A/N: Thanks as ever for all your feedback, and I apologise if I have not got round to replying individually to everyone this time. I do really appreciate every comment. It's very exciting for me, at this stage in the story, to be getting reviews that are really engaging with the plot and the characters and to be getting such different reactions; as a writer that's pretty much the greatest compliment that can be paid since it shows that the interpretation of the story has been taken out of my hands and put into those of the reader - I'm so thrilled. It's also quite scary: some people ship M/M, others M/S; some people like Sciarpa, others don't, and so on. It's scary because not everybody is going to be made happy by the ending of the story! Some people's theories will be wrong! (Though no less valid for that.) And... I hope that doesn't mean they won't appreciate what does happen. With all this speculation and analysis, it's becoming almost daunting as instead of just dangling potential plots and character development at you, I now have to start manipulating and tying up these threads and making sense of them so that eventually they can be drawn to a conclusion. I'm tremendously excited - but nervous - about it and I'm so grateful to everyone who comments, however briefly, for their encouragement. I want to point out at this stage now that there is real speculation and differences of opinion going on that there are two discussion threads for this story on the Downton Abbey Forums and the Highclere Awards Forums (where you still have time to vote!). I feel a lot of the time I'm writing similar responses to people's reviews and it might be fun to collate these discussions in a more open environment. Just a thought, anyway!
Special thanks, as usual, go to OrangeShipper not only for her beta-ing skills which improved the chapter, but also for the literal hours she spends listening to me rabbit on enthusiastically about future plots and character development and for her input and discussion in response to this. She is an absolute star!
I will say that this is a story that contains many allusions and references. (No, really!) Not all of that is to everybody's taste and I get that, but it's what this story is like! And there is a point to it all. I can't stress that enough. I'm not (just) writing long paragraphs about my favourite opera and What I Did On My Summer Holidays In Rome because I think they're cool, but because they have relevance to plot or character or some other significance to the story. Yeah, I sound pretentious now, don't I? ;) And with that, there is a little about the speech Sciarpa reads from this chapter on my profile page. You won't lose anything for not caring about Roman oratory, but you might gain something if you do. What I mean is, I find writing subtext in my stories a fun game and if other people want to play that's great! Otherwise, I hope there's enough on the surface to still keep your interest.
Hope you enjoy the chapter!
Chapter Eleven: Past/Future
Count Sciarpa was as good as his word and presented himself at the hotel the morning after the opera just as the Crawleys and Bowens were finishing their breakfast. In the clear light of day he was just as neat and short and magnetically attractive as he had appeared the day before. Mary found herself filled with a kind of fluttery nervousness and self-consciousness at seeing him that she did not like in herself. It reminded her of feelings and occasions best forgotten. For the first time in so long her heart and soul had been almost calm and now... they were not. All the same, as he sat down and accepted a cup of coffee from her grandmother and smiled charmingly at her and Miss Bowen, Mary was not sure whether this was not altogether a good thing. She had never had a particularly calm inner existence; or if she had, she could hardly remember now what it felt like. She was not entirely sure it would suit her.
But was she attracted to him or was she not? It was so hard to tell! And was there any point in determining the point so early in their acquaintance anyway?
"Duchessa," the Count addressed her, his eyes steady and a little amused as he looked at her, "you are lost in thought this morning. I must assume that you are either cogitating on the drama of the last night or you are anticipating what you will see today in the city."
She was roused from her unproductive reverie and gave a brittle smile. "Neither actually. I was merely thinking of..." She shook her head. "Nothing really. What would you suggest we see first? You are the expert here, Signor Conte, and more valuable than any number of Baedekers."
She had the odd impression that he knew perfectly well what she had been thinking.
"If you will permit me..." He inclined his head towards the dowager with great deference. "I will be your guide for the day. I will show you the Coliseum, the Forum Romanum, all the great places of the past. What do you say?"
It was Hettie who answered. "Oh, how fabulous! To be taken round Rome by a real Roman... Do say yes, Mama!"
"Your enthusiasm puts spurs to me to prove myself, Signorina Bowen, but you are wrong about one thing: I am not Roman. I am here in vacation only a few days."
"I have no objection if you don't, Lady Grantham," said Mrs. Bowen.
"None whatever," replied Violet. "We put ourselves in your hands, Count, for the morning at least."
"Benissimo. We start early then? Before there are too many people."
This was agreed to and he left them for the time being to finish their meal and prepare themselves for a day of sightseeing. Mary wondered at what he had let slip about his background, and asked him about it later, as they picked their way across the stones of the Forum, a little ahead of the others.
"Where am I from? I am a Neapolitan, from the Regione di Campania." He smiled brightly at her and took her hand in a firm grip to support her as she stepped down from one stone to another.
