GETTING MARRIED
DISCLAIMER: I do not own, nor do I in any way profit from the use of, the characters, settings, implied plot lines, or ideas drawn from Downton Abbey. These are the property of Julian Fellowes.
Chapter 12 The Blessing
Lady Mary had stopped him after breakfast.
"I know you've got a busy day ahead of you, Carson, but I was hoping you might join me for a walk this afternoon. Does your schedule permit it?" Her request was, in practical terms, only a formality. They both knew he would cancel any commitment, short of his wedding, to accommodate her.
He nodded. "Mid-afternoon has always been a flexible moment for me, my lady," he said easily. She was well aware of this. As a child, it had been her favourite time to visit the butler's pantry, knowing that he would be available to devote time exclusively to her.
As she passed on, having secured his agreement, Mary caught a silent exchange between her parents, who still sat at the breakfast table. They, too, knew what a little charade this question-and-answer had been. It was no secret to anyone that Carson would sever a limb if Lady Mary asked it of him.
They met in the Great Hall at two p.m. Lady Mary led the way to the front doors and he followed complacently. As they stepped out into the brilliant sunshine of a June afternoon and Andrew closed the doors behind them, Mary smiled up at the man beside her.
"I wanted to spend a little time with you on the eve of your wedding, Carson," she explained. "Things will be different after tomorrow." Though she believed her statement, she spoke playfully, too. Their relationship had always been an easy one, as flexible as it was possible to be within the restraints of the social system to which they both adhered.
Carson was intimately acquainted with the nuances of Lady Mary's speech, which he had studied carefully, and he beamed in response to this. But when he spoke, his tone was solemn. "Not between us, my lady."
His words brought a corresponding glow to Mary's countenance. No one offered more satisfying reassurances than Carson did and the impact of his devotion had not lessened over the years.
"Is everything ready for tomorrow?" she asked, as she led the way down one of the gravel paths that traversed the estate, this one leading in the direction of the folly. Strolling the estate was not their custom. Their natural habitat was the butler's pantry, which she had discovered as a small child and quickly learned to see as both a seat of empire and a haven. But it was a lovely day and Mary wanted this moment to be a special one, unique even in their long friendship. And she wanted to be alone with him and away from the distractions that would bedevil him in his work environs.
The butler rarely ambled the estate paths. He had known them as a boy, but not since his days as a junior footman had he had the time to take a leisurely stroll. But the novelty made no impression on him now, for his attention was focused entirely on his companion. He had not anticipated this diversion, but he reveled in it, for he valued his time with Lady Mary as much as she did his attention.
"As far as I know," he said, responding to her question. "At least, everything under my control is. Although," he admitted, "that's not very much."
Mary laughed. "The wedding day belongs to the bride, Carson."
He raised his eyebrows. "So I've been told, my lady," he said mildly. Mrs. Hughes had reiterated that fact to him in the dispute over the reception location, a dispute in which Lady Mary had figured. He preferred not to revisit it.
"And Barrow has been primed for his responsibilities while you're away?" She was making casual conversation, not really that concerned with such details because she knew they were well in hand. Lady Mary was not as accomplished a pupil of Carson's character as he was of hers, but she knew enough to lead him gently to a more intimate level of interaction. All things worked more smoothly with Carson when undertaken gradually.
"As well as he can be," Carson replied. "He knows what he is about. It's never the what that concerns me with Mr. Barrow, my lady," he confided earnestly, "but the how and the why. But it is a good experience for him. I'm not often out of the way."
"Only in sickness," Mary observed. "I can't remember the last time you took a holiday."
He only shrugged. If he had not taken all the time that was his due over the years, it was in part a reflection of his enjoyment of the work. There were things that he had occasionally wanted to see and do, but the absence of someone with whom to see and do them had diminished his enthusiasm. That would change after tomorrow.
