A/N: Sorry, this "final chapter" got a bit long so I decided it would be the penultimate and I'll write one more chapter to complete the story. Anyway, it's neater to finish on an even number! :D

***Chapter 41***

Featheringham, Dobbs and Woodruff offered their sincere condolences for his loss and regretted they should need to contact him again in this, the saddest of circumstances. It had, however, come to light that an additional item, pertaining to the estate of the late William Nathaniel Barrow, had been overlooked. They apologised profusely for this unfortunate error and wished to remedy this oversight as soon as possible and pass said item on to his next of kin, Mr Thomas Barrow. They therefore respectfully asked that he call into their offices at his earliest convenience to collect his rightful property and thanked him in anticipation.

Thomas frowned. Normally, he opened his own mail in his butler's office before distributing the staff's, but Aiden had sneaked a very touching love note into his uniform and he had been too busy smiling as he read it over and over, which had made him uncharacteristically late.

"Is everything okay, Mr Barrow?"

"Everything is perfectly okay, Mr Bates." It irked him when Bates used expressions more suited to an American. He wasn't sure why. He still read and enjoyed American magazines. He even had a regular subscription for one journal. And he used Americanisms himself sometimes. With the onset of motion pictures, many younger people did, and as he had a few years to go yet before he hit 40 Thomas still considered himself a young man.

Although it had been a little disconcerting when Master George excitedly asked him did he fight in the Boer War as well as the Great War then because "...there were pictures of soldiers in George's book and Papa said they were soldiers in the Boer War and George thought they might be Mr Barrow's friends, were they, Mr Barrow? And he liked the pictures of the horses best, did Mr Barrow ride a horse in the Boer War?" he continued in his usual way of non-stop chatter whenever they met and irrespective of whether Thomas was on duty.

But while it was fine for Thomas himself to use informal speech, it didn't sound right coming from Bates. Bates was a damn sight too old and too – well, staid - for it. He smiled tolerantly. At least, as tolerantly as he could summon up in the circumstances. They were friends now. Sometimes. Sort of. They bonded over little Johnny Bates and Anna Bates, but he would never lose his annoyance when John Bates slipped into his kindly father persona and John Bates was never going to lose his kindly father persona. Checkmate. Stalemate. Caring mate. A bit too bloody caring at times, though.

"Just a small matter of business I need to attend to." Thomas placed the solicitors' correspondence in his inside pocket, next to Aiden's love note and the photograph of himself and Kate, wishing, not for the first time, that he had a picture of Ben too. But no photos of his younger brother existed. No more money was spent on photography studios or days out or treats after Mam died in childbirth. After Mam died was when everything changed. When Dad drank heavily and became The Monster who beat him for being who he was.

The bastard was dead now. He could hardly say he had regrets, but nor could he say he danced on his grave either. Truth was, the news of his demise left him indifferent.

The solicitors had finally managed to trace him some time after William Nathaniel Barrow's death, and it gave him a small sense of satisfaction to realise he had triumphed over The Monster at last. His father had forgotten to update his will. Dated from when Ben was a baby, when nobody knew then, not even five-year-old Thomas, that he was homosexual, the will left everything to be shared among his three children. Though over the years that everything had dwindled into almost nothing. The London venture turned out to be an abject failure and cash flowed out of the clockmakers shop fast than water. The valuable ancient clocks were long gone to pay off debts. The rented premises closed down. What little money there was left was mostly drunk away. Thomas's "fortune", as the solitary surviving heir, consisted of a couple of bags of clothes, a few pieces of furniture, some worthless ornaments - and the princely sum of 10 pounds, two shillings and sixpence. His wage as butler at Downton Abbey being sixty pounds per annum, the latter was a welcome enough legacy.

But the revenge he'd dreamt of when a boy didn't happen and somehow it didn't matter that it didn't happen. When last he and his father spoke, after Kate's death from diphtheria, they spoke as strangers might in passing: the sky looked set to whip up the devil of a thunderstorm; the old wall clock in the basement was losing several minutes; they needed some new mouse-traps, the spring was gone in two. At least, his father spoke. In conciliatory tones, keen to appease his now much taller and much stronger son, anxious not to incur his wrath ever since the night he fought back. Thomas barely registered his presence. His anger with and hatred of William Barrow had not abated, and he would gladly have beaten him as furiously as he had beaten a younger and weaker Thomas so many times before. Yet he couldn't help but see his late younger brother's features in him, and though he know it was illogical, he felt he would be attacking Ben's memory.