"From Naples!" she responded slightly breathlessly, and dropped his hand as quickly as possible. "Our plans are to go there after we have spent some time in Rome."
"Then you must visit me in my castle when you are there."
Mary stopped and leaned on her parasol, her eyebrows raising. "Your castle?"
His teeth gleamed in his smile. "The count must have his castle, Duchessa. You do not surely think I live I live in a tenament block in the city?" He swept his hand dismissively past the forum to indicate the kind of buildings he meant.
"No, of course not," Mary recovered herself, "but there is something particularly romantic sounding about a castle, is there not, more than what we associate with a country estate or a even a villa."
She might have been standing right in the middle of the great forum of Ancient Rome, but in that minute her imagination was far away. She had no idea what the Bay of Naples was like and her only experience of Italian castles was from ridiculous, sensational gothic novels so her mind's eye painted an equally gothic picture, inspired more by childhood trips to Scarborough and climbing up to the castle there than anything at all realistic. Her common sense told her that the Count's ancestral home was unlikely to lack those modern conveniences of running water, glass windows and a sturdy roof, but the romantic image was hard to shake.
"Do you think so? I wonder... Are you afraid of the sea?"
"What an odd question, Signor Conte! Whyever should I be?"
"Some ladies find the movement of the boat unsettling, that is all. I am glad you have a stronger constitution, Duchessa. I ask you because-" He broke off to guide her over another patch of rough ground, "- because my castle is situated on a little island, Proschia, just a few minutes from the harbour of Napoli. In fact, it is a very tiny island – proprio piccolina! – with barely more there than the castle itself and a village."
Concealing the strong impression that his description of the castle had made on her, she only pointed out that both she and her grandmother were good sailors. He replied courteously that he and his sister with whom he lived would therefore look forward to offering them hospitality when they came to Naples. There was nothing here of the gothic and Mary chastised herself for the direction her thoughts had taken – and the strange sense of longing that accompanied them.
The others caught up with them, Violet moving rather more slowly than the rest. She sat down heavily on a fallen pillar and grimaced in discomfort. Mary glanced quickly at Sciarpa before hurrying to her side.
"If they really want people to come here, they should put in some steps and a nicely paved walkway!" she complained.
"It would rather distract from appreciation of the antiquity, wouldn't it?" teased Mary in reply, but with a fond smile.
"I would rather look at the ruins than walk on them!" she scoffed, but she sounded somewhat appeased.
"What's that?" interrupted Hettie, pointing at a large platform just across the open space of the forum.
Immediately Sciarpa reassumed his prescribed mantle of tour guide.
"That, Signorina? That is the Rostra, the platform from which the great Roman lawgivers and orators made their speeches."
They all looked at this piece of ruined masonry with the vague, hopeful interests of the ignorant. Mary could not see that it looked particularly special, compared to the temples and the senate house anyway.
"If you allow me?" Sciarpa was saying, and without waiting for any reply, darted across the forum and climbed swiftly and carefully onto the Rostra. He cleared his throat, shot them a smile, and then began to recite – to declaim – to perform (there was no good word for it) in Latin. Controlled as he was, it was a Mediterranean control that nevertheless allowed plenty of scope for gesticulations and very clear diction. His spoken English was smooth, but he endowed Latin with all the musicality and fluency that only an Italian can give it. Mary had no idea what he was saying, but she could still appreciate the rise and fall of the cadences and how fitting it sounded to hear it here, in the very place the speech would originally have been given.
After a few minutes he stopped speaking, removed his hat and swept a bow before rejoining them.
"Very impressive, Count!" said Lady Grantham with a touch of sarcasm. "Are we permitted to know what it means?"
"I suppose it was Cicero," said Mary, catching his eye, and giving the name of the only Roman orator she had actually heard of. She spoke indifferently for she found something rather vulgar in the way everybody else was hanging on his words and appearing so very obviously impressed. She also felt rather annoyed with him, for however special it was to hear Latin recited in such an appropriate spot, she felt that his learning made her appear only more ignorant and consequently insignificant.
"Yes, Duchessa. You are a lady of classical learning!"
Mary's smile in response was forced. That sounded patronising. "Hardly, Signor."
"What did it mean though? I do so want to know and you understand that we are not taught Latin. Do please tell us!" cried Hettie. Mary sighed. She needed to work on her flirting techniques; she was far too eager.
Sciarpa frowned briefly at Mary before attending to Miss Bowen. "I recited for you a clever little passage getting to the crux of one of Cicero's speeches, concerning a woman, yes? A woman "non solum nobili, sed etiam nota", that is 'not only noble but notorious'! A well balanced passage from a very good speech. You hear Cicero at his finest."
"Yes indeed," said Mary, increasingly fed up, "we should have done if we had known what you were saying! You could have been reciting a laundry list!"
