided and then visited the Registry Office in London."
"You saw the birth certificate?"
"I did. The mother identified herself under her mother's maiden name." That was the first wrinkle he had sorted.
"And the name of the father?"
"Unknown."
"Ah." The Dowager nodded gravely. "That was the arrangement. Did they...stay in London?"
"Not quite. You see there was also a death certificate." It was the second wrinkle.
"Of the child?"
Was she perturbed or relieved? He could not tell. That she was gripped by this fact, however, was undeniable. "No. The mother." Bates was not sure how close the Dowager wanted to come to the individuals involved and therefore chose to use the arm's length descriptors rather than specific names.
"What of the child, then?"
"That's where I am now," Bates said. "I'm writing more letters. It was fifty years ago. The adults involved in the arrangements at the time are likely dead."
"Yes," she agreed, with a note of resignation. "Not everyone is cursed with longevity." Her eyes, still bright with a vigour that belied her fading frame, fixed on his. "Is there any hope, Bates?"
"I believe so, my lady." If discretion had not been a requirement, he would have been able to make more direct inquiries. It was the creative element involved in subterfuge that slowed the process.
She sighed. "I am heartened by your confidence."
"We'll see this through, my lady." He spoke firmly. And then hesitated.
She noticed. "There is something else?"
"It's none of my business."
Her hand flicked dismissively. "I have made it your business. Speak."
Bates took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. "If I may be so bold, my lady. It is my experience that nothing good comes of keeping secrets. Indeed, keeping them may be harmful." There was ample evidence in his own life to support this statement. He felt the burden and pain of confidences even now. Her gaze rested on him for a long moment. He had the uneasy sensation that she understood something of his personal agonies over secrets.
"In frivolous matters, yes," she said finally. "And to avoid blatant dishonesty. But no one needs to know everything, Bates. We, His Lordship and I, wanted to do our duty as we saw fit."
Bates did not press her, though he did not agree with her. He accepted the Granthams' commitment to this child born the wrong side of the blanket and their remote concern, but there were other people to consider, specifically His Lordship and his sister, Lady Rosamund. And he thought her mistaken about this characterization of secrets. To his mind, the more important the secret, the greater the necessity of confiding it in those most affected. He was a little surprised that guilt or a lingering sense of responsibility had prompted the Granthams to agree upon this course of action in the first place. The most sensible avenue would have been to wash their hands of the matter and never speak of it again, to let sleeping dogs lie. But emotions, Bates conceded to himself, were seldom rational.
"Of course, my lady."
He withdrew.
Spratt intercepted him on the way to the door, as though determined to ensure that he left. The moment the butler joined him, Bates suddenly came over more lame than he was in order to slow his progress.
"Do you ever read The Sketch?" he asked casually.
"What?!" A look of outrage, wholly out of proportion to the question, came over Spratt's face.
"Lady Hexham's magazine," Bates went on patiently.
"I know of what you speak," Spratt snapped.
Bates ignored the other's obvious discomfort over this. "Only...there was a letter in this month's issue about a female domestic and her ...confusion ... over feelings about a butler. I..." He paused, stared keenly at Spratt, and then abruptly shook his head. "No," he said with a smile. "No, I've...I must have the wrong end of the stick." Re-gaining a fluidity of movement, he stepped out the door. When it slammed resoundingly behind him, Bates laughed aloud.
He proceeded along the walk to the gate and then headed up to the high street in the direction of Downton. At the corner, his eyes drifted along the market street and his mirth vanished at the sight of Anna disappearing through the gate of the cottage hospital. He had not told her of his own appointment this afternoon, so she might have assumed she could carry out her own expedition without fear of running into him accidentally.
She was going to see the doctor
He felt as though a stone had settled in his stomach.
Dr. Clarkson
The inhabitants of Downton Abbey were a hardy lot. Barring childbirth and epidemics, they rarely had need of a doctor and for this Dr. Clarkson was grateful. But since the night of his indiscretion when he had encountered Barrow in the village street - an incident he could not forget though he barely remembered it - he had hoped to speak with Downton's butler. But no opportunity presented itself.
The impulse to see Barrow was about clearing the air, not explaining away his behaviour. He couldn't even do that to himself. Almost every night he had a shot of whisky after returning alone to his cottage with the single lamp burning in the hall and the supper, laid out by his housekeeper, which he then reheated. But that night he'd had a second whisky, which he did infrequently, though he quite deliberately made it less often than not. And then he'd poured another, and must have had another still to have achieved that degree of insobriety. His brain had fogged after the third but his hangover the next day spoke to the extent of his indulgence.
