"All in Time", a Downton Abbey Fanfic, sequel to "The Different". 53 years after the last film, and 24 years after the end of "The Different"
All characters belong to the writers of the show and are used here for entertaiment purposes. Historical figures are similarly used in a fictional setting.
A/N: I have had a few requests for a sequel, and I have had some feelings towards a narrative, so here it is, "All in Time" set post "The Different", George Crawley junior is now the Earl of Grantham, at the tender age of twenty three, and has just lost his father, and has an enormous amount of money to pay if Downton Abbey is not to be sold off.
Thomas Barrow is living a comfortable life in the cottage at the back of Downton, once the chauffeur's cottage but now his home. HIs lover, Philip, shares his time there with Thomas and his own house in Manchester, where he lectures at the university on the applications of mathematics. He knew Ernest Ashby, Thomas's former lover and brother of Thomas's wife Melusina, who died after making a heroic effort to return from Germany at the end of the war and uncover a traitor. Milo is buried in St. Michael's and All Angels churchyard at Downton.
Ernest Ashby Barrow, Milo's son, is all grown up with a family of his own, quietly getting on with making a living making and selling clocks and watches, in business with Thomas's brother, Henry. Ernest and Daisy's daughter Flora, were married in 1950 at St. Michael's, and had twins, Janet and Christopher, the latter already on a scholarship to Manchester, working with Philip Bragg in the same building as his great uncle and grandmother had worked.
Downton is perilously close to ruin and George Crawley junior is trying his best to minimise the death duties from his father, Master George, who had, like his own father, been killed in a car accident on his way to Catterick.
The conglomerate of businesses who have bought most of the land are pressing for compulsory purchase of all the estate, including the house itself. George junior knows, from a network of friends at Wesminster, that they plan to level it for housing and industrial use, a road and an office building. Can anything done to save Downton Abbey? If so, by whom? And when?
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August 1970, Downton Abbey, North Yorkshire
"The taxman's taken all my dough, and left me in my stately home. Lazing on a sunny afternoon..."
It could have been written about them. George Crawley, grandson of Mary and Matthew Crawley, strode across fields that were soon to be houses, the song that had just been on the radio playing in his head.
New houses, to accommodate new workers, at the new steel foundry that was expanding from Scarborough to the north. He had only known Great Grandpapa for a short time, fuzzy memories of an old man, standing by the window in Downton's sitting room, looking at his cream labrador running in the summer's sun. On a day very much like this one. August, the month of holidays and the sea, and sand, and ice creams by the beach. Grandmama Gillingham had a boat and he had taken it out from Suffolk, sailed it around to Kent and brought it back again last summer. But even they were struggling, and had decamped to London permanently, leasing their estate to a business venture. Who made cheese, for heavens' sake!
In his mind's eye, George had been lifted aloft into the old man's arms and had had things pointed out to him that Sir Robert had thought important. George could not remember. And, even if he could, what good would that have done him? Great Grandpapa was not there now, and when he had to deal with death duties to an heir before, so Grandmama had told him, he had come up with little. Because there was little to do.
And much to pay. The Kinks had been drily accurate to the plight of so many of the aristocracy. So many factors had contributed to stately homes being abandoned, to the point of ruin in some cases, where a family had run out of heirs, where money was owed and they had upped to another property, cheaper to run, or sold to one of the most prolific owners of stately homes in the country, namely the National Trust.
Taxed to support the lower classes in the socialist mechanism, to pay "the going rate", to allow reasonable time off, to pay for the NHS and other social safety nets. To make fewer demands of servants, or at least fewer than in Great Grandpapa's time - if there were people outside his door to take up positions in the first place. The last time he had placed an advertisement in, "The Lady" for a housekeeper, George Crawley junior had had no applicants.
"Too many don't want to stay in," his grandmother Mary had explained to him, sniffily. "And the hours they would have to put in means they are put off." She reached for her glass of lemon water. "Why would they work here when they can work in a factory or an office for more?"
George junior could not answer. Nor could he discern a plan. Not one that would save his grandmother's childhood home. His father's come to that, and Aunt Sybbie's and Aunt Marigold's. Aunt Caroline, his father's sister, had no ideas, but she was away, anyway, living in Switzerland with her husband, running a school in the mountains, a finishing school for the titled. "The older money, the better," Granny Mary had told Georgie. "What we cannot match in wealth we can dazzle with breeding."
George had spoken to Peter at length. Brancaster was safe, always safe, with the Pelham money. "I cannot spare enough to match Automotive Cylinders. They would take the higher offer, and if you anger them - "
If I anger them, they might be hostile, turn Granny out of the Dower House, whose land was already being encroached on by the housing company that had originally bought the land in the twenties and had, in their clause, a first refusal to any other land on a fifty year agreement in conjunction with the county council.
His father, a lawyer like his grandfather Matthew, had trained in the law after the war, with the urgency of a man whose very life was at stake. He had spent all his short life trying to get out of the "gentleman's agreements" of Great Grandfather Robert, who made deals on the fly after dinners and the races, and so forth, but had not lived long enough to experience the consequences, the adverse effects, of such folly.
"And what will you do?" Harriet, George's mother asked of him. "The house will go; we have the flat in London. You have your education, thoiugh you have been late to Oxford. You will have missed the men of your generation, of course - "
That was mother all over. She would miss Downton too, of course, George junior knew that. She had come one weekend just after the war, just after the dramatic revelation of a traitor, Aunt Sybbie's father and, according to Granny, never really left.
