The Acquisition of Memories

by BorneToFlow

Embarking on their honeymoon, Charles and Elsie begin to process the events of their wedding day and those leading up to it. A series of internal reflections; lengthy, fun & sometimes in-depth conversations; &, interspersed with requisite amounts of playful holiday fun & honeymoon adult times. From Ch19 rating is a tasteful but strong M. Some S5/6 JF canon is blissfully ignored.

3. Chapter 3- Hands

The Acquisition of Memories. Chapter 3- Hands

Author Notes:

*I have conveniently forgotten the Becky/Elsie/pauper background for this story.

*I will now try to keep each chapters memory reflections to the POV of either Charles or Elsie. I am not adept enough at flicking between the two in one chapter, as my hero Virginia Woolf did. Besides which, I think her choppy-changey- without- warning POV style is an acquired taste and may not scan well for some readers. Taking this chapter-per-person approach will mean that it may be a while before I get back to my plot points about the new and improved honeymoon tour- Sorry- memories and reflections first!

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Sitting, as always, to the right hand of Charles, Elsie continues to stroke his hand as the Yorkshire landscape slides by her window, at once rugged and neatly tamed. Verdant farmland rolls by in sections, stopped by the hard labour of assembled stone walls, fencing in the lambs, providing a livelihood to people she cannot know. It is good land, with a wildness still peaking through, reminding her of Scotland. Elsie has always felt the landscape sustains her. She needs all that Downton and Yorkshire is. Although, she is sure that Charles doubts her connection to this land, that he feels she is somehow still detached from it, outside of it, not as connected to it as he is as a native Yorkshireman. But she feels it. It runs deep.

She loves to see the dark, craggy rocks and the moors as they rise and cut through the pastures with water and bracken and stones too large and tough and ancient to be moved by human hands. It speaks to her of the folly of trying to keep all of nature at bay behind manicured politeness. She needs its wildness in a way that Charles seems to shun. Charles's greatest comfort is from the order of the Abbey, the fenced fields, not from that wildness that resolutely breaks through and will not be tamed. And yet, Elsie sees all of Yorkshire within her man, even those aspects he would deny, carefully hidden beneath his finery and fences hewn from fastidious traditions. Elsie sees the craggy aspects of Charles and loves them all too. They sustain her and speak of secret places, places unexplored by others, places that are now revealing themselves to her alone. Something steady and strong and passionate that is immovable, yet somehow always free.

She moves her hand on top of his and traces her fingertips, feather soft, over the relief of veins that rise in ragged lines across the back of it. She presses down on the bumps and watches them spring back up, supple yet permanent, and she realises that, with age, these veins have become more prominent, on both their hands. Their lifeblood. The true nature of both of them was always going to break through it seemed. No amount of focused husbandry, nor carefully spliced social masks or corseted livery could cover this land within them.

His tough and steady hands have known a lifetime of hard labour, from stable boy to boot blacker and hall boy through to the highest, most distinguished position in service in the county. And despite his immaculately trimmed and scrubbed nails, Elsie sees the black stained ink on the tips of the fingers of his writing hand. She knows that the harsh scent of silver polish cannot be fully erased. The roughness of a life of lonely toil sits in the fibres of his skin and scars the landscape of his inner life.

She turns his hand over and lightly traces the jagged silver white line on the large flexor muscle below his thumb. She remembers how he got it, remembers how she removed the angry glass slivers and dressed the steadily bleeding wound. She remembers that she had caused it. She had made his wildness snap through because she had irked him all that time ago- when she thought that she was sick but would not tell him. She had made him fret and rage at her obfuscations, and his unbridled fear and passion for her (for she now knows that is what it was) had risen up. Even though his great rugged paws had expertly polished stemware with controlled delicacy for decades, she had caused him to demand more of the crystal than it could withstand. She was the cause. She had made this mark on him because she had made something undisciplined in him finally break through his carefully cultivated veneer.

Elsie remembers the night he proposed to her. The night he stunned her to her core. The night when she squeezed his arm in solidarity once more, just as she had when Lady Sybil died, but oh- so differently this time- once more with hot tears rising unbidden in his kind dark eyes, heart full to bursting, only, this time, not for their shared grief. This time, it was for the grafting together of something new- for the hope and promise of them.

She remembers how they had briefly sipped at their punch but then soon needed more of each other. Something quiet and sacred and shared, before they returned to the great hall and the more vocal celebrations of life and togetherness at Christmas. As they heard Lady Mary's pretty strains of Silent Night drifting down to their locked and hidden place below the Abbey, they had clasped their hands together. His, huge and steady and gentle, enveloping her fine-boned and strong ones in smooth warmth, holding them with such tenderness to his chest. That silent night she had seen the silvery ruggedness of the moors shining on him- shining in him. She had seen it rise up on his skin as she turned his palm towards her, slowly, and as she ran a slender cool fingertip along the line of the deep gouge she had rent upon him all that time ago. He seemed to speak somewhat unconsciously to her then. Low. Something about having read somewhere that that part of the hand was called the Mount of Venus in Palmistry and how he could not fathom what Venus really had to do with hands anyway. Nonsense words. But she stilled him, made him tumble out his next words- "Well it is all a load of silly old bunkum, really..."-and she made him catch his breath in that silent moment. And she had murmured low to him, as if in prayer. Slowly, raising his palm towards her face, she breathed a benediction over his heart- that he had laid out so nervously before her, breathed a blessing over the hand he had so willingly and assuredly offered her, breathed out- finally- that she had never had a chance to kiss it all better. She had heard him draw a shuddering breath as she dipped her head and gently brushed her warm lips against the mark of his pain and she knew then that they would always stitch up and heal their wounds together from that day.

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Thank you again for the reviews so far. They have been very encouraging. :)