I LOVED HER FIRST

Chapter 3 The Heart Stirs Again

He was sitting in the butler's pantry, in the butler's chair, and feeling like an interloper.

It's been three months! Seven, really, if he was counting the period before Mr. Finch's death when he'd served in his place as a stop-gap measure. They'd known - Charles, Lord Grantham, and Mr. Finch himself - they'd all known that the butler was not long for this world. Dr. Clarkson, the man given responsibility for the newly-established Cottage Hospital in Downton village, was clear on that. Mr. Finch had an inoperable and aggressive brain tumour, which accounted for his sudden, severe headaches and the sometimes radical shifts in temperament he had begun to display. But despite Mr. Finch's protestations, His Lordship had rejected the idea of a formal retirement and replacement. Mr. Finch was his man, he insisted almost every time he made his way up to the room in the attics where the butler lay, which was at least every other day, and would die as the butler of Downton Abbey, if only in name. It was a small favour on His Lordship's part and one that meant a great deal to Mr. Finch, even as he resisted it, and not something every employer would have offered.

Carson - as acting butler he had gained the recognition accorded in being addressed by his surname - had welcomed His Lordship's discretion in this matter. He knew by then, had known for a while, that His Lordship and Mr. Finch intended him for the position of butler one day, but this was too soon. He had expected to be first footman, or perhaps underbutler, for some years yet. Mr. Finch was only sixty-seven years old and a very fit man. But then the headaches had begun.

Even with the extensive training he had received and the expectation of assuming one day the post of butler of Downton Abbey, Carson would have understood if His Lordship had sought another man, an older and more experienced man, to succeed Mr. Finch. Charles Carson was only thirty-one years old and such an appointment was premature by almost all standards. But Lord Grantham never entertained an alternative. He waited until after Mr. Finch's funeral to make his decision explicit. Immediately after the funeral. They had only just turned from the grave and Carson, steeped in his own grief for the man who had played so substantial a role in shaping his career, had almost missed His Lordship's discreet signal. They walked together, away from the Dowager and Her Ladyship, both of whom had come to pay their respects, and from the staff, the entire complement of downstairs having been in attendance as well.

His Lordship was never one to dissemble. "You are the butler of Downton Abbey now, Carson. It's come upon us sooner than either of us expected. But there it is. I will make a formal announcement of it to the staff tonight." He waited only for Carson's inadequate acknowledgment in the form of a slightly stunned, "Yes, my lord," and then moved off to join his wife and mother.

Carson had frozen on the spot for a long moment, juggling his still-raw grief with the immediate and immense responsibility that had just been conveyed to him. And then, instinctively, he reached out to that source of support on which he had relied all his life - his parents. They were not far away. He had only to navigate his way around a number of tombstones to find them, his mother peacefully laid to rest fourteen years earlier, the still rough surface of his father's grave evidence of a more recent interment. It had been a bad year.

The Carsons were known for their longevity. Carson's grandparents, on his father's side, were in their mid-eighties when they passed. Family lore supported the assertion that this was not an anomaly. But Frank Carson was just sixty, the victim first of a cruel prank of nature and then a workplace accident, avoidable but for the demands of pride. It made his even-tempered son angry even now to think of it. The senior Carson's almost bottomless reservoir of patience, never so much in display as among his beloved horses, had dissipated rapidly with the advent of the palsy that had come on him almost fifteen years earlier than it had struck his own father. Forced to relinquish formal responsibility for the stables, he had maintained a presence there that had benefited neither himself nor his successor, an able enough man but one whose stodgy ways aggravated the displaced senior groom. Pus in the foot was a straightforward malady, a bit tricky to excavate, but not life-threatening to the animal. Sears would have found the problem eventually, but Frank Carson seized the hoof knife from him and went at the horn of the hoof with a vengeance. And then the knife slipped in the unsteady hand and the blade slid into his thigh and nicked the femoral artery. The new groomsman had panicked, there was a delay in sending for the doctor, and the wound was so awkwardly placed so as to impede the effective application of pressure. Frank Carson had quickly bled out. His son, urgently summoned from the house, had arrived in time to see him breathe his last, but just.*

He stood staring down at their graves for a long time, long after the other mourners had left the church yard. They couldn't help him now, his parents. They'd already done all they could for him. He could only apply the lessons they had imparted. He came to them out of habit, comforted more by the thought of them than anything else. The fact was, this was something he had to face alone.

