A/N: A couple of days ago a reader named Liz reviewed the story to tell me to update. Now, I had started writing this chapter already but that really pushed me to finish it quickly! Thank you so much! Also thank you to everyone who reviewed the previous chapter - I'm so pleased at the response. You really cannot imagine just how much I appreciate it and how much it inspires me to continue writing. Thanks also to OrangeShipper for letting me bounce ideas off her, squee about the story (yes, I am easily excited by my own writing...) and for being a wonderful beta. Thanks should also be acknowledged to EOlivet who knows this story better than I do and is the most kind and flattering and encouraging of readers.
University is good fun on the whole, though I'm not doing enough work, but it is certainly distracting, hence the delay in posting. Updates won't be very regular but I am absolutely definitely not in no way going to abandon this story. :-)
Hope you're all enjoying season two. Obviously this story contains no spoilers though I have to admit that since I have an awareness of S02 since I'm watching it and the way the characters develop in that, it is likely that I may well be influenced by it. But not that influenced! And any similarities of plot are just interesting coincidences!
Hope you enjoy the chapter!
Chapter Thirteen: The Price of Love
The night she became engaged to Matthew Crawley, Sybil did not sleep well. She felt changed in a fundamental way from the person she had been before and it caused great restlessness, both of mind and body.
From the moment she first saw the Abbey on her walk home she felt that she was seeing the world through different eyes, through the eyes of the future Countess of Grantham. Downton Abbey was no longer simply her childhood home that one day she would leave. Now, it was going to be her home for always, a place to manage and look after, to worry over, to love and to cherish, as her father and mother did. As she sat at her dressing table while Anna did her hair that evening, she considered her reflection in the mirror and fancied that it seemed more grown up. Would Anna become her lady's maid? she wondered. Would she like it? Never one to waste time in idle speculation, she asked her straight out.
"Eventually, would you rather be housekeeper or lady's maid?"
Anna smiled as she fixed a curl. "What a question, my lady! I haven't really given it much thought."
"But you must have some idea!"
"I suppose I shall go where I am most needed."
Sybil met her eyes in the mirror and sighed. "Yes, of course. And whatever you do, I'm sure you'll be very good at it."
Anna had always been closest to Mary but things were different now. She and Mary appeared to have swapped positions: Mary had Gwen and she had Anna. Curious, that. Sybil had never thought about the latter much before, but now she wondered. What were Anna's hopes and dreams? Of course she had them. When she was mistress, she decided, she would take good care of all the servants and let them pursue whatever their interests dictated. She would discover all their stories and support them, whatever the personal cost to the estate. There was never a shortage of people who wanted to work in service so it would hardly be a problem to lose the ones who didn't. She would be a revolutionary mistress.
Filled with these magnanimous plans, she followed Edith downstairs in near silence. So much so that her sister noticed it.
"You're very quiet, Sybil. What are you thinking about?"
Her eyes had been tracking an ancestral portrait which hung on the landing, a fine figure of a Regency statesman with a stern gaze and fashionable brown curls.
"Charles, the second Earl. I was wondering what he was like. Who he married. And what happened to him."
Edith turned round on the stairs and stared incredulously at her. "What an odd thing to think about all of a sudden! He married the Honourable Miss Victoria Spalding, youngest daughter of Viscount Umberforth, you know. They had six children but only one daughter survived infancy so the estate passed to his nephew, Edgar, the third Earl. As for him, he nearly bankrupted the estate in Charles' lifetime thanks to a gambling habit, and died not long after his uncle from the pox. That's why he has such a small portrait compared to the others. Why on earth do you ask?"
Sybil shook her head. "No reason." She descended the stairs, twisting her head to look back at Charles as she walked.
The history of Downton had been something to which she had previously given as little thought as she had to its future. Now that she had a stake in the one, however, she found she had an interest in the other. Poor Charles! Sybil tried to imagine having six children and losing five of them and then seeing the estate pass not to someone upstanding like Matthew or Patrick had been but to a wastrel. To know that everything you held dear was going to pass out of your hands into those of someone who didn't deserve them... it suddenly hit her, for the first time really. After all, she had always rather liked Matthew, and as the youngest daughter she had never given the issue of succession much thought. Reason told her that in these days of modern medicine it was very unlikely either that she would have six children (good Lord!) or that they would die before their time, but it could happen, or some other devastating tragedy would fall on Downton, her Downton, their Downton.