In that distracted state it had suddenly become imperative that he return to the hospital, convinced that he'd left someone in need. There must be someone in Downton to whose ailments he had not yet fully ministered. Nursing a sore head the next day he knew that this compulsion was only a symptom of his inebriation. But in the moment it had driven him from his home and into the streets, though he could barely stand.
Though Downton village was small and he could, when in his right mind, navigate it blindfolded, he'd gotten lost. And it was in that moment of confusion that Barrow had appeared. The butler's face was vivid in his memory as almost nothing else that night was. And then...his memory went dark. The next morning he could almost have believed it all to have been a bad dream but for the empty whisky bottle and the pounding headache that gripped him. He drank several glasses of water, swallowed some paracetamol, and suffered through the day. It was the price of destructive self-indulgence.
He hadn't seen Barrow since.
On Wednesday afternoon, however, Downton came to him, though not in the form of the butler. It was Mrs. Bates who appeared, looking anxious. She had known a great deal of grief over the last several years but it had seemed that things were finally going well for her and her mercurial husband, who attracted trouble the way a magnet attracted iron. Dr. Clarkson was glad for them.
The prospect of a visit from anyone at the Abbey might have unsettled the doctor. He could not know what use Barrow might have made of the knowledge he now had of the physician's indiscretion. But in the moment, Dr. Clarkson's first concern was always the patient before him. He listened attentively as Mrs. Bates described the symptoms that had prompted her to seek his counsel. Though she hardly noticed it herself, his calm manner had a soothing effect. Her agitated recitation of symptoms slowed in pace, a response to the broad empathy she read in his face. She ceased to wring her hands.
"Only I've never felt like this before," she said fretfully, most alarmed over the bouts of faintness she had been experiencing which, in addition to an unfamiliar lower back pain and a persistent sense of fatigue, had brought her to the doctor. "And I'm afraid that..."
She didn't finish the sentence, only staring at him in an appealing way, her grey-green eyes more eloquent than words in communicating her fear.
He knew what she was afraid of. Every mysterious illness came down to the same thing in the mind of an otherwise habitually patient - cancer. And he understood, too, Mrs. Bates's inclination to apprehension. She was by nature an optimist, but she'd known too much ill fortune in recent years to believe naively that everything always came out right in the end.
It was one of the most gratifying aspects of his work for Clarkson to be able to give relief to those who came to him in need. He was glad that, in this instance, he could immediately allay her worries. He leaned across the desk, his hands folded casually before him, his piercing blue eyes crinkled in a kindly expression, his mouth turned up at the corners in an encouraging smile.
"Mrs. Bates, you're not ill."
John and Anna
He ought to have gone straight back to the Abbey. There was work aplenty there waiting for him. But how could he pretend that he had not seen her? How could he let this charade continue? So instead he sat down on the bench outside the hospital gate and waited. She might be upset to find him there and to have to explain, but if there was something so seriously wrong with her as to bring her to the doctor, then she would be upset in any case.
The wait was excruciating, for though Bates would not have described himself as an imaginative man, he knew too much of the ills of the world to rest easily.
At length Anna appeared. Though he got to his feet slowly, he startled her. For a moment they stood frozen, staring at each other from different planes of shock. And then to his surprise, given the covert nature of her hospital visit, she flung herself at him, wrapping her arms about his neck.
"John!"
She had never called him by his first name in public.
Then he could feel warm tears on his face and all the anger he had felt at her shutting him out vanished. Whatever news it was - and it must be bad - his role now was to comfort and support, not to harbour resentments. He dropped his cane and tightened his arms around her.
But when she pulled away a little, he was startled again, for she was laughing through her tears.
"What is it?" he demanded, bewildered. "What's wrong?"
Anna stared at him through shining eyes, her face radiant, almost too overcome with elation to speak. "There's nothing wrong!" she whispered hoarsely, and then added, "I'm pregnant!" Her own astonishment was still fresh.
He staggered a little and then half-fell onto the bench from which he had just risen.
"John!" She quickly sat beside him, gripping his hand, comforting him.
He fixed his gaze on her and could hardly make out the fine features of her face because of the blur of tears in his own eyes. "I thought you were..." He spoke in a hushed voice.
