AN: So I know we're on a bit of a Cobert hiatus at the moment in this story...I promise to bring them back in next week's chapter!
Matthew was quite scarce from Downton in the next few weeks, and Charlotte suspected it was largely due to his embarrassment at what he'd inadvertently overheard. She was desperate to speak to him, although not quite desperate enough to work up the courage to go and visit him—it would be easier, she reasoned, if she were forced into his company and thus had no escape from speaking to him.
Her father had assured her that he had told Matthew that Pamuk had been unsuccessful and that the story was the strictest of secrets, and she did trust Matthew—for what good did it do him to repeat a tale that reflected so badly on his own relatives?—but she could not help wanting to assure herself, by looking him in the eye, that he believed her virtue had been preserved.
It wasn't that it mattered, really, she told herself. It didn't matter what Matthew thought. It was merely the embarrassment of what a distant male relative—so distant as to not really be a relative, in her book—might be thinking. Because Charlotte did not want Matthew. Not in that way, regardless of what her mother said.
Admittedly, he had made no apparent grab for her inheritance in the six months he had lived in Yorkshire. Perhaps he'd even given up the idea, but she knew she ought not to forgive him for entertaining such a scheme in the first place.
At last she learned that it had not been her that Matthew had been avoiding—rather, he had not been in the area, having taken a few weeks to travel back to Manchester. A telegram soon arrived at Downton announcing his return, and he was invited to luncheon the next day, after which Charlotte asked if he would walk outside with her.
"I wanted to be sure you knew," she said with no preamble, once they were out on the lawn, "that there was nothing between Mr. Pamuk and myself." She cursed the burning in her cheeks that accompanied her words, knowing she must be bright pink with embarrassment.
"I know that," he said quickly. "Your father explained."
"He just…appeared in my room. But nothing…nothing happened."
"Yes, I know. Cousin Robert was very clear."
She noted that he seemed no more inclined to look in her eyes than she was to look in his, and somehow, the mutual humiliation was a comfort, and they walked in silence for a few minutes.
"I hope you are all right now," he said at last, a sincere ring to his voice that made it sound like much more than a pleasantry.
"I am, thank you." She'd finally ceased waking in a cold sweat, sensing she wasn't alone. "And I was then."
"Your main concern," he said, suddenly glancing at her, "seemed to be your sister."
Charlotte held his gaze. "It seemed so very unfair. Mr. Napier had very little to do with it, and she had even less."
"Of course not. I understand the wedding is back on?"
"It is," she said, laughing at the memory of Evelyn's shock at her arrival in his home. "She's to be married in June."
"I'm glad for it. He seems a good man."
"Yes. Yes, he is." As boring as Charlotte had always thought him, she could find no fault in Evelyn's honor or kindness. He would be a good husband to Eleanor, and she imagined her sister's own fancifulness would easily cover his dullness.
They fell into silence again, but a comfortable one this time. She was almost surprised at how pleased she was to have their cousin back in Downton—he had been unfailingly polite for months now, and some days she could almost forget how rude and irritating he had been at first. Almost.
"You seem very fond of your family," Matthew observed.
"I am…but I suppose it's natural, when we've been so isolated."
"Isolated? Is Downton so very far from other estates?"
"No, but…" She sighed, fingering her parasol. "It's rather odd to be an adopted aristocrat. It wasn't so much that Eleanor and I were treated unkindly as it was that we were something of…a curiosity. My mother was too, of course. I don't mean to imply we never went anywhere and never saw anyone. Just that…I don't know that I had as many close friends as most ladies might."
He was quiet for a moment. "I didn't necessarily mean that you were close to your family, though of course you are. I meant…you seem so very protective."
"Of my mother? Of course I'm protective of my mother."
"Because she is crippled?"
"Yes, and everything that goes with it. I hate it for her. It's–it's so unfair." The words poured out of her heatedly, but she was finding it very easy to talk to Matthew. She'd been finding it that way for awhile now, in fact. "I can't stand that she can't walk, and I can't imagine how that would be. And her spine hurts her, and I hate that, too."
"Does it?" he asked, surprise on his face.
"Yes…more than she lets on to us, I think."
"Charlotte," he said after a pause, "may I ask you something about your mother?"
"Yes." She blushed, his caution a reminder of his first night at Downton. She'd known him long enough, and seen him interact with Cora enough, to know that he'd meant no harm in his initial confusion.
"When did you…that is, if she was injured before you were born, you've only ever known your mother in a wheelchair." She nodded, and he continued. "When did you first realize something was wrong? Do you remember realizing that this wasn't normal?"
It was not a question she had ever been asked before, but the moment was so burned into her mind from its repeated reviews throughout her childhood that she did not hesitate in her answer. "I was three," she said. "I don't think there was a sudden moment when I realized she couldn't walk, and that every other person could. I think I just slowly…started to wonder why she never stood up. And I asked her one afternoon why she didn't walk. I was sitting on her lap, having a biscuit." Charlotte smiled at the memory.
"What did she tell you?"
"The truth, of course. In simple terms—that she'd fallen off a horse a few years earlier and broken her back, and that her legs didn't work anymore."
"And is that when you started to feel protective?"
"I don't think so," she said, laughing softly. "I think I was too young to think that way then—although my parents tell me that even before that conversation, before I could talk, I was fond of toddling over and handing toys to her, as if I thought she might want them but not be able to get them for herself."
He laughed with her this time. "That's funny, but it does sound rather sweet," he said.
She smiled. "I'm told I was always eager to help. But I think I was older before I started to feel so…fierce about her. I think it went back to that first conversation, though, because I played it over so often in my head as a child that I started to notice things that hadn't quite been meaningful to a three-year-old."
Charlotte paused, finding the thought a painful one on Cora's behalf, but Matthew looked at her curiously, and she went on. "I remembered that she asked me—quite sincerely—if I'd prefer to have a mother who could run and play with me. It struck me as nonsense at the time, because I couldn't imagine ever wanting anyone but her, and I said so. But I realized as I got older—what a question to ask your child! What had she been feeling, wondering if her little girl wanted a different mother? Heavens, what a thing for a woman to think! I couldn't imagine how she'd come to feel so…unwanted, and so incapable, but the more I watched the way people treated her, the more I understood. And it made me so angry…and it's worse because she's so kind. All of this—it's only made her kind."
"She is that," he agreed quietly. "She has every right to be very bitter—I imagine most of us would be. I imagine I would be."
"I don't think you would," she heard herself argue before she could stop herself, and he gave her an odd look, as though surprised at the semi-compliment. "That is…" She could not find a way to make the statement into anything else. "You don't seem like you'd be the type to be much given to bitterness."
"You're much the same with your sister as you are with your mother," he said suddenly, and she sensed an awkwardness at words of praise from her.
"Am I? I don't think I am…I don't think of it quite that way. I haven't any reason to be."
Matthew raised his eyebrows. "But you—her engagement—"
Charlotte shrugged. "That just struck me as so unfair. I wasn't trying to protect her—I just wanted to make it right, because I thought I could."
"And you can't stand what's unfair because of your mother—which is really what you so desperately want to make right."
"Are you trying to psychoanalyze me, Mr. Crawley?" she asked, but she could not keep her smile out of her voice.
"Oh, I doubt that you're that easily understood, Miss Charlotte."
There was a warmth in his words that she had not heard before, and she looked down at the grass, not quite sure what to say.