isobel is the best. she is simply the best. and if mary can feel it when matthew is wounded, then so can isobel.
XXX
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…
Her son. Her son. Somewhere inside her, an older, less professional woman is tearing at her hair, screaming and wailing like the Trojan women of old. Her son. Her boy. Her Matthew.
She remembers the day his father died. It was a needless loss, one so easily prevented. "You must walk more," she'd insisted. "All that brandy can't be good for you. Go bicycling with Matthew." And her husband had waved her worries aside, grinning the grin that still makes her breath catch when she sees it on her son's face.
"I am the doctor," he'd reply, but his clear blue eyes would twinkle and he would squeeze her hand reassuringly. "You, my dear, are a worrywart."
Matthew had always been an unusually serious boy. But something had been lost, when his father died. Nineteen but exhausted as if he had lived a thousand years, he had grown up overnight. Her little boy, now a man.
She presses a handkerchief to her mouth, staring hard out the window, watching the hills roll and level until the ache retreats to hover, waiting for another moment of weakness. She cannot cry now, for if she starts, she will not stop, and she must be strong for her son. She had been packed before the telegram had even arrived; sometimes, a mother just knows. She had wobbled while walking down the street, and she had known. She was not a wobbler. And her son's face came unbidden into her mind, his father's careless grin shining on his still-boyish face, and she had pressed a hand to her heart.
"Etes-vous bien, madame?" an older man had asked her, gently touching her arm. She had recoiled, staring at him.
"Mon fils," she'd replied shakily, then, in English, "My son." And she had brushed his helpful hand away, stumbling to her little apartment and there she had very mechanically packed everything she would need for her trip to Downton. Then she'd eased herself slowly onto the bed, trunks stacked beside her, and waited until the telegram was delivered.
And now she sits in a train determined to draw out this hateful journey for as long as possible, and all the while her son waits for her, alone and wounded. Impatience makes her sharp; none of the servers offer her tea anymore, and the girl she had snapped at peeks at her from a distance, cowed. She folds the handkerchief and tucks it into her sleeve, just in case. She will apologize to the girl later, when she gets off. Crises do not excuse rude behavior.
At last, steam hisses around the windows as the train pulls into the station, and she stands, willing her knees to hold her upright.
My boy, my boy, keens the woman inside her.
Isobel Crawley raises her chin.
XXX
poem written by rudyard kipling in 1895.