Anna understood and reached out to stroke his cheek tenderly, soothing him. "Secrets!" she said scornfully, shaking her head in irritation with herself. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and then looked resolutely into his eyes. "I'm sorry, John. I was afraid it was something else and...we've been through so much. I didn't want to burden you..."
"Burden me!"
"I was wrong," she said firmly. "It's a bad habit we've gotten into - no a ... a disease almost – this misguided impulse to protect each other from our innermost concerns." She smiled apologetically. "I realized how wrong it was when Dr. Clarkson told me that it was a baby, not a ...that was troubling me. I knew then that you should have been with me." She traced the line of his jaw where a faint trace of stubble was beginning to surface. "I was going right up to the Abbey to tell you straightaway."
He believed her. The news itself - another child! - overwhelmed him, so much so that he could not yet clearly focus on it. "How did you not know?" he asked, shaken to think that she had been so afraid for her health.
It was a reasonable question. She'd been pregnant a half dozen times before, although she'd only been able to carry a baby to term once before.
"I've been feeling different," she said simply. "And ... I thought the worst because I didn't think I could get pregnant when I was nursing Robbie. But Dr. Clarkson says that's just an old wives' tale."
"But you've been so pale and anxious and tired and..." He'd been watching her with alarm, not least because she had shut him out of her worries.
Her hand tightened over his. "They're common symptoms. Dr. Clarkson says its nothing to worry about."
His apprehensions began to fade. Her own relief, palpable in every relaxed gesture, in the upturn of her lips in the first smile - the first real smile - he had seen there in weeks, calmed him, too. And his mind turned to the revelation at the heart of this upheaval.
"Another child."
No words could do justice to the maelstrom of feelings that swept him up in the reality of that fact. Another child! How could he make clear to Anna how wonderful he thought that news! But then, looking into those magical grey-green eyes that had always discerned his heart so clearly, he knew that words were unnecessary. He leaned toward her and she met him halfway in the sweetest of kisses.
"Another child," he said, grinning this time.
"Yes!" Her excitement perfectly mirrored his.
They sat for a bit, enjoying their news together, their hearts and minds far from Downton.
But that couldn't last for long.
"We'd better get back." Anna made to get up, but John held her fast.
"I want to tell you something," he said earnestly. "Nothing so momentous - well, not for us, at least."
Her wide eyes fixed on him with polite and not a little curious expectation.
He'd been thinking it over intermittently through his lonely vigil at the hospital gate, whenever he could tear his mind from what might be occurring within. "I've not been forthcoming with you of late over my own activities. You see, the Dowager has asked me to do something for her. It is a matter of the utmost discretion. I can't tell you anything about it. The secret is not mine to tell. But I shouldn't have let the fact of my service to her be a secret between us. And for that, I am sorry."
"The note the other morning...?"
"Yes. I had an appointment with her this afternoon. That's why I was in the village."
She readily forgave him. And then they got up to make their way back to the Abbey. They walked slowly, arm in arm, aglow with the exhilaration that the news of that everyday miracle evoked. Every other step they exchanged glances, in affirmation of their shared joy.
Though he hardly dared make the claim, it occurred to John that for them, for the John Bateses of Downton, life appeared finally to be unfolding as it should.
Charlie and Elsie
Elsie supposed it was something she'd better get used to. Indeed, she was surprised it hadn't happened before. On Wednesday night she sat at her own dinner table with her dear husband across from her, as usual, and between them Daniel Ryder. They'd made supper again, the men. Only this time Charlie had invited Mr. Ryder to join them and he had accepted. Naturally they wanted to talk about their work and they made some effort, at least initially, to include her. They took turns telling her and each other their revelations from the papers and books they were reading. From their eager remarks, she could hear the narrative of the late Earl's life coming together and, too, the larger story of how the smaller world of Downton fit into a broader framework. But she gave their words only part of her attention, being more intrigued by the dynamic between them.
They were so comfortable together, Charlie and Daniel Ryder. There they were, chatting easily and with some animation about even the most mundane - to Elsie's way of thinking - details of someone else's life. On occasion they leaned inward and spoke more rapidly, as though they did not want to deprive the other of this or that tidbit of information one second longer than necessary.
Although it was still startling to see her Mr. Carson so unbuttoned with anyone but her - for even with Lady Mary, whom he loved as much as the air he breathed, he had to maintain a certain level of decorum - she had begun to understand what it was about. And she still wasn't sure how she felt about it.
