Try as he might, sleep wouldn't have James that night.
Battling the rain all night leaking through the tiny fractures of the Miss's balcony, as he used his one pillow for a shield in his hammock.
Wishing now that he had taken the Miss up on the offer of that second pillow, but in the name of death-or-glory chivalry, he'd chosen to go down with this ship.
And every time he closed his eyes, he saw that same haunting mosaic of images that had ambushed him outside Miss Amberflaw's door, in a restlessly vivid and tantalizing game of "ghost in the graveyard".
Mercilessly taunting his suspicion that he'd left more parts of himself behind on Titanic than he counted on.
Miss Millicent Crawley.
Her name wandering out of his memory like rain washing away the fog on a glasshouse window.
The last soul to ever see him alive on Titanic.
James was almost sure now the girl from the glasshouse at Downton and the maid who tried to help him escape the ship were the same woman.
If I go, it's with you or not at all. You or nothing.
Soft words filling him with unimaginable regret.
Words that shook him up so much, that James maddeningly began stirring awake again, just as she said more.
My answer is still the same...Had it all been different for us, James...I would've...
James fought back to hang onto his restless dreams.
To give her a little more time to finish having her say, aware of something in him needing more than anything to hear her say it.
I've loved you since our very beginning.
Hadn't that been it?
Hadn't that always been it between them?
And if it was, why did she ever stop herself from saying it to him?
But when James's eyes batted open again, he was only squeezing one of Miss Amberflaw's borrowed quilts against his beating chest, rather than this woman his heart seemed so convinced he had loved.
Finding none such lover there but the soft rainfall from the view of the Miss's balcony.
His heart aching terribly for the rest his soul never seemed to find.
Though James couldn't remember the answers he gave her before it was all over for them, he knew the answer was still locked somewhere in his heart.
Whatever they had been to each other, somewhere deep down, he sensed that his fate with Miss Millicent Crawley was the sort of tragedy Miss Amberflaw had meant when she told him about the necklace's ruinous history. And if he had loved this stewardess enough to allow her to haunt him in the afterlife, the power of losing such a love must have shattered his psyche so completely that it left him too restless to find his peace. Making him as an irresistible prey for this unthinkable "diamond curse", feeding off of what was left behind of him in the hollow brokenness of his soul.
But to love a woman he couldn't fully remember the face of was like trying to hold water in his hands.
But he had her name now, at least, and now he could start somewhere.
"Millicent," he repeated it to himself several times, lest he be damned to ever forget it again.
Stirring up his timeless adoration of her...but for all that...realizing a darker reality still.
James suspected that as a ship officer, dying on Titanic was a fitting end in performance of his duties.
But how had this stewardess gotten trapped in a corridor with him to begin with?
Why had she not gotten away when she had the chance, knowing that he and the other officers boarded many a stewardess in a lifeboat safely off the ship?
His written log being proof of that.
And if he remembered dinner plates and teapots, he guessed then that the corridor he died in would've been located aft, around the passenger dining saloon and galley areas. Indeed, the stern would've flooded much later in the sinking. Not long after making his last log at 1:30 p.m. with the launch of Lifeboat 16.
By that time, Titanic would have been going down for plenty over an hour, giving the stewardess ample time to realize that failing to get to a lifeboat would mean she'd surely die.
And James assumed she already knew that, long before she found herself cornered in a hallway by the great Atlantic.
If Milicent had been offered a chance to get off that ship, why hadn't she taken it?
Why didn't she make it on deck in the ship's final hour, with everyone around her rushing to get into the last remaining lifeboats?
Whatever became of the maid in the end?
James hoped she'd taken him for dead and eventually left him behind to save herself.
He hoped she hadn't stayed and faced such a harrowing fate with him.
He hoped that by some miracle, she'd gotten out and been found by a rescue ship during the night, going on to live a long, full and happy life that he couldn't.
But as James remembered the way his heart unexpectedly fluttered when Miss Emily Amberflaw looked at him on the veranda, a cold dead weight of realizing the alternative dropped into his gut.
What if a full happy life after Titanic never happened for either of them?
What if staying with him on that ship had been the maid's deliberate choice?
And still more...what if he wasn't alone in this impossible twist of fate?
Were there others like him who had been 'misplaced'? Who had tragically met the same fate as he did on the night Titanic sank?
Could this woman he believed he loved in 1912 have walked by him in 2022, without him ever knowing it?
But that was grabbing for straws, that was.
That would mean that there were loads of people walking around in the future who actually belonged to the past, which didn't seem practical.
Surely, someone would've mentioned it by now.
