A/N: Oh there was so much love for the last chapter, thank you all! I seem to have caught myself promising some story extensions, so, that should be fun! Another visit to Lady Elizabeth and Mrs Burns (also a young Beth and Charlie as they walked, sung and danced the boards). In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this. It's not so very long, but I think it packs a fine punch all the same!
Timeline: This one takes please a little under a year before the Granthams invite Nurse Hughes to share dinner with them and therefore about 5 years before the Nurse Hughes chapter in Five Names.
Five: Nurse Hughes.
"It occurs to me that you could have picked lighter things to gift, Nurse Hughes." She turns around to find him hefting the canvas sack up higher on his shoulder.
"Oh do stop complaining, Mr Carson. Need I remind you again why we're doing this?"
"Of course not. I remember; good will, those less fortunate than ourselves. I understand the principle, it's the practicality of it that's the problem. And I'm not complaining." He adds with a scowl.
She smiles; she has only known him a short while, but already he makes her laugh when little else can these days. She suspects he could do that for a lot of folk, if he'd a mind to. "Look, it's just down here." She pushes open a door, mentally crossing her fingers that it will be the right one {Downton Abbey still trips her up, she is used to the East Greenwich Pleasaunce and the London Hospital, where she knows the wings, the rooms. Here she can step from the makeshift hospital to a Lady's bedroom as quick as opening the wrong door. Mr Carson has been rather a Godsend in helping her around the place, she isn't sure where he finds the time, busy as they all are, but she wants to prove that his directions, his tours have made an impression on her. Unfortunately, it's rarely the kind of impression that helps her navigate around}.
She steps through to the corridor and then through one more door to the ward and she might imagine Mr Carson's sigh of relief at the sight of the modest tree, but she thinks not.
"Thank you, Mr Carson." She whispers as they reach the first bed, hoping not to disturb too many of the patients. "If you'll just pop the sack down there, my nurses and I will sort them out."
He does as asked, although he hesitates a moment, one hand against the mouth of the bag. "If you're sure, I don't mind helping with the tree?" He tips his head to the bare thing, rather forlorn looking without decoration and few branches.
She hides her smile behind Sergeant Price's notes. Looks up to meet the Butler's eye above the clip board. "Thank you, Mr Carson, but I'm sure you have much more to do and I wouldn't like to be responsible for keeping you working late, not on Christmas Eve."
She waits then, wonders if he will take the bait as he has in a few of their conversations most recently, his wit and humour coming forth. "I see, the day makes a difference; tell me, if it were just another day in December would you have any compunction in keeping me from returning to my work?"
His eyes twinkle in the dim light. So often he appears staid and serious when she observes him, around the Crawley family, around the other servants, but this is still a part of him and one she has come to enjoy immensely whenever she can.
"But as you say, Mr Carson. It is after all, Christmas. Allowances must be made that wouldn't otherwise."
She had a friend once, who she teased like this, who was happy to tease her back. {He is gone now, one of the first casualties she read of from her old village.} But that was some time ago, and innocent in a way her heart tells her this might not be if given a chance.
"Nurse Hughes!" She turns to see Nurse Crawley - or Isobel as she has been instructed to call her - helping poor Lieutenant Michaels to sit up as he coughs.
"I'm sorry Mr Carson, but I'm afraid I must get back to my own work."
She rushes past him and for a moment almost believes that she feels his fingers brush her arm. "I'm sure I'll see you soon, Nurse Hughes."
She means to ask him if they might make a formal plan of it - she has no engagements tonight but to be at the Abbey should a patient need her, and from what he has said and she has heard, she gathers he usually spends this evening by himself in his pantry - but Michaels coughs again and she is close enough this time to see the blood that spots the cloth Isobel holds to his mouth and everything but her work slips from her mind for a time.
When she eventually pulls herself away from the patients; Michaels comfortable for now, young Private Beaty once again settled and no longer hallucinating a German guard at the door, Mr Carson is long gone and Christmas Eve is firmly on the way towards the day itself.
She sends Nurse Crawley home, there's no need for them both to be here, not when Lady Sybil can just as soon be woken to help if needed.
Weaving her way amongst the beds, she checks on her charges, adjusts bandages and bed sheets until satisfied that they should all sleep for a few hours at least.
From beneath the small desk that has been placed in the room, she pulls out a modest box of decorations. Things she has collected throughout the years, in wards not quite like this one, but similar all the same.