The butler's job was a lonely one. Mr. Finch had told him this on more than one occasion, seeking neither pity, nor as a deterrent. He was just stating a fact. "You're not upstairs or downstairs," he'd said emphatically. "You cannot be friends with people you must direct and discipline. It compromises your judgment. And don't look upstairs either. The relationship between His Lordship and his butler is unique, and can and does involve a close association. In the best of circumstances, it is a relationship of deep-seated trust. But you will not be friends."

It was precisely what Carson had sought. He wanted no emotional attachments. There would be his father, as long as he had him - which was not long, as it turned out - but he'd had his fill of friendship and romance in his sojourn on the halls, when he'd invested deeply in them and been betrayed by both. When he returned to Downton, he had not deliberately rejected the camaraderie of the other footmen as he had proceeded through the ranks, but he hadn't gotten particularly close to any of them either, becoming warier still as he discerned the path laid out for him by His Lordship and Mr. Finch. One of the greatest attractions of service was, for him, the discouragement of associations with female staff members. Such entanglements usually led to complications downstairs and inconveniences upstairs and so were severely frowned upon.

His appointment as butler of Downton Abbey had shown him, in short order, how true Mr. Finch's assessment was.

There were senior staff members - His Lordship's valet Mr. Bevin, the housekeeper Mrs. Dakin, and the cook Mrs. Yardley - with whom he might have established some kind of social relationship, but circumstances impeded this. They were all older than him by a quarter of a century and not inclined to warm relations with young footmen. And then he had leaped from the junior position of first footman over their heads to the most senior post in service, and if he was not exactly in direct authority over Mrs. Yardley and Mrs. Dakin, it was still a little awkward. Of the three of them, Mrs. Yardley was the most congenial.

He was most comfortable in the functional aspects of the butler's duties - overseeing the family's meals, taking care of the wine, managing the house books, maintaining the most valuable pieces of silver and crystal. Relations with His Lordship were good and the man was patient, but it was as Mr. Finch had said. They could not be friends. And there was more to it still. Carson knew it was no reflection on him personally, but it was clear that His Lordship missed Mr. Finch. They had worked together for a quarter of a century and operated in an unspoken tandem. Carson could do everything that Mr. Finch had done. It was only that he was not Mr. Finch.

He was least comfortable in his most familiar milieu, with the footmen, and he didn't quite know why. Had he not served among them and at every level so that he might understand and appreciate their work? Was this experience not intended to smooth, rather than obstruct, his direction of them from the position of butler? But, no. Frictions existed. It was as though the years he had spent in apprenticing for this position had never happened.

Only this morning he had lost his patience with Jonathan, the most junior of the footmen, recently hired to bring the number back to six. It wasn't a difficult job, Carson told himself. Polishing silver. There were, admittedly, some tricky pieces, but this was a fundamental component of the footman's work. He'd torn a strip off the fellow and told him to shape up, that there were plenty of other young men about who would be glad of an opportunity to work at Downton Abbey.

The young man was hardly out the door before he felt a wave of remorse and then heard Mr. Finch's voice, almost as if the man were leaning over his shoulder and speaking in his ear. Teach, don't terrorize. Instruct, don't insult. Not for the first time since his appointment did he realize that knowing something intellectually, as he knew every element of a butler's work, did not necessarily lead to action in accordance with that knowledge. And so he sat in the butler's chair in the lull of early afternoon feeling like a fraud.

