DOWNTON ABBEY 1926
Episode 7. Chapter 2
Friday September 24, 1926
Daisy and Mrs. Patmore
The fire dominated conversation at the Abbey all day and everyone came to it from their own perspective. And as the day unfolded a more complete picture of the events of the previous night fell into place upstairs and down, though the perplexing question as to where responsibility for the fire lay remained one that no one could answer.
"It's unfair!" Daisy pronounced vehemently to a somewhat bleary-eyed Mrs. Patmore as they prepared breakfast for a reduced staff. "Mr. Branson is a good man. He treats the farmers fairly and he's never put on airs with us since he moved upstairs. There's some who would deserve this, but not him!"
Everyone downstairs cherished the sleeping hours which employment in service cut to the bone. And though Mrs. Patmore had not been up all night as the men had, she was still feeling the ill effects of an interrupted and abbreviated rest. This made her more impatient than ever with Daisy's thinly disguised critique of the family. But she was deterred from a rebuke on these grounds by an even more fundamental point. "Daisy, no one deserves to have their house burned down over their heads."
Mrs. Patmore and Mrs. Carson
The cook had recovered somewhat from her own sleep deficit by mid-morning, enough at least to relate a coherent if patchy narrative of the night's events to Mrs. Carson over a quick cup of tea. With Mrs. Hutton as her primary source, Mrs. Patmore's account was thin on facts and laden with second-hand emotional overtones.
"How is the poor woman?" Mrs. Carson asked solicitously.
"Shaken up. As anyone would be. Have you ever been caught in a fire?" Mrs. Patmore had been counting her blessings on this score.
"Only the one we had here, when Lady Edith set fire to her room," Mrs. Carson replied, and then shook her head. It was a rare occasion indeed when she was at one with Lady Mary, but the housekeeper had not been impressed with Lady Edith's carelessness. No one could afford to be absent-minded when it came to safety with fire.
"Mrs. Hutton is worried she dropped a hot coal or didn't close the damper properly," Mrs. Patmore went on.
"Is anyone blaming her?"
"I don't think they know nought yet," Mrs. Patmore said vaguely. "I told her she wouldn't have done. Did you and Mr. Carson go to it?"
"No," was the reply. "Of course we heard the bells and Mr. Carson wanted to get up. But we knew it wasn't the Abbey from the direction of the glow in the sky. And we'd only have been in the way of those trying to put it out and I don't hold with gawking at other people's misfortunes."
"Of course not," Mrs. Patmore said agreeably, although she did not believe that there was anything wrong with natural curiosity. Hers had been thwarted the night before by her position in the household which demanded that she wait patiently behind the scenes and prepare for the return of the tired and hungry. She was diligent in the performance of her duties, but she did wish that she could have a front-row seat to events just once.
"I am very sorry for Mr. Branson," Mrs. Carson said sympathetically. "And the poor child. But at least they had someplace to go. And they'll not be down long."
"And what about Mrs. Hutton? She'll have lost her place with this."
"Not if I know Mr. Branson," Mrs. Carson said firmly.
Robert, Tom and Henry
Breakfast was later than usual upstairs and there only the men were present. Cora and Mary had both the leisure to lie down for a few hours and the inclination to do so. However strained the men were by their sleepless night, they chose to push through it. None of them noticed let alone remarked on the fact that a maid set out the meal and stood by ready to pour their coffee.
"Sergeant Willis had little more to offer than the police in York," Tom remarked. He said this for Robert's benefit, aware of the still smouldering embers of resentment that Tom's reticence had stirred. From Tom's perspective it was unrealistic to expect very much of the sergeant in such a case and in a way that was no reflection on the particular man. But he wanted Robert to realize that there had been no appropriate way to combat this menace.
"I've put in a call to Scotland Yard," Robert said abruptly. "They're sending an expert to examine the fire for possible clues. Sergeant Willis will rope off the site and keep the curious away, but we'll have our answers one way or another."
This presumptuous move on Robert's part, so in keeping with his lord-of-the-manor nature, rankled with Tom though he bit his tongue and settled for a quick glance at Henry to convey his irritation. If Robert was incensed by behaviour in Tom that he considered reckless, Tom could be equally irritated that his father-in-law did not recognize that it was precisely this kind of oversight that had encouraged Tom to remove himself just a little from the Abbey.
"And Willis can get a start on interviewing everyone in the neighbourhood," Robert went on, oblivious to the effect of his words. "Someone must have seen something."
"Ought I to cancel my trip to Berlin?" Henry asked. "I could easily reschedule."
