Chapter Six

December 1962

The new housekeeper always left a fresh cup of coffee by his bedside each morning. Shirley was good at that, he supposed. Every morning at a quarter to seven, she'd knock twice, smile at him as she peered around the door, and then place the hot cup of coffee right there, right within arm's reach. It only irked him a little at first that sometimes the small tray she should bring it in on was missing, but one couldn't expect too much from her, not in this day and age. She was no Bates, after all, nor Barrow, and she was certainly no Carson. And the longer Robert watched her in the dim light as she moved about his room, he realized what change ten or really twenty years had made. She was no butler, though they had one. For the duties and responsibilities of the housekeeper and the butler had begun to blend and blur together as of late. Jeremy Hodges, their current butler, was very good at his job - very knowledgeable and exact - and that was in the end his downfall. He'd been stolen away from Robert, Mary needing him more and more to head the administrative side in the business of opening the house. So he didn't see Hodges very often anymore. Mary had him locked up in some office on the estate, completing necessary paperwork and interviews in order to legally turn profit on a private home.

Or maybe it was that Robert had very little to do with the running of it all anymore...maybe it was in fact quite opposite and it was Hodges who now saw so little of him, his role in everything quite unnecessary. Robert didn't particularly like that thought, even if something deep in his belly knew it to be true, and so he returned his attention to his housekeeper who was moving his slippers nearer to the bed.

So it was to be Shirley and no true butler. And he was grateful for her.

He was so grateful, in fact, that he even allowed her to help him into his housecoat, which he usually insisted on doing himself, thanking her quietly as she reminded him not to let his coffee grow cold.

She continued on then with the typical idle chit chat as she drew open the curtains and got down his heavy coat and winter shoes. Robert wasn't really listening to her, though. He could hear her, but try as he might, he couldn't really follow her thoughts as they bounced from one superficial subject to the next. Even responding to it was rather difficult. Instead he sat upright in his bed, his eyes following her around his room, but his mind surveying the effects of another restless night's sleep. He felt like he was somewhere inside himself, not trapped really, but strangely aware of his body in ways he hadn't been before. Strangely aware and unable to escape his newfound awareness.

"Don't forget your coffee, Lord Grantham. You do hate it cold."

Robert nodded, her voice somehow getting through the thick fog of his mind and he brought the cup up slowly to his lips, the liquid burning them softly, and took in a sip. He knew there was a taste there, a flavor, but he also knew it was really there now only in his memory, the warm earthy smell and the bitterness that would nip at a younger man's senses were no longer present for him; he swallowed the sip he took down.

He lifted his eyes to his housekeeper and found her grinning at him.

"I'll put your gloves here," she tapped the glass case across the room, the case where the ticket rested. "Your woolen gloves, your scarf, and your hat."

He nodded at her again, but his eyes moved past her. Even in the pre-dawn winter light, the faded yellow ticket drew him in. He was younger there; the touch of his younger self remained. The touch of her remained as well. Young, so terribly terribly young. How were they ever so young?

"It is very cold out this morning, my lord. Your gloves, scarf, and hat, just here, alright?" Shirley walked toward him, and he tore his eyes away from the ticket and over to her. "I'll be back up shortly to fetch your cup and bring your stick."

Robert hummed his thanks and took another flavorless sip of coffee.

Sybbie rubbed her hands together as she approached the stairs. It was brisker this morning than it had been since she arrived and a shiver ran through her even beneath her woolen top. She shrugged her shoulders, shaking away the cold, and looked around her before she stepped onto the bottom step. The voices of the dozen people that she left at the breakfast table lingered around her with a warmth, and for a moment she felt the chill of the old house disappear. But as she climbed, the warmth faded, and the chill of her thoughts began to nip at her.

She hadn't slept well. Images of the days before threatened to wake her and she fought, as she laid in the dark, against the urge to go down into the library for a drink. In years - many years - past, she knew she would've found Donk there on the red sofa, still in his bowtie and pressed shirt from dinner, nursing a short tumbler of some amber drink. In her memories, he held a brief smile as a welcome, and then patted the cushion beside him. Of course that was too long ago now to say, decades even, and the house had changed since then. Or perhaps it was Donk who'd changed.

Or perhaps...perhaps it was herself.

It wasn't until she heard shuffling and movement in a bedroom at her left that she realized she stood on the gallery, looking stupidly at the light that bounced around from the vaulted ceiling above. She shook herself awake, blinking away the shadows of uglier thoughts before she turned and watched as Shirley came through the doorway, her hands full of a bathroom's trash.

"Oops!" the gray-haired woman laughed when she noticed her, and Sybbie smiled back, attempting warmth.

"G'morning, Mrs. Langston. I didn't know you'd be up again already. Just taking away the rubbish."