"Mr. Carson?"

He looked up.

It was Jonathan again. There was a note of trepidation in the young man's voice and Carson bridled at it, more out of guilt than any justifiable cause.

"Well? What is it?" He didn't have all day to be playing guessing games.

"I don't know what to do, Mr. Carson," Jonathan said, still hovering just outside the door as if he dared not risk life or limb by venturing inside. When the butler raised an eyebrow at him in an expression of exasperation, he hastily added, "I think you'd better come."

Carson sighed. He might be young, this Jonathan from the village, but he was a man. He'd made a fair impression at the interview, but if he was going to fall apart at the first reprimand, then he would be doomed to remain on the lowest rung of the ladder, or drop off altogether. But they wouldn't resolve that question today. In the meantime, all he could do was follow where the fellow led.

And that was to the servants' stairway, leading upward to the family floors and to the servants' quarter above. Here another sight aggravated the butler. A gaggle of servants stood at the bottom of the stairs. They were all junior sorts, other footmen and a few maids. He wondered irritably where they had found the time for any diversion and made a mental note to tell Mrs. Dakin to control her maids. He would deal with the footmen himself. In the moment, however, his attention remained on Jonathan who stopped as he reached the group and pointed.

Carson's gaze followed the trajectory of this gesture and his irritation dissolved as surprise took over. There, halfway up the flight of stairs, sat a little dark-haired, dark-eyed girl. Her eyes were round with curiosity and she returned with interest the looks of the several adults standing there gawking at her. She had an alertness about her. Despite the novelty of her circumstances, she was not afraid, not cowed, only a little excited, perhaps, at her adventure.

When his eyes fell on her, Carson's heart gave a convulsive tug. "Miss Mary," he said, and the people before him parted that he might approach the child.

Her gaze shifted to him and she smiled. Here, at last, was a familiar face.

"I'll see to her, Mr. Carson."

Mrs. Dakin had been drawn by the agitation in the passageway and now stood at his side. She was a capable woman. She'd been employed as housekeeper Downton for a little longer than Carson's tenure as a footman and she ran a tight ship. If she was not especially warm, the young butler had never had cause to complain about her either. She did her job very well and that was all anyone could ask of her.

"No." He spoke more sharply than he had intended and she glanced at him with a questioning look in her eye. He cleared his throat, made a deliberate effort to relax his stern bearing, and then turned toward the maids and footmen who still congregated nearby. "Thank you, everyone," he said calmly. They began to disperse. He focused next on the housekeeper. "Thank you, Mrs Dakin. I'll manage this."

She stared at him for a moment, her expression giving away nothing of her thoughts about this, and then she silently retreated to her sitting room.

And then he returned his attention to the child. She had not moved from her perch on the stair. But when their eyes met again, she smiled at him, and he smiled back.

"Miss Mary," he said again.

She shifted a bit, rising a little that she might look beyond him. "Is this where you live, Mr. Carson?"

She didn't know them all downstairs. Indeed, she saw little of any of them. A scullery maid made up the fire in the nursery, but that was done while she slept. Occasionally a housemaid came to clean the room before nanny had her small charges - for Miss Mary had a sister, Miss Edith, who was little more than a year younger - packed off for their daily walk on the grounds of the estate. But she knew him. They'd had a few adventures together, although she would not have remembered those few - to his mind very special - occasions when she was just a babe and he had walked her colic away. But she'd tripped by him often enough in the Great Hall on her way in and out with the nanny or, more rarely, her parents and nanny, he holding the door for them all. He always smiled at her. Indeed, he was one of the few adults who did smile at her, her grandparents coming over rather stern from a small child's perspective. She remembered his smile.

"No, I do not," he said, answering her question. He rested a foot on the first step and leaned down a little, that he might present a less formidable bearing. "I live at the top of the house," he went on, lowering his voice as if confiding in her. "In the attics. But I work down here. Would you like to see where?"