The three of them, sat here together as they were, might have been a family. A stranger passing in the lane who glanced in the window at their cozy candlelit meal might easily have mistaken them for one. They could have had a son like Daniel Ryder, if they'd taken to each other immediately after her arrival at Downton thirty years ago and if they'd moved - been capable of moving - with alacrity. Certainly looking on the two heads of thick black hair, one of them showing grey, and their great dark eyes that so clearly revealed the enthusiasms of the minds within, it was possible to think them related.
Neither she nor Charlie had had the experience of going 'home' on their half days to join their parents in a family meal. She'd not lived near enough to her family and his mother had died when he was a youth and his father not much longer after that. They weren't people to lament what had not been. They were both happy enough to have found each other and gotten on with it, enjoying what they had in the present. But she could see the appeal for Charlie of the company of this vibrant young man and understood the attraction of their working together on a project that interested them both.
Look at them, she told herself. Like father and son.
Did Charlie long for something like this? Was this the reason he had embraced this young man, this stranger, so readily? She sighed quietly. Well, she wouldn't ... couldn't... begrudge him that. Not if it gave him pleasure.
Daniel Ryder, though, was a different story and when her gaze settled on him the sentimentality inspired by her husband evaporated. Why was he here? He was a good-looking, very well educated, middle class young man. What could he possibly want from Charlie? The fact was, she couldn't imagine him wanting anything from Charlie, who must, therefore, be only a means to some other end. But what? She still had no idea. And she wasn't going to find out by remaining a spectator.
"What was it you studied at Cambridge, Mr. Ryder?" She passed up the more intriguing question as to why someone who had been up at Cambridge was in Yorkshire at all.
"History," Charlie said promptly. "I told you that." Then he came over a little abashed for having spoken out of turn. "Beg pardon," he mumbled in Daniel's direction.
The younger man was not at all bothered and gave Charlie a quick smile. "I read history and politics," he told Elsie.
"Classics?" she inquired politely.
"No, modern. Renaissance, industrial revolution, French Revolution..."
"Edmund Burke had a few choice words to say about that," Charlie interposed with a growl.
Elsie started to hum the Marseillaise and Charlie glanced sharply at her. It was an allusion to a confidence he had made to her on their honeymoon and was possibly one that he wished he had not imparted.*
Daniel missed the exchange between them and addressed Charlie's remark. "Mr. Burke supported the Americans wholeheartedly in their revolution, though. People forget that."
Charlie's attention returned to their guest. "Best not go there," he intoned. "I don't think we're in agreement."
"No," Daniel said amiably.
It did not escape Elsie that they had smoothly negotiated a topic that usually stirred Charlie to fevered indignation. There was a tolerance of Mr. Ryder's idiosyncracies that her husband rarely extended. She persisted in her own line of inquiry.
"I thought you were from Oxfordshire."
"I am. Wheatley."
"Then why did you go to Cambridge University?" She thought this suspicious. Why would one travel across four counties to go to college instead of going up the road? Nevertheless she affected an air of bewildered innocence.
"Universities are much like...great houses, Mrs. Carson. Each has its own atmosphere. I preferred the ambience of Cambridge."
How smoothly he said that. Every thought seemed to roll off his tongue with that same imperturbable aplomb. Perhaps he had been asked these questions before.
"But you were only there two years?" It was easier for a woman to feign ignorance. Men accepted it so readily.
Charlie, knowing her as he did, was more perceptive and coughed reprovingly. She ignored him.
"Yes. I did two years there. Then there was the war."
"Ah, yes."
"In which Mr. Ryder served with distinction," Charlie said forcefully, "for four years."
Daniel flashed him a grateful look. "Well, I served. Many others made a greater contribution."
His modesty was appealing. Elsie could see how it charmed Charlie. And it touched her, too, this part of his life. But she could not shake off her wariness. But Charlie intervened then and steered the conversation in a different direction and very soon they were back to Downton.
"Has Mr. Barrow been at Downton long?" Daniel asked.
"Interminably."
Now it was Elsie's turn to give her husband a reproachful look. "He came to us a few years before the war and returned to service in 1919."
"He served, then," Daniel said, clearly interested in Barrow's war record.
"Yes. As a medic in the trenches for two years. Then he was wounded and came back to Downton to work in the cottage hospital here in the village. When Downton became a convalescent hospital, Dr. Clarkson appointed Mr. Barrow - Sergeant Barrow as he was then..."
"Acting sergeant," Charlie corrected her.
"...to run the place on a day-to-day basis." Elsie felt she could be more forthcoming about Mr. Barrow's history. Whatever Mr. Ryder's motives, they could have nothing to do with the butler.