With his mother's insistence he made plans for the future, and Granny Mary's pressing as to a lineage, "And she might bring you a good deal of wealth, if you choose well. Have you thought of going to America?", George Crawley junior, was taking a walk.
The sun was fine, and he turned across a field as yet unsullied by heavy plant equipment. Supper at the Grantham Arms, he considered, and a mind free of burden. There was no-one he wished to marry, no-one of social status. He was only twenty three anyway, there would be time in the future. Downton should not depend on his circulating and networking to find a wife with a dowry.
A figure appeared at the rise of land beyond the church, tall and wild, carrying with her something in both hands. George junior pushed away his guilt, picked up the pace and met Janet Ashby Barrow at the estate's boundary gate.
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Downton Railway Station, August 1971
It was a wonder this line was not yet extinct. Yes, it was true the motorways crossing the country were the future, filling up with vehicles to do what the railways had done for over a hundred and fifty years - Beeching's cuts had been heavy. But he didn't drive. And even if he did, Chadwick preferred the train.
Two trains, Cambridge to York, York to Downton. He had resolved not to ever return to the place, to get on with his life that he had forged before the war. The past was buried - she was buried.
Yet the letter was so polite, written by his neat and tidy hand. He could talk the birds down from the trees, or the sun from the sky. And he was her son, of course. Melusina Ashby's son.
Of course, it would be the last time he would see the great house: Downton Abbey had been sold and would be demolished to make way for industrial buildings and a workforce who were mostly coming from Manchester to build cars, for a chance to buy their own house in the countryside and good prospects.
What did Ernest want? Urgent, he had said. And to bring anything he had of his mother's. Chadwick would not have come had Barrow asked, Ernest would have known that. And it depended on the urgency. Ernest had always kept in touch via Christmas card. He had never written such a letter to Chadwick before, and the former friend of Milo Ashby knew its significance.
"Please," the letter had finished. "Not for me, but for my father. There is a situation that needs to be put to rest, and I believe, Professor, that you are the only man who can settle it. If not you, who else?"
Who else indeed, Chadwick thought, as he alighted at the station. Anyone who may have been closer to Milo was now dead. Even he was not as young as he had been, and forever recovering from, or developing an infection, brought on in 1915 by an illness caught while doing his duty in the trenches. There were precious few still alive who remembered Melusina Ashby.
George Paget Thomson had driven the last time, and they had burned everything they had of Ashby's. Nearly everything. There was a letter, or rather, half a letter, that had arrived to him with a heiroglyphed missive intended for Otto Frisch at the height of the race for the development of the Bomb. It was a question, not one that needed to be answered.
"If Maud produced three unpolitical children, and her heavy husband was in control of them, would they see the ninth planet?"
Chadwick had puzzled over it, and when Ashby had been buried and he had put away that part of his life, he had buried it in a book in his library at their home in Cambridge, along with just one more of her letters, so private that Chadwick had never re-read it.
Of course he had showed Aileen. "I do not wish to go, really."
"But, if you can help someone?" she counselled.
If he could help. Help Milo Ashby's son, who had chosen to return to the country of his mother, smuggling himself out of Germany, where he had been adopted. Oh, how life might have been different without Ernst Scholtz, as was. Had life been different, Ernest Ashby Barrow might well be going by a different name now, that of his father.
But it couldn't have been, Chadwick mused, as he stepped onto the street which would lead to Downton village. Not far to the Ashby cottage.
No. Fascism was rising all over Europe, not just in Germany, his real father would have still taken the same decisions. As would Ashby. If she had not...
If she had not...would Chadwick have ever written his report, pressed Churchill to press Roosevelt for the US to continue the Manhattan Project with every resource they could possibly throw at it?
"You can be damn sure the Germans will be working on a bomb," he had told Vannevar Bush, at an ultra-closed meeting in Washington. His words were then repeated and the scientific world - most vociferously, of course, by Teller - a world filled with men who had fled with Europe with their lives and who meant to do all they could to use their Nazi-rejected talent against that hated regime.
"Bethe, you will know," Chadwick had told the man, on his next visit, his twins and his wife safely in Canada, travelling by train as he had done to California. Hans Bethe had read the messages Chadwick had received, fluent as he was, of course, in German and given to Frisch the one covered in lines.
Which had turned out to be an ancient Gaelic language that Milo had taught Otto Frisch at Cambridge, and that they had had fun using between one another. Now, she had used it to inform the man of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's progress with uranium.
"She writes German well, only a few corrections in her grammar needed."
Chadwick smiled at the memory; Bethe has been at the Cavendish when Milo had been there, when Oppenheimer had had his disastrous few months - it had he who had suggested Max Born to him, leave and try working under the best physicist in Europe. Chadwick liked Bethe, who had had to apologise formally for publishing a spoof physics paper and had woken up the Vice Chancellor with a morning punt along the Cam singing at the top of his voice "Lohengrin".
These happy memories buoyed the man along the road until Melusina Ashby's cottage came into view. But the rest of Downton, excepting the pub and the old car repair shop, was half-abandonded by people who knew that the village was dying and were leaving it while they had a better prospect somewhere else.
Here. He was here. Ernest Barrow needed his help. Chadwick smoothed his jacket pocket wherein lay Milo's message. He was ready.