It was an odd week, that week following Kate's funeral. A season all of its own, trying to recapture what could never be recaptured. The clockmakers shop echoed, as it had always echoed, with its steady tick-tocking, and Thomas still wound every clock when he rose each morning, and William Barrow once more sat at his work-bench repairing time-pieces large and small. Everything was as it had always been before Death knocked and demanded entrance. But Time had turned itself inside out and hung suspended somewhere between Earth and Sky.

Maggie Sedgewick, the elderly widow William Barrow had hired to keep house since Kate's death, arrived by early morning to cook, clean and mend and left by late evening for her own home in a cellar she shared with two other families in an overcrowded house nearby. If she thought father and son's relationship exceptionally strained, age had given her the wisdom to keep her counsel and she made no comment. For William and Thomas Barrow led separate lives. His father never offered to teach him the trade as he'd been teaching Ben and Thomas neither asked nor wished to learn it.

Breakfast and dinner were the only times they spent together. And, after a while, Barrow senior would give up his vague attempts at conversation and turn the pages of his morning or evening newspaper, and Thomas would bolt down his food to aimlessly roam the familiar Manchester streets or simply stand by the graves of the three people he had loved most. It never occurred to him then to wonder where his father found the money to hire Maggie Sedgewick or pay for lavish funerals for both his brother and sister. Not until long afterwards. After he left his old life behind, walking out on an impulse as the cuckoo clock chimed the hour and the rain wildly lashed the pavements, to carve out for himself a successful career in service, he didn't think about his father for years. Not until Featheringham, Dobbs and Woodruff.

"Anything I can do to help?" Curse him, Bates had obviously not missed his perplexed expression when he'd slit open the envelope with the sword-shaped letter opener, its handle studded with toy fake diamonds that sparkled in the sunlight, a gift from Aiden in a jokey reference to The Rainbow Nursery.

"No. Thank you." He rose from his seat at head of the table and his staff immediately followed suit. "I will be away until this evening. Mr Bates will deal with any queries in my absence."

It was the first Mr Bates had heard of it, but he hid his surprise as the servants politely chorused "Yes, Mr Barrow", some sneaking curious glances at the promoted second in command, obviously hoping he would drop some hints at to what was going on.

Well, perhaps Thomas would enlighten him before he departed! Because no doubt His Lordship would agree to the sudden request. Being so good with the Downton children seemed to give him special dispensation to do whatever he wanted, and so he did, as he told his wife later. Anna had been busy with Johnny and was keen to catch up on the servants' morning gossip. Because, unsurprisingly, Thomas was given permission, despite the fact it meant calling in Mr Carson at short notice, reorganising the servants' rosters and changing previously planned arrangements for almost everyone.

"But he did very, very kindly decide to tell me where he was going before left," John chuckled. Thomas's arrogance was often a source of amusement to both. It only added to their fondness for the contrary man, for Mr and Mrs Bates and their young son were well aware, even though he rarely showed it, their affection for Thomas was heartily reciprocated.

XXXXX

Curiosity, and not any vague hope that the "overlooked item" would be of high value, had been the driving force behind Thomas's decision to visit the solicitors on the same day he received the letter. It was fortunate his expectations were low. The pocket watch, engraved with the name Nathaniel Thomas Barrow, the grandfather he never knew, while it would have fetched a fair price at any pawnbrokers, wasn't a King's ransom either. Of far more interest was the small portrait concealed inside.

The picture, cut somewhat clumsily from a larger photograph to ensure it fitted inside the back of the watch, showed a middle-aged woman, with light-coloured hair piled up in a bun, with light-coloured eyes and arched eyebrows, with a quiet smile that couldn't hide the sadness in her eyes. His paternal grandmother. Mam, who unlike Dad sometimes reminisced, had told Kate she met Eliza Barrow a handful of times before she passed away, and that she was a small, thin lady who had given birth to fourteen babies in twenty years of marriage, only three of whom, one son and two daughters, survived into adulthood. This was all he knew.