"Barrow has taken an interest in Master George," Lady Mary remarked. "He's quite a hand with all the children, really. But I think George is his favourite." She smiled the satisfied smile of a mother whose child has been singled out for special treatment.
"I had noticed," Carson said circumspectly.
"Do you approve?"
A gentle smile formed on his lips. "I am in no position to object, my lady," he said, meeting her inquiring gaze.
Again Mary was reassured, and she accepted the argument implicit in his guarded response. Whatever Carson's professional reservations regarding the underbutler, he could not criticize the man for following in his footsteps where the children of the family were concerned. Mary supported George's attachment to Barrow. But she was pleased that Carson saw value in it, too.
They walked on. Mary's mind shifted to her own relationship with Carson and to recollections of the many hours they had spent together over the years.
"Do you remember the time I locked Edith in the cowsheds? The cows were all out to pasture and so were their handlers. She might have been in there for days. But you fetched her out and cleaned her up, without a scratch. She blabbed, of course. Getting us both into trouble." The memory both amused and exasperated Mary.
Carson smiled only briefly. He did not now, nor had he then, share her enthusiasm for the prank, even as he had bailed her out of trouble for it. "She was just six years old, my lady," he chided her mildly. It had never been his way to reprimand Lady Mary. His approach had always been to call her to her better nature. It did not always work and he was aware of this, too.
Mary tossed her head. "She was always a tattler, Edith. If it had been me, I'd have bided my time and plotted revenge instead of bawling to Mama and Papa."
Carson knew this impulse to be as true of the seven-year-old child who had trapped her sister in the cowsheds as it was of the fierce young woman who stood before him today. His eyes rested affectionately on her. He observed her still-potent irritation with her sister over that long-ago incident, glimpsed the impatience with which she dismissed Lady Edith's feeble efforts to combat her older sister's onslaughts, and yet saw through this brittle exterior to the heart of the little girl he loved.
"If I may say so, my lady," he said quietly, "Lady Edith has never had your spirit. No one has your spirit."
She smiled triumphantly. "She was screaming like a banshee."
"She was frightened," he reiterated.
Mary remained unimpressed. "Even I wasn't born with courage, Carson. You know that better than anyone." She spun around on the path and paused to contemplate the great house that now lay some distance behind them.
"Do you remember the time you took me on a tour of the Abbey in the middle of the night?"
How could he ever forget it? In the annals of rewarding moments he had spent with Miss Mary Crawley, this was one of those he most prized. "You were having nightmares, my lady," he said.
"And waking everyone up," she added. "And then one night you came and took me on a walk all over the house. It was pitch black almost everywhere, and you held a candle in one hand - a candle! my goodness, that was long ago! - and my hand in the other. And you showed me there was nothing in the shadows." She glanced at him. "It was only what Nanny had been telling me, but I believed you."
Her words gave Carson a great rush of satisfaction. He had spent the years of her early childhood fostering a relationship of trust with her that had stood the test of time. In that trying moment so many years ago, he had given her empirical evidence - in the form of that midnight tour - that her fears were groundless. But she had believed him because of her profound trust in him. That this was so was one of the great successes of his life.
"Mama and Papa must have wondered if they'd ever get a full night's sleep again. Nanny was beside herself. She was certain it had something to do with what I was eating, and was taking this and then that out of my meals. Or not letting me eat past five o'clock in the evening. No doubt hunger had something to do with it."
"It's only natural for a child to be afraid of the dark, my lady. Most children go through it."
"But they don't keep half the house up every night. Nothing worked. Nothing until you took a hand in it. Whatever inspired you?"
"Well, what are we all afraid of? The unknown." Carson was not a philosopher. In that instance, the answer, if not the problem itself, had seemed to him fundamentally a matter of common sense. "I thought if you saw the Abbey in the dark, and realized there was nothing lurking there in the shadows, then you might be able to let go of your fears."
"Did my parents know about it?" This information hadn't been of any consequence to the child decades earlier, but now, as a mother, she had a different perspective.