For a moment, while Sybbie smiled absently toward the new-age housekeeper, she thought of Mrs Hughes, of Daisy, of Anna, and she shuddered at the contrast thirty-five years had made. They would've done it quietly, without ceremony, dignified and yet almost invisibly, old Mr Carson's giant brows lifting in appreciation of a job well done.

"That's all right," she heard herself say, her voice suddenly sounding very Americanized, a decade abroad staining her syllables. She cleared her throat and smiled again. "And good morning."

Oh, what was wrong? The past was eating away at her flesh, her skin smoothing and shrinking down into the girl she was in these halls. Ghosts of her family slept in the corners of the ceilings; she could feel them peering down at her in a way that seemed to grow with every passing year. Was it that she had abandoned them? Atlanta was not Downton. Georgia was not Yorkshire, and America was certainly not England. There was no quiet at home, there was no Ancient Earl who trekked every morning, through the mist and flowers and rain and snow, to see the tombstone of his wife. There were no freezing mornings, no giant hearths, no crests of families detailing the chronicles of hundreds of years, of lines of her family - the only family she'd ever known - on her foyer's walls. And that feeling that grew and grew inside her at every Christmas, at every New Year, the feeling that she dreaded and the feeling that she ignored when she was away again ached in her throat.

Perhaps it was guilt.

Perhaps it was guilt that sank in her belly as she walked back toward her father's old room - the room in which she was born. The room where her mother had died. Why that made it more special to her, and why it made her feel more guilt, she couldn't understand.

She stopped in the hall, and she pulled in a deep breath. The house smelled of dust. Of soot. It smelled of tobacco and very faintly of perfume - of jasmine. And although her mind immediately thought of Granny, her heart thought of Donk. She thought of the way his trembling hand had held to the little yellow ticket, how his eyes had tried to name the people in the photographs...she thought of the long string of pearls.

Sybbie turned and retraced her steps, walking to the end of the hall to her grandmother's bedroom. She only needed a moment alone in there, a moment alone with her.

Quietly, she opened the door, and then the next. It swung open easily, without a sound. Inside the room was just as silent, the door to Donk's former dressing room opened slightly, the curtains pulled open completely, the morning made brighter by the glare of snow, but not clearer. It was a gray glare that reflected on all of Granny's blue walls, and it hurt Sybbie's eyes.

But ignoring it, she went to the far window, picked up a stack of papers, and she sat down.

It constituted a very small portion of what she imagined her grandmother's things to be and realized with a certain sadness that most of her things - not her books or jewelry or photos but her own things she'd written and folded and tucked into her tiny clutch purses - must have already been sorted through, that people who did not know her the way she had had determined the fate of those things. The fate of Granny's lingering existence.

Growing uneasy, Sybbie shuffled agitatedly through the stack of mostly letters and then put them by her side, back onto the sill where she assumed they'd stay - it would make the room more personable for visitors.

Brisking her hands together again, this time less to do with the cold and more to do with the agitation she felt in her joints, Sybbie's eyes were drawn to her right, toward the slightly ajar door that was once Donk's dressing room. She caught herself staring, for a little longer than she realized, at the darkness in there and wondered briefly if his room would be opened as well. Likely not, she had decided nearly as quickly as she had wondered, for the room, even in her memories, had little life. It was Granny's room where she saw Donk most. It was Granny's room where the family seemed to gather, if not in the drawing room. Sybbie looked back around her, at all the blue. Granny's room.

"It just seems rather unfair, is all -"

Sybbie looked up at the sound several doors away, and she tipped her head. Not wanting to be found shuffling through papers, she stood and began to make her way quietly out of the room. She slipped through the small space she made for herself and then stepped quietly into the hallway, listening to the voices down the hall. She moved slowly toward them.

"I'm not sure, Coconut. Granny seems to think it in good taste, and I wouldn't dare contradict your Granny."

George. And Coco. Sybbie could hear their footsteps on the carpeted walk before she saw them, George walking purposefully into her direction, Coco walking close behind. Sybbie shook off as much of her gloom as possible and lifted her chin.

"Daddy, I -"

" - Good morning, Georgie. Coco. I didn't see you at breakfast."

At the apparent surprise at the sound of her voice, their eyes shot up to the her face and she smiled, coming to a stop before them.

"You look serious," she commented as her eyes flitted from her cousin to his child, Coco wide-eyed and pink-cheeked.

"We've gotten a letter finalizing the details of the paper's visit."

Sybbie raised a brow. "Oh?"

Coco shifted beside him, "Yes. It'll be this time next week, just in time for the Christmas decorations."

Sybbie hummed, waiting for her to continue, and when she did not, Sybbie furrowed her brow and asked, "And I suppose all the documents are in order for the article, then? About the house?"

Coco, however, sighed. "Yes. Not that it'll matter now."

"Has Aunt Mary changed her mind about it after all?" Sybbie looked at George now, but neither answered her. Instead, Coco turned toward the stairs and began to descend. And as she began to move away, tapping the letter against her skirt, George sighed heavily. It was a sign he'd change the subject.