Dinner brought additional reflections. She watched her mother as she had never watched her before. She watched the way she drank her soup, the way she interacted with her husband, the way she turned to Carson and indicated with a subtle hand gesture that she required something... Sybil tried to see herself in her mother's place, tried to imagine Matthew at the head of the table in her father's place. But would Matthew really want to maintain this level of formality just for a family dinner? She could not quite see it somehow and yet – and yet what would Downton be like without its centuries old traditions? It was equally impossible to imagine eating dinner by the fire in the drawing room, just her and Matthew. Carson would not stand for it for a start.
She turned her attention to her parents' conversation. What did a Countess talk about over dinner?
Gossip from London, apparently.
"I had a letter from Rosamund today," Cora was saying.
"Oh?" replied the Earl. "Does she want another haunch, because I'm really not sure we can spare it."
"Of course we can, Robert. Where is she going to get proper venison from in London if not from us? No, she was telling me Susan Flintshire's got a new maid and she's even worse than the old one."
"Oh dear, poor Cousin Susan." He took a mouthful of food and nodded to Carson to fill up his wine glass.
"Not a bit of it; I'm sure I'd go mad if I had to work for her. O'Brien can't stand her."
"Is there anyone O'Brien can stand?"
"Don't be nasty, darling! All I was thinking is that we should start looking for someone for your mother for when she gets home. It would be so nice for her to come back and already be settled with a good maid."
"What if she doesn't come back?" interrupted Edith. "Haven't you thought of that? I can see her settling abroad quite easily, especially if Mary marries that Italian. Mary always was her favourite."
"My mother announce her intention of ending her days in a foreign country?" her father chuckled. "Now that I'd like to see."
Sybil sighed heavily and obviously. Was her family always this tedious?
"Darling, you're awfully quiet this evening!" said her mother. "Did something happen with Cousin Matthew?"
Her eyes widened and she shook her head. "No! No, nothing at all." She put her knife and fork down as her hands shook very slightly. Did they suspect? They weren't meant to know anything until Matthew came in the morning to ask permission! What would she do if they did suspect? "Please, go on with what you were saying about Aunt Rosamund's letter."
"There's not much more to say unless you particularly want to hear the details of her social life," Cora replied with a sharp look. Sybil lowered her eyes to her plate. "They're building up to a big dinner at the Russian Embassy in a couple of weeks."
"Yes, I've been invited to that," said Robert, also glancing with a quick frown at his youngest daughter. "Do you think we should go to London for it?"
"Why bother? It'll be dreadfully dreary – these things always are, and I can't believe the food will be any good. Not with the Russians in charge of it."
Embassy dinners in which real politics could be discussed, but never were. Sybil lost interest in the conversation again. One day, would she and Matthew have to attend them? More interesting than the dinners themselves, would they discuss attending them like this? She could not imagine it. How should a modern Countess behave? Perhaps she would be so revolutionary that she would not even be invited to embassy dinners in the first place. She was not entirely sure how she felt about that.
It was not until several hours later, when she was sitting in her nightdress at her dressing table, Anna dismissed for the night, that Sybil considered the other side of it and gingerly touched her lips in wonder.
She had never been kissed before. She had never even thought about it very much before except as something that people who loved each other did and that had no place in her life yet. Mary and Edith sometimes talked about it but as far as she knew neither had done it yet, though it was hard to tell. The way Mary had spoken about her seasons, one might be forgiven for thinking she had been continually fighting off desirous men with a parasol. Then again, Mary said a lot of things.
Sybil felt she should be more changed by the experience of having been kissed than she was. It had been... an odd sensation, that had caused an even odder swooping feeling, not unpleasant but nevertheless strange. She supposed she would get used to it but at the moment the very idea of being like that with Matthew seemed almost unaccountable. And what then? Sybil had only very imperfect ideas of what took place between a man and his wife once they were out of the public eye but just the notion of it made her physically squirm on her chair and look at her reflection afresh.
Was she in love with Matthew?
She felt this ought to be an easier question to answer than it was. To marry without love was something she instinctively abhorred in a way she knew her sisters did not, and yet love itself seemed difficult to recognize. Having accepted Matthew, did it mean she must therefore love him? Otherwise how could she have said 'yes'? It had been an automatic reaction, a feeling, sudden and unexpected, that she wanted to accept. So was that love? She liked him, she liked him very much; she thought he was handsome and good and noble in the true meaning of the word and trustworthy and kind and certainly the most interesting person she knew – well, Branson was perhaps more intriguing but their interaction was limited by circumstance and quite different to what she had with Matthew.
