DISCLAIMER: I don't own Downton Abbey and I make no money from this work.
"Am I supposed to feel this frightful after champagne?" Edith was lying in bed and Dorothy was sat cross-legged in pink silk pyjamas on the chaise-lounge. She had crept into her bedroom with a cup of tea just as Edith had decided that she must be dying.
"Bearing in mind we each drank a bottle of it, I think we've got off lightly." Dorothy looked like a little girl in the morning. Her hair was plaited down her back and her face was pale. Edith realised she must have been wearing make-up last night because her eyes looked smaller too.
"I can't remember getting home." Edith mumbled, covering her eyes with her hand. She had a blistering headache and even the thought of daylight hurt.
"I think Duncan called us a taxi. I'm not sure. Billings was waiting up for us." Dorothy sipped her tea. "Wasn't it the most splendid evening though?"
Edith thought about the dress and the dinner and the smoky jazz club and nodded. "I'm not sure when I last had that much fun." It had been an experience in itself not to have anyone to answer to, or tut in disapproval when she laughed too loudly or did something 'middle class'.
"What did you think of David?"
"I liked him. He was very easy to get along with." Edith meant it, he had been lovely to be with all night and incredibly generous. Actually, she was beginning to wonder if that was a good thing.
"He is such a sweetheart."
"How do you know him?"
Dorothy was quiet for a moment. "I met him before the war. I had a friend who introduced us."
"Oh, do I know them?" Edith asked.
"No. You don't. And he's dead now so it doesn't matter anyway." For a moment Dorothy looked deeply sad, and Edith almost thought she saw anger on her pretty, angular face. "But that is a story for another time!" The seriousness was gone, and Dorothy clearly didn't want to be questioned further. "Shall I get Matilda to bring our breakfasts up here so we can eat them together?"
Breakfast turned out to be a poached egg with thick, white toast and a bowl of fresh fruit. Once Edith started eating she discovered she was starving, and finished it off in a manner that was most unladylike.
"You're lucky we were on champagne. If we'd been drinking whisky you would have had your head in the toilet this morning. Whisky will make you sick as a dog." Dorothy told her, waving a rice of toast in the air as she spoke. "What did you think of Duncan and Vanessa?"
"I thought Duncan was very quiet. I kept feeling like he was watching what I was doing so he could write it all down afterwards." Edith said. "Vanessa was quite wonderful, though. She was terribly glamorous."
"I must take up cigarette smoking." Dorothy agreed. "She made it look so beautiful."
"I did like them, but they scared me a bit." Edith admitted. "I'm not sure I've met anyone like them before."
"I know what you mean. They scare me a bit too. It's because they're bohemians, and our sort of people have never really mixed with bohemians. The romantics were bohemians and they weren't even allowed in the National Gallery by our lot. I have to make a real effort not to be intimidated."
Edith felt a lot better after Dorothy had said this. It was comforting to know that she wasn't quite as daring and at ease with those sort of people as she appeared. They sat in silence for a while, pouring more tea and feeling comfortable and full. "What did you come here for, Dorothy" She asked eventually, breaking the peace. In all of her chatter and excitement, Dorothy had never really explained why she wanted to move to London in the first place.
"I expect I came here for the same thing you did: a bit of fun. I spent the whole war down in Dorset, bored out of mind and sick with worry. You're lucky not to have brothers – you cannot imagine what it was like to have two of them fighting. By the end of it my Mother and I had nearly driven each other mad and my nerves were in pieces.
"Your brothers came through all right, though?"
"They were about the only ones who did." Dorothy said. "Almost all of the men we came out with were killed or injured, weren't they? All of my friends, everyone who I had ever sat next to at a ball or shared a taxi with… Everyone lost someone." She sighed. "I was talking to Isobel Lavery last week – Bobby's sister – and she was saying that Bobby has been having a terrible time of it. He was at Ypres, you see. Apparently he screams all night long and sometimes he even… soils himself."
"Which is better – living a haunted half-life or lying dead in some field? Some of the men at Downton made me wonder. They looked like they wished they'd been left in France." Edith said.
"Michael is fine," Dorothy was speaking about her brothers now. "Or, he acts fine. He's thrown himself back into running the estate as if he never left. I'm not sure if it's just an act, though. One day I'm certain he'll turn around and discover that the horrors are still behind him."
"You can't run from your own shadow." Edith murmured.
"Michael thinks he can. Maybe Tommy should be trying a bit harder, though. I know he's not as bad as many, but he was there at the Somme and he saw things that he can't leave behind. He talks a lot about pacifism now, which upsets Father no end, and he's setting great store by this League of Nations idea." Dorothy ran a hand down her plait and began to unravel it. "He was such a brave little boy when he left – and clever, he was going to go to Oxford - but now he seems very old and sad. I don't think 22 year olds should hate people as much as he does."
"We were so lucky." Edith said, feeling incredibly guilty for not having suffered more. "Luckier than we had a right to be."
"Oh, so were we. We got our boys back. Father still has his heir and his spare, which is more than a lot of families have. I suppose we shouldn't grumble." Dorothy moved and sat on the edge of Edith's bed. She was more serious and reflective than Edith had ever known her, and she felt privileged to have been allowed to see past the frippery of the surface. "I came to London because I didn't want to think about the war anymore. I had four years of being frightened and nearly two more of being bored and mournful. I'm 25 years old and I haven't really done anything yet." Dorothy threw her hands wide and flopped back onto the bed, Christ-like. "So why did you agree to come with me, then? It's your turn."
Edith felt ashamed telling her the real reason. Yes, the war had been awful, but for Edith it had also meant emancipation. "I think the war was the best time of my life." She said simply. "I might not have been doing anything selfless like nursing, but I learnt to drive and I worked ona farm and I felt like I was helping people in my own little way. I suppose I felt happier when people stopped minding that I was I was unmarried with no offers, because I stopped minding so much too. It was easier to be me during the war because I wasn't just Mary's ugly sister. I know it's wicked and selfish but it's true."
"No, I think it's marvellous. You made something good come out of it. All I did was stew in my own misery."
"When the war ended it felt like everyone expected things to go back to normal. I was the Maiden Aunt again before I'd even realised it. Nobody wondered if I minded." Edith smiled wryly. "Sybil was always saying that things would have to change for women after the war, because we wouldn't be able to go back to how things were. She was right."
"So you chucked in flower arranging and being your sister's dinner table joke for champagne and jazz." Dorothy said.
"Exactly." Edith decided not to say anything about Patrick yet. She was not ready to explain how she had loved for as long as she could remember, and how she had lost him three times; once to Mary, once to the Titanic and once again to God knows where. Her family had abandoned them both when there had been a chance he was still alive, and that pain remained too raw to articulate properly. That betrayal and the bitterness that had lingered after it had made her more desperate to leave Downton and her family than everything else put together, but Edith couldn't bear to speak it all aloud yet.