"Paul finally find some warmth last night? Grace said that Shirley had searched out an electric blanket." He followed after his daughter, and because Sybbie was happy to think of better things, she followed him.

"Yes. Actually he's still asleep. It's the latest he's slept in years. Breakfast will be cleared away before he's even shown his face."

"Is it that late?" He stopped on the landing and looked at his watch. "What time do you have?"

"Oh," the change of conversation was enough to make her dizzy, but stopping next to him she answered, "Nearly half nine."

"Really?" George picked up his pace again, this time rushing down the rest of the stairs in staccato bounces, Coco even watching him from where she spoke with Shirley on the ground floor. He moved past them toward the library. "Uncle Tom?"

Sybbie was more confused than ever. She glanced at her young cousin who asked Shirley for the time. George and Tom came out of the library and back into the hall.

"Go and find your Gran, Co," George said quietly and then asked Shirley to find his coat and gloves.

"Oh, dear. Not again," the housekeeper muttered to herself as she turned, and Sybbie stepped forward.

"What's wrong?"

No one answered her. Instead there was a silent sort of understanding amongst them. There was the choreography of a dance Sybbie had never heard of, the members of her family moving and turning to some music that baffled her.

Again, she spoke up. "Dad?"

But nothing. Aunt Mary strode into the hall now.

"I'll drive and fetch him. I am sure he's just stopped off in the village -"

"He's not stopped off somewhere, Mary," Tom interrupted as he pulled on his coat. "This makes one time too many. You know it as well as I, and I'm sorry but -"

"Uncle Tom," George was behind him, Shirley having gathered his winter things and George taking the scarf and wrapping it around his neck. "Not now. We can talk about it after we find him. Mother, I'll drive. You come with me. Uncle Tom -"

Sybbie's father nodded, "Right, I'll drive up towards Pip's Corner first if you go straight to the churchyard along his route. Mary -" at this Sybbie watched, her heart now beating too hard inside her chest, as her father pointed a finger at his sister-in-law, "this can't happen again. You'll tell him."

But her aunt only shook her head as Sybbie watched them flood to the door. "I won't tell him, Tom. And besides even if I did, I don't believe he'd listen anyway."

"He'd listen to you, Mother," George was saying as the three of them walked away from the hall and outside into the snow. "If no one else, he'd listen to you."

Sybbie stood still for a moment after they left, watching their backs as Shirley and Coco did near her. It was only when the movement of Shirley quickly rubbing Coco's back appeared in her periphery did Sybbie's trance crumble.

She walked towards them. She could hear her sons in the drawing room; Benjamin was laughing. She sensed Paul slowly coming down the stairs. However all these things seemed muted or dulled in comparison to the worry she felt swelling in her throat.

"What's happening?"

Coco glanced at her but then back to the door. She flicked the envelope she held. "You should ask her," she frowned.

"Now, my dear -" Shirley tilted her head, but Coco pulled in a deep, agitated breath.

"She doesn't care! I thought it was about the house. I didn't think she was using Donk as some sort of advertising or … or publicity. That's why she doesn't care if he catches … catches pneumonia or … or freezes to death out there when he loses his way again."

"You're overreacting, Love -"

Sybbie shook her head, "Again?"

But Coco had broken away, shoving the opened letter into Shirley's hands.

"Oh Mrs Langston," Shirley sighed, smoothing out the envelope in her hands. She glanced toward the delighted voices of children calling to go out and play, and Sybbie waited for her explanation. "They have to watch for him, you see." She made eye contact again. "He tends to wander off after visiting her nowadays. He doesn't mean to, he just …" her voice got smaller. "He forgets, your grandfather does. He'll forget and get lost."

Paul's hand on her shoulder startled Sybbie and she turned her head to look over her shoulder. His eyes were soft, and the greens of them were warm, full of pity. She felt angry.

"You missed breakfast," she snapped, and pushed past both her husband and Shirley. A more logical part of her brain saw herself as the mirror image of her sixteen-year-old cousin, but Sybbie really didn't care.

He felt tired. He knew that much. He felt tired and he felt cold. But he always felt cold. Old age was cold, he told himself, and he chortled once, sardonically.

Mary turned around to him from the front seat and drew up her chin. "Where did you plan to go?"

"Mother -" George was driving.

"Papa, what did you have planned? You must've had a plan."

George hissed at her again, but Robert ignored it. He ignored their hushed conversation, the one he assumed was about him. He ignored the way his mind shouted respect one's elders because it was such an impossible thing to do. A person cannot be respectful of a fool. Kind to, loving, considerate of. But respect? That word was reserved for men of ability. Robert couldn't do anything anymore.

He couldn't.

He couldn't even recall what it was he couldn't do.

He was tired. He was cold. He turned his gaze toward the white blur of the scenery racing past him and worked his hand into his pocket.

The little yellow ticket was warm between his frozen, bare fingers.