She nodded eagerly, her eyes shining brightly, and she got to her feet. He held out a hand to her and she immediately took it, skipping down the few steps and then jumping from the second last to the floor beside him. Immediately she looked up to see his reaction. His expression registered an astonishment at her achievement that would have been more appropriate to an Olympic feat. This delighted her.

Miss Mary Crawley was tall for her three years, but he was of such a great height that he had to bend a little to keep her hand in his.

"It's a regular beehive of activity down here," he said, leading her down the passage and speaking with an animation more reminiscent of his time on the halls than any voice he had used in his career at Downton. The effect was to transform the drab grey corridors and the several functional rooms off of them into mysterious venues. "In here," he said, pushing wide the door to the boot room, where the two most junior footmen were hard at work, "Terrence and Jonathan are cleaning all the boots and shoes of the mud from yesterday's rain. There are His Lordship's riding boots." He pointed and she stared with fascination.

"Over here, is Mrs. Dakin's sitting room." He nudged the door open just a little as he said this and Mrs. Dakin, who had returned to her desk after his rebuff, turned a little in her chair on hearing his voice at her door. She was always polite to him in a formal sort of way, an acknowledgment of his rank, but without warmth. He had discreetly avoided drawing the superiority of his position with regard to her to anyone's attention.

"Erm...Mrs. Dakin is quite a busy woman," he told the child. "Best we leave her to get on with her work." And he ushered her on.

Next he guided her across the passage and through the door to his own office. "This is where I work!" he declared, with a dignified air that would not have been out of place announcing guests to dinner at Buckingham Palace. "It is the butler's pantry."

Miss Mary did not fail to be impressed. Her eyes wide with excitement, she stared about the room. "You have two doors!" she cried.

"I do."

"And two chairs!" Uninhibited, she let go of his hand and ran to the desk, climbing into his chair. She had to kneel in it in order to see over the desk. He quickly moved to her side and pushed the chair in that she might reach the items before her. She had to stand up to do so and he held the chair steady. She examined each object in turn. "What's this?" she asked.

"A fountain pen."

"What's this?" she said, reaching for the letter opener.

He swiftly swept it up before her small hand could close on it. "A letter opener," he said. "And it's very sharp. You must never touch it."

For a moment she looked as though she might challenge this, her lower lip jutting out. But when he smiled at her, she smiled again and rturned her attention to the desk once more. "What's this?" she demanded as, behind her, he put the letter opener onto a high shelf.

"The wine ledger," he replied. He drew it a little toward them - she could not budge the great heavy book - and opened it to a blank page, at the same time offering her the fountain pen. She eagerly scribbled across the page, cooing with delight. Then she put down the pen and turned the pages back.

"What's this?" she said again, and this time pointed to a long list of wines and their accompanying columns of year, when received, cost, numbers ordered and received.

"In the wine ledger," he said, pointing to a line of script, "I keep track of all the bottles of wine in His Lordship's wine cellar."

"What's that?" she asked, frowning at the unfamiliar words.

"It's a cool, dark room below this floor -," he pointed downwards, "...where we keep all the wines in long racks, to make sure they stay fresh, or to store them until they're ready to drink."

She was less interested in what was in the cellar than the cellar itself. Staring up at him with an appealing expression, she said, "Can I go there?"

He was delighted with her inquisitiveness. "Another day, perhaps." Immediately her tiny brow furrowed in disappointment at his first denial of her wishes. "I promise," he said solemnly, meeting her fierce little gaze directly.

She seemed, he thought - or hoped - almost as entranced by his eyes as he was by hers. He smiled again and once more she favoured him with a radiant look of her own.

"Right now, though," he went on, "we might get a biscuit in the kitchen and then go find nanny. I think she might be looking for you. What do you say?"