"Where he was a thorn in my side every day," Charlie declared. "And then I failed to get shot of him afterward."
"Oh, now. He's settled down quite a bit. You'll give Mr. Ryder a bad impression of our Mr. Barrow if you talk like that."
But Charlie only grunted. Clearly he was prepared to risk Daniel taking away an ill impression on that subject.
"Not to worry, Mrs. Carson. I've seen quite a bit of Mr. Barrow at the Abbey, mostly at meals, and he seems all right to me."
"Another point on which we'll have to disagree," Charlie grumbled, but with a good-natured smile.
Daniel moved on carefully. "It was once, I think, not the practice of domestic staff to marry. But at Downton this seems not to be the case, with you and the Bateses, and perhaps..." He let his sentence trail off.
He was perceptive, Elsie thought, although, now that she thought of it, living with Mr. Molesley he could hardly help but pick up a few clues.
The possibility of another Downton downstairs wedding slipped by Charlie. "It was a late-run thing with us," he said instead. "The Crawleys have had a more progressive attitude on this subject than most."
Elsie almost choked on her tea. Had her husband just used the word progressive in a positive sense?! She could only shake her head about that fact that he chose not to acknowledge his own legendary resistance to change as something that had obstructed progress in their case.
"And yet Mr. Barrow is alone."
"Mr. Barrow is..." Charlie began.
"A traditionalist," Elsie finished, giving her husband a look. "He's worked hard to get where he is, Mr. Ryder, and he hasn't had time for anything else." There was in this some distance between the truth of the matter and her words. But while Elsie could be forthcoming on Barrow's professional life within the Abbey, she would not expose the complexities of his private world. Then she remembered something else, a fortunate distraction.
"I've been meaning to tell you," she said, addressing her husband. "We've got a new footman at Downton. He came on Monday."
"At last! Why've you been holding back on me?"
Elsie shook her head. "I just forgot." Every time she'd remembered he'd been in the middle of some story about his book or Daniel Ryder.
"Where did Mr. Barrow find him?"
"He came on the recommendation of another butler." She frowned a little, trying to recall. "Somewhere in Northumberland, I think."
Charlie's elation faded before a guarded look. "Strathmere Hall," he said.
"Why, yes! How did you know?" Her husband's extensive knowledge of the staff of northern estates never ceased to amaze her.
"It's not Lewis, is it?"
"Yes. Lewis Stairs." She could tell now that he did not think this good news at all. "Why?"
"Only that Mr. Erskine at Strathmere is his uncle. And he's been trying to unload him for years. Mr. Barrow," he added grimly, "has been played for a fool."
"That's a rotten trick to play on Mr. Barrow," Daniel said indignantly.
"It is," Elsie agreed warmly. "Lewis seemed fine to me. What's wrong with him?"
Charlie's sober look reached her from the length of the table. "Nothing at all," he said emphatically. "He's perfect."
Daniel Ryder made it an early night and Elsie was grateful for it and also that Charlie did not object. He was pleasant enough, Mr. Ryder, but not understanding him made it impossible for Elsie to like him. She didn't mind private people, but the unfathomable ones unsettled her.
"You were hard on him," Charlie remarked as they cleared the table.
"I beg your pardon?"
"On Daniel." He said the name easily.
She noticed that he'd slipped into this casual address, at least in conversation with her, and was no longer correcting himself.
"Asking all those questions. Staring at him."
"Did he notice?"
"I noticed. Why do you dislike him?" Charlie seemed genuinely distressed by this.
"I don't dislike him."
"But you don't like him either."
"I don't know him," Elsie said truthfully. "Weren't you hard on Mr. Barrow?"
He drew himself up, a little affronted. "Since when have you become his champion?"
She sidestepped that question. "You're very indulgent of Mr. Ryder. You didn't snap at him for any of his contrary views."
"Everyone is entitled to his opinion," Charlie said circumspectly.
Elsie stared at him, astonished. "Since when?"
Now he gazed at her, chagrined again. "You make me out to be quite a narrow-minded man, Elsie."
She yielded then to his disgruntlement, reaching out to take his hand and drawing him close to her. "I like you just the way you are," she said, and then kissed him.
"The fact that you like me despite my apparent shortcomings is not much comfort," he murmured against her lips.
"And I thought that's what love was!"
*Author's Note: The story of Charlie Carson and the Marseillaise is something I'm saving for another story...