"Of course, my lady," he said emphatically. "Even the butler doesn't wander off with a child of the house in the middle of the night without permission. You had them at their wits' end."
She laughed a little at the foolishness of her own question. "You took me round all the doors and windows and showed me the great locks and bolts to convince me that even the most intrepid burglar could not get past them. And then you took me up to the attics and proved to me that no dark creature could slip in without waking up someone. It was a great relief to me to know that you were up there." Together they stared at the house for a long moment and then Mary turned to Carson with a yearning look. "I've always felt safe knowing you were there."
He felt a twinge at that for after tomorrow he would no longer be there for her. She read the thought as it formed in his mind and reached out to squeeze his arm gently, her turn to reassure him.
"You've taught me well, Carson. I can fend for myself against the dark creatures of the night now." Then she pointed at one of the upper windows of the Abbey. "We looked out from there and you showed me how to find the North Star."
"Did I?" He had forgotten that. When was the last time he had looked at the stars? "Fancy my remembering that," he murmured. It was something his father had told him a long time ago, one night when he'd been allowed to stay up and help with a sick horse. They'd come out of the stable into the darkness of a moonless Yorkshire night and Frank Carson, who wasn't given to frivolous conversation, had paused to draw his son's attention to that brightest of stars. Lady Mary was the only person to whom Carson had ever been able to impart this nugget of wisdom.
"Well."
"And then," she continued, in a more dramatic tone, as if saving the best for last, "we ended up in the kitchen and you fixed me a late-night sandwich. I don't remember what it was exactly. I only know that it was one of the most delicious things I ever ate. I think because it was one of the most enjoyable times I'd ever had." Her shining eyes met his. "It was the perfect end to a magical night."
He did not remember what he had given her. He did recall, however, some sharp words the next morning from Mrs. Yardley about elves in her kitchen.
"And you had no more nightmares," he concluded.
"And I had no more nightmares," she affirmed.
They walked on in silence for a moment, each cherishing the memory.
The folly was a useless structure that broke the skyline vista as residents of the Abbey looked north. It was an attractive one, as such buildings went, and had drawn the girls and their friends as children, if only as somewhere to flee their governess of the moment, but seldom otherwise had seen much activity. In later years it also served as a useful point to walk to and from as a private or intimate conversation unfolded. Having reached the stone structure, Lady Mary and Carson stood on its foundation for a few minutes, staring back at the Abbey. It was a view that enchanted them both.
"Do you remember the atlas you kept in the pantry?" Mary said suddenly.
Of course he did. He still had it. "We took many a voyage together, my lady," he said quietly, thinking back to how they had traced Marco Polo's trek to China and Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe on those pages.
"You showed me where South Africa was, and when His Lordship went away to war, we tracked the progress of his regiment together."
"Did we." He had forgotten that, but it came back now that she mentioned it.
"You used to read me articles from the papers about the war. I learned about the Black Week, and the siege of exotic sounding places like Mafeking, and about the Boer surrender at Pretoria. I don't recall everything, of course. But you helped me to understand what His Lordship was doing."
He was surprised that she recollected anything and was more than perturbed that he had told her so much. He had tried to put Lord Salisbury's South African venture out of his mind as something that had offered no glory and a great deal of grief to Britain. His Lordship himself hardly ever spoke of it, though he served for two years there. One of the terrible facts of that terrible war that was burned into Carson's brain was the carnage in horses, some 300,000 having died carrying the British Army to battle. It would have reduced his father to tears to have known how the animals suffered. And though Carson did not have the same attachment to horses that his father had had, it was a thought upon which he did not like to dwell.
"I...should have exercised greater discretion," he said, wondering what possessed him to recount such horrific battles or to have read graphic or controversial articles on the subject from The Times or The Guardian to a little girl. Mrs. Dakin, the woman who had preceded Mrs. Hughes in the post of housekeeper, had occasionally questioned his forthrightness with the child, but he had ignored her.