"Of course not," Tom said quickly, pre-empting a response from Robert. "There's nothing you can do here. Go to Berlin next Friday." But he gave Henry a half-smile of thanks for the offer.
"How is Sybbie this morning?" Robert asked.
"She's holding up well." Tom had gone up to the nursery after the constable had left and sat with his daughter until she stirred. "I thought it best she stay home from school today."
For a moment it looked as though Robert might say something about that but seemed to think the better of it. He turned in another direction. "Has anything come to you about the voice you heard? Can you think of any identifying elements? Was it at all familiar?"
The sergeant had asked similar questions, but Robert seemed to find it hard to believe that the only clue they had so far gave them nothing.
Tom shook his head. "I didn't recognize it," he said firmly.
Robert made a disgruntled sound. "Then we must wait for the police to find something."
Downstairs Lunch
By the time the staff sat down for lunch, the men had returned and a fuller picture began to emerge.
Andy proved that he could tell a story well and Barrow and Lewis let him do so. He told about the wild run down to the cottage in the dark, about how Mr. Talbot organized the bucket brigade while the fire fighters wielded their hose, about the fire that seemed to burn forever.
"It was hot!" he said emphatically, wiping his brow as though the sweat was still pouring off him. "But I was glad I'd put my clothes on properly before I left the Abbey. We never stopped."
"It's aggravating," Bates said in a quiet aside to his wife, "never to be able to help in such a crisis."
Like the Carsons, the Bateses had heard the fire bells and made the decision to stay out of the way, but it was frustrating for Bates to come up against the limitations of his body when, in his mind, he was still a man of action.
Anna knew there was nothing she could say to ease his discontent. She sought a distraction instead, addressing the man who sat across the table from her. "It was rather a shocking welcome to Downton for you, Lewis. It was good of you to help last night."
Anyone who knew Anna would have realized that she was trying to include Lewis, to draw him into the relatively congenial circle that existed downstairs at Downton. The footman was the first 'new blood' at the Abbey in some time. The rest of the staff were either long-term employees or locals who had some passing acquaintance with the others before entering service. They had all tried to engage him in some way, but Lewis seemed determined to remain aloof even when in their midst as at the table. Only Anna persisted.
"He's shy," was the explanation Anna had suggested to John when they'd discussed Lewis at home.
"He's a snob," John had replied.
Now Lewis met Anna's friendly remark with a dispassionate countenance. "I am in service at Downton Abbey," he said without inflection. "It was my duty to act."
"And I suppose if you weren't working here, you wouldn't have lifted a finger?" Andy said, with a disparaging look at his colleague.
Lewis ignored him.
Bates gave Anna an I told you so look.
"Well, it wasn't your duty," Barrow said, addressing Daniel Ryder. "But you certainly played your part." They had worked side by side on the bucket brigade.
"That was good of you," Mrs. Carson said amiably, casting an approving glance at the man beside her.
"All hands in a crisis," Ryder responded modestly. "Fortunately Mr. Molesley knew the way. I'd have been lost in the trees otherwise."
"Mr. Molesley was there!" Miss Baxter looked up alertly at this news.
"And carried buckets with the best of them," Barrow told her expansively.
"He was there to the last dying ember," Ryder added. "And went off to school this morning with the scent of smoke about him and quite exhausted."
A brilliant smile lit Miss Baxter's face at these words, but she asked for no further details, only quietly treasuring this information.
"I thought Mrs. Hutton would be with us," Mrs. Carson said. There was an empty place beside Miss Baxter, as though the housekeeper's presence had been expected.
"She's not feeling well," Miss Baxter said absently.
"She's enjoying her misfortune," Mrs. Patmore corrected her, coming in from the kitchen. "It was a fire, she survived, and no one's blaming her for it. Any more. Yet she can't seem to get out of bed." The cook had been sympathetic enough in the middle of the night, but her patience had begun to run thin when Daisy had to take tea up to the woman in mid-morning.
"Do they know what caused it then?" Mrs. Carson asked, looking around the table.
"It's too early to say, but it started at the front of the house, well away from the kitchen," Barrow said. "Well. Andy, Lewis, we have work to make up." As he spoke, the butler got to his feet and everyone else did so as well.
"They know a little more than that," Bates murmured to Anna, as they moved together toward the door. "His Lordship told me this morning that they suspect foul play. There's to be a special investigator from London." He spoke quietly, intending this information for her ears only, though the alarmed look on her face might have betrayed the seriousness of his communication to anyone who saw it.