Taking her chair with her, she stands before the tree and lifts the first decoration out; a wooden reindeer; one antler snapped off, the other a little chewed; given to her by a grateful family on only her second Christmas as a Nurse, chewed by a tiny wee thing a year or so later who wandered into Elsie's ward while she waited for her brother to be born.
She hangs it from a branch she'll see from her desk, reaches into the box for the next ornament; a tiny knitted stocking - from an old lady she used to care for before they lost her to age. She places that a little higher, steps onto the chair to reach one of the branches at the top.
The chair wobbles beneath her and her hand flies out in the vein hope that she might find something to grasp for balance. She finds a hand, large warm fingers that wrap around her own, even as another set curl around her waist. She looks down to Mr Carson, his head raised up to her for a change, his eyebrows climbing high on his forehead.
He opens his mouth and she quickly places a finger of her free hand across his lips.
"If you mean to say 'I told you so', or any variation thereof, I shall take back my gratitude for your timely rescue, Mr Carson."
His mouth remains open, his breath gusting across her fingertip but she can see the humour in his eyes, senses that what he has to say now will not be that.
With narrowed eyes that she hopes convey a warning to him, she pulls her finger away. "I only meant to say that perhaps I could place the decorations on those branches, Nurse Hughes. We can't afford for you to fall, after all. Who would take such good care of the men in your absence?"
He still has her hand in his, his other still about her waist. She wonders if he has forgotten, she certainly hasn't, can hardly focus on much else. She swallows before answering him.
"I'm sure the others would do admirably, Mr Carson. I'm hardly irreplaceable."
"Aren't you?" She doesn't know what to say to that, he seems as surprised as she that that the words were spoken. Thankfully, a particularly loud snore across the ward has Mr Carson step back, release her waist. He doesn't let go of her hand however, until he has helped her step down off of the chair.
From her desk he hands her a cup of still steaming tea, raises his own to her with a hushed 'Merry Christmas'.
She responds in kind, taking a steadying sip of the tea while her heart slows its fluttering in her chest.
"Well then." Mr Carson announces, and had he no cup in his hand, she imagines he might even have clapped with the words. "Hand me the next decoration, Nurse Hughes, we'll soon have this tree ready for the gifts to sit beneath it."
She hides her smile behind her tea cup, busies herself with unwrapping a glass sleigh from crumpled and worn newspaper. He takes it from her carefully, dangles it by its thread from his fingers and watches it as it spins. After a moment he looks back at the tree, his eyes flitting over the two ornaments there, and then back to the box at her feet, before meeting her eyes.
"I sense that each of these has a story, Nurse Hughes."
She nods, "They do, Mr Carson. Each a little Christmas miracle, if you can believe that."
He chuckles even as a single bushy eyebrow rises sceptically. "Perhaps, if you wouldn't mind telling me a few, you might convince me."
He turns to hook the sleigh to a branch and she wonders what would happen if she laid her hand against his broad back, just for a minute.
"I think I can accommodate you, Mr Carson. Just this once. It is-"
"Christmas after all. Yes, you've said. I have to say, I find all this relaxing of your usual practices at this time of year a little worrisome."
"Oh hush, you. Do you want to hear the stories or not?"
"Of course, Nurse Hughes, please accommodate away."
She thinks of the gift she has for him locked away in her rooms in the village, a decoration of his own for the servants' tree he spoke of a few weeks ago; a small silver star.
She is sure now that she will give it to him, after all.
"Well, in spite of your cheek, Mr Carson, I shall tell you anyway. That sleigh there was given to me only last year by a farmer I treated, who had got himself into a fine mess with a rotary blade..."
They talk and laugh quietly throughout the night, and when the last decoration has been hung and the tea long gone, they kneel side-by-side and place the soldiers' gifts beneath the tree. Christmas day begins as he hands her another present and their fingers brush together across the brown paper.
Neither hears the midnight chimes from the clock in the hall, too lost in the magic of the moment and their shared memories of the Capital.
"You've not seen London until you've seen it covered in a fine layer of snow, Mr Carson."
"I'm afraid Nurse Hughes, that you're quite mistaken. Trafalgar Square lit by the summer sun, children paddling about in the fountains, that's the way London should be seen."
The chimes stop, but for quite some time more, their evening does not.
I suspect this, with how Mr Carson puts a stop to their friendship after the Crawley dinner, has just made Nurse Hughes as tragic a little AU as Lady Elizabeth, but of course, this class divide will be much easier for him to cross, especially when it pretty much exists only in his head. There is much hope for them.
Next time we join Mr and Mrs Carson for their first christmas in their cottage, following on from my version of their proposal in Five Names.