Though, why should he be the only one?
Was he so exceptional in the eyes of God that he'd alone been given this second chance, and not the other passengers and crew who died with him?
Didn't this stewardess, Millicent, deserve a second chance too?
There had to be more.
Some minor detail about the night he died that he was missing.
And as James studied the ocean-deep glimmer of the Heart of the Ocean in his hands, he wondered if finding this missing detail was the answer to reversing all this. If the diamond had something to do with him being sent forward in time, could it also be the key to sending him back?
Perhaps, Miss Amberflaw might tell him more about the other mysterious cases in which the Hope diamond was present where tragedy had unfolded.
Miss Amberflaw...
James's mind wandered back to the cashier girl who'd unwittingly gotten carried away by all this...and considering the circumstances...was taking it rather well?
How many people of his day would've locked him up by now for being a quack?
He couldn't help but wonder again what it was Miss Amberflaw had meant by having her own reasons for taking him in.
In fact...wouldn't it be something, hypothetically speaking...f Miss Amberflaw were more like him?
She had, after all, fit so convincingly into her maid costume, and had a striking resemblance to a memory he chased in his heart.
And he still vowed she looked nothing like an Emily.
Because if he hadn't known any better, it being a goose chase of an idea, he'd guess that Millie was short for a number of things than Emily.
Mildred...Amelia...Camilla...
Millicent.
James stilled, his heart sinking into his stomach.
Miss Amberflaw as Miss Millicent Crawley?
Why, she behaved nothing like her.
She was much too modern, much too stubborn, much too independent, and much too...well, American.
And besides, if Miss Amberflaw truly were the woman he left behind on Titanic...why wouldn't she say so?
It might've explained everything about why he felt the way he did when he was near her.
Though it raised more questions for him than it gave answers.
If that were really the case, and Emily had indeed been a woman of his time, why did she seem so very much a part of this one?
Unlike him, she appeared to have no memories of another past. Not even the broken ones.
If she were the woman from his recollections, why didn't she seem to recognize him?
Or did she, like him, have a heart so devastatingly broken after Titanic's sinking, that it wished to make her forget everything?
As a boy, James remembered hearing whispered rumors about such neuroses behind smoking room doors among his doctor cousins.
Just before mama died.
A condition in which one endures a traumatic event so soul-wounding, that the broken heart forgets its crushing distress, in desperation of preserving itself from the agony of remembering.
The cure of which was steady exposure to stimuli that triggered the memory, drawing it out of the dark unconscious of the mind, and by way of gentle healing, restoring courage in the patient to face the pain of recollecting.
Of course, Dr. Freud's theory of repressed memories was controversial psychoanalytic hogwash, even in James's day.
It never saved mama.
And what's more, there was no telling proof that Miss Emily Amberflaw even required saving.
Other than James's own what-if ravings at this wee hour in the morning, there was no evidence to suggest that Miss Amberflaw had indeed died on the Titanic.
But once he'd gotten it into his head, James couldn't stop seeing it in her.
The way she'd looked to him dressed up in costume in her shop. The little things she said that seemed to strike him in peculiar ways. The uncontrollable way his heart skipped when she called him Lancelot.
And so convinced was he about this theory, he all but stumbled out of his hammock to get to the balcony sliding door and demand of her straight away if she'd actually ever been to Downton Abbey, or why exactly she was working at a Titanic museum, of all places, when she was so talented at styling hair, or why she never warned him that one pillow in 2022 most certainly wasn't enough?
But just as James came up to the sliding door and his hand moved to the glass, he stopped.
His next breath caught in a stalemate with his doubt. Closing his outreached hand into a fist just short of opening her door. Holding himself back with remarkable restraint to not throw everything to hell and go through his plan of runing to her.
The sun hadn't even come up yet.
Was he really so unhinged that he'd barge in on the poor girl like the devil as she slept, and demand she tell him at once if she was a woman who had been long dead a century before she was even born?
Not at this hour, he wouldn't.
James checked the brass open-faced Elgin watch snuggled in his pyjama pocket.
2:20 in the blooming morning...again?
'Right...Bloody thing is still broken.'
Exactly what was he playing at anyway?
Miss Amberflaw, a time-traveller?
He wasn't trolleyed enough for those kinds of ideas.
And where should he even start in telling her about his ravings?
'I couldn't sleep a wink last night after dreaming you were the woman I once loved.'
Not even in 100 years, he couldn't.
James fell back against the sliding door as he simmered down into a seat again, sighing as he leaned his head back on the glass.
Deciding at once that there was a proper way of going about these things, and every single one of those things could wait until morning.