Chapter Twenty Two
Vanished Splendour
A pair of sparkling blue eyes gazed down into dark brown.
Although she had not especially contrived it so, a final tiresome adjustment to her tiara meant that Sybil arrived somewhat later than she had intended for the splendid reception her parents had given to mark both her eighteenth birthday and her entrance into society.
Her cheeks faintly flushed with excitement, with her flawless ivory skin, the long tresses of her dark hair put up for the first time in public, adorned with the smaller of the two Grantham tiaras so graciously leant to her for the occasion by her grandmother the Dowager Countess, her slender figure set off by a stunning sapphire blue gown, Sybil looked a vision of loveliness.
To the dying echo of a waltz that floated faintly up to her ears from the magnificent ballroom below, Sybil stepped out onto the landing above the entrance hall, turned, and came to an abrupt stop at the head of the main staircase of the town house belonging to her aunt, the companionable, fashionable, and gregarious Lady Rosamund Painswick.
From her unrivalled vantage point, Sybil gazed down on the splendid scene in the main hall below. Candlelight and firelight flashed and sparkled reflected in the crystal of the cut glass chandeliers and in the polished facets of the superb jewellery adorning the gowns of many of the women in attendance. As it was, Sybil managed to profit from her late appearance and turned it most adroitly to her advantage, for it meant that those present - her parents, her grandmother, her two sisters, other relatives, and numerous friends - were all there when, quite unobtrusively, and entirely unannounced, she appeared at the head of the grand staircase.
Down below her in the ornate marble entrance hall, Sybil suddenly caught sight of a handsome young officer resplendent in the full dress uniform of a lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment. From where she was now standing, Sybil could see that he was doing his very utmost to try and engage her sister Mary in polite conversation. A thankless task, thought Sybil, if the petulant expression on her eldest sister's face was anything to go by. It was perfectly obvious to Sybil, if not to the young officer, that for once not being the centre of everyone's attention, Mary was utterly bored by the whole of the evening's proceedings.
Sybil followed Mary's distracted gaze, and seeing where it had come to rest, she smiled broadly.
If, apart from herself, Mary could be said to be remotely interested in anyone present at tonight's gathering then it was in the man who had just arrived; the dark haired Greek naval attaché who had been a recent house guest of their parents at Downton Abbey. It was odd, thought Sybil, but Mary seemed to have a positive penchant for members of foreign legations. Why, only last summer, at the Henley Regatta, Mary had been entranced by the attentions paid her by the Italian military attaché; this autumn it had been the Serbian chargé d'affaires, and now it was the handsome naval attaché from Athens. In her continuing quest for amorous diplomatic conquests, Mary appeared to be moving steadily south eastwards across the continent of Europe.
Recalling what she could of her geography, learned in the school room at Downton under the watchful eye of Mademoiselle Bourges, Sybil idly wondered whether she should contact the Turkish embassy and warn them in advance that her sister Mary's next port of call might well be a diplomat from Constantinople .
Finally, realising he was achieving precisely nothing by his well-mannered overtures to Lady Mary, the young officer politely took his leave of her, nodding curtly to Sybil's elder sister Edith standing close by, and who seemed utterly crestfallen at his sudden departure.
It was as he turned that his arm was accidentally jostled by another male guest. Had this minor contretemps not occurred when it did, the young officer would not then have looked up at the very same moment that the youngest daughter of the earl and countess of Grantham, chose to appear at the head of the main staircase. And so it was that out of all of them present there that evening, the one who saw Sybil first was young Miles Stathum.
And a pair of dark brown eyes gazed up into sparkling blue.
Later, of course, the young officer was to attribute his sudden surge of emotion, at least in part, to both the airlessness of the room caused by the press of so many people being present at the same time in the entrance hall, and because he had somewhat over indulged himself by partaking rather too liberally of the excellent champagne then being served.
However, to the impressionable lieutenant but recently returned from the rigours of the South African War, it seemed that the young woman who came seemingly from nowhere to stand at the head of the staircase was a veritable goddess made flesh; Aphrodite, sprung from the summit of Mount Olympus.
The individual reactions of those members of Sybil's immediate family waiting for her at the foot of the main staircase to welcome her downstairs were predictable enough.
For once, indeed perhaps for the very first time in Mary's pampered, privileged life, even she was momentarily lost for words at the sight of her youngest sister now transformed from a girl whom Mary still patronisingly considered to be but a sweet child, if somewhat gauche and something of a tomboy, into a ravishingly beautiful young woman.
Mary's eyes narrowed.
She did not like to be upstaged and would, she reflected, have to keep a watchful eye on Sybil in the future. After all, it would be utterly mortifying to be beaten to the altar by her youngest sister. As for poor, plain Edith, well there was no chance of that. Edith, thought Mary cattily, would be lucky to find anyone interested in her who was both under sixty and yet still possessed of all their faculties.
As for Edith, she registered no emotion whatsoever on her younger sister's appearance and was in fact so tongue-tied and self-effacing as to render herself virtually invisible; while the Dowager Countess of Grantham permitted herself the merest nod of her head and the briefest of smiles to her youngest grand-daughter to indicate her tacit approval.
For her part, Sybil's mother Cora, the present Countess of Grantham, shed a few silent tears of happiness following her youngest daughter's appearance, but then of course, as her mother-in-law the Dowager Countess quietly observed later to a confidante, "Americans are always so self-indulgent"; adding that she was supremely thankful to which ever deity it was which had contrived a trans-Atlantic storm of such apocalyptic proportions that it delayed the sailing of the Cunard liner RMS Mauretania from New York to Liverpool thus making it impossible for Sybil's maternal grandmother the brash, vulgar Martha Levinson to attend the lavish party held in her youngest grand-daughter's honour.
For his part, whatever his innermost feelings, Lord Grantham never permitted himself to display his private emotions in a public arena. He had no intention whatsoever of breaking the cultivated habit of a lifetime and even if he had felt inclined to do so, it would not have been before the sea of spectators now gathered in the marble entrance hall of his sister's town house to witness him escort Sybil downstairs to meet her guests and then to partner her on to the floor of the ballroom. Thus it was that throughout the evening's entire proceedings his face wore its customary mask of aristocratic inscrutability.
Whether a relative or a friend, not of course that the individual designations were mutually exclusive, each and every one of those guests attending Sybil's eighteenth birthday celebrations, naturally extended to her the customary felicitations and good wishes for her future.
However, none of the guests present there that evening were as smitten by Sybil's unheralded appearance at the head of the staircase as was Miles Stathum. It was a memory which he would carry with him and which he cherished for the rest of his life. While military postings overseas to Egypt, then east of Suez to India, and thereafter the outbreak of the Great War, meant that following that single glimpse of Sybil he did not see her again, the young lieutenant was never to forget the beautiful dark haired girl who had so stolen his heart.
What became of her, he was never to know until chance, or was it fate, brought them both together again, and in the unlikeliest of circumstances, on a quiet country lane northeast of Dublin, on a June evening in the summer of 1919.