"Mary!" hissed her grandmother, but the Count laughed.
"Yes, it is very true. The Duchessa is quite correct. A thousand apologies. I only wished that you might rest yourselves for a moment and not be struck by ennui."
"That was very kind of you, indeed it was!" replied Mrs. Bowen, "but we are ready to move on, aren't we, girls? I want to know what that big building over there is!"
Mary jumped up and set off immediately ahead of them, since she could see her grandmother was perfectly rested. (At least, she had better be.) Girls? It was like being with a governess again.
Sciarpa joined her almost immediately. "I have offended you somehow, Duchessa. You are upset by the mention of Clodia perhaps?"
Mary did not much like being told when she was offended either. Her awareness of how unfair and difficult she was probably being in a situation that called for nothing but pleased gratitude only soured her mood more.
"Not really. Was she very notorious?"
"She was a whore," he replied calmly, "possibly the worst Rome ever saw, but if she was the inspiration for so fine a passage of rhetoric, then she has done some good!"
Mary raised her eyebrows. "Now I feel I ought to be shocked!"
He met her eyes. "Are you not? And yet, why, I ask myself, should I be surprised, when you watched with Tosca with so much composure!"
"Then your memory must be at fault. What is this building?" A discussion about her attitude to the greatest whore of Rome was not a topic she felt comfortable pursuing.
"Here? Oh, the Basilica, the central law courts where all the business and legal cases were carried out... "
The discussion became general and the tour proceeded. Mary avoided another tête-à-tête with the Count that morning and followed mostly in silence. She admired his education and found his conversation mostly stimulating but there was something about his attitude that disturbed her and made her wary. Wary, yet nevertheless curious. He was, after all, attentive, pleasant, and amusing, all things that Mary appreciated in a male companion and which she had not come across since coming abroad.
Matthew was used to thinking of his life as a sequence of alternating periods of calm and unrest. Judging from what the few friends he had talked to about this said, he was not alone in this outlook. Childhood had been calm. Hardly anything had happened to disturb his upbringing until change came quickly from his father's death, followed swiftly by his matriculation at Oxford. University itself had been a pleasant though challenging time, and afterwards he had settled back into another mostly unchanging routine in Manchester with his mother. Most of Matthew's life in fact had been relatively uneventful until he had received the letter from Lord Grantham which had altered everything. Since then nothing had seemed very stable. That was not to say that every moment of life since coming to Downton had been emotional (how exhausting if it had been) but there had been something about it. A brightness, a sharpness, a clarity perhaps. A way of seeing things and of looking at the world that had not been there before. The colours had seemed more intense in Yorkshire than they ever had in Manchester.
He had never thought about it before or even noticed it until these last few weeks, when he had become aware of a change; he was trying to put his finger on it. Things seemed strangely faded in his impression; the birdsong quieter, the colours of the trees paler. Maybe it was just the approaching dampness of autumn after a particularly beautiful summer. Maybe, Matthew thought, it was simply the natural settling down of his life into a pattern again after all the upheaval.
He welcomed the peace and the routine. He got up every morning, ate breakfast, kissed his mother goodbye, went to the office, worked all day, came home, kissed his mother again, ate supper, and spent the evening reading or playing cards or sometimes at the Abbey with his cousins. (Since he had first met Sybil in Ripon he had dined twice at the great house.) There was absolutely nothing in this that was different to before of course except in Matthew's attitude to it. Somehow there seemed less to think about, he was working harder, it seemed easier to reconcile his job with his role as Lord Grantham's heir... and yet it was all so much duller! Matthew supposed that he must be foolish indeed if he was going to start complaining about a comfortable, steady life being dull.
It would be too easy to blame it all on Mary. It would be easy to say that she lit up his world and in her absence everything was drear and drab. The suggestion whispered itself to Matthew at the back of his mind and he tried his best to ignore it for the matter was certainly not so black and white. He had argued with Mary, she had distracted him, she had made him miserable, she had confused him. Things were so much simpler without her.
So it was that when Cousin Robert asked him whether he was happy one Saturday afternoon as they walked back from the cottages, he delayed his answer for a long time, before finally saying that yes, he was happy.
Robert smiled. "I'm glad to hear it, Matthew. I was saying to Cora only last night after you and Cousin Isobel left how much more settled you seemed recently."
"Oh? Well," he continued, "I think I am finally finding a balance between being a lawyer and being your heir. It's been a long time coming but I do feel settled now."
"That's excellent; I'm so pleased. You are doing splendidly, you know." He waved a hand in the direction of the damp woodland to the side of the path. "We shall be able to start interviewing tenants to take possession soon."
"You think they will be ready in time for-"
"Before Christmas, almost certainly. It's enough to warm your heart thinking about them under a good, solid roof when the snow comes. This – this is what it's all about, Matthew."