Whatever she might have thought of seeking out nanny, she was certainly enthusiastic about the more enthralling words of 'biscuit' and 'kitchen.' His invitation prompted her to scramble down from the chair, without his assistance, although once on the ground again she reached out to take his hand before he'd even extended it to her. "What's the kitchen?" she asked.

"This way," he said, adopting his magical voice again. "I'll show you."

The kitchen was a world apart. Everywhere there were kitchen maids in a frenzy of activity - peeling and chopping vegetables for dinner, scouring pans, punching dough - and amidst it all Mrs. Yardley in full voice as she ordered them all about. To the uninitiated, it might have looked like chaos, but there was a complex if subtle organization to it all that owed everything to the able commander.

Mrs. Yardley was immediately aware of the intruders, her sensitivity to changes in the atmosphere of her kitchen being highly developed. Her eyes met the butler's, dropped down to take in his charge, and then came up to his again. Like the housekeeper, she was older than him by more than two decades and had observed his progress from the bottom of the table where he had sat as a junior footman to the head of the table as butler. She was more warmly disposed toward him, having known his parents well and having always found him to be the least boisterous of the young men about the servants' hall.

"How now, Mr. Carson? Have you got us a new girl to do the washing up?"

He gave her an appreciative smile as she crossed the kitchen toward them, wiping her hands on her apron as she did so.

"We're taking the tour," he told her, "and I think Miss Mary is in need of a fortifying snack before I take her back upstairs to nanny."

Mrs. Yardley rolled her eyes as though she disagreed with him, but put her hands on the biscuit tin in short order. She might have set eyes on the child only once or twice before. A cook rarely set foot out of the kitchen, except to retire to her room in the attics at night, and saw little to nothing of the family except for Her Ladyship when they consulted on the menus. Unless the children of the house came to her, they were great unknowns. But children did find their way downstairs sometimes and Mrs. Yardley had been at Downton long enough to remember a tousle-headed boy with bright eyes and a very cheerful disposition who had enjoyed a biscuit or two, and other delicacies, too, in his time, and who sometimes sought refuge below stairs when things upstairs became too trying for him. She saw in the little face upturned toward her now some shades of that sweet lad. "Here you are, then," she said crisply but not unkindly, extending the tin to the child.

Miss Mary made a careful choice and then looked up into the cook's indulgent countenance. "Thank you very much," she said.

"Mrs. Yardley," Carson supplied.

The little girl's eyes twinkled at him and then she turned to the cook once more. "Thank you very much, Mrs. Yardley."**

Mrs. Yardley was pleased with the child's manners, but much more amused by the butler's reaction. He stood there beaming at the little girl as though her performance reflected directly upon him. The cook wondered at the ease with which the child had so completely captivated this always polite but often distant young man. She'd not seen this side of him before.

"You'd best get her back where she came from, Mr. Carson. Nanny will be out of her mind with worry."

The cook's words startled him from his reverie. He came over a little resigned. Yes, she was right, of course. A child of three ought not to have slipped nanny's care to begin with. No doubt the woman was frantic if, in fact, he thought just a little unkindly, she had even noticed she was gone at all.

"Indeed."

So he took Miss Mary's free hand and led her down the corridor once more.

"Is it a good biscuit?" he asked, watching her nibble on it in a more refined manner than the hallboys went about their dinners.

She rolled her eyes and patted her tummy. "It is delicious, Mr. Carson!"

He was entranced.

"What's this?" she asked, pausing on their route to point to a bucket hanging from a hook on the wall.

"It's a bucket of sand," he said promptly, and when she craned her neck in a futile effort to see for herself, he stooped and picked her up that she might get a clear view.

"What's it for?" she demanded, turning in his arms to look into his eyes.

He had held her before and looked into her eyes, but that was almost three years ago when she was an infant a few months old. How much more alert, and how even much more mesmerizing she was! He set her back on her feet before he responded.

"It's in case of a fire," he explained. "Throwing sand on a fire smothers the flames and so puts them out." She nodded in satisfaction and he turned to lead her back to the stairs only to find Mrs. Dakin impeding his path.

