As always, my thanks to chelsie fan. This particular update is for nanniships, because she's pretty awesome.

She leaned back happily into her husband's embrace. Their own Christmas tree - all to themselves. No wonder he'd been so mischievous that morning… She half wondered if the coffee hadn't been to overpower the smell so as not to ruin her surprise.

"Would you help me decorate it?" he asked, his voice rumbling in her ear.

"I don't think I'd be much help, Charles," she replied. "Besides, we haven't anything to put on it."

"I disagree on both accounts," he said, breaking their embrace.

"Do you now?" she said, the corners of her mouth turning up slightly. "I must say you are full of surprises today."

"That was the intention," replied Charles, who seemed to have gone over to the corner of the room. "Here were are. Christmas decorations."

He took her hand and guided her onto the sofa, placing a large box carefully in her lap. She opened it and her fingers ran over what seemed to be little lumps wrapped up worn rags.

"They're hardly extravagant," he said, sounding almost embarrassed now after putting on such a show. "But they are ours."

"A gift from the Crawleys, I assume," she poked, wondering at his guarded tone. He was always very defensive when it came to –

"No. My father made them."

Suddenly the room felt very still. He'd never spoken of his father, not once. She would have remembered. She reached out for him, balancing the box on her lap, and clasped his arm with her hand.

"Tell me?" she ventured.

She heard him sigh ever so slightly. "There isn't much to tell," he rumbled. "I didn't know him long or in particularly well in that short time."

His words were clinical, as if he could dismiss the topic with his gruffness, but he'd said more than enough for Elsie to know there was something there. Something he didn't ever get to say, maybe didn't want to say. Probably ought to say. And if there were ever a person in his life to say it to…

She pulled a bundle out of the box, but refused to unwrap it, instead casting the rest of the box aside and shifting to be closer to him. She cradled the little cloth-wrapped figure in one hand, and the other rested gently on his arm. She waited a moment before nudging. Slightly.

"The only way I can see is if you tell me," she said softly.

She had a way with secrets, his wife. He'd marveled about it countless times over the course of their shared career at Downton. At ferreting them out, at keeping them, and moving them around as she saw fit. Sometimes it felt as if he were on the outside looking in, knowing that she knew something he did not. Knowing that no amount of pushing would get it out of her if she'd made up her mind. It had been a blow to his ego more than once, but if he was truly honest, he didn't always mind. 'Mrs. Hughes is the one for a secret.' No matter how big or how small. There was something about her, and everyone else, from the youngest hall boy to her Ladyship had seen it. She was the only person he'd ever told about Alice, and for all her meddling, he couldn't say he'd ever truly regretted it. If anyone had ever gotten him to open up his heart and look inside, it was her.

"I will try," he said uncertainly. She nodded, and he studied her expression. Soft. Kind. The corners of her mouth were turned up slightly, not quite into a smile, but carrying a hint of one. Waiting, but certainly not impatient or irritated with him. How she managed to have so much patience with him was something he loved dearly about her.

"My father and I were not particularly close growing up," he said. "My mother died before my second birthday and I don't think he really knew what to do with me."

He paused, not sure if he wanted to go back there, not even with her beside him, holding onto him.

"That must not have been easy," she offered, her words pushing at his hesitations.

"He tried, I think. But it wasn't natural to him, child rearing. Besides, he spent most of his time working or looking for work."

"What did he do?" she asked.

"Anything, everything, it seemed," he said. "It would change monthly – road work, deliveries, whatever there was that needed doing. I was too young to help, and he was too busy trying to make ends meet. Needless to say, we didn't have much money, but there was always food on the table. But the fear that there wouldn't be, that was always present."

A life walking on a knife's edge, terrified of falling into complete poverty from one failed crop was something familiar to Elsie. She had craved stability, consistency from a young age. Clearly so had he.

He took the little figure wrapped in cloth from her and unwrapped it slowly. "He didn't ever say it, but I knew he cared about me. In his own quiet way, I suppose. Sometimes, in the evenings after supper, he would whittle toys for me."

He placed the figure in her hands, and Elsie ran her fingers over it. A little man with what seemed like a musket or some such thing leaning on his shoulder.

"A wooden toy soldier?" she asked.

"That's right," Charles confirmed. "That is how I remember my father – the smell of pipe tobacco and whittling away beside the fire place. He was a man of few words, so we'd sit in silence, he whittling and I watching. I used to sweep up the scraps afterwards and throw them into the fire. I had no aunts or uncles that I ever knew of, or I would have been shipped off to them. It was just him and me. Lonely at times."

"I imagine it would be," said Elsie, stroking his arm in a soothing motion. He wasn't sure if she even realized she was doing it.