But now, sitting in the railway station, surrounded by clouds of white steam from the thundering trains, only half aware of the hubbub of fellow travellers and the piercing shrieks of the porters' whistles, he studied the old photograph, and knew so very much more.

That she was pretty, that her light-coloured eyes told the story of eleven babies lost, that her lips would have curved into a wider smile had her life not been so hard, that her light-coloured hair refused to stay neatly piled in a bun and strands worked themselves loose, that his grandfather must have loved her deeply, for pencilled in small, unsteady, emotional letters that ran off the back of the picture were the words "My darling Eliza" and had loved her so well that he carried her picture with him until he, too, shuffled off this mortal coil.

He'd often seen his own father checking the time on that pocket watch on his waistcoat, but it surprised him to think he'd been sentimental enough to keep the picture inside. Perhaps he just couldn't be bothered to remove it or perhaps, b*****d Bill Barrow actually had feelings enough to miss his mother, and so left it where it was when the watch was passed down from Nathaniel Thomas Barrow to his only son. And there were no photos of Mam to replace it anyroad; Thomas couldn't recollect there ever being any, although he remembered well the day Mam took him and Kate, dressed in all their finery, to the photography studio, and Kate silenced him with a look.

Squinting at the small portrait now, wondering what she was thinking when the camera flashed, why that particular day had been chosen for a photograph, recalling that Ben, too, had a birthmark on his forehead like his grandmother (or was it a birthmark at all? Or simply a mark on the old photo?), he was suddenly overcome with nostalgia for the past.

The Downton children loved to hear stories about Mr Barrow's childhood. And so he told them of the morning Dad accidentally locked himself out of the clockmakers and Thomas had to climb in through the window and got stuck, of when Kate was so busy talking that she put sugar instead of salt into the pan of soup she was stirring, of the time he and Ben were playing in the market and Ben knocked over a barrel of apples so the stallholder chased them until he tripped over a pile of second-hand clothes, then the old woman selling the second-clothes chased him; of the winter the water pipes froze and he and Kate broke slabs of ice and carried bucket-loads upstairs to melt before the fire; of how they would ripen green tomatoes on the windowsills on hot days; of Jackson's grocers and ancient Miss Fox scowling at everyone from her bath-chair, of the day the milkman's horse bolted, and of the men who would play pitch and toss for hours, unless a policeman came along and "then they scarpered"; of the stray dog that limped on his right leg to gain sympathy and food except sometimes he forgot and limped on his left leg; of the hustle and bustle of the High Street shops; of how funny Mrs Latham, Paul's widowed mother, could be over the smallest problem, if she lost a hat pin, perhaps, or didn't have an umbrella and it started to rain.

Of course, he told them about "his best mate Paul", of how they would read comics or collect tadpoles in jam-jars from the pond or walk down by the canal together. Though he never told them Paul was his very first sweetheart when they were just thirteen.

The children listened in wide-eyed fascination and begged for more. It was another world they stepped inside, cosseted as they were in Downton Abbey, and he was glad for them it was. He would never burden them or any child with his own demons, and so he never told them of the beatings and hunger, of the misery and sadness of his childhood. But the anger and the bitterness, they lingered yet, hidden in a heart calmed now by the love and belonging Downton Abbey had given him, but there still, ghosts never laid to rest.

His business at the solicitors had been concluded more quickly than he expected and he was not due back at Downton Abbey until much later. And a mere six miles separated the old clockmakers shop from where Featheringham, Dobbs and Woodruff sat at their sloping desks in their imposing Stockport offices, importantly dipping pens in inkwells and answering the shrilly ringing telephone with an air of undisputed authority - although the hole in the elbow of Mr Woodruff's suit, and Mr Dobbs being observed, when he thought no one was watching, to be carefully counting out the four pennies, one threepenny bit and one farthing he'd found in his pocket, suggested the legal practitioners were not doing quite as well as they wished their clientele to believe.

And he was only six miles away from his past. Six miles away from his childhood. He would take a tram to Manchester and finally lay those ghosts to rest.…

*Boer War (1899-1902) Thomas would have still been a young child.

**Pitch and Toss: an illegal gambling game, which involved throwing pennies and placing bets on how far/where they would land, how many landed heads or tails etc

A/N: Coins described are in UK old money (sterling). Britain moved to decimalisation in 1971.