Barrow, who was making annotations in the day book a few feet away, did not see Anna's face but his hearing was acute from long cultivated practice and he got the gist of what Bates had said. Foul play. Well, that presented a puzzlement. Barrow was not an admirer of Mr. Branson, resenting him for his breaching of the barrier between upstairs and down. Even more irritating was that the former chauffeur had done this by marrying Lady Sybil. Until Master George had come into his life, Barrow had felt an emotional affinity for only one member of the Crawley family and that had been Lady Sybil, one of the few people he had ever met who had shown him a measure of human kindness. She had been too good for Tom Branson. Though he had no great regard for the man, still Barrow could not imagine anyone hating him, hating him enough to burn down.
And then Barrow remembered something. Mr. Branson knew. Had he not come into the butler's pantry several weeks earlier with that odd query about strangers at Downton? He knew there was someone after him. Well, it would be interesting to see how that played out.
The Family and the Constable
Sergeant Willis returned to Downton Abbey shortly after lunch. He looked harried and as though he had not eaten yet that day. Criminal activity within his jurisdiction was fairly low key and almost never a matter for His Lordship's direct involvement. The constable had hardly sat down since he'd been roused from his bed at dawn. For all his exertions, however, he had little of import to convey.
"There was petrol liberally splashed about," he said, checking his notebook.
Robert, Cora, Mary, Henry, and Tom were all present for this report. They received him in the library.
"We knew that," Henry murmured impatiently. His usually imperturbable manner had all but disappeared with the conflagration at the cottage.
"I found a few empty petrol cans on the other side of the garage and took them in for finger-printing. He didn't make any effort to hide them, whoever it is."
"And who is it?" Mary demanded impatiently.
The sergeant shrugged. "I don't know, my lady. But it wasn't some lad down in the village. Any mother's son who came home smelling of petrol - and he would have to have done - would have been found out by now. There's more to this than a simple prank gone bad. It's going to take some investigating to unravel."
"I've made arrangements for a forensics specialist to come up from London," Robert informed him. "We ought to get some explicit answers about the nature of the crime, at least. And maybe that will lead us somewhere."
Some men might have felt slighted at this appeal to expertise. But Sergeant Willis came over relieved. He felt comfortable policing local shenanigans and petty crime. But arson was a little beyond his professional competence, if not technically outside his jurisdiction.
"In the meantime, Mr. Branson, if you could make up a list of anyone with whom you've had words in the past four months, anyone who might have felt hard done by by you, even if there was no grounds to feel so. Or if you can think of any other circumstance that might have prompted someone to lash out at you like this." The sergeant sounded slightly apologetic, both for imposing on Tom at such a moment and in even suggesting, however obliquely, that there might have been a reason behind this attack.
"Of course," Tom said immediately, though as he had done much the same thing for weeks he did not see much promise for success in it.
"Oh. There was one other thing." Sergeant Willis rummaged in the satchel he had with him. "This. I found it down the road a bit."
He held out a battered metal plate. Tom took it from him almost gently.
"What is it?" Robert asked, unsettled by the look of devastation on Tom's face.
"The name plate for our home. Shamrock Cottage," Tom said hollowly. "They made it at the blacksmith's shop. I'd only just put it up."
Mary and Henry
"How are the children?" Henry had begun the elaborate process of undressing Mary. It was a ritual that almost always cultivated desire, but Henry had found that taking proper care with Mary's jewellery and handling the fussy little buttons carefully could thwart it as well. He was having the devil of a time with the clasp of her necklace.
"They are all well," Mary said, holding perfectly still to help him. "George has been excited all day. He was a bit cross at having slept through the fire. Now he wants to be a fireman when he grows up. Somehow being the Earl of Grantham pales in comparison."
Henry got the necklace off at last and nodded with satisfaction. "I noticed that this afternoon. I think helping to fight the fire is the first time I've done something that rivaled Barrow's achievements in his eyes." He said this lightly. He was not jealous of George's affection for Barrow, though he did not understand it.
"Not so," Mary assured him, with a sympathetic look.
"You know it is," Henry said more warmly. "Fathers have it hard trying to compete with the butlers in this family."
Mary gave him a genuine smile at this. Henry seemed bemused bytimes by her relationship with Carson, but he was wise enough not to challenge it and she appreciated that about him. "George took a distressing interest in the gory details of the fire," she said, drawing back to the subject. "I told him to stop as dwelling on it might upset Sybbie."
"Did it?"
"Not that I noticed. Sybbie has Sybil's courage. And Tom's. But two fires in such a short life! And the cottage was her home. I would be devastated if Downton Abbey burned to the ground."
"It won't," Henry said calmly and gave her a one-armed hug.
"You don't know that," she said soberly. "Edith almost brought it down all on her own."
