A/N: Thank you so much for your encouragement, I really appreciate it. Today it's my precious cinnamon roll's turn. I love her so much, but never really tried to write her before, so this was extra fun! I hope you will enjoy it too and that you'll leave me a review!
Mrs Patmore has gone to bed and she is drinking a last cup of tea before going up too. It's late - later than usual. There was a big dinner party and Mrs Patmore let her handle it all on her own. She does that more these days. It's worrying.
She feels being pulled this way and that and it's very distracting. She can make gougeres with one hand tied behind her back, but they almost failed yesterday because she was thinking about poor Mr Mason losing the farm like that.
It's not fair how they push out tenant farmers like that. Even prospering ones like Mr Mason's, who always turned a good profit. Farming is hard work and he only has the farmhands he hires during the different seasons on the farm: lambing, sowing and planting, harvesting. She's gone up year after year to help with the canning.
Perhaps she should have left Downton and gone to live with Mr Mason and help him. There must have been letters coming to let him know he was going to be evicted.
But she didn't want to leave Mrs Patmore or the kitchen. She was finally given some responsibility and Mrs Patmore paid for the lessons with Miss Bunting. Mr Molesley and Miss Baxter kept encouraging her and in the end even Mr Carson did. Mrs Hughes was probably behind that; she was the most adamant she worked hard, to make something more of herself than just a kitchen maid.
Now there is a third person who steals away her concentration. She doesn't remember when it happened, but it's all very confusing, because she did love William but she had been just a child and this… this is different.
She can't confide in Mr Mason for obvious reasons and she cannot tell Mrs Patmore either.
She wouldn't understand.
She hardly understands it herself.
She puts her cup in the sink. It's much too late be pondering about all these things. Best go to bed: she has an early start baking. She climbs the stairs towards her small room that she no longer shares with anyone.
But perhaps she will again. One day.