"Cora?" Robert called softly as he pushed his wife's bedroom door open. "Are you up?"

"Of course," she said as he stepped inside and saw that she was. Cora was sitting up in bed, propped against her pillows with a breakfast tray on her lap and the Daily Sketch in her hands. He could see from here that the Titanic was the lead story.

She smiled at his entrance, and he realized she made no connection between the story and his presence. She likely thought he was here to help her dress, as he often did.

As a new bride of twenty, Cora had been thrown from a horse and left paralyzed from the waist down. The first year after her injury had been a nightmarish one for them both, but they had both slowly adjusted and become accustomed to her handicap. The last two decades had been very good ones as they'd raised their adopted daughters, and Robert believed that Cora had been happy. He knew she'd certainly made him happy.

He had fallen hard for his wife sometime after her accident—he could not say exactly when, only that it happened long before he himself had known it. But he was very much in love, he'd finally realized, as well as very much in awe, as he'd watched all the things she could still manage without her legs and observed how her suffering only made her kinder and softer yet.

The Crawleys had hired nurses immediately after Cora had been injured, women who, together, were capable of all the lifting necessary to get her in and out of bed and dressed and into her wheelchair, but Robert was fond of doing these things himself whenever possible. He'd discovered early on how much he liked having Cora in his arms, liked carrying her about the house in lieu of her chair, liked looking after her. He had spent as much of the last twenty years devoting himself to Cora's care as he had managing the Downton estate.

On mornings when he did not have early business on the grounds, he often returned to her room after breakfast to sit and talk as she finished hers, then to lift her in and out of the bath before her maid arrived to do the actual dressing. As adept as he was at taking it all off, he'd never mastered the intricacies of putting her corset and skirts and outer clothing on.

"You make a very good substitute for a lady's maid," she'd told him once as he'd helped her bathe. "But you won't be able to find a job anywhere without being able get me into my dresses."

"Yes, but it's not nearly as rewarding to put your clothes on as to take them off," he'd said, slowly kissing her neck.

Robert had come to love mornings with Cora not just for the thrill of having her undressed before him—or for the terrific fun they often got up to—but also for the chance to simply sit and talk with her while she ate her breakfast and took her bath. With his responsibilities on the estate and her work running the house—something she'd risen to beautifully, after a bit of pushing from him, after his father's death—he often did not see her again until dinner.

Yet he was not here today for pleasant conversation. "I take it you've seen the news," he said, taking a seat on his side of the bed.

Cora nodded. "The Titanic? Yes, what a tragic loss of life. Did you see the Astors were aboard? You know I wasn't any great supporter of theirs, but how awful for that girl to have to raise her baby alone…"

"I did see the Astors were aboard and that he was lost, yes. But Cora, I've also had a telegram this morning."

Her eyes clouded with fear. "Was there someone else we knew?"

"I'm afraid James and Patrick were aboard. Neither one of them seems to have been rescued."

"James and Patrick Crawley?" she asked.

It wasn't strange that she asked for confirmation that he meant James and Patrick, their relatives, and not some other James and Patrick, considering how little either man had ever been mentioned at Downton. Robert's cousin and his son were the heirs to the earldom, but James, a notoriously unpleasant man, had spoken cruelly to and about Cora on several occasions, leading to Robert's and his father's severing ties with James's branch of the family nearly twenty years ago.

As Robert had no son of his own, James remained the future Earl of Grantham. Yet the title was all he was heir to—Robert had pressed his father to undo the entail he had created before his death, leaving the fortune Cora had brought into the family, as well as the estate itself, to "the eldest legal child of Robert Crawley, with preference given to a son." This last bit had been inserted due to Robert's father's hope that, should Cora predecease her husband, Robert might go on to remarry a woman who would produce a biological male heir. The idea was incomprehensible to Robert. He did not doubt that he was likely to outlive his crippled wife, but he could not imagine ever falling for anyone else.

It was a fear of not outliving Cora, though, that had prompted him—and convinced his father—to have the will changed. As a young man, Robert had taken a shortcut through a rough part of London one day and happened upon a beggar with both legs amputated at the knees. A war veteran, he supposed—Robert was startled to realize that the man was not as old as he'd first seemed and had perhaps even served in the same conflict he had. But he was filthy and hungry, and drug himself along the sidewalk by his arms. Robert had stared at him in horror—not horror at the beggar or his condition, but horror at the suggestion of the life Cora would be reduced to if she had no money. And, if he predeceased her and her fortune went to James, she would have none. He did not want to assume or hope that her parents or her brother would still be living and ready to rescue her. He wanted to know that he had done everything in his power to ensure that his wife would be taken care of, and he had begged his father, almost on his knees, to alter the inheritance. Patrick, who had, his frustrations with her forced infertility notwithstanding, grown very fond of his daughter-in-law, was easily moved by Robert's fears and readily agreed to undo his entail. The fortune and the home would now pass to their eldest adopted daughter, Charlotte, who adored her mother and who would certainly see to her care.

"Yes," he said, drawing himself back to the present. "James and Patrick Crawley are both dead."

"That's terrible," Cora said after a moment. "I can't pretend to have had much affection for James, but how terrible to think of him dying so young—and what an awful death it would have been." She shuddered. "And Patrick! I always think of him as a little boy, but he'd be about Charlotte's age, wouldn't he? Or a year older—22? That's the real tragedy of it." She paused. "But what does this mean for the earldom? James didn't have a brother, did he? Have you got another cousin?"

He shook his head. "No, he didn't have a brother, and no, I haven't got another male cousin on my father's side. I'm actually not at all sure who the next heir would be." He saw her chewing her bottom lip, and he knew she was regretting for the thousandth time that she had not been able to give him a son.

"But it's no matter, darling," he went on, taking her hand in his and raising it for a kiss. "It's merely the title that's in question, and it's nothing more than a curiosity to me who will get it."

Yet although he would not have admitted it to Cora, it was far more than a curiosity to Robert who the next heir would be. He should have liked to have known young Patrick, to have taught him and mentored him—not in estate management, of course, but simply in the public role of an earl. And perhaps that might be possible with whichever distant relative Murray might find. They had an appointment on Friday to discuss the matter.

And frankly, for her own reasons, it was more than a curiosity to Cora as well.