"You're exaggerating," Henry said with a laugh, letting her go again. He hadn't been at Downton at the time, but he'd heard the story.
"Only slightly. And that was an accident. Now we have to worry about someone doing it on purpose."
"No one would do that."
"Well, I would have thought no one would set Shamrock Cottage on fire either. Henry." Her demeanor became more serious. "Why didn't you say anything about what was happening with Tom?" It was the question that had been festering in her mind all day.
"Tom asked me not to," he said promptly. "And ... there was nothing to tell. They were such petty incidents. We thought it must be one of the local lads having a laugh.'
"But things happened in York, too."
"I didn't know about the jacket. And after the grit in the gasline I persuaded Tom to go to the police. I'm not trying to malign Tom. We just couldn't - neither of us - imagine that pranks would lead to danger."
"But ... he really has no idea?" This seemed almost impossible to Mary. "If it were me, I'd have a list of suspects as long as my arm."
Tom
"Goodnight, Daddy."
Tom held his daughter close for a long moment, kissed her, and then tucked her in. "Goodnight, darling," he said.
From the doorway of the nursery, he looked back and saw her waiting for this and smiling at him. This had become their routine at Shamrock Cottage. He smiled back.
His mood was heavier on entering his own room at the other end of the gallery. Here he was, back at Downton Abbey, and not at all happy about it. He had so much on his mind.
Sybbie was doing well. She'd been terrified last night at the fire, naturally. And she'd been anxious that morning, too. But once she'd seen him and Mrs. Hutton, too - the housekeeper descending to the nursery for a brief visit - then Sybbie became more herself again. She bore bravely the news that their house had been destroyed and with it all of her things. It was a painful thing for Tom to see his dear child materially reduced to just the clothes on her back.
Now, wait a minute. He'd given himself a good shake at that thought. Sybbie had lost all her things to be sure, and some of them were dear to her, but she had hardly been cast out in the streets. Even before the fire had peaked, she was comfortably ensconced in her old bed in the familiar surroundings of Downton's nursery.
"I've been living here too long," Tom murmured, unbuttoning his shirt. The family's perspective on things had seeped into his being. And that was no small thing.
He was grateful, very grateful to his parents-in-law for the shelter of Downton Abbey. He had fled to this sanctuary once before, when he had left Ireland for the last time only steps ahead of the authorities. They hadn't been quite so welcoming then, Robert and Cora, but they'd taken him in. He had not been proud of himself in that moment, though he'd talked it through with Sybil beforehand. It was different this time. Cora and Robert had drawn them in with open arms, the relief in their faces when they had met at the fire a palpable manifestation of the love they extended to Tom and Sybbie both.
Coexistent with this love and concern there was, however, a slight undercurrent of resentment from Robert. It encompassed a bewilderment about what he thought Tom's misplaced discretion, but it was grounded in Robert's ongoing conviction that Tom should never have left the Abbey in the first place.
Well, Tom wasn't going to second-guess himself on that. Nor would he surrender the autonomy he had regained in moving to the cottage. Their stay here would be only temporary and he would resist what impositions he could. Tomorrow he would spend the day with his daughter. Though Nanny had dug out some of Sybbie's old clothes, she needed to be wholly re-fitted and Tom was determined that he, not Cora or Mary or Nanny, would see to this. And on Monday she would return to the village school, no matter what the Earl of Grantham thought of that. Tom would take her there himself.
He had to.
For alongside the sorrow he felt for their losses and the discouragement at having to return to Downton Abbey, there was as well a powerful current of guilt. He had, however inadvertently, let a risk to himself, Sybbie, and Mrs. Hutton grow unhindered. He had not done all he could to protect his family. And that they had escaped unscathed in the moment of danger was not his doing but that of the perpetrator who had chosen this time not to kill one or all of them. They would not venture forth to live on their own again until this situation was resolved, and not because Robert said so, but because Tom, now awakened to the hazard, would not make that mistake again.
The guilt he felt for his decisions in this matter was great but not all-consuming, for there was another layer to it that he was only yet discerning. Before he had married Sybil and come to understand her family as individuals who were, at a fundamental level, not very different from himself, he had held them in contempt as part of a class he did not recognize as legitimate. He no longer thought that way, was that man no longer, and was glad of it, for his own sake as much as anyone else's. He had been blind, in a way.
Standing in the cold and darkness the night before, watching the cottage burn, he had been drawn back dramatically to Ireland and his last political act there. Those places are different for me, he had told the Granthams in explanation for his involvement. But the crumbling timbers of his own home ablaze had opened to him a fresh perspective on this, too. Surely a home with a family beneath its roof was a home like any other.