"Nonsense!" Mary declared, waving away his belated apprehensions. "I wanted to know where my father was and what he was doing. My mother and grandmother persisted in telling us that he was away and would come back soon. It was frighteningly vague. You told me the truth, Carson. That always meant something to me."
Well, that meant something to him, too. He had never believed in telling lies to children, or anyone else, no matter what the rationalization. In retrospect, he might, perhaps, have been a little less zealous with the truth. It occurred to him that her nightmares might have been of his making.
They began the return trek to the Abbey.
"I learned much more from you about the important things - what was going on in the world, things about my country - than I ever did from the governess," Mary said, and was unable to stifle her exasperation at that.
"I doubt that, my lady," Carson said modestly, although he believed governesses to have been the least successful of staff members and he'd never met one he liked. That he might have absorbed this opinion through the jaded conduit of an adolescent Lady Mary was not something that crossed his mind.
"It's the truth," Mary insisted, "although it's not much of a compliment given how little they imparted. I don't even speak French very well and that was their primary function. Don't mistake me, Carson. I've always understood that it was my duty to marry in a manner so as to bring honour to my family and to produce an heir to inherit my husband's wealth and title. But I could never see why I couldn't have something of substance to think about while I was doing it."
They both laughed at that.
As they came abreast of the house, Mary's pace deliberately slowed and Carson automatically slowed with her. He watched as a thoughtful look came over her and she turned to him almost hesitantly. When she focused her wide-eyed gaze upon him, his heart fluttered, as it had done ever since the first time he had met those compelling eyes thirty-two years earlier.
"You've always been so kind to me, Carson."
Lady Mary had no need to resort to effusion to strain the sinews of his heart.
"It was never kindness, my lady," he said solemnly, staring at her. "It was only..." love. But he couldn't possibly say it. It exceeded the bounds of proper behaviour.
She was staring right back at him and her eyes misted over. She nodded gently and favoured him with one of her very rare, genuinely warm smiles.
"When I came downstairs on the morning of my wedding to Mr. Crawley, you were there to give me away," she said, and had to pause for a few seconds to steady her voice. "I won't see you tomorrow morning. Papa will keep you well away." This elicited almost a giggle from her and brought an indulgent smile to his face. "I'm letting go of you now, as once you let go of me, and with all the best wishes for your happiness that you bestowed on me that day."
Like His Lordship and His Lordship's butler, Lady Mary was an advocate of emotional reserve, seeing it as a manifestation of strength and of Englishness, which to her mind were almost synonymous. She had absorbed the principle in equal measure from both men. And like them, in moments of great feeling, she elected to speak, as she did now, more with her eloquent and expressive eyes than with potentially traitorous words. But it wasn't quite enough. Abruptly she leaned up to him and kissed his cheek.
And as abruptly, she pulled back. "Now," she said briskly, looking away and struggling to re-impose her controlled demeanour, "I really must let you get on." And she turned away and disappeared quickly into the house.
He was not at all put off by this precipitous conclusion to their pleasant excursion. Her departure saved him from an emotional outburst of his own. For a long moment, he stood without moving before the closed door, breathing deeply, blinking back tears of paternal pride, and trying to restore the internal equilibrium Lady Mary had melted with her words, and look, and gesture.
He was grateful to her for the walk, the reminiscences, the affection, and the kiss. And for her discernment in speaking to him so intimately today. He loved Lady Mary and her attentions meant so much to him. He would see her tomorrow and receive her good wishes in a more formal way then, which was how it should be. For tomorrow his great reservoir of emotional energies would be focused on Mrs. Hughes - on Elsie - and he wanted no distractions.
It would have been wholly appropriate for him to use the front door, but Carson chose not to follow Lady Mary into the Great Hall. Instead, he took the longer way round the house, heading for the coal yard door, giving himself just that much more time to regain the requisite propriety of the butler of Downton Abbey.