But did all this amount to romantic love? For that seemed a rather necessary criterion for marriage. Sybil was very aware at the back of her mind that when she had previously considered marriage it had been in the context of Branson's plan of using her husband's power for good, a plan in which love played no part. It was all very well, however, to consider sweeping plans in the abstract: this was the here and now. Not just some future hypothetical marriage which would never happen because Branson's ideas were utterly ridiculous but her marriage to Matthew – now.
Sybil wished for the first time that she was more of a reader and that she had some kind of cultural background in which to arrange her thoughts. Mary and Edith both read novels containing heroines whom they could look up to and identity with, fictional worlds of romance and sentiment. Mary had her long, difficult novels, volume after volume through which she would plough almost every day. Edith on the other hand enjoyed Jane Austen, preferring satire to psychology. But Sybil had never really read anything but the most superficial fiction and she could not call on the experiences of the likes of Anne Elliot or Catherine Earnshaw or Tess Durbeyfield to help her understand her feelings.
What had Mary been reading before going to Italy? She had been telling her about it only a few days before her departure when she had finally finished the eighth volume, just in time. How the heroine, virtuous but not without flaws, forbidden by a clause in her late husband's will from ever marrying or even associating with the man she so desperately loved, when threatened with being separated from him forever had thrown away her fortune, independence and property for his sake. Shunned by her family for her incomprehensible actions, they were still happy in their poverty. Mary had spoken as if on some level she admired Dorothea's actions – at least, she had spoken wistfully – but was that possible? To be willing to give up everything, every comfort, every expectation, for one person; was that love in its purest form?
Sybil could not in all honesty look into her heart and declare that she would be ready to give up her life as she knew it for Matthew. Perhaps it was fortunate therefore that she would only be gaining by the marriage. She would have an enviable position not just socially but one most perfectly suited to her own interests, she would secure Downton's future for her family's descendants as Mary had failed to do, and most importantly (surely most importantly?) she would be married to Matthew who was one of the best men she knew. It could not be more perfect.
But was love really dependent on making huge personal sacrifices? Most people married and loved and did not give up rank and fortune and nobody called their feelings into question... Sybil's native pragmatism began to re-emerge. Impassioned declarations of forbidden desire during thunderstorms might work all very well in novels but they hardly resembled anything she knew in real life and perhaps, just perhaps, it did Mary no good to be such a romantic.
Suddenly desperate to try to arrange her thoughts since she had no friend in whom she could confide or ask advice, she pulled a piece of writing paper towards her, began Dear Gwen and started to write, the words pouring out of her without any coherence or restraint.
Some time later, the letter finished, addressed and sealed before she could change her mind about sending it, Sybil stood up feeling considerably calmer and stretched, before carrying her candle across to her bed. She set it down on the bedside table and climbed in, pulling the covers right up to her chin and staring out across the room. Then, almost as if she was afraid of what she might discover, she turned to the expanse of bed at her side. One day, soon perhaps, she would no longer be alone here. She wondered rather irrelevantly what kind of pyjamas Matthew wore. She hoped they were nicer than her father's which were such a dull, unappealing grey. Moreover his hair would not be quite so slicked back as it usually was, she imagined. She fancied she would rather like that. Her heart began to beat a little faster at thinking about Matthew so informally attired.
No, maybe Mary did read too many novels but the spirit of romance had been now awoken in Sybil's breast among all the other new feelings she was experiencing that night. In that final moment before blowing out her candle when for the first time in her life she was aware of being lonely in her own room, she wished that she could make sense of her feelings and she hoped with all her heart that she would be able to succeed in the new life she would be beginning in the morning as the fiancée to the future Earl of Grantham.
A/N: First person to correctly identify the novel Mary was reading gets a cookie in the form of a spoiler/line/fact/something from the following chapter!
I just want to say a quick word about Sybil in relation to S02. I'm worried that she is developing very differently here to how she is in S02 (the extent of this will become clear soon) but this story is entirely based on her character as we knew it in S01 and on an AU scenario taking place in 1913. I still think it's a plausible interpretation of her, just one that, unlike Matthew and Mary who I think do fit rather well with their S02 characters, is rather different to canon. I hope you think she's ok.
Next chapter: Matthew asks Robert's permission to marry Sybil, while over in Italy, Mary's situation changes.
As ever, I'd love to know what you thought - it's really so interesting to read people's varying responses to this story, and it does honestly make me more inclined to write more of it! Thank you for reading. :-)