"He wasn't a man of little talent, but he was one of little ambition. I never liked that, but it wasn't my place to criticize him for it. I never did understand him, and I don't think he understood me. I always half wondered when he away stayed late what I would do if he never come home at all."

"I'm sorry," she told him. It wasn't fair for a child to live with that worry as a companion.

"It is what it is," said Charles indifferently. Elsie bit her lip to keep from objecting at how high a standard he still held his childhood self to. How unfair.

"What happened to him?" she asked instead.

"He died," Charles said simply. "An accident while he'd been helping on a neighboring farm."

Elsie inhaled sharply, "Oh-"

"I didn't want to go to an orphanage," he said, the words tumbling out in a rush now. Just as she'd always held the keys to everything, this too she'd managed to unlock, and now the story burst forth, longing to be free. "I was dead set on not ending up in a place like that. It turns out all of my planning wasn't for naught. I took my father's suitcase and packed up every valuable possession I had, along with many of the toys he'd made me and my mother's wedding ring. I took everything I could fit in that suitcase, along with the small amount of money my father had hidden for emergencies. And I ran."

She swallowed back the wave of emotion that crashed into her. She could be steady, for her sake as much as for his. "How old were you?"

"Ten," he replied. "Scrawny back then, if you can believe it. I ran to the train station, bought a ticket for the first train out and ended up at Downton Station."

"You must have been terrified," she said, shaking her head.

"Out of my mind," he admitted. "But I was determined to get away, find myself a real job."

"And you did," she said, the pieces of the puzzle coming together. "At Downton?"

"Yes. I didn't know better, I marched right up to several houses only to be turned away at the door. Downton Abbey was the grandest of them all, and it was going to be my last attempt before I tried to find a barn to sleep in for the night. I walked right up to the front door at half past eight in the evening and asked to see the Earl of Grantham." Charles gave an exasperated sigh at the memory.

"I had nothing to lose at that point. I'm not certain if the old Earl thought me mad or amusing, but he insisted I be taken on all the same. I would be a hall boy and sleep in the attics. I worked for my room and board for the next six years."

His immense devotion to the family was brought rapidly into focus for her. It had driven her downright batty at times, the way he held them upon a pedestal, but now she understood so much more deeply why.

"You never went back? Never even to see where your father was buried?"

"I don't even know where he would be," said Charles. "I'd kept the things he'd made for me in an effort to remember him, but after a time he himself faded into a distant memory. A man I can faintly picture, but not a man I ever knew."

"I see," said Elsie quietly. They're all the family I've got...The really had been his salvation. His only family. Until her of course.

"I don't even know why I've kept them all," he said, lifting another one out of the box. "I never envisioned having children of my own-"

"But they are where you come from," said Elsie simply. "Roots. Something tangible to remind you that you weren't born in the Downton airing cupboard, and there is something in that, or you wouldn't still have them."

He considered this. "I suppose you're right," he said slowly. "I even turned each of them into ornaments when I became the butler of the house, thinking I might put them on the downstairs tree, but I could never bring myself to explain it."

"Well, now you have, so shall we put them up?" she asked, holding up the wooden solider.

"I suppose we ought to."

"That was the idea, wasn't it?" said Elsie, her tone lightening the serious mood somewhat.

"Yes, it was. I just…I wasn't sure what you'd think."

"I think it's an excellent idea," she said sincerely. "Here, I'll unwrap them and you hang them as you see fit." She held out the toy solider to him with a smile and he took it gently from her fingers, letting their hands touch for an inordinately long time. They'd perfected the art of not touching each other in their decades together at the Abbey. Never bumping knees under the servant's hall table or making any contact when handing other a dish. Before all this she'd held his hand exactly twice in two decades, at the death of their dear Lady Sybil and as a steadying hand on the Brighton beach. But this was different. Slow and tender. And deliberate. Desired.

And once he'd taken the figurine from her fingers, he took her hand in his large one, coaxed in her fingers to uncurl, and placed a kiss of gratitude on the center of her palm.

And so began a ritual of her carefully unwrapping each little toy. Trains, people, snowmen, birds. She would touch each one carefully, hazard her best guess as to what it was, and give it to him. Every time, she received a gentle kiss in return, on her palm, her wrist, the tip of each finger. They carried on until they'd run entirely out of ornaments and he sat back down beside her.

"All finished."

"I'm sure it's quite lovely, Charles."

"Very lovely."

She didn't know that he wasn't looking at their tree at all, but instead at her hands, neatly folded in lap when he responded.

So he took her hands, and brought them to his mouth again, kissing her knuckles, and her fingertips. Over and over until she was completely sure what he'd really been speaking of.

TBC...