"That's hardly the thing to be telling a child, Mr. Carson," she said, with a frown on her face and a tone of disapproval in her voice. "She'll be having nightmares."

He glanced swiftly at the child, but she had finished her biscuit and was now rubbing her hands, trying to get rid of the sticky residue of her treat. Instinctively he pulled the crisp handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her. His attention returned to the housekeeper.

"Miss Mary asked me a question, Mrs. Dakin. I was only answering it." He could not quell entirely a note of defensiveness in his own voice.

"You don't need to explain as fully to a child as you would to an adult," she responded sharply.

"I believe in the truth," he said carefully.

"She won't understand."

He thought for a moment. "She will eventually. If you will excuse us." He reached for the child's shoulder, intending to re-direct her toward the stairs. Instead, he found her warm hand slipping into his again. "Let's go upstairs, shall we?" he said, catching her eye. She nodded obligingly.

When he returned from delivering Miss Mary to the nursery, where he persuaded a somewhat distraught nanny that the child had been under appropriate supervision, if not her own, and assured her that no harm had been done, he found his mood considerably brighter than it had been all day. Striding by the boot room he saw the two young footmen still hard at work and he came up abruptly and looked in on them.

"Jonathan, a moment, please."

He stepped into his pantry and waited for the young man to join him. Jonathan moved into the room with caution, his attitude understandable given that this was the third direct interaction he had had with the butler in the space of only a few hours, and that the previous two had been unsatisfactory. He clearly anticipated a further rebuke.

Carson chose to address the lad from a standing position, rather than taking the butler's chair, which would have given him a relational advantage. The dynamic was important.

"Jonathan, I apologize for the curt manner of my reprimand this morning," he said, speaking formally but quietly. "You made a mistake. You must take care not to repeat it again. But I should have made arrangements to show you the proper way to do your work, rather than calling you out for it so harshly. Come back here when you've done with the boots and bring some of the pieces and your cleaning materials with you and I will show you how to manage it."

The look on the young man's face shot from alarm to relief to gratitude. "Thank you, Mr. Carson! I will get it right, I promise. It'll never happen again."

Carson waved off the fellow's effusiveness. "That's it then," he said, turning away. Behind him Jonathan bolted.

As he took his chair, Carson reflected on the fact that Mr. Finch might not have approved of that. Mr. Finch's world had been one of strict hierarchy wherein an acknowledgment of error might be construed as an admission of weakness. But individuals other than Mr. Finch had exercised a formative influence on his thoughts and behaviour, and in this instance he believed advice his mother had given him to have more relevance. You should always apologize when you're in the wrong, she had said, and no other consideration ought to come into it. He had been in the wrong in the way he had dealt with the footman and that was that. If his acknowledgment of this error was interpreted as a weakness in the servants' hall, then he would address that problem when it emerged. In the meantime, it made him feel better to have righted relations with his subordinate.

It did not occur to him as he turned his attention to the wine ledger, smiling in passing at the childish scrawls that now defaced a few of its pages, that he had taken an inaugural step in forging his own approach to the butler's governorship of affairs below stairs. He had admired the austere manners of his predecessor and saw much in Mr. Finch's method that he might emulate. But he would chart his own path. Nor did it occur to him that the tender touch of a child might have helped free him to do so.

*A/N1. I am neither a veterinarian nor any sort of practitioner with responsibility for human health. The veterinary details I have drawn from James Herriot, the famous Yorkshire veterinarian-turned author renowned for All Creatures Great and Small. In the matter of Frank Carson's injury, I consulted an R.N., Google having failed me. I'm hoping the details are both specific enough in what is said to be convincing and vague enough to get away with it if they aren't.

**A/N2. I am well acquainted with a two and a half year old girl, not my own, who is at least this articulate, so I hope my characterization of Mary here will strike most as realistic.