They exchanged firm smiles. Matthew did feel pleased with what he had achieved and in this moment he felt as close to his cousin and to the path now set out for him as he ever had.
For a few minutes they trudged in silence through the fallen, browny-orange leaves. It was a moist October and everything seemed muted and faded and dripping. Matthew scuffed his shoes in the leaves and thought about how much pleasanter the country was to the city. How much quieter. How much more relaxed. How little there was to worry about.
"And what about outside of work?" The Earl interrupted him. "We have been rather quiet recently though I dare say we can lay the blame for that at my mother's door! I hope, however, that you are finding good ways to occupy your spare time."
Something in the way Robert said this caught Matthew's attention and he looked up. He frowned slightly.
"Why, yes; yes, I am," he replied cautiously.
"Sybil talks about you a lot," continued his cousin, almost casually.
"Does she? I – I suppose I have seen more of her lately. She wants to go to university, you know."
Robert sighed. "Yes, I know. I suppose you approve of that, as a modern man?"
Matthew felt that this was some kind of test.
"I approve of anybody following their interests, whatever they are, and I am happy to offer Cousin Sybil any advice or help that is in my power, to assist her in following hers," he replied eventually.
"Yes, I'd heard you were doing that."
Again, that strange tone of voice. Matthew frowned some more. He was starting to feel uncomfortably aware of where this conversation could be going and he wished it wouldn't. "I'm not sure-"
"Sybil's very young, Matthew. Much younger than Mary and Edith and I don't just mean in terms of their ages."
"I – yes, sir. If you want me to stop talking to her about it then I-"
"I think you know that's not what I mean."
That floored him and he could only stare, slightly open mouthed at the Earl. They stopped walking and sized each other up for a moment. Then the Earl laid his hand firmly on Matthew's arm and nodded.
"I like you, Matthew, as my cousin, as my heir – and as the son I never had." He was very serious now and held the other's gaze. "And I know that you are incapable of behaving dishonourably towards anyone, let alone an innocent and susceptible young girl, that you would never give rise to expectations you did not mean. I trust you understand me."
"Yes," he replied, his mouth dry. "Yes, I understand you perfectly."
Lord Grantham smiled then and dropped his hand and began walking again.
"Good."
Matthew blinked several times, remaining motionless a second. Then he matched his pace to his cousin's as they scuffed their way in silence through the damp, musty-smelling autumn leaves back to the Abbey. All of a sudden he had a lot to think about.
The new housemaid considered herself a bit above her job. It had been hard to find a replacement for Gwen at such short notice and Ethel had what Mrs. Hughes disparagingly called "attitude", an opinion expanded on at much greater length by Thomas and Miss O'Brien, much to Ethel's displeasure. It hardly motivated her to do more work.
One of her jobs, in addition to her usual round of tasks, was to go to the dower house once a week to check that everything was in order and deal with any post. In fact, the dowager Countess had received very few letters since going away, for she had told her closest friends in advance that she was going abroad and not to bother writing to her as it was unlikely she would reply, if the letters ever reached her in the first place.
This week, however, when Ethel unlocked the door and slipped inside the house to do her checkup, there were two letters waiting to be forwarded to Italy. Ethel picked them up. London addresses. Ladies' handwriting.
She opened the drawer where the forwarding address should be – and found nothing. She opened all the other drawers in the hall cabinet, then checked down the back in case the piece of paper should have fallen, looked on the kitchen table and eventually, after five whole minutes of half-hearted searching, gave up. Maybe she had put it somewhere else. Maybe she had burnt it by accident.
Ethel knew she should tell Mrs. Hughes that she had lost the forwarding address for it would be easy enough to copy out a replacement, but she was in enough trouble as it was. She held the two letters in her hands and dithered. She considered opening them and if there was anything important passing it on, but she shrank from this active wrong-doing. Anyway, it was very unlikely that there could be anything urgent in the correspondence of gossiping old ladies.
She shrugged her shoulders, stuffed the envelopes down the back of the sofa and went to put her feet up for a while in the drawing room before returning to her work.
A/N: Well, didn't quite get 100 reviews last time, so no additional story, but hey, I write enough, don't I? Check out University Challenge if you want something pretty different! It is also very much a multi-ship story.
I thought at this point in the story I might give you a few tasters of what's to come... A teaser trailer, if you will. Well... Gwen writes some letters, Violet feels her age, Mary gives herself up to romance and the sea, Sybil gets herself in a terrible muddle, Branson does somethin' stupid, Robert is terribly shocked and disappointed, and Matthew... well, that, my friends, would be telling!
As for the next chapter, all I shall say is that the story will finally deserve its T rating and I really can't wait to write this one!